The Women’s Super League’s December goal-of-the-month compilation will probably include three contributions from this match. Arsenal scored two of them and climbed to second in the table as half-volleys from Katie McCabe and Olivia Smith helped them on their way to a valuable victory.
It will have felt all the more satisfying for Arsenal after Chelsea dropped points against Everton last Sunday. They were momentarily given a scare when Honoka Hayashi levelled the scores in a frenetic first-half spell, but that proved to be a rare Everton attack in a contest that was otherwise managed well by Arsenal’s midfield.
It’s just over 15 minutes to go before kick-off – let’s remind ourselves of the Women’s Super League Standings after 10 games. Stating the obvious, fourth is not where Arsenal hoped to be; out of the Women’s Champions League spots as it stands. But a long way to go!
Ruby Mace was a defensive colossus for Everton last Sunday – and, of course, the 22-year-old is a former Arsenal player. Safe to say she’ll be motivated this afternoon.
Women’s football is booming – but the bigger it’s got, the messier it’s become for players. Through it all, the hot tip for Sports Personality of the Year has kept a cool head
At the end of last year, Chloe Kelly was seriously considering stepping away from football. She was deeply unhappy at Manchester City, her team since 2020, where it seemed as if they wouldn’t let her play, nor let her leave. She wasn’t getting enough time on the pitch, so wasn’t sure that she would be selected for England, who were preparing to defend the title she had helped win in 2022 in the Euros tournament. She was 26, about to turn 27. She had been a professional footballer since she was 18, but her mother was starting to get concerned. She desperately wanted her daughter to be happy again. “I remember my mum coming up to see me and she was meant to go home, but she didn’t go home, because she was so worried,” recalls Kelly.
Less than a year later, and things are very different. At the time of writing, Kelly is favourite to win Sports Personality of the Year after a history-making comeback. At the end of January, she was loaned to Arsenal and in May shelifted the Champions League trophy with the team, very much the underdogs in the final against Barcelona, whom they defeated 1-0. At the end of July, she scored that penalty for England, securing them a second Euros title, against arch-rivals Spain. She was fifth in the Ballon D’or Féminin, and named in the Fifpro World 11 squad for the first time – a peer-voted list of the best footballers in the world. Against the odds, then, 2025 has turned out to be a great year. “For sure,” Kelly smiles. “To bounce back, that’s what makes it the best year of my career.”
Blaine McGraw accused of inappropriately touching and secretly filming patients during appointments on base
Another 81 women have joined a civil suit against a US army gynecologist who was recently criminally charged in connection with accusations that he secretly filmed dozens of his patients during medical examinations.
The civil lawsuit, which initially began in November, alleges that Blaine McGraw, a doctor and army major at Fort Hood in Texas, repeatedly inappropriately touched and secretly filmed dozens of women during appointments at an on-base medical center.
Women are trailblazing efforts in the UK and US to improve sustainability on film and TV sets, from donating catering and rehoming props to reducing emissions
It’s two days before Thanksgiving and Hillary Cohen and Samantha Luu are trying to figure out how they’re going to cook 120 turkeys with limited oven space in their food warehouse in downtown LA. “We’re going to have to do a bit of spatchcocking. It’s not very showbiz,” Cohen says.
It’s the busiest time of year for Cohen and Luu, assistant directors who founded not-for-profit organisation Every Day Action during the Covid pandemic. Designed to help unhoused people and those facing food insecurity across the city, the idea was born when Cohen noticed the amount of food waste on film and TV sets, and looked into redistributing it to those in need. “I remember asking, ‘Why can’t we donate this food?’ I kept being told it was illegal and that people could sue us if they got sick.” It didn’t take Luu, who grew up working in a soup kitchen her father founded, long to establish this was not the case. “In the US, there’s the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act that’s been around since 1996,” she says. “It protects food donors from liability issues.”
Tribute to Sylvia Townsend Warner follows campaign to nominate overlooked women
“The thing all women hate is to be thought dull,” says the title character of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel, Lolly Willowes, an early feminist classic about a middle-aged woman who moves to the countryside, sells her soul to the devil and becomes a witch.
Although women’s lives are so limited by society, Lolly observes, they “know they are dynamite … know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are”.
Dying is a process and in a person’s final hours and days, Nickie and her Threshold Choir are there to accompany people on their way and bring comfort. Through specially composed songs, akin to lullabies, the choir cultivates an environment of love and safety around those on their deathbed. For the volunteer choir members, it is also an opportunity to channel their own experiences of grief and together open up conversations about death.
Plummeting birth rates mean that without attracting immigration, many countries are sliding towards collapse
I know what “civilisational erasure” looks like: I’ve seen the graph. The European Commission published it in March. It’s a chart of total fertility rate: the average number of children born per woman. After a minor bump over the past 20 years, the EU rate appears to be declining once more, and now stands at 1.38. The UK’s is 1.44. A population’s replacement rate is 2.1. You may or may not see this as a disaster, but the maths doesn’t care what you think. We are gliding, as if by gravitational force, towards the ground.
Civilisational erasure is the term the Trump administration used in its new national security strategy, published last week. It claimed that immigration, among other factors, will result in the destruction of European civilisation. In reality, without immigration there will be no Europe, no civilisation and no one left to argue about it.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Free Birth Society (FBS) is a multimillion-dollar business that promotes an extreme version of free birth, meaning women giving birth without medical assistance. The Guardian can now reveal that the organisation has been linked to dozens of cases of maternal harm and baby deaths around the world. After a year-long investigation, Sirin Kale and Lucy Osborne explain why some women they interviewed found FBS’s views so appealing, and why medical professionals say their claims about birth are dangerous
Marc Skinner, the Manchester United manager, defended his decision to make five changes after his team were outplayed in the Champions League.
Melchie Dumornay’s two sumptuous late goals produced a margin of victory that was no less than OL Lyonnes deserved when United failed to lay a glove on their opponents.
The Chelsea captain, Millie Bright, had dismissed any suggestions that the team were in crisis after a first league defeat in 34 games, and six goals in a comprehensive victory against Roma in their penultimate game of the Champions League group phase put those thoughts to bed.
An own goal broke the fight of Roma early on, with further goals from Wieke Kaptein, Johanna Rytting Kaneryd, Sjoeke Nüsken, Maika Hamano and Lucy Bronze.
The Free Birth Society was selling pregnant women a simple message. They could exit the medical system and take back their power. By free birthing. But Nicole Garrison believes FBS ideology nearly cost her her life. This is episode one of a year-long investigation by Guardian journalists Sirin Kale and Lucy Osborne
Mary Wrenn points out that women given custodial sentences in Wales are sent to prisons in England, which has a negative impact on families
Simon Hattenstone, quoting Ministry of Justice figures, says “the self-harm rate in women’s prisons in England and Wales was at a record high” (Report, 3 December). It is worth remembering that Wales does not have a women’s prison. Women given custodial sentences in Wales are sent to prisons in England (Cheshire or Gloucestershire, for example). This clearly has a negative impact on families, especially children.
The Welsh government’s preventive and trauma-informed approach favours the creation of residential women’s centres as a community-based alternative to short prison sentences. A pioneering project in Swansea, in development with the Ministry of Justice, is shockingly delayed. It can’t come soon enough for the hundreds of Welsh women (the majority of whom are themselves victims of domestic abuse or trauma) currently serving sentences several hours away from their families. Mary Wrenn Llandenny, Monmouthshire
Women say fears were dismissed and help was unavailable at crucial moments during labour
Almost one in five women feel their concerns were not taken seriously by healthcare professionals during childbirth, according to the “concerning” results of a national survey of maternity experiences.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) survey of almost 17,000 women who gave birth across England in NHS settings this year found that 15% felt they had not been given relevant advice or support when they contacted a midwife at the start of their labour, while 18% said their concerns had not been taken seriously.
Women work longer and per hour earn a third of what men are paid, in figures that have changed little in 35 years, UN report shows
“Gender inequality is one of the most entrenched and significant problems of our time,” says Jocelyn Chu, a programme director at UN Women, responding to the stark figures contained in this year’s World Inequality report, which labels gender inequality a “defining and persistent feature of the global economy”.
Women work longer and earn just a third – 32% – of what men get per hour, when paid and unpaid labour, such as domestic work, are taken into account. Even when unpaid domestic labour is not included, women only earn 61% of what men make, according to the report.
Arsenal qualified for the Champions League knockout phase after a narrow but industrious victory at Meadow Park, with Beth Mead’s early finish enough to overcome Twente.
Arsenal are guaranteed to come inside the top 12 of the 18-team league phase and may still have a chance to reach the top four and go straight into the quarter-finals depending on results on Wednesday and if they can then win their last game in Belgium against Leuven next week.
Our UN report reveals the link between the online misogyny and offline crimes that are hounding women out of public life
Networked misogyny is now firmly established as a key tactic in the 21st-century authoritarian’s playbook. This is not a new trend – but it is now being supercharged by generative AI tools that make it easier, quicker and cheaper than ever to perpetrate online violence against women in public life – from journalists to human rights defenders, politicians and activists.
The objectives are clear: to help justify the rollback of gender equality and women’s reproductive rights; to chill women’s freedom of expression and their participation in democratic deliberation; to discredit truth-tellers; and to pave the way for the consolidation of authoritarian power.
Dr Julie Posetti is the director of the Information Integrity Initiative at TheNerve, a digital forensics lab founded by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa. She is also a professor of journalism and chair of the Centre for Journalism and Democracy at City St George’s, University of London.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Soon-to-be parents hired a woman they believed would act as a licensed midwife. But she in fact belonged to a radical society that was linked to baby deaths around the world
Ernesta Chirwa recalls the jarring moment the woman she presumed was her midwife said something unexpected. Caitlyn Collins was driving her to hospital after 6am, on 15 February 2022. “She said,” says Chirwa, who is 30 and lives in Cape Town, “Please don’t mention to the nurses that we were trying to have a home birth.”
Chirwa was in too much pain to speak – she was in active labour. But she remembers feeling surprised. “Why,” Chirwa recalls, “is she asking us not to mention that we were trying to have a home birth?”
It’s one thing facing a major diagnosis; it’s quite another dealing with your partner pulling away. But does the stereotype match the reality?
Jess never dreamed that she was going to get sick, nor did she consider what it would mean for her love life if she did. When she first started dating her boyfriend, they were both in their late 20s, living busy, active lives. “Sport was something we did a lot of and we did it together: we worked hard, played hard, we went for bike rides and went running and played golf together.”
But around a year into their relationship, all that stopped abruptly when Jess was diagnosed with long Covid, the poorly understood syndrome that in some people follows a Covid infection. For her, it meant “a general shutdown of my body: lungs, heart, stomach, really bad brain fog”. She went from being a sporty, independent 29-year-old with a successful career to sleeping all day and relying on her boyfriend for everything.
Venues promoting destruction as stress relief are appearing around the UK but experts – and our correspondent – are unsure
If you find it hard to count to 10 when anger bubbles up, a new trend offers a more hands-on approach. Rage rooms are cropping up across the UK, allowing punters to smash seven bells out of old TVs, plates and furniture.
Such pay-to-destroy ventures are thought to have originated in Japan in 2008, but have since gone global. In the UK alone venues can be found in locations from Birmingham to Brighton, with many promoting destruction as a stress-relieving experience.
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