Arsenal Loanee Patten on Aston Villa beating Chelsea to get to Women’s FA Cup Final by Michelle

Aston Villa Women welcome Chelsea to the Poundland Bescot Stadium today, Sunday 16th April, with kick-off scheduled for 14:15 UK, for the Vitality Women’s FA Cup semi-final.

Anna Patten is on-loan to Aston Villa, from parent club Arsenal, and very much hopes to feature for Aston Villa today, having tasted success when she won two FA Youth Cups with Arsenal.

“The first final I played in with the under-17s, I had my Scottish family come down which was unusual. I had grandparents from both sides there,” Patten told BBC Sport.

“I remember they were all there with their phones out wanting me to pose for photos with the cup. It was a great feeling.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is on the verge of signing a bill that would allow people in Florida to be executed without a unanimous decision by a jury. Instead, an 8-4 vote would be enough for someone to be put to death in the state.

The bill passed the Florida Senate last month and passed the House on Thursday by an 80-30 margin. The bill has been a priority for DeSantis, who opposed the decision not to sentence to death the Parkland school shooter who killed 17 people in 2018. Three jurors voted against the death penalty in that case.

“I’m sorry, but if you murder 17 people in cold blood, the only appropriate punishment is capital punishment,” DeSantis said in October. “We need to reform some of these laws.”

According to the Washington Post, only three of the 27 states with capital punishment allow people to be executed when a jury is divided during the penalty phase. A unanimous decision would still be required in Florida to convict a defendant.

In 2016, the US Supreme Court struck down a Florida law that allowed judges to decide whether to sentence someone to death after receiving a recommendation from a jury. “The Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomyor. “A jury’s mere recommendation is not enough.”

In 2017, Matthew Kacsmaryk, then deputy general counsel at the right-wing First Liberty Institute, criticized protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions in a draft law review article. The Obama administration, he wrote, was ignoring doctors who, for religious reasons, “cannot use their scalpels to make female what God created male” and “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.”

What’s unusual is what happened next. The Washington Post reports that Kacsmaryk, now the federal judge issued who issued the temporarily-stayed decision to ban the abortion drug mifepristone across the country, asked an editor at the law journal a few months later to remove his name from the article because of “reasons I may discuss at a later date.” Instead, he asked the journal to put the names of two of his colleagues on the article. At the time, Kacsmaryk was being considered for a judgeship. As the Post explains:

As part of that process, he was required to list all of his published work on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, including “books, articles, reports, letters to the editor, editorial pieces, or other published material you have written or edited.”

The article, titled “The Jurisprudence of the Body,” was published in September 2017 by the Texas Review of Law and Politics, a right-leaning journal that Kacsmaryk had led as a law student at the University of Texas. But Kacsmaryk’s role in the article was not disclosed, nor did he list the article on the paperwork he submitted to the Senate in advance of confirmation hearings in which Kacsmaryk’s past statements on LGBT issues became a point of contention.

Kacsmaryk did not respond to requests for comment from the Post. A spokesman for First Liberty told the paper that Kacsmaryk’s name was “placeholder” on the article and that the now-judge did not make a “substantive contribution.” But a former editor at the journal said there was no sign that Kacsmaryk was being used as a “placeholder.” He had never seen the name of an author changed out before, according to the Post.

Arsenal v Wolfsburg Semi Final re-writing Women’s Champions League history in UK by Michelle

After beating Bayern Munich in the quarter-final of the UEFA Women’s Champions League, Arsenal Women progressed to the semi-finals where our Gunners will play VfL Wolfsburg.

Arsenal set a UK-record attendance of 21,307 for a Women’s Champions League match, when Bayern Munich travelled to Emirates Stadium, for the second leg of the quarter-final. Ticket sales for Arsenal Women’s UEFA Women’s Champions League Semi Final, second leg tie against VfL Wolfsburg have now exceeded 42,000!

Arsenal will be playing Away at the Volkswagen Arena for the first leg of the Semi Final on Sunday 23 April at 14:30 UK time, 15:30 local time. Click here to buy your tickets!

The second leg will be played at Emirates Stadium on 1st May bank holiday, kick-off 17:45 UK, and you can buy tickets here!

Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump’s former CIA Director and Secretary of State, was never going to be president. Now he’s admitted that he won’t be running in 2024. Few Republicans will think twice; a poll this month put him at 1 percent. 

Pompeo has long harbored presidential ambitions. The problem was that his base never extended much beyond Republican apparatchiks for whom bombs over Baghdad is a career milestone, not a song. Having ruled himself out, he can now return to pasture as a distinguished fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. 

In another era, Pompeo might have been a plausible Republican nominee. After graduating first in his class in high school and at West Point, he served as a tank commander then left the military for Harvard Law. He later went into the defense industry with substantial financial backing from the Kochs. But as Susan Glasser reported in a 2019 New Yorker profile, he mostly failed in business anyway. 

Nevertheless, he positioned himself as something of a corporate guru while successfully running for Congress in 2014 in his adopted hometown of Wichita, Kansas. During the 2016 primary, he warned that Trump would follow Barack Obama in being “an authoritarian President who ignored our Constitution.” He later supported Trump anyway and used his ties to Mike Pence to become CIA Director. Trump bumped up Pompeo to Secretary of State after firing Rex Tillerson by tweet. 

As Glasser made clear in her profile, Pompeo’s singular talent was sucking up to the president. One formal official told her he was “among the most sycophantic and obsequious people around Trump.” Another, a former ambassador, said, “He’s like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.” Trump, for his part, claimed, “I argue with everyone. Except Pompeo.”

Sorry Moyes, To Win The League, Arsenal Need A Big Fat W At The London Stadium

David Moyes hasn’t shied from admitting Arsenal are the team playing some of the best football, and they have been consistent, which puts them in an opportune position to lift the PL title. “I think they’ve got a great chance [to win the league], which is an obvious thing to say. Will they win the league? I don’t know, because they have got a huge opponent in Manchester City, and you never know, but they have got themselves in a great position, and to be fair, they’ve been playing some really good football throughout the season,” said Moyes, as quoted by Football London.

The West Ham boss made these claims in his press conference on Friday, ahead of the West Ham game. I bet deep down he would be hoping his team beats Arsenal this Sunday; however, he and his boys may be in for a bad day. He has spoken of Arsenal having a great chance to win the Premier League and hinted that they ought to beat Manchester City to it.

What he forgot to say is that the only way Arsenal is winning this league title is by winning every game they play, the West Ham vs. Arsenal clash included. Arsenal, having failed to win last weekend, will be hungry to go back to winning ways.

West Ham may be picking up their form, but if Arsenal can be as good as they were in the first half against Liverpool, there is only one outcome for the London derby this weekend: Arsenal winning.

Jude Bellingham would have thrived under Arteta at Arsenal, but does his price tag prevent him from having the opportunity.

As per speculation, Jude Bellingham is set to depart Borussia Dortmund this summer. Do you believe he is a midfielder who could come to Arsenal in the summer and change the club’s midfield into something special? Maybe then some people will agree that Arsenal already has the best midfield unit. Hold that thought but, with Liverpool out of the running for the English midfield sensation the race might be wide open.

At one point, it appeared that Bellingham would only move to Liverpool if he returned to play in England. We now know that there is no obvious favourite for him in England; we even asked why Arteta and Edu couldn’t take advantage of it.

According to the Express, that is something they would have done, but it is improbable. They claim Arsenal will not enter a transfer battle with Manchester City or Real Madrid (two clubs who are said to be willing to break the bank for the former Birmingham man), not because Bellingham isn’t the right fit for their midfield but because they aren’t the type of team that engages in transfer battles that only end up being a battle of who pays the most.

Arsenal’s refusal to entertain transfer battles in the cases of signing Dusan Vlahovic, Lisandro Martinez, and Mykhailo Mudryk are examples of when Arsenal had the opportunity to compete with other teams to sign them but chose not to. Arsenal’s philosophy of not participating in transfer battles may lead them, like Liverpool, to opt out of the competition for Bellingham.

Leah Williamson voted Arsenal Women’s Player of the Month for March by Michelle

Edra Soto’s work likely appears familiar to you. Though the Chicago-based artist has been commissioned for numerous public artworks in recent years, that is probably not the reason why. Instead, it is simply because her decade-long project, “GRAFT,” draws on architectural motifs—repeating stars, circles, and other shapes— ubiquitous in Puerto Rico that have since been exported all over the world.

In her work, Soto, who was born in Puerto Rico, highlights the cultural appropriation of these patterns, which were originally found on cast-iron fences outside homes in Puerto Rico.

“You can find them everywhere,” Soto told ARTnews recently, ahead of two solo exhibitions opening this month. “You can find them at Starbucks, at a department store. I realized they exist all over the world. They’re not only exclusive to Puerto Rico. But the story that I’m telling is the story of Puerto Rico.”

When visitors arrive at Puerto Rico’s San Juan Airport, among the first things they encounter is Spanish colonial era architecture. One element, the garita (an overhanging turret or sentry box), has even been incorporated into the logo of the Puerto Rico Tourism Company, in essence becoming a symbol synonymous with the island, according to Soto. But, for her, that symbolism is inextricably connected to Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated territory of the United States and as the world’s oldest colony.

“This is a colonial and military architectural element that lives in Puerto Rico,” she said of the motifs.

This season, Manchester City’s project might be about to reach its final chapter: lifting the Champions League. Andy headed up to Manchester on Tuesday night for City's clash with Bayern Munich, where he discusses a night of contradictions and Bayern fans’ remarkable protest against City’s ownership during the game with Miguel Delaney.

Where should Andy head to next? Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

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