My predicted line up for Burnley

Arsenal will look to face off against Burnley today as they look to get back to winning ways in the Premier League and continue our good form. A lot of injuries are floating over the Arsenal squad and we should see a few changes again today. With the international break coming up, it could be time to rest a few players or it could be the perfect time to go full strength before our players jet off with their national teams. Here’s how I expect Arteta to line his team up this afternoon.

In goal, David Raya, playing a great game against Sevilla and keeping a clean sheet would have been good for confidence, after the drama against Newcastle, Raya will be looking to redeem himself and hopefully get back to his best.

In defence I’d expect a back four of Zinchenko, Gabriel, Saliba and White. Tomiyasu has been playing the left back role very well but after starting mid-week and against Newcastle last weekend, I’d expect Arteta to give him a bit of a rest, we could see him come on at some point though. Ben White had a very good game against Sevilla, he looked solid in defence and even had some decent shots throughout the game. Gabriel and Saliba as the centre back pairing, both performing well whenever they’re beside each other.

In the midfield I’d go for a three of Rice, Jorginho and Havertz. The same system as our game against Sevilla, using both Rice and Jorginho in the middle as extra back up for the defensive line, and also great going forward to break the lines with through passes to our attackers. Havertz hasn’t been at his best recently but although he hasn’t been scoring he still makes a big impact off the ball and going forward.

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

After half a decade of failed attempts, Kathleen Campbell thought 2021 would finally be the year she retired. That is—until she received a letter in December from Navigator CO2 Ventures.

The company wanted to build part of its carbon dioxide pipeline through her property, about 1,000 feet from her rural Illinois home, just south of Springfield, which she had shared with her husband for more than 30 years. The massive project would ultimately span five Midwestern states, and Navigator was threatening to seize her property through eminent domain if she didn’t grant them an easement.

“This has absolutely ruined my retirement,” Campbell remembers thinking. Anxiety gave way to anger as she imagined a backhoe tearing up the beets, peppers and other vegetables growing in the quarter-acre garden that she and her husband had spent years cultivating. Later, she would learn a CO2 pipeline in rural Mississippi had ruptured just a year prior, sending at least 45 people to the hospital.

Carbon capture projects have received more than $1.8 billion in federal funding. 

But Navigator’s executives couldn’t have known who they were dealing with. A distinguished research professor at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Campbell had spent her life combing through complex health studies and thwarting deep-pocketed pharmaceutical companies from bringing potentially dangerous drugs to market. Within months, she had helped birth a formidable opposition campaign to the pipeline.

Last month, the head of Florida’s public university system issued a directive. After consulting with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Chancellor Ray Rodrigues ordered the state’s universities to “deactivate” campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. Rodrigues suggested—without evidence—that the national SJP organization was violating criminal laws by providing “material support” to Hamas, which two weeks earlier had massacred roughly 1,400 people in Israel. In a similar letter, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called on universities across the country to “investigate the activities” of SJP chapters “for potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”

Rodrigues and Greenblatt based their demands in large part on a public relations “toolkit” in which the national SJP described the October 7 attack as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”

“SJP chapters are supporting & praising Hamas terrorism,” Greenblatt wrote after the toolkit became public. “This is unacceptable, dangerous & despicable.” That may be so, but as attorney Greg Lukianoff explains, the document wasn’t evidence of a crime—and it certainly shouldn’t be used by universities to interfere with constitutionally protected speech. “We don’t even think the analysis is particularly hard,” he told me last week during a wide-ranging interview about threats to campus free speech during the Israel-Hamas war.

Lukianoff—the co-author of the new book The Canceling of the American Mind—is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties group that for years has battled to protect the free speech rights of college students, staff, and faculty. After Rodrigues ordered the closure of SJP chapters, FIRE wrote its own letter to Florida universities, calling on them to “refuse the State of Florida’s order to violate” students’ rights. To do otherwise, FIRE argued, would represent “unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.” (Disclosure: I’ve donated a small amount of money to FIRE.)

Since we spoke last week, there’s been a bit of hopeful news. According to one key DeSantis ally, two of Florida’s most prominent public universities are “openly disobeying” the order to disband SJP chapters. The schools, according to Politico, cite “lingering legal concerns” for their unwillingness to immediately comply with the governor’s demands.

Since October 7, there has been a divide. Polls have found that Democratic voters are about equally sympathetic to Palestinians and Israelis, do not approve of Israel’s response to the attack by Hamas, and favor sending humanitarian aid to Gaza by far larger margins than sending weapons to Israel. But these have not been the priorities of the representatives they elected.

President Joe Biden and most Democrats in Congress continue to take the pro-Israel line that the party has for decades. Biden has rejected calls for a ceasefire while adhering to a longstanding personal policy of largely refraining from public criticism of Israel. Most Democratic members of Congress have avoided breaking with the administration or making themselves a target for pro-Israel groups. Like the president, they tend to be old—the average Democratic House member is 58 and the average senator is 65—and came of age at a time when largely unconditional support for Israel was the norm.

Their positions are particularly at odds with the younger voters whom Democrats will need to win next year. Many young progressives appear more disgusted with a Democratic president than they have been in decades. At the anti-war protests that have spread across the nation, they have chanted, “Biden, Biden, you can’t hide; we charge you with genocide.” The concern for Democrats is not so much that younger voters will back Republicans in 2024, but that they will support a third-party candidate, or not vote at all.

There is limited survey data on support for a ceasefire. A poll from the left-leaning Data for Progress last month showed that two-thirds of all voters, including 80 percent of Democrats, support the United States calling for a ceasefire. So far, a pro-ceasefire resolution introduced by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Ill.) is backed by only 18 of 212 House Democrats. Along with them, perhaps a couple dozen additional Democrats have called for some form of stopping the violence.

Many young progressives appear more disgusted with a Democratic president than they have been in decades. At anti-war protests, they have chanted, “Biden, Biden, you can’t hide; we charge you with genocide.”

Waleed Shahid, a Democratic strategist and former communications director for Justice Democrats, said that he believes most Democrats have not called for a ceasefire because of the “political wrath they would face” from groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Democratic Majority for Israel. AIPAC alone spent at least $28.5 million in the last election cycle, according to Jewish Currents. Much of that went to defeating progressive candidates seen as critical of Israel.

Bonk! Your Keystone Cops – Marcus, Luke, Jim and Pete – are on hand to see you into the weekend.

Jürgen Klopp attends Fyre Festival, Neil Warnock at last has his say on VAR, and Dominic Cummings has an “excellent” drink with Peter Reid.

Plus, there’s the most epic Jack’s Encyclopaedia tiebreaker you’ve ever heard. Seriously, don't miss it...

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

The US and UK militaries “owe” at least $111 billion in reparations to communities most harmed by their planet-heating pollution, a first-of-its-kind study calculates.

The research employs a “social cost of carbon” framework—a way to estimate the cost, in dollars, of the climate damage done by each additional ton of carbon in the atmosphere.

“The environmental costs of maintaining the global military reach of the US and UK armed forces are astonishing,” said Patrick Bigger, research director of the Climate and Community Project and co-author of the report.

According to the report, which was published by the UK-based think tank Common Wealth and the US-based Climate and Community Project, the two militaries have generated at least 474 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent since the 2015 United Nations Paris climate agreement. That’s more than the total greenhouse gas emissions produced in the UK last year.

In 2010, Barack Obama signed the Plain Writing Act into law, requiring that federal government documents use clear, straightforward language. Despite its passage more than a decade ago, though, getting plain-language information about government policy—ranging from the federal to local level—isn’t always easy. 

Plain-language documents serve a dual purpose: they can make information more accessible to people with disabilities that affect cognition and memory, but also address the fact that legislation is already complicated for most people to read—a case in point of how accessibility practices benefit even those without a particular disability.

New Disabled South, a disability justice nonprofit founded in 2022, is trying to make more information available to disabled people on legislation that affects them, launching its Plain Language Policy Dashboard in November to cover 14 Southern states. As of now, the bills it explains fall into six categories: accessibility, civil rights, criminalization, poverty and care, democracy, and education. 

Dom Kelly, New Disabled South’s CEO, told me that he hopes the dashboard—which uses AI to translate texts into plain language, which is then checked for accuracy and additional analysis is added—can also help “combat myths and disinformation” that spread on social media, like whether a mental health–related bill could actually lead to more institutionalization. 

I spoke to Kelly and e.k. hoffman, associate director of the nonprofit’s advocacy arm, about the policy dashboard and the importance of accessibility in politics.

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia will not run for reelection next year. 

The conservative Democrat called the choice—which he shared the news of in a video he posted to X—”one of the toughest decisions of my life.” Instead of running for Senate, Manchin said he would be “traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together.” 

If you think that sounds insufficiently vague…I agree. Which is why I reached out to Manchin’s press team in a bid to get some clarity. And specifically, to ask: Is he running for president?

No word yet. (Though, I’m not quite holding my breath: after my colleague David Corn reported a Manchin scoop back in 2021—that he was considering leaving the Democratic party and formulating an exit plan if the Build Back Better plan wasn’t dramatically cut down to his liking—the senator denigrated the Mother Jones story as “bullshit.” We stand by the story.)

In the meantime, NBC News reports that a person “with direct knowledge” of the politician’s future plans said “nothing is off the table” and “no specific decisions have been made other than a commitment to find a way to change the country’s political dialogue.”

GOP presidential candidates are threatening to deport international students who they accuse of sympathizing with anti-Israel terrorists. “If you are here on a student visa as a foreign national, and you’re making common cause with Hamas, I’m canceling your visa and I’m sending you home, no questions asked,” vowed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during Wednesday night’s debate.

“To every student who has come to our country on a visa to a college campus, your visa is a privilege, not a right,” South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said during the same event. “To all the students on visas who are encouraging Jewish genocide, I would deport you.”

“What if I just call for a ceasefire? Does that count as support for Hamas?”

Those comments were just the latest salvo in the escalating Republican campaign against immigrants who the right accuses of siding with Hamas, the group that perpetrated the October 7 mass murder in Israel. It’s a trend that is setting off alarm bells for civil liberties advocates, who warn that these proposals risk conflating support for Palestinian rights or criticism of the Israeli government with an endorsement of terrorism. Moreover, they argue, threats of deportation could have a severely chilling effect on free speech and the right to protest.

“It’s a really dangerous rhetoric,” says Azadeh Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director of Project South, an organization that focuses on racial justice and immigrants’ rights. “This seems to be just another measure that is targeting a particular group of people, in this case immigrants, and using vulnerability in terms of immigration status to try to force people to stay quiet.”

The Republican demands have already gone far beyond typical campaign-trail bluster. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) urged the Biden administration to “immediately deport any foreign national—including and especially any alien on a student visa—that has expressed support for Hamas and its murderous attacks on Israel.” A week after the October 7 attack, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) introduced a resolution calling on President Biden to “revoke visas and initiate deportation proceedings for any foreign national who has endorsed or espoused the terrorist activities of Hamas” or other anti-Israel terrorist organizations. 

Marcus and Vish react to a chaotic Champions League night in Copenhagen, which saw Manchester United swing between good, bad, good again, and then - finally - ugly.

From Marcus Rashford’s red, to the two handballs, to a 17-year old literally called Roony scoring the winner, to Vish’s impending lobotomy, there’s a lot to talk about! Come join us!

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As usual Marcus, Luke, Jim and Pete start the show with the biggest and most important piece of news… Phil Neville is BACK! You just can’t keep a good man down.

The Champions League is also back. Pete explains how Newcastle at least put up more of a fight last night than he did against some confirmed Dortmund locals at the weekend. Plus, the lads try to figure out the impossible: what would the ideal Christmas present be for Pep Guardiola?

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Spurs 1-4 Chelsea: where to begin?! Luke and Vish are here to pick apart a quite ridiculous game and a quite ridiculous performance from Cristian Romero, which somehow left the lads comparing him to Arnold Schwarzenegger and both Kray twins.

They also take a moment to enjoy Big Ange’s commitment to playing with a high line and - of course - Luke still manages to find time to take Gary Neville to task for a quite insane analogy about parrots.

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Another VAR conspiracy, eh? It must be time for a Monday Ramble!

Marcus, Jim, Andy and Vish get their head around all the drama at St James’ Park on Saturday night after Arsenal join the Statement Posse. 

Plus, Vish suggests the novel idea of burying old football grounds, Darwin Nunez continues to prove that he’s the most Ramble player to ever play the game, and a Scottish non-league player really puts the ‘injury’ in injury time…

And how could we forget? Phil Neville is almost back in management! Rejoice!

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Some of our favourite moments from last month on the show!

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Welcome to the very FIRST Football Ramble Mailbag! Every fortnight, we're sharing our favourite listener stories and tackling your questions – some of which will be from X. There’s some great stuff on there, by the way.

This week: how do we stop the enshittification of football? Which footballers have pied us off? And if someone had to score a penalty to save our lives, who would we pick?

Marcus, Luke and Vish answer all that and hear about one listener’s trip to the theatre with Big Ange Postecoglou.

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Technical areas, do we really need 'em? That’s the question that Marcus, Luke, Pete and Vish are answering ahead of the Jason Tindall vs Mikel Arteta derby this weekend.

Elsewhere, there's fear for the residents of Kenilworth Road as Captain Chaos Darwin Nunez heads to town, and we learn that an unusual friendship (fight?) is on the cards between Peter Reid and Dominic Cummings. Classic Dom.

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Miguel Almiron’s at the wheel! Oh hang on, that’s not a good thing though…

Marcus, Pete and Jim look back on a double cupset in the Carabao Cup as Manchester United actually quite predictably got thwacked 3-0 by Newcastle, leaving Erik Ten Hag making exactly the same expression he always does.

Plus, Jim gets worried about Mikel Arteta’s record in knockout competitions and we all get worried that Chelsea might just win the whole thing.

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Do people love Lionel Messi a little bit too much? That’s the question that Media Darling Marcus wants answered after the latest Ballon d’Or.

Today, he’s joined by Jim, Vish and Pete to discuss that and explain why Manchester United vs Newcastle feels more like a stag do than a football match.

Plus, Pete has an important warning: don’t give Carabao to dogs!

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Manchester United may have lost yesterday, but at least they have a really bad tackle from one of their former players 20 years ago on one of Man City’s new players’ dad to cling onto.

Marcus, Jim and Pete look back on the Manchester derby, Antony’s terrible cameo, and some even worse poetry about Man City which Pete tries to rewrite. Plus, what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen written on a bridge? Have you ever seen anything more painful than that VAR check at Bournemouth? And have you EVER heard anyone as excited as Marcus about Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham?

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Newcastle United and Premier League legend Alan Shearer have had a change of heart regarding his opinion on Gabriel Jesus. Previously, he had criticised Jesus for his lacklustre goal-scoring record as a striker in England’s top flight.

Jesus is not known for being the most prolific scorer in the Premier League but often compensates for this by creating chances for his teammates. He is also adept at pressing, making him an ideal player for Mikel Arteta’s team.

Arteta added Jesus to his squad in the last campaign, and despite facing challenges such as injuries and struggles in front of the goal, Jesus has remained the club’s main striker.

Despite his previous view that Jesus might not be a top Premier League striker, Shearer has now acknowledged that the Brazilian could fit into the current Newcastle United side and perform well.

“I would agree with you (that he’d take Jesus at Newcastle),” Shearer said, as quoted by Football London.