( MENAFN - Gulf Times) Turkiye's foreign Minister discussed with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Saturday the need to act in cooperation with the new Syrian administration to ensure the completion of the transition period in an orderly manner, the Ministry said. In a phone call, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told Blinken that Ankara would not allow Kurdish YPG militia to take shelter in Syria, the ministry spokesperson said. During the call, Blinken emphasised the need to support a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned Political process that "upholds human rights and prioritises an inclusive and representative government," according to a statement from the US State Department. Blinken and Fidan also discussed preventing terrorism from endangering the security of Turkey and Syria, the statement said. Meanwhile, Lebanon expelled around 70 Syrian officers and soldiers Saturday, returning them to Syria after they crossed into the country illegally via informal routes, a Lebanese security official and a war monitor said. Many senior Syrian officials and people close to the former ruling family of Bashar al-Assad fled the country to neighbouring Lebanon after Assad's regime was toppled on Dec 8. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a London-based organisation with sources in Syria, and the Lebanese security official said Syrian military personnel of various ranks had been sent back via Lebanon's northern Arida crossing. The new administration has been undertaking a major security crackdown in recent days on what they say are "remnants" of the Assad regime. The Lebanese security official said the Syrian officers and soldiers were found in a truck in the northern coastal city of Jbeil after an inspection by local officials. Reuters reported on Friday that Rifaat al-Assad, an uncle of Assad charged in Switzerland with war crimes over the bloody suppression of a revolt in 1982, had flown out of Beirut to Dubai recently, as had "many members" of the Assad family. Earlier this month, Lebanese Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi said top Assad adviser Bouthaina Shaaban had flown out of Beirut after entering Lebanon legally. MENAFN28122024000067011011ID1109038233 Legal Disclaimer: MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.Farage: Badenoch must apologise for ‘crazy conspiracy theory’ on Reform numbers
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Broncos hope to continue playoff push when they meet the banged-up RaidersAmid some Republican Party infighting, one GOP congressman is seeking to unite his caucus behind House Speaker Mike Johnson ahead of a pivotal vote that will decide whether he retains the gavel in 2025. Appearing Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Rep. Mike Lawler of New York said Republicans are "playing with fire" if they are considering replacing Johnson as speaker of the House, pointing to the chaotic removal of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year. RELATED STORY | Trump endorses Speaker Johnson to retain House gavel in 2025 "The fact is that these folks are playing with fire," Lawler said. "And if they think they're somehow going to get a more conservative Speaker, they're kidding themselves." "We can't get anything done unless we have a Speaker — including certifying President Trump's election on January 6th," Lawler added. "So, to waste time over a nonsensical, intramural food fight is a joke." RELATED STORY | Upcoming Congressional committees take shape on Capitol Hill Johnson won a unanimous voice vote during nominations for House GOP Conference leadership in November, but now faces a formal vote in the House when the next Congress begins in January. He will need to secure 218 votes, which means he can't afford many defections from Republicans, who are currently projected to hold a slim majority with 220 seats.
A big shopping deadline is drawing near for some people, and it has nothing to do with the holidays. Millions of people use flexible spending accounts to help pay for health care, and some may lose money left in those accounts if they don’t spend it by year’s end. There are many ways to spend that use-it-or-use it balance __ think raiding the local drugstore __ but it’s important to understand FSA rules before going on a shopping spree. Here are some things to consider. What are fSAs? FSAs let you set aside money from your paycheck before taxes to cover a wide range of medical expenses like copays, deductibles, eyeglasses and other supplies. They are set up through your employer, and individuals can set aside up to $3,300 in these accounts. Figuring out the right amount to set aside can be tricky because it involves forecasting how much care you might need. And you have to use the money by a certain point or you lose it. What are the deadlines? They can vary by employer or plan administrator. In some cases, you may have to spend the money by Dec. 31 or you will lose it. But many plans offer a grace period in the new year to let people use their remaining funds or they allow participants to carry over some of the leftover balance. “Make sure you understand the clock and the rules,” said David Feinberg of Justworks, a technology company that helps small businesses with benefits. There are limits. The IRS, for instance, limits the balance carried over to $660 for 2025. Any amounts over that could be lost if they are still in your account by the plan deadline. How can I spend my FSA balance? Story continues below video Think of medical expenses not covered by insurance. The IRS keeps a huge list of eligible expenses for both FSAs and health savings accounts. But companies can limit the expenses they’ll reimburse, so employees should check with their employers. Eligible expenses can include travel costs to the doctor’s office, eyeglasses, bandages, sunscreen, condoms and tampons. FSA dollars may even be used to cover things like gym memberships or electric massagers if you have a doctor’s note stating that they are medically necessary. But they don’t cover things like health insurance premiums or certain cosmetic procedures like teeth whitening. Do you have any receipts from health care you could submit, like the copayment for a doctor’s office visit? That would qualify. Some plan administrators watch for stockpiling. Don’t buy a crate of aspirin to use up your balance. Limit purchases to about a year’s supply. Items can be bought in stores or online. What is an HSA? Health savings accounts, or HSAs, also allow you to set aside money before taxes. The difference is that you won’t lose the balance, you can keep the account if you leave your job, and some plans let you invest the money. HSAs can only be paired with high-deductible insurance plans. Account holders can contribute several thousand dollars each year, depending on the type of coverage they have. FSAs work with more types of coverage. And the help they offer can be more immediate. The money you decide to set aside over the course of the year is available right away.
WASHINGTON >> Donald Trump has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to pause a federal TikTok law that would ban the popular social media app or force its sale, with the President-elect arguing that he should have time after taking office to pursue a “political resolution” to the issue. TikTok and its owner ByteDance are fighting to keep the popular app online in the United States after Congress voted in April to ban it unless the app’s Chinese parent company sells it by Jan. 19. They have sought to have the law struck down, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case. But if the court does not rule in ByteDance’s favor and no divestment occurs, the app could be effectively banned in the United States on Jan. 19, one day before Trump takes office. “This case presents an unprecedented, novel, and difficult tension between free-speech rights on one side, and foreign policy and national security concerns on the other,” Trump said in a filing today. “Such a stay would vitally grant President Trump the opportunity to pursue a political resolution that could obviate the Court’s need to decide these constitutionally significant questions,” the filing added. Free speech advocates separately told the Supreme Court today that the U.S. law against Chinese-owned TikTok evokes the censorship regimes put in place by the United States’ authoritarian enemies. Trump indicated earlier this week that he favored allowing TikTok to keep operating in the United States for at least a little while, saying he had received billions of views on the social media platform during his presidential campaign. The U.S. Justice Department has argued that Chinese control of TikTok poses a continuing threat to national security, a position supported by most U.S. lawmakers. TikTok says the Justice Department has misstated the social media app’s ties to China, arguing that its content recommendation engine and user data are stored in the United States on cloud servers operated by Oracle Corp while content moderation decisions that affect U.S. users are made in the United States as well.Mocha Mousse sounds like a dessert for New Year’s Eve. Chocolatey and creamy, but with a coffee kick to keep you up till midnight. It is, in fact, Pantone’s ‘Color of the Year’, a shade that the colour management company decides can best “express a global mood and attitude” at this time. ET Year-end Special Reads What kept India's stock market investors on toes in 2024? India's car race: How far EVs went in 2024 Investing in 2025: Six wealth management trends to watch out for 2024 was a chaotic year and 2025 promises even more turmoil. Is that best expressed by “a warming, brown hue imbued with richness”, as Pantone describes it? Brown, as Philip Ball writes in Bright Earth, his history of artists and colour, is like a non-colour: “It sits on the border between a real colour and an achromatic one — a ‘dirty’ colour akin to grey. Brown is, in fact, a kind of grey biased towards yellow or orange.” Ball notes how, compared to costly materials like lapis-lazuli or gold, brown literally came from dirt. Burnt sienna was mined in Italy, becoming rich red-brown on heating. Earth pigments like ochre and umber were used in ancient cave paintings. Varnishing paintings with protective glazes also tended to darken them, forming the image of brownish ‘Old Master’ paintings. The 19th century Impressionists derided this as ‘brown gravy’ art, which they countered with fresh, bright colours. But the Industrial Revolution was turning their world brown. Claude Monet loved painting the heavy yellow-brown ‘pea-soup’ fog that enveloped London for days, and which we now see in Indian cities. Dusty cities, desert sands, sewage spills and flooding rivers all come in brown. For those who watch the news with gloom, Pantone’s choice of colour may seem all too apt. Brown has even darker associations. In the 18th century, a brown with an oddly dark stain became popular with artists. Sometimes called Egyptian brown, the more honest name was mommia, or ‘Mummy Brown’, since it was made by grinding up mummies embalmed with ingredients like myrrh that gave their flesh a brown colour. There were rumours that dealers who were short of mummies created new ones using the bodies of executed criminals. One horrified artist formally buried his paints when he learnt of their origin. Yet, brown has positive associations as well, especially linked to food. The company describes Mocha Mousse as “answering our desire for comfort” and many shades of brown are named after favourite foods, like caramel, chocolate and cinnamon. Different types of coffee, like espresso, cappuccino and latte, are used to name different shades, just as nut-brown can be differentiated into light almond, medium pecan, yellowish peanut and dark walnut. Cuttlefish were both prized as food and for their ink which appeared on paper in a mellow, slightly faded brown that was called sepia. Nigella Lawson, in her book Cook, Eat, Repeat, writes ‘A Loving Defence of Brown Food’. She laments how social media is quick to label brown foods, like stews, disgusting — but the real problem is that brown is hard to photograph: “To the naked eye, brown food is beautiful: Rich, warm, and full of depth and subtle variegation. None of this can be easily caught on camera...” The problem, she feels, is also textural. Slow cooking breaks down both the shape and colour of ingredients, reducing them to a brown mush. This is often really delicious, but it can also recall bland, badly cooked food shovelled down our throats as children. Brown poses a particular challenge for Indian foods. Turmeric, fenugreek and other yellow-brown spices combine with slow cooking to make this a dominant colour, which makes it an easy slur — brown food from brown people. Social media is full of such insults, yet in the real world, Indian food only gets more popular. Perhaps that is the real value of brown, reminding us in an image-obsessed world that flavour lies in more than just vivid colours.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — An online spat between factions of Donald Trump’s supporters over immigration and the tech industry has thrown internal divisions in his political movement into public display, previewing the fissures and contradictory views his coalition could bring to the White House. The rift laid bare the tensions between the newest flank of Trump’s movement — wealthy members of the tech world including billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and their call for more highly skilled workers in their industry — and people in Trump’s Make America Great Again base who championed his hardline immigration policies. The debate touched off this week when Laura Loomer, a right-wing provocateur with a history of racist and conspiratorial comments, criticized Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence policy in his coming administration. Krishnan favors the ability to bring more skilled immigrants into the U.S. Loomer declared the stance to be “not America First policy” and said the tech executives who have aligned themselves with Trump were doing so to enrich themselves. Related Story: Debate Plays Out on X Much of the debate played out on the social media network X, which Musk owns. Loomer’s comments sparked a back-and-forth with venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks, whom Trump has tapped to be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.” Musk and Ramaswamy, whom Trump has tasked with finding ways to cut the federal government, weighed in, defending the tech industry’s need to bring in foreign workers. It bloomed into a larger debate with more figures from the hard-right weighing in about the need to hire U.S. workers, whether values in American culture can produce the best engineers, free speech on the internet, the newfound influence tech figures have in Trump’s world and what his political movement stands for. Trump has not yet weighed in on the rift. His presidential transition team did not respond to questions about positions on visas for highly skilled workers or the debate between his supporters online. Instead, his team instead sent a link to a post on X by longtime adviser and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller that was a transcript of a speech Trump gave in 2020 at Mount Rushmore in which he praised figures and moments from American history. Musk, the world’s richest man who has grown remarkably close to the president-elect, was a central figure in the debate, not only for his stature in Trump’s movement but his stance on the tech industry’s hiring of foreign workers. Technology companies say H-1B visas for skilled workers, used by software engineers and others in the tech industry, are critical for hard-to-fill positions. But critics have said they undercut U.S. citizens who could take those jobs. Some on the right have called for the program to be eliminated, not expanded. Related Story: Musk Was Once on a H-1B Visa Born in South Africa, Musk was once on an a H-1B visa himself and defended the industry’s need to bring in foreign workers. “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent,” he said in a post. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” Trump’s own positions over the years have reflected the divide in his movement. His tough immigration policies, including his pledge for a mass deportation, were central to his winning presidential campaign. He has focused on immigrants who come into the U.S. illegally but he has also sought curbs on legal immigration, including family-based visas. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump called the H-1B visa program “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. workers. After he became president, Trump in 2017 issued a “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, which directed Cabinet members to suggest changes to ensure H-1B visas were awarded to the highest-paid or most-skilled applicants to protect American workers. Related Story: Trump’s businesses, however, have hired foreign workers, including waiters and cooks at his Mar-a-Lago club, and his social media company behind his Truth Social app has used the the H-1B program for highly skilled workers. During his 2024 campaign for president, as he made immigration his signature issue, Trump said immigrants in the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country” and promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But in a sharp departure from his usual alarmist message around immigration generally, Trump told a podcast this year that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges. “I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” he told the “All-In” podcast with people from the venture capital and technology world. Those comments came on the cusp of Trump’s budding alliance with tech industry figures, but he did not make the idea a regular part of his campaign message or detail any plans to pursue such changes.IISc Launches Pravriddhi Product Accelerator Programme to Develop Innovative Solutions
Of Reforms and Dantsoho’s Election as PMAWCA ChairmanPresident José Raúl Mulino of Panama brushed off U.S. President-elect Donald Trump ’s baseless claim that Chinese soldiers are “operating the Panama Canal, ” calling it “nonsense.” In a Christmas Day message on Truth Social , Trump sarcastically wished a merry Christmas to “the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal” and “making certain that the United States puts in Billions of Dollars in ‘repair’ money, but will have absolutely nothing to say about anything.” He then claimed the Panamanian government is “ripping off” the United States at the Panama Canal. But Mulino put a stop to the accusation in a press conference on Thursday, saying there is no truth to the claim Chinese soldiers are operating the canal. “There are no Chinese soldiers in the canal. For the love of God, you are free, the whole world is free, to visit the canal if you please,” Mulinto said in a translated speech. “What [Trump] has said on this issue is nonsense, it does not exist,” he added. Trump last weekend threatened twice to take over the canal in a post on Truth Social and at a conference of the conservative Turning Point USA in Phoenix, where he told the crowd he is prepared to take control because he’s angry about “exorbitant’ use fees . Mulina said after those threats: “The sovereignty and independence of our country are not negotiable .” The president-elect’s attack on the canal is the latest in his series of complaints about other countries and their relationship with America. Trump has attacked Mexico and Canada for what he believes are unfair trade practices and harmful border policies. He has mocked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and said he’d make Canada the 51st state. He has also lambasted the European Union for selling more products to the U.S. than buying from the nation. But in his latest, more threatening claims, Trump suggested the U.S. should not only take over the canal but Greenland, a territory of Denmark, as well. Trump floated the idea of buying Denmark – a country not for sale – during his first administration. In a Truth Social post last Sunday he insisted that American “ownership and control” of Greenland is an “absolute necessity” for world “security” and “freedom.” As for the Panama Canal, Mulino denied U.S. vessels are being overcharged to use the waterway and emphasized that China plays no role in the canal. A Hong Kong-based firm manages two ports at the Panama Canal’s entrances, but Panama owns and operates the entire canal. “Look, there are no Chinese on the canal. As simple as that. Neither the Chinese nor any other power are in the channel,” Mulino said. Any Chinese on the canal are aboard a cruise ship or visiting the canal like other tourists, he noted “I reiterate, there is absolutely no Chinese interference or participation in anything that has to do with the Panama Canal,” Mulino said.
I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here has kicked off for the 2024 season and already the show is in for a shake-up. Irish TV personality Maura Higgins has now joined the camp, which includes the likes of Coleen Rooney and Alan Halsall, as a late entrant. The 33-year-old rose to fame following her appearance on Love Island in 2019 where she finished in fourth place with then-boyfriend Curtis Pritchard. She has since transferred into the presenting space with shows such as This Morning and currently fronts the Love Island USA Aftersun show. Maura, who was a model before her rise to fame, has been through many high-profile romances from fellow islanders Curtis and also Chris Taylor to Strictly star Giovanni Pernice. She was also friends with fellow islanders Molly-Mae Hague and Lucie Donlan though she reportedly fell out with the later in 2023. Island romances, cheating rumours, and Giovanni Maura reportedly dated fellow campmate Barry McGuigan’s son Shane before jetting off to the Love Island villa. Her dating life has been the centre of intense media attention since the show where she started dating dancer Curtis. They dated for several months before splitting in March 2020. Cheating allegations were made on both sides with Curtis taking aim at her on his Channel 4 comedy show Stand Up and Deliver. She also dated another Love Island 2019 contestant and close friend Chris Taylor with Maura confirming their relationship in November 2020 before they separated in May 2021 in what was said to be a painful break-up for the pair. The Irish reality TV star has also dated Strictly Come Dancing star Giovanni Pernice who was embroiled in controversy recently with internal investigations into his alleged conduct on the show. Recently it has been rumoured Maura is dating current Strictly contestant Pete Wicks with the couple reportedly spotted sharing a kiss. However she insists they are just friends. Celebrity friends and fallout with Lucie Donlan Maura made close friendships in and out of the villa with Molly-Mae and Lucie. Molly-Mae and Maura’s friendship has blossomed since leaving the villa having been in a love triangle with boxer and co-star Tommy Fury on Love Island. Maura showed her support for Molly-Mae in August, after her split with Tommy, commenting on her Instagram post announcement saying: “LOVE and ADORE YOU”. Maura’s relationship with Lucie did not have the same success as the two, who were very close friends, reportedly had a high-profile fallout in 2023. Maura unfollowed Lucie on Instagram in autumn 2022. An insider later told The Sun that “Lucie and Maura just drifted apart”. What is she up to now? Maura is currently a presenter on Love Island USA’s Aftersun show after her role as social host for Love Island USA and Love Island games. She has also recently taken her first steps into film with her role on comedy flick the The Spin where she played a character named Rose. Speaking to Digital Spy about her role she said: "Being on set was an incredible experience and I enjoyed every moment of it." Now she's set to head into the Australian jungle. She described being selected for the cast of I’m a Celebrity as a real “pinch-me moment," she told ITV . “I am ready to step outside my comfort zone. I hope I do make myself proud and I am both excited but also very nervous."Magic travel to Charlotte after learning more about their gritty group