Arsenal will take on Wolverhampton Wanderers this evening with the chance to build a gap on Manchester City at the top of the Premier League table.

The Citizens slipped up by letting Brentford claim all three points at the Etihad after seeing Ivan Toney score the winner deep into injury time, leaving us top of the table even before we play tonight.

We also go into this evening with plenty of our squad available, with Mo Elneny and Oleksandr Zinchenko both having returned to fitness, but Takehiro Tomiyasu is a doubt today. Emile Smith Rowe is our only remaining long-term absentee.

Predicted Arsenal XI:

Ramsdale
White Saliba Gabriel Zinchenko
Partey Xhaka
Saka Odegaard Martinelli
Jesus

Arsenal’s Beth Mead 50th cap as England Lionesses beat Japan 4-0 in Spain By Michelle

Oh, what a night!  England’s Lionesses made their 4-0 win over Japan look easy..

Before the 7pm kick-off, players of England and Japan paid their respects as they observed 2 minutes silence for Remembrance Day.

There was a false start when Ella Toone took the kick off and then remembered the players are supposed to take the knee.

Beth Mead won her 50th cap for England, and her Arsenal teammate Mana Iwabuchi started for Japan.

Oleksandr Zinchenko has been one of the most outspoken players against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which has lasted for most of this year.

The Ukrainian has been passionate about his calls for the Russians to leave his country and now it has earned him an award.

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February and since then both countries have been at war on Ukrainian territory,

While remaining in England and playing for Manchester City and Arsenal during that time, Zinchenko continued to protest against the invasion of his homeland.

And now he has won an award for his activism, according to a report in The Daily Mail.

Of all the far-right extremists on the ballot Tuesday, perhaps none had the bona fides of Ammon Bundy.

In 2014, he took part in an armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management at his father Cliven’s Nevada ranch after agents tried to impound Cliven’s cows for his failure to pay 20 years worth of grazing fees. In 2016, he led a 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon to protest the arrest of two ranchers. Bundy spent more than 600 days in jail, half in solitary confinement, awaiting trial on federal charges related to the standoffs. When he was acquitted by a jury in Oregon and freed after a mistrial in Nevada, it only contributed to his mythical outlaw status.

But then, a year and a half ago, in an unusual career twist, Bundy announced a run for governor of Idaho. He began as a Republican, then he switched to an independent when it became clear he’d lose the primary. On Tuesday, Bundy’s divinely inspired campaign came to an end. He finished in third-place.

Bundy’s campaign platform was extreme. It included criminalizing abortion, eliminating most “immoral” taxes, cutting welfare programs, seizing control of federal public lands in the state and turning much of it over to affordable housing development and extractive industries. His message was a motto: “Keep Idaho Idaho.” He proposed paying liberals to move back to California—an idea that resonated with a significant number of voters who have seen a huge influx of new residents push up housing prices. Bundy jumped on the hateful anti-LGBTQ rhetoric of the far right, calling trans people “groomers” and promising to put drag queens in prison if elected. In one of the weirder ads of the election season, he took on the “woke cult.”

But the outlaw candidate also ran a remarkably energetic, old-fashioned retail campaign of the sort rarely seen in the US these days. For more than a year, he has hosted an endless stream of town halls and in-person events across the state, gladhanding with the public, showing off his beautiful family, and relying on his personal magnetism rather than TV ads. On the trail, the former Virgin River Valley high school class president has seemed to be enjoying himself immensely.

Illinois workers are on the verge of a historic win: a labor rights amendment to the state constitution that—among other things—would make the state the first to ban so-called “right-to-work laws” throughout its territory. The amendment, on the ballot in Tuesday’s election, has to meet a high bar: either 60 percent approval (not counting blanks) or more than half of all ballots, even ones that skipped that question. With more than 95 percent of votes counted, unions across the state have already started to celebrate: the yes vote holds a 58 percent lead and looks set to win.

Amendment 1, also called the Workers’ Rights Amendment, makes collective bargaining a constitutional right that can’t be legislated or contracted away. It goes further than any state ever has in barring right-to-work laws—and any other legislation that “interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively.” That mandate, and the bill’s wide support, are the high point so far of a pro-worker push under Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, kicked off by the 2019 Collective Bargaining Freedom Act (which forbid legislation that interfered with union security agreements, where employers agree to require union membership or dues). Amendment 1 protects gains like those from conservative rollback attempts down the line.

Right-to-work laws allow employees in a union workplace to not join, not pay dues, but enjoy all the benefits of the union contract. That compels the rest of the employees to work, for free, on behalf of people who specifically don’t want to help or pay—with the idea of starving their funding and killing incentives to join. In right-to-work states, wages are lower across the board, union or not, there’s less employer-provided healthcare, and workers are poorer in retirement. They’re also considerably less safe: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2016 that the rate of workplace fatalities in states with right-to-work laws is 54 percent higher than in those without.

For the cherry on top, their history is also incredibly racist, as noted in 2012 by Dissent :

Southern conservatives feared that if unions united working-class whites and blacks, they could upend the politics of the South, where Jim Crow laws helped keep white and black workers on opposite sides of the political fence. They argued that unions could bring “black domination in the South”…

The England squad has finally been unveiled!! Luke and Marcus are on hand to answer the big questions surrounding Gareth Southgate’s selection, including i) why has he picked Maguire and ii) who will Mr Sheen be supporting at the World Cup?

Elsewhere, we are joined by Iranian football expert Sina Saemian who explains why England shouldn’t underestimate Iran in their opening group game.

@Sinaa_sa & @GolBezan on Twitter to hear more from Sina! 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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Mark Finchem, a Trump-backed “poster child” of election denialism, has lost his bid to become Arizona’s top election official.

Even by the current standards of the Republican Party, Finchem is extreme. After spending the first part of his career as a public safety officer in Michigan, he relocated to Arizona and adopted the look of a western lawman. In 2014, while running for the state house, Finchem said he was a member of the Oath Keepers, the right-wing militia whose founder is now on trial for seditious conspiracy. He won that election and has been a state representative ever since.

On January 6, 2020, he was photographed outside the US Capitol in one of his trademark cowboy hats (he didn’t enter the building). The next year, he started his run for secretary of state. As Mother Jones explained in August, he called for decertifying the results of the 2020 election, said he supported banning early voting, and co-sponsored legislation that would allow state legislators to overturn election results. He told supporters that if he’d been secretary of state in 2020, “we would have won. Plain and simple.”

Not surprisingly, Donald Trump endorsed him and other members of the America First Secretary of State Coalition started by Nevada candidate Jim Marchant.

In August, Finchem won his primary by nearly 20 percentage points, despite GOP Gov. Doug Ducey endorsing his main opponent. In the general election, Finchem faced Democrat Adrian Fontes, who’d previously served as the recorder of Maricopa County.

During his days as a Stanford libertarian, Blake Masters was nothing if not principled. The 36-year-old Peter Thiel protégé turned Arizona Republican Senate candidate considered voting morally indefensible, taxation theft, and nationalism a scourge. He called for open borders and full drug legalization. He was an anarcho-capitalist. 

But as I reported this summer, this was not the Blake Masters that Arizona voters saw in one of the closest and most consequential Senate races in 2022. Masters entered the race as a Republican with $10 million from Thiel as the avatar of a young and highly online New Right. He called abortion “demonic.” He tweeted that “not everything has to be gay” after a bisexual Superman was announced. He plugged the Unabomber’s manifesto. More half-heartedly, he claimed Trump won the 2020 election.

After securing Trump’s endorsement, he won a competitive primary with ease. Predictably, he moderated when needed later in the cycle. Abortion was no longer a “genocide,” but something in need of “common-sense regulation.” Instead of gun-slinging campaign videos whose aesthetic reminded one of his childhood best friends of a “creepy teenage boy in his basement,” he ran ads featuring his wife and boys working around the kitchen table. But he never abandoned the idea that Americans would warm to his cold-blooded style of Stanford-knows-best intellectual combat.

But Masters was wrong. Arizonans chose Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat and onetime astronaut married to former Rep. Gabby Giffords. Masters’ transformation from college-aged libertarian to champion of state control did not matter so much as what both of those versions of him had in common. He was always, as Kelly put it during their only debate, one of those “guys that think they know better than everyone about everything.” 

Kelly’s winning message: “c’mon man just look at this guy” pic.twitter.com/lce9BJiMXb

Sometime between midnight and 2 A.M. last night, I ordered a second copy of Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present. The book, a collaboration between Charlotte Zolotow and Maurice Sendak, was published sixty years ago. Sendak won a Caldecott for his eerie, dioramic illustrations, which look like they were executed in oil pastel, or perhaps in thick-tipped colored pencil. They’re sketchier and more impressionistic than the exacting Sendak lines I’m familiar with from Where the Wild Things Are and Outside Over There, but just as unnerving. Mr. Rabbit is a proto–Slender Man, lounging louchely around a little girl in a pink twinset who’s just out to find a birthday present for her mother.

“Mr. Rabbit,” said the little girl, “I want help.”
“Help, little girl, I’ll give you help if I can,” said Mr. Rabbit.
“Mr. Rabbit,” said the little girl, “it’s about my mother.”
“Your mother?” said Mr. Rabbit.
“It’s her birthday,” said the little girl.
“Happy birthday to her then,” said Mr. Rabbit.

The book consists only of dialogue, all of which Zolotow imbues with this distinctly creepy cadence and rhythm. Mr. Rabbit helps the little girl figure out what her mother likes (“red”). When she realizes she can’t give her mother “red,” he offers some alternatives: a fire engine, a red roof, underwear. (I think the book would still be unnerving without this humanoid rabbit suggesting red underwear as a suitable gift from child to parent, but it’s one of the more deliciously sinister moments.) The little girl decides on apples, but determines that she needs more for her mother. Her mother likes other colors, too—yellow and green and blue—so Mr. Rabbit helps her to find suitable accompaniments to apples in all of those hues. For blue, he first suggests sapphires, even though the girl has already said she can’t afford emeralds—such a caddish, cruel companion for a child! Proposing absurd, impossible gifts: gems and the stars and taxicabs! In the end, an entire fruit basket comes together, and the little girl thanks Mr. Rabbit and bids him farewell; he returns the goodbye, adding, “and a happy birthday and a happy basket of fruit to your mother.”

My three-year-old son loves this book. He loves it so much he doesn’t mind that our current copy, a staple-bound paperback retired from the Minnesota library system, is missing several key pages (all of “yellow” and parts of “green”) so that it jumps abruptly from Bartlett pears to blue grapes. But I thrill to imagine his joy when I present him with this new copy, and my own, when I take the old paperback, slice out the pages, and hang them on the wall. I wonder: How many more times will my son sit in my lap or stand against the pillows on the bed, leaning over my shoulder, as we’re held in thrall by this incantatory rabbit, reading this lovely present?

Gareth’s Gang has been selected! James Maddison is officially declared a nice man after his call up, while Callum Wilson prepares to clean Harry Kane’s boots.

Marcus, Luke, Vish and Jim pore over that and the final weekend of Premier League fixtures, as Southampton hope to avoid a new manager trounce while Eddie Howe and Graham Potter enter Ru Paul’s Drag Race. The prize: to be the next England boss.

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