Looking at Arsenal’s defence yesterday we looked extremely strong, with yet another clean sheet after William Saliba’s addition to the Gunners back line.

And we still have Tierney and Tomiyasu yet to come to make us even stronger after their  injuries, and Rob Holding waiting for his chances on the bench, so, to be fair, I can’t see the Spanish defender Pablo Mari getting much of a look in at all this season.

And it looks like he will get his wish for more regular game time after a successful second half of last season on loan at Udinese in Serie A.

Fabrizio Romano is reporting that Mari is “100%” on his way out of Arsenal, with both Hellas Verona and Monza keen on taking him back to Italy for the new season.

The transfer guru tweeted…..

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

The plastics had only been submerged in the ocean off Falmouth, England, for a week, but in that time a thin layer of biofilm, a slimy mix of mucus and microbes, had already developed on their surfaces. Michiel Vos, a microbiologist at the University of Exeter in England, had sunk five different types of plastic as a test. He and his colleagues wanted to know which of the myriad microbes living in the ocean would glom on to these introduced materials.

Vos and his colleagues’ chief concern was pathogenic bacteria. To understand the extent to which plastic can be colonized by potentially deadly bacteria, the scientists injected wax moth larvae with the biofilm. After a week, four percent of the larvae died. But four weeks later, after Vos and his team had let the plastics stew in the ocean for a bit longer, they repeated the test. This time, 65 percent of the wax moths died.

The scientists analyzed the biofilm: the plastics were covered in bacteria, including some known to make us sick. They found pathogenic bacteria responsible for causing urinary tract, skin, and stomach infections, pneumonia, and other illnesses. To make matters worse, these bacteria were also carrying a wide range of genes for antimicrobial resistance. “Plastics that you find in the water are rapidly colonized by bacteria, including pathogens,” says Vos. “And it doesn’t really matter what plastic it is.”

It’s not just bacteria that are hitching a ride on plastics. Biofilms on marine plastics can also harbor parasites, viruses, and toxic algae. With marine plastic pollution so ubiquitous—it’s been found everywhere from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to Arctic beaches—scientists are concerned that plastics are transporting these human pathogens around the oceans.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), a crucial vote in an evenly divided Senate, announced last night that she would support a key piece of Biden’s legislative agenda—with some caveats.

Last week, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a longtime holdout, stunned his colleagues when he announced that he had struck a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” which “includes roughly $370 billion in energy and climate spending, $300 billion in deficit reduction, three years of subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums, prescription drug reform and significant tax changes,” per Politico.

But the bill was not going to move forward without the support of Sinema, who demanded that Democrats drop a provision that would place new limitations on the carried interest loophole—which many of her donors happen to benefit from—and garner roughly $14 billion in funding. Instead, the bill will reportedly include a 1 percent excise tax on stock buybacks—the practice of corporations repurchasing their own stock to drive up share prices—that’s set to garner $73 billion in federal revenue. Sinema also reportedly managed to win $5 billion in drought resiliency funding, a boon to Arizona.

NEW: DEMOCRATS REACH DEAL WITH SINEMA ON TAXES.

“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate's budget reconciliation legislation." She will move forward after parl review.

The seventies and eighties were a high point in American dance, and consequently, dance on television. As video technologies advanced, one-off performances inaccessible to most could be seamlessly captured and broadcast to the masses. Like all art forms, dance at this time was also influenced aesthetically by this new medium, as cinematic techniques permeated the choreographic (and vice versa). Today, many of these dance films are archived on YouTube. My favorite is a recording of avant-garde choreographer Blondell Cummings’s Chicken Soup, a one-woman monologue in dance that aired in 1988 on a TV program called Alive from Off Center. The piece is set to a minimalist score Cummings composed with Brian Eno and Meredith Monk. Over the music, a soft feminine voice narrates: “Coming through the open-window kitchen, all summer they drank iced coffee. With milk in it.” Cummings repeats a series of gestures: sipping coffee, threading a needle, and rocking a child. She glances with an exaggerated tilt of the head at an imaginary companion and mouths small talk—what Glenn Phillips of the Getty Museum calls her signature “facial choreography.” Her movements are sharp and distinct, creating the illusion that she is under a strobe light, or caught on slowly projected 35 mm film. She sways back and forth like a metronome, keeping time with her gestures.

This particular performance placed Cummings in a detailed set evocative of a fifties household. But when she performed Chicken Soup onstage, accompanied solely by piano music, there was no set at all aside from a wooden chair. In this recording, for example, of a 1989 live performance at Jacob’s Pillow, her movements themselves seem endowed with greater importance, and the barrier between storyteller and audience feels gauze thin. Chicken Soup is an invitation inside, into a conversation that is both private and familiar. “They sat in their flower-print housedresses at the white enameled kitchen table,” the voiceover continues, “endlessly talking about childhood friends. Operations. And abortions.” The work premiered in 1973, the year the Supreme Court ruled on Roe vs. Wade, but Cummings’s kitchen could be any woman’s—anytime, anywhere.

—Elinor Hitt, reader

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

The US is, following decades of political rancor and fossil fuel industry obfuscation, on the verge of its first significant attempt to tackle the climate crisis. Experts say it will help rewire the American economy and act as an important step in averting disastrous global heating.

Independent analysis of the proposed legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, shows it should slash America’s planet-heating emissions by about 40 percent by the end of the decade, compared with 2005 levels.

This cut would bring the US within striking distance of a goal set by Joe Biden to cut emissions in half by 2030, a target that scientists say must be achieved by the whole world if catastrophic global heating, triggering escalating heatwaves, droughts and floods, is to be avoided.

“This is a massive turning point,” said Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This bill includes so much, it comprises nearly $370bn in climate and clean energy investments. That’s truly historic. Overall, the IRA is a huge opportunity to tackle the climate crisis.”

I first met Patrizia Cavalli in 2018, in her apartment near Campo de’ Fiori, where we drank tea with honey and talked from early afternoon until sunset. Every surface was covered with books, papers, notebooks, scissors, and scarves, and each bore the same handwritten note, a warning to visitors: “Do not move! If you move anything, I’ll kill you.” Over the course of two years, we had three more conversations, speaking for five hours at a stretch. The apartment had been her home for decades: in the late sixties, as a twenty-year-old philosophy student, she rented a single room there; she had just left Todi, the town in Umbria where she grew up, and in Rome she felt unmoored and lonely. In 1969, through a mutual friend, she met the writer Elsa Morante, who was then working on her novel History. Morante was the first person to look at Cavalli’s poems, and after reading them, she called to say, “Patrizia, I’m happy to tell you that you are a poet.”

More than fifty years later, Cavalli’s poems are translated and loved across Europe and the United States. Her first collection, My Poems Won’t Change the World (1974), signaled the forthrightness and disregard for authority that would characterize all her work. Cavalli examines the causes and conditions of pleasure and pain, and the moments in life, often imperceptible at the time, that herald change. Her work explores infatuation, boredom, deception, conflict, grief—all in a poetic voice whose nonchalance belies its artistry.

When Cavalli died in June, it felt as though all of Rome wanted to pay tribute. A beautiful ceremony took place at the Campidoglio, where flowers were piled upon flowers. Her admirers and friends crowded the stairwell, and the room where her body lay in state. Cavalli might have criticized the extravagant floral arrangements, but she would have been moved by the words her loved ones chose to speak—some of them her own.

After spreading baseless claims of election fraud in the Arizona gubernatorial primary, Republican Kari Lake has won her party’s nomination. The Donald Trump-backed candidate and former FOX 10 Phoenix anchor defeated real estate developer Karrin Taylor Robson, who received endorsements from former Vice President Mike Pence and current Gov. Doug Ducey and invested $15 million of her own money in the campaign. Lake, a steadfast proponent of the Big Lie, had been the frontrunner, building her campaign around Trump’s stamp of approval—and the support of election deniers like Rep. Paul Gosar, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and My Pillow’s Mike Lindell. Lake campaigned on election conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant and pro-border enforcement rhetoric, and her repudiation of the very media that gave her a platform. 

Lake announced she was running for governor three months after ending her 22-year career with the Fox affiliate. In a video making her resignation public, Lake said she no longer approved of the direction journalism was going and that media needed more balanced and diverse viewpoints. “Not everyone is dedicated to telling the truth, but thankfully many of you have figured that out,” she said. “I promise you: If you hear it from my lips, it will be truthful.” She has continued to call the media the “enemy of the people” and appeared in a campaign video smashing televisions while vowing to take a “sledgehammer to leftist lies and propaganda.” Her conversion from TV personality to media-basher seemed to be a strategy intended to turn a “potential liability with Republican voters to an asset,” as Melanie Mason writes in the Los Angeles Times. 

Kari Lake has been contending for weeks now their is fraud & irregularities in her *primary* election — yet, below, she’s unable to offer a single specific allegation & refuses to answer why she wouldn’t take such intel to authorities. https://t.co/wxi4z0X2Ha

— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) August 2, 2022

On various occasions during the campaign, Lake has hinted at supposed attempts to steal the primary election, but she has refused to provide any evidence to support her claims. “I’m not going to clarify it,” she recently said on a radio show. “We are on to some things that are very suspicious and possibly illegal. We’re working on it. I don’t want to ruin the investigation.” The chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversees elections in the state’s largest county, called her allegations “beyond irresponsible.” As part of her election integrity platform, Lake has proposed a ban on ballot-counting machines. 

It’s here: the Fulham crisis has begun, your subscription isn’t working on your telly, and the Scott Sellars t-shirt is ON!

Pete, Andy and Luke preview the return of the Premier League! Mikel Arteta’s been revealing the state secrets on 'All or Nothing' ahead of the annual Arsenal Croydon capitulation, but there’s darker clouds and plenty of leaves in the pool over at Fulham as they welcome Liverpool. Plus, Cristiano Ronaldo's being replaced by an inflatable petrol station mascot and – watch your chins – Luke’s Game is back!

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

Phoenix is America’s hottest city, and it’s getting hotter. The global climate crisis and decades of sprawling urban growth have turned this desert city into a hazardous heat island with dwindling water supplies and inadequate shade.

An assortment of programs to cool down Phoenix and help people survive the heat have not been working: in Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, record high temperatures contributed to at least 662 deaths between 2020 and 2021, while thousands more people needed emergency medical treatment.

That’s where the city’s new Office of Heat Response and Mitigation comes in. The pioneering heat team was created last September amid pressure from activists, researchers, faith groups, and health experts for a dedicated team responsible—and accountable—for making Phoenix more livable.

David Hondula, a climate and health researcher at Arizona State University, was hired to lead the four-person team and coordinate the city’s immediate efforts to cut heat deaths and illness, and come up with ways to cool the city and make it more comfortable in the long term. It’s the first local government-funded heat team in North America, possibly the world. “It’s a long game—we’re fighting for small wins that we hope will accumulate into larger wins,” said Hondula. “We need to prepare for and recover from every summer, not occasional heatwaves.”

Before Celsius filed for bankruptcy last month, the company seemed optimistic about its future. In a June 7 blog post titled “Damn the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead,” the crypto-lending firm took aim at the “vocal actors” who were “spreading misinformation and confusion.” It assured its customers that it was “online 24–7” and said it was continuing to “process withdrawals without delay.”

Celsius—which offers bank-like services for crypto enthusiasts, including the chance to earn eye-popping interest rates by depositing digital assets and the ability to borrow using crypto as collateral—boasted that it had “one of the best risk management teams in the world.” 

“We have made it through crypto downturns before (this is our fourth!),” the company assured consumers. “Celsius is prepared.”

Five days later, Celsius paused all customer withdrawals—a move that essentially froze the assets of its hundreds of thousands of users. A month after that, Celsius filed for bankruptcy. During the bankruptcy proceedings, it became evident that the company did not offer the same protections that traditional banks do. Since 2019, “the Company has been clear” that it may have to temporarily or permanently pause withdrawals due to a variety of potential circumstances, Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky wrote in a legal declaration. When customers deposit their savings with Celsius, they “transfer ‘all right and title’ of their crypto assets to Celsius,” he stated.

According to a presentation filed in court, Celsius now hopes to offer its customers a choice: accept a cash payment worth just a fraction of their investments, or opt to “remain ‘long’ crypto”—that is, continue to hold their digital currency on Celsius’ books in the hopes of eventually being able to recover their money.