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Arteta defends Arsenal’s Covid postponement request

AFP

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has defended the club’s decision to apply for Sunday’s match with Tottenham to be postponed — a request that was granted by the Premier League but proved controversial.

The Gunners, who will host Liverpool in the second leg of the League Cup semi-final on Thursday, asked for last weekend’s game to be rescheduled with a number of players unavailable due to a mixture of international duty, injuries, suspension and coronavirus cases.

“We didn’t have the players necessary to put a squad out to compete in a Premier League match, that is 100 percent,” Arteta said at his pre-match press conference on Wednesday.

“This is a no-win situation. When we play the first three games of the season when other games were off, we were killed and called naive. Now we postpone a match for all the right reasons, believe me, and we get these reactions?”

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Spurs reacted angrily to the decision to call off the north London derby.

“It’s the first time in my life — and I’ve had a bit of experience in football — to see postponed games because of injuries,” said Tottenham boss Antonio Conte.

But Arteta hit back, saying: “We have been very consistent. We played (Nottingham) Forest (in the FA Cup) when we had 10 players out.

“It got to a point where we could not put a squad out, that is why we didn’t play. As simple as that.”

The Arsenal v Liverpool match at the Emirates Stadium should have been the first leg of the League Cup semi-final two weeks ago, before a coronavirus outbreak within the Liverpool camp led to its postponement.

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Arsenal held Liverpool to a goalless draw in the first leg last week despite playing more than an hour with 10 men after the dismissal of Granit Xhaka.

In his own press conference, Liverpool assistant manager Pep Lijnders said he had no complaints over recent Covid postponements both in the Premier League and the League Cup.

The Dutchman said it was impossible for anyone outside a club to know the full picture.

“It’s really difficult to judge from outside,” said Lijnders, who himself tested positive earlier this month during an outbreak at Liverpool.

“We saw this with our own situation.

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“I fully respect the submissions because I trust 100 percent the medical departments of each Premier League club. I think this is the most important thing, full trust in these decisions.”

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FBI Most Wanted Fugitive Arrested in Mexico and Deported to U.S.

Authorities in Mexico announced Thursday that Samuel Ramírez Jr., a U.S. citizen accused of murdering two women and listed among the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, was arrested in the northern state of Sinaloa.

Ramírez Jr., 33, was detained Tuesday in Culiacán just 1 hour and 13 minutes after being added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Ten Most Wanted list, the agency said in a statement.

The suspect, who was born in California, has already been deported to the U.S. state of Washington, where he faces charges related to the fatal shooting of two women at a bar in Federal Way in May 2023.

A court issued an arrest warrant for Ramírez in November last year, and the FBI initially offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to his capture, later increasing the amount to up to $1 million.

“To protect individuals’ privacy and ensure continued cooperation from the public, the FBI does not confirm the identity of those who provide information,” the agency said in its statement.

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UN experts warn Nicaragua runs vast transnational network to monitor exiled dissidents

Nicaragua maintains an “extensive” transnational network to monitor and intimidate opposition figures living in exile, affecting “hundreds of thousands” of people, the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua warned on Tuesday.

In a statement, the experts said their report “details an extensive transnational architecture of surveillance and intelligence used to monitor, intimidate and attack the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans living abroad.”

The report, which will be presented on March 16 to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, states that the structure maintained by the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo includes the army, the police, migration authorities and diplomatic missions.

According to the statement, “the government has arbitrarily stripped 452 Nicaraguans of their nationality, left thousands more exiled in a situation of de facto statelessness, and prevented many from returning to Nicaragua.”

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Trump: ‘We Think It’s True’ Amid Claims Iran’s Supreme Leader Was Killed

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he believes multiple reports claiming the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during the U.S. and Israeli offensive against the Islamic Republic are likely true, though he stopped short of confirming the news.

“We have a feeling that the information is correct,” he said, according to NBC News. “I don’t want to say anything definitive until I see it, but we think that’s the case. And many of their leaders have disappeared,” he added.

Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there were “many indications” that Khamenei had died in an attack on his residential compound.