skygaming In the Syrian capital, banks reopened for the first time since the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, in a major step towards restoring normal life. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday that the U.S. fully supports Syria’s political transition processand wants it to lead to credible, inclusive, and non-sectarian governance. Meanwhile, Israel pounded Syrian army bases on Tuesday in strikes it says aim to keep weapons from falling into hostile hands, but denied its forces had advanced into Syria beyond a buffer zone at the border. We spoke withPaul Salem, vice president for international engagement with the Middle East Institute, and the organization’s former president and CEO.The fluoride fights are a decades-old cultural war America can’t quit

Dallas (5-8) at Carolina (3-10) Sunday, 1 p.m. EST, FOX. BetMGM Odds: Panthers by 3. Against the spread: Cowboys 4-9, Panthers 6-7. Series record: Cowboys lead 11-3. Last meeting: Cowboys beat Panthers 33-10 on Nov. 19, 2023 in Carolina. Last week: Cowboys lost to Bengals 27-20; Panthers lost to Eagles 22-16. Cowboys offense: overall (20), rush (28), pass (11), scoring (21) Cowboys defense: overall (25), rush (30), pass (22), scoring (31) Panthers offense: overall (30), rush (22), pass (27), scoring (28) Panthers defense: overall (31), rush (32), pass (12), scoring (32) Turnover differential: Cowboys minus-8; Panthers minus-5. Panthers edge rusher Micah Parsons vs. Panthers offensive line. Parsons seems to be getting better as the season progresses and will be a tough matchup for Carolina's offensive line regardless of where he lines up. Parsons has 3 1/2 sacks over his past three games. WR Adam Thielen. The veteran wide receiver was Bryce Young's favorite option last season and is finally developing into that again this season after battling back from a hamstring injury that left him on injured reserve. Thielen has 17 catches on 21 targets for 201 yards and a touchdown over the past two games. When the Panthers need a first down on fourth down, the pass is almost always going to Thielen. Cowboys RB Rico Dowdle vs. NFL's worst run defense. Dowdle has had the first two 100-yard outings of his career the past two weeks, resetting his career best both times. The undrafted fifth-year player on an expiring contract had 131 yards in the loss to the Bengals. Since taking over as the lead back at the start of November, Dowdle is averaging 16 carries and 81 yards with a touchdown rushing and another receiving. On Sunday, he will face the league’s 32nd-ranked run defense. Carolina allowed Philadelphia’s Saquon Barkley to run for 124 yards last week and Tampa Bay’s Bucky Irving to run for a career-high 152 yards the week before that. The Panthers are allowing more than 170 yards per game on the ground and 4.97 yards per carry. Cowboys LB DeMarvion Overshown was set for season-ending surgery on the right knee he injured in the fourth quarter of the loss to the Bengals. The second-year player from Texas missed all of his rookie season after tearing a ligament in his left knee in a preseason game. ... DE DeMarcus Lawrence, who hasn’t played since Week 4, is close to returning from a foot injury. With the playoff hopes all but gone, the question remains whether to press the 32-year-old into action. Lawrence is on an expiring contract. ... Rookie C Cooper Beebe sustained a concussion against Cincinnati.. ... The Panthers are hoping to get WR Jalen Coker back on the field this week after he has missed the past three games with a quad injury. ... Also, No. 1 CB Jaycee Horn has been playing with a groin injury, and that could be problematic against CeeDee Lamb. The Cowboys are 7-2 against the Panthers since losing a wild-card game at Carolina 29-10 during the 2003 season, the first of Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Bill Parcells’ four years leading Dallas. The Cowboys are 4-2 on the road this season, including victories over playoff contenders Pittsburgh and Washington. ... QB Cooper Rush is 2-3 filling in for Dak Prescott, who is out for the season after surgery for a torn hamstring. Assuming Rush starts, this will be his longest stint as Prescott’s replacement. He went 4-1 in 2022 after Prescott broke the thumb on his throwing hand in the opener. ... Dowdle’s 7.3-yard average per carry on 18 attempts against the Bengals was the highest for a Dallas back since Ezekiel Elliott averaged 7.9 per carry at Philadelphia in 2018. ... WR CeeDee Lamb has just one 100-yard receiving game this season after finishing with eight in his breakout 2023 All-Pro season. But Lamb has five other games with at least 89 yards. He has reached 1,000 scrimmage yards in each of his first five seasons, the fifth receiver to do that. ... S Malik Hooker’s interception of Joe Burrow was his second of the season. He has seven interceptions in his four Dallas seasons. He also had seven in four years with Indianapolis, where he spent four injury-filled years as a 2017 first-round draft pick. ... The Panthers have endured six straight seasons with at least 10 losses. ... Carolina’s past five games have come down to the last possession. ... Panthers 1,000-yard RB Chuba Hubbard needs one rushing touchdown to pass Stephen Davis for fifth in team history. He is also 9 rushing yards away from reaching 3,000 for his career. ... Rookie WR Xavier Legette had three drops last week vs. the Eagles, including one for a potential go-ahead score in the final minute. ... OLB Jadeveon Clowney is tied for 11th in sacks among active NFL players. ... The Panthers have 15 sacks in the past four games. Carolina’s improved pass rush has coincided with OLB D.J. Wonnum getting on the field after missing the first nine games of the season on injured reserve. Chuba Hubbard is expected to see the overwhelming majority of carries for the Panthers, who are now thin at the position. Miles Sanders and Jonathon Brooks are on injured reserve and Raheem Blackshear is working through a chest injury. That leaves Mike Boone as the Hubbard's backup. NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nflNEW YORK: Over the American Thanksgiving weekend, two girl-centric movies about female empowerment – one starring an animated Polynesian teenager and the other a bunch of singing witches – crushed at the box office. Moana 2 , from Walt Disney, had the biggest Thanksgiving Day opening in history. Universal Pictures’ Wicked , which debuted the week prior, set a record for a Broadway-to-screen adaptation. Together, they led the holiday stretch to its best numbers ever. And it was women who drove the results. Moana’s audience was two-thirds female, while Wicked’s opening weekend topped that at 75 per cent. The election might have been won by the manosphere, a collection of “anti-woke” influencers who extol traditional gender norms and hypermasculinity. But the box office results were a reminder that girl culture is still driving large swaths of the economy. GIRL CULTURE DRIVING THE ECONOMY And expect demand for it to build during a second Trump administration. Companies should pay attention to a female audience looking for ways to immerse itself in art and entertainment that embraces overtly feminist themes and takes seriously the complexities of being a girl and a woman – precisely because the political sphere will not. The girl power energy of this moment feels more subdued than it did in the summer of 2023 when the troika of Barbie , Beyonce and Taylor Swift not only shattered records but drove a level of spending that was credited with helping head off a recession. Deflating the vibes, of course, is the painful reminder that the US presidency still remains out of reach for women. However, the numbers show that commanding the culture is not. Beyond the Thanksgiving weekend, Inside Out 2 – a movie about the feelings of a teenage girl – is set to become the biggest film of 2024. On the small screen, the original Moana is the most streamed movie of the past half decade, racking up more than 1 billion hours watched. In the music world, Swift on Sunday (Dec 8) played the final performance of her nearly two-year, five-continent, 51-city Eras Tour, which became the first to surpass US$1 billion in revenue even before it hit its halfway point. Women dominated the Grammy award nominations, led by Beyonce – now not just the most-winning but also the most-nominated artist in history. She was honoured alongside a slew of other female stars including Swift, Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan. THE CULTURE WE CONSUME While young women are attempting to live their best lives in the girl power economy, young men increasingly are residing in the manosphere. On some level, its rise can be read as a reaction to the forces that are driving girl culture: More women in the workforce than ever before – where it’s increasingly common for them to outearn their partners; women more likely to go to college and to graduate, and less likely to be living at home with their parents. The manosphere peddles the idea that men have been emasculated by the success of women, and that the breakdown of traditional gender roles is responsible for their feelings of loneliness and aimlessness. The playbook of the manosphere – and those who capitalise on it – is to grow its influence by undermining women’s progress. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s 43-minute diatribe against the Barbie movie — in which he lights a bunch of the dolls on fire in a trash can — has been viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube. To vice president-elect JD Vance, the powerful women at the helm of the Democratic Party are just a bunch of “childless cat ladies.” The culture young men and women are consuming reflects their feelings but also reinforces them. Even the way it is consumed supports their diverging worldviews. The girl power economy is comprised of massive, joyful and optimistic cultural moments that are shared together. (Nearly half of Wicked purchases are for three or more tickets, for example.) Meanwhile, the manosphere is mostly absorbed in isolation, on podcasts and YouTube off in the splinted parts of the internet. POLITICAL SPLIT BY GENDER Nowhere has the consequences of this split played out more starkly than in the 2024 US presidential election, when Vice President Kamala Harris leaned into girl culture and Donald Trump embraced the grievance politics of the manosphere. When the vote was tallied, the gender split was greatest among the youngest voters. An analysis by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found that women under 30 voted for Harris by a 17-point margin, while their male counterparts went for Trump by 14. Young women, whose worldview has been informed by the overturning of Roe v Wade and the #MeToo movement, are 15 percentage points more likely to say they are liberal than men of the same cohort, according to Gallup. Twenty-five years ago, the gap was just five percentage points. Some businesses are viewing the election results as a reason to reallocate their investments – away from themes that embrace women’s progress and instead double down on retrograde notions of gender. We have already seen this kind of reactionary reversal play out as companies scurry away from their commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion. But smart executives will see the demand for content that speaks not only to women’s empowerment, but also to the frustration they feel over stalled progress and what remains out of reach.

VICTORIA — British Columbia Premier David Eby says his fellow premiers and the federal government have hatched a game plan to fight U.S. tariffs, with conservative premiers lobbying Republican counterparts, left-leaning provincial leaders courting the Democrats, and Ottawa focusing on president-elect Donald Trump. The premiers and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau talked about using their political diversity and connections to thwart the prospect of Trump's proposed 25 per cent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, Eby said Thursday in a year-end interview. He said it was discussed that conservative premiers Danielle Smith in Alberta, Doug Ford in Ontario and Nova Scotia's Tim Houston are well-placed to lobby Republican governors and business leaders. Eby said as a New Democrat he will likely have more in common with Democrat governors and business leaders from the West Coast states. "I can easily have conversations with governors and businesses down the West Coast of the U.S., where we have close relationships and our politics are very similar," he said. "Premier Smith can have conversations with Republican governors. That would be more challenging for me, and (she) would have more connections potentially with the Trump administration than an NDP administration in B.C. would." He said a meeting last week between the premiers and Trudeau discussed Canada's diversity of representation, and how it could bring leverage and advantages in tariff talks. "It's interesting, there was a lot of talk about what unity means in terms of Canada's response to the tariffs," he said. "There's obviously a diversity of views around the Council of the Federation table of all the premiers. Certainly, mine is not the same as Premier Smith's or Premier Ford's or Premier Houston's, and that diversity of views is actually potentially a significant strength for us as we enter into these discussions." Eby also said he was prepared to appear on American's right-leaning Fox News TV network, as did premiers Ford and Smith. "Anything that I can do to support the national effort to protect the families in Canada from the impact of tariffs and also families in the U.S. from those unjustified tariffs," he said. "Absolutely, if I thought it was helpful." This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 5, 2024. Dirk Meissner, The Canadian PressLeads + Wins : 288 / 288 Results : 81 / 81 10 ways to use pumpkin seeds 7 things that boys learn from their moms 10 Indian breakfast dishes loved across the world How to grow onion and garlic on your kitchen window Kid-friendly wildlife experiences in India How to make Chicken Chili Pakora at home 10 types of South-Indian rice dishes and how to make them 10 most beautiful offbeat places for solo travel in India (2025) Persimmon: Nutrients, health benefits of this vibrant orange colored fruit 8 animals that have more than 2 eyes

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