Egypt is preparing to reshape internet access for children at the network level. In April, the country announced plans to launch a dedicated “child SIM” by June 2026, embedding parental controls, age-based social media restrictions and “secure internet packages” directly into telecom infrastructure. The SIM is also expected to block adult websites, violent material and even some tools used to bypass restrictions, such as VPN applications.
At first glance, the initiative may sound like a niche telecom policy. But it points to something much larger: a future where governments increasingly shape internet access not through apps or platforms, but through the architecture of connectivity itself.
Unlike parental controls installed on devices or moderation systems managed by social media companies, Egypt’s proposed model would operate at the network level. Restrictions would be embedded into the SIM card infrastructure itself, meaning filtering happens before content even reaches a child’s phone.
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Words: Dalia Elkady (@elkdelld )
For a week now, Instagram’s watch fans have been losing their minds over what looked like leaked product images. Vivid plastic Audemars Piguet Royal Oak wristwatches in bright colours: navy and orange, pink, yellow and green. Captions guessed about prices and launch queues. Comment sections argued over colours. None of it was real. Every image was AI-generated.
When the real Royal Pop Collection dropped on Tuesday, ahead of schedule (perhaps forced by the volume of fake images circulating), it turned out to be genuinely different and interesting. But for a significant section of the audience that had already fallen for the fakes.
Within hours of the Royal Pop announcement, third-party strap brands seized on this prospect, looking to fashion adaptations that convert the timepiece from pocket to wristwatch. The market recognised in real time that the pocket watch contained all that was structurally needed to deliver the very wristwatch that the AI concepts had promised. Now, brands are already announcing their concepts to fill this wristwatch-shaped hole.
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Words: @jeremywired
Gaza now has more than 60 million tons of rubble and no clear path to reconstruction. The Israeli blockade has long restricted cement, steel and other building materials, and after nearly two years of intensified bombardment, what little system existed has collapsed.
Suleiman Abu Hassanin is trying to do something with what's left. His project, Green Rock, crushes debris, mixes it with locally developed binding materials, and compresses it into interlocking bricks using a hand-built machine that requires no mortar or imported materials. The project cuts construction costs by roughly 50 to 60% and creates work for displaced people, but it remains experimental.
For Abu Hassanin, the significance runs deeper than the bricks. He describes a moment that repeats itself often: a man standing where his home once stood, helping rebuild it with his own hands.
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Words: Hassan Herzallah
For sixty years, 10,000 steps a day has been the rule everyone chases. It turns out the number was never science, it was a tagline.
Manpo-kei launched just before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and rode Japan’s post-Games fitness boom into the rest of the world. That’s how one product’s marketing line became a global health standard.
New research presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Istanbul this week also found something else worth knowing: extra steps don’t speed up weight loss. Diet does. Where the steps matter is in keeping the weight off, which is the harder half.
For more stories like this, follow @wiredmiddleeast .
The head of Microsoft's Israeli subsidiary is stepping down at the end of this month.
This follows an internal investigation into how Microsoft's cloud infrastructure was used by Unit 8200 – the elite intelligence unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defence.
The probe found that the Israeli military used Microsoft's Azure cloud to store and analyse data from millions of calls from Gaza and the West Bank each day – held in European data centres and subject to EU data protection laws.
Microsoft's official statement did not offer a clear explanation for the leadership change and did not link it to the investigation.
Microsoft has previously said it was not aware of the type of content being stored at its facilities as it does not access its customers' data.
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Words: @sertintea
Across southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, farmers are abandoning fields, irrigation systems are under pressure, livestock production has been devastated and some of the country’s most productive agricultural land has been damaged by continued Israeli attacks.
More than 56,264 hectares of agricultural land have already been affected across approximately 285 towns in the south, Bekaa and Baalbek-Hermel regions, representing nearly 22.5% of Lebanon’s total agricultural areas.
The damage is beginning to break Lebanon’s farming system.
The crisis is no longer just about hunger. Officials, farmers and food experts warn Israeli attacks are damaging the land and farming systems that Lebanon relies on to feed itself.
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Words: @danalomar and @yasmina.elzein
For a week, Instagram was flooded with AI-generated fakes of the Swatch x Audemars Piguet collab, all of them imagined wristwatches. Swatch finally revealed the real thing today, and the internet got it completely wrong. It's a pocket watch.
It's a callback to a 1986 Swatch line whose watches could clip off the wrist to become brooches or pocket pieces. Whether the watch world actually wanted this is another question.
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US-based pharmaceutical company Moderna confirmed that it has been working on the development of hantavirus vaccines in collaboration with the Vaccine Innovation Center of Korea University College of Medicine (VIC-K).
This information comes against the backdrop of a hantavirus outbreak on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius.
Moderna, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the biotechnology company that perfected messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic. Following the announcement that it was developing a hantavirus vaccine using this same technology, the drugmaker’s stock rose from $49 on 7 May to $55 the next day.
The drugmaker undertook this collaborative project with VIC-K in 2023.
The so-called New World hantaviruses, such as this Andean hantavirus (ANDV), are mostly found in South America and can reach a case fatality rate of up to 40%; ANDV is the only hantavirus with documented human-to-human transmission, and the variant that was identified that the WHO identified on the MV Hondius. There is currently no vaccine to prevent an ANDV infection.
South Korea is the partial exception to this picture. The country reports between 300 and 400 cases annually, mainly among young men in their 20s and 30s. The prevalence is significant enough that the country’s health authorities have included the pathogen on their list of nine priority threats for future pandemic preparedness.
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Within hours of reports emerging about a hantavirus outbreak aboard the Dutch-flagged luxury cruise ship MV Hondius, the internet had already decided what was happening. It was a psy-op, or possibly an alien invasion cover-up.
Across X, Bluesky and Reddit’s r/conspiracy, users revived the same depopulation and bioweapon theories that dominated conspiracy corners during the Covid-19 pandemic. The hashtag #Hantavirus quickly became attached to posts from many of the same accounts that pushed “Scamdemic” narratives and antivaccine rhetoric in 2020 and beyond. On X, users have claimed the outbreak would usher in a manufactured global lockdown.
“This is not Covid, this is not influenza. It spreads very, very differently,” Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic management at the World Health Organization, said in response to growing comparisons.
Unlike SARS‑CoV‑2, hantavirus is not a novel virus. It has existed for decades, and while the Andes strain involved in the outbreak can spread between humans in rare cases, person-to-person transmission remains extremely limited.
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Words: @megantomos
Gulf countries are spending tens of billions of dollars building AI data centres designed to power the world's AI systems. The ambition is to turn the region's energy abundance, sovereign wealth and geography into a new kind of export industry.
When Iran attacked, falling shrapnel from interceptions damaged data centres in the UAE and Bahrain. A London-based data centre operator reported damage to its Yas Island facility. Its owner reportedly paused new Middle East investment decisions shortly after.
The incidents exposed a challenge with global ramifications. Data centres are becoming as strategically significant as oil terminals, shipping routes and financial exchanges. Unlike pipelines, you cannot hide a five-gigawatt AI data centre.
Experts say the fundamentals of the Gulf's AI ambitions have not changed. The energy, the geography, the sovereign wealth are all still there. But the attacks were a reminder that compute is now a strategic asset that attracts risk.
The Gulf may simply be the first region to confront a problem the entire world will eventually have to address.
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Words: @chrishamil
For years, countries outside the US and Europe have largely relied on foreign providers for satellites, launch services and the infrastructure that powers them. The UAE – Abu Dhabi in particular – is trying to change that.
Across the capital, companies are building different layers of what could become a larger domestic space ecosystem. Some are focused on manufacturing and integrating satellites, others are exploring whether data storage and processing can eventually move into orbit.
The broader objective is tied to sovereignty, resilience and control over infrastructure that governments increasingly depend on.
Over the past decade, the UAE has invested more than $5.9 billion (22 billion UAE dirhams) into the space sector.
The newer push is more commercial: building companies that can manufacture, operate and eventually export parts of that infrastructure.
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Words: @danalomar
