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k rich ROME (AP) — Robert Lewandowski joined Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi as the only players in history with 100 or more goals. But is on a faster pace than anyone by boosting his total to 46 goals at age 24 on Tuesday. Still, Haaland's brace wasn't enough for Manchester City in a 3-3 draw with Feyenoord that extended the Premier League champion's winless streak to six matches. Lewandowski’s early penalty kick started Barcelona off to a 3-0 win over previously unbeaten Brest to move into second place in the new single-league format. The Poland striker added goal No. 101 in second-half stoppage time. Ronaldo leads the all-time scoring list with 140 goals and Messi is next with 129. But neither Ronaldo nor Messi play in the Champions League anymore following moves to Saudi Arabia and the United States, respectively. “It’s a nice number,” Lewandowski said. “In the past I didn’t think I could score more than 100 goals in the Champions League. I’m in good company alongside Cristiano and Messi.” The 36-year-old Lewandowski required 125 matches to reach the century mark, two more than Messi (123) and 12 fewer than Ronaldo (137). Barcelona also got a second-half score from Dani Olmo. The top eight finishers in the standings advance directly to the round of 16 in March. Teams ranked ninth to 24th go into a knockout playoffs round in February, while the bottom 12 teams are eliminated. Haaland converted a first-half penalty to eclipse Messi as the youngest player to reach 45 goals then scored City's third after the break to raise his total to 46 goals in 44 games. Ilkay Gundogan had City's second. But then Feyenoord struck back with goals from Anis Hadj Moussa, Santiago Gimenez and David Hancko. Inter Milan beat Leipzig 1-0 with an own goal to move atop the standings with 13 points, one more than Barcelona and Liverpool, which faces Real Madrid on Wednesday. The Serie A champion is the only club that hasn't conceded a goal. Bayern Munich beat Paris Saint-Germain 1-0 — the same score from the 2020 final between the two teams. PSG ended with 10 men and remained in the elimination zone. The French powerhouse has struggled in Europe after Kylian Mbappe’s move to Real Madrid. Kim Min-jae’s first-half header was enough for Bayern, especially after Ousmane Dembelé was sent off in the 56th with his second yellow. Atalanta moved within two points of the lead with a 6-1 win at Young Boys. Charles De Ketelaere scored two and assisted on three other goals for Atalanta. Also, Arsenal kept red-hot striker Viktor Gyokeres quiet in a 5-1 win over Sporting Lisbon; and Germany star Florian Wirtz scored two goals and was involved in two more as Bayer Leverkusen boosted its chances of finishing in the top eight with a 5-0 rout of Salzburg. AC Milan followed up its win at Real Madrid with a 3-2 victory at last-place Slovan Bratislava in an early match. Christian Pulisic put the seven-time champion ahead midway through the first half by finishing off a counterattack. Then Rafael Leao restored the Rossoneri’s advantage after Tigran Barseghyan had equalized for Bratislava and Tammy Abraham quickly added another. Nino Marcelli scored with a long-range strike in the 88th for Bratislava, which ended with 10 men. Bratislava has lost all five of its matches. Argentina World Cup winner Julian Alvarez scored twice and Atletico Madrid routed Sparta Prague 6-0 in the other early game. Alvarez scored with a free kick 15 minutes in and Marcos Llorente added a long-range strike before the break. Alvarez finished off a counterattack early in the second half after being set up by substitute Antoine Griezmann, who then marked his 100th Champions League game by getting on the scoresheet himself. Angel Correa added a late brace for Atletico, which earned its biggest away win in Europe. Atletico beat Paris Saint-Germain in the previous round and extended its winning streak across all competitions to six matches. AP soccer:LAS VEGAS (AP) — A team that previously boycotted at least one match against the San Jose State women's volleyball program will again be faced with the decision whether to play the school, this time in the Mountain West Conference semifinals with a shot at the NCAA Tournament on the line. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * LAS VEGAS (AP) — A team that previously boycotted at least one match against the San Jose State women's volleyball program will again be faced with the decision whether to play the school, this time in the Mountain West Conference semifinals with a shot at the NCAA Tournament on the line. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? LAS VEGAS (AP) — A team that previously boycotted at least one match against the San Jose State women’s volleyball program will again be faced with the decision whether to play the school, this time in the Mountain West Conference semifinals with a shot at the NCAA Tournament on the line. Five schools forfeited matches in the regular season against San Jose State, which carried a No. 2 seed into the conference tournament in Las Vegas. Among those schools: No. 3 Utah State and No. 6 Boise State, who will face off Wednesday with the winner scheduled to play the Spartans in the semifinals on Friday. Wyoming, Nevada and Southern Utah — which is not a Mountain West member — also canceled regular-season matches, all without explicitly saying why they were forfeiting. Nevada players cited fairness in women’s sports as a reason to boycott their match, while political figures from Wyoming, Idaho, Utah and Nevada suggested the cancellations center around protecting women’s sports. In a lawsuit filed against the NCAA, plaintiffs cited unspecified reports asserting there was a transgender player on the San Jose State volleyball team, even naming her. While some media have reported those and other details, neither San Jose State nor the forfeiting teams have confirmed the school has a trans women’s volleyball player. The Associated Press is withholding the player’s name because she has not publicly commented on her gender identity and through school officials has declined an interview request. A judge on Monday rejected a request made by nine current conference players to block the San Jose State player from competing in the tournament on grounds that she is transgender. That ruling was upheld Tuesday by an appeals court. “The team looks forward to starting Mountain West Conference tournament competition on Friday,” San Jose State said in a statement issued after the appeals court decision. “The university maintains an unwavering commitment to the participation, safety and privacy of all students at San Jose State and ensuring they are able to compete in an inclusive, fair and respectful environment.” Boise State did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. “Utah State is reviewing the court’s order,” Doug Hoffman, Aggies associate athletic director for communications, said in an email. “Right now, our women’s volleyball program is focused on the game this Wednesday, and we’ll be cheering them on.” Winnipeg Jets Game Days On Winnipeg Jets game days, hockey writers Mike McIntyre and Ken Wiebe send news, notes and quotes from the morning skate, as well as injury updates and lineup decisions. Arrives a few hours prior to puck drop. San Jose State, which had a first-round bye, would be sent directly to the conference title game if Utah State or Boise State were to forfeit again. If the Spartans make the title game, it’s likely the opponent would not forfeit. They would face top-seeded Colorado State, No. 4 Fresno State or No. 5 San Diego State — all teams that played the Spartans this season. The conference champion receives an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. ___ AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports Advertisement Advertisement

Thousands of Syrian refugees return home after brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad toppled by rebels

Social Media Dad Predicts Major Shifts in Digital Landscape for 2025, Parents Need to Buckle UpQatar tribune Smitha Vishveshwara Reeling from a divisive and turbulent election season, many of us seek spaces of solace, light, unity and worship as we turn toward the winter holidays. The cosmos and its reflection within us harbor such spaces. By viewing and embracing scientific insights through the lens of humanity, you form a connection with your place in the universe. And when you do so, a window opens into the sacred space of our profoundly united existence. Earlier this year, a celestial event cast its splendor along a belt traversing our nation — the total solar eclipse. During totality, day turned to night. The sun’s corona blazed around its darkened disc. A moment so visceral, unwitting animals could palpably feel it. Transcending age, walks of life, race and politics, the eclipse brought millions together in a communion of cosmic wonder. In my family of three generations, some drove from Illinois to Indiana, while others traveled from India in time for the event. Our shared experience formed immediate bonds with hitherto unknown friends. As a scientist, the eclipse also offered me spectacular links to two modern revolutionary branches of physics that have completely changed our perception of nature: relativity and quantum physics. As my late black hole physicist father would delight in sharing, a solar eclipse was needed to demonstrate the bending of light around the sun, sealing predictions of Albert Einstein’s relativity in 1919. As for the quantum revolution, its technological marvels are part of our daily lives: lasers, semiconducting circuit elements, MRI machines, and more. A practicing quantum physicist, I rejoice at the unity of our common quest. Scholars come together from across the world to the United States, collaborating, learning, mentoring. Just as my parents did — my mother, a biophysicist — half a century ago. During the eclipse, I felt a heightened awe for the phenomenon that sparked this revolution. Humans and stars radiate light in the same way. An ever-present miracle on Earth — we are all perfectly glowing beings in our unhindered outpouring! What is this universal light? “Blackbody radiation,” as physicists call it, is the common pattern of light that emanates from stars, heated metal, the universe and you and me. We are all effulgent blackbodies. Our radiation pattern depends only on the body’s intrinsic temperature. For a star, it peaks in the visible range and depending on its temperature, appears anything from red to blue in the rainbow spectrum. For mammals, reflecting a similar body temperature across species, the radiation peaks in the infrared. Through an infrared camera, we can perceive our glowing warmth. Our Earth, too, is nearly a blackbody. Save for the atmosphere — a thin veneer trapping heat and balancing a temperature range that sustains life. A delicate balance that we humans can disrupt by pumping this veneer with emissions. Quantum physics grew from contemplating this universal pattern. Understanding it required re-envisioning light not as a wave, but as a bundle of energy, a photon. This seed gave way to mind-boggling notions and theories that explain so much of the world, starting with our current description of the atom. Today, quantum science thrives splendidly across the globe. Looking ahead, the U.S. National Quantum Initiative passed as an act of Congress with bipartisan support, meaning that throughout 2025, the world will celebrate a United Nations International Year, commemorating a century of quantum science and its wonders. The seed that gave birth to all this brings alive a luminous sacred space. The universe, the stars, humans — all mirroring one another in radiance. A sacred space of awe and care as you might find in nature — lying in a pine forest, walking by a mountain range, immersing in the ocean’s infinity. Or in an act of worship — praying together beneath a spire or dome, meditating in a sanctum, dancing in spiritual ecstasy, feeding a child, creating patterns of colored chalk powder to be blown away by the wind. We are here as but one burst in space and time. Contemplating our mortality, do we not hold the sacred all the more precious? In the afterglow of Thanksgiving — a relatively new holiday, in cosmic terms — I invite you into this space. An invocation that can bring joy, universal love and gratitude. A contemplation that comes as a prayer. On the veneer of the Earth, just as the celestial sphere is riddled with a billion blazing stars, we form a human galaxy of glowing beings. Nodes of an interconnected complex web. Connecting in the smiles of strangers passing by, in our exchanges, our altercations included, in a shoulder to rest on in moments of deep pain, in a shared meal, in an embrace. The stretches of darkness grow longer in the winter, and we kindle fires. We illuminate our festivities with clusters of light. In all this, each of us carries within ourselves a burnishing lamp. Each of us is a radiant, glowing being. (Smitha Vishveshwara is a professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project.) Copy 22/12/2024 10Membership of Britain's upstart anti-immigration Reform UK party has overtaken that of the centre-right Conservative Party for the first time, the party said Thursday, as Tories disputed the numbers. Party leader and Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage hailed the figure as a "historic moment". Immigration was a major issue at the ballot box at the UK's July general election which saw the Conservatives ousted after 14 years in power. The digital counter on the Reform website showed a membership tally ticking past the 131,680 figure declared by the main opposition Conservatives during its leadership election earlier this year. "The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world," wrote Farage on X. "Reform UK are now the real opposition." Party chairman Zia Yusuf said the milestone showed the long "stranglehold on the centre-right of British politics by the Tories has finally been broken". The last declared Conservative Party tally was the lowest on record and a drop on 2022, when there were around 172,000 members. New Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, however, questioned the figures, accusing Farage of "fakery". She said Reform's counter was "coded to tick up automatically". Farage responded by saying he would "gladly invite" a firm to "audit our membership numbers" if the Tories did the same. Reform won five seats in the 650-seat UK parliament in July, though it received roughly 14 percent of total votes cast. Reform maximised the damage to the Conservatives by splitting the right-wing vote and picking up former Tory supporters in key constituencies. The Labour Party won by a landslide although Prime Minister Keir Starmer has had a bumpy first five months in power. An Ipsos opinion poll this month found that 53 percent of Britons said they were "disappointed" in what the Labour government had achieved so far. British politics has been dominated by the two main parties -- Labour and the Conservatives -- for decades but commentators have warned that major parties have seen irreversible downturns in their popularity in the past. In the years after World War I, a divided Liberal Party found itself supplanted by the Labour Party as the main opposition. The party of 19th-century political giant William Gladstone and World War I leader David Lloyd George never again regained its status as a party of government. Farage, a supporter of US President-elect Donald Trump, said earlier this month that he was in talks with tech billionaire Elon Musk about donating to his hard-right party. har/js