There’s no tension around Arsenal Women’s camp concerning their managerial situation, if we are to believe Steph Catley’s latest comments. Speculation has it that interim manager Renée Slegers’ reign as Arsenal Women’s boss ends after Arsenal’s UEFA Champions League final group game against Bayern Munich.

In mid-October, Renée took over as the Arsenal manager on an interim basis. She replaced Jonas Eidevall after the Swedish tactician opted to resign. Eidevall decided to leave after a disappointing start to the season, feeling the team would be better off without him. And certainly, the team has been better.

While one might believe Arsenal Women have never had it easy, knowing who’s perfect to lead their girls, given Renée has proved herself worthy, there’s still a chance she might not become the permanent Arsenal Women manager. Indeed, the mother to a young child, simply may not want the high pressure of the head coach role.

The decision process (both internal and external) for replacing Eidevall is ongoing, causing some uncertainty and tension about who will be leading our Gunner women from the dugout after the winter break.

As tense as we Gooners might feel about the Arsenal decision-makers not being straightforward about who they’ll appoint to replace Eidevall, that tension isn’t shared within the Arsenal camp.

Arsenal v Crystal Palace- predicted lineup.

Arsenal will make the short trip to Selhurst park this evening to take on Crystal Palace in what is a must win game for us. Regardless of the missed opportunities we didn’t take in our two previous matches, this will present itself as another opportunity nonetheless given a win could take us to within one and three points of Chelsea and Liverpool respectively before they play their games tomorrow.

Liverpool will have a tricky assignment against Tottenham away and Chelsea’s encounter with Everton at Goodison Park might also be a banana skin for the Blues. With this said, it is therefore imperative that we get the win today so that we can profit on a potential slip up by the top two. We’ve already beaten Palace in midweek, we should fancy our chances of beating the same opponent again!

Team News.

Ahead of his pre match press conference, Mikel Arteta gave some positive news about the availability of some players with two of them, Declan Rice and Riccardo Calafiori, being available for selection. The latter will be available after missing the last five games due to a knee issue picked up against West Ham exactly three weeks ago. Arteta also confirmed that Oleksandr Zinchenko could make it just in time for the squad, which means that him and Calafiori’s return will give us more options at left-back after being stretched thin by their injuries. The boss also confirmed the continued absence of Ben White and Takehiro Tomiyasu with their respective knee injuries.

Though she never got off to a bright start this season, Alessia Russo is now surely silencing her doubters. Over the last two months, the England Lionesses star has really been on the rise. She’s re-discovered her mojo in front of goal. Nowadays, whenever opponents see her in Arsenal’s lineup, they can almost smell a goal coming against them.

In the last 10 games for Arsenal, in all competitions, she’s scored 9 goals, which is quite impressive.

It seems like she’s the only Gunner women star we write about these days, but we can’t help it. She pops up in every Arsenal Women press conference, whether before games or after. Every time interim Arsenal manager, Renée Slegers, has had to answer questions about her.

Ahead of the Arsenal versus Bayern Munich UEFA Champions League clash, the Dutch tactician touched on Alessia Russo’s development and versatility. She raved about how Alessia can turn out as a #9 or a #10, and how she has also highlighted that Alessia can now play as a left winger. It is now about what you need on the pitch from her.

Renée said, “Alessia came in as a 9, but we know she’s good in a 10 position. Because of a couple decisions we made and experiments we were doing, we now know she can also play left wing. Depends on what you need on the pitch. We know that she can play in different positions.”

Annoyed with time changes in the fall and spring? So is President-elect Donald Trump. On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that the “Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time” because it is “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

Ending daylight saving time would also not be that original—two thirds of countries do not have it. Americans do seem to be split on the issue. In a 2019 poll, 7 out of 10 Americans said they did not like the biannual switches, but 4 in 10 wanted a fixed standard time and 3 in 10 wanted daylight saving time.

Even putting aside the economic argument for ending daylight saving time, some research suggests that the practice of putting the clock one hour ahead in the spring can negatively impact peoples’ mental health. When our internal clock is thrown off and we get less sleep, our mood can be impacted, leading us to feel less focused and potentially more depressed. This lack of focus can also be deadly—a February 2020 study that looked at two decades’ worth of traffic accidents found that there was a 6 percent increase in the risk of fatal traffic accidents in the week following daylight saving time in the United States.

In October 2020, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional society that represents medical specialists who focus on sleep medicine, even issued a statement in support of ending daylight saving time in favor of a fixed year-round schedule:

Every summer, 50 of the nation’s best and brightest teenage girls gather in Mobile, Alabama, to embark on two of the most intense weeks of their lives. Everybody wants the same thing: to walk away with a $40,000 college scholarship and the title of Distinguished Young Woman of America.

Reporter Shima Oliaee competed for Nevada when she was a teenager, and was invited back as a judge more than 20 years later. Oliaee accepted, and recorded the experience for a six-part audio series called The Competition.

In the final days of the competition, there was news from Washington that had big implications for women across the nation: Roe v. Wade had fallen. 

The girls are faced with a tough decision: Do they speak up for their political beliefs or stay focused on winning the money? And what might this mean for their futures—and their friendships?

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

In the landscape of international finance for fossil fuels, some of the most important players are obscure government bodies known as “export credit agencies.” These agencies provide funding to companies seeking to build large and risky infrastructure projects, often in developing countries. In return, the developers of those projects purchase construction materials or other goods from the country of the agency. For instance, an oil pipeline company might take a loan from a German export credit agency in exchange for using German steel in the pipeline.

Export credit agencies have become some of the world’s largest public funding sources for energy infrastructure, providing far more money than multilateral institutions like the World Bank, while avoiding much public scrutiny. 

Now, as Joe Biden’s administration winds to a close, officials are working with international partners to push forward an agreement that would see export credit agencies pull back almost all funding for oil and gas projects, a measure the administration had balked on supporting before Donald Trump’s reelection.

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

Shortly after he was reelected last month, Donald Trump announced an economic gambit that was aggressive even by his standards. He vowed that, on the first day of his second term, he would slap 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, and boost those already placed on Chinese products by another 10 percent. 

The move set off a frenzy of pushback. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even flew to the president-elect’s Florida resort to make his case. Economists say the potential levies threaten to upend global trade—including green technologies, many of which are manufactured in China. The moves would cause price spikes for everything from electric vehicles and heat pumps to solar panels. 

“Typically with tariffs, we’ve seen [companies] pass them along to the consumer,” said Corey Cantor, electric vehicles analyst at Bloomberg NEF. Ansgar Baums, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan foreign policy think tank Stimson Center, said retaliatory moves from the three targeted countries would only make things worse. “It will drive up consumer costs and hurt those who cannot afford it.”

In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, which claims a supposed Deep State has been plotting against Donald Trump for years, Kash Patel, whom Trump has tapped to replace Chris Wray as FBI director, recounts his three-year stint as a mid-level attorney at the Justice Department. For him, this gig was apparently a radical learning experience. During that time, Patel writes, he came to see that the top leaders of the government were “political gangsters, frauds, and hypocrites.” Yet in the book and in interviews, Patel has embellished his own work at the department.

Patel, previously a public defender in Miami, was a lawyer at the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section from late 2013 until after the 2016 election. In his book, he calls it “a dream job for a young and ambitious lawyer,” and he states that he played a key role in the Benghazi case, in which the FBI and the Justice Department pursued the culprits responsible for the September 11, 2012, attack on a US diplomatic compound in Libya that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. “I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice in Washington, DC,” Patel writes.

Several FBI and Justice Department officials who worked the Benghazi case say this description is an exaggeration. Asked about Patel’s characterization, a former FBI special agent who was on that investigation for years exclaimed, “Oh my god, no. Not on that case. Not on Benghazi.”

“Kash has claimed he made certain decisions on what crimes should have been charged and should not have been. He did not make those decisions. He had no major role.”

Last week, Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Kevin Kiley (R-Calif) introduced federal anti-SLAPP legislation, in a bid to protect journalists, whistleblowers, and individual internet users from those who use lawsuits as an intimidation tactic.

SLAPP suits—formally, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—are designed to prevent people from exercising their free speech. A common example is a person suing a media outlet after unfavorable coverage—attempting to bankrupt journalists from lawyers’ fees, even if, in the end, the outlet wins the case. Such suits are already illegal in 34 states. But, on the federal level, there’s no such legislation. 

Raskin and Kiley’s bill, the “Free Speech Protection Act,” would allow people being sued over speech acts to file a special motion to dismiss by classifying a lawsuit as a SLAPP. The party who filed the SLAPP suit would then be required to pay the respondent’s legal fees. 

There is a rush to implement the bill before the next presidency. Trump and his companies have sued a broad range of media companies for defamation, ranging from the New York Times to a local Wisconsin local TV station. Most recently, Trump filed a lawsuit against CBS over the editing of  Kamala Harris’ “60 Minutes” interview, asserting that the interview’s presentation was “consumer fraud.” (CBS is moving to get that lawsuit thrown out before Trump assumes the presidency.)

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At last the women’s super league is back following the November-December international break. On Sunday our Arsenal Women take on Aston Villa at the Emirates Stadium. Our Gunners will be hoping to pick up from where they left off before the international break.

Fixture details: Arsenal Women v Aston Villa Women – WSL

Arsenal went on international break on a run of 4 wins, which came during their fine run under interim manager Renee Slegers. Under Renee, the Gunners are unbeaten in 7 straight games; that is, 6 wins and a draw in what makes their run before that break look great, under Renee Slegers.

One could argue that Chelsea Women’s unbeaten record in the 2024-25 league has given them an advantage in the title race, but anything can happen. Therefore, Arsenal should aim to pick win after win, hoping to capitalize on the Blues’ potential (though unlikely, in my opinion) slippage.

A strong Arsenal lineup should, on Sunday, defeat a Villa team that has only managed one win and one draw in their last five games across all competitions.

That said, Arsenal will be without Lia Walti this weekend. During the international break, she experienced discomfort, and a checkup revealed an abscess. Renee Slegers revealed she’s still in Switzerland recovering. She will therefore miss the game on Sunday.

The Premier League all-time single-season assist record by a player is currently at 20 assists. Arsenal legend Thierry Henry set that record in the 2002-03 season; Kevin De Bruyne equalled it in the 2019-20 season.

After 14 Premier League match days this season, Arsenal’s star player Bukayo Saka has already recorded 10 assists. With 24 PL match days remaining, experts predict that the Hale End star will surpass the PL’s all-time single season assist record. There’s a feeling he’ll rack up 20 or more league assists.

After the Gunners’ 2-0 win over the Red Devils Wednesday night, Declan Rice expressed his wish that Saka breaks the PL assists’ record. He showed his disappointment that Saka failed to achieve another assist on Wednesday night. Arsenal scored from a well-hit Saka corner; Thomas Partey’s header could have gone into the net, but it was a Saliba deflection that saw the ball find the back of the net.

“He’d have been fuming!” Rice joked when he learned Saka narrowly missed out on being credited for an assist after his corner led to Arsenal’s second goal. “That would have been another one closer to the record. I want him to get that; that’d be massive for him.”

Given how lethal Arsenal are from corners, surely it increases the chances of Saka getting more assists from them.

Pete Hegseth, the Fox News anchor whom Donald Trump has tapped to be his defense secretary, has come under intense scrutiny for his mistreatment of women, including an allegation of rape. One of his critics was, at one time, his own mother.

“That is the ugly truth.”

In 2018, Penelope Hegseth wrote her son an email in which she laid into him for poor behavior and disrespect toward women. “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote in the letter, obtained by the New York Times. 

Hegseth chastised her son for how he treated his wife, Samantha, in the divorce proceedings that prompted her to send her April 2018 email. She concluded it by writing, “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself…”