Central America
Apple CEO warns price rises 'unavoidable' amid AI boom
Apple CEO warns price rises'unavoidable' amid AI boom The prices of Apple products will have to increase due to the new demand for memory chips from the artificial intelligence boom, outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook has told The Wall Street Journal. "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," he told the newspaper on Wednesday, adding that his company has been "trying to shield customers from the increases" but that it had become "unsustainable." It is also unclear, for instance, how much the price of Apple's iPhone 18, which is expected to launch in September, will be affected. "There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases," Cook said. Citing an estimate from research firm TechInsights, the Journal reported that Apple would need to increase the price of its iPhone Pro model by $270 to maintain its current profit margin .
Why do AI models struggle with online hate speech detection?
Why do AI models struggle with online hate speech detection? Hate speech that once circulated in person now travels farther and faster via anonymous online accounts behind a screen. As the United Nations marks the International Day for Countering Hate Speech on June 18, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that social platforms are amplifying the threat. With artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly tasked with detecting and removing hate speech online, Al Jazeera looks at where these systems fall short compared with human judgement. How is hate speech defined?
World Cup racism monitor urges FIFA to remove VAR official over gesture
FIFA's discrimination monitor at the World Cup has called for a VAR official to be removed for appearing to make a hand gesture resembling a white supremacist sign. When the official broadcast of Germany's opening game against Curacao on Sunday cut pre-game to show the team of video review analysts, Shaun Evans from Australia made an "OK" symbol with his right hand in front of his right leg. Though the game was played in Houston, video officials work in Dallas at the World Cup broadcast centre. "Advice from our experts is that the gesture used clearly resembles an upside down'OK' hand symbol used as a'white power' symbol in global far-right circles," the Fare network, a long-time partner of FIFA and European football body UEFA to monitor racist and discriminatory chants, flags and symbols at international games, said in a statement. "Clearly this official should have no further role to play in this World Cup," Fare said in a statement, describing the gesture as "neo-Nazi".
The Baltics urgently need a de-escalation mechanism; Belarus can help
Recent weeks have seen a significant escalation of military tensions in and around the Baltics. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which are all NATO members, now experience regular incursions into their airspace by Ukrainian drones. According to both Kyiv and the Baltic capitals, those drones, en route to hit targets in western Russia, get diverted by Russian electronic jamming and end up entering these countries' territories. In early May, several stray unmanned aircraft crashed in Latvia, one of them damaging an oil storage facility. Those developments triggered a political crisis in Latvia and led to the collapse of its government.
Few-shot Cross-country Generalization of Tabular Machine Learning and Foundation Models for Childhood Anemia Prediction under Distribution Shift
Brima, Yusuf, Atemkeng, Marcellin, Kallon, Lansana Hassim, Niyukuri, David, Vacavant, Antoine, Saidu, Samuel, Chen, Ding-Geng
Background Childhood Anemia affects an estimated 40% of children aged 6-59 months globally and arises from heterogeneous nutritional, infectious, and socioeconomic factors that vary substantially across settings. This variability challenges the generalizability of predictive machine learning models, which often degrade under cross-population or temporal shifts. We investigated the utility a modern transformer-based tabular foundation model (TabPFN) as a complementatry framework with respect to supervised classical machine learning methods across diverse country contexts, with particular attention to data-scarce settings where surveillance capacity is most limited. Methods We conducted a multi-country prediction study using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) children's recode data from 16 countries spanning Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. The harmonized analytic cohort comprised of (n = 68,856)children aged 6-59 months with valid hemoglobin measurements. Anemia was defined using WHO age and altitude-adjusted thresholds and treated as a binary outcome. We trained Logistic Regression, XGBoost, and LightGBM models using standard supervised learning, and evaluated TabPFN v2.6 in an in-context learning setting. Performance was assessed using Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC-ROC) and other standard classification metrics, with calibration evaluated via Brier score and expected calibration error (ECE). Uncertainty in performance estimates was quantified using bootstrap resampling to derive 95% confidence intervals. Robustness was assessed in a few-shot learning setting. Cross-population generalization was examined using leave-one-country-out (LOCO) validation and reverse-LOCO experiments to assess directional transferability. Subgroup analyses were conducted across five demographic strata: child age group, sex, maternal education, residence type, and household wealth quintile. Feature importance was assessed using standard linear and tree-based explainer SHAP values for the three supervised models and an adapted version of SHAP for TabPFN, aggregated across countries and examined at the country level. TabPFN also yielded the best probabilistic calibration across all 16 countries, achieving the lowest mean Brier score (0.203) and Expected Calibration Error (ECE = 0.042) of all models evaluated; LightGBM and Logistic Regression exhibited the greatest miscalibration, particularly at higher predicted probabilities. Under full-data conditions, within-country discrimination was moderate across all models (AUC-ROC 0.59-0.76) Under LOCO validation, performance declined modestly (AUC-ROC 0.58-0.69) Reverse-LOCO analyses revealed asymmetric and directional transferability, with epidemiologically diverse populations serving as more informative training sources and certain target populations remaining persistently difficult to predict regardless of model or training data.
Latvian PM resigns over handling of stray Ukrainian drones
Latvia's Prime Minister Evika Silina resigned following criticism of her government's handling of stray drones, believed to be Ukrainian, crossing into Latvian territory. The controversy deepened divisions within the ruling coalition, causing it to lose its parliamentary majority. Trump, Xi speak ahead of talks to make relations'better than ever'
Why are World Cup tickets so expensive?
Why are World Cup tickets so expensive? Game Theory Why are World Cup tickets so expensive? The 2026 World Cup is not only the biggest World Cup in history. With dynamic pricing and rising travel costs, the game may be global, but access isn't to your average football fan. So who gets to be in the stands?
War, the Gulf & Rethinking Money in Sport
Game Theory: Could geopolitics impact the business of sport in the Gulf? The Gulf helped transform global sport through billions in investment. But as geopolitical tensions rise is that era of rapid expansion coming to an end? Al Jazeera's Samantha Johnson looks at how geopolitics could impact the business of sport. The Masters: Golf's segregated past Are Iran's athletes political pawns?
Sebastian Sawe breaks London marathon record with first run under two hours
Kenya's Sabastian Sawe has become the first man to run a marathon in under two hours, winning the London Marathon in 1:59:30. Ethiopia's Tigst Assefa defended her London Marathon crown on Sunday, breaking her own world record. The 31-year-old, who has never lost a marathon, smashed the world record by 65 seconds. Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia stayed on Sawe's heels for most of the 42.195km course before fading down the final stretch to take second in his marathon debut with 1:59:41, while Jacob Kiplimo of Uganda won bronze in 2:02:28. All three finished under Kiptum's previous record time.