The final weekend of the Premier League is here! Marcus, Jim and Andy are here with a tasty lowdown on today’s Preview Show, sponsored by Betway!

Frank Lampard cemented his status in English football folklore after Everton’s dramatic escape last night, while Leeds survival hopes hang by a thread. At the top end, one man stands between Man City and another glorious title: Steven George Gerrard.

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Marcus, Luke and Pete recap a tough night for Rangers as their European adventure comes to a bitter end. STOP BRINGING PLAYERS ON FOR PENALTIES! 

We also turn our attentions to two former men of this sleazy parish, as José Mourinho fires up the Roma faithful and Alan Pardew joins us from his Sofia bungalow. Single bed, thankfully.

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Marcus, Luke and Jim are here to look ahead to the climax of a cracking title race, as Liverpool’s charge was almost derailed by Pep’s sleeper agent, Nathan Redmond.

We also bring you a Wagatha Christie update, as Wayne Rooney remains as clueless as us, while Nottingham Forest are one game away from history!

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St James’ Park erupted last night and, inevitably, Arsenal were caught choking in the Geordie volcano’s noxious fumes. Bring out the lasagnes!

Marcus, Pete and Jim look back on a disastrous night for the Gunners in their Champions League chase, while Huddersfield battled their way to Wembley. All of which was eclipsed, of course, by Matt Le Tissier, Rickie Lambert and Wayne Rooney’s search for the truth.

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As Liverpool two-step to another trophy in the Wembley sunshine, Ryan Gosling’s goals for West Ham put a spanner in City’s title works. Tense times as the season draws to a close! 

Jules, Vish and Andy are here to recap all that, guide Jesse Marsch to full riproarin’ cowboy mode, and celebrate more Christian Eriksen brilliance.

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Mikel Arteta has claimed that he has no good news on Arsenal pair Ben White or Gabriel Magalhaes ahead of our clash with Newcastle on Monday, but he hopes there is better news tomorrow.

The English defender has been missing since we took on West Ham, but things got worse on Thursday when Rob Holding saw red to mean that he will be suspended for our upcoming fixture, while the Brazilian limped off and needs to be assessed.

With Thomas Partey already missing in midfield, the thought of having to drop one of Granit Xhaka or Mo Elneny into defence means weakening us further up the field, and news that both of our two centre-backs could remain sidelined is certainly worrying. Arteta claims we will have a better understanding of their condition in the coming days however.

The manager told Arsenal Media: “We will know probably more tomorrow, so we wanted to extend this period as much as possible to understand how they are recovering, how they are feeling, assess them and tomorrow probably we will know more about how they are.”

Arteta went onto claim that it would be unlikely that he will be calling on young and inexperienced players, adding: “We will have to modify certain positions to try to make it work, because we don’t have more defenders and even though we have academy players, they haven’t experienced a lot of those positions because they’re not specified central defenders, so it’s something that we will try to find a way.”

Carlo Ancelotti has claimed that Eden Hazard will not be leaving Real Madrid this summer, despite reported interest from Newcastle and Arsenal.

The Belgian international has failed to find his best form since moving to La Liga from Chelsea in 2019, and could well have got the chance to return to the Premier League this summer.

Carlo Ancelotti has poured cold water on such reports however, by claiming that he will be staying to prove himself in the Spanish division instead.

Carlo Ancelotti announces: “Eden Hazard will stay here at Real Madrid next season”. #RealMadrid @SQuirante

“Hazard’s plan is very clear, he wants to show his quality next season”. pic.twitter.com/X1YDKbZAGo

Marcus, Luke and Jim are here to pick through the good, the bad and the Rob Holding of last night’s North London Derby. Their two-horse race might be the league’s last interesting one, especially if the Seagulls nab Jesse Marsch’s chips on Sunday. 

We also look ahead to Carabao Cup II: And This Time It’s Personal - and it’s the start of the Championship play-offs! Plenty to get through on today's Preview Show, sponsored by Betway!

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Kate, Andy and Vish are here to watch the jeopardy seep out from both ends of the league table, as Man City tighten their title grip and Leeds shoot themselves in each other’s feet yet again.

Elsewhere, Watford remind Forest Green that sour grapes are indeed vegan and - drumroll - we look ahead to the North London Derby! All from the comfort of Kate’s lonely living room.

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Careful, them ghosts are real

Liverpool kept their title hopes alive, but Man City have already taken a huge step towards next season’s crown by picking up Area 51’s Erling Haaland in Vincent Kompany’s disused ambulance. Yikes.

Jules, Andy and Pete round-up the action from Villa Park and plenty more big stories, as day one of Wagatha Christie brings some startling revelations and there are accusations that Marcelo got the boot at Lyon for farting too much. Plus, make sure you stick around for Pete's interpretation of Jonathan Woodgate's first LSD experience.

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Alex Neil? Roy Hodgson? A backtracking Jurgen Klopp? Difficult to say, really - but we’re here to find out! 

Pete’s joined by Kate and Luke to wave Sunderland through to the League One play-off final and hear Mark Clattenburg’s footballing masterplan. Speaking of masterplans: we’ve got a Michael Owen NFT update! Tremendous, by the way.

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Marcus, Vish and Jim are here to rightfully scold Tottenham after they dared to execute a succinct game plan against our brave Merseyside title chasers. Some mild scorn is reserved for Watford, whose grim season comes to an inevitable end.

Elsewhere, Vish documents his stint in purgatory as Man United sink to a seemingly new low, while Peter Shilton reminds us all he’s indeed had the last laugh.

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Overturning Roe v. Wade has been a foundational purpose of Republican politics for nearly half a century. The quest to end constitutional protections for abortion rights has determined who runs for office, how they run, and what they do when they win. It’s channeled massive sums of money into remaking all three branches of government at the state and federal level and ways that reverberate far beyond the immediate issue at hand. The anti-abortion movement gave us, in different ways, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and the world-changing chaos that entailed. But in the days since Politico published a leaked opinion from Justice Samuel Alito that would finally scrap the 1973 ruling, the response from the party has been distinctly subdued.

In the aftermath, many Republicans, such as Sen. Mitch McConnell preferred to focus on the mechanics of the story, publicly deriding the leak as a historic breach of norms. (Which it is—thank God.)

Others downplayed the significance of the ruling itself, citing the wide variance in how abortion is regulated at the state level. The conservative commentator Erick Erickson tweeted that, “Nothing is actually going to change.”

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson told Politico’s Burgess Everett that “the political ramifications of this thing are being overstated,” and that “It’s just never been an issue for me in Wisconsin.” 

There weren’t the kind of vocal affirmations that you might expect upon achieving a goal that has galvanized and defined the conservative movement for generations. And that cautious, changing-the-subject response brought to mind the radio silence from the right last year, when the Supreme Court gave Texas permission to temporarily nullify Roe through a shadow-docket decision.

Some of this is just reflexive, for sure, but this shift in tone is also deliberate. This week Axios snagged a polling memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee advising candidates to say that “Abortion should be avoided as much as possible” (as opposed to outlawed and criminalized) and encouraging them to “be the compassionate consensus builder on abortion policy.” 

The people who worked the hardest to overturn the 2020 presidential election have faced few professional consequences. I don’t mean the jet-setting realtors and ex-NYPD officers and children of conservative commentators and so on who stormed the Capitol on January 6th—they’re pretty well accounted for in court filings. I mean the people in positions of power who used that power for ill: Josh Hawley is still in the Senate; Donald Trump is a 19th-century party boss; Mark Meadows is now a man of letters.

But Ken Paxton, at least, isn’t out of the woods just yet. In December of 2020, the Texas Attorney General, who I profiled for a recent issue of the magazine, sued Pennsylvania and three other states Joe Biden won, and pushed to have their electoral-college votes thrown out. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case and unanimously rejected Paxton’s argument, but the matter didn’t end there. In the aftermath, dozens of constituents—including four former presidents of the State Bar of Texas—filed formal complaints, charging that the frivolous, disingenuous, and incredibly sloppy lawsuit had violated ethics guidelines. The state bar investigated. And on Friday, it took action: the bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline sued Paxton’s top deputy, Brent Webster, accusing him of “professional misconduct” for his handling of the case. According to the Austin American-Statesman, Paxton himself “expects to be named in a similar lawsuit.”

I can’t speak for the commission’s case against Webster or Paxton, but the electoral-college lawsuit was about as bad of a brief as you’ll ever see from a state AG office—actually, 18 state AG offices—in the Supreme Court. It talks about Dominion voting machines. It misstates the number of electoral votes in play. It repeats this random claim from a guy in California that “the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four States collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.” I would have loved to hear the Texas solicitor general walk the justices through the math on that one at oral arguments, but it didn’t go to oral arguments, and the Texas solicitor general wisely sat out this case. 

The lawsuit had little purpose beyond inflaming the Big Lie and insulating Paxton from the consequences of his various other scandals. And in that respect, even if the bar does bring suit against him, it will have been a success. He spoke before Trump on the Mall on January 6th—and he’s on pace for a third term.

There will be no deus ex machina from the federal government when the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, as it is now virtually guaranteed to do since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in a Mississippi abortion case was leaked on Monday. President Joe Biden won’t be able to stop the 22 states that are certain to ban abortion immediately—many of them using laws still on the books from before Roe was decided in 1973. Four more states will likely move fast to pass their own bans, according to the Guttmacher Institute. In total, about half of Americans are expected to live in places without legal access to the extremely common, life–saving, liberty-ensuring medical procedure.

Congress, too, looks like a dead end for attempts to undo the Supreme Court decision. Passing a federal law guaranteeing the right to abortion would require overcoming a Senate filibuster (Democrats don’t have the votes) or eliminating the filibuster entirely (Democrats don’t have the votes—thanks, Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin). 

But that doesn’t mean the White House can do nothing. This week, Biden directed his team to protect abortion rights “at every aspect, in every creative way, every aspect of federal law, to try to do all that’s possible,” an anonymous senior administration official told the New York Times. So what are their options? I called up reproductive rights legal experts and advocates to brainstorm.

Use FDA powers to ease abortion pill access

The Food and Drug Administration allows the use of two medications, taken in combination, to end pregnancies in the first 10 weeks. One, misoprostol, is a common anti-ulcer drug. The other, mifepristone, has been approved for use in the United States for 22 years and has an excellent safety record. Yet “the FDA has over-regulated mifepristone from day one,” says Elisa Wells, a veteran public health expert and the co-director of Plan C, an online information clearinghouse about abortion pills. “When they did approve it, they attached special restrictions only used for a handful of drugs thought to be dangerous.”

Bucha was known as Ukraine’s Switzerland. Now it is synonymous with unimaginable horror.

I first traveled to the town five years ago to film a documentary about the country’s struggle to build a democracy enshrined in human rights after the 2013–2014 Maidan revolution swept a Russian proxy from the presidency. My protagonist had fled war in the embattled east to rebuild her life in Bucha, a comfortable commuter exurb on the northwest perimeter of the capital, Kyiv. With its coffeehouses, organic cheese stores, and villas adjoining leafy parks, Bucha reminded me of the neighborhood where I grew up in Sydney, Australia. 

When I returned recently, it was torn to pieces, the contents of plush homes splayed on sidewalks. There were survivors on nearly every corner, waiting to tell me something that would haunt me for weeks.

Bucha is normally less than an hour from Kyiv. Now, my journey took nearly three, past checkpoints, wrecked tanks, and shot-up civilian cars, some with signs on them reading “children” and bullet holes where a driver once sat. In town, body parts still littered the streets a week after the Ukrainian army liberated its remaining residents, as I joined a macabre, government-organized tour of atrocities for mobs of reporters; I watched as several journalists took selfies with a boot containing a severed foot, rumored to be booby-trapped. “In Bucha,” an American journalist said into his mobile phone’s camera, “life is cheap.”

Destroyed tanks piled up in a main street of Bucha.

Marcus, Vish and Jim have the keys to your weekend on another edition of the Preview Show, sponsored by Betway!

We recap last night’s action, as David Moyes booted West Ham’s European hopes into space and the Rangers surge continues. We also look ahead to another weekend of relegation quicksand and that tasty two-way title tilt. Join us!

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This article is adapted from the forthcoming book No Choice: The Past, Present, and Perilous Future of Abortion in America, published by Hachette Book Group.

In Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion that, if made official as a decision this summer would overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he refers repeatedly to “this Nation’s history and tradition” as being at odds with abortion rights.

It begs the question: Whose history, precisely, is Alito considering here?

Our history encompasses so much beyond the white supremacist ideals our nation was founded upon.

Too often, when “this Nation’s history and tradition” is boiled down into such a broad generalization, it’s the “history and tradition” of the white Christian men who have held power in the United States since its inception. But make no mistake, this country does not belong to them alone, and our history encompasses so much beyond their experiences and beyond the white supremacist ideals our nation was founded upon.

Before this land was stolen by colonizers who called it America, it belonged to Native peoples who had inhabited it for centuries. And, as it turns out, people indigenous to America have a long, intimate “history and tradition” related to abortion and reproductive care. For one, they shared knowledge of which herbs can help a woman control her body. Stoneseed and dogbane, which have natural contraceptive properties, were used by the Shoshone peoples and the Bodéwadmi to prevent pregnancy. Studies of indigenous cultures also turn up evidence of commonplace abortion practices—a South American matrilocal native tribe known as the Wichí reportedly abort the first pregnancy of any tribal member; it’s a matter of routine, to make the childbirths that follow easier. North American native tribes, too, have documented abortion practices that prioritize the health and well-being of the person carrying the fetus and their quality of life.

More than two years after the start of the pandemic, the United States has reached a staggering milestone: 1 million Americans dead from Covid-19.

Since March 2020, the coronavirus has radically reshaped life. We live in a limbo of individualized choices. Each state, workplace, and person has adopted different norms of masking, distancing, and communing. The pandemic has been different for each of us.

Research varies, but estimates show that a majority of Americans know someone who has been hospitalized from or died of Covid. That toll is higher for Black and Hispanic Americans. (As my colleague Jackie Flynn Mogensen has reported, knowledge of racial disparities doesn’t necessarily get white people to care.)

The virus began in an era of ignorance. It spread amid the political inadequacy of the administration of President Donald Trump, who lied about Covid continually. Mass death became normalized amid the political complacency of the Biden administration.

The death toll has far outpaced scientists’ worst fear. When the pandemic began, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that estimates could change, but that getting up to 1 million or 2 million deaths would be “almost certainly off the chart.” It was “not impossible, but very, very unlikely,” he said.

On a humid morning in early October, Brittney Poolaw sat in an Oklahoma courtroom waiting on a verdict. Instead of the jail uniform she’d donned over the past 18 months, she wore a yellow and white blouse. After less than three hours of deliberation, the jury returned with their decision: Poolaw was guilty of first-degree manslaughter. She was sentenced to four years behind bars.

But Poolaw, a 20-year-old and a member of the Wichita Tribe, had not driven recklessly or shot a gun. She’d had a miscarriage.

Poolaw will not be the last woman sent to prison for accidentally losing a pregnancy. Indeed, if the leaked Supreme Court decision overturning Roe vs. Wade is in fact its final opinion on the matter, cases like Poolaw’s will likely become more common.

That’s because, as Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, says: “Not only did Roe vs. Wade establish that there’s a constitutional right to abortion, it also rejected the idea that fetuses are people under the Constitution.” The draft opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, is steeped in language that paints fetuses—no matter what stage of development—as people. And when we lend credence to the idea of fetal personhood, it creates “a situation in which, when there is perceived harm to a fetus, it can be a victim of a crime. You can’t add fetuses to the community of individuals who are entitled to constitutional rights without diminishing the rights of the person carrying that fetus,” Sussman says.

The connection between fetal personhood and prosecutions of pregnant people is well-established. While Oklahoma’s manslaughter and murder laws have a provision preventing pregnant people from being prosecuted “for causing the death of the unborn child,” there’s an exception for cases where “the mother has committed a crime that caused the death.” NAPW has identified more than 70 pregnancy-related prosecutions in Oklahoma since 2007, when it started counting cases in the state. Most have been related to illegal drug use, including the first conviction under the law: a 31-year-old woman charged with murder in 2007 after using meth and having a stillbirth.