Chelsea had a very turbulent end of season with the sanctions imposed on the club when Roman Abramovich was the owner, but they still managed to hold on to Third Place in the League.

They now have a new billionaire American owner (like Arsenal) who has many franchises in the American sports market in Todd Boehly, and perhaps there may be a little rivalry brought into the mix, as Arsenal are aiming to overtake their neighbours in the coming season.

So now the two giants are set to meet on their doorstep in America, and I am sure both owners will be very keen to win the boasting rights as Arsenal take on Chelsea in the Final of the Florida Cup tonight (Okay 1 a.m. on Sunday!).

Arsenal have won all their preseason games well, while Chelsea have not been so successful, with a 2-1 win over Club America and a loss on penalties to Charlotte, but the Gunners are wel aware how difficult the Blues are to beat in preseason.

This will be our fourth meeting since 2017 with Chelsea winning the first one 2.0 in Beijing that summer. The following year we met in Dublin and Arsenal only managed a 1-1 draw with a last-minute Lacazette equaliser.

Mikel Arteta changed half the Arsenal team last summer, and despite a few hiccoughs on the way, we improved so much that in the end we were disappointed in not succeeding to finish up in the Top Four.

Now we have even more talented additions in the squad in Zinchenko, Jesus, Turner, Vieira, Marquinhos and William Saliba retuned from loan like a new top class arrival, and once they all get integrated into the squad we should be even more of a force to be reckoned with this season.

One of our arrival’s last summer was Martin Odegaard and he has quickly become an important player for the team and he has been impressed with how the new contingent are settling in during pre-season.

“The new signings have been really good so far,” Odegaard told Arsenal.com. “They are working hard and are all good personalities. They all bring something good to the team.

“Fabio has been injured but we’ve seen Matt and Gabby play well in the games, so I think they are all going to be good for us. Especially for me, playing close to Gabby up front, I think it will be really fun.

Arsenal’s newest signing Oleksandr Zinchenko has given his first interview with the official Arsenal website and he has made it clear that he supported the Gunners since he was a kid, watching players like Thierry Henry, and he says its a “dream come true” to finally wear the famous Red & White jersey.

His first words in the interview were: “Thank you so much. First of all I would like to say this is a boyhood dream come true, because I was a massive fan when I was a kid. Since Thierry Henry and young Cesc Fabregas was playing here, I was just enjoying watching those games, that Arsenal. And obviously I started to love this club, so I am so excited and I cannot wait to play for this amazing club.”

When asked about this picture from when he was a kid, Oleks said: “Yeah, I remember that was in Donetsk, when I was at the Shakhtar academy, and like I said already, it’s a dream come true.”

The deal was very quickly agreed between the player, Man City and Arsenal, and Zinchecko was asked if Mikel Arteta was instrumental in his decision to choose Arsenal. “I would say it’s the most important role in my decision because I’ve known Mister for a while, I used to work with him at Manchester City. Since the first day at City I knew that he’s going to be a very good manager. The way he can see football, especially I was watching the last season of Arsenal’s games and I was really enjoying it. You can see in the style, the picture of the game, so I would love to see it (while) playing and being involved.

“The way we were working together, I was so impressed because I remember how many times we were working hard in the training sessions and then straight after with individual stuff and I took a lot from the manager and I hope I can take even more.”

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

A quarter of Europe’s breeding seabirds spend spring in the UK, turning our coastline into a giant maternity unit. These noisy outcrops usually stink of bird poo. However, this year has been different. “Instead of the smell of guano, it’s the smell of death,” says Gwen Potter, a National Trust countryside manager working on the Farne Islands, off the coast of Northumberland. “It’s completely horrendous.”

This annual congregation of life has turned into a super-spreader event, as a highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1—also known as bird flu—sweeps through populations of breeding birds, causing devastating losses. More than 300 outbreaks have been reported in UK seabird colonies, and dozens of coastal sites have closed to the public.

The Farne Islands are home to 200,000 seabirds, including Arctic terns, Atlantic puffins, guillemots, kittiwakes, and razorbills. Potter is one of many conservationists swapping binoculars for a hazmat suit, picking up the bodies of birds she has spent her career trying to protect. Birds will sit on the ground, unable to move, twisting into unnatural positions, before dying. It is happening with chicks, too, still gently trying to flap as they die. “It sweeps through, takes everything in its path. It doesn’t seem to spare anything, really…We’ve collected thousands of dead birds, and that’s the tip of the iceberg. It’s just the scale of it which is hard to grasp,” she says.

Early observations suggest that how closely the bird’s nest is a key factor in how quickly the virus is transmitted. Guillemots nest quite densely, and kittiwakes are often next to them, which makes them vulnerable, although there is more space between them. Terns also nest densely and already 25 percent of the 350 sandwich terns on the Farne Islands are thought to have died, according to Potter. Some seabird chicks jump into the sea prematurely if their parents have died, while others starve in the nest.

Football really only has two seasons. The football season, where the football is played, and silly season, where the transfers happen.

From celebrity agents to players liking Instagram posts, ITKs and fans tracking planes, Marcus, Jim and Andy are on hand to lead you through the chaotic and simply bizarre world of modern transfers. Some hate it but if we're being honest, we kind of love it!

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Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was convicted Friday of defying a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. For all the sound and fury from Bannon about Justice Department overreach, the case wrapped with an almost inhuman speed. A jury in Washington, DC only had to deliberate for less than three hours before finding him guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress.

For months, Bannon had refused to provide documents to the committee or submit for a deposition despite being central to many of the key events prior to the insurrection.

As Mother Jones reported last week, Bannon was recorded prior to Election Day predicting that former President Donald Trump would falsely declare victory. On his podcast, War Room, he has also repeatedly accused Joe Biden of being an illegitimate president and said “stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.” 

Yep, that was our scoop you just heard as Liz Cheney closes the #January6thHearings.

Reporter @dfriedman33 got ahold of leaked audio of Steve Bannon confirming Trump had a plan to declare electoral victory, even if he was losing. Listen here:pic.twitter.com/ARr3M4qAjH

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill Thursday to legalize weed on the federal level, finally opening the floodgates to a conversation that activists (and stoners) have been working toward for decades. 

The Senate bill goes further than just pure legalization too. It “expunges federal cannabis-related records and creates funding for law enforcement departments to fight illegal cannabis cultivation,” Politico reported. 

But the chances of any of this becoming law are still slim. The bill is not expected to clear the 60-vote threshold for most legislation in the Senate. A minority of Democrats, including some from states that have already legalized weed, are not on board with changing federal law. Politico has the details:

Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, for example, represents a state where weed is legal—Montana—and says he does not support federal decriminalization. A handful of other Democrats told POLITICO that they are against legalization or are undecided, including Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.). 

That’s a huge bummer, but not entirely unexpected when you consider the demographics of Congress. As my colleague Abigail Weinberg so succinctly put it earlier this year: old people are much less inclined to support weed legalization and the Senate is really old…”11 senators over the age of 75″ levels of old.

In February, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced his plan to buy a badly needed new United States Postal Service delivery fleet. There was just one problem: Ninety percent of the trucks would be gas-powered, with fuel efficiency ratings less than half a mile per gallon better than those of the existing fleet.

Environmental groups sued. Lawmakers tried to step in. And then, earlier this week, the USPS announced a breakthrough: The agency said that 40 percent of its new fleet would be electric. That’s a smaller proportion of electric mail trucks than environmentalists wanted—a House bill called for 75 percent—but it’s more than double what anyone expected under DeJoy’s plan.

In March, the USPS said that its initial procurement of 50,000 trucks from manufacturer Oshkosh Defense would include 10,019 battery electric vehicles. Now, the agency is aiming to buy 25,000 electric trucks. It also will supplement its fleet with 34,500 commercially available trucks—trucks that aren’t made-to-order for the USPS—”including as many [battery electric vehicles] as are commercially available and satisfy operational needs.”

The announcement is a big step toward fulfilling President Biden’s goal of phasing out federal agencies’ use of gas-powered trucks. But proponents of an electric fleet argue that 40 percent emissions free vehicles is not enough. 

“Investing in an outdated technology never made sense, and I am glad the Postmaster General is belatedly coming to that commonsense realization,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who introduced the House bill calling for an electric fleet, said in a statement. “We still have more work to do, and Congress will continue to help push the USPS to a modern, green fleet.”

When Donald Trump won in 2016, after fully not expecting to upon announcing his run, the transition period was a chaotic mess, leaving hundreds of government positions unfilled. This time around, Trump’s allies won’t be asleep at the wheel, according to a new Axios report. But the result might be the same.

Trump’s team is planning on “purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his ‘America First’ ideology,” Axios‘ Jonathan Swan reported in a lengthy piece Friday morning. 

Using an executive order that would make it easier for Trump to fire federal employees, his White House would proceed to remake the Executive Branch in his image, ultimately turning over “thousands of mid-level staff jobs.” Here’s Axios on the plan (bolding in original):

The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department—including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say.

The result would be a fully-politicized civil service that, in effect, proves Trump’s own conspiracy theory correct. Once a MAGA Corps is installed, there would be a “Deep State,” just one loyal to Trump. Then his successor has the choice, as the report lays out, of “whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy.”

In mid-July, Sri Lanka’s government fell, with former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa bolting the country on a pre-dawn flight while protesters frolicked in the pool of his lavish mansion. The island nation of 22 million people, once one of the most prosperous in South Asia, had plunged into a severe economic crisis, characterized by empty grocery shelves, days’ long lines for gasoline, planned electricity outages lasting up to seven hours, and mass protests against the government. What happened? According to one prominent theory, it was all the result of a fateful decree Rajapaksa made in April 2021 to ban synthetic fertilizers and force the nation’s farmers—prodigious producers of rice and tea, among other crops—to embrace organic agriculture. 

Writing in The Wall Street Journal opinion page on July 14, Tunku Varadarajan, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society, summarized the case like this: “In an uprising that has its roots in Mr. Rajapaksa’s imperious decision to impose organic farming on the entire country—which led to widespread hunger after the agricultural economy collapsed—Sri Lanka’s people have wrought the first contra-organic national uprising in history.” 

Similar takes have emerged from Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who characterized Rajapaksa’s push for organic agriculture as a disaster-inducing “green new deal,” equating it to the stalled, never-implemented proposal by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D.-Mass.) (even though their GND never included a fertilizer ban or an organic mandate); and from members of the “ecomodernist” movement—a crew, centered around the Breakthrough Institute think-tank, that favors technology-centered, nuclear-powered responses to environmental crises. In a July 9 post on his Substack blog, Michael Shellenberger, the Breakthrough Institute’s co-founder and former president, opined that the “underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture.” 

Back in March, months before Rajapaksa’s inglorious exit, the prestigious magazine Foreign Policy ran a similar take on Sri Lanka’s then-already-mounting crisis. Co-authored by BTI executive director Ted Nordhaus, the article suggested that the “ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture” had triggered a range of ills—everything from a tumbling currency to rising inflation and poverty rates. 

Did that piece foretell the sequence of events that brought down Rajapaksa? And does the situation prove that any push to slash reliance in agrichemicals anywhere will produce “only misery,” as Nordhaus insisted? Unlike the Fox News and Wall Street Journal commentators, Nordhaus and Shellenberger both acknowledged that factors apart from organic agriculture played roles in Sri Lanka’s meltdown. But the two deans of ecomodernism also took pains to place the blame squarely on the removal of agrichemicals. Spoiler: Things on the ground in Sri Lanka were quite a bit more complicated than what these tirades suggest.