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Leila Al-Khatib

Senior Editor,

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Leila Al-Khatib earned her undergraduate degree in Communication and Public Media. Her articles on financial culture have appeared in ICN.live since 2023. Her reporting style emphasizes clarity and accessibility, making complex changes in global finance understandable to broad audiences.
Ben Affleck replaced Jennifer Garner
  • Hollywood

Ben Affleck replaced Jennifer Garner in his new Netflix film Animals, and the reason says a lot about how a real relationship can shape what happens on screen. He wanted his former wife for a major role. Then the plan changed, and both of them decided that sharing the screen could work against the film rather than for it. It is a small casting choice with clear logic, and it shows how star power and private life collide.

How the casting plan started

The Animals movie began taking shape in 2024. Back then, Matt Damon was set to lead as a mayoral candidate in Los Angeles. Affleck, who directs the picture, thought of Garner right away for the role of the character’s wife. He liked the idea because it would let her play against type, a part unlike her usual work.

A family upside came with it. Affleck and Garner share three children, so working on the same production would have let them line up schedules and keep home life steady. For two busy parents, that kind of overlap helps.

Everything shifted when Damon stepped away for other work. Coverage of the Matt Damon Animals exit points to the schedule for Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey. Damon stayed attached as a producer through Artists Equity, the company he runs with Affleck.

Why Ben Affleck replaced Jennifer Garner

Once Damon left, Affleck took the lead role himself. That one change reset the whole question of Garner’s casting. The clearest way to understand why Ben Affleck replaced Jennifer Garner is to look at what happened next. He and Garner talked it through, and both saw the same risk. If two former spouses played a married couple, viewers might read the marriage on screen through the marriage they remember.

Affleck framed it simply. You do not want to hand the audience their own baggage and let it push against the story. Garner agreed with him. She said it would not be a wise move for the two of them to act together under those conditions.

So Ben Affleck replaced Jennifer Garner to protect the story, not because of any doubt about her range. The pair wanted people watching the film, not tallying their private history.

Kerry Washington takes the role

The part went to Kerry Washington. In the Kerry Washington Animals casting, she plays Abigail, wife of Affleck’s character, Mark Kimball. The plot follows a couple in a corner. Their young son is taken, and they scramble to raise a ransom as secrets pile up around them. That is the setup of the Ben Affleck movie, a political thriller made for Netflix. The premise puts an ordinary marriage under extreme pressure, which is the kind of role that rewards a strong lead.

Alongside them, the cast includes Gillian Anderson and Steven Yeun. Affleck co-wrote the script with Connor O. McIntyre, with revisions from Billy Ray, and he both directs and stars for the first time since 2023. Fans also have a firm date. The Animals’ Netflix release date is October 9, 2026, when the film reaches Netflix and select theaters on the same day.

What the switch tells you

Casting is not only about who fits a part. It is also about what an audience carries into the room. When two actors share a known history, that history can lift a film or distract from it, and Affleck read the risk early. The story of how Ben Affleck replaced Jennifer Garner comes down to attention, and where he wanted the viewers to land.

He has not ruled out working with Garner down the line. Affleck called her fabulous, said the two are good friends, and made clear he would welcome a future project together. That fits what people see in Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck now. They met on a film set in 2001 and married in 2005, having already shared the screen in earlier films. The couple split in 2015, finalized the divorce in 2018, and have kept a warm co-parenting bond since. Ben Affleck replaced Jennifer Garner in his Netflix film Animals, choosing Kerry Washington instead. Here is the real reason behind it.

  • 4 min read
Etihad launches Etihad Escapes
  • Etihad Airways

Etihad Airways has unveiled Etihad Escapes, a new travel platform designed to extend the Etihad experience beyond the flight and make it easier for guests to plan and book more of their journey in one place.

Announced at Arabian Travel Market (ATM) 2026 in Dubai, Etihad Escapes will launch in October, initially allowing guests with an Etihad flight booking to add hotel accommodation directly through etihad.com.

The platform is the first step towards a broader integrated travel offering that Etihad plans to develop through 2027, bringing together flights, hotels and additional travel services within a single digital experience, with further integration into the Etihad app and Etihad Guest.

Antonoaldo Neves, Chief Executive Officer of Etihad Airways, said, “Our guests already choose Etihad to take them to some of the world’s most exciting destinations. With Etihad Escapes, we want to make the rest of their journey just as easy.”

He added that the platform aims to build a deeper relationship with guests beyond the flight, eventually bringing together flights, hotels, Etihad Guest and other travel experiences in one place to provide a simpler and more personalised journey.

Neves said Etihad Escapes also creates a new growth opportunity for Etihad and Abu Dhabi by connecting the airline’s network with a wider travel offering and some of the emirate’s leading visitor experiences.

He added that the platform can help attract more visitors to Abu Dhabi, encourage them to explore more of the emirate and support its ambition to welcome 39.3 million visitors and raise tourism’s contribution to GDP to AED90 billion by 2030.

At launch, Etihad Escapes will allow guests to add a hotel after booking their flight, giving them access to accommodation through etihad.com without needing to plan different elements of their journey across multiple platforms.

The platform will gradually expand to allow customers to search and book hotels independently and later combine flights and hotel accommodation within an integrated booking experience.

Future phases will extend Etihad Escapes to the Etihad app and introduce greater personalisation, enhanced Etihad Guest integration and a wider range of travel experiences and additional services.

Etihad Escapes targets a significant commercial opportunity in the global holiday market, valued at approximately US$2.7 trillion and forecast to grow by 6.5 percent through 2030, with a substantial share of travel spending taking place beyond the cost of the flight.

  • 2 min read
GCC fund managers
  • Capital

GCC fund managers have no shortage of capital to place. The harder question is what deserves it. One Stride Ventures report puts GCC venture capital funding at about $3.3 billion across 541 deals in 2025, up 14 percent on the year. Saudi Arabia and the UAE took most of that total.

Hasnae Taleb has a method for sorting it. She is managing partner at Mintiply Capital and GCC partner at Fuel Venture Capital. In an interview with ICN Business, she set out how she reads a startup, a sector, and a crisis. One thread runs through all three. Ignore the story. Follow the money.

For asset classes, I look at liquidity, duration, collateral quality, supply and sensitivity to policy. I spend more time watching funding costs, currencies, sovereign spreads, deposit movements, freight rates and insurance markets than watching the daily headlines. These indicators often reveal where the pressure is building and where capital is beginning to seek protection. During the first stage of a crisis, capital usually values access and liquidity. The larger return opportunities often appear later, once the market begins repricing the beneficiaries of the new environment.

Most GCC fund managers hear the regional growth story in every deck. Taleb takes it out and studies what is left. Who pays for this product today? Why do they pay? How often do they come back? What happens to revenue if subsidies fade or the state becomes a pickier buyer? The GCC startups she wants to back have built an edge of their own. That edge might be regulatory access, data nobody else holds, distribution, deep ties with customers, better economics, or a product clients would struggle to replace.

Founder behaviour matters too. Taleb watches how a team acts when money is easy to raise. Disciplined founders can explain the purpose of each round, what each dollar is expected to deliver, and which assumptions are still open. Strip the expansion story away, and the business still has to add up.

Business Intelligence & News

  • UAE passport ranks first globally in 2026, recording a Mobility Score of 182 and worldwide access of 91.9 percent, per Passport Reports’ September ranking.
  • The score covers 128 visa-free destinations, 44 visa-on-arrival or simplified-entry destinations, and 10 reachable through an eTA.
  • Europe, the Gulf, and the Middle East each show 100 percent overall access for UAE passport holders.
  • Only 16 destinations remain visa-required, and the UAE itself ranks 91st out of 199 for inbound travel.
  • HOSPITALITY

The sector GCC fund managers still underrate

Asked where the region undervalues its own potential, Taleb points to industrial technology. She means robots, sensors, automation and business software for the water, energy, manufacturing, construction and logistics sectors. The GCC runs some of the largest physical assets anywhere, in some of the toughest operating conditions. Trim maintenance, downtime, inventory, or energy costs by a small margin on assets that size, and the savings run into millions.

The GCC has some of the world’s largest physical assets and some of the most complex operating environments. Thatcreates an exceptional place to build and testtechnology with real economic value. A smallimprovement in downtime, energy use, maintenanceor inventory management can translate into millions ofdollars. Before writing a cheque, I would want to seea clearly defined operating problem, a customer whohas already paid and measurable financial results.

Her pre-investment checklist is short. An operating problem she can state in one sentence. A customer who has paid real money, not a prospect. Results she can measure in dollars. Then she looks at rollout: how many months a deployment takes, how much custom work each client needs, and whether margins rise with every new sale. One pilot inside a big institution is only a start. The company passes when private buyers keep signing, and the product eventually sells beyond the region.

For GCC fund managers, tighter discipline has made the market healthier, in her view. The last cycle let companies raise at rich valuations before the numbers earned it. Investors now press on cash burn, governance, margins and the path to scale, while founders think harder about dilution, the ownership they give up each round. Her worry is overcorrection. Venture investing means committing to a big idea while much of the proof is still missing. Early-stage funding dries up when a committee expects a seed-stage company to show what a mature buyout would. She still backs ambitious founders, provided they know the risks they take, what those risks cost, and which evidence will show if the plan holds.

Where money goes when a crisis hits

Taleb’s crisis method starts with a diagnosis. Is the shock about liquidity, inflation, the currency, solvency, a rule change, or a geopolitical event? Each one forces a different set of people to act. The next step is to find them: the sellers with no choice, the borrowers scrambling for dollars, the institutions with bills due now. She also looks for the markets deep enough to take large capital flows without the price lurching.

For countries, she checks currency stability and convertibility (whether the money can be freely exchanged), the safety of custody, banking depth, the courts, political risk, and how easily money can leave. Assets get a similar test: how fast they sell, how long the money is tied up, whether they work as collateral, and how hard a policy shift would hit the price. She watches borrowing costs, currency moves, sovereign spreads (the extra yield investors demand to hold a government’s debt), deposit flows, shipping rates, and insurance prices. The news feed comes second. Those signals show where pressure is building before the headlines do.

Early in a crisis, money wants two things: to stay accessible and to stay liquid. That is the stage when safe haven assets, gold and the dollar being the usual examples, get crowded. The larger gains tend to arrive later, once markets work out who benefits from the new conditions and reprice them. GCC fund managers who track the early signals see the move forming. Taleb reads where the money is heading, and she reads it before the crowd.

  • 4 min read