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Reflecting back on Van Bronckhorst’s demise, a large part of the support wanted him gone too, just not with the same ferocity Martin is experiencing.

How many might welcome him back now, or wish to go back to a time when European finals seemed achievable?

The Dutchman’s credentials clearly are valued by English Premier League-winning Liverpool boss Arne Slot, no less, who appointed him as assistant manager at Anfield this summer after a short-lived tenure at Besiktas.

High points under him, though, were balanced by uninspiring domestic displays and a failure to retain the long-awaited Scottish title that Steven Gerrard delivered.

A bruising Champions League campaign added to their woes, but, in truth, Rangers were ill-equipped to compete on that stage at that time and the financial boost was most welcome.

Former Heart of Midlothian and Dundee United head coach Robbie Neilson suggested on the Scottish Football Podcast: “Things start to spiral and we’re getting to that point now where the negativity towards the manager is definitely having an effect on the players – there’s no doubt about that.

“The only way to turn that is to win football matches. I don’t know if they’ve got the squad to win six, seven, eight in a row, but that’s the only way they’ll turn it.

“It looks like Russell Martin has taken as much pressure as he can on himself to try and get it away from the players.

“But I think at the moment it’s coming back on the players as well now because it’s got to quite an extreme stage.”

What Martin and the board are contending with are previously unseen levels of negativity, though. There’s an all-consuming crescendo of ill will stretching far and wide across the support.

Until now, those in charge have held firm, although the growing sentiment over the past weeks is that even an extended run of favourable results will not influence a support seemingly not for turning.

Might McCoist’s point add weight to the idea that sticking with Martin may bear longer-term fruits, despite the lack of evidence to support that right now?

We’ll soon find out.

KIGALI, Rwanda — Rwanda on Tuesday became the third African nation to agree to accept deportees from the United States under the Trump administration’s plans to send migrants to countries they have no ties with to get them off American soil.

Rwandan government spokesperson Yolande Makolo told The Associated Press in a statement that the East African country would accept up to 250 deportees from the U.S., with “the ability to approve each individual proposed for resettlement” under the agreement.

Makolo didn’t provide a timeline for any deportees to arrive in Rwanda or say if they would arrive at once or in several batches. She said details were still being worked out.

The U.S. sent 13 men it described as dangerous criminals who were in the U.S. illegally to South Sudan and Eswatini in Africa last month and has said it is seeking more agreements with African nations. It said those deportees’ home countries refused to take them back.

The U.S. has also deported hundreds of Venezuelans and others to Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama under President Trump’s plans to expel people who he says entered the U.S. illegally and are “the worst of the worst.”

Rwanda attracted international attention and some outrage when it struck a deal in 2022 with the U.K. to accept migrants who had arrived in the U.K. to seek asylum. Under that proposed deal, their claims would have been processed in Rwanda and, if successful, they would have stayed there.

The contentious agreement was criticized by rights groups and others as being unethical and unworkable and was ultimately scrapped when Britain’s new Labour government took over. Britain’s Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the deal was unlawful because Rwanda was not a safe third country for migrants.

The Trump administration has come under scrutiny for the African countries it has entered into secretive deals with to take deportees. It sent eight men from South Sudan, Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar and Vietnam to South Sudan in early July after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for their deportations.

They were held for weeks in a converted shipping container at an American military base in Djibouti as the legal battle over their deportations played out. South Sudan, which is tipping toward civil war, has declined to say where the men are being held or what their fate is.

The U.S. also deported five men who are citizens of Vietnam, Jamaica, Cuba, Yemen and Laos to the southern African kingdom of Eswatini, where the government said they will be held in solitary confinement in prison for an undetermined period of time.

A human rights lawyer in Eswatini said the men are being denied access to legal representation there and has taken authorities to court. Eswatini is Africa’s last absolute monarchy, and the king rules over government and political parties are effectively banned.

Both South Sudan and Eswatini have declined to give details of their agreements with the U.S.

Rwanda, a relatively small country of some 15 million people, has long stood out on the continent for its recovery from a genocide that killed over 800,000 people in 1994. It has promoted itself under longtime President Paul Kagame as an example of stability and development, but human rights groups allege there are also deadly crackdowns on any perceived dissent against Kagame, who has been president for 25 years.

Government spokesperson Makolo said the agreement with the U.S. was Rwanda doing its part to help with international migration issues because “our societal values are founded on reintegration and rehabilitation.”

“Those approved (for resettlement in Rwanda) will be provided with workforce training, healthcare, and accommodation support to jumpstart their lives in Rwanda, giving them the opportunity to contribute to one of the fastest-growing economies in the world over the last decade,” she said. There were no details about whether Rwanda had received anything in return for taking the deportees.

Gonzaga Muganwa, a Rwandan political analyst, said “appeasing President Trump pays.”

“This agreement enhances Rwanda’s strategic interest of having good relationships with the Trump administration,” he said.

The U.K. government estimated that its failed migration deal with Rwanda cost around $900 million in public money, including approximately $300 million in payments to Rwanda, which said it was not obligated to refund the money when the agreement fell apart.

Ssuuna and Imray write for the Associated Press. Imray reported from Cape Town, South Africa.

England’s magnificent win came six years to the day since Eoin Morgan’s white-ball side memorably lifted the World Cup at the same venue, with Jofra Archer bowling the hosts to victory against New Zealand in the super over.

Stokes said he felt Archer – in his first Test match since 2021 – would produce another special performance on day five against India.

“He cracked the game open with those two wickets,” said Stokes of Archer’s dismissals of Rishabh Pant and Washington Sundar in the morning session.

“I just had this gut feeling something was going to happen, with it being Jofra’s first time back.

“It’s been awesome to have him back out there, every time he gets announced you hear the whole ground erupt. When he turns it on, the speeds come up on the screen, and the feeling in the game just changes.”

With two Tests remaining, the on-field tensions during the Lord’s encounter have added a little extra heat to the series, which will motivate both sets of players.

India seamer Mohammed Siraj was fined 15% of his match fee and given one demerit point by the match referee for his celebration after dismissing Ben Duckett on day four, which followed an altercation between Zak Crawley and Shubman Gill the preceding evening.

On the final day, there was a collision between Ravindra Jadeja and Brydon Carse in the middle of the pitch as the batter set off for a run, with Stokes eventually separating the pair.

“It’s a massive series, emotions are going,” added Stokes. “All 22 players are playing for their country and I don’t think anyone in the either dressing room is going to be complaining about what was said.

“A bit of niggle out in the middle gets over-egged from people watching.

“I’m all for it. I don’t think it went over the line whatsoever. It adds to the theatre.”

WASHINGTON — For generations, official American documents have been meticulously preserved and protected — from the era of quills and parchment to boxes of paper to the cloud, safeguarding snapshots of the government and the nation for posterity.

Now, the Trump administration has sought to expand the executive branch’s power to shield from public view key administration initiatives. Officials have used apps like Signal that can auto-delete messages containing sensitive information rather than retaining them for record-keeping. And they have shaken up the National Archives leadership.

To historians and archivists, it points to the possibility that President Trump will leave less for the nation’s historical record than nearly any president before him.

Such an eventuality creates a conundrum: How will experts — and even ordinary Americans — piece together what occurred when those charged with setting aside the artifacts properly documenting history refuse to do so?

How to preserve history?

The Trump administration says it’s the “most transparent in history,” citing the president’s fondness for taking questions from reporters nearly every day. But flooding the airwaves, media outlets and the internet with all things Trump isn’t the same as keeping records that document the inner workings of an administration, historians caution.

“He thinks he controls history,” says Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian who served as founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda. “He wants to control what Americans ultimately find out about the truth of his administration, and that’s dangerous.”

Trump long refused to release his tax returns despite every other major White House candidate and president having done so since Jimmy Carter. And, today, White House stenographers still record every word Trump utters, but many of their transcriptions are languishing in the White House press office without authorization for release — meaning there’s no official record of what the president says for weeks, if at all.

“You want to have a record because that’s how you ensure accountability,” said Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library in Mount Vernon, Va.

The law mandates maintaining records

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 mandates the preservation, forever, of White House and vice presidential documents and communications. It deems them the property of the U.S. government and directs the National Archives and Records Administration to administer them after a president’s term.

After his first term, rather than turn classified documents over the National Archives, Trump hauled boxes of potentially sensitive documents to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, where they ended up piled in his bedroom, a ballroom and even a bathroom and shower. The FBI raided the property to recover them. The case was later scrapped.

Trudy Huskamp Peterson, who served as acting archivist of the United States from 1993 to 1995, said keeping such records for the public is important because “decision-making always involves conflicting views, and it’s really important to get that internal documentation to see what the arguments were.”

Presidential clashes with archivists predate Trump

President George H.W. Bush’s administration destroyed some informal notes, visitor logs and emails. After President Clinton left office, his former national security advisor, Sandy Berger, pleaded guilty to taking copies of a document about terrorist threats from the National Archives.

President George W. Bush’s administration disabled automatic archiving for some official emails, encouraged some staffers to use private email accounts outside their work addresses and lost 22 million emails that were supposed to have been archived, though they were eventually uncovered in 2009.

Congress updated the Presidential Records Act in 2014 to encompass electronic messaging — including commercial email services known to be used by government employees to conduct official business.

But back then, use of auto-delete apps like Signal was far less common.

“It’s far easier to copy — or forward — a commercial email to a dot-gov address to be preserved, than it is to screenshot a series of messages on an app like Signal,” said Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives.

Relying on ’an honor system’

There were efforts during the first Trump administration to safeguard transparency, including a memo issued through the office of White House counsel Don McGahn in February 2017 that reminded White House personnel of the necessity to preserve and maintain presidential records.

The White House now points to having recently ordered the declassification of bevies of historical files, including records related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King Jr.

The Trump administration says it also ended a Biden policy that allowed staffers to use Microsoft Teams, where chats weren’t captured by White House systems. The Biden administration had over 800 users on Teams, meaning an unknown number of presidential records might have been lost, the Trump administration now says.

But the White House did not answer questions about the possibly of drafting a new memo on record retention like McGahn’s from 2017.

Chervinsky, author of “The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution,” said Congress, the courts and even the public often don’t have the bandwidth to ensure records retention laws are enforced, meaning, “a lot of it is still, I think, an honor system.”

“There aren’t that many people who are practicing oversight,” she said. “So, a lot of it does require people acting in good faith and using the operating systems that they’re supposed to use, and using the filing systems they’re supposed to use.”

Angered by the role the National Archives played in his documents case, meanwhile, Trump fired the ostensibly independent agency’s head, Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan, and named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as her acting replacement.

Peterson, the former acting national archivist, said she still believes key information about the Trump administration will eventually emerge, but “I don’t know how soon.”

“Ultimately things come out,” she said. “That’s just the way the world works.”

Weissert writes for the Associated Press.