One player who dreams of leading his team to the top is Gabia, a talented young midfielder for AC Milan. Gabia has always had a burning passion for the game and a deep desire to one day wear the captain's armband for his beloved team. He has worked tirelessly on and off the field to improve his skills and leadership qualities, determined to one day achieve his dream.Shanxi Team Head Coach Encourages Liu Chuanxing to Play Tougher, Enhance Team Defense and ReboundingOn Wednesday, at Sednaya, a political prison in Syria, hundreds of people prowled the grounds. It was the third day after an astonishing rebel offensive deposed Bashar al-Assad, who had ruled as a tyrant during thirteen years of vicious civil war. After the rebels swept into Damascus, the jailers had fled Sednaya, and the prisoners had been set free. The visitors on Wednesday were relatives of men who were known to have been held there but had not reappeared. On the grass outside, burned black in places by recent fires, groups of them camped out in a grim limbo. That morning, a Turkish search-and-rescue team in blue coveralls was busy with shovels inside the darkened administration block, working at a small rectangle of dirt where a concrete slab had been torn away. Rumors persisted that there was a buried hatchway to a “red prison”—a secret underground facility where hundreds, or even thousands, of prisoners might still be alive but dying of hunger, thirst, or asphyxiation. Whether or not the rumors were true, most everyone at Sednaya seemed to believe them, and several relatives approached me to ask whether, as “a Westerner,” I could provide the technology to peer through the floors. The leader of the Turkish team told me that his group had nothing but shovels. “We are here because we want to show solidarity,” he explained, gesturing at the desperate people around him. Being entombed alive is an apt metaphor for a populace that had its civic freedoms squashed by the Assad dynasty for half a century. Hafez al-Assad, a secular nationalist from the minority Alawite sect, ran Syria tyrannically from 1971 until his death, in 2000. He was succeeded by his son Bashar, a former ophthalmologist who proved no less repressive than his father. The civil war erupted in 2011, after Bashar responded to a peaceful demonstration with deadly force. Since then, it has been estimated that six hundred thousand Syrians have been killed; some six million, nearly a third of the population, have fled into exile. Throughout the decades of the Assads’ rule, resistance of any kind was brutally quashed, and offenders were detained and tortured in a network of dozens of facilities across the country. Sednaya was the most infamous. Built in the late eighties, on a barren limestone hilltop forty minutes from downtown Damascus, it acquired such a fearsome reputation that many Syrians refused to utter its name aloud. In the first days of the war, I visited the hills nearby and spotted the complex. When I asked my driver what it was, he shook his head. Asked again, he whispered, “Sednaya” but would add only that it was a “terrible” place. Since then, as the war intensified, the prison became, by all accounts, even more terrible. In 2021, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights calculated that as many as thirty thousand people had been executed there since the war began. But the number of people who survived within the prison’s walls was, like most everything else about it, impossible to know. When Sednaya was liberated, last weekend, some of those freed had been there for decades. One inmate had reportedly been imprisoned since 1981; he had entered as a young man of twenty-seven and emerged, a ghastly Rip Van Winkle, at seventy. The searchers who gathered on Wednesday morning, moving through dank stairwells and across the flat prison roof, were traversing a place that they could have seen only in their horrified imaginations. A militiaman in camouflage played me a cell-phone video—sent, he claimed, by a former jailer—that purportedly showed the layout of the prison and of a set of tunnels. The militiaman held out his hands uncertainly; even with the video, no one could find the tunnels. No one had even found a registry of prisoners who had been held there. I met an elderly couple from Aleppo—a man in a red-and-white-checked kaffiyeh and a woman in a dark hijab. “Where are the lists?” the man asked, and then answered himself: “There are no lists.” Moving away, he said, “All I want to know is if they are alive or dead.” For the family members who have come to Sednaya—after enduring years with no news about their fathers, brothers, sons, and nephews—any bit of evidence stirs a despairing hope, which shows plainly in their body language and on their faces. The crowd that gathered around the Turks shovelling at the floor resembled relatives of people buried in earthquakes; they watched avidly, helplessly, for any indication of life. Other visitors wandered through cellblocks, some stooping to examine the documents on prison stationery that lay everywhere. I asked one dazed-looking man about a paper in his hands. Studying it as if for the first time, he said that it had to do with food allocation—not for the prisoners but for the guards. “It says the guards have been transferred, so they don’t need the food anymore,” he said. Another visitor thrust his phone in my face. It was playing a video of a young man in shorts being beaten in a cell at Sednaya. There were vicious red welts on his body; he whimpered in fear and pain as guards struck him. For years, as reports of atrocities filtered out, Bashar al-Assad remained in power, propped up by Russian and Iranian allies. As I entered one hallway, a woman in a robe began shouting, “Now you come to look. Why didn’t you come before? Why didn’t you believe us? Why didn’t you hear us when we said they were killing us!” After a moment, she moved on, but a nearby man began shouting, too. He wanted revenge, nothing less or more. He would get a weapon and kill the Alawites—Assad’s sect, which some members of Syria’s Sunni majority see as complicit in his repression. The man vowed to kill every man, every woman, and every child he saw. A boy in a turban stood inside the barred steel door of a cell. He was looking for his brother, who had been taken, at the age of fifteen, from their family’s home in the northeastern city of Deir ez Zor. He had been gone for nine years, which would make him twenty-four now, the boy calculated. The cell floor, like all the others, was covered with unidentifiable stains and strewn with grimy gray blankets and bits of clothing. The boy looked intently at the refuse, as if expecting to see something that would help him find his brother. Up on the roof, three men pointed at a reinforced hatchway, from which a pipe protruded. Perhaps, they suggested, it was an air vent to the secret underground prison. There was a rank smell seeping from it, but it seemed like the stench of sewage, not of bodies. As I prepared to climb back down into the prison through a hole bashed through the concrete, they called out again, pointing to a hatch at the far end of the roof. Another vent there had an even worse smell—but that, too, seemed like nothing more than waste. The men went on, aimlessly looking for whatever they could find. Everywhere I went in Sednaya, it was the same story. The Syrian people had been so terrorized and disenfranchised, so thoroughly cut off from their missing relatives, that they were reduced to a kind of ad-hoc forensic anthropology. One man, who had lost two brothers and three cousins to Sednaya, told me that he had been able to visit them once, back in 2016. But he was told afterward that he could not return, and since then there had been only silence. I asked if he had tried to come back, despite the order, to check on his family members. He replied, with a stricken look, “My relatives told me not to ask about them, that it could be bad for them, and so I stopped.” As I walked down a stairwell, a young man beckoned to me, cupping his other hand over his mouth and nose. A friend of his had made a hole in the wall about six feet up and was crouched in the opening. “Please smell,” the young man asked me. This time, I thought, it did possibly smell like death. The man in the hole began tearing at the masonry and hurling aside debris. A knot of onlookers gathered, looking up through the bars of a locked doorway below. For the moment, their faces were hopeful. ♦ New Yorker Favorites A man was murdered in cold blood and you’re laughing ? The best albums of 2024. Little treats galore: a holiday gift guide . How Maria Callas lost her voice . An objectively objectionable grammatical pet peeve . 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With a legacy of delivering unparalleled realism and attention to detail in the world of virtual racing, "Assetto Corsa" has garnered a loyal following over the years. The series has set the bar high for racing simulators, offering players the chance to experience the thrill of high-speed competition from the comfort of their own homes."Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum." Section 1.10.32 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum", written by Cicero in 45 BC "Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?" 1914 translation by H. Rackham "But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?" 1914 translation by H. Rackham "But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?" To keep reading, please log in to your account, create a free account, or simply fill out the form below.Takeaways from Biden's Africa trip: Pardon of son Hunter overshadows official business

Healy confirms major change to her roleIn addition to the engaging multiplayer gameplay, "Eternal Sky" also offers a competitive mode where players can test their skills against one another in thrilling PvP battles. Whether it's a fight for resources, territory, or survival itself, the competitive mode adds an extra layer of excitement and challenge for those seeking a more intense experience.

One of Lippi's key points is that while it is important to learn from the successes of European football, China should not simply replicate European football culture. Each country has its own unique footballing heritage, and China should leverage its own strengths and traditions to develop a style of play that suits its players and resonates with Chinese fans.

Utah Set to Start Fourth Different Quarterback of the College Football SeasonSwimming changing lives for those with cerebral palsy

Some Centralia area residents living in the Fords Prairie neighborhood near Centralia High School and the banks of the Chehalis River are now questioning whether it's safe to drink the water coming from their own taps. Recent testing from wells in the area has shown dangerously high levels of nitrates in the water, but questions now remain, specifically what is causing it and how it can be remedied. More than a dozen residents were in attendance at the Centralia City Council meeting on Tuesday, Dec. 10, to voice their concerns over the contamination as both city and Lewis County staff were on hand for a presentation on the issue. The neighborhood is in Centralia’s urban growth area, meaning the city is in an interlocal agreement with Lewis County for jurisdiction in the area. The county is ultimately responsible under the current agreement. Currently, both city and county officials are working with neighborhood residents to test more wells on private property throughout the neighborhood, trying to pinpoint the source of the nitrate contamination in the area’s ground water. High nitrate levels in water are dangerous, especially to infants and adults with pre-existing health issues, as the nitrates can cause methemoglobinemia, also known as blue baby syndrome, according to the Cleveland Clinic. With blue baby syndrome, the nitrates are converted to nitrite in the stomach, which prevents red blood cells from carrying oxygen, leading to bluish skin discoloration due to low blood oxygen levels. This can cause a number of symptoms ranging from neurological development issues for infants to pale skin, fatigue, headaches, nausea, vomiting and more for adults. Chronic nitrate exposure can also lead to increased cancer risk and possible birth defects. As for what can cause high nitrate levels in water, it can be triggered by a range of factors from industrial waste, fertilizers, animal waste, wastewater and more. And while many of the residents in Fords Prairie do have septic tanks, they believe there is another source aside from the possibility of wastewater leaking from their septic tanks, as resident Amy White told the council during the public comment session. Through her own investigation, White stated city staff told her they had actually been seeing increasing nitrate levels in a monitoring well northwest of Fords Prairie going back to 2015. “The wells at (Fort) Borst Park are pure, I was told, so that showed city water that the contamination source was to the west of the park,” White said. “What large source could there possibly be on Fords Prairie? Well how about a 240-acre game farm, raising 40-to-45,000 birds every year. Do the math. That many birds produce around 200 pounds of poop every day.” White was referring to the Washington state Department of Fish and Wildlife’s (WDFW) Bob Oke Game Farm, which is located south of Centralia High School along Mt. Vista Road. She claimed staff told her the likely cause of the nitrate levels was leaking septic tanks, but stated her own was well-maintained and not leaking. White also recalled how shortly after she moved to the neighborhood in 2004, the game farm euthanized its entire flock to prevent the spread of disease to wild birds in the area, and the tens of thousands of dead birds were simply “buried on site,” on top of other questionable farming practices she’s observed. The game farm breeds and raises pheasants for hunters. It is named after the late Washington state Sen. Bob Oke. Originally opened in the 1950s as the Lewis County Game Farm, it was renamed the Bob Oke Game Farm in 2006 and is almost completely funded by WDFW pheasant hunting license fees, according to previous reporting by The Chronicle. Following public comment, Centralia Public Works Director Kim Ashmore and Lewis County Public Health & Social Services Director Meja Handlen gave a presentation addressing what the city and county know about the nitrate problem so far and what the next steps are in addressing this issue. According to Ashmore, Centralia staff have been testing wells in Fords Prairie since 1981 and did notice nitrate levels increasing in the area from 2017 to 2019 — where an increase of 2.8 to 3.42 milligrams per liter was observed. The maximum allowable limit of nitrate levels in water is 10 milligrams per liter, according to the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, while state law mandates increased monitoring be conducted if the level rises above 5 milligrams per liter. “We started looking at what are potential contaminants out there besides septic tanks and stormwater catch basins, things like that,” Ashmore said. Then a monitoring well on Mt. Vista Road directly next to the Bob Oke Game Farm showed much higher levels starting in 2023 — first at 8.0 milligrams per liter and rising to 9.18 milligrams per liter. The city also drilled another monitoring well at the corner of Mt. Vista and Eshom roads in late 2023. Test results from that well have ranged from 9.12 milligrams per liter to well above the allowable limit at 30.8 milligrams per liter this year. “That’s when we invited Lewis County into this discussion,” Ashmore said. He added wells on private property have also been tested in the neighborhood, all with nitrate levels above 10 milligrams per liter. According to Handlen, the main areas of concern the county has are residences located on Mayberry, Rancho, Eshom, Prill, Mt. Vista, Cowlitz and Pheasant roads along with some residences on Borst Avenue. “This is an area of concern and impact of about 70 homes,” Handlen said. “When we look at this map, we want to be really cognizant of a plume zone.” Tests on Centralia High School’s water supply did not find high levels of nitrates. Handlen stated that Centralia’s drinking water aquifer is shallow with loose overlaying soils, making it vulnerable to nitrate contamination, and historically nitrate has always been present throughout the entire aquifer. As for what happens next, Handlen said she is working to try to get more residents in the area to allow for testing in private wells. So far, they have notified 70 private well owners in the area, tested 28 wells and are now monitoring 20 wells in Fords Prairie, with “about 10 that are private wells that have very high (nitrate) levels.” While results were still inconclusive, high nitrate levels appear to be clustered in an area generally downgradient of the monitoring well at the corner of Mt. Vista and Eshom roads — mainly from residences on Mayberry Road. “We don’t have all the data for everybody on, say Mayberry (Road), and that’s what we really need, to show all the homes together,” Handlen said. Once more testing is conducted and the contamination source is identified, then work can begin on remedying this issue, Handlen added. In addition to more testing to pinpoint the source of the nitrate contamination, county and city staff are working to fund installation of under-sink nitrate filters for residents, with $41,600 coming from a Washington state Department of Health grant, pending grant approval next month. Ashmore added the city has been in contact with both state legislators and the WDFW about this issue, and is planning a community town hall meeting next week. “Everybody’s aware of the issue and we’re all trying to find what is the right solution, but as Meja said, we need a little bit more data,” Ashmore said. While he didn’t announce the exact time, Ashmore said he was in talks with Centralia High School staff to utilize a room on Thursday, Dec. 19, for the town hall meeting, “sometime around 6:30 p.m.” An announcement will be made once the town hall meeting details have been finalized.China Includes 13 Rare Disease Drugs in Medical Insurance, Improving Treatment Accessibility

In conclusion, the Syrian conflict's external ramifications, including the refugee crisis and terrorism risk, underscore the urgent need for a holistic and coordinated response to address the multifaceted challenges. By working together and prioritizing humanitarian principles and security cooperation, there is hope for mitigating the devastating effects of the Syrian conflict and fostering peace and stability in the region.

In conclusion, the case of the man who choked on a sticky rice dumpling and is now seeking compensation has captured the attention of many, shedding light on the importance of product safety and consumer rights. As the legal proceedings unfold, one thing is certain – the demand for "evidence" in this unusual case may be a game-changer in how such incidents are handled in the future.

But the benefits of being a part of the Annual Pioneer List extend beyond just the material rewards. It's also about being part of a vibrant and dynamic community of like-minded individuals who share a passion for technology and innovation. Through collaborations, meetups, and online forums, members of the Pioneer List have the opportunity to connect, learn, and grow together.Raiders confirm QB Gardner Minshew out for season, look to Aidan O'Connell