Sam Finley, a midfielder for Rovers from Tranmere, received a 13-game ban for making homophobic remarks to an opponent player.
The 32-year-old midfielder admitted to a misconduct charge from the Football Association for a comment made to Jamille Matt in a League Two game in January.
Due to Finley’s prior offenses, the lengthy suspension is one match over the 12-game upper limit for an aggravated breach involving “abusive, indecent, or insulting words or behavior.”
Prior to this, Finley was facing a four-game ban and fine for a homophobic comment made to a referee in February 2016 while he was playing for AFC Fylde – .
Diogo Dalot, a Portugal defender, may miss the remainder of the season due to a calf injury, according to Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim.
Dalot was the only substitute in Amorim’s effort to keep him fresh for the final two games of the season when he lost to Wolves last Sunday, going 1-0.
However, the versatile full-back is suffering from a muscle strain that threatens to end his campaign abruptly.
The release date for Diogo Dalot is. Something is in his calf, either in the muscle or the cow. Before Sunday’s Premier League game against Bournemouth, Amorim declared to reporters that he would not play these next games.
Dalot has made 51 appearances for United this season, with only one game missing due to a suspension.
Amorim responded, “There is that possibility, but I don’t know. I don’t know. Because he works a lot and recovers well, we’ll keep an eye on him week by week.
He consistently played a series of games. Some of the players have to play a lot of minutes, but we made an effort to manage. ”
With a crucial Europa League semi-final first leg trip to Athletic Bilbao looming on Thursday, Dalot’s absence is a blow to United.
United limp finished the weekend in 14th place in the Premier League.
The team’s worst league result since 1973-74 could be predicted by Amorim, who took Erik ten Hag’s place in November.
INCLUDE At the end of the season, Leicester will be a ‘Greatest-Ever’ Vardy to leave.
Things can change, according to the saying.
On April 17, 2025, Manchester United’s English defender #05 Harry Maguire (2L) and his teammates celebrate with their fans after Maguire nets their fifth goal in the UEFA Europa League quarter-final, second leg football match between Manchester United and Lyon at Old Trafford Stadium in Manchester, north of England. (Photo by Oli SCARFF/AFP)
United are already assured of their worst points total since 1992 when the Premier League was first introduced.
Even if United win the Europa League, a significant overhaul of their underperforming squad is likely.
Amorim, who was unsure about whether he knew the players he wanted to sell in the off-season, responded, “Yes, I could say that.
We must start conversations at the end of the week, of course, but I have a clear idea because things need to be done early. However, until the season’s end, things can change. ”
United’s target list includes Brazil international Matheus Cunha, but Amorim was uninterested in talking about the Brazil international.
I won’t comment on Matheus because, if I say something once, I’ll have to say whether it’s yes or no, so I won’t comment on it,” he said.
We’re looking forward to this season. It’s difficult to predict what will happen in the future because of how we will prepare for these games the first season. ”
With Champions League qualification on offer for the tournament winner, the United must lift the Europa League to prepare for European action next term.
Despite their European status, Amorim reaffirmed that United would continue to be a desirable club for elite players.
Manchester United, you say. There are many players who want to play for our club, he said.
According to me, if you look at our club at the moment, it may seem like there are some issues with the staff, people leaving, changing coaches, and the outcomes.
However, the player can explain it to them in the most straightforward way. Then, every player wants to play for Manchester United. ”
After a gunman at Florida State University killed two people and wounded at least six others last week, an advocacy group posted about firearm-related deaths.
“Gun violence is the leading killer of college-aged people in the US”, Moms Demand Action, part of gun violence prevention organisation Everytown for Gun Safety, posted on April 17 on Threads. “Our young people deserve better”.
According to health experts and the most recent data, the statement is accurate for firearm-related deaths in this class of young people.
Everytown for Gun Safety released a 2023 report citing 2021 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data showing firearms are the number one mechanism of death for people aged 18 to 25. Everytown for Gun Safety spokesperson Katie Wertheimer also pointed to a 2022 article published in the journal Pediatrics that found “firearms are the leading cause of death in children and youth 0 to 24 years of age in the United States”.
PolitiFact queried the CDC’s , Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System , for data on the most recent injury deaths for ages 18 to 25. In 2023, firearms were the mechanism that accounted for the most deaths in that age group, at 8, 086. For ages 24 and 25, drug poisoning was the top cause.
CDC data showed accidents, followed by suicide and homicide, were the leading causes of death among people aged 18 to 25. These categories all include firearm-related deaths. Brian Tsai, a CDC spokesperson, told PolitiFact that although the agency does not rank firearm deaths as a leading cause of death because they occur across categories, “our data does show that firearms are the leading mechanism of injury mortality”.
“Categories for ranking cause of death must be mutually exclusive and it has been CDC’s longstanding policy to rank the homicide, suicide and unintentional injury categories”, Tsai said in an email. “CDC does not classify firearms as a cause of death, but rather as a mechanism by which death occurs (same is true for motor vehicle accidents)”.
The CDC considers unintentional firearm injuries as “fatal or nonfatal firearm injuries that happen while someone is cleaning or playing with a firearm or other incidents of an accidental firing without evidence of intentional harm”.
In 2023, CDC data showed unintentional injuries (14, 238) were the leading cause of death among people ages 18 to 25, followed by suicide (5, 632) and homicide (5, 060). Narrowing down to deaths by firearm, the majority were homicides (4, 651), followed by suicides (3, 158).
Gun-rights advocates question whether the term “gun violence” should include suicides. Countries, such as Canada and Australia, include firearm suicide in that term. Surveys about gun violence use varying language and criteria on including suicide deaths.
Daniel Webster, distinguished scholar for the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, told PolitiFact the Moms Demand Action statement is accurate.
Veronica Pear, a University of California Davis School of Medicine social epidemiologist and assistant professor, also said the statistic is accurate, based on 2023 mortality data, noting that “gun violence” includes suicide and homicide.
Wertheimer referred PolitiFact to a 2024 article by KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News, that said firearm-related deaths among ages 18 to 25 “are predominantly due to homicides”.
Shootings on school and college grounds appear to make up a small portion of firearm-related deaths among people aged 18 to 25. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, there have been 463 deaths from gunfire on school grounds since 2013. An average of 4, 300 children and teens, up to age 19, were shot and killed per year from 2019 to 2023, Everytown for Gun Safety reported.
Our ruling
Moms Demand Action said “gun violence is the leading killer of college-aged people in the US”.
Accidental deaths ranked number 1 for people ages 18 to 25 in 2023, and firearms were the “leading mechanism”, according to the CDC.
If Barry Ferguson stays at Rangers after the end of the season, he vows to “make them a better club” and won’t look for another managerial position in the future.
The 47-year-old had previously served as the club ambassador before being appointed interim manager following Philippe Clement’s departure in late February, and the former captain made an announcement that he would step down from his previous position in the interim.
Ferguson, who has won four victories from his ten games in charge, said, “No” in terms of managing elsewhere in the future.
“I enjoyed my time working for Rangers before, and I’m hoping to return and enjoy what I was doing.”
Ferguson’s temporary appointment came as a surprise because he had been a member of Alloa Athletic for three years.
After serving as player-manager at Blackpool, he also managed clubs like Clyde and Kelty Hearts.
He continued, “I am aware of what this club needs.” Rangers Football Club should achieve what I can.
“I’ve enjoyed every second of it, and I got an opportunity I never thought I would get.” Some of the outcomes have hurt me, which I haven’t enjoyed. Because it is a big challenge, I enjoy the challenge.
“I always have my back.” We just need to wait and see, even though I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m confident that I can do the job with the staff I’ve hired.
One of the most important decisions made at Ibrox is the head coach’s position, which the club confirmed this week as the first time they are negotiating with American investors, including the San Francisco 49ers, about a potential takeover of the club.
And this summer, Everton’s football director Kevin Thelwell will move to Rangers to take over the position of sporting director.
Ferguson said, “He’s an experienced guy, he’s been about a lot of clubs, a lot of big clubs as well, so I think it was a appointment that was necessary.
Kyiv, Ukraine – Serhiy Parkhomenko’s two-storey apartment building stood right next to its twin that was struck and levelled by a Russian missile early on Thursday.
The unbearably red, eardrum-rupturing explosion killed 12, wounded 87, gouged out windows and damaged roofs in dozens of nearby buildings of the tranquil, leafy neighbourhood in northwestern Kyiv.
The shockwave caused Pakhomenko’s steel entrance door to fly through his living room, flattening a cosy armchair he or his wife used to sit in during hundreds of earlier shellings.
Luckily, they were in bed during the 1am [23:00 GMT on Wednesday] strike, the largest in Kyiv since the July 2024 bombing that damaged Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital and killed 34.
The Parkhomenkos hastily grabbed their documents and rushed outside. Serhiy also managed to drag his 68-year-old next-door neighbour out of the debris of his apartment.
“I have been really lucky,” Parkhomenko, 60, a telecommunications expert, told Al Jazeera, standing next to his broken furniture and a flatscreen TV that somehow remained intact.
What most confounds him has been the White House’s inaction over the death and destruction caused by Russia in Ukraine since Donald Trump’s re-election as United States president.
Trump turns a “blind eye” to what Russian President Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine, Parkhomenko insisted.
Serhiy Parkhomenko points to the steel door that flew across his living room after the Thursday morning missile strike [Mansur Mirovalev/Al Jazeera]
The neighbour he had saved was sitting on a bench wrapped in a blanket, his face cut and bruised, and kept repeating: “You won’t frighten us.”
Even though Trump wrote “Vladimir, STOP!” in a social media post on Thursday, US Vice President JD Vance said a day earlier that Washington would refuse to mediate peace talks if Kyiv and Moscow don’t start them within days.
“We’ve shown them the finish line,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday in the Oval Office after news of the strike on Kyiv. “We need both of them to say yes, but what happened last night with those missile strikes should remind everybody of why this war needs to end.”
Close to Parkhomenko was an American who arrived in Kyiv to teach Ukrainian servicemen English and join Dobrobat, a volunteer group that rebuilds houses all over the war-battered nation.
“I feel a moral obligation to come and help,” Tom Satterthwaite, who once led researchers on salmon spawning in Oregon’s dammed rivers, told Al Jazeera while hauling broken bricks and stucco downstairs.
He said the White House had failed to uphold its security guarantees to Kyiv, according to the Budapest Memorandum.
The 1994 deal prohibited Moscow, Washington and London from using military force against Ukraine in return for its abandonment of nuclear weapons.
Kyiv inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear stockpile from the Soviet Union after its 1991 collapse but agreed to transfer it to Russia in return for the security guarantees.
“Ukraine got the shaft on the deal,” Satterthwaite said.
Tom Satterthwaite, an American volunteer from Oregon, helps remove debris following Russia’s missile strike on Kyiv on Thursday [Mansur Mirovalev/Al Jazeera]
Saved by her glasses
The destruction and debris after the shelling seemed shockingto some foreign volunteers. But to the head of the Dobrobat volunteer group that invites and hosts them, the scene was familiar.
“We got used to it,” Dmytro Ivanov told Al Jazeera as other volunteers ran up and down the stairs in Parkhomenko’s building. “We see it every day.”
Russia’s strike on Ukraine on Thursday involved 70 missiles and 145 explosives-laden drones.
The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, claimed that the strike had targeted “military and military-adjacent sites”.
But the destroyed house next door to Parkhomenko was about a kilometre away from the Antonov Serial Production Plant, a century-old aircraft manufacturer that once produced Mriya (Dream), the world’s largest plane. The plant was burned down by Russian troops in February 2022.
But the strike on Thursday did not hit the plant if that was indeed the target.Instead, it damaged a dozen apartment buildings in the area.
The shockwave from the missile strike on Thursday damaged nearby cars and buildings in Kyiv [Mansur Mirovalev/Al Jazeera]
Most of the victims were in the building next to Parkhomenko’s, which was almost completely levelled.
One of the survivors was Yelena, a blonde woman in her 40s whose impeccable hairdo, makeup and glasses contrasted with everything around her.
The glasses are what saved her, seconds after the strike when she moved to grab them – and her upstairs neighbour’s gas stove fell on the spot she’d just been standing in.
The blast collapsed the inner walls and ceiling of her first-floor corner apartment, while her husband Viktor saved his upstairs neighbour’s two-year-old girl from the debris.
She and her husband crawled outside to see their car mauled by the shockwave, while natural gas pipes in the building were “bursting like ropes” and neighbours yelled for help, she told Al Jazeera.
They spent hours helping them in the darkness and panic before finding out the girl’s mother had been killed.
Rescue workers continue to search for bodies in the debris of an apartment building in Kyiv, destroyed by a Russian missile on early Thursday [Mansur Mirovalev/Al Jazeera]
‘There are still people down there’
At dawn, once the shock and adrenaline had worn off, Yelena realised her hair was full of broken glass, brick fragments and asbestos dust.
She rushed to her relative’s apartment to clean up and then came back to retrieve whatever was left of her belongings.
“No apartment, no car, no stuff,” she said with a sardonic smile, standing next to a dozen black garbage bags with her belongings and a microwave-sized power bank she’d been using during blackouts caused by Russia’s strikes on energy infrastructure.
Rescue workers kept excavating the debris looking for survivors, while officials registered the residents. Communal workers unfurled and cut pieces of transparent plastic film to replace broken window glass.
“There are still people down there,” Yelena said.
The strike took place on the 99th day of Trump’s second presidency whose boastful pledge to end Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II “within 24 hours” has proved futile.
The Kremlin has continued to produce conditions for a ceasefire – and continues the ferocious shelling of Ukrainian cities almost daily.
“They say they hit military sites, but keep striking civilian areas,” Viktor, a 59-year-old survivor whose face and scalp were cut by glass shards, told Al Jazeera as he stood next to his 90-year-old mother.
World-class Canadian athlete Gabriela DeBues-Stafford has been added to the Belfast Irish Milers Meet entries despite the pressure of English star Phoebe Gill’s decision to withdraw from the event’s schedule.
Gill, a 17-year-old at the time, set a new record for the under-18 age group by breaking the 45-year-old European under-18 record by clocking one minute 57.86 to claim a runaway 800m victory at the Belfast meeting last year.
The St. Albans runner, who won the UK Olympic trials before making it to the semi-finals of the Paris Games, was scheduled to run the 1500-meter race in Belfast on May 10 but had to miss the Mary Peters Track due to injury.
After having an incredible impact last year, meeting director Eamonn Christie said, “Phoebe has said she intends to be back in Belfast in 2026.”
Gabriela DeBues-Stafford, who won the 3, 000-meter race in her second Olympics, is the most recent addition to the meet despite losing Phoebe. She finished fifth in the 1500-meter race in Tokyo.
Rowland coached DeBues-Stafford.
The Canadian, who is currently being trained in Edinburgh by Mark Rowland, a 1988 Olympic 3, 000m steeplechase medalist, had a shaky 2022 and 2023 campaign. She is now very much on the rebound after missing out on last year’s competition in Paris.
“Gabriela’s 3, 000m personal best is a very quick 8: 33.92, and she wants to hit that pace on May 10,” Christie said. “I’m sorting the pacemakers so she has every chance to do that,” Christie said.
She contacted me to ask if she could reserve a spot after learning about the meeting, and I’m only too happy to accommodate an athlete of this caliber.
Other notable names will compete in Belfast, including British Olympic relay champion Sam Reardon, who also holds a double Olympic medal from Paris.
Callum Dodds, a former world champion, and his fellow Great Britain internationals Daniel Rowden and Tom Randolph will compete in the men’s 800m field, while the 21-year-old will compete over the 400m.
Dodds broke the record for one minute and 45 seconds at the meet for the first time, beating Randolph, who also went under the mark of one minute 45, but Rowden will be the fastest man on personal bests in the 800-meter field thanks to his personal best of 1: 43.95 from 2023.
