On February 16, John Fetterman, the first-term Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to receive treatment for depression. Fetterman, who defeated Republican Mehmet Oz in one of last fall’s tightest and most expensive races, had been in office for a little more than a month and was still dealing with the effects of a stroke he suffered in 2022.

Fetterman never fully stopped working—he was briefed every morning by his chief of staff, according to the New York Times, and he introduced a bill last month relating to railroad safety. But he was devoting the bulk of his time to his own recovery. Evidently, he’s made significant progress. Fetterman was discharged on Friday. He will return home to Pennsylvania for two weeks, and plans to return to the Capitol on April 17 when the Senate resumes its business after a spring recess.

In an interview with CBS News, Fetterman elaborated on the experiences that had brought him to Walter Reed. He was losing his appetite and struggling to get out of bed. “It’s like, you just won the biggest race in the country, and the whole thing about depression is that, objectively you may have won, but depression can absolutely convince you that you actually lost,” he said. “And that’s exactly what happened. And that was the start of a downward spiral.”

Six weeks after entering Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for inpatient treatment for depression, Sen. @JohnFetterman shares his struggle with depression, his health, and more in an intimate interview with Jane Pauley this "Sunday Morning." pic.twitter.com/3o2926I48B

— CBS Sunday Morning (@CBSSunday) March 31, 2023

Sky Sports journalist Oliver Yew insists Arsenal’s win against Leeds United was not straightforward, but he praised the Gunners for getting the job done.

Mikel Arteta’s side has had an amazing season and was expected to see off the Whites.

However, Leeds needed points to remain in the league and were always going to be very tricky opponents for the Gunners.

Arsenal got the job done eventually and a 4-1 score seems like it was an easy runout, but it wasn’t.

Leeds gave a good account of themselves in the fixture. Arsenal just wanted it more and had more quality in their team.

The coronation next month of Kaiser Wilhelm’s and Tsar Nicholas II’s distant cousin, Charles Philip Arthur George, as King of England is a big event, but it is not such a big event that people are afraid to turn it down.

As my colleague Inae Oh noted in February, “Some of the United Kingdom’s biggest stars, including Adele, Harry Styles, Elton John, the Spice Girls, and Ed Sheeran have all reportedly declined invitations to perform at Charles’ big day.” To that list of thanks-but-no-thanks and oh-I-wish-I-could and I’ve-got-to-see-a-man-about-a-dog, you can add a new luminary: President Joe Biden.

Per The Telegraph:

The US president is ‘not expected’ to join dozens of heads of state for the event on May 6, according to sources close to the discussions, and will send a delegation in his place.

America is keen to counter any perception of a snub and show support for the King by sending high-profile representatives, with one possibility under consideration being that Jill Biden, the first lady, could attend.

Former Scotland star Pat Nevin has praised Arsenal for how they defeated Leeds United this afternoon.

Mikel Arteta’s men responded emphatically to Manchester City beating Liverpool earlier in the day.

Arsenal had their points lead reduced by that City win, but Arteta’s men had plans to get it back and did so in fine fashion after a terrific performance against the Whites.

Leeds were not easy pickings, but Arsenal was in the mood to get nothing but a win and earned it with a superb display.

The Gunners showed why they could win the title and it impressed Nevin. He said on the BBC:

Almost immediately after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced that he had indicted ex-president Donald Trump, Republican critics settled on a company line. Trump’s impending arrest was, in the words of Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt, “some Third World Banana Republic lunacy and a very, very dangerous road to go down.”

Schmitt should probably ask his local history professor what a “Banana Republic” is, why we call them that, and which country’s marines had a tendency to deploy to their shores to force them at gunpoint to stay that way. But he and others are wrong on the underlying point, too: Wealthy democracies investigate and indict their leaders all the time. 

Former French prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to a year in prison in 2021 for—oh!—campaign finance violations. Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, a Trump-like figure in many ways, has been involved in 35 criminal cases, with one conviction for tax fraud. Trump’s good friend, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted for corruption. And the current Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, was once sentenced to 12 years in prison.

That the Brazilian case was later thrown out, precisely because it was a politically motivated hit-job, might sound like a point for the skeptics, except that American conservatives were quite happy with that outcome: It gave them Jair Bolsonaro.

It’s indicative of a certain kind of American exceptionalism that some politicians are so likely to claim that countries like this don’t investigate their presidents, and that their supporters are so eager to believe it.

Leeds United managed to get a goal back to make it 3-1 but any hope they had of getting back into the game has been completely eradicated with Granit Xhaka getting his name on the scoresheet to put the Gunners 4-1 up.

Apart from a few isolated moments in the first half, Arsenal has completely dominated the game and deserves both the win and the scoreline.

This result will have sent a clear message to Man City, that Arsenal will not crumble under the pressure.

Ohhh quel but de Granit Xhaka sur une merveille de centre de Martin Ødegaard #ARSLEE | #PremierLeague pic.twitter.com/gfZv08l22f

— CANAL+ Foot (@CanalplusFoot) April 1, 2023

What would a dream 2022-23 Arsenal women’s season look like? Making sure they win another trophy, either the Champions League title or the WSL title, or fighting to win both?

I have two arguments for this question: First, Arsenal can decide to focus on one trophy, most likely the Champions League, and fight tooth and nail for it. Up next for them in the competition is the Semi-finals against Wolfsburg.  Beating an in-form Bayern Munich should make give Arsenal the confidence that they can beat Wolfsburg in the upcoming semi-finals. If Eidevall and his team reach the final, then we can trust them to do one thing: win it. This may guarantee them a double: a chance to defend the Champions League and enough funds to invest in the squad.

Eidevall and his squad may also put in a shift to lift the WSL title. With three points separating Arsenal from top spot and a game in hand, Arsenal can lift the league if they put their mind to it, but they’ll have to give everything they’ve got not only because at this point any of the Manchester clubs or Chelsea can lift the league but because of their injury struggles, with Kim Little and Katie McCabe adding to the long list of Arsenal injuries. Should Arsenal win them all, or should they just pick one and say, That’s it?

If it were up to Manuela Zinsberger’s (Arsenal’s goalkeeper) decision on what the Arsenal women should target, she would want them to win them all. “We are always trying to win trophies; that’s how we start the season and how we come into pre-season,” Zinsberger said after the Continental Cup win as quoted by Fawsltalk. “I am always aiming for a trophy, no matter what. I don’t need a trophy to start us off; I need the team we have. We want to win every trophy.

“I think it’s a nice opportunity for us to get some training in.”

Arsenal is flying now, just ten minutes into the second half and the Gunners are now three up against a hapless Leeds United.

It was a brilliant goal in terms of its build-up with Leandro Triossard and Gabriel Jesus combining to put the game beyond Leeds.

This is the perfect response to Man City beating Liverpool comprehensively earlier today and will maintain the 8-point gap at the top of the table.

Watch and enjoy one of the videos below.

Gabriel Jesus has a brace and look at how much it means!

That did not take long, just a couple of minutes into the second half and Arsenal have doubled their lead over Leeds United.

It was a well-crafted goal with Gabriel Martinelli providing the cross that deceived the Leeds defence and Ben White was on hand to take full advantage.

It is looking good for the lads, all they need to do now is not concede and the three points are guaranteed.

Watch the video below and enjoy, I certainly did.

Et le break pour Arsenal !

Gabriel Jesus is back with a bang, the Brazilian created then converted a penalty against Leeds United this afternoon at the Emirates Stadium.

The penalty was deserved, however, it has to be said that the Whites did have more than enough chances to take the lead themselves.

Hopefully, this will settle the lads down and they can now go on and collect all three points.

Watch the video below and enjoy the return of Jesus to scoring for Arsenal.

For the first time since October, Gabriel Jesus scores and Arsenal are in the lead!

It was a grim but not terribly surprising coincidence. Last Monday morning, just a few hours after the Washington Post published a new series on the popular semiautomatic rifles known as AR-15s, a suicidal 28-year-old used one to murder three children and three adults at a Nashville elementary school. It was the sixth mass shooting in the past 10 months committed with this type of highly lethal firearm, according to our Mother Jones database.

Semiautomatic pistols used to be the top weapon of choice for mass shooters. But ever since the massacres at a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school just over a decade ago, many perpetrators of these crimes have armed themselves with AR-15s and caused growing carnage. The phenomenon accelerated further with five high-profile attacks in 2022, beginning with those in Buffalo and Uvalde. (In the several years prior: the massacres in Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, Pittsburgh, Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton, Boulder, Indianapolis—the list quickly grows long.) Mass shooters increasingly also use body armor, tactical vests, and other tactical gear, the Nashville perpetrator included. As I reported in December:

The past decade brought a sharp increase in shooters using military-style semiautomatic rifles. Among the 83 mass shootings since 2012 documented in the Mother Jones database (whose perpetrators also include several high school adolescents and various middle-age men), 34 of the cases involved such assault rifles.

As those weapons have soared in popularity in the United States, there also remains scant regulation of the military-grade body armor that mass shooters increasingly use. Such gear helped protect the perpetrator who committed the racist mass murder at the supermarket in Buffalo; his body armor stopped a bullet fired by a security guard, whom he then fatally shot. Body armor also made it more difficult to stop the attacker at Club Q in Colorado Springs, according to the military veteran who heroically took him down.

This disturbing trend connects in part to how mass shooters emulate previous attackers as they plan and prepare, one of multiple common warning behaviors I examine in Trigger Points, my book about preventing mass shootings through the method of threat assessment. The weapons and gear these perpetrators select has coincided with aggressive marketing tactics long used by the gun industry:

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A handful of weary residents gathered at the windowless Randolph church to mull over the latest effort by an electric utility to expand its power station—a polluting gas-fired plant next door to the community that the state regulator has blocked on environmental and health grounds.

Randolph is a historic Black community in central Arizona flanked by railroads and heavy hazardous industries, a small dusty place where residents are exposed to some of the worst air quality in the state while lacking basic amenities like fire hydrants, trash collection and healthcare.

Last year, the community celebrated a historic win when the state regulator rejected a proposal by the public utility Salt River Project (SRP) to more than double the size of its power plant, ruling that it would cause further harm to Randolph residents and was not in the public interest.

It was major victory for clean energy and environmental justice in Arizona, according to the Sierra Club, the environmental group which condemned the proposed expansion as “textbook environmental racism.”

Last week, a bill introduced by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) received a hearing.

For some congresspeople, this would not be news. For Boebert it is: In her first term, she sponsored 41 pieces of legislation—one set out to impeach President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris; another to require the Department of Homeland Security to treat fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction; a third to prohibit the use of federal funds to research youth gender transitions—and none warranted a hearing.

This turned out to be a problem. Despite being predicted to comfortably win reelection, Boebert prevailed over her Democratic opponent by less than a percentage point. Voters in her district told me the reason was simple: “I don’t think she did shit,” one constituent explained. “She didn’t back one bill, she just talked a lot.”

Now, it seems Boebert has taken that message to heart. In proposing to remove the gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act, she has taken aim at a serious, complex issue in her home state.

In 2020, Coloradans narrowly voted to allow the reintroduction of gray wolves, which had been hunted out of their natural range in the 1940s. Environmentalists say that wolves are an important part of ecosystems, allowing aspens and willows to thrive by mediating the elk population that feeds on them. Because wolves are protected by the Endangered Species Act, it is illegal to kill them—except in the Northern Rocky Mountains, which encompasses Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, because those states have already successfully restored their gray wolf populations. (Endangered species can be killed in self-defense.) Wolves have not yet been officially reintroduced by Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Still, some packs have migrated into the state from Wyoming. These wolves occasionally kill cattle, frustrating ranchers, who view the reintroduction of wolves as harmful and say that the state’s city-dwellers don’t know what it’s like to have their livelihood threatened by carnivorous animals. By removing wolves from the ESA, Boebert wants to allow Colorado ranchers to shoot wolves.

Starting tomorrow, states will begin to terminate health care coverage for people who no longer qualify for Medicaid, marking the end to a pandemic-era rule that automatically renewed coverage for Medicaid recipients even if they were no longer eligible. An estimated 15 million Americans, a majority of whom are low-income, are expected to lose their health insurance before the end of the year. 

The emergency policy was created at the start of the pandemic under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act which prevented states from kicking off Medicaid recipients regardless of whether they had filled out the necessary paperwork to re-enroll. During the pandemic, the program saw 20.2 million new recipients over the course of two years, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. With the end of the pandemic-era requirement, states will return to checking people’s Medicaid eligibility by requiring recipients to fill out forms to verify their personal information, income, and household size—a massive administrative effort for families likely economically struggling.

According to a Department of Health and Human Services analysis, the 15 million expected to lose coverage include an estimated 5 million children; Black and Latino households will be disproportionately affected. Others at risk of losing their insurance include: individuals who have moved out of state during the pandemic, people with limited English proficiency, and those with disabilities.

Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, New Hampshire, and South Dakota will be the first states to end coverage. Most states will move to do the same in either May or June. 

Donald Trump is going to be spending a lot of his time in courtrooms this year—and not just fighting Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s newly-filed charges. The recent indictment has raised legitimate questions about how Trump would manage the roles of being both a presidential candidate and a criminal defendant. But the reality is that Trump was already going to have an incredibly busy schedule fending off legal threats. There are as many as 40 other lawsuits and investigations into his behavior before, during, and since his time in the White House.

And three of them—all major, all potentially extremely costly—are set to go to trial at some point in the next ten months. The last of the cases will kick off in early 2024, and all will occur as Trump is trying to get his 2024 presidential campaign into high gear. All will be heard in courthouses within one block of each other in southern Manhattan, and by the end, each case will likely have cost millions of dollars, thousands of billable hours, and weeks of time in front of empaneled juries. Trump will not necessarily have to appear in the courtroom for every hearing in every case—he will be paying attorneys millions to do most of it for him—but the former president is going to have a legally busy, and legally perilous, year ahead—whether Bragg’s charges stick or not.

For starters, there is the lawsuit filed by writer E. Jean Carroll who has accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. Carroll has filed both a defamation lawsuit—alleging that Trump had disparaged her when she first made her accusation saying, by saying, among other things, that Carroll was “not my type”—and a civil lawsuit accusing Trump of battery for the alleged assault. The defamation lawsuit has been temporarily put on hold. But the battery lawsuit is moving forward—made possible by a new New York law that makes it easier for adult survivors of sexual assault to make civil claims against their alleged attackers. The trial will begin April 25 in a federal courtroom a block from the New York City courthouse where Trump will be arrested and fingerprinted on Tuesday in Bragg’s case.

The testimony in the Carroll case is expected to last a week and judging by the flurry of pre-trial motions that have been filed back and forth for months, it has enormous potential to be ugly for Trump. Win or lose, it seems likely to be a high-profile platform for allegations that Trump routinely made aggressive, uninvited sexual advances toward women fairly regularly. Attorneys in the case, for example, are waiting for the judge to rule on whether depositions from other women who say Trump sexually assaulted them should be admissible. They are attempting to demonstrate that his sexual advances on women constituted a “signature crime”—meaning Trump had a modus operandi of preying on women. Never a positive description for a presidential candidate.

Then, there is the massive $250 million civil lawsuit that New York attorney general Letitia James filed against Trump last fall. It’s a sprawling case that accuses Trump of systematically manipulating the values of his various properties. When using them as collateral to get loans and insurance coverage, he would pump up their value, and then drastically undervalue them when it came time to pay taxes. James’ office has been sparring with Trump for nearly four years in the matter, but it will all come to a head on October 2, when the case will go to a full jury trial.

Editor’s note: The below article is a preview of the lead item in the next edition of  David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out.

Donald Trump has been a one-man stress test for the American political system. The framers did not envision such a dishonest, narcissistic scoundrel winning the highest office of the land. And the system of laws, rules, and norms that began with the Constitution and that has evolved in the past two centuries was not formulated to deal with a demagogue with a cult-like following who would baldly lie about anything and everything, who would aid and abet a foreign attack on the nation, who would flaunt numerous and brazen conflicts of interest, and who would try to blow up the nation’s constitutional order and incite violence to remain in power. But—so far—the nation appears to have survived the authoritarian threat Trump poses. Yet with his historic indictment in New York City on charges related to the $130,000 hush-money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to prevent her from airing the story of her alleged sexual romp with Trump, the failed casino owner who became president is once again about to stress test the nation.

Never has the US judicial system contended with the criminal prosecution of a former president (who is also the leading GOP 2024 aspirant). That almost happened with Richard Nixon. But his handpicked successor, President Gerald Ford, granted the Watergate co-conspirator a pardon. Ford insisted that would allow the country to move on. But in retrospect, his pardon did the United States a disservice by not allowing the nation to establish a precedent for managing the sensitive matter of presidential criminality.

So after years of repeated brushes with the law and other sordid actions—from allegedly violating housing law to hobnobbing with mobsters to possibly committing perjury to mounting  assorted tax  dodges to obstructing justice to plotting multiple schemes for overturning an election—Trump is finally being prosecuted for a caper that involved paying off and silencing an adult film director and star. As did the January 6 insurrectionist riot, this will place tremendous pressure on American politics.

Trump's chaos machine has already been unleashed following his indictment. And now the system is about to be tested like never before, warns @DavidCornDC. pic.twitter.com/gjOn4ztrPR

Marcus, Vish, Jim and Andy celebrate the glorious return of club football and a very, VERY inglorious week for Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Lol.

We chat about all of that nonsense, plus Marcus rallies to Roy the Boy’s defence and tips Crystal Palace for the Europa League (“clip that”). We also discuss what Jack Grealish really needs to add to his Chinese takeaway ahead of Man City vs Liverpool.

Plus, do donkeys pop up and score winning goals in the Champions League? And what do Newcastle and AI have in common?

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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When the NFT trading platform OpenSea agreed to meet with representatives from Color of Change, staffers at the civil rights advocacy group assumed that meant that the largest and most prominent business in the space would be receptive to suggestions on making their business more inclusive.

Before their first video conference in April, Color of Change had found, through a series of quick searches, that OpenSea was facilitating and profiting from the sale of a slew of indefensibly racist and antisemitic collections of NFTs. (Non-Fungible Tokens are commodities based on crypto blockchains that usually signify ownership of digital art, videos, or photos.)

When questioned about those tokens in a series of three meetings that unfolded into September, OpenSea staffers defended their presence as a matter of not stifling users’ expression and creativity. Participants in the meetings from OpenSea, according to the Color of Change representatives, falsely claimed the inability to police their site, compared their platform to the Holocaust Museum, and ultimately defended leaving up NFTs that used the n-word, depicted Black people as racist caricatures, and that featured antisemitic, pro-Nazi content. 

OpenSea is far and above the most well-known and used NFT trading platform; it has accrued over 1 million users, who have traded billions of dollars worth of NFTs. One 2022 survey found that a quarter of Black Americans own crypto—only 15 percent of whites do—and Color of Change set up the meetings as part of an effort to make the space more hospitable for people of color. 

OpenSea’s response tracks with a broader hesitation to grapple with racial issues in Web 3, as the ostensibly decentralized apps and communities around crypto are collectively known. The heavily white, male community of Web 3 founders and developers who built a libertarian dream have sometimes been resistant to adjust to the reality of society’s persistent inequities. In 2020, in the wake of demonstrations over George Floyd’s murder, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced a controversial policy barring employees from debating “causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work.” A year later, his company quietly pulled language from its prohibited uses policy that explicitly barred users from using the crypto platform to “encourage hate” and “racial intolerance.” 

After Rodri and Spain got tangled in the long grass at Hampden, Dotun, Andy and David are here to ask what’s going on with Spain. A one-off slip-up, or are they just short of talent right now?

Next, we answer your questions about Thomas Tuchel’s move to Bayern Munich! It’s a challenging time there: David argues that Bayern’s players drove the bus over Julian Nagelsmann, while Andy explains why there’s a whole heap of pressure on Bayern’s board as much as Tuchel now. 

Plus, Feyenoord are on course for their second Eredivisie title in 23 years, but they could have a tricky (Arne) Slot to fill come the summer…

Got a question for us? Tweet us @FootballRamble, @dotunadebayo and @andybrassell. 

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