This season, Arsenal began the campaign with four strikers, namely Aubameyang, Lacazette, Nketiah and the youngster Folarin Balogun. But without any European football and an early exit from the FA cup, we only had Lacazette and Nketiah after January.

We all expected Laca and Nketiah to be leaving this summer, but Arteta surprised us all by persuading the English U21 international to sign a contract extension.

So we now have one striker, and maybe we are expecting Balogun to return to the squad, but there is still need of at least one more striker. Currently we all are hoping that Gabriel Jesus will our main frontman next season, but will we still need one more striker to get through all the Europa League games on top of our domestic schedule?

The Arsenal expert Charles Watts certainly thinks we are in the market for more than one. Speaking on his YouTube channel he said: “I still think there is a very good chance Arsenal go out and sign two forwards because there is going to be lots of demands on the squad, certainly a lot more demands that were on the squad this season because of those extra games in the Europa League and things like that, so I still think there is a very good chance they’ll go out and sign two.”

So if we get Gabriel Jesus as competition for Nketiah, surely any new man would have to be prepared to fight for his place in the team, so who do you think could be our next striker target?

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

Last December, a young patient was admitted to Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, after several medications had failed to quell the child’s relentless seizures. A hospital pediatrician, Vignesh Doraiswamy, consulted with neurologists and then tried a different drug. The child had fewer seizures, became more interactive, and was ready to go back home, says Doraiswamy. But there was a problem: The patient’s insurance company refused to authorize the new medication for the parents to administer. The family had to remain in the hospital for at least two more days, Doraiswamy recalls, while the decision went through an appeals process.

Doctors have long asserted that prior authorization—the need to get approval from the patient’s insurer before proceeding with treatment—causes delays that can hurt patient care. In an American Medical Association survey conducted in December 2021, one-third of physicians reported that such delays have caused at least one of their patients to experience a serious problem, such as hospitalization, the development of a birth defect, disability, and even death. In that same survey, more than 80 percent of surveyed doctors said patients at least sometimes abandon their recommended treatment because of prior authorization hassles. Just over half of the physicians who treat adult patients in the workforce said prior authorization has interfered with patients’ ability to do their jobs.

Physicians want laws to curtail the crushing burden of faxes and calls insurers impose on them as a requirement for coverage.

Prior authorizations also exact a toll on doctors, who say the paperwork has gotten out of hand. The average physician must now seek approval for dozens of prescriptions and medical services each week, an administrative burden that contributes to burnout and costs physician practices an estimated $26.7 billion in time each year.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, prior authorization is one of several strategies that insurers use to reduce wasteful medical spending. (Other strategies include patient cost-sharing and requiring patients to try low-cost drugs before the insurance company will pay for a more expensive therapy.) These strategies can discourage the use of inappropriate and overpriced medications and promote the use of better options. But, as drug prices rise, insurers are intensifying prior authorization requirements and physician practices have built up a huge infrastructure to fight for the drugs they want to prescribe.

As gun violence ravages communities and the country reels from a string of horrific mass shootings, Americans have been left with an all-too-familiar question: Will our lawmakers finally do something to stop the carnage? We’ve been here before, many times; we’ve watched as Republicans (and some Democrats) bowed to pressure from the National Rifle Association and blocked even the most basic gun control measures.

But as the Trace’s Mike Spies pointed out the day after the Uvalde massacre, there actually has been a seismic shift in the political landscape. The NRA is still a powerful force, but years of scandal and infighting and a failed attempt to declare bankruptcy may have left it substantially weaker than it was in 2013, when pro-gun forces killed a bipartisan background check bill in the wake of the Sandy Hook murders:

2/Its longtime PR firm, which served as the voice of the organization and devised Wayne LaPierre’s persona, is long gone. Its most effective spokespeople are long gone. Its most effective leader, Chris Cox, is long gone. Cox’s team is gone. Oliver North is long gone.

— mike spies (@mikespiesnyc) May 26, 2022

The NRA still spends millions on lobbying, but Chris Cox, its legendary chief lobbyist, stepped down in 2019. The group shelled out more than $29 million on the 2020 elections, according to Open Secrets. But that was barely half of what it spent in 2016.

A 'tear-jerkingly sweet and tender' buddy story

En route to a crime scene down back roads in rural Ireland, Sergeant Jackie Noonan briefly flips down her car’s sun visor to check out the sky. “That is some incarnation of sun,” Noonan announces to her fellow officer Pronsius, and though it falls over a landscape where cows “sit down like shelves of rock in the middle of the fields,” she deems it “equatorial.”

     “You know where Guadalajara is, Pronsius?” 

     “Is it the far side of Belmullet?”

Technically, she concedes, it is. A little later when she asks him, “You ever been anywhere exotic, Pronsius?” he replies, “I been the far side of Belmullet.”

The latest Star War series on Disney+ is the darkest yet

Five stars for Hirokazu Kore-eda's funny, knotty caper – with a big heart

Brace yourselves, some of the season's biggest games are happening this weekend! Plenty for Kate, Jim and Andy to get stuck into on today's Preview Show, sponsored by Betway.

Liverpool have the straightforward task of dispatching 13-time winners Real Madrid in the Underdog Derby, while Huddersfield and Nottingham Forest are one game from the promised land. You can also now speak to a Diego Maradona hologram on an Argentinian plane bound for Qatar 2022... Yep.

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

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Once upon a time, Alex Berenson was a New York Times journalist covering major stories, from the Iraq War to Hurricane Katrina to the Bernie Madoff scandal. But over the last several years, he’s increasingly focused on a new pet project: owning the libs. In his Substack newsletter “Unreported Truths” he rails against Joe Biden, derides the pro-choice movement, and complains about inflation to his “tens of thousands of subscribers.”

One of Berenson’s favorite themes has been to downplay the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines—and it’s this work in particular that has made him a star. Before Twitter kicked him off the platform for spreading vaccine disinformation last year, he had hundreds of thousands of followers. Berenson’s Substack newsletters over the last month have mostly been more of the same: He rails against “woke media whoppers about Covid vaccines” and describes Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman as a “fat vaccinated cannabis activist.”

But earlier this week, Berenson took aim at a new target: the growing global outbreak of the monkeypox virus. In a post titled “Is It Monkeypox or Crystalpox?” Berenson writes that public health authorities have “almost got another epidemic on the go—the perfect way to distract the shiny-haired robots in the media from the complete failure of the mRNA vaccines.” He then goes on to argue that monkeypox is strictly a disease of gay men. “Are you a gay man who likes sex with lots of other gay men?” he wrote. “Maybe in a bathhouse? Maybe names optional? Maybe with a meth bump on the side? No? Are you sure?… Okay. Don’t worry about the monkeypox thing then.”

With those two points—a supposedly overblown illness plus some homophobia—Berenson did what anti-vaccine activists do best. He managed to build upon his previous talking points and pivot to the current news cycle, neatly weaving the latest headlines into a grand conspiracy theory with necessary villains and egregious profiteering.

There is seemingly no topic too far afield for these zealots to exploit. Recently, I’ve reported on anti-vaccine influencers’ embrace of pro-Kremlin ideology and their promotion of dangerous disinformation about the baby formula shortage. But the monkeypox outbreak offers especially fertile ground because it allows the purveyors of misinformation to recycle many of the same talking points that they developed for Covid. The addition of homophobic rhetoric is particularly toxic, as it’s likely to unite anti-LGBTQ extremists with Covid denialists. As Yale epidemiologist and AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves put it on Twitter earlier this week, this might be “that moment when homophobia meets far right pandemic politics.”

For many years now, every horrific gun massacre has ricocheted widely with a familiar theme of outrage and surrender. On Wednesday, the day after a heavily armed, suicidal 18-year-old slaughtered 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school, Washington Post columnist Brian Broome published one of the more powerful versions of that narrative I’ve ever read. “Nothing happened after innocent children were slaughtered the last time, or the time before that, and nothing is going to be done now,” he wrote, citing Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Parkland.

Broome’s column articulated the enduring shame of our nation’s political stalemate and pathetic inaction on gun policy. It was piercing and poignant—and, in my view, wrong.

It’s not just that we shouldn’t resign ourselves in perpetuity to such outrage, rightful as it is. This narrative has become part of the problem itself—in some cases possibly even fueling the escalating cycle of mass shootings. That’s because it validates the recurring violence, framing it as an indefinite feature of our reality.

And mass shooters pay heed. After nearly a decade of studying these attacks and how to prevent them through the work of behavioral threat assessment, I documented extensive case evidence for my book, Trigger Points. The research shows that many perpetrators are keenly aware of media and political narratives about their actions.

They hope the public will focus on sensational coverage of their rage-filled “manifestos,” their sinister photos uploaded to social media, their ghastly livestreams. They want notoriety, and they seek justification and credibility for their acts of violence. And in the message that America will never stop these mass shootings, they find such affirmation.