• Arsenal forward still struggling with achilles injury

• ‘Bukayo is just not there yet. Some things are missing’

Bukayo Saka continues to play through the pain of an achilles injury, according to the England manager, Thomas Tuchel, and must be managed carefully as the start of the World Cup looms large.

The Arsenal winger joined up with the England squad in West Palm Beach on Saturday after being given an extra week off after his involvement in the Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain. Tuchel gave a similar break to his other Arsenal players Declan Rice, Eberechi Eze and Noni Madueke.

Continue reading...

• England 3-0 Ukraine

• Carter 14, Stanway 37, Mead 67

England had to settle for a place in the World Cup playoffs despite cruising to a 3-0 victory against Ukraine, as Spain’s 6-1 win in Iceland forced England to finish in second spot.

It is the first time that England have failed to top their World Cup qualifying group for nearly 25 years, since missing out on a place at the 2003 World Cup, back when the major tournament finals only included 16 nations overall. Being involved in the playoff this time around is not as concerning as it might initially sound – a revamp of the format has meant that only four European sides will qualify automatically, down from nine automatic qualifiers four years ago.

Continue reading...

We look at the betting markets to see who bookmakers are backing to win in Barcelona.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Meta says it will expand how it uses off-platform activity shared by other businesses to personalize Facebook and Instagram feeds as well as AI responses, not just ads. The change starts in July and can be disabled through the "Activity from other businesses" setting, though Meta says it is not collecting new data as part of the update. The Verge reports: For example, Meta says if you bought a tent online recently, you might see camping-related videos in your Reels feed. "We aren't collecting any new data as part of this update," the blog post says. "This is about using information that businesses already send to us to further improve your experience."

Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez tells The Verge that the company previously only used the activity across its apps, such as likes, views, and follows, to tailor the content you see. The company also started using conversations with its AI assistant to personalize ads last year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If your phone is too compelling, your sex life might not be. American birth rates have been declining for nearly two decades now, and researchers believe they’ve identified a potential new culprit: The iPhone. That’s right: A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper examines AT&T mobile broadband coverage from the iPhone’s 2007 launch until the company lost carrier exclusivity in 2011. Comparing birth rates across counties and controlling for confounding factors, the authors concluded that access to the iPhone reduced births, particularly among younger women. The data, Middlebury College Economics professor and NBER researcher Caitlin Myers and Middlebury graduate Ezekiel Hooper wrote in their paper, suggests that iPhone access caused significant birth rate decreases across age groups. The authors found that women aged 15–19 in counties with access to the iPhone through AT&T saw birth rates fall by as much as 8 percent during the study period, while those aged 20–24 experienced declines of up to 6.6 percent. Older age groups also showed "statistically significant but smaller declines," according to the paper. Myers argues the findings point to more than a simple correlation. “It’s pretty much undeniable that births fell faster in places with AT&T coverage,” Myers told The Register in an email. “As a scientist, I’m loath to ever say causality is ‘proven’ … but I would say that we’ve identified a compelling natural experiment and that it strongly points to a large and causal relationship between iPhones and fertility.” Compared to counties with dominant Verizon and Sprint coverage, which only began to receive Android devices in 2009 per the paper, there was no effect on fertility related to the iPhone release. Myers told us that they did see some evidence that those control areas started to show some similar declines when Android phones became widely available, but smaller sample sizes and limited data make those findings a bit less precise. “Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women,” the paper explained, adding that the release of the iPhone can be attributed to as much as 52 percent of the decline in general US fertility rates over the period. Again, controlling for factors like income, race, education level, and more didn’t eliminate the iDecline in birth rates. How the iPhone killed sex Writing on LinkedIn, Hooper said that people he’s spoken to about the paper were entirely unsurprised. “Some counties got a working iPhone; nearby ones didn't,” Hooper noted. “We find that teen and early adult births fell much faster where the iPhone worked. And the counties stuck on Verizon? No effect. Hard to explain that timing with anything but the iPhone.” The study’s data doesn’t include anything about the reasons the iPhone’s introduction caused a birth rate decline, but Myers and Hooper point to other research - and a bit of common sense - to suggest three possibilities. First there’s the fact that smartphones are a substitute for in-person interactions, meaning people aren’t in physical proximity, and thus less likely to be having sex. Combine that with one of the other factors they identified - instant, easy access to online porn - and people remaining at home instead of going out to socialize are more likely to just take care of business on their own. Third, the iPhone gave people easy access to information about contraception and abortion access, so even those bucking the don’t-leave-the-house trend are less likely to have a kid they don’t want. “iPhone is the always-available alternative to in-person time; its social-media apps are engineered to sustain attention; both features displace the peer time that produces sexual encounters,” the pair wrote. Then again, iPhone owners still get more action than Android users, at least according to a 16-year-old OkCupid study, so Apple aficionados can at least count themselves lucky in that regard. “We do not claim that the iPhone is the sole cause of the post-2007 decline,” the duo concludes in their paper. Research looking at more recent effects of connected tech on fertility rates closer to the present has similarly found that, while the iPhone may have been the canary in the coal mine, internet connectivity, social media, and ubiquitous pornography are still having an effect. The fertility decline that began in 2007 has become a cause for concern around the world, not just with weird billionaires, and Myers and Hooper conclude their paper with a look at government programs in various countries that have been offering economic incentives to encourage their citizens to have kids. Those programs, they say, are targeting the wrong problems, even if the cost of raising a child is too high for many. “Our estimates imply that the introduction of the modern smartphone played a sizable role in the decline in US births,” the paper concludes. If they’re correct, cash incentives and other economic relief isn’t necessarily going to change things. “The policy instruments to which governments have committed the largest sums … do not, on their own, address the behavioral shift our estimates suggest is at work,” the pair wrote. The solution, like so many other social issues of the modern age, may be better solved by people just putting down their damn phones and ditching FaceTime for some actual face-to-face time. ®

Dinsdagavond braken er rellen uit in Belfast naar aanleiding van het steekincident van maandag in de Noord-Ierse stad. Nog voordat de nationaliteit van de verdachte van dat incident bevestigd werd, kondigden verschillende groepen ‘anti-immigratie’-demonstraties aan.

These age verification laws aren't about keeping kids off social media, they're about surveillance, control, and locking LGBT people out of public discourse. It's a fascist power play. Centering Children on Social Media as the argument for mandating IDs to use computers is a smokescreen, so that we're spending time arguing about how to best solve this very complicated problem, instead of talking about all the ways that this legislation will be used to facilitate the abuse of children and marginalized people.

From later in the thread: "[...]Anyone who sees a conversation about how age verification laws are going to cause widespread significant harm to lots of different groups of people and decides instead to talk about how social media is harmful to children is doing the work of disinformation spreading propagandists. They might not *be* disinformation spreading propagandists, they might have just been duped by disinformation spreading propagandists, but either way they are doing the *work* of disinformation spreading propagandists. This is a propaganda and PR technique that is in common use today. This is how it works: Person 1 makes a point that is harmful to the narrative the PR firm has been paid to protect. One or more accounts on the payroll of that PR firm, who usually just posts innocuous stuff but who *always* has an opinion on the topic of the day, chimes in with an indirectly related smokescreen argument, usually accompanied by an accusation or an emotional appeal. Person 1 then gets bogged down with that argument, tacitly approving that the two topics are in fact one topic. Lots of people then see the argument, and come to associate the smokescreen with the real issue. Some of them will be swayed specifically by the emotionally appeal ("think of the children") and some of them will genuinely believe in the smokescreen issue ("social media is bad for children") and accept that the smokescreen is important enough to justify accepting whatever the original post was arguing against. There are lots of these PR accounts floating around out there. They're sockpuppets. They look like real people, sometimes they *are* real people, but they're also sockpuppets. The end result of that is a bunch of people popping in to conversations about Age Verification laws to talk about separate and legitimately important issues as if those issues and Age Verification laws are the same thing. And some of those people might be paid PR Sockpuppets, but some of them are definitely real people who really care about the harm social media might have on children. And so we spend so much time talking about the nuance and potential solutions to this much more complicated problem that the real issue (these proposed Age Verification Laws are actually tools of fascist surveillance and control which will be used to suppress dissent and harm marginalized communities) gets lost." also (responding to someone): "'I'd rather give my 13 year old child a bottle of whiskey than access to Roblox' is a hell of a take, y'all. I'm not here to argue that Instagram or Roblox are good for kids (the opposite!) but 1) these arguments are still just providing cover to normalize laws that mandate sending government IDs to 3rd parties (like Peter Thiel) in order to use a computer or phone, which we have decided to allow politicians to call "age verification" 2) What the fuck? That's a hell of hot take. But! It's *exactly* the kind of hot take you'd get from a PR firm sock-puppet or propagandist who is trying to distract from the issue at hand. It provokes such a clear and immediate negative emotional response that it completely re-frames the conversation away from the very real threat of increased and increasingly inescapable mass surveillance and towards what is more harmful for kids!" Andrew Roach, a.k.a. ajroach42 (Mastodon, blog, website, newsletter) is an interesting figure, who among other things is responsible for New Ellijay TV, a real community television station in the mountains of north Georgia (US) with a strange and eclectic array of programming, much of it produced locally.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn overwegend met verliezen de handel uitgegaan, waarbij vooral techaandelen omlaag gingen. Beleggers deden relatief dure chipfondsen in de verkoop, mogelijk om zich meer te richten op andere sectoren die binnenkort kunnen profiteren van een veerkrachtige Amerikaanse economie. Tegelijkertijd bleven de spanningen tussen Iran en de Verenigde Staten boven de markt hangen.

De Nasdaq verloor 1 procent tot 25.678,82 punten. De Dow-Jonesindex steeg juist 0,2 procent tot 50.872,11 punten. De breed samengestelde S&P 500 ging 0,3 procent omlaag tot 7386,65 punten.

Chipbedrijven Marvell, AMD, Micron en Broadcom zakten tot ruim 9 procent, terwijl ze eerder nog in de plus stonden. De afgelopen handelsdagen schommelden de koersen van deze bedrijven al sterk. Na het begin van de Iranoorlog, die aanvankelijk een schok op de financiële markten teweegbracht, waren het voornamelijk sterk presterende chipbedrijven die de belangrijkste graadmeters op Wall Street naar recordhoogtes duwden. Maar na sterke cijfers over de Amerikaanse arbeidsmarkt gingen de chipfabrikanten vrijdag hard onderuit.

Beleggers maken zich tegelijkertijd op voor een reeks megabeursgangen in de Verenigde Staten. Ruimtevaart- en AI-bedrijf SpaceX gaat naar verwachting vrijdag naar de beurs om een recordbedrag van 75 miljard dollar op te halen, bij een waardering van bijna 1,77 biljoen dollar. Ook OpenAI en Anthropic, die vooroplopen met toepassingen van kunstmatige intelligentie, hebben stappen gezet voor een beursgang.

Rondom de oorlog tussen Iran en de Verenigde Staten bleef de situatie gespannen. President Donald Trump beschuldigt Iran van het neerhalen van een Amerikaanse helikopter op maandag. Volgens hem moeten de VS reageren, waarmee het staakt-het-vuren met Iran in het gedrang kan komen. Eerder zei Trump nog dat gesprekken over een vredesdeal in "de laatste fase" zijn beland.

De olieprijzen daalden ondanks Trumps uitlatingen. Een vat Brent-olie werd 2,7 procent goedkoper op 91,72 dollar per vat. Amerikaanse olie zakte 3,1 procent in prijs tot 88,50 dollar per vat.

Beleggers hadden verder aandacht voor Nuvalent, een bedrijf dat medicatie voor longkanker ontwikkelt. De Britse farmaceut GSK kondigde aan de biofarmaceut voor 10,6 miljard dollar te willen kopen, waarop Nuvalent ruim 39 procent meer waard werd.