My predicted line up vs Liverpool

Mikel Arteta and his Arsenal squad will travel away to Liverpool tonight in what could be one of the biggest games of the year. On paper, its anyone’s game but Arsenal will be hoping that they can walk away with all three points.

Beating Liverpool at Anfield is no small task and the Arsenal lads will have to be at their very best. I expect a full-strength side from both teams, Liverpool played EFL football mid-week so, Arsenal has the advantage of extra rest, but after Liverpool drew to United last weekend, they’ll be looking to rectify that result. Here’s how I expect Arteta to line his squad up at Anfield.

In goal I expect David Raya, after a great performance against Brighton where he kept a clean sheet yet again, he will be looking to do the same thing. Keeping calm, concentrated and composed will be vital for Raya as one mistake and Liverpool will be looking to punish him.

In defence I expect a back four of White, Saliba, Gabriel and Zinchenko. Having all played last week against Brighton and kept a clean sheet, I think Arteta opts for his strongest back four available. Both full backs had really good games vs Brighton but Liverpool is a different task, with both Salah and Diaz to deal with, it will be a busy night for our full backs. Saliba and Gabriel obviously at centre back and hopefully they can continue their great form when partnered together.

Arsenal Women are now on their winter break, having opened their Christmas presents at London Colney yesterday in great festive spirit!

“I’m sorry Mum. I don’t normally do this before Christmas Day but I’m being forced to.”

Who’s ready for Colney Christmas?

(@leahcwilliamson isn’t) pic.twitter.com/JDfw8Pfmsa

— Arsenal Women (@ArsenalWFC) December 22, 2023

Our listener Christian has a theory: could a European Super League actually improve English football? Marcus, Luke and Andy debate the merits of that suggestion on today’s Mailbag.

Elsewhere, Luke explains why someone should make a biopic all about Paolo Maldini’s tennis career and there's agreement that humiliation is the key to improving players' conduct in football!

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What reason would Roy Hodgson have to incubate Pep Guardiola? I don’t know.

It’s cold outside, but Marcus, Luke, Andy and Jim are here to warm your footballing hearts with tales of Hodgson looking after his owl eggs, Ross County’s manager having a full-blown rant about the standard of Scottish football, and Gary O’Neil almost certainly getting a contentious penalty decision against him and his team on Christmas Eve! Probably in the 92nd minute.

Plus, can Luke Darth Moore at last turn his fortunes around on Jack’s Encyclopaedia before the end of the year? Tune in to find out!

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Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, a step he said was unavoidable after he was ordered to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers he defamed by falsely accusing them of election fraud. The former New York mayor’s Chapter 11 filing was no surprise. It came the day after federal district court judge Beryl Howell ordered Giuliani to immediately pay Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss before entering an appeal regarding the award.

A Giuliani spokesperson, Ted Goodman, cast the filing as a tactical move. “No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Rudy Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount,” Goodman said in a statement Thursday. “Chapter 11 will afford Mayor Giuliani the opportunity and time to pursue an appeal, while providing transparency for his finances under the supervision of the bankruptcy court, to ensure all creditors are treated equally and fairly throughout the process.” 

The man once known as “America’s mayor” has now become arguably the country’s best-known debtor. Among the debts cited in Giuliani’s filing today are legal bills going back to his role as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, in the former president’s first impeachment, along with mounting legal fees from his involvement in Trump’s effort to use election fraud lies to steal the 2020 election. Obviously, Giuliani is unable to pay Moss and Freeman $148 million. His personal lawyer and friend, Robert Costello, is suing Giuliani for $1.4 million in unpaid legal fees. Giuliani also reports about $3.5 million in additional debts to lawyers.

Giuliani faces substantial additional expenses from his Georgia indictment for trying to interfere in the counting of votes during the 2020 election. He’s also an unindicted co-conspirator in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Despite Trump’s assurance in August that he would help his former lawyer pay off additional legal debts, Trump’s Save America PAC only has helped Giuliani pay some $340,000 in legal expenses.

The IRS in August filed a $549,435 tax lien against Giuliani for the 2021 tax year, and his bankruptcy petition says he now owes a total of about $989,000 in unpaid taxes. He also cites “unknown potential obligations” to Dominion and Smartmatic voting machine companies who have sued him for defamation, and to Hunter Biden, who has sued Giuliani for violating his privacy by “hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over” material on Hunter’s laptop. He also cites potential obligations to Noelle Dunphy, a former employee who has sued Giuliani for “sexual assault and harassment, wage theft,” and “rape.”He denies those allegations and well as claims in other suits against him.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. 

The Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that vinyl chloride would be among five chemicals to begin the process for risk evaluation prioritization under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, an early step toward potentially banning the chemical.  

The news comes after environmental groups campaigned this summer for the chemical to be banned, visiting EPA offices in Washington in July and gathering thousands of petition signatures. Vinyl chloride is a colorless gas that is used to make PVC, a common material in construction products like flooring, siding, pipes, and roofing. Vinyl chloride has been known as a human carcinogen since the 1970s. 

“The announcement is very significant because EPA announced that they’re only going to look at five chemicals for a new evaluation,” said Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator and the president of Beyond Plastics, an organization working to end plastic pollution. 

Enck was part of the team that traveled to Washington this summer. She brought a large vinyl rubber ducky to the EPA meeting to illustrate the fact that PVC is used to make children’s toys. 

Marcus needs consoling. Again. That’s because Fulham have been drawn against Liverpool in a two-legged semi-final. Oh no...

Luke joins Marcus to react to Liverpool dishing out yet another defeat to poor old David Moyes, who made history by becoming the first manager to try and play a Carabao Cup quarter-final via email. Plus, why Santa has been dragged into the middle of the Celtic-Rangers rivalry and bold predictions that Steve Cooper’s going to pop up in the Bournemouth end at the weekend. Probably topless.

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Almost three years ago, during his first week in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department to stop renewing its contracts with private prison companies. The news was like a glimpse of blue sky for critics of the controversial sector—especially after four years of Donald Trump, who had fostered a cozy, mutually lucrative relationship with the private prison industry.

The order restored an Obama-era policy first announced in 2016—and later suspended by Trump administration—after a damning federal report found that private federal prisons were less safe and less secure than their publicly run counterparts. No longer would the Bureau of Prisons sign deals with corporations to lock up people serving federal prison sentences. Nor would the US Marshals Service, in charge of detaining people while they await trial on federal criminal charges, enter or renew contracts with those same companies. 

Or, at least, that was the idea. And over the last three years, the Bureau of Prisons has indeed ended its use of private prisons—moving the roughly 14,000 people it previously held in private facilities into government-owned ones as of last December. But the Marshals Service is a different story. Among the roughly 63,000 people held in USMS custody each night, the ACLU has found that about 1 in 3 still go to sleep in a detention center run by a private prison company. “As far as we can tell, the numbers remained about constant,” says Kyle Virgien, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project. 

So what gives? That’s the question at the heart of a new letter sent by nine Senate Democrats to Marshals Service Director Ronald Davis and Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday, seeking more information on two workarounds USMS has been using to avoid moving its detainees out of private prisons. “The Marshals Service must end its abuse of loopholes to circumvent the order, which allow these private jails to operate unsafe facilities and profit from mass incarceration,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the letter’s lead signatory, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “We have a basic responsibility to keep detainees safe.”

The letter notes several ways in which USMS has continued to house people in private prisons. First, the agency has been using municipalities as go-betweens to avoid directly hiring private prison companies. USMS has long made deals with town or county governments to keep USMS detainees in their local jail. But in some cases, that local government then turns around and hires a private prison company as a subcontractor. This pass-through mechanism allowed USMS to keep detainees in the 2,016-bed Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, owned and run by CoreCivic, one of the country’s largest private prison operators. When USMS’s contract with CoreCivic expired in May 2021, USMS signed a new contract with Mahoning County, which in turn signed a deal with CoreCivic. 

In a earthshaking decision on Tuesday evening, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution bars former President Donald Trump from holding federal office again—disqualifying the Republican frontrunner from the 2024 presidential ballot in Colorado.

Trump is expected to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. If the justices were to affirm the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision, Trump could be wiped off ballots nationwide.

“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the Colorado Supreme Court wrote in its decision. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

The decision overturns the ruling of a federal court in Denver last month.  As I reported then:

In the days after the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, some legal experts began to speculate that a little-known constitutional provision might be used to block President Donald Trump from ever serving a second term. The 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War, included a portion, called Section 3, that was designed to keep former Confederate leaders out of Congress. But could the section, which disqualified officials who had engaged in “insurrection or rebellion,” also be used to block Trump from running for president again, based on his actions supporting for the Capitol riot?

Catholic priests can now bless same-sex couples, the Vatican announced on Monday, a notable shift toward creating a more open atmosphere in the Catholic Church. 

The move, outlined in a new document, expands on a letter published in October from Pope Francis to conservative cardinals in which he hinted that same-sex unions could receive blessings, as long as they are not considered the same as heterosexual marriages. The document warned against “doctrinal or disciplinary schemes, especially when they lead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying.” The text can be read as a response to conservatives, both inside the US and around the world, who dogmatically oppose even tepid inclusion for LGBTQ Catholics. 

While the document lists several requirements for the blessings—queer couples can’t invoke the clothing and gestures traditionally associated with a wedding—it states that requests for these blessings should not be denied. The message here from the Vatican, which has been echoed through Pope Francis’ previous rhetoric on the topic, is that although the church still thinks that individuals engaging in extramarital sex and “irregular” unions are living in sin, those individuals should not be barred from having a relationship with God. “Even when a person’s relationship with God is clouded by sin,” the document reads, “he can always ask for a blessing, stretching out his hand to God.”

Monday’s announcement is certain to have global implications for priests and parishioners around the world. Yet the scope is still unclear. As the Associated Press notes, the Vatican did not signal any plans to “regulate details or practicalities about same-sex blessings, or respond to further questions about them, leaving it to individual priests to work out.” It’s also possible that some American Catholics may not even experience these changes due to the staunch ideological divides between local and global doctrine, as well as the fierce opposition some conservative Catholics in the US have toward reform. 

I reported in depth on these divides back in October when hundreds of delegates gathered in Rome for the pope’s “Synod on Synodality,” a meeting to discuss the future of the Catholic Church, part of a multi-year process that will culminate in 2024 with Francis’ decisions on topics that could include celibacy and divorce. As expected, the lead-up to October’s synod was filled with warring ideas about how liberal the meeting could get. Some of the contentions reflected a growing push among prominent members of the far-right in recent years, who identify as Catholic, to oppose inclusion for those who have been historically left out of the religion.  

“Football was better in the good old days!” But was it really? Today, Marcus, Luke and Vish state the case for why football is actually better off with fewer Vinnie Jones type characters. I am sure Gazza agrees…

Marcus then plays the hits by reminiscing about the time a 35-year-old Gabriel Batistuta nearly signed for Fulham and shoehorning everyone's (no-one's) favourite British-Canadian tennis playing Greg into the show. And no, it’s not Greg Proops…

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Join us for a bumper Barclays preview! Marcus, Luke, Jim and Vish settle in to write some Tom Cairney fan fiction and wonder if Steve McClaren will tear his hair island out should Man United get punished by Jürgen n’ co.

Elsewhere, Stevey Cooper looks to save his skin Under The Lights™ and Chelsea vote to ban something they’ve been doing all season - very noble.

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After Newcastle’s chaotic loss against Milan, Pete comes down from off the ceiling to commiserate Andy, who saw his dreams of some paid Europa League work at St James’ go up in smoke.

Commiserations are also extended to fans of the Premier League’s UEFA coefficient and we catch up with results elsewhere, as the Champions League group stages rage against the dying of the light.

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Is Man United’s season over? Marcus, Jim and Vish debate that on today’s Ramble after their Champions League exit has left Vish yearning for the haunted boy himself, Ole Gunnar Solskjær. Things must be really bad…

Elsewhere, Jim explains why perhaps Arteta didn’t play the kids in their “big rubber” against PSV last night and we wonder whether Sevilla have a Europa League Black Card that will guarantee them a spot in the knockouts, despite finishing bottom of their group. Plus, we take a moment to reflect on the last-ever Champions League group stage!

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We see you, sitting there with that apple core in your hand, about to listen to this podcast. See that bin over there? Go for it. Be brave. Be like Michael Owen.

Marcus, Luke and Andy react to one of the weirdest things anyone has ever said this year, while Man United revert to their painful norm. Plus, Andy explains how Aston Villa went full-blown Emery on Arsenal, Marcus inspires Fulham to score more goals, and Whamaggedon descends upon Northampton Town! Oh, and we REALLY channel the spirit of Sean Bean. Join us, you b*****ds!

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Arsenal captain Martin Odegaard maintains that his team did not deserve to lose to Aston Villa this evening. Despite falling victim to Villa’s impressive home form, Odegaard believes the Gunners outplayed their opponents in a closely contested game.

While Villa was physically present throughout the match, they did not create many clear-cut chances. Arsenal, on the other hand, had numerous opportunities but failed to capitalise, leading to their second defeat of the season.

Despite the outcome, Odegaard remains convinced that Arsenal was the superior team in the game and did not deserve to lose.

The midfielder said, as quoted by the BBC:

“In front of the goal we had enough chances to win the game. I felt they didn’t create anything apart from the goal. It happens sometimes.

Arsenal correspondent Charles Watts has bemoaned the chances the Gunners missed in their loss to Aston Villa this evening.

They were not effective enough in a game that required them to take every half-chance they got because of how stingy the opponents were.

Unai Emery has drilled Villa to become one of the hardest clubs to face in the Premier League and they showed Arsenal who they have become.

John McGuin’s early goal made the difference, but the Gunners had plenty of time on their hands to score. They created some chances but never took them.

In the end, Villa won, though were fortunate to do so, but Arsenal must do better. After the fixture, Watts tweeted:

Piers Morgan has responded to Arsenal’s loss to Aston Villa in the Premier League this evening, emphasising the team’s need for a striker after witnessing Villa claim all three points.

As one of Arsenal’s most prominent fans and an English TV host, Morgan expressed his dissatisfaction with the team’s performance in the game. Despite being aware of the formidable challenge Villa posed, Arsenal struggled to provide effective responses.

The Gunners possessed the ball for a considerable duration of the match, but Villa’s physical play proved challenging to overcome. Arsenal failed to capitalise on the few chances they created, ultimately resulting in their defeat. Morgan’s commentary underscores the urgency for Arsenal to address their striking options to enhance their overall performance.

Morgan was frustrated by the outcome of the game and tweeted:

“Arsenal were done in by VAR (as usual), but we were bullied off the ball all game, and we still desperately need a proper striker.”

Aston Villa downed a second top Premier League club in four days as they defeated Arsenal this evening.

It was a game Arsenal knew would be tough after seeing Villa defeat Manchester City to win 14 consecutive home matches.

The question on everyone’s mind before the game was, will Arsenal allow them to make it 15?

Unai Emery’s men were good value for money and fought hard as they chased down every ball and flew into tackles at the slightest invite.

It was a performance that Arsenal struggled against even though the scoreline was just 1-0.

On Friday, a federal judge in San Diego approved a settlement that prohibits the separation of migrant families for crossing the border illegally. The settlement was the result of a 2018 lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union to block the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which separated more than 5,000 children from their parents, with no plan to reunite them.

“It does represent, in my view, one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country,” said Judge Dana M. Sabraw, a George W. Bush appointee, before approving the settlement. Some families were separated for months or years. Sixty-eight children who were separated from their parents under the policy have yet to be located, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers. 

Under the settlement, illegally crossing the border will not be grounds for family separation for the next eight years—a move that would block Trump from resurrecting the policy if he’s reelected. Children may be separated from their families under limited circumstances, including when the adult poses a threat to the child or to national security. The settlement also makes available certain kinds of aid to families who were separated under the policy. They may apply for work permits and humanitarian protection, as well as assistance with housing, medical care, and counseling. Those who were deported under the policy may apply to come back and their immigration records will be cleared.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said the settlement reflects efforts to address “the prior Administration’s cruel and inhumane policy, and our steadfast adherence to our nation’s most dearly held values.”

The Trump administration eventually halted the separations after the policy sparked international outcry, but the former president defended the policy as recently as last month. “It stopped people from coming by the hundreds of thousands,” he told Univision. “When you hear that you’re going to be separated from your family, you don’t come.”