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In conclusion, the controversy surrounding the criticism of President Zelensky's attire by a Trump advisor serves as a cautionary tale about the power of words and the importance of showing respect to leaders, regardless of personal preferences. It also underscores the complexities of diplomatic relations and the need for thoughtful and measured discourse in the public sphere. As the world watches how this incident unfolds, it is a reminder that every word spoken in the public domain has the potential to shape perceptions and influence outcomes on the global stage.
officials have discussed the merits of removing a $10m bounty on Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, whose rebel group swept into Damascus and toppled the government of Bashar al-Assad on Sunday, a senior Arab official briefed by the Americans told Middle East Eye. Ahmed al-Sharaa, commonly known as Jolani, has been designated as a terrorist by the United States since 2013, whilst his organisation, HTS, was proscribed by the Trump administration in 2018 when a $10m bounty was placed on his head. For years, HTS lobbied to be delisted, but its pleas largely fell on deaf years with the group relegated to governing just a sliver of northwest Syria. But the lightning blitz by the rebels, which saw Assad's iron-grip rule end in spectaular fashion on Sunday, has since forced Washington to rethink how it engages with the former al-Qaeda affiliate. The senior Arab official, who requested anonymity due to sensitivities surrounding the talks, told MEE that the discussions had divided officials in the Biden administration. Meanwhile, when asked about the discussions, one Trump transition official disparaged the Biden administration. Jowlani, 42, gave a rousing victory speech in Damascus' iconic Umayyad Mosque on Sunday and is widely expected to play a key role in Syria's transition after 54 years of Assad family rule. "Today, Syria is being purified," Jolani told a crowd of supporters in Damascus, adding that "this victory is born from the people who have languished in prison, and the mujahideen (fighters) broke their chains". He said that under Assad, Syria had become a place for "Iranian ambitions, where sectarianism was rife," in reference to Assad's allies Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah. Speaking several hours after the fall of Damascus, US President Joe Biden called the rebel takeover a "fundamental act of justice," but cautioned it was "a moment of risk and uncertainty" for the Middle East. "We will remain vigilant," Biden said. "Make no mistake, some of the rebel groups that took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human rights abuses," adding that the groups are "saying the right things now." "But as they take on greater responsibility, we will assess not just their words, but their actions," Biden said. Later, a senior Biden administration official, when asked about contact with HTS leaders, said Washington was in contact with Syrian groups of all kinds. The official, who was not authorised to publicly discuss the situation and spoke on condition of anonymity, also said the US was focused on ensuring chemical weapons in Assad's military arsenal were secured. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that US intelligence agencies were in the process of evaluating Jolani, who it said had launched a "charm offensive" aimed at allaying concerns over his past affiliations. Jowlani was born to a family originally from the occupied Golan Heights and fought in the Iraq insurgency and served five years in an American-run prison in Iraq, before returning to Syria as the emissary of Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. "A charm offensive might mean that people are turning over a new leaf and they think differently than they used to so you should hear them out. On the other hand, you should be cautious because charm offensives can sometimes be misleading," the US official said. "We have to think about it. We have to watch their behavior and we need to do some indirect messaging and see what comes of that," the official added. But, US President-elect Donald Trump, who will be entering office in just five weeks, has left few doubts where he stood on the conflict, saying Washington "should have nothing to do with it [Syria]." In a social media post on Saturday, Trump wrote that Assad “lost” because “Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success”. Trump used Assad's fall as an opportunity to call for an end to the war in Ukraine, without mentioning the Syrian opposition or the US' Syrian allies. Assad's ouster has seen Nato-ally Turkey cement its status as the main outside power in Syria at the expense of a bruised and battered Iran and Russia. But the US holds vast amounts of territory in Syria via its allies, who joined a race to replace the Assad regime as its soldiers abandoned villages and cities en masse. The US backs rebels operating out of the al-Tanf desert outpost on the tri-border area of Jordan, Iraq and Syria. The Syrian Free Army (SFA) went on the offensive as Assad's regime collapsed taking control of the city of Palmyra. The SFA works closely with the US and its financing is mainly run out of Jordan. The SFA also enjoys close ties to Jordanian intelligence. A former Arab security official told MEE that Jordan's King Abdullah II met with senior US officials in Washington DC last week and lobbied for continued support for the Syrian Free Army. However, maintaining stability in post-Assad Syria will be key for Jordan as it looks to send back hundreds of thousands of refugees and ensure a powe vacuum does not lead to more captagon crossing its border, the former official said. In northeastern Syria, the US has roughly 900 troops embedded with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Arab tribes linked to the SDF swept across the Euphrates River on Friday to take a wide swath of strategic towns, including Deir Ezzor and al-Bukamal. The latter is Syria’s strategic border crossing with Iraq. The US's support for the SDF is a sore point in its ties toTurkey, which views the SDF as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK has waged a decades-long guerrilla war in southern Turkey and is labelled a terrorist organisation by the US and the European Union. Turkey's concerns about the PKK led it to launch an invasion of Syria in 2016, with the aim of depriving Kurdish fighters of a quasi-state along its border. Two more military forays followed in 2018 and 2019. The SDF is already being squeezed in the north with Turkish backed rebels called the Syrian National Army entering the strategic city of Manbij. According to Reuters, the Turkish backed fighters already control 80 percent of the territory around the city center. During Syria's more than decade long war, the US slapped sanctions on Assad's government, enabled Israel to launch strikes on Iran inside Syria, and backed oppositions groups that hold sway over around one-third of the country.The Philadelphia Phillies are expected to be aggressive this winter after a disappointing postseason in 2024. They could target outfielders who can bring more power to their lineup. While making offseason predictions, theScore predicted that the Phillies would sign Baltimore Orioles slugger Anthony Santander in free agency. "He also inks Anthony Santander, whose 44 home runs last season matched the output of outfielders Nick Castellanos, Brandon Marsh, and Austin Hays," theScore wrote of Dave Dombrowski while predicting his many free agent moves. "Santander has some warts, and the defensive fit isn't perfect with Castellanos and Kyle Schwarber also on the roster, but Philadelphia needs to add to the team to get the most out of a title window." Santander hit 44 home runs in 2024 and was named an All-Star for the first time in his career. Spotrac projects him to sign a five-year, $88 million deal in free agency. He can play either of the corner outfield spots. The Phillies ranked 20th with a .610 OPS from center field last season. Signing Santander could allow them to move Brandon Marsh to center field full-time, allowing Santander to play left field. Even though Marsh struggled at the end of the year, he would still be an upgrade in center field. Adding Santander would ultimately give them three outfielders they can rely on every day. The Phillies ranked 22nd in home runs from the right side of the plate. Santander is a switch hitter but could bring some power from that side of the dish. He hit 12 of his home runs as a right-handed hitter last year. More MLB: Phillies predicted to sign $131 million All-Star in offseason blockbuster
SoftArc Gaming has yet to provide a detailed explanation for the removal of the throwing Poke Balls summoning mechanism, leaving players speculating about the motives behind this decision. Some believe that the developers may be trying to streamline the gameplay and focus on other aspects of the game that they feel are more important, while others suspect that it may be a way to encourage players to spend more in-game currency on alternative summoning methods.Escalation in Ukraine: Hypersonic Threats and Strategic Unfoldings
Combo-drug treatment to combat Melioidosis December 3, 2024 Princeton University A new approach could herald a shift in the way we use antibiotics. By attacking the pathogen's unique and hidden metabolic 'vulnerabilities,' researchers offers a new tool in the global challenge to counteract antibiotic resistance and uncover similar combination therapies for other diseases. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIN Email Melioidosis -- a bacterial infection that causes fever, pneumonia, and sepsis -- presents two enormous challenges for infectious disease experts: it kills roughly half the people who contract it and it is extremely tough to treat even in countries with advanced health care systems. The pathogen that causes melioidosis is so virulent it was used as a biologic warfare agent in World Wars I and II. Treatment demands an expensive, long-term IV and antibiotic regimen that is difficult to enact in southeast Asia and northern Australia where melioidosis is prevalent. And while the disease itself is rare in the United States, the first known case of environmental transmission occurred here in 2022. Princeton Chemistry's Seyedsayamdost Lab offers a promising treatment for this neglected tropical disease with a combination of low-dose antibiotics that targets the pathogen but leaves gut microbiome bacteria unscathed. The researchers' approach could herald a shift in the way we use antibiotics. By attacking the pathogen's unique and hidden metabolic "vulnerabilities," the lab offers a new tool in the global challenge to counteract antibiotic resistance and uncover similar combination therapies for other diseases. "Virtually all antibiotics are A-bombs. They are broad-spectrum and we use them in such high doses that they eradicate nearly everything in and around them, notably bacteria that protect us. That's a problem," said Mohammad Seyedsayamdost, professor of chemistry. "We found that even low doses of antibiotics reveal susceptibilities that are difficult to detect but can be leveraged, once known. That was the 'aha' moment. "Low-dose or subinhibitory doses of antibiotics don't affect growth of the pathogen but have a significant impact on its physiology and metabolism. And once we noticed that, we took advantage of this very unique response to combat an organism that is really difficult to kill." The lab's research, Combatting melioidosis with chemical synthetic lethality, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in collaboration with the Davis Lab at Emory University and the Chandler lab at the University of Kansas. "To me, the most exciting part of this paper is its potential to change how we think about antibiotic development," said the paper's lead author and former Mo Lab graduate student Yifan Zhang. "We've known for a long time that antimicrobial resistance is a growing global crisis, and yet the pipeline for new antibiotics has been alarmingly slow. With this study, our goal was to take a different approach -- one that doesn't just focus on finding a new 'silver bullet,' but instead looks at how we can outsmart pathogens by exploiting their metabolic vulnerabilities. "This work also reinforces how important it is to think beyond traditional boundaries in science," added Zhang, now a medical student at Robert Wood Johnson. "Combining ideas from the oncology space with our knowledge of microbiology and microbial metabolism, required us to challenge a lot of assumptions about how antibiotics 'should' work. It's exciting to see those risks pay off with a discovery that could genuinely help patients." Looking at the pathogen through HiTES Melioidosis is caused by the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei . One traditional method of determining antibiotic efficacy against it is by looking for signs of Burkholderia growth with the unaided eye or through a simple assay, and then treating it with a broad-spectrum antibiotic that kills everything in its path: antibiotic as blunt instrument. But the Mo Lab used another method, High Throughput Elicitor Screening (HiTES), a technology for which Seyedsayamdost was awarded a 2020 MacArthur Prize, to peer deeply into the metabolome for clues to bacterial vulnerability. HiTES revealed that this pathogen's metabolism is altered dramatically with low-dose antibiotics. In essence, low-dose trimethoprim opens up a secondary, previously unknown, metabolite stress response in the pathogen. Under these conditions, the researchers found the folate biosynthetic enzyme FolE2 to be conditionally essential, an enzyme that's not widely found in bacteria and that, ironically, makes it easy to exploit. By using an approach called chemical synthetic lethality, they were able to successfully combine trimethoprim with a natural product, dehydrocostus lactone (DHL), to inhibit the function of FolE2, cutting off this secondary response on which the bacteria relies for survival ... and doing it in a way that selectively kills the pathogen without annihilating the gut's essential bacteria. "Basically we accomplished the molecular version of synthetic lethality, a well-known genetics phenomenon, wherein two mutations are only deadly when combined," said Seyedsayamdost. "You add one molecule, it has no effect. You add a second molecule, it has no effect. But you combine the two molecules -- in this case, trimethoprim and DHL -- and the combination is deadly. We mixed genetics and chemistry, and it worked." The research also suggests that this combination therapy can be used against any organism to find treatments that are less destructive systemically. "Ultimately, I hope this research doesn't just stop at Burkholderia pseudomallei ," said Zhang. "If we can expand this strategy to other pathogens, I believe we can open up entirely new avenues for developing treatments that are not only effective but also respect the delicate balance of our microbiomes. "Knowing that our work has the potential to contribute to targeted, life-saving treatments for such a devastating disease is both humbling and deeply fulfilling. That's the bigger picture that keeps me motivated and excited about where this work can lead." Story Source: Materials provided by Princeton University . Original written by Wendy Plump. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Journal Reference : Cite This Page :