Entertainment
the rise of AI war dashboards
The AI dashboard shows frigates gathered around Cyprus and military planes flying towards the Gulf, where a breaking news pin alerts users to unconfirmed reports of a drone strike on Dubai.
At that precise moment on Friday, more than 3,200 people had their eyes glued to “Monitor the Situation”, which tracks everything from world leaders’ locations to internet outages.
It’s one of several free sites using artificial intelligence to crunch data into interactive world maps that are info-rich but not always reliable.
Interest has surged in these tools since conflict erupted in the Middle East, along with memes gently mocking the kind of people who seek a movie-like control centre experience.
“I think it’s human psychology — they feel like they have God’s view or something,” said Elie Habib, creator of the AI dashboard “World Monitor”.
Habib, CEO of Middle Eastern music streaming platform Anghami, told AFP “World Monitor” has had 4.4 million visits since he built it in January.
“I just want to understand what’s happening in the world,” said the 53-year-old based in Dubai, who originally envisaged his tool as a “Bloomberg Terminal for geopolitics”.
Despite the war driving a spike in interest, Habib said he has not put adverts on the site because he doesn’t want to profit from the conflict.
“World Monitor” displays more than 450 data sources on a crowded, customisable screen that includes live webcams from strategic global locations and AI-selected headlines from real news outlets.
Among a constellation of options on their map, users can see where protests, GPS jamming and earthquakes are taking place in real time.
Habib said he was “trying to move to the next step, which is extracting the signals from the noise. Otherwise, for me, it’s just too much noise.”
‘Not mere eye-candy’
Habib, a trained engineer based in Dubai, used AI to “vibe-code” his website over one weekend — a task he says would have taken at least a year if he had written the computer script by hand.

The inner workings of “World Monitor” are open source, so other programmers have made tweaks and suggestions that Habib has since built in.
Sites like “World Monitor” and “Monitor the Situation”, co-created by a staff member of US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, have many flashy functions but experts said users should not treat all their insights as credible.
“They are not mere eye-candy… but they are not truth engines either,” Wei Sun, principal analyst for AI at Counterpoint Research, told AFP.
“The hallucination risk is real” when an AI model is tasked with determining the significance of information, or causal links, she said.
Despite the risk of false data points, these AI dashboards “satisfy a very modern psychological need”, Sun said.
“In a crisis, people want speed, synthesis, and a feeling of control when headlines are fragmented and overwhelming.”
Some of the sites have chatrooms for users to interact, noted Sun Sun Lim, a professor of communication and technology at Singapore Management University.
That is “especially engaging during unfolding events”, she said.
“Interest in global events has also been fuelled by the rise of prediction markets where people have been placing bets on events” from national elections to whether Iran’s supreme leader would be ousted, Lim said. Live feeds of these bets are sometimes featured on the AI dashboards.
So should news wires like AFP or Reuters be concerned about people turning to such sites for their updates on the global situation?
“They should worry somewhat, but not existentially,” said Counterpoint’s Sun.
“In my view, the real disruption doesn’t come from AI dashboards replacing these news wires, but how it pushes them upmarket, towards being the most trusted validators and explainers.”
Entertainment
Sydney Sweeney hard launches her romance with beau Scooter Braun
Well, that soft launch has officially become a full-blown hard launch.
Sydney Sweeney just made things very Instagram official with Scooter Braun – and fans wasted approximately three seconds before turning the comments section into a full FBI investigation.
The Euphoria star dropped a Stagecoach photo carousel on Friday that looked innocent enough at first: cowboy vibes, festival lights, karaoke chaos. Then came the cuddling photos.
One snapshot showed the pair squeezed together in a photo booth making goofy faces, while another featured Braun literally carrying Sweeney bridal-style through the crowd like this was the final scene of a rom-com nobody saw coming.
There was also a clip of them singing karaoke together and another of Sweeney perched on his shoulders during a performance because apparently subtlety has officially left the chat.
“cowboy kind of weekend,” she captioned the post — which may be the understatement of the year.
Braun had already hinted at the romance weeks earlier after posting Sweeney on his Instagram Story, but this is the clearest confirmation yet that the two are no longer trying to keep things low-key.
The pair reportedly started dating in September 2025 after meeting at the lavish wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in Venice.
Since then, they have been spotted on multiple dates and holding hands publicly.
Now? The internet has officially upgraded them from rumour to relationship status.
Entertainment
Greta Gerwig finally reveals her wild new ‘Narnia’ movie title
The wardrobe is officially open again – and this time, Greta Gerwig is leading the way.
Netflix has finally confirmed the title and release dates for Gerwig’s long-awaited Chronicles of Narnia reboot, and fantasy fans already sound emotionally unwell online.
The first film will be called Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew and arrives in theaters on February 12, 2027, before landing on Netflix on April 2.
And yes, the cast is stacked.
Meryl Streep, Daniel Craig, Carey Mulligan, Emma Mackey and Denise Gough are all set to appear in the fantasy epic based on C.S. Lewis’ classic books.
Gerwig, who writes, directs, and produces the film, got deeply personal while explaining why this story matters to her.
“I was a child when I first read The Magician’s Nephew, and I fell in love with the gorgeously improbable but completely brilliant concept of a cosmic lion singing the world of Narnia to life,” she said.
“I didn’t know that I would grow up to make films… but a universe built out of music is an idea that always lived in my heart.”
Unlike the earlier Narnia movies, Gerwig’s film starts at the very beginning of the timeline, exploring Aslan’s creation of Narnia itself – essentially the fantasy franchise’s origin story.
In other words: Greta Gerwig is about to make an entire generation cry over a lion all over again.
Entertainment
Trump expands US sanctions on Cuban government and affiliates
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday broadening US sanctions against the Cuban government, two White House officials told Reuters, as he seeks to put more pressure on Havana after ousting Venezuela’s leader.
The fresh sanctions target people, entities and affiliates that support the Cuban government’s security apparatus or are complicit in corruption or serious human rights violations, as well as agents, officials or supporters of the government, the officials said.
It was not immediately clear who exactly had been hit with sanctions under the order, which was first reported by Reuters.
But a copy of the order released by the White House said the sanctions could apply to “any foreign person” operating in the “energy, defence and related materiel, metals and mining, financial services, or security sector of the Cuban economy, or any other sector of the Cuban economy.”
The order authorises secondary sanctions for conducting or facilitating transactions with those targeted under the order, the officials said.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said the new “coercive” measures reinforce the US’s “brutal, genocidal” blockade against the island.
“The blockade and its reinforcement cause so much harm because of the intimidating and arrogant behaviour of the world’s greatest military power,” Diaz-Canel wrote on social media.
Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez, said the sanctions measures, which were announced as the island held its traditional May Day celebrations, aim to impose “collective punishment on the Cuban people” and that Cubans would not be intimidated.
Ratcheting up pressure on Cuban government
Jeremy Paner, a former sanctions investigator at the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, said the move was the most significant one for non-American companies since the US embargo against Cuba began decades ago.

“Oil and gas, mining companies, and banks that have carefully segregated their Cuba operations from the United States are no longer protected,” said Paner, who is now a partner at Hughes Hubbard & Reed, a law firm.
The new sanctions are the latest broadside by the Trump administration against Cuba, which the president has repeatedly declared is near a state of collapse.
Under Trump, US forces have launched strikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs off Venezuela and gone into Caracas to seize President Nicolas Maduro. Trump has said, without providing specifics, that “Cuba is next.”
The officials said Trump’s order contained an implicit warning to Cuba, accusing the Havana government of aligning itself with Iran and groups like Hezbollah.
“Cuba provides a permissive environment for hostile foreign intelligence, military, and terrorist operations less than 100 miles from the American homeland,” one official said.
The US has long demanded Cuba open its state-run economy, pay reparations for properties expropriated by the government of former leader Fidel Castro and hold “free and fair” elections. Cuba has said its form of socialist government is not up for negotiation.
The US heaped additional sanctions and pressure on the island early this year, when it halted Venezuelan oil exports to Cuba after ousting Maduro on January 3. Trump later threatened to slap punishing tariffs on any other country that sent crude to Cuba, prompting Mexico, another top supplier, to stop shipments to the island.
The fuel shortage in Cuba has contributed to major national-level blackouts and prompted many foreign airlines to suspend flights to the island.
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