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Jenni Hermoso is kissed by the president of the RFEF Luis Rubiales during the presentation ceremony of the FIFA Women's World Cup 2023 at Stadium Australia in Sydney, Australia.
Will a kiss kick off Spain’s #MeToo?
FIFA has benched Spanish soccer federation president Luis Rubiales for 90 days pending a disciplinary committee investigation of his conduct following Spain’s World Cup victory over England. Rubiales was suspended after he kissed star forward Jenni Hermoso on the lips during the presentation ceremony, provoking a storm of reaction from Hermoso, her team, the sporting world, and politicians.
While Rubiales initially claimed the kiss was consensual, “spontaneous” and “without any intention of bad faith,” last Monday he called it “a mistake.” That didn’t satisfy Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who said the apology for an “unacceptable gesture” was “not enough.” Yolanda Díaz, acting second deputy prime minister, called for Rubiales to resign. Spanish men’s international striker Borja Iglesias said he will not play for the national team “until things change,” and Hermoso’s teammates vowed not to play any more games as long as Rubiales remains as president.
But Rubiales then changed his tune. On Friday, he defended himself before an Extraordinary General Assembly of FIFA and refused to quit. The next day, Spain’s football federation accused Hermoso of lying and backed up Rubiales’ version of events, threatening to sue the star forward if she did not play.
In response, Hermoso issued a lengthy post to X, formerly known as Twitter, writing that “I felt vulnerable and a victim of an impulse-driven, sexist, out-of-place act without any consent on my part,” and that she had been pressured to issue a statement “to justify Mr. Rubiales’ actions.” In solidarity, 11 coaches and technical staff resigned and released a joint statement condemning Rubiales’ conduct. FIFA has ordered both Rubiales and the Spanish football federation to refrain from contacting Hermoso and those close to her.
This leaves everyone wondering, will this be Spain’s “Me Too” moment? So far, the score appears to be Hermoso 1, Rubiales 0.
A woman outside the damaged house of her son, who was killed the day before by shelling in Donetsk, Russian-controlled Ukraine.
Hard Numbers: Deadly shelling, drug kingpin's jail security, Lai sighting, Sweden soccer semi, twin takeover
7: Shelling in the southern Ukrainian province of Kherson Ukraine on Sunday killed seven people, including a 23-day-old baby girl. The attack followed denials by Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar that Ukrainian forces had engaged in Russian-occupied territory in the region.
4,000: The Ecuadorian government dispatched 4,000 military and police personnel to the Zonal 8 Detention Center in Guayas province, to “establish control over weapons, ammunition and explosives within the prison.” The jail is home to José Adolfo Macías Villamar, the drug trafficker who murdered presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio claimed had threatened him prior to his assassination. President Guillermo Lasso this weekend said Macías was relocated to La Roca maximum security prison in the same penitentiary complex.
23: Photos have surfaced of former Hong Kong newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai, the first taken since 2021. They show Lai accompanied by two guards at the maximum security Stanley Prison in Hong Kong, where the pro-democracy activist is kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours each day. Lai was sentenced to more than five years in prison for fraud in 2022, but he is awaiting trial on charges of endangering national security, which could lead to a life sentence.
4: Sweden’s women’s soccer team has advanced to the World Cup semi-final — its fourth big semi in four years. They reached the semi-finals of the 2019 World Cup, the 2020 Olympics, and Euro 2022, but they have yet to take home the crown. To make it to the finals this time, Sweden's women must beat Spain on Tuesday.
17: Must be something in the water. Primary schools in the Scottish town of Inverclyde, population 76,700, are preparing to welcome 17 sets of twins this fall. “Twinverclyde,” as the town has become known, has welcomed 147 sets of twins to its primary schools since 2013, an average of 13 sets a year.
A rescue worker searches for victims after a train derailed in District Sanghar in the Sindh province of Pakistan.
Hard Numbers: Train derailment, bombing anniversary, Barbie's billion, winter heat, stunning soccer saves
30: At least 30 people were killed and another 90 injured after a train derailed in Pakistan’s Sindh province on Sunday. The country’s railway system has a notoriously dubious safety record, and the cause of the crash remains under investigation.
25: It has been 25 years since al-Qaida terrorists bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring thousands. The attacks took place eight years after US troops landed in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
1 billion: "Barbie" finished its third weekend in cinemas with more than $1 billion in global ticket sales, making Greta Gerwig the first solo female director to hit that mark. Warner Bros. says none of its movies have ever sold so many tickets so fast.
100: Despite it being winter in the southern hemisphere, South Americans are sweltering amid a record heatwave, with temperatures as high as 100 degrees Fahrenheit. This is another grim reminder of the fast-emerging reality that political leaders must think urgently about how to invest in new technology and infrastructure to help people adapt to a hotter planet.
11: Swedish goaltender Zecira Musovic was the star of the show in a tough World Cup match between Sweden and the United States, scoring 11 saves against 22 attempts on goal before the shootout that eliminated the US from contention. Sweden now advances to the quarterfinals against Japan.Brazilian soccer legend Pele holds the World Cup trophy during the World Cup 2006 opening ceremony in Munich, Germany.
The king is dead. Long live the beautiful game
Twenty-one years of professional soccer, three World Cup wins, and more than 1,200 goals, including 77 for his country, Brazil. Edson Arantes do Nascimento – better known as Pelé, possibly the greatest athlete to have ever played the world’s most popular game – has died at age 82 in Sao Paulo. He was suffering from advanced colon cancer.
Pelé scored his first club goal in his first club match as a substitute at age 16. By 17, he was scoring on the international stage and lifting his first World Cup for Brazil, having scored two goals in the final in a historic 5-2 win over Sweden. That was in 1958. He would repeat the feat and bring home the World Cup again in 1962 and 1970, a record that remains unbroken today.
An international ambassador for his country and the sport, Pelé helped popularize the game in the US with a stint at the New York Cosmos in 1975. But as his golden era overlapped with a brutal military dictatorship back home, the attacking soccer star chose not to speak out against dictator Emilio Garrastazu Médici, who had seized power in 1969, suspending freedoms and conducting torture of political opponents. Médici needed a cultural icon – a face to attach to his nationalist propaganda, and Pelé provided it. In 1970, he didn’t just deliver the World Cup in Mexico, but he also turned up in Brasilia and posed next to the dictator with it, making the notoriously anti-democratic comment: "Brazilians don't know how to vote." He also never uttered a word about the thousands of political prisoners of the regime.
Post-retirement, he stayed involved politically: Pelé’s last political stint as a sports minister in the 1990s ended amid allegations against his company. Business and media savvy to the end, his continuing deals and endorsements afforded him a level of wealth that contrasted with the poverty of his childhood, when he resorted to playing soccer with grapefruits, rather than balls. The “Rei do Futebol” (King of Football), as the locals called him, will be buried in Santos, the coastal city where he played most of his soccer.
Frenemy face-off at the World Cup: Morocco vs. Spain
It's just a soccer game. Or maybe there’s more to it.
On Tuesday, underdog Morocco takes on 2010 champion Spain at the Qatar World Cup in what one might frame as a battle between “neighbors” in Africa and Europe, separated by barely 9 miles of the Mediterranean Sea and with a long-fraught political relationship that’s seen some recent twists and turns.
And there’s a bigger geopolitical story that goes beyond the two kingdoms.
Territorial disputes have always made Morocco-Spain ties, to put it mildly, complicated. Morocco resents Spain for not handing over the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara, which Rabat claims as part of its territory and is rich in fish and minerals.
Morocco also has a beef with Spain over Ceuta and Melilla, two centuries-old Spanish enclaves inside Morocco and the last vestiges of European sovereignty in mainland Africa. (Fun fact: 20 years ago, the two sides almost went to war over a rock in the Strait of Gibraltar inhabited by … goats.)
The bilateral tensions have two major spillover effects with EU-wide implications.
First, Morocco has been accused of weaponizing sub-Saharan African migrants when it tells its border guards to stand by and "let" asylum-seekers try to scale the border fences of Ceuta and Melilla, which is EU sovereign territory. Rabat does this whenever Spain triggers it over Western Sahara: In May 2021, Madrid had to deploy the army to help defend the border from an influx of thousands of migrants after the Spanish government allowed a leader of the Polisario Front — a militant group that seeks independence for Western Sahara — to get medical treatment in Spain.
This is not just a Morocco-Spain problem. Once the asylum-seekers are on EU soil, they are free to travel to other EU countries — potentially unleashing a migration crisis across the entire bloc.
Second, whatever happens between Morocco and Spain is closely watched next door in natural-gas rich Algeria, which backs the Polisario Front and has kept the border with its western neighbor closed since 1994 to protest Morocco’s partial “occupation” of Western Sahara.
In late April, the Algerians first threatened to cut off gas supplies to the Spanish after Madrid announced it would resell some of that gas to Morocco. And when PM Pedro Sánchez went a step further by ending Spain's long-held neutrality on Western Sahara to ward off another migrant crisis, Algeria responded by selling more gas to Italy. Algerian gas deliveries to Spain are now down by half from a year ago and the US has become Madrid’s top seller.
Algeria's strong pushback to Spain's pro-Rabat gestures is a heads-up to the EU: Kicking the Russian gas habit is not risk-free. The more leverage an alternative supplier gets, the more inclined it'll be to turn on a dime and move to kill a contract if political feathers get ruffled.
So, what’s the current state of bilateral ties and what does the future hold? “Spain and Morocco are now on a honeymoon, but this is only a parenthesis before the next crisis, which Morocco will decide when to launch,” says Ignacio Cembrero, a veteran Spanish journalist and expert on Morocco-Spain relations.
The next big development will come, he adds, when the Spanish government follows the US in recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, as the Trump administration did in December 2020 in exchange for Rabat joining the US-brokered Abraham Accords. “That’s what Morocco wants.”
Back to the soccer ... on the pitch, Spain is the favorite.La Roja has a young squad led by FC Barcelona playmaker Pedri that excels at its signature tiki-taka passing game. Still, the Atlas Lions have plenty of talent too and will surely give their northern neighbors a run for their money.
Yet off the field, the stakes are higher for Morocco. If it wins and becomes the first Arab country to reach the World Cup quarter-finals, Moroccans will go crazy at home — and in Spain, where some 800,000 of them live.
Let’s just hope the celebrations don’t turn into the violent riots that erupted across Belgian and Dutch cities when Morroco upset Belgium in the first round.This comes to you from the Signal newsletter team of GZERO Media. Sign up today.
The Graphic Truth: The Mother of All Games 2.0
The US plays, of all countries, Iran (!) at the Qatar men's soccer World Cup on Tuesday in the most politically charged game of the most political edition of the tournament in decades. What’s more, if Team Melli — as Iran's team is popularly known — wins, it’ll advance to the knockout stage for the first time. (Not to mention that Iran won't miss a chance to beat Great Satan at anything.) USMNT, for its part, wants revenge from France '98, when Iran won 2-1 in a major upset that Tehran billed at the time as the "Mother of all Games." We take a look at how the two geopolitical rivals compare on some soccer and non-soccer metrics.
Saudi fans watching the World Cup first-round match against Poland at a fan zone in Doha.
World Cup in Doha: Ghost city by day, party town for Arabs by night
Special edition: World Cup quiz!
How much do you think you know about politics at the most-watched sporting event in the world? Find out here.