It has generally been accepted that Arsenal need a new striker and according to a report by Voetbal4u as cited by Matt Law on Sportsmole, Feyenoord hitman Santiago Gimenez is the latest forward to be linked with Arsenal.

The Mexican international has been prolific so far this season netting ten goals in just eight appearances and he has found himself firmly on the radar of top clubs.

Arsenal is joined by London rivals Tottenham and Chelsea in monitoring the 22-year-old, however, it is thought that Feyenoord will not sanction a transfer until next summer, at the earliest.

Just Arsenal Opinion

If I am brutally honest I know absolutely nothing about Gimenez, never heard of him, however, if Mikel Arteta decides he is worth signing then I am on board with that.

Arsenal injury worries continue to mount with both Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Jesus now a cause for concern after the 4-0 dismantling of Bournemouth earlier today.

Speaking to the media after the game Mikel Arteta said that Saka had received a “pretty bad knock” and the manager also said that Jesus was limping in the dressing room.

The exact nature of the injuries is unknown at this moment in time with Arteta stating that he himself does not know the full extent, as quoted by the Metro.

The duo are just the latest in a long line of injuries that has afflicted the Arsenal squad and with Man City coming up next Sunday and a midweek Champions League game away at Lens, it is going to be an anxious wait.

Just Arsenal Opinion

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has a tough decision to make: who he’ll appoint to temporarily replace the Senate vacancy created by the death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who served in the upper chamber for more than three decades and wielded enormous influence over firearms policy, judicial selections, and more until her death Thursday.

Three Democratic members of Congress from the state have already announced their bids to replace Feinstein in 2024: Rep. Barbara Lee, a liberal who has served in Congress since 1998; Katie Porter, a rising star in the progressive coalition who was first elected in 2018; and Adam Schiff, who rose in prominence managing former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, and as a member of the committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

But Newsom is unlikely to pick any of the three for the interim. Earlier this month, the governor said he didn’t want to give anyone an advantage in next year’s primary should Feinstein be unable to finish her term. “It would be completely unfair to the Democrats that have worked their tail off, he said on NBC’s Meet the Press as Feinstein publicly battled health issues. “That primary is just a matter of months away. I don’t want to tip the balance of that.”

His decision is complicated by a 2021 promise to name a Black woman to replace Feinstein should she leave the Senate early. That promise came after he appointed Alex Padilla to fill the vacancy left by Vice President Kamala Harris, who was the only Black woman in the Senate.

Lee, who is Black, was incensed by Newsom’s comments. “I am troubled by the governor’s remarks,” Lee said in a statement. “The idea that a Black woman should be appointed only as a caretaker to simply check a box is insulting to countless Black women across this country who have carried the Democratic Party to victory election after election.”

Kai Havertz has been subjected to a vast amount of criticism since he moved to the Emirates and some of it has come from Arsenal fans but if the support he was shown at the full-time whistle today is anything to go by that may well be a thing of the past.

Havertz scored from the penalty spot and the joy he and his teammates showed when the ball went into the back of the net was clear to see.

Hopefully, he will kick on now and justify the faith that Mikel Arteta has shown in him.

Don’t tell me the Arsenal fans aren’t behind Kai Havertz. Anything else is just noise, this is what it’s all about pic.twitter.com/XMcZRdOT0v

— Harry Symeou (@HarrySymeou) September 30, 2023

In the midst of hurricane and wildfire season, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is preparing to withhold billions in disaster funding until Congress passes a budget bill that refills its dwindling cash stock, according to a footnote in a FEMA document first reported by E&E News.

In November, FEMA had roughly $23 billion in its disaster relief fund. As of September, that funding was down to about $4 billion. 

As a faction of far-right House Republicans hold up the congressional appropriations process and stonewall efforts by more moderate Republicans and Democrats to at least pass a temporary budget package before most funding for federal agencies runs out on Saturday, FEMA has begun freezing funds dedicated to long-term recovery projects to preserve its ability to respond to future catastrophic events.

The $8 billion FEMA expects to freeze includes $376 million for recovery projects stemming from Hurricane Laura, which hit Louisiana in 2020, and Hurricane Ida, which hit multiple states in August 2021. FEMA also plans to freeze $265 million in funding for continued recovery from Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 storm that ravaged Southwest Florida last September.

Puerto Rico, beleaguered by earthquakes and hurricanes in recent years, will be particularly affected by the pause. According to the Biden administration, 188 projects on the Caribbean island will be delayed. E&E News reports that Puerto Rico could have “up to $2.6 billion withheld for projects such as rebuilding critical facilities like hospitals and the electrical grid.”

This afternoon, Arsenal secured a convincing 4-0 victory over Bournemouth, while at the same time, Manchester City suffered a loss to Wolves, setting the stage for an epic clash next Sunday.

Arsenal’s performance against Bournemouth was nothing short of outstanding, and it didn’t take long for Piers Morgan to express his excitement and confidently anticipate the upcoming match against Manchester City.

Utterly commanding performance.. bring on City next Sunday. https://t.co/D1zzl9H7zm

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) September 30, 2023

Last week, there was much discussion and even some excessive pessimism following the draw with Spurs. However, those who were feeling down and pessimistic then are surely in higher spirits today. There’s no denying it now – the title challenge is very much alive, just as many believed it to be from the start.

Describing this victory as a casual walk in the park would not be an exaggeration and Arsenal undoubtedly deserved their comfortable 4-0 win against a struggling Bournemouth side this afternoon.

Arsenal found the back of the net through Bukayo Saka, Martin Odegaard, Kai Havertz and Ben White and to be honest, the margin of victory could have been even more substantial.

None of the goals was extraordinary; Saka’s goal came from close range after Jesus’ header hit the woodwork following a splendid Odegaard cross, while Odegaard and Havertz both converted penalty kicks and Ben White converted from a corner with his head. Overall, it resembled more of a practice session than a Premier League fixture.

The team’s performance was incredibly efficient. Declan Rice excelled in the midfield, David Raya showcased his distribution skills and William Saliba displayed his usual masterful abilities. In fact, every single player on the team performed at the highest level.

A heartwarming moment occurred when Saka and Odegaard allowed Havertz to take the second penalty, demonstrating the unity within the Arsenal squad and their awareness of the criticism Havertz faced.

It may have been a penalty but Kai Havertz has finally got his name on the scoresheet for Arsenal.

The German has come in for a lot of criticism recently and let’s be honest, it was deserved and even though it was just a penalty, this goal may go some way to boosting his confidence.

Bukayo Saka and Martin Odegaard decided between themselves to hand the spot kick duty to Havertz, which in itself shows what sort of team spirit there is within the Arsenal camp.

Let’s hope this is one of many to come.

Havertz converts the penalty! 3-0!

Arsenal are on course for the win over Bournemouth thanks to a penalty from Martin Odegaard.

Eddie Nketiah was brought down in the penalty box and the referee did not hesitate to point to the spot and he was correct to do so.

Odegaard in his usual cool manner stepped up and slotted the ball beyond the Bournemouth keeper.

The lads should have no issues now picking up the three points and based on what we have seen so far, they deserve it.

Ødegaard ©

Arsenal are one up after 16 minutes against Bournemouth thanks to a goal from Bukayo Saka.

The move that led to the goal started with a wonderous cross from Martin Odegaard which Gabriel Jesus met with his head against the Bournemouth goal and Saka was on hand to apply the finishing touch.

It was a careful and focussed start from Arsenal and it was just a matter of time before they made the breakthrough.

Watch one of the videos below, you will enjoy what you see.

Saka marca de todas as formas

Arsenal, currently unbeaten, is set to face Bournemouth today with the aim of securing another victory. Mikel Arteta has chosen the following lineup for the match.

𝗧𝗘𝗔𝗠𝙉𝙀𝙒𝙎

Saliba at the back
Saka on the wing
Rice in midfield

COME ON YOU GUNNERS! pic.twitter.com/50sRUNLdsH

— Arsenal (@Arsenal) September 30, 2023

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

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died on Thursday evening at the age of 90, leaves behind a long and complex legacy on climate and environmental issues. Feinstein represented California as a Democrat in the US Senate for more than 30 years, becoming the longest-serving woman in Senate history, and during that time she brokered a number of significant deals to protect and restore the natural landscapes of the West. In recent years, as politics shifted, she found herself on the receiving end of criticism over her approach to tackling the climate crisis.

After taking office in 1992 following a decade as the mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein established herself as a champion for conservation. She worked to pass legislation that would protect millions of acres of California wilderness from development and extractive industry, using her deft skills as a negotiator to bridge disputes between competing interests. She succeeded in that conservation effort where her predecessors had failed, spearheading a 1994 bill that created the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks, which encompass millions of acres. She later passed bills to protect Lake Tahoe, the California redwoods, and the Mojave Desert.

Feinstein also supported action to reduce carbon emissions for much of her Senate career, and she was a key backer of a cap-and-trade bill that failed to pass the Senate during the first years of the Obama administration. She also authored successful legislation on automobile fuel economy standards, and pushed forward new regulatory standards for oil and gas pipelines following a 2010 gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people.

Even so, as a compromise-oriented legislator from California, she often had to weigh the competing interests of farmers, ranchers, and environmentalists, and at times she angered all of them. This tendency toward centrism was evident in her legislative work on water in the state’s Central Valley. She brokered a monumental restoration agreement on the valley’s overstressed San Joaquin River in 2009, but then helped override species protections for fish on that same river in 2016.

New York City is underwater. As heavy rainfall hits the northeast, making the city’s roads impassable and halting train and subway service, social media videos show flooding through holes in subway walls and water rushing into buses and cars—as well as sewage pushing up into homes. Twenty-three million people in the area are on flood watch, with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Eric Adams, and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy all issuing states of emergency and deploying rescue teams.

New York’s battle with rain and floods isn’t new. The city has a devastating history of flooding in disasters like 2021’s Hurricane Ida, which broke city records for amount and intensity of rainfall. Friday’s floods mark the wettest day in New York City since Ida—from 1958 to 2016, Climate Central reports, the northeast saw the country’s biggest increase in heavy precipitation events.

Rainfall and floods are only expected to worsen due to climate change, and the city’s wastewater and drainage infrastructure isn’t equipped for the pressure. A FEMA report from this summer concluded that most cities’ drainage systems “were not built to handle the amount of runoff from increasingly intense storms.”

Those infrastructure problems are set to worsen, compounding the impact. Erika Smull, a municipal bonds analyst at Breckinridge Capital Advisors, is a  water utilities expert and former environmental engineer. She explained to me earlier this year that US water infrastructure “is reaching or has reached the end of its usable life. It’s been there for longer than it should be. We are entering into a new era.”

Ida also led to scrutiny of New York’s illegal basement apartments: thirteen residents trapped in the unregulated dwellings were killed by its floods. “Ida will not be the last flash flood that puts the lives and homes of basement-dwellers at risk,” city Comptroller Brad Lander wrote in a 2022 report, highlighting the fact that such apartments are generally occupied by low-income people, people of color, and immigrants.  

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Plus, David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has just been released in a new and expanded paperback edition. 

If you’re not familiar with term “stochastic terrorism,” now is a good time to bone up, for the leading Republican candidate is a stochastic terrorist.

Stochastic terrorism is defined by conflict and law enforcement experts as the demonization of a foe so that he, she, or they might become targets of violence. Scientific American recently put it this way:

Dehumanizing and vilifying a person or group of people can provoke what scholars and law enforcement officials call stochastic terrorism, in which ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims. At its core, stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.

In addition to disgust, fear and hatred can work, the point being to depict a person or set of people as a loathsome other undeserving of respect or acceptance, and a dangerous threat. Establishing such a framework boosts the odds that a lone individual or group will violently assault the deprecated.

“As president of the Board of Supervisors, it’s my duty to make this announcement. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed. The suspect is…Supervisor Dan White.” —Dianne Feinstein, Nov. 27, 1978

Unlike the murders that were the catalyst for her national political career, Dianne Feinstein’s death shouldn’t have taken anyone by surprise. She was very old and very sick and for the last year the entire country had been on a death watch of sorts. Her passing is not a shock, and one of the reasons she stayed in office until the end—the possibility that Republicans could use her departure to strip Democrats of a key seat on the Judiciary Committee, enabling them to deny President Biden the ability to appoint judges and potentially even a Supreme Court justice—remains.

She had become a source of speculation and rage, a Weekend at Bernie’s punchline, and she could yet be another cautionary tale, a la Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of how aging leaders who refuse to step aside unspool their own legacy and accomplishments.

Even in this moment, when 10,000-word obits are being slapped up on front pages across America, it can be hard to remember just how historic, how symbolic, those accomplishments were. And how emblematic of the currents in San Francisco’s politics.

Feinstein became mayor of San Francisco because of assassination. Because of a workplace shooting. Because of an aggrieved white dude who saw himself as a “defender of the home, the family and religious life against homosexuals, pot smokers and cynics,” as the New York Times would put it, and who shot the first openly gay Californian to ever hold elected office and a progressive mayor determined to bring social services to San Francisco’s downtrodden. White and Milk had both been elected just a year earlier, when the city moved from at-large supervisors to a system where each supervisor was elected by their district alone. It was a revolution best remembered for Milk’s historic win, but it also ushered in the board’s first Chinese American (Gordon Lau), the first Black woman (Ella Hill Hutch)…and the first firefighter, Dan White. The board had previously been mostly rich and white and straight, and suddenly it was not. 

House Republicans really don’t want to hear from Rudy Giuliani.

Though their impeachment crusade grew out of the former New York City mayor’s anti-Biden machinations, the GOP-led House Oversight Committee spent much of Thursday’s impeachment inquiry hearing voting down repeated efforts by Democrats to subpoena Giuliani and Lev Parnas, his former sidekick.

But Republican attempts to limit what they hear about Giuliani’s activities apparently go further than a few committee votes, according to an FBI whistleblower. In a memo obtained by Mother Jones, Johnathan Buma—an FBI agent who says he conducted foreign influence investigations— alleges that investigators working for House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told him in June that they were not interested in what he knew about Giuliani potentially being “compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.

The memo suggests that Republican investigators privately imposed the same fact-finding limitations Democrats highlighted on Thursday: GOP lawmakers say they want to investigate allegations about Joe Biden, but they appear reluctant to scrutinize the origin of their own probe or turn up details that undermine their preferred narrative. Judiciary Committee staff dispute Buma’s allegations, telling Mother Jones that his account of his interactions with House investigators isn’t accurate. (The Judiciary and Ways and Means Committees are working on the Biden investigation with the House Oversight Committee, which held Thursday’s hearing.)

As Insider, the New Yorker and others have previously reported, Buma—who originally filed a whistleblower complaint with the FBI last year—submitted a statement to the House Judiciary Committee in April 2023. He sent another statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July. (Here is Buma’s full statement to the House committee, which recently became public.) 

Dianne Feinstein, the five-time senator from California, has died, according to multiple reports. She was 90.

A towering figure in both California and US politics, Feinstein was the longest-serving female senator in US history. Our 2017 feature on the trailblazing Democrat:

People who know Feinstein say the [2016] election has been transformative for her. “Trump injects an entirely new level of outrage,” Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society and a longtime Feinstein friend, told me. With the president going after institutions that Feinstein has historically been aligned with—chief among them the intelligence establishment—Schell believes she will find a middle-of-the-road position increasingly untenable.

“Dianne is like the canary in the mine shaft,” he says. “The last bastion of bridge building in the Senate may be giving up.”

But burning a few bridges may also be the only way for Feinstein to survive politically. Nearly a quarter century into her Senate career, she has remained popular with voters, who reelected her in 2012 with a 62.5 percent majority. But progressive Democrats have been frustrated with her old-school style and steadfast defense of the security state. 

Marcus, Vish, Andy and Jim look ahead to the Premier League weekend, featuring the clash of the dads…

We also chat Luis Suarez s***housing at his son’s 10th birthday party, Real Madrid behaving like the Evil Empire (again), and the very real possibility of Rob Edwards locking Garth Crooks in a dark room.

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

Sign up to the Football Ramble Patreon for ad-free shows for just $5 per month: patreon.com/footballramble.

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

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

By the time superintendent David Smith decided to close Joshua Tree national park on January 7, 2019, the list of problems was already long. Tire tracks wove through the wilderness mapping a path of destruction where rare plants had been crushed and trees toppled. Charred remains of illegal campfires dotted the desert, and historic cultural artifacts had been plundered. Trash piles were growing, vault toilets were overflowing and park security workers were being pushed to their limits.

It was week three in what would become the longest shutdown of the US government, and the famed California park was feeling the consequences of operating without key staff, services and resources. To protect the park and its workers, it would have to close, Smith thought.

But the Trump administration, which demanded national parks remain accessible throughout the shutdown, wasn’t willing to change course. In a controversial move, David Bernhardt, who had only recently been appointed acting secretary of the interior, called Smith and ordered him to keep the gates open.

By the end of the 35-day shutdown, irreversible damage had been inflicted on Joshua Tree’s ecosystems, its wild, remote landscapes thrust into the political turmoil unfolding thousands of miles away.

Or to put it more accurately: Jamaal Lascelles and Paul Dummett turn into prime Paolo Maldini and Alessandro Nesta!

Marcus and Andy discuss the end of Manchester City’s quadruple hopes while Port Vale and Mansfield Town stay in the hunt. Plus, Joelinton’s invisibility cloak, Dominik Szoboszlai’s teeny tiny feet, and Chelsea *actually* win!

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

Sign up to the Football Ramble Patreon for ad-free shows for just $5 per month: patreon.com/footballramble.

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***