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Inter Milan is currently in search of a new striker and has identified Arsenal’s Folarin Balogun as one of their key targets for the position. The American forward is considered an important option for Inter, who are also interested in adding Alvaro Morata to their squad in the current transfer window.

Following the failed pursuit of Romelu Lukaku, Inter has intensified their efforts to secure the signature of Balogun in recent weeks. The Italian club is willing to work out a deal with Arsenal to acquire the young striker.

According to a report from FC Inter News, Inter is prepared to send representatives to New York to negotiate the transfer of Balogun.

If Inter demonstrates enough seriousness and commitment to completing the deal, Arsenal may be willing to offer a discount to facilitate an agreement between the two clubs.

Inter Milan’s pursuit of Balogun, along with their interest in Morata, indicates their ambition to strengthen their attacking options for the upcoming season, especially after their recent success in reaching the UEFA Champions League final. As negotiations unfold, both clubs will likely work towards finding common ground to potentially complete the transfer.

Oleksandr Zinchenko has been vocal and outspoken about the war in his native Ukraine, which escalated after Russia’s invasion last year. The conflict has turned into a full-scale war, leading the European governing body to take action by banning the Russian national team and clubs from competing in their tournaments.

Despite being unable to actively participate in the frontline due to living and working in England, Zinchenko has been actively involved in coordinating efforts to help refugees from Ukraine. Additionally, he has been using his platform to speak out against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his country.

As a professional footballer, Zinchenko cannot carry arms or directly engage in combat, but he is doing what he can to contribute and assist those affected by the conflict. His efforts to raise awareness and support refugees demonstrate his commitment to making a difference and lending a helping hand in any way possible.

The ex-Manchester City man has now revealed his motivation and said as quoted by Sky Sports:

“My mission is to try to help as much as I can.

Romeo Lavia remains a target for Arsenal, but securing the young Belgian midfielder’s signature won’t be an easy task. Several Premier League clubs are also interested in him, including Liverpool and Chelsea.

Lavia had an impressive season with Southampton, despite the club’s eventual relegation from the English top flight. His performances have caught the attention of bigger clubs, and Arsenal has been monitoring his progress closely.

However, the competition for Lavia’s signature is fierce, and it’s now apparent that he may soon move to a new club. While Arsenal is keen on signing him, they currently face financial constraints and must first make player sales before they can bring in new recruits.

Sky Sport’s Dharmesh Sheth reveals that Arsenal’s transfer activity may be dependent on offloading players before they can make any significant new signings.

He said on the Transfer Talk Podcast:

Arsenal has fallen behind in the race to sign Mohamed Kudus from Ajax, with Chelsea now leading the pursuit for the midfielder.

Kudus has garnered interest from various Premier League clubs, including Arsenal, following his impressive performances at the last World Cup.

However, Arsenal currently faces financial constraints and needs to make player sales before they can make a move for Kudus in this transfer window. This has given Chelsea an opportunity to potentially secure his signature before the transfer window closes.

According to a report from Football London, Chelsea is eager to bolster their midfield options, and manager Mauricio Pochettino has specifically asked the club to pursue Kudus.

The talented midfielder is seen as a player who can thrive in the English football environment, making him an attractive target for Chelsea. If Arsenal cannot make significant progress in the race for Kudus, Chelsea could potentially secure the player’s services in the coming days.

Arsenal is finally the club that isn’t shy to splash the cash on players and it delights their fans.

For several years, the Gunners refused to spend money on important established players, with Arsene Wenger forced to develop players instead.

However, under Mikel Arteta, that has changed and the Gunners have spent significantly in the last two transfer windows.

Stan Kroenke owns other sports clubs in the United States and was criticised for not giving Arsenal the funds his other teams get, which make it easier for them to achieve success.

That is no longer the case and Gunners CEO Vinai Venkatesham says he has proven he loves the club and wants to win the Premier League after their spending this summer.

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has seemed to confirm that Thomas Partey will remain at the Emirates for the upcoming season, despite the arrival of Declan Rice.

Since joining Arsenal, Partey has been a key figure in the squad and has played a crucial role in the team’s successes.

While Arsenal has strengthened their squad with the addition of Declan Rice and Jorginho in the last two transfer windows, Partey’s position in the team has been a topic of discussion.

Both Rice and Jorginho can play a similar role as Partey, and Rice is expected to be an automatic starter at the Emirates. This has led to speculation that Partey could find himself in a bench role, potentially prompting him to consider leaving the club.

In recent weeks, Juventus and clubs from Saudi Arabia have expressed interest in signing Partey, but Arteta’s confirmation suggests that the Ghanaian midfielder may stay at Arsenal for another season.

Arsenal has increased the price of their jersey ahead of the next season and it is not a decision that sits well with financial analyst Dr Dan Plumley, who has accused the Gunners of exploitation.

Mikel Arteta’s side is making some good progress in the last few months and it is easy to see that the gaffer has played a huge role in their success.

The success has also brought new business partners to the club and improved their revenue.

Because of this, the Gunners should maintain the cost of their shirts at a reasonable level, especially because of the cost of living crisis.

But they will now sell their shirt for £80, a 14% increase from the previous amount.

The Upfront team bring you all the reaction to England’s very first game at the Women’s World Cup!

England got off to a winning start, but a pretty unconvincing one. So, what next?

Join Chloe and Rachel for chat throughout the tournament here and follow Upfront on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube!

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Mikel Arteta has revealed why Nicolas Pepe did not travel with the rest of the Arsenal squad for pre-season.

The Ivorian is expected to leave the club this summer after failing to make an impact while on loan at Nice last season.

He is no longer in the first team plan at the Emirates and recently saw a move to an unnamed Saudi Arabian club collapse.

Arsenal has a big squad and must trim it down before the transfer window closes, but Mikel Arteta is giving chances to every player to prove their worth.

Pepe was left at home by the Gunners as they travelled to the USA and Arteta has revealed that the winger is injured.

Football has a unique way of connecting people from all corners of the world, and for one devoted Arsenal fan, it has been a journey of love, passion, and family. Hailing from Rwanda, Placide Magambo’s story is a testament to the unifying power of the beautiful game.

Growing up in Rwanda, where television access was limited, this Arsenal enthusiast relied on his father’s vivid descriptions of matches and sports news on the radio. The magic of football was brought to life through his father’s narrations, and he vividly remembers the day in 1996 when he learned that the Gunners had hired a coach named Arsène Wenger.

The combination of an intriguing name and his father’s admiration for the manager sparked a deep connection to the club.

Loyal American Gooners celebrate Kai Havertz late goal to make it 5-0 to Arsenal here at Audi Field in Washington DC pic.twitter.com/mxBoxar34d

— Layth (@laythy29) July 20, 2023

Mikel Arteta may have ensured that Kieran Tierney has a future at Arsenal. Over the last few months, Tierney has been heavily linked with an exit from Arsenal. The 26-year-old was not to leave because he wasn’t quality, but because Arteta’s tactics last season saw Arsenal overdepend on Zinchenko playing from the left back.

This situation saw him struggle to break into the team, as he couldn’t offer what the Ukrainian offered.

Zinchenko would be deployed at left back, but whenever he was in possession, he would drift to midfield, giving Granit Xhaka the licence to join the attack and thus outnumber the other team once the ball was supplied to Arsenal attackers.

While Zinchenko temporarily moved to the midfield, the other defenders had to hold the fort, which meant Ben White at right back had to be attentive to support the defence. Arsenal depended on this play, but Arteta wants to change that with Jurrien Timber.

With the arrival of Jurrien Timber, who’s undoubtedly technically gifted, Arteta seeks to have the Dutch do a “Zincheko” from right back, which may necessitate a defensive-minded left back, which we know Zinchenko isn’t, hence Tierney gets to feature at left back.

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

The mother of a 24-year-old worker who died from heatstroke while working for a construction firm in San Antonio, Texas, has filed a lawsuit against his employer.

Gabriel Infante was working for B Comm Constructors in San Antonio, Texas, on June 23 2022, digging in the hot summer sun to move internet fiber optic cable, a job he had recently started with a childhood best friend while they were finishing college.

The lawsuit comes after Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed a controversial bill into law on June 14 that prohibits local municipalities from enacting heat protection standards for construction workers. The bill nullifies ordinances previously passed in Austin and Dallas that mandated 10-minute breaks for workers every four hours. A similar ordinance was being considered in San Antonio before the state bill was passed.

According to the lawsuit, Infante began exhibiting heatstroke symptoms, including confusion, altered mental state, dizziness and loss of consciousness. His friend and co-worker Joshua Espinoza began pouring cold water over him, trying to cool him down. A foreman insisted Espinoza call the police, claiming Infante’s bizarre behavior was due to drugs, and the foreman pushed for a drug test when emergency medical services arrived.

In July 2022, the United Nations and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan helped broker the Black Sea Grain Initiative: A deal between Russia and Ukraine that the UN Secretary-General António Guterres called “a beacon of hope.” It allowed food and fertilizer exports from three Ukrainian ports—on the Black Sea, Odesa, Chornomorsk and Yuzhny/Pivdennyi—to be shipped to the rest of the world. Since the agreement was signed last year, 32.8 million tons of Ukrainian grain have been exported; more than half has gone to developing countries, including drought-ridden East African nations like Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. 

This week, that deal ended. And it soon got worse. After pulling out of the deal, Russia attacked storage facilities in the coastal city of Odesa, reportedly destroying 60,000 tons of grain, according to Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Mykola Solskyi. Both nations say that they will now treat each other’s ships traveling across the Black Sea as potential military targets. 

The end of the deal, and the bombings, could be a major blow to the global food supply. As my former colleague Tom Philpott wrote in March 2022, the Russia and Ukraine war is being fought in the world’s breadbasket:

Today, Russia is a global wheat powerhouse, the world’s number-three producer of the staple crop, and its number-one exporter. Just as in 1768, much of its most productive farmland lies east of the Ukraine border, making it largely reliant on the same “black paths” (now covered in paved roads and railroad tracks) to reach markets. Ukraine, too, is a major wheat exporter, and has recently emerged as a corn powerhouse, too, supplying China and its booming meat industry with nearly a third of its feed corn imports.

What does it mean when a war of conquest descends upon one of the globe’s great breadbaskets in the 21st century? With trade routes embattled and markets roiled by Russia’s invasion, wheat prices have already shot up to their highest level in 60 years. This far exceeds the spike of the early 2010s, which led to bread riots in the Middle East that helped bring about the Arab Spring and the still-simmering civil war in Syria. “It’s a core food,” Nelson says, “and when you double its price, it just changes everything.”

Marcus and Andy are back with big news! Everyone wants to leave Fulham.

They discuss what playmaker-keeper André Onana will bring to Erik Ten Hag’s ranks and there’s some heated debate about King of the Cottage, Marco Silva!

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There is much to admire in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which opens in theaters on Friday. The directing, script, editing, sound design and acting are all extraordinary. Nolan deserves high praise for tackling this difficult and sprawling subject and raising questions about one of the most sensitive issues in our history, a raw nerve even today: America’s use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed at least 150,000 civilians.

Even in a three-hour movie, Nolan had to leave out a lot of vital material, in part because of his secondary focus on Oppenheimer’s infamous security clearance hearing almost a decade after he left Los Alamos. Still, his film omits or downplays several important—even crucial—aspects of America’s 1945 detonations that continue to haunt us today.

Notably, the new film barely touches on arguments that were expressed back then, not in retrospect, against using the bomb. Ditto the deadly radiation the new weapon produced,  and the secrecy that surrounded it—starting with the Trinity test, when a radioactive cloud drifted over nearby villagers who were not warned, and were then lied to about the fallout effects. This combination of lethality and secrecy would have extensive and tragic results in the decades after Hiroshima.

Nagasaki’s fate is also ignored, save three or four brief and rather forced mentions in the final hour of the picture. But Nolan’s most significant failing lies in not confronting—and in some ways sustaining—the popular narrative around the decision to drop the bombs, one that endures in government and media circles and among many historians, and is thereby reflected in public opinion polls.

That narrative holds that it was the detonation of the two bombs, and only that, which brought the Pacific war to an end. Simple cause-and-effect. The key scene in this regard in Nolan’s film, largely accurate, depicts the late-May 1945 meeting of the Interim Committee, President Harry Truman’s top advisory panel on the matter. One or two advisers question the necessity of deploying such a terrible weapon against Japanese cities, but their doubts are silenced by an officer who insists the Japanese won’t surrender otherwise, and a host of American soldiers will then have to die storming the country’s beaches. The panel is reminded of how savagely the Japanese have fought to the last man in other circumstances.

The Florida Board of Education’s new standards dictating how Black history will be taught in public schools includes a provision implying that enslaved African-Americans learned skills for “their own personal benefit.” The guidelines, approved on Wednesday, have come under fire from civil rights advocates who’ve called them “a sanitized and dishonest telling of the history of slavery in America.” 

“Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice, and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat, and tears for,” Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement. “It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history.”

Two of the most contentious inclusions in the Board’s current guidelines include:

State Senator Geraldine Thompson, who worked on legislation to designate scholarships for the descendants Occoee Race massacre, on Wednesday blasted the new standards for blaming the victims, according to the Washington Post.

The policies add to Florida’s ongoing war against educational material Gov. Ron DeSantis and his conservative allies believe are objectionable, including content in courses focusing on African-American studies. Since his gubernatorial campaign, DeSantis has made combatting “wokeness” a large part of his platform and has signed off on several pieces of legislation aiming to control the way racism and history are taught to young Floridians in public schools. Perhaps the most severe form of legislation came in the form of the “Stop the Woke Act” which prohibits schools from teaching anything that implies the existence of systemic racism.

Sometimes, my rage gets the better of me.

To bike into downtown Denver, I need to take a left at a dangerous intersection. Despite being labeled as “cyclist friendly” by Google Maps, the crossing has no discernible bike infrastructure. There is a left turn lane but no signal; at rush hour, turning is impossible.

So, I use the crosswalk.

I was recently doing just that—rolling through the crosswalk with the pedestrian signal—when a car taking a right turn pulled in front of me. The driver rolled down his window, shook his finger at me, and said: “Not where you belong.” I was taken aback. Not where I belong? In the fucking crosswalk? With no pedestrians around, at an otherwise impassable intersection?

When I am zipping through town on a bicycle, my body protected only by a plastic sheath around my skull, I know that it is a bad idea to argue with motorists But, whoops, I yelled back at him.

Kylian Mbappé’s deadline to extend his PSG contract is approaching. Today, Jonathan Johnson joins Dotun and Andy to explain why Harry Kane to PSG would never have made sense and Andy explains why Dušan Vlahović is a much better fit. It’s fair to say the PSG ultras don’t agree…

Elsewhere, we celebrate the romance of Ángel Di María’s return to Benfica before Andy and Jonathan talk about the transfers that have caught their eye so far this summer.

We'll be back with another OTC Transfer Special next week. Got a question for us? Ask away! Find 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..

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***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!***

As a UC Berkeley graduate, I never thought I’d type these words, but okay: Go Wesleyan!

Wesleyan University, a small, elite college in Middletown, Connecticut, costs about $85,000 a year, including room and board and sundries. On Wednesday, it announced that, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision ending race-based affirmative action in higher education (and possibly elsewhere), it would finally ditch legacy admissions, the practice of giving a preference to applicants whose parents—and in some cases grandparents, siblings, and other relatives—attended the school in question. It’s a practice that amounts to affirmative action for children of privilege.

Johns Hopkins and Amherst also ended legacy admissions in recent years, and MIT ditched them more than a decade ago. (“If you got into MIT, it’s because you got into MIT. Simple as that,” one admissions staffer noted in a 2012 blog post.) But all of the Ivy League colleges, and the majority of so-called Ivy Plus schools (the traditional Ivies plus the likes of Duke, MIT, and Stanford) still use them. In fact, a 2018 survey of admissions directors by Inside Higher Ed found that 42 percent of private colleges and 6 percent of public ones gave an admissions boost to children of alumni, and sometimes to grandchildren and siblings. Children of faculty may also get special consideration, as they do at Harvard.

Legacy admissions, if it even need be said, are unfair, unpopular, and un-American—or at least run contrary to the ideals of the America we mythologize. I poked that alligator in an earlier piece about how the Ivies are grappling with their slavery ties. And whatever you think of affirmative action, legacy admissions look even less fair when you outlaw preferences for underrepresented minority applicants. That’s because the history of racial exclusion in US higher education ensures that the legacy admits at most elite schools, deserving or not, are dominated by well-off white kids. From that earlier piece:

Why do legacies persist? The optics, after all, are atrocious. “Back in the old days,” Matt Feeney wrote in the New Yorker after Amherst ended legacy admissions in 2021, “the rich kids probably liked having a few smart kids from the lower classes around, or at least conceded that they were necessary. The raw bookishness of the smart kids ratified the larger enterprise that they were all participating in—it was a college, after all. But now that the aristocrats are siphoning status from the meritocrats, the social bargain is starting to look like a bad one.”