Ian Wright is not happy about Arsenal’s 1-0 loss at Everton this afternoon, but the Gunners’ legend insists they must learn quickly and move on from the setback.

Arsenal is in an unlikely title race and has dealt with the pressure of leading the league standings very well so far.

After beating the likes of Tottenham and Manchester United in recent weeks, everyone expected another win against the Toffees.

Champions do not have to go through a campaign unbeaten, but it is important that they recover after every setback.

Wright knows this and tweeted:

Darren Bent has given Everton credit for how hard they worked to secure a 1-0 win against Arsenal this afternoon.

The Toffees have had a bad season, which cost Frank Lampard his job and Sean Dyche was brought in to help the team perform better.

We all expected this game to be a tough first match for the former Burnley man. However, that never happened and the Gunners saw their unbeaten run end with just their second defeat of the season in the league.

Everton deserved something from the game and former striker Bent admits they worked well for the victory.

He tweeted:

The giant white, aerial blob that US officials described as a Chinese spy balloon was seen plummeting towards the Atlantic Ocean near Surfside Beach, South Carolina, on Saturday afternoon, having been shot down by a US military fighter jet.

“I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday, as soon as possible,” President Biden told reporters in Hagerstown, Maryland, en route to Camp David. Military officials advised that the best time to do so was when the device was safely flying over water off the East Coast, he said.

Biden: "On the balloon, I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible [for safety] … they successfully took it down." pic.twitter.com/2GbSzejnZI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 4, 2023

Live television images showed the balloon suddenly losing shape amid a plume of smoke and falling towards the ocean over several minutes. The dramatic turn of events came after the Federal Aviation Administration closed airspace and halted departures of planes to three Atlantic coast airports due to “national security initiatives.” Contrails from fighter jets were seen streaming across bright blue skies near the balloon.

Talk Sports editor Tom Rennie believes the midfield Arsenal used in the second half of their match against Everton is simply not good enough to win the league.

The Gunners had an off day at Goodison Park as they lost only their second league game of the season against a very determined Everton side.

Gooners have come to expect top performances from their team in this campaign, but the quality was lacking in the side, which forced Mikel Arteta to make some changes in the second half.

However, things did not exactly get better and one area the Gunners were terrible at was in midfield.

After the game, Rennie tweeted:

Bucking decades of political tradition, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted for a new line-up of early primary dates in the 2024 presidential cycle. It was a long-awaited move that top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have championed for years in hopes of making the country’s nominating process more representative of the party’s voters.

The calendar assigns South Carolina as the first state to hold a 2024 presidential primary on Feb. 3, 2024, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on Feb. 6. Georgia and Michigan would also move up in the nation’s primary order, whereas Iowa—which has been the first state to participate in the nominating process for decades—would be moved out of the early window entirely.

The DNC’s goal is to make the nominating process more equitable. Iowa and New Hampshire have long been the first states to get a say in which candidate should be the party’s nominee for President, but those states are not among the most racially or economically diverse, and people of color make up sizable blocs of the party. “Our early states must reflect the overall diversity of our party and our nation—economically, geographically, demographically,” President Joe Biden wrote to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee in December. “This means more diverse states earlier in the process and more diversity in the overall mix of early states.” 

So congrats to South Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Michigan for moving up in the (political) world? Not so fast.

New Hampshire has a state law that stipulates it must be the first state in the nation to hold presidential primaries. Changing this law may be difficult given that Republicans control both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature and the governor’s mansion and aren’t eager to comply with DNC rules. New Hampshire Democrats aren’t exactly trying very hard to get their state Republican counterparts to help them on this matter, either. 

Sky Sports’ Peter Smith insists Arsenal had no answers to breaking down Everton in their Premier League game today.

The Gunners took on the struggling Toffees in a game that fans expected them to win, but with their new manager on the touchline, Everton secured a 1-0 victory.

Sean Dyche has been their latest gaffer for just a few days and the players enjoyed a new manager bounce with that win.

Arsenal struggled to make the kind of impact we are used to seeing from them and they could not break down a Toffees side that looked well-drilled.

After the game, Smith said on Sky Sports:

Danilo, Nottingham Forest’s winter midfield signing, was heavily linked with a move to Arsenal for the better part of 2022.

According to reports, Arsenal’s offer for the Brazilian’s services in the summer of 2022 was rejected by Palmeiras.

Back then, Arsenal’s signing of the 22-year-old was dubbed a “shrewd signing” by BBC Reporter Zach Lowy. He tweeted, “Did not expect Arsenal to prioritise a midfielder over a winger in the final day of the window, but Danilo would be a shrewd pickup for them if they can get it over the line.”

Many expected a new offer this winter, but Arsenal were slow to return to convince Palmeiras to do business with them, so Nottingham Forest beat them to the Brazilian’s signature.

Although it is difficult to see the impact of Arsenal’s failure to sign Danilo, Football Fan Cast believes Arteta simply missed out on having his own Gilberto Silva. Those who watched Silva at Arsenal’s midfield knew he was the real deal.

Arsenal will make the long trip back to London disappointed after losing 1-0 to Everton on Merseyside.

The Gunners named the same starting line-up for the fifth consecutive game, but despite the consistency on the teamsheet, we struggled for form early on.

The first half was a real struggle for us, with Sean Dyche’s appointment bringing an immediate improvement from their side, and we eventually made it to the break level. Bukayo Saka had come closest to scoring in the opening 45 minutes, but two chances for Dominic Calvert-Lewin really should have been put away also.

After the break, the deadlock was finally broken, and it was no shock that it was another dangerous Everton corner which bared the fruit for the opener. James Tarkowski managed to find space between a sea of players to get his head onto the ball and send it into the goal, leaving us just 30 minutes on the clock to put things right.

Despite bringing on all of Jorginho, Leandro Trossard and Fabio Vieira, we still struggled to break through an organised Dyche defence. Odegaard tried to place an effort into the far side of the net, only to send his effort wide of the post with time ticking on.

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

Deep in the confines of the hulking, brutalist headquarters of the US Department of Energy, down one of its long, starkly lit corridors, sits a small, unheralded office that is poised to play a pivotal role in America’s shift away from fossil fuels and help the world stave off disastrous global heating.

The department’s loan programs office was “essentially dormant” under Donald Trump, according to its head, Jigar Shah, but has now come roaring back with a huge war chest to bankroll emerging clean energy projects and technology.

Last year’s vast Inflation Reduction Act grew the previously moribund office’s loan authority to $140 billion, while adding a new program worth another $250 billion in loan guarantees to retool projects that help cut planet-heating emissions. Which means that Shah, a debonair former clean energy entrepreneur and podcast host who matches his suits with pristine Stan Smiths, oversees resources comparable to the GDP of Norway: all to help turbocharge solar, wind, batteries and a host of other climate technologies in the US.

With a newly divided Congress stymieing any new climate legislation in the foreseeable future, Shah has emerged as one of Washington’s most powerful figures in the effort to confront global heating. Shah says such focus on him is “hyperbolic” but the White House is pinning much of its climate agenda on an office that barely had a dozen people when Shah joined in March 2021. It now has more than 200 staffers as it scrambles to distribute billions in loans to projects across the US.

President Joe Biden seems to be pretty unhappy about the suspected Chinese spy balloon flying over Montana. His administration signaled this by postponing Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing—less than a day before Blinken was supposed to depart.

Donald Trump apparently prefers a different response. “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON!” the former commander-in-chief Truthed this morning. A few hours later, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley demonstrated her status as the sane, serious alternative to Trump by tweeting the same thing, but with some lowercase letters mixed in.

Shoot down the balloon. Cancel Blinken’s trip. Hold China accountable.

Biden is letting China walk all over us. It’s time to make America strong again.

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 3, 2023

Pete’s back! He brings tales of alligator-infested trips to the Flamingo Land Stadium alongside ten other Brackley Town fans. They didn’t know who he was, either.

Marcus, Vish and Jim are also here to look ahead to a bumper weekend of Barclays, as Sean Dyche bans sombreros from the Everton training ground and Todd Boehly finds Kenedy down the back of the Stamford Bridge sofa. Plus, can Jesse Marsch survive an inaccurate aerial bombardment from Jonjo Shelvey n’ co?

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The past two weeks have marked a significant escalation in the years-long struggle over the proposed construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (PSTC), a $90 million project that would be built on nearly 100 acres of city-owned land in an unincorporated section of DeKalb County—Georgia’s fourth largest county that encompasses a sliver of southeast Atlanta. The forest—once the homeland of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, then the site of a slave plantation and notorious prison camp—for at least a year has been occupied by activists who call themselves “forest defenders.” They have camped among the trees with the goal of blocking the construction of the PSTC, a massive complex for law enforcement that would include training and recreational facilities.  For them and other opponents of the project, PSTC is known instead as “Cop City.”

On January 18, a multi-agency task force that included Atlanta police, the Georgia State Patrol, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided what they estimated to be about 25 campsites throughout the forest. During the operation, a Georgia state patrol trooper shot and killed a 26-year-old activist named Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who went by the nickname “Tortuguita.” The state’s Bureau of Investigation released a statement claiming that officers approached Terán in a tent, and then Terán shot at a state trooper first, wounding him, before officers returned fire. Law enforcement has said there is no body camera footage. 

Fellow activists dispute this account and have called for an independent investigation. Terán’s mother, who is originally from Venezuela but now lives in Panama City, Panama told The Guardian that she believes her child was “murdered in cold blood” and that she will work to “clear Manuel’s name.” Protests following Terán’s killing led to a police cruiser in flames and smashed windows at the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters, Wells Fargo, and Truist Bank branches in downtown Atlanta. In response, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp called a state of emergency and activated the Georgia National Guard (though they were not deployed).

In his State of the State address the day before the state of emergency was declared, Kemp decried the violence of “out-of-state rioters” and applauded the police response to the protests. “That’s just the latest example of why here in Georgia, we’ll always back the blue!” he said. 

In countries in the global south that are on the frontiers of resource extraction, being an environmental activist is extraordinarily dangerous. A 2021 Global Witness report estimated 1,700 environmental activists have been killed in the last decade. But, as Kate Aronoff wrote in The New Republic, Terán’s death is a worrisome sign that this deadly violence against environmental protesters could become a reality in the United States, too. Terán’s death is the first known example of someone killed by law enforcement while engaged in environmental “land defense” activism.

On January 5, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tweeted about the unexpected passing of Quentin Williams, a Democratic member of the Connecticut House of Representatives. “Terrible news today of Q Williams sudden death,” he wrote. “I’m sending every good thought I have to his family and friends today.” Most of the replies to Murphy’s tweet echoed the senator’s sentiments; many commented that it was especially sad to lose someone so young—Williams was just 39 when he died. But some of the commenters seemed determined to take the conversation in an entirely different direction. “Vaccine related?” asked one. “How many shots did he get?” wrote another. “Let me guess he has taken the Covid vaccine,” speculated a third. At least one tweeter added a hashtag you may have seen popping up: #diedsuddenly.

Williams’ vaccination status had nothing to do with his death—he was one of two people killed in a head-on collision. But the commenters on Murphy’s tweet reflect an increasingly popular conspiracy theory that healthy people are dying shortly after receiving the vaccine. Indeed, in the last two months, every time a celebrity dies—from former NFL player Ahmaad Galloway to Lisa Marie Presley—adherents of this theory have swarmed social media to blame the shots. Despite no evidence that such a correlation exists, this myth is remarkably persistent, especially since the November 2022 release of a slickly produced documentary called Died Suddenly, which baselessly claims that many people who take the vaccines develop potentially fatal blood clots.

The film has been widely debunked, even by some people within the anti-vaccine movement, but that hasn’t stopped it from going viral. By late December, the phrase “died suddenly” was surging on Twitter, with an average of nearly 4,000 mentions per day. Then, on January 2, NFL player Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field from cardiac arrest after a relatively routine tackle. Experts believe the most likely cause was a rare phenomenon called commotio cordis, which can happen if a person receives a blow to the chest between beats of the heart. According to an analysis by the online extremism watchdog group Center for Countering Digital Hate, the morning after the game, the number of mentions skyrocketed to nearly 17,000—an increase of 328 percent. Hamlin did not die—after a week in the hospital, he was discharged—and neither did the hashtag. Nearly a month after Hamlin’s collapse, it’s still trending on Twitter.

The 16 million people who have watched the film Died Suddenly on the far-right platform Rumble may have been expecting more of what they saw on social media: titillating speculation about Covid vaccines’ role in celebrity deaths. Yet viewers of Died Suddenly encounter much more than just a tired and repeatedly discredited strain of medical misinformation. Its premise is that the vaccines are a tool of global elites who want to “depopulate” the world—a variation on the “Great Reset” narrative that “globalists” like George Soros and Bill Gates orchestrated the pandemic in order to reprogram people to accept a new age of Marxism. This conspiracy theory gained traction in neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups, which are increasingly intermingling with the anti-vaccine movement.

One of the leaders in combining these two movements is Stew Peters, the 42-year-old producer of Died Suddenly. Although his name may not be as well-known as Alex Jones or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his influence is considerable. He didn’t start out as an anti-vaccine crusader. Rather, Peters launched his far-right media career several years ago, when he began posting videos of himself monologuing about his work as a bounty hunter in Minneapolis. Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, suggests that Peters has discovered that vaccine skepticism is a powerful way to mobilize new followers. “This is a guy from the far right who sees an opportunity to weaponize the pandemic, to increase distrust in the government,” he says. “Even among otherwise hostile, non-aligned groups, if they can find a point of mutual interest, they will coalesce around it.”

At first I figured the Republicans would be all over this. I guess I figured wrong.

I’m referring to the bombshell working paper that made headlines earlier this week, in which a team of academic and Treasury Department economists found that the IRS audits Black taxpayers at roughly three to five times the rate of non-Black taxpayers. 

The authors, whose findings were based on an anonymized 2014 dataset consisting of more than 148 million tax returns and 780,000 audits, write that the disparities seem to be driven largely by racial differences in audit rates among taxpayers claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit.” 

The IRS has long scrutinized claimants of the EITC and certain other refundable tax credits at higher-than-average rates, regardless of race, in part because they are low-hanging fruit. The credit—aimed at low- to moderate-income taxpayers—is often claimed in error, and such audits are a cheap and easy by-mail job for a chronically underfunded tax agency.

Even among those claimants, the study found, Black taxpayers, who accounted for an estimated 21 percent of EITC filers, were selected for 43 percent of the audits. Now, IRS staffers don’t sit around deciding whom to audit—the selection is algorithmic and nominally race-blind. But the agency’s secret sauce somehow produced results that are far from colorblind.

House Republicans removed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday because she is a Black, Muslim woman. Officially, that’s not the reason. But the facts speak for themselves: The removal is the culmination of years of targeting Omar by Donald Trump, the rightwing media, and Republican lawmakers who attacked her religion, ethnicity, and history as a refugee. The GOP majority has an official reason for ousting Omar—and then there’s the reason both they and everyone else know is really behind this outrage. 

There's only one Reason why House Republicans have punished Ilhan Omar https://t.co/xzpis2vYmn pic.twitter.com/ERdFLHiNBK

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) February 2, 2023

Their nominal reason is that past anti-Semitic comments make her unsuited to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee. The resolution to remove Omar contains a list of offenses. Read closely, it reveals how the party (along with some moderate Democrats) have targeted Omar since she was elected in 2018, taking her words out of context to make her a boogeyman for the right. 

The first offense is a February 2019 tweet in which Omar attributed lawmakers’ support for Israel to the deep pockets of the pro-Israel lobby, touching on the anti-Semitic trope that Jews buy influence and control. That tweet caused outcry on both sides of the aisle. Omar’s response included the words: “I unequivocally apologize.”

Misdirection, an essential tool for magicians, is not usually a component of media criticism. But in a lengthy critique of the coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal published this week by the Columbia Journalism Review, veteran investigative reporter Jeff Gerth deflects attention from the core components of Russiagate, mirroring Donald Trump’s own efforts of the past six years to escape accountability for his profound betrayal of the nation. Though Gerth’s target is media outlets, particularly the New York Times (where he worked for 29 years), Gerth ends up bolstering Trump’s phony narrative that there was no Russia scandal, just merely a hoax whipped up by reckless reporters and Trump’s enemies in the press, with the assistance of the Deep State. 

In a massive 24,000-word, four-part article, Gerth dissects how the Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other news organizations during the 2016 election and afterward reported on Trump’s and his campaign’s interactions with Russia. (He briefly references, without criticism, the story I published that first revealed the existence of the dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and that reported that the FBI was investigating its allegations.) Gerth does probe genuine errors committed by his former employer and others. The Times, for instance, reported shortly before the 2016 election that the FBI’s investigation had found no link between Trump and Russia, when the bureau had barely begun its inquiry and had reached no final conclusions. And after the election, the Times produced a report in early 2017 that seemingly went too far in the opposite direction when it reported that US intelligence had evidence that “Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.” (Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, we later learned, had been huddling with a suspected Russian intelligence official during the campaign, but FBI officials handling the Russian investigation at the time saw this Times article as going too far.)

Gerth finds plenty of ammo for his assault on the media. But here’s where he goes wrong: He misrepresents the scandal that is the subject of the media coverage he is scrutinizing. He defines the Trump-Russia affair by only two elements of the tale: the question of Trump collusion with Moscow and the unconfirmed Steele dossier. This is exactly how Trump and his lieutenants want the scandal to be perceived. From the start, Trump has proclaimed “no collusion,” setting that as the bar for judging him. That is, no evidence of criminal collusion, and he’s scot-free. And he and his defenders have fixated on the Steele dossier—often falsely claiming it triggered the FBI’s investigation—to portray Trump as the victim of untrue allegations and “fake news.” Gerth essentially accepts these terms of the debate. 

Yet the focus on collusion and the Steele material has been a purposeful distraction meant to obscure the basics of the scandal: Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win, and Trump and his aides aided and abetted this assault on American democracy by denying such an attack was happening. Trump provided cover for a foreign adversary subverting a US election. Throughout the thousands and thousands of words Gerth generates, he downplays or ignores these fundamentals and how the media in 2016 covered them (which was shoddily). Instead, he zeroes in on the reporting related to collusion and Steele. In doing so, he offers an examination predicated on a skewed view of reality.

Gerth sets off a worrying signal in the fifth paragraph of this opus, when he writes that there was “an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth.” Hyperbolic version of the truth? What does that mean? Gerth does acknowledge that the Washington Post “has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements,” but to cast Trump’s lies as “hyperbolic” truth—as if there are two morally equivalent sides here—indicates this analysis is not going to fare well. (Trump, of course, lied repeatedly about his doings in Russia.)

Dotun, Andy and David Cartlidge provide the European perspective to a record-breaking Premier League transfer window and worry how savvy European operators might soon be squeezed out of the market.

Elsewhere, we wonder if Bayern have the patience for their Julian Nagelsmann project and assses Barcelona’s recent defensive performances - both on the pitch and in court.

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Three weeks after his death at the hands of Memphis police, Tyre Nichols is finally being laid to rest. On Wednesday, friends and family gathered to celebrate Nichols’ life at the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis, Tennessee. Several lawmakers and civil rights advocates, including the Reverend Al Sharpton and Vice President Kamala Harris, attended the ceremony and expressed their condolences. 

“On the night of January 7, my baby brother was robbed of his passion, his talents, his life, but not his light,” said Nichols’ older sister, Keyana Dixon, through her tears. “All I want is my baby brother back. And even in his demise, he was still polite. He asked the officers to please stop. He was still the polite young man he always was. My family will never be the same.” 

Following the release of body-camera footage from the brutal beating by police, much of the world knows Tyre Nichols, a Black man, for his death. But today’s service was dedicated to remembering how Nichols—an avid skateboarder, loving son, and father to a 4-year-old boy—lived. 

“He set his own path. He made his own light,” said Nichols’ older brother, Jamal Dupree, who said he originally didn’t plan on speaking. “He was very peaceful and very respectful. I spent a lot of time away from my brother, and I wish that I hadn’t because I want to know the person everyone else knew. And now five officers made it so I’ll never be able to. But I’ll never forget my brother. I’ll never forget my Gemini twin.”

A Sacramento native, Nichols traveled to Memphis to visit his family in 2020 but, according to his mother, RowVaughn Wells, remained in the city when the pandemic hit. He eventually got a job at FedEx and settled down in the area. Wells has spoken openly since his death of an intensely close bond she shared with her son, who she said had a tattoo of her name on his arm.  

Someone pass Nobby Solano his trumpet, because Newcastle are heading to Wembley! Jim, Luke and Vish react to last night’s Carabao semi-final and a spending spree on deadline day!

We discuss Sky’s coverage and why it suddenly resembles a Zoom call sales conference, before turning to the very best of the pettiness from João Live Laugh Love Cancelo. Luke also explains his firm belief that Arsenal will let the Premier League slip through their fingers on the final day and we look forward to Jonjo Shelvs turning the ship around tonight for Nottingham Forest! If he’s let into the stadium, that is…

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