All the records broken by Lionel Messi today:
Most FIFA World Cup finals goals by a football (soccer) player - 18
Most FIFA World Cup matches played in by an individual - 28
Most matches won by a player at the football (soccer) FIFA World Cup - 18
Most minutes played in the football (soccer) FIFA World Cup - 2,489
We are witnessing history.
A boy once sent a Christmas gift to a girl in the Philippines, and 15 years later she tracked him down on Facebook—and they ended up getting married.
In 2000, seven-year-old Tyrel Wolfe from Idaho sent a Christmas shoebox through Operation Christmas Child, which was received by a young girl in the Philippines named Joana Marchan. Inside the gift, he included a photo of himself in cowboy gear—something Joana held onto for years, even after her thank-you letter never made it back.
More than a decade later, in 2011, Joana searched his name on Facebook and reached out. After reconnecting, they began talking regularly, eventually forming a long-distance relationship that led Tyrel to visit her in Manila. The two married in 2014 in Idaho, completing a remarkable full-circle story that began with a simple holiday gift.
Veiem per primera vegada la torre de Jesucrist il·luminada!
L'espectacle de llum iniciat des de la base fins a la il·luminació de la creu ha culminat amb una composició de llums guiats per drons, que han dibuixat la figura Gaudí i la frase «primer l'amor, després la tècnica».
A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name.
He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping.
His name is Fabrice Bellard.
Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the systems programming world knows what one man has built.
Fabrice was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. He studied at École Polytechnique, the top French engineering school. He never went to Silicon Valley. He never built a startup empire. He just wrote code.
In 2000 he started a project called FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia framework for encoding, decoding, and streaming video. He was 28. The project did one thing nobody else had done well. It handled every video and audio format that existed, in one library, on every operating system. He led it himself for years.
Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice's code processed it.
He was not done.
In 2003 he started QEMU, a machine emulator and virtualizer. He wrote it solo until version 0.7.1 in 2005. QEMU lets you run any operating system on any other operating system. It became the foundation of modern virtualization. KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, runs on top of QEMU. Every major cloud provider, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, runs virtual machines on infrastructure built around it. The Quick Emulator is the most cited piece of cloud infrastructure code on Earth.
He kept going.
In 2001 he won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest with a small C compiler that grew into TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. TCC can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in under 15 seconds. In 2004 he calculated the most digits of pi ever computed at the time, using a personal desktop computer and an algorithm he derived himself called Bellard's formula. In 2011 he wrote a complete PC emulator in pure JavaScript that runs Linux in your browser, a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real.
In 2019 he released QuickJS, a small but complete JavaScript engine that fits where V8 cannot. In 2021 he released NNCP, a neural network based lossless data compressor that immediately took the lead on the Large Text Compression Benchmark.
Then he turned his attention to large language models. He built TextSynth Server, a web server with a REST API for running LLMs locally. He released ts_zip and ts_sms, compression utilities that use language models to compress text and short messages at ratios traditional algorithms cannot reach. He released TSAC, a very low bitrate audio compression system. In December 2025 he released Micro QuickJS, a new JavaScript engine for microcontrollers, separate from QuickJS, designed for environments with almost no memory.
Fabrice co-founded a telecom company called Amarisoft in 2012, where he serves as CTO. Amarisoft builds 4G and 5G base station software used by carriers and labs around the world. He has been running it for over a decade while continuing to ship personal projects from his own home page at bellard dot org
He has no Twitter. He has no Instagram. He gives almost no interviews. His personal website is a flat list of projects with no styling, no fonts, no marketing copy. Just titles and links.
A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet.
He is still shipping.
@visegrad24 It would have been nice to see this happen. But Russia wont allow it. Romania and Moldova its exactly similar case like Albania and Kosovo. But in both cases russians directly or indirectly influence so the unification its still just a dream.
🇺🇸 Ivanka Trump revealed she's building a massive 1,400-hectare private island resort in the Mediterranean that has no existing power, everything constructed from scratch.
She found it by swimming to it off a friend's boat.
Add five miles of beachfront across the way and "some of the greatest living architects of our time."
She's building a kingdom from the ground up.
Source: @davidsenra
@ShakeLS@atsipras@ediramaal You're welcome to visit again, but stop spreading hate and its south Albania again, with albanian heritage not what you're dreaming on your comments!
@ShakeLS@atsipras@ediramaal They are all albanians mrs Nina, but with greek passports so they can have open roads across Europe and of course enjoy some € from your goverment. And nobody had been attacked in South Albania!
The Russian drone crash into apartments in Galați was a blatant and serious violation of Romania’s sovereignty and European airspace.
I spoke with Foreign Minister @oana_toiu this morning to convey the EU’s full solidarity with Romania.
Russia has long ago stopped respecting borders.
Moscow cannot be allowed to breach European airspace with impunity.
EU Foreign Ministers yesterday vowed to ramp up pressure on Russia, increase support for Ukraine, and invest in Europe’s own defence readiness.