Economy
Meta ordered to pay $567M to address kids’ mental health online
Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta has been ordered by a New Mexico court to pay $567 million to address harms to young people from its platforms in the second phase of a landmark trial.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid said in a ruling late Thursday that the bulk of the money – $420 million – will be used for treatment services for young people. The rest will go toward awareness and prevention, screening services and other costs over the next five years.
The new penalty is in addition to the $375 million in civil penalties that jurors ordered against Meta in March after determining the company knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.
In the second phase, prosecutors asked the judge to impose fundamental changes at Meta aimed at reining in addictive features, improving age verification and preventing child sexual exploitation through default privacy settings and closer oversight.
The total amount Meta is responsible for – $942 million – is a small fraction of its annual profit, which was about $60 billion in 2025. Investors seemed to shrug off the New Mexico ruling in after-hours trading Thursday, sending Meta’s stock down less than half a percent to $589.44.
Still, the ruling is another setback for Meta, which faces an avalanche of lawsuits from thousands of families of children harmed by social media.
New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said it sends an unmistakable message that companies will be held accountable when their product designs knowingly put children at risk.
“Today’s decision is a victory for every parent who has worried about what social media is doing to their child and every child who deserves to grow up safer online,” he said in a statement.
Meta vowed to appeal.
“We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content,” the company said in a statement. “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”
The judge ordered Facebook and Instagram to build banner and informational screens to clearly explain its protection features, best practices and tools to address inappropriate comments, for example, and display them regularly. Those changes and an educational campaign in New Mexico would be subject to review by the state.
The court said federal children’s privacy laws prevent Meta from applying age-verification tools to children under 13. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, means it cannot order Meta to request children to submit personal data or be passively tracked online, even for age verification purposes.
The court also noted that ordering verification of children’s ages only for Meta and not other social media companies would be “inequitable and unduly injurious” to the company.
Instead, the court ordered Meta to continue to improve its age assurance tools in New Mexico, which include using artificial intelligence to determine people’s age based on signals such as who their friends are and what types of content they post and consume. Meta must also attempt to develop a dedicated “under-13-years-of-age prediction model” in the next two years.
Additionally, Meta should also request proof of age for Instagram and Facebook users in New Mexico it estimates to be under 13. If it determines a user to be under 13, or under 18 but without being able to estimate a specific age, Meta must treat the user as under 13 or under 18 until the user verifies their age.
The company must also partner with schools or a child safety organization to create a reporting portal where school staff can flag users who may be under 13. And it must delete personal information it has collected on users under 13. The court also ordered Meta to report on its progress twice a year on how it’s complying with the abatement measures.
Meta is also gearing up for a trial later this month in federal court in Oakland, California. Here, Meta will face the first four of 29 states that sued it in a federal multi-district lawsuit filed in 2023 for contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.
Eight states, including Tennessee, where a trial is currently ongoing, filed lawsuits in their own state courts.
And late last month, Meta, along with TikTok, Snap and Google’s YouTube, were sued by the families of four teenagers who died by suicide over what they describe as “years of escalating harms” from using their platforms that eventually resulted in their deaths.
What comes out of New Mexico is the first of many dominoes that will fall for Meta, said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor at Northeastern University focusing on social media and cybersecurity.
“America is not going to pass a law that bans social media,” Edelson said. “But if companies like Meta know they’re causing harm to users by product design, the states are finally finding a way to rein this in.”
Financial markets already roiled by an Iran war-driven energy shock are facing another headache, as record temperatures across Europe are piling fresh pressure on food prices, supply chains and heavily indebted economies.
Here’s how extreme heat is becoming a key macroeconomic indicator for investors.
Supply chain squeeze
Investors’ supply chain worries have centred on the Strait of Hormuz and other trade routes disrupted by the Iran war. But Europe faces its own bottlenecks.
Major waterways, including the Rhine river, are suffering from exceptionally low water levels. Around 285 million metric tons of freight are transported on the Rhine each year, according to ING.
The river carried roughly 80% of goods moved on Germany’s inland waterways, connecting key industrial centres. Some cargo services have been suspended, while others are operating with reduced loads, pushing up transport costs.
Nomura senior European economist Andrzej Szczepaniak said he was monitoring water levels at Kaub, one of the shallowest points on the Rhine, on a daily basis.
Another inflation worry
The disruption risks adding to inflationary pressures.
Heat waves, droughts and wildfires across Europe are also hitting agriculture, raising concerns about food supplies and prices.
“We are definitely going to notice food price inflation,” said Invesco global market strategist Paul Jackson, citing the additional impact of the El Nino weather pattern, which is expected to intensify food inflation pressures globally.
If energy prices rise again, the impact could create a “double whammy” for central banks, Jackson said.
In Britain, major supermarket groups have warned another food-price shock could be on the horizon.
Growth hit
That leaves the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) balancing inflation risks from extreme heat against the potential drag on economic growth.
Markets are pricing in at least one more ECB interest rate increase by the end of the year. A recent paper by the University of Mannheim and the ECB estimated that heat waves, droughts and floods reduced Europe’s economic output by 0.3% last summer. It projected cumulative losses could rise to 0.8% by 2029.
Persistently low water levels could further weigh on industrial production and growth.
“We’re at concerning levels (with the Rhine); however, we’re probably not at the stage where it could cause a drag on GDP,” said Nomura’s Szczepaniak, though he added that forecasts for continued dry weather in Germany remained a concern.
Catastrophic demand
One sign of how markets are adapting to climate risk is the rapid growth of catastrophe bonds, which transfer disaster risk from insurers and reinsurers to investors.
Investors receive regular payments but can lose part or all of their principal if a predefined event, such as a hurricane or earthquake, occurs. Morningstar estimates catastrophe bond funds now manage almost $38 billion in assets, up more than 70% from June 2023.
Europe, the world’s fastest-warming continent, has been ravaged by wildfires this summer, particularly in France and Spain. Morningstar said wildfires and floods account for a growing share of the risks covered as insurers seek protection against losses from those events. The trend creates new challenges for issuers and investors because catastrophe risks are difficult to model.
“A key question in the field is whether the frequency of natural disasters can still be reliably extrapolated from long historical data series, or whether new and unexpected patterns are beginning to emerge,” Morningstar said.
The weather market
Demand for weather derivatives linked to Europe has surged this year as businesses from ski resorts to utilities seek protection from heat waves, cold snaps, floods and droughts.
CME data show trading volumes in European-specific weather futures have risen nearly 30% in 2026, compared with little change in overall weather-related trading volumes, including U.S. and Japanese products.
Cool down
Record temperatures have also created winners.
Google Trends data shows searches for “aircon” have rocketed across Europe. Retailers including Currys and Carrefour have reported strong demand for fans and air-conditioning units during the hottest periods of the summer.
Italian appliance maker De’Longhi reported “significant double-digit” growth in cooling-product sales in its latest results, outpacing its core coffee business.
Europe remains a relatively under-penetrated air-conditioning market, offering growth opportunities for mainly Asian and U.S. manufacturers that dominate the sector.
The European Commission estimates the number of room air conditioners in the EU will exceed 100 million by 2030, up from 57 million in 2020 and fewer than 7 million in 1990. Demand has become significant enough that air-conditioning costs are now included in EU consumer price statistics.
One of Meta Platforms’ artificial intelligence models accessed the internet on its own and hacked another company, the company said Thursday, the latest in a series of disclosures about AI models going rogue.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic also have described instances of AI models going beyond humans’ instructions to access the web and find ways around other companies’ digital security.
Meta said in a statement that a “misconfiguration” during cybersecurity testing by Irregular, an independent company hired by Meta, inadvertently allowed one of its models to access the internet.
“The model subsequently exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service, in a manner similar to previously-reported instances with other companies,” the company said. Meta said it is investigating the incident and will issue a report when that’s complete.
The disclosure has added to worries about AI models acting autonomously.
Separately this week, the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute announced it had found “unsanctioned agent behavior” during cyber testing. In one case, an agent created fake online identities to pressure a person to approve use of malicious code.
“On investigation, we found that some of the agents being tested had engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organizations,” AISI said Tuesday. “We declared a security incident and, within roughly one hour of discovery, had contained it and begun a full investigation.”
During the agency’s testing, Anthropic and OpenAI models took “autonomous, unsanctioned action” on the internet. Some guardrails to prevent misuse had been disabled, the agency said.
“As was standard in our cyber testing, we had intentionally permitted internet access, and model-provider cyber classifiers were deliberately disabled – conditions that do not reflect how frontier models are made available to the public,” AISI said. “We do this to best assess the maximum capability of models.”
Anthropic said it is “grateful” for AISI’s work and added that it underscores the need for a broader conversation about how to safely evaluate AI agents as their capabilities grow.
OpenAI said the AISI incidents took place “in testing environments with reduced safeguards, under conditions that do not reflect ordinary use.” It added it will continue working with others across the industry to “strengthen shared practices for conducting evaluations safely as models become more capable.”
The first company to disclose a hack late last month, OpenAI said it had tasked the AI models involved with pursuing “advanced exploitation using complex attack paths” to test cyber capabilities, but the technology went to unexpected lengths. It apparently decided on its own to target Hugging Face, a well-known AI development hub and marketplace, to obtain information it needed to carry out a task.
A spokesperson for Irregular, the San Francisco-based AI security company, said the Meta episode involves a test-environment issue that was disclosed last week by Anthropic.
Irregular said it’s writing a paper to share “best practices for containment” to prevent such incidents in the future and securely run cyber tests.
Turkish construction company Kalyon Inşaat said Thursday it had begun construction work on the United Arab Emirates’ first high-speed railway, one of the Gulf region’s largest transport infrastructure projects.
The company is a part of an international consortium awarded the Abu Dhabi section of the Abu Dhabi-Dubai High-Speed Rail Project by Etihad Rail, the developer and operator of the UAE’s national railway network.
The flagship company of the Turkish conglomerate, Kalyon Holding, is carrying out the project alongside UAE-based National Projects and Construction and Trojan Tunneling, and China’s China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC).
The project forms part of Etihad Rail’s $13 billion plan to develop a passenger railway network spanning approximately 900 kilometers across the UAE.
Once completed, the line will reduce travel time between Abu Dhabi and Dubai from around 90 minutes to 30 minutes.
The railway will operate at speeds of up to 320 kilometers per hour, making it the UAE’s first high-speed rail line. Existing railway lines in the country operate at speeds of around 200 km/h.
First of its kind
The full Abu Dhabi-Dubai high-speed railway will extend approximately 150 kilometers.
Under the consortium’s contract, the Abu Dhabi section will include around 97 kilometers of railway track and four stations.
The route will also feature an 11.2-kilometer twin-tube tunnel, one of the project’s major engineering components.
The railway is scheduled for completion in 2031.
Kalyon Inşaat Chair Murathan Kalyoncu said the project will be the first of its kind in the region and reflects the company’s engineering capabilities and growing international presence.
He described the project as not only a strategic investment for the United Arab Emirates but also an important milestone in global railway engineering.
“We will bring the engineering expertise and experience gained through large-scale infrastructure projects in Türkiye and around the world to the UAE’s first high-speed railway, while continuing to represent our country successfully in international markets,” Kalyoncu added.
U.S. workers again saw their slice of the U.S. economy drop to a record low in the second quarter amid an ongoing productivity boom that is producing output gains that are outpacing wage growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported on Thursday.
The so-called labor share of nominal gross domestic product (GDP), which BLS defines as the percentage of output that accrues to workers in the form of compensation, fell to 52.9% in the second quarter from 53.7% in the first quarter.
That was the lowest since the series began in 1947, BLS said, as it reported stronger-than-expected growth in second-quarter productivity.
The labor share has been falling for decades, driven by forces such as the diminishing breadth and power of organized labor and globalization that shifted relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs to low-cost overseas production centers.
More recently, the economy has seen technological advances like automation and potentially artificial intelligence that allow companies to increase output without substantially adding to headcount.
The trend essentially means that benefits of productivity gains are accruing more toward business owners and shareholders than to workers through wage gains.
Real weekly earnings – which measure wage growth against inflation – were essentially unchanged during the first half of 2026, though the most recent data for June snapped three straight months of falling readings and was the strongest in six years.
Retail sales across the eurozone dropped unexpectedly in June after rising moderately in May, suggesting that consumption continues to weigh on the economy in the second quarter, official data revealed on Thursday.
Retail sales decreased 0.3% in June from May, Eurostat reported. Sales had increased 0.4% in May but fell 0.4% in April.
The decline came in contrast to economists’ expectations for a slight increase of 0.1%.
ING economist Peter Vanden Houte said data reinforced the view that consumption was not a major driver of growth in the second quarter. Some improvement can be expected, but a genuine consumption boom looks unlikely at this stage, he noted.
Sales of food, drinks and tobacco fell 0.5% and that of non-food products slid 0.4%. Meanwhile, sales of automotive fuel in specialized stores increased 1.5%.
On a yearly basis, retail sales posted an expansion of 0.7%, which was weaker than the prior month’s 1.9% increase and economists’ forecast of 1.0% growth.
Retail sales in the European Union edged down 0.1% from May but increased 1.2% from the previous year.
Among member states of the EU, the largest monthly decreases in sales volume were reported in Finland, Romania and Germany. Meanwhile, Luxembourg, Portugal, Croatia and Sweden registered the highest increases.
Syria has achieved self-sufficiency in wheat production for the first time since the outbreak of its civil war in 2011, an agriculture official said Thursday, marking a milestone for the country’s food security after years of depending on imports.
As well as the war hitting the agriculture sector hard, Syria has seen drought in recent years, with the United Nations saying 2025 saw the country’s worst climate conditions in decades, also impacting wheat-growing land.
“There won’t be any need for (wheat) imports this season,” said Ahmed Qadoun, deputy general director of the Syrian Grain Establishment, adding that Syria had last been self-sufficient in 2010.
On Wednesday, state news agency SANA reported that the grain establishment had received 2.7 million tons of wheat from across Syria during this year’s harvest, exceeding the national annual requirement of 2.55 million tons.
Before the civil war erupted in 2011, Syria was self-sufficient in wheat, producing an average of 4.1 million tons annually.
But after the conflict and drought disrupted production, Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad used to rely on imports, particularly from ally Russia, for wheat.
Syria’s new authorities took power in 2024, and the country said last year that it had received wheat shipments and donations from countries including Russia and Iraq.
The United Nations said in June that more than 13 million Syrians, or over half the population, were facing acute food insecurity.
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