Trump Shrugs Off Surging Inflation, and Why a Groundbreaking Social Media Ban Is Floundering

I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for the Athletic. And I'm Amy Lawrence. I cover football for the Athletic. Whatever you call it, the biggest competition in the sport is happening right now. And the Athletic's World Cup coverage has everything you need to follow the tournament. We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground. If you're eager to know more about the teams, the matches, all the stories on and off the pitch, we've got you sorted. Throughout the tournament, you have free access to all the coverage in our app. Download the Athletic app and see you there. From The New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Thursday, June 11th. Here's what we're covering. In the Oval Office yesterday, President Trump shrugged off new economic data that shows inflation in the US is surging. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall cost of goods in the US is now 4.2% higher than a year ago. It is the third straight month that inflation numbers have gone up. The increase has been driven almost entirely by energy prices, which skyrocketed after Trump took the US to war with Iran. But the president has repeatedly brushed aside the issue of rising prices for Americans, calling concerns about affordability a, quote, con job. He has said that the economic pain now is a small price to pay for national security and has insisted that any damage to the economy will only be temporary. The inflation has come down between now and November. When the war is over? It's coming down. It's going to come down like a rock. Hours later, the president escalated the conflict with Iran. I just spoke with President Trump, who is currently in the situation room. The president tells Fox News that 49 Tomahawk missiles were used to hit targets inside of Iran. The US launched a new wave of attacks after Trump said Iran was taking, quote, too long to negotiate and would have to pay the price. Both Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made clear the strikes are meant to try and pressure Iran to agree to a deal on Trump's terms. If we need to negotiate with bombs, we'll negotiate with bombs. And we're very good at it. Nobody better in the world. In response, Iran said it carried out its own series of strikes on US bases across the Middle East. Taken together, the flurry of strikes this week appears to contradict Trump's repeated claims that the two countries are on the verge of a peace deal. In Northern Ireland, the city of Belfast is on edge after a graphic video of a brutal stabbing this week set off unrest there. The video captured one man attacking another in the middle of a Belfast street on Monday, and authorities later charged a 30-year-old Sudanese refugee with attempted murder. The footage spread quickly online and led to calls for protests by anti-immigrant activists, with one prominent far-right agitator calling it a, quote, invader attack on our people. On social media, Elon Musk, who has repeatedly boosted far-right messaging in the UK and elsewhere, weighed in too, sharing a list of locations around Northern Ireland for people to gather. By Tuesday night, crowds took to the streets. Police said while some people protested peacefully, others, including young men in masks, targeted immigrants. Firefighters had to escort immigrant families from homes that had been set on fire. One local official said, quote, people were being terrorized simply because of the color of their skin or where they came from. Last night, violence flared again, and police used water cannons to try and disperse crowds who had set small fires and hurled bricks and bottles. The unrest in Northern Ireland comes after another high-profile stabbing in the UK that has also galvanized far-right activists. In that case, police in England recently released body cam footage of the aftermath of a fatal attack. The responding officers initially handcuffed the victim, an 18-year-old white college student, before realizing he was the one who'd been stabbed. They'd been misled by the actual attacker, a British-born Sikh man who told police he'd been the target of a racist attack. Nigel Farage, the head of Britain's far-right reform party, claimed the police response was evidence of, quote, anti-white prejudice. And Vice President JD Vance jumped in, claiming it showed that, quote, European elites had allowed a mass invasion of migrants. British officials pushed back sharply on Vance's comments, noting that the attacker in that case was not an immigrant, and a spokesman for the UK's prime minister accused Vance of, quote, seeking to stir up division on our streets. Six months ago, Australia began an ambitious experiment. It became the first country in the world to ban social media for everyone under the age of 16. It was an attempt to protect kids from the potential harms of those platforms, like anxiety, bullying, depression, et cetera. The law requires TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other apps to verify the age of any users and remove young teens' accounts, or face fines of tens of millions of dollars. In terms of how it's going, though. Well, if you've met any teenagers recently, they're very tech-savvy, and they've really found a bunch of ways around this. VPN is a popular option. A lot of age verification systems that the apps have put into place have been pretty fallible. So kids have been able to get around it by drawing mustaches on them, using somebody else's face to scan them. And there's also teens who say their accounts never were flagged in the first place and continue to work without a hitch. Victoria Kim covers Australia for the times. She's been talking to families about the effectiveness of the ban. Something that kept coming up in conversations with parents I've been having about this law is that the real kids that may be benefiting from this are actually the younger kids who are not yet on social media. So kids who are 12 and younger, who don't have older siblings and haven't actually been on social media yet. And for parents, they say this law has really given them the confidence and the backing to tell them it's illegal, you can't have it. And that may eventually get to a point where enough of them, a critical mass of them are off it and that peer pressure that kids feel from their friends may lessen over time. Victoria says so far, no social media companies have been fined despite how many kids are still using their platforms. Though there are compliance investigations underway against some of the tech giants. For now, Australia's mixed results haven't stopped other countries from pushing for their own bans. Just this month, lawmakers in Canada and the UK said they are moving forward with similar proposals to keep kids off social media. And finally, even if you've never heard the name Andres Cantor, you have heard his voice. Goal! Back at the 1994 World Cup, the Argentine sports broadcaster became a global sensation for his iconic goal call. Please welcome Univision's Andres Cantor. Andres! He made the talk show rounds. He did TV commercials. No! This job has taken its toll. And for many people, his call has since become the sound of soccer. I want to get to the World Cup as prepared as I can mentally, physically and obviously with the strongest voice possible knowing that I have a very hectic schedule. I'm calling a lot of games in a very short amount of time. The Times recently caught up with Cantor to see how he prepared for this World Cup, which kicks off this afternoon and where he'll be calling games for Spanish language broadcasts. He said he has been training, complete with a voice coach. When you start pulling up like this, ah, we start doing this, then pull. Emotions can't come out, air can't come out, energy can't come out, and it gets more tired quickly. Before every World Cup, I asked Wendy to get me in shape as much as I can because obviously my voice takes it all after calling so many emotional games. At the last World Cup, when his home team of Argentina won the whole thing, his goal call, where he was barely keeping it together, went viral. You know, I was overtaken by emotions. It was something that had been waiting for as much as all the Argentinian soccer fans for 36 years. Cantor says at this point, with the games kicking off today, all he can do is try and prepare himself for another round. When the play is non-stop and it's continuous and it's high energy, I put that high energy into the broadcast itself. And sometimes, like when the final whistle blows, I'm pretty much as tired as the players are. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow with the latest and the Friday News Quiz.