Arsenal has been handed a tremendous blow to their hopes of signing Douglas Luiz after the midfielder signed a new contract at Aston Villa.

The Brazilian has been the subject of transfer interest from the Gunners for a long time and they submitted at least two bids for his signature on deadline day.

Villa rejected the offers, even though they knew he would be a free agent at the end of this season.

Arsenal had hoped he would not renew his contract with the Midlands team and join them for free in the summer.

However, that plan can be buried now because Steven Gerrard’s side has announced via their Twitter page that he has signed a new long-term contract.

Arsenal has one of the finest stadiums in the Premier League, and the Emirates is a favourite destination for some players and fans.

The ground was built to become a modern destination for fans and people who love football.

It was one of the best grounds in the world when it was first built, but other stadiums have since been erected to a better and higher standard.

Nevertheless, it remains a fine stadium to visit, and its hospitality is one of the best in the Premier League.

A report on The Sun says, however, the Tottenham Stadium has beaten them to become the ground with the best away experience.

Like everyone else in the League, we are going into an invedible month where we play every single 3/4 days, and there is the clear and obvious danger of fatigue and injuries setting in, and for Arsenal our treatment list was pretty bad before the glut even started.

We luckily got a few of our players back during the funeral and international break, but one of those, Oleks Zinchenko, looks like he is still suffering the aftereffects and is unlikely to be available for tomorrows game at Leeds. Arteta was asked if he was still on the unavailable list: “I think so.” he replied. “With Oleks, I don’t know, he has not been on the pitch yet. So we have to be a little bit calm.”

Well, we certainly hope that he regains some fitness before we play PSV on Thursday, as we will need to rest as many first teamers as possible but still get the three points needed to guarantee top spot in the Group Table.

But we still have Kieran Tierney and perhaps Tomiyasu to cover that spot, but a lot more worrying news is that Gabriel Jesus is also a doubt after getting concussed in last weeks physical encounter with Liverpool. Arteta said in the pre-match presser when asked if Jesus was recovered: “I don’t know, obviously he has some discomfort after the game against Liverpool and that’s why we decided not to bring him in [to Norway], so let’s see how he is tomorrow and Saturday.”

This would be a big blow for Arsenal if he misses the game, but we at least have Nketiah in reserve. If we lost both of them we could be in serious trouble.

On Friday night, incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Baptist pastor, and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, a former football star, convened for a debate in Savannah, Georgia to answer questions about the policy issues Americans routinely rank as most important: Things like Abortion. Healthcare. Crime.

Warnock’s assignment was to prove he should keep the job. Walker’s mandate was proving he was fit for it. Friday was the only chance they would get to make their respective cases on the same stage, their first and only face-to-face debate before the election. And with the polls showing a less than 4-point margin in a state where Warnock won his last election by just 2 percentage points, the stakes of the candidates’ answers to questions about these issues couldn’t have been higher.

Walker has been characterized as sounding incoherent at times. Just this week at a rally, he shared a strange story about a bull who abandoned three pregnant cows to visit cows on the other side of the fence. Apparently, Walker was trying to explain that the grass is not always greener on the other side, because the cows across the fence ended up being male bulls. But the metaphor unintentionally evoked the recent bombshell allegations against Walker—that the staunch anti-abortion advocate has been credibly accused of pressuring a woman to get an abortion and paying for it. He’s also been accused of being an absentee father, not unlike the bull who leapt the fence.

Walker’s showing on Friday included a few head-scratchers, but was overall less bizarre than even his supporters were anticipating. “Herschel did a good job of keeping expectations low,” Walker surrogate Ralph Reed told reporters after the debate. “People said he can’t string three sentences together, [and that] he doesn’t know the issues. But that’s not what you saw on the stage.”

Based on crowd reaction, Warnock also had a strong showing, replete with several jabs.

Matteo Guendouzi completed his permanent transfer to Olympique Marseille from Arsenal this summer.

The midfielder had impressed at the French club on loan last season and merited the move.

However, he could have played in Ligue 1 sooner than that had an offer from Arsenal been accepted by Lyon in 2020.

The Gunners proposed a swap deal that would have taken Houssem Aouar to London in exchange for the midfield hot-head.

However, Lyon didn’t like his profile then, and their director at the time, Juninho, has now admitted he underestimated the midfielder.

Doesn't it just make you fizz when you see one of Gareth's gang having a lovely time? Doubts might have emerged about Mason Mount's fitness on Friday night after we recorded, but he has caught the eye under his new boss, Graham Potter.

We also mourn another difficult week for England's defenders – but don't worry, at least Ben White is really attractive. And Jordan Pickford is the subject of the Take Thermometer! Will this week's take finally be a Carolina Reaper?

Got a question? Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Get along to our Friend of the Ramble watchalong on Sunday! Free tickets with ever $10/month membership: patreon.com/footballramble.

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This article is produced as a collaboration between Bolts and Mother Jones.

For the first time since the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020, voters in Minneapolis and greater Hennepin County will vote for their new top prosecutor. County Attorney Michael Freeman, whose office came under intense scrutiny that summer over racial disparities and its handling of police brutality, announced last fall he was not seeking re-election. An August primary cut a crowded field down to two candidates: Mary Moriarty, the county’s former chief public defender who regularly clashed with Freeman during her tenure, and Martha Holton Dimick, a judge who used to work for Freeman’s predecessor, Senator Amy Klobuchar. 

The candidates embody two sides of a debate that has divided Minneapolis and the nation since the summer of 2020. Moriarty is carrying the mantle of progressive criminal justice reform. Amidst a surge in homicides, Holton Dimick strives for a more traditional law and order agenda, and often seems outright hostile to the prospect of wielding the prosecutor’s office for the purpose of reform. 

“A referendum on what we want to do as a community moving forward since George Floyd was murdered,” is how Malaika Eban, the Deputy Director at the Minneapolis-based Legal Rights Center, described the race for Hennepin County Attorney. “Even though this is a nonpartisan race, [the candidates] have been offering two really different perspectives on what to do in order to keep our community safe,” she added. 

Floyd’s killing on a south Minneapolis street corner in 2020 sparked a historic nationwide outpouring of protest and debate over policing and racism in America. This call for a less punitive, less racist system of policing dovetailed with the aims of reform-minded prosecutors in cities around the US who have leveraged the discretion held within district attorney’s offices in an attempt to undo mass incarceration. But since 2020 reform critics have invoked the rise in violent crime around the country to push back, and they often use Minneapolis as an example in their arguments about how criminal justice reform has gone too far. 

In a rambling letter responding to the January 6 committee, Donald Trump waxed nonsense about a witch hunt, Black Lives Matter, and television ratings—littering the entire document with his trademark chaotic capitalizations and election lies. But despite dedicating 14 pages to the matter, the former president declined to answer the only question of consequence: whether he’ll comply with the committee’s subpoena and finally testify.

That, of course, was likely the point. After all, if you wanted to convey useful information, you probably wouldn’t kick off a letter to Congress with, “THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN!” While much of the document recycles his false electoral conspiracy theories—you can take a full tour of the letter here if you have the patience for that kind of stuff—I feel the need to call out the appendix:

What you see above transcends an ordinary, sloppily done Microsoft Word, import-images job. It’s also a snapshot into the mind of a former president nearly two years after his historically disgraceful departure from the White House. Does he seem overly concerned with his ever-mounting legal woes? No, and we have plenty of other publicly available evidence to support that inkling, such as Trump having the gall to start something called “Trump Organization II” while being sued for financial fraud. Instead, Trump continues to obsess over seemingly pointless details, in this case, crowd size. He logs paragraphs worth of complaints in a letter to lawmakers about how the media failed to give him credit for attracting a large audience to the rally that proceeded the attack on the US Capitol. Here’s a glimpse:

The massive size of this crowd, and its meaning, has never been a subject of your Committee, nor has it been discussed by the Fake News Media that absolutely refuses to acknowledge, in any way, shape or form, the magnitude of what was taking place. In fact, for such a historic event, there are very few pictures that accurately show the event, or how many people were really there. Incredibly, it seems that pictures showing the size of the event were perhaps cancelled, scrubbed, deleted or, in any event, not available, but we still have some—as attached.

So, there we have it. Not long before an all-but-certain announcement heralding his future attempt to storm his way back into the White House, Donald Trump is here to remind you that in addition to being a menace to democracy, an unabashed bigot, and general terror—he’s also just a small-minded boy, writing hate mail to the January 6 committee, whining about crowd sizes. 

Clarence Larkin’s commentary on THE BOOK OF REVELATION is written LIKE THIS, crafted with occasional capitalizations to emphasize IMAGES and TERMS. Reading it doesn’t feel like being shouted at but rather kind and intimate, as though he’s DIRECTING our attention in the same way a CHILD is directed to look at CARDINALS and CATERPILLARS during NATURE WALKS. Larkin directs the reader to symbols like THE SEVEN SEALS, a kingdom made of STONE, and the NEW HEAVEN and NEW EARTH. As a writing style, its effect is in guiding the EYE to see ONE THING over another. Eventually we’re pointed to this: a vision of the New City. There shall be NO NIGHT there: they need no candle, neither light of the Sun; for the Lord God giveth them LIGHT; and THEY SHALL REIGN FOR EVER and EVER.

***

I grew up in Willoughby, Ohio, the supposed subject of the Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby” (1960), in which a man falls asleep during his daily commute and DREAMS of a train station for a UTOPIAN TOWN. The opening narration begins: “This is Gart Williams, age thirty-eight, a man protected by a suit of armor, all held together by one bolt. Just a moment ago, someone removed the bolt, and Mr. Williams’s protection fell away and left him a naked target.” A naked target, the episode suggests, for virulent daydreaming. It’s a cold winter, and Gart is an advertising executive so beleaguered by both wife and boss that his only respite is the commute he spends dreaming of a better place. As his life spirals horrific—his wife thinks he’s a coward, he fails at his job—Willoughby from the window waxes idyllic: parasols, pushcarts, summertime in 1888. It is a backward-looking fantasy, one he indulges in daily while sleeping.

My Policeman is quiet and understated – and 'the opposite of explosive'