Plevla

Senior Videoscout America's @PSV

[Plevla @Plevla1]

Nu het seizoen voorbij is leek het me een mooi moment om te delen dat ik in april ben begonnen als Senior Videoscout bij @PSV. Ik ga verantwoordelijk zijn voor de America's regio dus mochten jullie tips hebben van spelers uit Noord, Midden en/of Zuid-Amerika dan lees ik ze graag!

[Umir Irfan @umirf1]

We've got this incredible feature on the BBC through the World Cup. For games the BBC cover, you can watch the games live (or back) in this 3D space, freely controlling the camera angle or viewing it in first person from any players' POV. Top for tactical insight. See here: https://t.co/jAqYFbSPBU

[Sudanalytics @sudanalytics_]

Los escoceses pusieron a un POLICÍA ESTADOUNIDENSE A HACER JUEGUITOS.

Atención al festejo con la gente. 😅🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇸

[Paul Tenorio @PaulTenorio]

Fox comes back late from its hydration break commercials. Unreal. Second break of the tournament and we're already missing live World Cup action.

Brutal and embarrassing.

https://t.co/sORnrXQcF6

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

BEFORE YOU BOARD YOUR NEXT FLIGHT READ THIS

A former airline captain named John Hoyte reached out to me recently. He spent nearly 30 years flying commercial aircraft, developed serious neurological damage, lost his career, and has been trying to get this story properly investigated ever since.

He sent me documents spanning two decades. The scale of what is in them is HUGE.

What he shared includes parliamentary records, a 320-page published report from the British pilots union, @BBC coverage, House of Lords testimony, and active litigation in multiple countries. This has been heard at the highest levels. It has largely been buried.

Most commercial jet aircraft use a system called bleed air. Instead of drawing fresh air from outside, the plane takes compressed air directly from the engines and pumps it into the cabin. That is the air you breathe for the entire flight.

When engine seals wear down, oil and hydraulic fluid can leak into that air supply. Those fluids contain organophosphates, the same compounds found in certain pesticides and nerve agents. Inhaling them can cause neurological damage, memory loss, and chronic fatigue. In documented cases, far worse.

This design has been in use since the 1950s. The health risk has been documented for just as long.

In 2005, @BALPApilots, the British pilots union, published a full conference report on this with the University of New South Wales. The following year, 27 BALPA pilots were tested by University College London. All 27 showed evidence of toxic poisoning and reduced cognitive function. Not some of them. All of them.

@BBCPanorama covered it in 2008. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee heard evidence on it in 2007 and 2008. In February 2007, 40 unrelated passengers on a single XL Airways flight were seriously injured by contaminated cabin air. Their cases went to court. Twenty of them won a US jurisdiction ruling in 2010.

A UK coroner recorded a death linked to this in 2015.

France has formally recognised aerotoxic syndrome as an occupational disease. In the US, a law professor is suing Boeing for $40 million after a single exposure left him permanently injured. Morgan & Morgan, America's largest personal injury firm, is now actively taking mass cases on behalf of passengers and crew.

John himself was one of those 27 pilots tested by UCL. He founded the Aerotoxic Association in 2007 at the Houses of Parliament to support other survivors. He has been fighting for this for nearly 20 years.

Almost every commercial jet aircraft except the Boeing 787 Dreamliner uses the bleed air system. The 787 uses a different design that avoids this problem entirely. That safer design has existed for years. That fact alone says everything.

BBC has not covered this story since 2020. The UK Civil Aviation Authority continues to say there is no positive evidence of a link. The Aerotoxic Association has been contacted by more than 2,500 people who believe they have been affected.

John is looking for mainstream investigative journalists who want to dig deep into this. He is an expert witness with decades of evidence and is willing to answer every question. He has a passenger injured on that 2007 flight, Samantha Sabatino, whose case is in the parliamentary record.

This is a genuine story of enormous public interest and it deserves proper investigation.

If you are a journalist or researcher and want to speak to John directly, his contact details are in the comments.

I will add media coverage links in the comments section.

Sources:
@AerotoxicAssoc (Aerotoxic Association)
@BALPApilots (British Airline Pilots Association) @forthepeople (Morgan & Morgan)
gcaqe org (Global Cabin Air Quality Executive)

@BBCPanorama covered it in 2008 with a full documentary titled Something in the Air.

@heraldtweets
@WSJ
@FlightGlobal
@TheCanaryUK
@the_ecologist

[Leyla Hamed @leylahamed]

Iranian Football Federation announces the 8% ticket quota allocated to Iran has been revoked by the U.S., leaving the federation currently unable to distribute tickets to supporters.

A case study in political interference, discrimination and FIFA looking the other way.

[Maher Mezahi @MezahiMaher]

The Trump administration barring Somali referee Omar Artan from the World Cup is nauseating

He’s one of Africa’s best , especially at controlling hostile environments. There’s no justification for this beyond mean-spirited discrimination based on nationality.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

[╰┈➤ 🇮🇪 Brònzy 🇮🇪 @BronzyGuevara]

Albania has officially drawn the
line, Sazan 'lsland is being cleared. In an stunning turn of events, Albanian authorities have
launched an active enforcement operation to kick
out foreign developers and private security
personnel occupying Sazan Island. The decisive
action marks a total collapse of the controversial €1.4 billion luxury real estate deal that aimed to turn the protected national marine reserve and
former military base into an exclusive private playground for global elites,
The eviction comes after four consecutive weeks of historic
hundred-thousand-strong protests that completely
shut down the capital city of Tirana, refusing to allow their native coastlines and ecologically sensitive wetlands to be privatized by foreign
investors, the Albanian public unified under a
single, unyielding demand: "Albania is not for sale, the courts faced with a historic political crisis, mounting
domestic fury, and a widening anti-corruption
investigation by special prosecutors (SPAK), the
government was forced to pivot, by deploying state forces to reclaim Sazan lsland, Albania has
sent a clear message to international billionaires
and foreign developers trying to bypass environmental protection laws, This historic victory for citizen-led activism proves that the collective voice of a nation can successfully overpower backroom corporate deals and protect sovereign land.
The people spoke, and the
government had to listen.

[Alex Shams @alexshams_]

The US has still not issued for Iran's team to come to the World Cup

The World Cup kickoff is a week away

This is unsportsmanlike and frankly disgraceful behavior for a nation hosting the World Cup

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

ALBANIA — Seems like it should be a bigger deal that Ivanka Trump & Kushner’s luxury resort project is being massively protested, with the people demanding the PM’s resignation and firebombing homes over the corruption of their project partners.🤷🏼

The Trump grift is endless.

[Katerina Horbunova @blue_eyedKeti]

...another morning in Ukraine, and once again, it is neither peaceful nor bright. Once again, we wake up exhausted, learning the names of the Ukrainians who were killed. What else is left for us, the civilians of this country, but to hide at night when cities face mass attacks… In Kyiv, during air raid alerts, crowds of people, along with their children and pets-seek refuge in metro stations that serve as bomb shelters. But in other cities like mine, you simply stay in your apartment, hoping for the best.

Some people underground are watching the events above ground through their phones, others are seeing the destruction from their windows. But morning has finally arrived, and it's impossible not to be grateful for it-it's just heartbreaking that this morning hasn't arrived for everyone. Is there any point in repeating "fucking russia" for the millionth time, does it even make any sense anymore...

[Thrilla the Gorilla @ThrillaRilla369]

@Red_Pill_US Another good one from him!

“They don't want well informed, well educated people"

George Carlin

[Red Pill USA @Red_Pill_US]

@ThrillaRilla369 George Carlin nailed it.

"The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep on showing up at those jobs."

[TheSecretScout @TheSecretScout_]

These are the conversations football fans appreciate. Insightful and honest

[Brendan Boyle @BrendyBoyle]

I love the angle taken by @kenearlys on the Champions League final.

He’s absolutely right to dedicate so much time to how Arsenal waste time 🗑️

The drinking water and human life lines 🤣

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Environmental activist Erin Brockovich has launched a national campaign and crowdsourced map to track the explosive growth of AI data centers across the U.S. She aims to empower local communities facing the massive environmental and infrastructural footprints of these facilities.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Así estalló hoy el juguete en forma de cohete del magnate capitalista Jeff Bezos, que sufrió una enorme explosión durante una prueba espacial en Florida (EEUU).

Una explosión así puede emitir CO₂ equivalente a cientos o miles de coches diésel circulando durante un año completo.

Mientras los capitalistas contaminan por hobby como si no hubiese un mañana, a ti te piden que hagas un esfuerzo por salvar al planeta.

[Ron Wyden @RonWyden]

Called this in October

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

I guess Nazis still flee to Argentina. Some traditions never die.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The Netherlands Just Told America to Get Its Greasy McDonald’s Fingers Off Their Data

The Dutch government has blocked American IT giant Kyndryl from buying Solvinity, the cloud provider behind DigiD, the system every Dutch citizen uses to access their taxes, medical records and pension information. Washington responded with a formal statement expressing “disappointment.”

The Dutch public responded rather differently.

“You have been spitting in our faces for 1.5 years. Did you think that came without consequences?”

“Fuck off yanks.”

“Get lost.”

“Cry all you want.” And, in what may be the most perfectly constructed sentence in the history of transatlantic diplomacy:

“We don’t want your greasy McDonald’s fingers on our data.”

These are not the words of people who feel they have been heard.

The U.S. Embassy invoked “shared prosperity,” “mutual reliance,” and “co-creation.” The Dutch, a nation historically not known for mincing words, heard all of that and collectively said: mate, you threatened to invade Greenland. You pulled troops. You voted with Russia at the UN. You tried to meddle in our elections. You slapped us with tariffs while calling us partners. At what point exactly were we supposed to keep nodding along?

One commenter summed up the root cause with surgical precision: “The reason is one orange clown you voted into office.”

And here is the thing. This is not just a Dutch problem. Canada is buying Swedish fighter jets. Europe is building its own defence industry at speed. Country after country is quietly but very deliberately reducing its exposure to American infrastructure, American platforms and American goodwill, because American goodwill has turned out to be a subscription service that cancels without notice.

The Embassy called it disappointing.