Arab Observer

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[ᜰ @markklfc]

Lamine Yamal on Lionel Messi after Spain’s FIFA World Cup triumph over Argentina.

🗣️ Lamine Yamal: “Tonight I lifted the World Cup for Spain, but I also experienced something I’ll tell my children one day. The man who once held me as a baby was standing on the other side of the pitch, fighting for the same dream. Football has a beautiful way of bringing stories full circle.”

“When I looked at Messi after the final whistle, I didn’t just see an opponent. I saw the player who made millions of kids, including me, believe football could be art. I saw the man whose videos I watched over and over, trying to copy things that nobody else could do.”

“I know this defeat will hurt him. You don’t play with that much passion, carry your country again and again, and lose a World Cup final without feeling pain. Even in defeat, he kept demanding the ball, creating chances and refusing to stop believing. That’s what champions do.”

“People will talk about Spain winning this World Cup, and they should. But they’ll also remember that, at an age when most legends have already retired, Messi was still making the world’s best defenders panic every time he touched the ball. That’s extraordinary.”

“The photo of Messi bathing me became one of football’s most iconic images. Today we took another picture together, but this time I could thank him face to face. Without players like him, kids like me wouldn’t dare dream this big.”

“One day another generation will replace mine too. That’s football. But there will never be another Lionel Messi. Records can be broken and trophies can be won, but inspiring an entire generation to fall in love with the game is something only a few people in history will ever achieve.”

“Tonight belongs to Spain. Tomorrow, the debates will continue. But my respect for Lionel Messi will never change. He didn’t need to win this final to prove who he is. For me, he’ll always be one of the greatest players football has ever seen, and sharing the pitch with him was a privilege I’ll carry for the rest of my life.”

[B.M. @ireallyhateyou]

This is insane. Twitter suspended the account of the British consulate in Jerusalem for this tweet! WTF

[Actu Foot @ActuFoot_]

🚨 RESPECT AU COMMENTATEUR SUISSE DAVID LEMOS 🇨🇭, QUI AU MOMENT DE RENDRE L'ANTENNE A PARFAITEMENT RÉSUMÉ LES ÉCHECS DE CE MONDIAL ! 👏

🗣️ « C'était sans aucun doute LA COUPE DU MONDE LA PLUS MERCANTILE DE L'HISTOIRE, l'une des plus POLITISÉES aussi.

Nous n'oublierons pas les prix qu'ont dû payer les personnes qui n'ont pas des moyens considérables pour leur passion... 🤑

Parfois sans pouvoir ne serait-ce qu'ENTRER DANS LE PAYS SI LEUR NATIONALITÉ N'ÉTAIT PAS LA BONNE. Qu'ils soient fans, journalistes, arbitres parfois, comme le Somalien Omar Artan 🇸🇴.

On pense aussi au traitement INACCEPTABLE de l'équipe d'Iran 🇮🇷, qui n'a pas pu défendre ses chances correctement dans ce tournoi.

On pense également au cas Balogun 🇺🇸 : on aura vu un président se vanter d'avoir appelé le président de la FIFA pour faire annuler une suspension d'un joueur.

La politique s'est immiscée au cœur du jeu, alors que la FIFA dit vouloir le mettre au-dessus de tout : visiblement, C'EST JUSQU'À UN CERTAIN POINT.

Une Coupe du monde qui aura aussi vu tous ses matches se disputer en quatre quart-temps et sa finale connaître une mi-temps de près de 30 minutes...

LA CRISE A DEUX NOMS : L'ARGENT ET LE POUVOIR. Il y a aujourd'hui UNE CRISE DE CONFIANCE entre de nombreux acteurs de ce sport et la FIFA.

Ces prochaines semaines, l'argent va pleuvoir sur beaucoup de Fédérations, beaucoup d'acteurs de ce sport, QUI SERONT GENTIMENT INVITÉS À SE TAIRE. 🤐

On a l'espoir que certaines choses seront relevées ET QU'ON NE LES REVERRA PLUS. » ❌

🎙️ @RadioTeleSuisse / @davidlemos

[grandson @Grandsoncr7]

🗣️ Luis de la Fuente:

“I’m so happy we won the World Cup. This is the happiest day of my life, thanks to Ferran Torres’ goal. But we also need to talk about the VAR and the referee. I have never seen a bigger robbery in my coaching career than this. It looked like they wanted Argentina and Lionel Messi to win it again so badly.

The referee was practically Argentina’s 12th man on the pitch. In the first half, there were several fouls that he ignored, but the worst was the challenge on Dani Olmo. Mac Allister tackled him with both feet, which is a red-card offense, but the referee and VAR ignored it.

There was also the challenge on Yamal, where a player stepped on his ankle from behind. The referee ignored it, and VAR didn’t intervene either.

Argentina should be ashamed of receiving such favoritism in a World Cup final. They had the officials on their side, but we were fully prepared for everything. In the end, football won.”

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

You can't even set most gym treadmills to the speed this guy just broke the MILE world record at. They max out around 12 to 14 mph. Josh Kerr held 16.2 mph for the entire mile today: 3:42.66, breaking a record that had survived 27 years.

The pace on this new mile record is just wild.

It works out to 13.8 seconds per 100 meters. Go sprint 100m all-out right now. If you're slower than 13.8, Kerr was moving faster than your sprint, and he did it 16 times in a row without stopping.

In 1954, Roger Bannister ran the first four-minute mile, a barrier people once argued was the limit of human physiology. Put Bannister's race on the track next to Kerr's today, and Kerr finishes while Bannister is still 110 meters back, coming off the final bend.

The man who lost the record, Hicham El Guerrouj, set it in 1999 with no pace lights and no super spikes. Beating him took 27 years of shoe technology plus a four-month engineering project Kerr named after the goal time itself. The margin: 0.47 seconds.

And El Guerrouj isn't finished. His 1500m record, set the year before on the same track, turned 28 this week. Only three men since have even broken 3:27. One record fell today. The harder one is still standing.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

🇪🇸Certain victories remind us that freedom can still prevail.

Thank you Spain and to all those who continue to stand with courage and dignity on the side of justice.

#HastaLaVictoria

[حمد @HamadAlMajidi]

بـ 40 مباراة بلا خسارة و استقبال هدف واحد طوال كأس العالم.. إسبانيا الأفضل على الاطلاق 🇪🇸

مدرب إسبانيا لويس دي لا فوينتي الذي لم يسمع له أحد قبل 3 سنوات، يسطّر اسمه ضمن أهم المدربين عبر التاريخ بفوزه باليورو و كأس العالم

كان عاطل عن العمل بعد طرده من ألافيس في 2011، و لم يرغب به أحد

قدم على وظيفة وجدها في الصحيفة في الاتحاد الاسباني لتدريب فرق الناشئين، و تم قبوله

العديد من لاعبين الدوري الاسباني اليوم و المنتخب خصيصا تدربوا تحته ضمن فئة الناشئين

بعد رحيل لويس انريكي و ضيق الخيارات المتاحة من المدربين ال��سبان، قرروا منحه الفرصة

فاز بدوري الأمم الاوروبية، بطولة أمم أوروبا، و الان كأس العالم.. قصة من أجمل ما يمكن

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

"What did you think of the World Cup final half-time show?"

Wayne Rooney: “I thought it was crap.”

Wayne Rooney speaks for the entire world.

#WorldCupFinal

[Pedro Sánchez @sanchezcastejon]

¡¡SOMOS CAMPEONES DEL MUNDO!! 🇪🇸

¡Enorme nuestra Selección!

Gracias, equipo.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

You share photos of women in hijab and say:

"Look how oppressed they are."

You never share photos of women holding their dead child in a bombed hospital and say:

"Look what my taxes did."

You are not worried about women’s rights.

You are worried about maintaining the illusion that your violence is somehow enlightened.

[Tamer | تامر @tamerqdh]

من جوانب الجمال في تشجيع إسبانيا، هو تذكير الإسرائيليين مع كل فوز بدعمها لفلسطين؛ حيث ينتظر الإسرائيليون نهاية كل مباراة للاحتفال بخسارتها وانتصار الخصم الآخر، لكن هذا لا يحدث حتى الآن.

فإسبانيا من الدول الأوروبية النادرة التي وقفت مع فلسطين ودعمتها شعبياً وحكومياً، وحتى من قِبل نجومها مثل الممثل خافيير بارديم، الذي لا يترك فرصة واحدة دون المطالبة بحرية فلسطين ووقف الإبادة الجماعية .

[RT @RT_com]

'We're getting A LOT from Venezuela — GOLD, OIL' — Treasury Sec Bessent

'It's going back to the Venezuelan people'

If it's theirs, why is it going back there?

[Antifa_Ultras @ultras_antifaa]

Unai Simón is a great goalkeeper, an anti-fascist goalkeeper, and an anti-zionist goalkeeper.

[HealthRanger @HealthRanger]

I have to apologize in advance, because I think I’ve failed to explain this with sufficient clarity on my part, and it’s important to get this right. Our current global population of 8+ billion people is only alive because of a supply chain infrastructure built up over the last 60 years or so which saw dramatic scaling of natural gas extraction infrastructure (largely in Qatar and North America), dramatic improvements in oil extraction from existing Persian Gulf wells, and a tremendous amount of downstream chemistry that processes raw gas and oil to produce critical substances for our world such as helium (He), sulfuric acid, phosphate fertilizers, nitrogenous fertilizers, polyethylene, naphtha, aluminum smelting and so on.

The sulfuric acid that extracts phosphate (for fertilizer) from phosphate rock ores, for example, comes from pulling excess sulfur out of “sour” crude oil. (The core chemical reaction converts tricalcium phosphate into phosphoric acid and gypsum, with very high efficiency.) The “sour” refers to sulfur content. Without high-volume oil extraction, you don’t get the sulfur needed to produce this key type of fertilizer. And without the low-cost energy from the gas extracted from gas fields like Las Raffan, you don’t get the Haber-Bosch process that pulls N2 Nitrogen out of the atmosphere and breaks it to form ammonia (NH3) which becomes the feedstock material for nitrogenous fertilizer. (I’m simplifying the steps, but you get the idea.)

If these raw materials that normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz don’t get restored in short order, we aren’t merely facing annoying economic effects like higher food prices, higher diesel prices, fuel rationing, supply chain disruptions, loss of food packaging plastics and so on…
...we’re facing a loss of the infrastructure that keeps 8+ billion people alive on this planet.

If you lose 25% of the global supply of these critical substances, you will sooner or later lose 25% of the global population: 2 billion people. The Persian Gulf, by the way, supplies roughly about one-third of the world’s fertilizer that traded in the global marketplace. Do the math.

Right now, literally 50% of the global population is kept alive from food that’s fertilized using nitrogenous fertilizers derived from natural gas. A significant portion of that gas normally comes out of the Persian Gulf. But no longer. Not since Trump bombed Iran and started this war, resulting in Iran closing off the Strait of Hormuz.

QatarEnergy, which suffered extensive damage to two of its LNG processing trains and suffered a catastrophic explosion when trying to restart one of its processing trains a few weeks ago, has already declared force majeure and publicly announced a 3-5 year repair time for its damaged gas trains. So if we’re lucky, then QatarEnergy’s gas will be fully back online possibly around 2030. That’s if the war stops tomorrow and the repairs can get under way.

But if Iran chooses to strike additional gas trains – a feat that is easily achieved by Iran, possibly in retaliation for Trump’s latest threats to target and destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure – the repair time grows to ONE DECADE. And that assumed Qatar could even get the financing to fund such an effort, which itself seems doubtful.

Should that scenario unfold, the entire planet will be lacking critical energy, helium, nitrogenous fertilizers and their parent molecules (ammonia, urea, etc.), affordable aluminum smelting and other outputs that are downstream from Qatar’s gas production. This shortage will last ten years in a best-case scenario. During that decade, it is impossible that all 8 billion people will have enough to eat. It is also impossible that all the world’s current industrial manufacturing operations will economically survive, which means widespread global job losses.

The lack of fertilizer means a mass die-off on planet Earth is unavoidable if the infrastructure destruction in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, etc., escalates to the point of all-out war. Iran has so far decided to refrain from achieving the near-total destruction of critical infrastructure across the region, but that restraint may end quickly if Trump escalates the U.S. bombing campaign to target Iranian power plants, bridges, water treatment facilities and other key civilian infrastructure.

Stated differently, the fate of some significant portion of the world’s 8 billion people now rests in the hands of an orange mad man who demonstrates zero understanding of the ramifications of his escalation actions. And if he proceed to make good on his threats, he will unleash a series of events that will make the continued survival of the full 8 billion people on planet Earth quite literally impossible, likely for a decade or longer.

This would plunge Earth into a 10+ year “dark ages” and likely see the loss of billions of lives, the fall of numerous governments around the world, and economic destruction on a scale no living person has ever witnessed. Nor has history ever witnessed that we know of. Add in a dose of civil unrest, large-scale uprisings and regional warfare, and you have a recipe for global instability and systemic collapse that no one in a position of power has seriously pondered. The impacts of this would be, arguably, similar to planet Earth being struck by a high-velocity (and large) asteroid, unleashing mass kinetic destruction and a dimming of the sun, causing photosynthesis collapse on a global scale, lasting several years while food crops fail, famines take hold and nations tear themselves apart from the inside. And I haven’t even covered the climatic changes that would end civilizations around the world.

It almost seems like a cliché to state we are facing, “the end of the world as we know it,” but hell, we are literally facing the end of the world as we know it. And Trump, infused with all the madness and arrogance of a rogue emperor who has lost the plot, is pushing us all right to the edge of the abyss.

I would normally say, at this point, “I hope you have a year’s supply of food” to make it through what’s coming, but honestly that won’t be enough if Trump pushes us into an all-out infrastructure destruction war. The loss of the 60+ years of human infrastructure that has allowed the population to double from 4 billion to 8 billion over just a few decades will be REVERSED, and the population will shrink from 8 billion to 4 billion or possibly even less, depending on wars and economic strife.

Trump isn’t merely at war with Iran, in other words. He’s waging war on the entire human race. He is assaulting the very civilizational infrastructure that made our modern population possible to sustain. That infrastructure can be destroyed in an instant, with a rebuilding time of a decade or longer. And once it’s gone, there’s no going back to the way things were in 2025.

And during the new dark age, what will billions of human eat if there’s no fertilizer available for agriculture?
The honest answer is that they’ll sooner or later start eating each other.

Prepare accordingly. And demand an end to this senseless war before we all find ourselves in the cross hairs of global destruction and the death of billions of human beings.

[Dr. Simon @goddek]

This sensor detected a Croatian player touching a ball that no camera on Earth saw him touch: GOAL DISALLOWED.

The same sensor felt nothing when the ball visibly smashed into a camera cable and handed England a goal.

It detects hairs but not steel cables.
Impressive technology.

[Pamphlets @PamphletsY]

🚨🇺🇸 BREAKING — World Cup:

How Team USA would look without immigrants.

[Arab Observer @ObsArab15369]

@atrupar @grok is the post attributed to Trump true

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

Zeteo proud to have helped exec-produce this. Go watch it!

[Megatron @Megatron_ron]

NEW: 🇩🇪🇶🇦🇮🇱 Qatar is blocking German companies to sell military equipment to Israel, per Bild

Qatari sheikhs are endangering entire Volkswagen plants, as if the company’s crisis was not severe enough already.

Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund (QIA) is Volkswagen’s third-largest shareholder

Volkswagen and Israeli defence contractor Rafael signed a Letter of Intent in late April for the production of components for the Iron Dome air defence system at Volkswagen facilities.

The proposal was subsequently vetoed by QIA.

Hamburg-based shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd also suspended its planned acquisition of Israeli shipping company ZIM after it emerged that QIA holds a significant stake in Hapag-Lloyd.