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Mane and Salah’s penalty had the game wrapped up by half-time and Firmino completed his hat-trick from the spot as Jurgen Klopp’s men extended their unbeaten league start to 20 games and took another significant step towards a first league title since 1989/1990.
Win again in their next outing at Manchester City on Thursday and only a Liverpool collapse in the final months of the season can prevent an end to nearly three decades of hurt.
Champions City now trail the pace setters by 10 points and even if they reduce that lead to seven with victory at Southampton on Sunday, they need to end Liverpool’s invincible season so far to get back in the title race at the Etihad.
Tottenham’s title ambitions suffered a huge blow as Wolves scored three times in the final 18 minutes to win 3-1 at Wembley earlier on Saturday to further embolden Anfield with belief before kick-off.
That confidence could have been shaken when after a bright Liverpool start, it was Arsenal who led when Iwobi’s teasing cross perfectly dissected Alisson Becker and Virgil van Dijk, to leave Maitland-Niles with an open goal.
The signings of Alisson and Van Dijk have been credited for Liverpool’s rock solid defensive record with that goal just the eighth they have conceded all season in the league.
But that solidity is now being married with a return to the sort of form Salah, Firmino and Mane showed last season in smashing a combined 91 goals last season.
Firmino didn’t even have to look at the ball when he slotted the equaliser into an empty net after Sokratis’s attempted clearance rebounded off Mustafi into his path to quickly level.
However, the Brazilian did all the hard work himself two minutes later by jinking through Arsenal’s hapless central defensive pairing before drilling low past Bernd Leno.
Mane made it 3-1 on 32 minutes when Salah cushioned a cross perfectly into the Senegalese’s path to side-foot high into the net.
Arsenal were handed a let off moments later by referee Michael Oliver when Granit Xhaka was only given a final warning rather than a second booking in a matter of seconds for kicking the ball away in frustration.
But Oliver gave Liverpool the chance to extend their lead just before half-time when Salah tumbled under pressure from Sokratis in the box.
Leno got a touch to the Egyptian’s spot-kick but couldn’t stop Salah moving level with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Harry Kane as the Premier League’s top scorer on 13.
Liverpool could easily have had more after the break as only a poor touch from Salah allowed Leno to smother and the German ‘keeper also denied Fabinho, while at the other end Aubameyang’s blushes were saved by the offside flag when he fired over with an open goal gaping.
Salah gave up the chance to move clear in the race for the golden boot when Sead Kolasinac pushed Dejan Lovren 25 minutes from time and Firmino gratefully fired home the penalty to round off a five-star performance.
New international report shows uni study has little effect on salaries.
New Zealand university degrees are the most worthless in the developed world, an international report reveals.
The value of spending years at university has been severely dented by an OECD report that reveals tertiary study adds little to our earning power.
New Zealand is at the bottom of the global league tables. The net value of a man's tertiary education is just $63,000 over his working life, compared with $395,000 in the US. For a Kiwi woman, it's $38,000 over her working life.
The Government says it has already cut the number of poor-quality courses by at least 15 per cent, and wants to reduce or eliminate fees for lower-level qualifications - because students who complete them don't make any money out of their qualification.
One expert says much of what passes for school or even university education would be better suited to after-school activities. Professor Jacqueline Rowarth of Waikato University's management school said New Zealanders weren't paid well for tertiary qualifications and thousands of students were enrolling in expensive creative arts courses that won't help them get jobs.
The OECD annual report on the state of global education, published this month, reveals that New Zealand tertiary fees were seventh-highest among developed nations.
Rowarth said too many people were going to university. About half dropped out and still more were left with tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt and no job. "They're sold a crock by people telling them to follow their passion. We fund an awful lot of peculiar courses."
That was because people enrolled in courses they would enjoy, she said, so universities got funding for them and put more time into seeing how many more enjoyable subjects they could build up.
Tertiary education minister Steven Joyce, who has a zoology degree, said Government figures showing how much people earned four years after study were more positive. By that measure, those with a bachelor's degree earned 46 per cent more than those with a level-three school qualification.
Joyce said the Government kept an eye on under-performance at the lower levels of tertiary study. There was no improvement in pay for people who had done NZQA level-three and level-four certificates and diplomas. It was not until they reached a level five or six, or a level-seven degree, that earnings increased.
The Government wanted lower-level qualifications to have low or no fees, Joyce said, because there was no earning premium to pay back a loan.
Sir Peter Leitch, who sold his nationwide Mad Butcher business four years ago, said he had wondered what life would be like if he had gone to university. "My life might have been a bit better with an education but then I may not have been so pig-headed and determined."
When he was recruiting, Leitch did not set any store by qualifications. "I used to look people in the eye," he said. "There are two different types of education, academic and street smarts, which I have. I still don't know my alphabet or times tables."
Labour MP Louisa Wall, a vocal supporter of education as a way out of poverty, said the OECD findings were a concern. "The concern I have is the reality of people who get an MA or a PhD going overseas where they are remunerated and valued better."
Employers and Manufacturers Association boss Kim Campbell agreed. People at the top in business weren't paid anything near what counterparts overseas were getting because we didn't have the big companies that paid top dollar.
A top-level executive in New Zealand would be lucky to get 10 times the entry-level pay rate, he said. In the US, it was not uncommon to get 200 times that level.
Campbell said people needed to think about what they wanted to achieve with their qualifications. The Government should consider reinstating interest payments on some student loans. "The loan scheme needs to be adjusted so it's for skills that are essential."
But Auckland University of Technology Vice-Chancellor Derek McCormack said a degree was becoming vital to finding work.
"Any work that isn't human service, [such as] cafe work, anything that can be reduced to an algorithm, automated or sent offshore, will be. The jobs for people with no qualifications won't be there."
Professor Stuart McCutcheon, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Auckland, said his graduate's salaries increased rapidly as they moved to positions of responsibility. "However, wages are lower across the board and if Australia's economy continues to expand at a higher rate than New Zealand's, we will continue to face the brain drain of our most talented graduates," he said.
One sibling has a master's degree and 18 years' experience in the health sector. The other has a diploma and has been working since school.
Now one is "on the breadline" and the other has an above-average salary but if you think it's the super-qualified Melissa Osgood who has the healthier income, you're wrong.
Osgood changed careers at her brother Richard Green's urging after almost 20 years. After returning from overseas she found it hard to get mental health work.
Green said she'd be a good film producer so she studied film and began working her way up the career ladder again.
"It was a massive pay cut. I've now been poor for three years."
Green ignored expectations he'd go to university and worked overseas before doing a film diploma and setting up the Ugly Shakespeare theatre company, the longest-running theatre education company in New Zealand.
Green said people needed to start at the bottom and work hard.
After years of special treatment under Saddam, Palestinians in Iraq are getting a brutal postwar payback.
Though her light brown hair is matted with dust and her eyes are swollen from crying, Ibtesam Yahya Al-Assa'ad seems to glow when she talks about the Iraqi TV melodrama she starred in many years ago. Now a 43-year-old widowed mother of two, she continued to study theater as a graduate student until the war. She clutches a copy of her master's thesis, "The Aesthetics and Principles of the Environmental Theater," as if to prove that she doesn't belong in the barren refugee camp that's been her home since she fled anti-Palestinian violence in Baghdad two weeks ago.
Al-Assa'ad is one of 850 Iraqi Palestinians living in a refugee camp 50 kilometers over the Jordan border, near the squalid town of al-Ruweished. The refugees report a kind of anti-Palestinian pogrom in Baghdad: People are being evicted from their homes at gunpoint; their businesses are being expropriated; they are subjected to threats, robberies and beatings. A 26-year-old named Fouad pulls up a tie-dyed pant leg to show the bullet wound near his knee. He was shot when gunmen came to his house, fired a Kalashnikov at him, and said: "You are Palestinian. Get out."
But Fouad doesn't have anywhere else to go. Like most of the other refugees at al-Ruweished, he was born in Iraq, the child of a family that migrated following the 1948 war in Israel. He was part of a community of Iraqi Palestinians that numbered around 90,000, according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees. The community was favored and protected by Saddam Hussein's regime, which provided some of them with free housing in a show of Arab solidarity against Israel.
Now that the regime is gone, Palestinian refugees say, many Iraqis are turning on them, exacting revenge for what they perceive as the Palestinians' unfair advantages. With the U.S. failing to protect them, they're defenseless against the outbreak of communal violence that they say has driven them from their homes forever. Most are willing to restart their lives almost anywhere, if only they can find a safe, stable country that will have them.
Nazima Sulaiman, a 50-year-old mother of seven wearing a black robe and white hijab over her head, says that on the day Baghdad fell, a gang of armed men came to the house where she lived rent free and threatened her and her extended family, demanding they leave. "Ask Saddam to find you another home," they taunted her. With the streets in chaos and nowhere to go, though, Sulaiman's family stayed put. Two days later, while the family was having breakfast, someone tossed a grenade into their house. Her cousin's baby girl was killed, "her body smashed completely," she says. Seven others were injured.
According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, these attacks are part of a wave of violence against non-Iraqis living in Iraq; other victims have included Iranian Kurds, Sudanese and Somalis. The report notes that not all the Palestinian victims went to Jordan -- hundreds are living in Red Crescent tents on the soccer field of Baghdad's Haifa Sports Club.
Of course, Baghdad has been so convulsed with violence that there are victims from every ethnic group, but the Palestinians say they are more than just incidental casualties of chaos and looting. According to them, the explosion of violence between Iraqis, particularly Shiites, and Palestinians is part of what a merchant named Husam ali Hasan calls "an ancient hate." Aziza Ismail, a 53-year-old mother of five, recalls being threatened by Iraqis when she'd go shopping, but says, "We were in Saddam Hussein's protection."
Not all the refugees were cared for by the Iraqi government; many middle-class people in the camp insist they lived ordinary lives, side by side with Iraqis. "I didn't take anything from Saddam Hussein. I lived like the Iraqi people," says Baha'a, a 28-year-old office worker. "But the Iraqi people think we take their rights. I had Iraqi friends before the war, but I discover that Iraqi people are changing. They destroyed their country, burned their government buildings, and are stealing our houses."
Many people say armed mobs seized their shops and businesses -- that is, when they didn't destroy them outright. Thirty-eight-year-old Mohamed Abdullah owned a coffee shop in Baghdad. The day after the city fell, one of his customers came in with his family. All of them had guns, and they took it over. He, his wife, and their four children were also thrown out of their home.
These people seem blindsided by what has become of their lives. One man's Al-Rasheed Bank book shows a balance of 37 million Iraqi dinars, about $18,500. The bank was looted and he doesn't know if he'll ever recover the money, but he holds out the bank book as if offering evidence that he once amounted to something. Carsten Voelz, the CARE project manager for the camp, says that one man was complaining about the camp's food -- mainly bread and beans. "'It's not the food, it's the principle," Voelz said, recounting the man's complaint. "'If I could just go to the store and buy food -- I have $30,000 in my pocket.'"
In Al-Assa'ad's tent her 14-year-old son, Hassan, wearing plaid shorts and a T-shirt, sits in the corner and plays on his laptop, while her grave 16-year-old son, Sinan, watches his mother grow increasingly upset as she starts shouting, "Why am I here?" When he's alone, Sinan says the family will soon be returning to Baghdad, because "it's too horrible here." He was in his last year of high school and is still thinking about his examinations. But his mother is vehemently against going back, ever. "I don't have any place to go there," she says. "I want to go anywhere where there are good schools for my kids, where I can continue my Ph.D. and live a good life. We are human. We have a right to live." As she speaks, Sinan stares at the floor.
In interviews, none of the refugees expressed a desire to go to the West Bank or Gaza Strip, those troubled areas that might one day form a Palestinian state. Like many others in the camp, Al-Assa'ad hopes for admission into Jordan, whose population is 70 percent Palestinian, if only to stay there until she finds refuge in a third country. Many of the refugees have Jordanian relatives, even Jordanian spouses. But Jordan doesn't want them. Human Rights Watch reported that, in order to cross the Jordanian border, many Palestinian refugees had to sign documents promising to return to Iraq when the situation in Baghdad stabilizes.
These Palestinians, though, say Baghdad will never again feel safe to them. "All my relatives are in Jordan, but we will go anywhere except Iraq," says Aziza Ismail. "I'll never go back to Iraq. We're not safe with the Iraqi people."
Meanwhile, more refugees are trickling in every day. A man who owns a sewing factory says he's getting calls from friends and relatives in Baghdad warning him not to go home. "They ask if there is hope here or not," he says. "I tell them we are waiting."
Mike Pence Is Not The Only One From Trump's Inner Circle To Have Seen "Hamilton"
Just the only one who's been booed.
On Friday night, Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended the musical Hamilton on Broadway, where he was met with a round of boos from the audience and an impassioned speech from the cast.
While the show's pro-immigrant and pro-diversity themes may seem an odd choice of entertainment for the conservative politician, he's not the only member of Donald Trump's inner circle to have seen the musical.
Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner attended in March while she was pregnant.
And Kellyanne Conway, Trump's former campaign manager, also seems to be familiar with the musical. She recently asked Trump's Attorney General pick, Jeff Sessions, if he's seen it himself.
While the message of the musical is one of diversity and inclusion, the show's expensive tickets and its lack of accessibility to those outside of New York can give the impression of liberal elitism — the very same thing the Trump campaign promised to fight against.
The historian Niall Ferguson has even speculated that Trump's election win was "in some sense, a vote against Hamilton, with its celebration of multicultural America as heir to the American Revolution."
BuzzFeed News has reached out to the Trump campaign to find who else has seen, or is familiar with, the musical.
So far, Trump social media director Dan Scavino said he hadn't seen it, but Republican National Committee communications director Sean Spicer said, "No, but if you've got the inside scoop on how to get tickets let me know."
March for Our Lives: A tipping point?
No one can deny the Parkland students “their grief,” said Rich Lowry in NationalReview.com. But while putting on outrage-filled marches feels cathartic, “passion is not wisdom.” Egged on by liberal adults, these students demonize every gun owner and politician who disagrees with them as not merely wrong, but as “the equivalent of murderers.” The NRA and its supporters, said rally organizer David Hogg, “want to keep killing our children.” Missing from their fear-driven diatribes was one basic, “indisputable fact,” said Robby Soave in Reason.com: “Gun violence has declined precipitously over the past 25 years,” despite the fact that the number of guns in circulation has doubled. Schools are no exception, with four times as many children shot dead in schools in the early 1990s than today, according to one study.
Shun Classic Santoku is used for just about every cutting job in the kitchen. Hollow-ground indentations on the blade help reduce friction so the blade glides through the food more easily. When the Shun Classic Hollow-Ground Santoku was first introduced to the market, it was named “Kitchen Knife of the Year” by Blade magazine. Handcrafted in Japan.
Josiah is The CRICKET Center in Worcester's new facility dog who works with children who are the victims of alleged crimes.
Josiah is the newest addition to The CRICKET Center in Berlin.
Though the 2-year-old golden retriever and Labrador mix spends much of the work day playing games and snuggling up to children, he serves an important role in the center's work with young victims of alleged crimes.
Josiah has only been with Worcester County's child advocacy center for about a month, but Executive Director Wendy Myers said the staff already jokes he's the organization's best employee, though the most underpaid.
He was placed with The CRICKET Center through Canine Companions for Independence, which breeds, raises and trains assistance dogs, including facility dogs like Josiah that work with organizations such as child advocacy centers.
At home, Myers, Josiah's handler, said he's just like any other dog, but when he comes into the center, he's always ready to work.
"Josiah is specially trained to do many things that he won't need to do like tug socks off, for example, but he still knows those commands, and if he needs to do that, he can," she said. "But he's mostly here to provide comfort to our victims and he also provides comfort to our staff who, of course, it's really important to take care of."
When children and their families come into the center for forensic interviews, she said Josiah's there to greet them and interacts with them if they return for therapy or other services as well.
So far, he's learned to play two games, but Myers said he's also very good about sensing when a teenager, for example, might simply want to relax and snuggle with him instead.
During trauma-based therapy, Myers said the therapist often works with children on their deep breathing, and one of the activities they use to reinforce that technique is blowing bubbles, which Josiah then gets to pop.
"That's a really fun way for them to remember how to breathe, and it's fun for him too," Myers said. "He likes that because the bubbles are peanut butter flavored."
The ultimate goal, Myers said, is to actually have Josiah in the courtroom with children when they testify.
She said the county's judges are interested in seeing that happen, and the state's attorney's office has already been working with the center on facilitating his acclimation to the courtroom.
When court's not session, Myers has been able to take Josiah into the courtroom to introduce him to that environment and she'll soon start having him interact with non-victims in that setting so that he can get a feel for this new responsibility.
She said she's not worried about him behaving because he's quiet and knows to check in with her periodically to make sure he's doing exactly she wants, especially if he notices a change in her voice, but she does want to make sure she's comfortable working with him in court.
"When he's wearing his vest, he very much knows what his role is," Myers said.
In the courtroom, Jessica Reiss, Canine Companions participant program manager, said a facility dog like Josiah can help with consistency.
When the dog is brought in, she said they typically already have a relationship with the child, which means there's a familiar figure there to help them through their testimony.
"The dog is with them so they don't feel so alone," Reiss said.
Canine Comapnion's assistance dogs are all trained the same way, she said, which begins with an evaluation of the dogs' temperament, ability to learn new skills, socialization and interactions.
The dogs are then trained to perform approximately 40 to 50 commands, which includes tasks like opening and closing doors and drawers, turning light switches on and off and retrieving items.
Both individuals and facilities interested in getting an assistance dog from Canine Companions go through a five-step application process, Reiss said, before they're placed on a waiting list so that they can be matched with the ideal assistance dog.
For a facility dog, she said it can take about six months to a year to match organizations with the right dog for their particular environment and needs.
Once that match is made, the dog's new handler is brought to a Canine Companions training center for two weeks to meet their new assistance dog and learn everything they need to know about how to work with their dog and manage them in public.
"Because our dogs are in public, we want to make sure that they're very appropriate, they're behaving appropriately, they're being managed properly and they're representing their organization," Reiss said.
In the past five years, she said facility dogs have become increasingly more common as organizations learn about them through word of mouth and research the benefits of having a victim, for example, interact with a professionally trained dog on a regular basis.
Canine Companions has found that a dog can be helpful in bridging the gap between a therapist and a child, Reiss said. For example, many of the dogs are trained to bowl, and that's an activity that can help make a child more comfortable and destigmatize everything else going around them.
Letting a child who might have to go through multiple sessions of forensic interviews work with the dog periodically on learning a new command can also help build self-esteem, she said.
During a forensic interview, Reiss said children sometimes find it's easier to tell a story to the dog rather than the actual interviewer.

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