Danilo, Nottingham Forest’s winter midfield signing, was heavily linked with a move to Arsenal for the better part of 2022.

According to reports, Arsenal’s offer for the Brazilian’s services in the summer of 2022 was rejected by Palmeiras.

Back then, Arsenal’s signing of the 22-year-old was dubbed a “shrewd signing” by BBC Reporter Zach Lowy. He tweeted, “Did not expect Arsenal to prioritise a midfielder over a winger in the final day of the window, but Danilo would be a shrewd pickup for them if they can get it over the line.”

Many expected a new offer this winter, but Arsenal were slow to return to convince Palmeiras to do business with them, so Nottingham Forest beat them to the Brazilian’s signature.

Although it is difficult to see the impact of Arsenal’s failure to sign Danilo, Football Fan Cast believes Arteta simply missed out on having his own Gilberto Silva. Those who watched Silva at Arsenal’s midfield knew he was the real deal.

Arsenal will make the long trip back to London disappointed after losing 1-0 to Everton on Merseyside.

The Gunners named the same starting line-up for the fifth consecutive game, but despite the consistency on the teamsheet, we struggled for form early on.

The first half was a real struggle for us, with Sean Dyche’s appointment bringing an immediate improvement from their side, and we eventually made it to the break level. Bukayo Saka had come closest to scoring in the opening 45 minutes, but two chances for Dominic Calvert-Lewin really should have been put away also.

After the break, the deadlock was finally broken, and it was no shock that it was another dangerous Everton corner which bared the fruit for the opener. James Tarkowski managed to find space between a sea of players to get his head onto the ball and send it into the goal, leaving us just 30 minutes on the clock to put things right.

Despite bringing on all of Jorginho, Leandro Trossard and Fabio Vieira, we still struggled to break through an organised Dyche defence. Odegaard tried to place an effort into the far side of the net, only to send his effort wide of the post with time ticking on.

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

Deep in the confines of the hulking, brutalist headquarters of the US Department of Energy, down one of its long, starkly lit corridors, sits a small, unheralded office that is poised to play a pivotal role in America’s shift away from fossil fuels and help the world stave off disastrous global heating.

The department’s loan programs office was “essentially dormant” under Donald Trump, according to its head, Jigar Shah, but has now come roaring back with a huge war chest to bankroll emerging clean energy projects and technology.

Last year’s vast Inflation Reduction Act grew the previously moribund office’s loan authority to $140 billion, while adding a new program worth another $250 billion in loan guarantees to retool projects that help cut planet-heating emissions. Which means that Shah, a debonair former clean energy entrepreneur and podcast host who matches his suits with pristine Stan Smiths, oversees resources comparable to the GDP of Norway: all to help turbocharge solar, wind, batteries and a host of other climate technologies in the US.

With a newly divided Congress stymieing any new climate legislation in the foreseeable future, Shah has emerged as one of Washington’s most powerful figures in the effort to confront global heating. Shah says such focus on him is “hyperbolic” but the White House is pinning much of its climate agenda on an office that barely had a dozen people when Shah joined in March 2021. It now has more than 200 staffers as it scrambles to distribute billions in loans to projects across the US.

A revival of interest in unruly folk customs can tell us a lot about life now

Called to testify in a 1981 lawsuit brought by a San Diego transit workers union against Aztec Bus Lines, photographer Fred Lonidier found himself explaining the finances of his art practice. The purpose of his testimony was to interpret some pictures he had taken of striking bus drivers to help determine whether the strikers had impeded access to a bus depot. The lawyer for Aztec asked whether he’d been paid by the union, and Lonidier said that he had not, that all the expenses came out of his own pocket. “I’m not engaged in a commercial endeavor in a straightforward sense,” he said. “I’m an artist. If my work ever sells, which it rarely does, it’s in a museum, a gallery, to a private collector…. Only on a very rare occasion does anyone ever buy a photograph from me.” 

Such occasions, it seems, are less rare now than they were in 1981. Over the course of five decades, Lonidier has produced a vast and idiosyncratic body of work, principally as a participant-observer in North American labor struggles. During the past decade, that work has appeared not infrequently in modish galleries and Kunsthallen, a far cry from the union halls, libraries, and universities where he previously exhibited (a fact often recited in the press releases and bios issued by his new urbane venues). Not that anyone could begrudge him this recent art world embrace, but it is hard to ignore a certain dissonance between the content and context, between images of organizing workers and a market that is a picture of their antagonists.  

Lonidier reproduced his testimony in the multi-panel photo-text installation AZTEC VS A.T.U. 1309: Long Ago In A Faraway Galaxy (1996), included in his recent exhibition at Michael Benevento in Los Angeles, a career sampler that comprised mostly lesser-known or never-before-exhibited works. Eighteen prints of the striking workers accompany as many panels of blown-up text from the artist’s testimony embellished with graphic design: highlighted passages, circled phrases and faces, and lines connecting bits of text and image. Annotations in a goofy faux-handwritten font say things like proof!; elsewhere, Lonidier calls his own testimony into question: so I say! amends an explanation of a particular picture. He seems to delight in the way the staid courtroom examination—with questions about his position relative to his subjects, how we can know what a photograph really shows or means—echoes the bugaboos of photoconceptualism. 

Lonidier has frequently employed this photo-text format in examining workplace injuries or the ravages of NAFTA. Examples on view here tend to be anecdotal: in 3 Art Talks (1975), he relates, among other experiences, attempting to take a picture at a Lee Friedlander lecture, before the famous photographer called Lonidier out for forgetting to remove his lens cap; a contact sheet with a black frame, followed by the back of a bald head, illustrates the incident. His is a charmingly casual, even artless approach to image, design, and language. We can see this anti-, or amateur, aesthetic as a tool for demystification of the sort that animated a number of students and teachers at the University of California, San Diego in the early 1970s. The group included Lonidier, who received his MFA and joined the faculty in 1972, as well as Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula. Galvanized by the anti-war and feminist movements, they sought to reconcile social documentary photography’s political engagement with Conceptualism’s scrutiny of the production and circulation of images. 

The other key body of work in this show comes out of Lonidier’s revisiting of his vast archive, much of it recording student activism and an atmosphere of experimentation from those early San Diego days. More intimate, Female Photo Resistance II (2022) is a video slideshow devoted to an unnamed subject who appears to be a photo student and Lonidier’s girlfriend. We see her in class, installing a show, lying in bed, and sitting on the toilet as intertitles narrate the power dynamic of artist and muse: “She didn’t like me to photograph her.” The self-criticism, tongue-in-cheek from the start, disappears in a profusion of images. A salient instinct in Lonidier’s art is to make space for irony and folly alongside serious political commitment.

A review of 96 artifacts from the Kingdom of Benin in Swiss museums found proof or strong evidence that more than half of the items were stolen by British soldiers in the 19th century.

A research report from the Swiss Benin Initiative (SBI) released this week found that 21 Benin objects in eight Swiss museums were looted based on written records or evidence like burn marks that “provide a direct link to the fateful events of 1897.”

Researchers found “strong evidence” of looting for 32 objects that did not have written evidence linking them to 1897 but were still considered to be court or royal artworks exclusively produced for the palace. “We may assume with considerable certainty that they were violently appropriated in 1897 when the palace was occupied and sacked by the British troops,” the report’s authors wrote.

For example, a brass hip pendant mask at the Rietberg Museum bears an inventory number of William D. Webster on its backside. According to the museum’s latest research, the London art dealer was tasked with the sale of the seized Benin artifacts on behalf of the British colonial administration.

The SBI report also says private collectors, as well as international and Swiss art markets, played a pivotal role in how the objects entered the museums’ collections.

A high court in South Korea ordered the return of a Buddhist statue that was stolen from a temple in Japan in 2012.

The statue, which is more than 450 years old, depicts the Kanzeon Bodhisattva. Kanzeon is known among Buddhist culture as the One Who Perceives the Sounds of the World and is said to “grant salvation to the suffering.”

The bodhisattva statue has been at the center of an international tug-of-war since it surfaced in South Korea, according to the Asahi Shimbun.

In 2013, the South Korean government arrested the thieves who looted the statue from the Kannonji temple in Tsushima, Nagasaki Prefecture. The statue was subsequently confiscated by the South Korean government. Shortly after, the Kannonji temple, with the support of the Japanese government, requested that the statue be returned.

But a temple in South Korea, Buseoksa, also claimed it had a right to the statue and demanded that it be granted ownership of the work. The temple says the Kanzeon Bodhisattva was stolen in the 14th century by a group of Japanese pirates known as “Wako” who sailed the along the Chinese and Korean coasts between 1200 CE and 1500 CE.

A life-sized statue of a Roman emperor depicted as the Greek hero Hercules was discovered near the Appian Way, ancient Rome’s first highway. The statue was recovered on January 25 during a sewer repair project.

The statue’s face emerged as a bulldozer was tearing through old pipelines. On-site archaeologists investigated the find.

The marble statue has Hercules’s trademark lion skin pelt and club, with frown lines on its forehead that are meant to indicate of a time of deep crisis for the Roman Empire. Its style is typical for 3rd-century depictions of emperors.

Archaeologists believe that the statue might be Emperor Decius, who ruled Rome from 249 CE to 251 CE. Decius was the first Roman emperor to be killed in battle by a foreign enemy. He died while fighting against the Visigoths in present-day Bulgaria, and was also responsible for the first organized execution of Christians.

The statue now exists as several broken pieces, as it sustained some accidental damage during its discovery. It is currently undergoing cleaning and restoration ahead of its public display.

President Joe Biden seems to be pretty unhappy about the suspected Chinese spy balloon flying over Montana. His administration signaled this by postponing Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing—less than a day before Blinken was supposed to depart.

Donald Trump apparently prefers a different response. “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON!” the former commander-in-chief Truthed this morning. A few hours later, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley demonstrated her status as the sane, serious alternative to Trump by tweeting the same thing, but with some lowercase letters mixed in.

Shoot down the balloon. Cancel Blinken’s trip. Hold China accountable.

Biden is letting China walk all over us. It’s time to make America strong again.

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 3, 2023