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fishing online game Blue Origin Licenses Nimbus Power Systems’ Fuel Cell Technology for Development of Space Power Systems GROTON, Conn.–( )–Nimbus Power Systems, Inc., a pioneering developer of advanced fuel cell technologies for heavy-duty vehicles, today announced the successful completion of a fuel cell technology licensing agreement with Blue Origin to facilitate electric power and potable water production in space applications. Nimbus’ unique fuel cell technology features gravity and momentum independent water management, a critical enabler of fuel cell power production in space environments. Fuel cells for space applications react oxygen and hydrogen to produce electricity, heat, and potable water, three vital resources for crewed space operations. The water produced in fuel cells for terrestrial applications is frequently managed using a combination of gravitational and reactant momentum forces – both limited or unavailable in space applications. Nimbus’ unique water management technology removes product water via a combination of capillary and hydraulic forces that are uncompromised by the space environment. This water management advantage decreases system complexity and offers significant weight savings, resulting in more reliable and affordable space operations. , Senior Vice President of Lunar Permanence at Blue Origin, said : “Working with Nimbus leverages the latest advances in their terrestrial fuel cell technology to accelerate Blue Origin’s in-house fuel cell solutions for in-space and lunar products.” , CEO of Nimbus Power Systems, said : “This collaboration with Blue Origin combines decades of fuel cell technology advancements, with state-of-the-art crewed space flight systems to serve the rapidly growing market for affordable space products and services. We are delighted that our dual-use fuel cell technology will support terrestrial and aerospace applications for years to come.” For more information about Nimbus Power Systems visit . the latest news shaping the hydrogen market at Blue Origin Licenses Nimbus Power Systems’ Fuel Cell Technology for Development of Space Power Systems, Delta Unveils Taiwan’s 1st Megawatt-grade Hydrogen Electrolyser and Fuel Cell R&D Lab to Advance Hydrogen Energy Innovation TAIPEI, December 12, 2024 — Delta, a global leader in power management and a provider of... SFC Energy AG secures another million-euro order – Linc Polska again relies on fuel cells by SFC Energy Brunnthal/Munich, Germany, 9 December 2024 – SFC Energy AG (“SFC”, F3C:DE, ISIN: DE0007568578), a leading... Ballard to Supply 8 MW of Fuel Cell Engines to Stadler for Californian Passenger Rail VANCOUVER, BC, Dec. 9, 2024 /PRNewswire/ – Ballard Power Systems (NASDAQ: BLDP) (TSX: BLDP) today announced the signing of a...Article content Game Day 29: Oilers vs Wild The Edmonton Oilers have waived struggling defenceman Travis Dermott, making way for newcomer Alec Regula, who was claimed on waivers on Wednesday. My take 1. Dermott was brought in on a try-out contract this September and made the Oilers, but he struggled in his two-way play and failed to exhibit any one skill that would keep him in the line-up. He had some chances but didn’t click, making it an imperative for the team to move on from him. 2. Edmonton needs at least seven solid NHL d-men heading into the playoffs. Perhaps newcomer Alec Regula will be that seventh man. Both Josh Brown and Dermott took a stab at winning the job but couldn’t get it done. Ty Emberson and Troy Stecher, on the other hand, have impressed enough in Edmonton that it’s likely they’ll remain on the NHL roster. 3. Edmonton has a solid top-pairing in Evan Bouchard and Mattias Ekholm, along with a solid second-pairing in Brett Kulak and Darnell Nurse, who since November 1 has played the best hockey of his NHL career. Stecher, Emberson and Regula are all right-shot d-men, so they’re not an ideal group to mix and match on the third-paring, but the Oilers have been getting around this issue to date by moving Kulak up and down the roster, sometimes pairing with Nurse, at other times with Emberson. 4. It speaks well of owner Daryl Katz’s commitment to the team that he’s willing to bring in numerous players on pro contracts, give them a chance, then pay the full shot or a substantial portion of their NHL salary if they fail and end up in the NHL. Brown will make $1 million this year and for the next two. Dermott earns $500,000 this year if he’s in the minors. Regula earns $775,000 wherever he plays. This kind of expensive experimentation allowed the team to see if Brown, Dermott, Stecher and Emberson could cut it. So far the Oilers have two hits and two misses, but perhaps Regula will make it a third hit. 5. As for tonight’s game, the Oilers are going with the same line-up as last game, save for having Calvin Pickard in net. Pickard has six wins and three losses, but an underwhelming .892 save percentage. At the Cult of Hockey McCURDY: Surprise! Oilers bring in big new d-man Staples on politics Danielle Smith in damage control to stop sell-out of Alberta’s interests in Trudeau/Trump tariff crisisJudith Graham | (TNS) KFF Health News Carolyn Dickens, 76, was sitting at her dining room table, struggling to catch her breath as her physician looked on with concern. “What’s going on with your breathing?” asked Peter Gliatto, director of Mount Sinai’s Visiting Doctors Program. “I don’t know,” she answered, so softly it was hard to hear. “Going from here to the bathroom or the door, I get really winded. I don’t know when it’s going to be my last breath.” Dickens, a lung cancer survivor, lives in central Harlem, barely getting by. She has serious lung disease and high blood pressure and suffers regular fainting spells. In the past year, she’s fallen several times and dropped to 85 pounds, a dangerously low weight. And she lives alone, without any help — a highly perilous situation. This is almost surely an undercount, since the data is from more than a dozen years ago. It’s a population whose numbers far exceed those living in nursing homes — about 1.2 million — and yet it receives much less attention from policymakers, legislators, and academics who study aging. Consider some eye-opening statistics about completely homebound seniors from a study published in 2020 in JAMA Internal Medicine : Nearly 40% have five or more chronic medical conditions, such as heart or lung disease. Almost 30% are believed to have “probable dementia.” Seventy-seven percent have difficulty with at least one daily task such as bathing or dressing. Almost 40% live by themselves. That “on my own” status magnifies these individuals’ already considerable vulnerability, something that became acutely obvious during the covid-19 outbreak, when the number of sick and disabled seniors confined to their homes doubled. “People who are homebound, like other individuals who are seriously ill, rely on other people for so much,” said Katherine Ornstein, director of the Center for Equity in Aging at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. “If they don’t have someone there with them, they’re at risk of not having food, not having access to health care, not living in a safe environment.” Related Articles Health | Weight loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy are all the rage. Are they safe for kids? Health | Rural governments often fail to communicate with residents who aren’t proficient in English Health | Some breast cancer patients can avoid certain surgeries, studies suggest Health | Who gets obesity drugs covered by insurance? In North Carolina, it helps if you’re on Medicaid Health | New Alzheimer’s drugs are available, but can you get them in Florida? Research has shown that older homebound adults are less likely to receive regular primary care than other seniors. They’re also more likely to end up in the hospital with medical crises that might have been prevented if someone had been checking on them. To better understand the experiences of these seniors, I accompanied Gliatto on some home visits in New York City. Mount Sinai’s Visiting Doctors Program, established in 1995, is one of the oldest in the nation. Only 12% of older U.S. adults who rarely or never leave home have access to this kind of home-based primary care. Gliatto and his staff — seven part-time doctors, three nurse practitioners, two nurses, two social workers, and three administrative staffers — serve about 1,000 patients in Manhattan each year. These patients have complicated needs and require high levels of assistance. In recent years, Gliatto has had to cut staff as Mount Sinai has reduced its financial contribution to the program. It doesn’t turn a profit, because reimbursement for services is low and expenses are high. First, Gliatto stopped in to see Sandra Pettway, 79, who never married or had children and has lived by herself in a two-bedroom Harlem apartment for 30 years. Pettway has severe spinal problems and back pain, as well as Type 2 diabetes and depression. She has difficulty moving around and rarely leaves her apartment. “Since the pandemic, it’s been awfully lonely,” she told me. When I asked who checks in on her, Pettway mentioned her next-door neighbor. There’s no one else she sees regularly. Pettway told the doctor she was increasingly apprehensive about an upcoming spinal surgery. He reassured her that Medicare would cover in-home nursing care, aides, and physical therapy services. “Someone will be with you, at least for six weeks,” he said. Left unsaid: Afterward, she would be on her own. (The surgery in April went well, Gliatto reported later.) The doctor listened carefully as Pettway talked about her memory lapses. “I can remember when I was a year old, but I can’t remember 10 minutes ago,” she said. He told her that he thought she was managing well but that he would arrange testing if there was further evidence of cognitive decline. For now, he said, he’s not particularly worried about her ability to manage on her own. Several blocks away, Gliatto visited Dickens, who has lived in her one-bedroom Harlem apartment for 31 years. Dickens told me she hasn’t seen other people regularly since her sister, who used to help her out, had a stroke. Most of the neighbors she knew well have died. Her only other close relative is a niece in the Bronx whom she sees about once a month. Dickens worked with special-education students for decades in New York City’s public schools. Now she lives on a small pension and Social Security — too much to qualify for Medicaid. (Medicaid, the program for low-income people, will pay for aides in the home. Medicare, which covers people over age 65, does not.) Like Pettway, she has only a small fixed income, so she can’t afford in-home help. Every Friday, God’s Love We Deliver, an organization that prepares medically tailored meals for sick people, delivers a week’s worth of frozen breakfasts and dinners that Dickens reheats in the microwave. She almost never goes out. When she has energy, she tries to do a bit of cleaning. Without the ongoing attention from Gliatto, Dickens doesn’t know what she’d do. “Having to get up and go out, you know, putting on your clothes, it’s a task,” she said. “And I have the fear of falling.” The next day, Gliatto visited Marianne Gluck Morrison, 73, a former survey researcher for New York City’s personnel department, in her cluttered Greenwich Village apartment. Morrison, who doesn’t have any siblings or children, was widowed in 2010 and has lived alone since. Morrison said she’d been feeling dizzy over the past few weeks, and Gliatto gave her a basic neurological exam, asking her to follow his fingers with her eyes and touch her fingers to her nose. “I think your problem is with your ear, not your brain,” he told her, describing symptoms of vertigo. Because she had severe wounds on her feet related to Type 2 diabetes, Morrison had been getting home health care for several weeks through Medicare. But those services — help from aides, nurses, and physical therapists — were due to expire in two weeks. “I don’t know what I’ll do then, probably just spend a lot of time in bed,” Morrison told me. Among her other medical conditions: congestive heart failure, osteoarthritis, an irregular heartbeat, chronic kidney disease, and depression. Morrison hasn’t left her apartment since November 2023, when she returned home after a hospitalization and several months at a rehabilitation center. Climbing the three steps that lead up into her apartment building is simply too hard. “It’s hard to be by myself so much of the time. It’s lonely,” she told me. “I would love to have people see me in the house. But at this point, because of the clutter, I can’t do it.” When I asked Morrison who she feels she can count on, she listed Gliatto and a mental health therapist from Henry Street Settlement, a social services organization. She has one close friend she speaks with on the phone most nights. “The problem is I’ve lost eight to nine friends in the last 15 years,” she said, sighing heavily. “They’ve died or moved away.” Bruce Leff, director of the Center for Transformative Geriatric Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, is a leading advocate of home-based medical care. “It’s kind of amazing how people find ways to get by,” he said when I asked him about homebound older adults who live alone. “There’s a significant degree of frailty and vulnerability, but there is also substantial resilience.” With the rapid expansion of the aging population in the years ahead, Leff is convinced that more kinds of care will move into the home, everything from rehab services to palliative care to hospital-level services. “It will simply be impossible to build enough hospitals and health facilities to meet the demand from an aging population,” he said. But that will be challenging for homebound older adults who are on their own. Without on-site family caregivers, there may be no one around to help manage this home-based care. ©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.The Chinese Embassy has condemned accusations about a cyber attack as "unfounded and irresponsible smears and slanders". The National Cyber Security Centre put out an advisory last week alongside US and other authorities about an operation called Salt Typhoon, that breached the networks of major global telecommunications providers, which they blamed on China-affiliated hackers. US authorities who had investigated it for months said hackers accessed phone conversations and texts, and swept up masses of metadata from Americans. But the Chinese embassy in New Zealand rejected this and criticised the US. "We urge the relevant countries to immediately cease their global cyberattacks and stop using cybersecurity issues as a pretext to smear China," it said in a statement to RNZ on Saturday. Expert research in China showed the US had been using advanced methods "frame" other nations for launching cyberattacks. This included "inserting foreign-language strings, including Chinese, to distort traceability analysis and mislead attribution," it said. The US was even targeting the leaders of its allies, including by leveraging its strategic position in global submarine fiber-optic networks. "It is noteworthy that Guam, which the US claimed to be the victim of 'Volt Typhoon' cyberattacks, is actually the headquarters of a large number of cyberattacks against China and many Southeast Asian countries launched by the US," said an earlier official statement . It referred to a report in October by China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center, National Engineering Laboratory for Computer Virus Prevention Technology, and 360 Digital Security Group, that said the US was "hyping" up warnings about the "typhoon" hacking operations. "The US is using its advantages on undersea cables to launch massive, systemic cyber surveillance and espionage globally," it added. "Ironically, the US rallied some of its allies to issue a joint statement on the occasion of this year's UN General Assembly, claiming to safeguard the security and resilience of undersea cables." That statement in September , endorsed by New Zealand, listed a range of measures including taking into account "undue influence by a third country on suppliers and service providers" of cables. The Chinese embassy said it had "taken note that relevant institutions from New Zealand, the United States, and a few other countries issued the so-called joint guidance about enhanced visibility and hardening for communications infrastructure". China had consistently fought cyber attacks in accordance with the law and promoted international efforts to stop the undermining of other countries' critical infrastructure, or the stealing of sensitive data or jeopardising national security, it said. "We call on all nations to engage in dialogue and cooperation, to collectively address cybersecurity threats, based on mutual respect, equality, and shared benefit." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.

Golden Knights get help with returning playersJudith Graham | (TNS) KFF Health News Carolyn Dickens, 76, was sitting at her dining room table, struggling to catch her breath as her physician looked on with concern. “What’s going on with your breathing?” asked Peter Gliatto, director of Mount Sinai’s Visiting Doctors Program. “I don’t know,” she answered, so softly it was hard to hear. “Going from here to the bathroom or the door, I get really winded. I don’t know when it’s going to be my last breath.” Dickens, a lung cancer survivor, lives in central Harlem, barely getting by. She has serious lung disease and high blood pressure and suffers regular fainting spells. In the past year, she’s fallen several times and dropped to 85 pounds, a dangerously low weight. And she lives alone, without any help — a highly perilous situation. This is almost surely an undercount, since the data is from more than a dozen years ago. It’s a population whose numbers far exceed those living in nursing homes — about 1.2 million — and yet it receives much less attention from policymakers, legislators, and academics who study aging. Consider some eye-opening statistics about completely homebound seniors from a study published in 2020 in JAMA Internal Medicine : Nearly 40% have five or more chronic medical conditions, such as heart or lung disease. Almost 30% are believed to have “probable dementia.” Seventy-seven percent have difficulty with at least one daily task such as bathing or dressing. Almost 40% live by themselves. That “on my own” status magnifies these individuals’ already considerable vulnerability, something that became acutely obvious during the covid-19 outbreak, when the number of sick and disabled seniors confined to their homes doubled. “People who are homebound, like other individuals who are seriously ill, rely on other people for so much,” said Katherine Ornstein, director of the Center for Equity in Aging at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. “If they don’t have someone there with them, they’re at risk of not having food, not having access to health care, not living in a safe environment.” Related Articles Health | Lawmakers seek to break up drug middlemen in push to reduce medication costs Health | Weight loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy are all the rage. Are they safe for kids? Health | Stanley recalls 2.6 million travel mugs over burn hazard from shrinking lids Health | Rural governments often fail to communicate with residents who aren’t proficient in English Health | Some breast cancer patients can avoid certain surgeries, studies suggest Research has shown that older homebound adults are less likely to receive regular primary care than other seniors. They’re also more likely to end up in the hospital with medical crises that might have been prevented if someone had been checking on them. To better understand the experiences of these seniors, I accompanied Gliatto on some home visits in New York City. Mount Sinai’s Visiting Doctors Program, established in 1995, is one of the oldest in the nation. Only 12% of older U.S. adults who rarely or never leave home have access to this kind of home-based primary care. Gliatto and his staff — seven part-time doctors, three nurse practitioners, two nurses, two social workers, and three administrative staffers — serve about 1,000 patients in Manhattan each year. These patients have complicated needs and require high levels of assistance. In recent years, Gliatto has had to cut staff as Mount Sinai has reduced its financial contribution to the program. It doesn’t turn a profit, because reimbursement for services is low and expenses are high. First, Gliatto stopped in to see Sandra Pettway, 79, who never married or had children and has lived by herself in a two-bedroom Harlem apartment for 30 years. Pettway has severe spinal problems and back pain, as well as Type 2 diabetes and depression. She has difficulty moving around and rarely leaves her apartment. “Since the pandemic, it’s been awfully lonely,” she told me. When I asked who checks in on her, Pettway mentioned her next-door neighbor. There’s no one else she sees regularly. Pettway told the doctor she was increasingly apprehensive about an upcoming spinal surgery. He reassured her that Medicare would cover in-home nursing care, aides, and physical therapy services. “Someone will be with you, at least for six weeks,” he said. Left unsaid: Afterward, she would be on her own. (The surgery in April went well, Gliatto reported later.) The doctor listened carefully as Pettway talked about her memory lapses. “I can remember when I was a year old, but I can’t remember 10 minutes ago,” she said. He told her that he thought she was managing well but that he would arrange testing if there was further evidence of cognitive decline. For now, he said, he’s not particularly worried about her ability to manage on her own. Several blocks away, Gliatto visited Dickens, who has lived in her one-bedroom Harlem apartment for 31 years. Dickens told me she hasn’t seen other people regularly since her sister, who used to help her out, had a stroke. Most of the neighbors she knew well have died. Her only other close relative is a niece in the Bronx whom she sees about once a month. Dickens worked with special-education students for decades in New York City’s public schools. Now she lives on a small pension and Social Security — too much to qualify for Medicaid. (Medicaid, the program for low-income people, will pay for aides in the home. Medicare, which covers people over age 65, does not.) Like Pettway, she has only a small fixed income, so she can’t afford in-home help. Every Friday, God’s Love We Deliver, an organization that prepares medically tailored meals for sick people, delivers a week’s worth of frozen breakfasts and dinners that Dickens reheats in the microwave. She almost never goes out. When she has energy, she tries to do a bit of cleaning. Without the ongoing attention from Gliatto, Dickens doesn’t know what she’d do. “Having to get up and go out, you know, putting on your clothes, it’s a task,” she said. “And I have the fear of falling.” The next day, Gliatto visited Marianne Gluck Morrison, 73, a former survey researcher for New York City’s personnel department, in her cluttered Greenwich Village apartment. Morrison, who doesn’t have any siblings or children, was widowed in 2010 and has lived alone since. Morrison said she’d been feeling dizzy over the past few weeks, and Gliatto gave her a basic neurological exam, asking her to follow his fingers with her eyes and touch her fingers to her nose. “I think your problem is with your ear, not your brain,” he told her, describing symptoms of vertigo. Because she had severe wounds on her feet related to Type 2 diabetes, Morrison had been getting home health care for several weeks through Medicare. But those services — help from aides, nurses, and physical therapists — were due to expire in two weeks. “I don’t know what I’ll do then, probably just spend a lot of time in bed,” Morrison told me. Among her other medical conditions: congestive heart failure, osteoarthritis, an irregular heartbeat, chronic kidney disease, and depression. Morrison hasn’t left her apartment since November 2023, when she returned home after a hospitalization and several months at a rehabilitation center. Climbing the three steps that lead up into her apartment building is simply too hard. “It’s hard to be by myself so much of the time. It’s lonely,” she told me. “I would love to have people see me in the house. But at this point, because of the clutter, I can’t do it.” When I asked Morrison who she feels she can count on, she listed Gliatto and a mental health therapist from Henry Street Settlement, a social services organization. She has one close friend she speaks with on the phone most nights. “The problem is I’ve lost eight to nine friends in the last 15 years,” she said, sighing heavily. “They’ve died or moved away.” Bruce Leff, director of the Center for Transformative Geriatric Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, is a leading advocate of home-based medical care. “It’s kind of amazing how people find ways to get by,” he said when I asked him about homebound older adults who live alone. “There’s a significant degree of frailty and vulnerability, but there is also substantial resilience.” With the rapid expansion of the aging population in the years ahead, Leff is convinced that more kinds of care will move into the home, everything from rehab services to palliative care to hospital-level services. “It will simply be impossible to build enough hospitals and health facilities to meet the demand from an aging population,” he said. But that will be challenging for homebound older adults who are on their own. Without on-site family caregivers, there may be no one around to help manage this home-based care. ©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Govt urged to scale up education financing to 4pc of GDP

Rio Ferdinand makes bold Liverpool claim as he backs them to claim a dream doubleBEIRUT (AP) — Insurgents' stunning march across Syria accelerated Saturday with news that they had reached the suburbs of the capital and that government forces had withdrawn from the central city of Homs. The government was forced to deny rumors that President Bashar Assad had fled the country. The loss of Homs is a potentially crippling blow for Assad. It stands at an important intersection between Damascus and Syria’s coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus — the Syrian leader’s base of support and home to a Russian strategic naval base. The pro-government Sham FM reported that government forces took positions outside Syria’s third-largest city, without elaborating. Rami Abdurrahman who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Syrian troops and members of different security agencies have withdrawn from the city, adding that rebels have entered parts of it. The capture of Homs is a major victory for insurgents, who have already seized the cities of Aleppo and Hama , as well as large parts of the south, in a lightning offensive that began Nov. 27. Analysts said Homs falling into rebel hands would be a game-changer. The rebels' moves around Damascus, reported by the monitor and a rebel commander, came after the Syrian army withdrew from much of southern part of the country, leaving more areas, including several provincial capitals, under the control of opposition fighters. The advances in the past week were among the largest in recent years by opposition factions, led by a group that has its origins in al-Qaida and is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the United Nations. In their push to overthrow Assad's government, the insurgents, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or HTS, have met little resistance from the Syrian army. For the first time in the country's long-running civil war, the government now has control of only three of 14 provincial capitals: Damascus, Latakia and Tartus. The U.N.’s special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, on Saturday called for urgent talks in Geneva to ensure an “orderly political transition.” Speaking to reporters at the annual Doha Forum in Qatar, he said the situation in Syria was changing by the minute. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, whose country is Assad's chief international backer, said he feels “sorry for the Syrian people.” In Damascus, people rushed to stock up on supplies. Thousands went to Syria's border with Lebanon, trying to leave the country. Many shops in the capital were shuttered, a resident told The Associated Press, and those still open ran out of staples such as sugar. Some were selling items at three times the normal price. “The situation is very strange. We are not used to that,” the resident said, insisting on anonymity, fearing retributions. “People are worried whether there will be a battle (in Damascus) or not.” It was the first time that opposition forces reached the outskirts of Damascus since 2018, when Syrian troops recaptured the area following a yearslong siege. The U.N. said it was moving noncritical staff outside the country as a precaution. Syria’s state media denied social media rumors that Assad left the country, saying he is performing his duties in Damascus. He has had little, if any, help from his allies. Russia, is busy with its war in Ukraine . Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which at one point sent thousands of fighters to shore up Assad's forces, has been weakened by a yearlong conflict with Israel. Iran has seen its proxies across the region degraded by regular Israeli airstrikes. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday posted on social media that that the United States should avoid engaging militarily in Syria. Pedersen said a date for talks in Geneva on the implementation a U.N. resolution, adopted in 2015, and calling for a Syrian-led political process, would be announced later. The resolution calls for the establishment of a transitional governing body, followed by the drafting of a new constitution and ending with U.N.-supervised elections. Later Saturday, foreign ministers and senior diplomats from eight key countries, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Egypt, Turkey and Iran, along with Pederson, gathered on the sidelines of the Doha Summit to discuss the situation in Syria. No details were immediately available. Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said insurgents were in the Damascus suburbs of Maadamiyah, Jaramana and Daraya. Opposition fighters were marching toward the Damascus suburb of Harasta, he added. A commander with the insurgents, Hassan Abdul-Ghani, posted on the Telegram messaging app that opposition forces had begun the “final stage” of their offensive by encircling Damascus. HTS controls much of northwest Syria and in 2017 set up a “salvation government” to run day-to-day affairs in the region. In recent years, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani has sought to remake the group’s image, cutting ties with al-Qaida, ditching hard-line officials and vowing to embrace pluralism and religious tolerance. The shock offensive began Nov. 27, during which gunmen captured the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest, and the central city of Hama , the country’s fourth largest city. Opposition activists said Saturday that a day earlier, insurgents entered Palmyra, which is home to invaluable archaeological sites had been in government hands since being taken from the Islamic State group in 2017. To the south, Syrian troops left much of the province of Quneitra including the main Baath City, activists said. Syrian Observatory said government troops have withdrawn from much of the two southern provinces. The Syrian army said in a statement that it carried out redeployment and repositioning in Sweida and Daraa after its checkpoints came under attack by “terrorists." The army said it was setting up a “strong and coherent defensive and security belt in the area,” apparently to defend Damascus from the south. The Syrian government has referred to opposition gunmen as terrorists since conflict broke out in March 2011. The foreign ministers of Iran, Russia and Turkey, meeting in Qatar, called for an end to the hostilities. Turkey is a main backer of the rebels. Qatar's top diplomat, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, criticized Assad for failing to take advantage of the lull in fighting in recent years to address the country’s underlying problems. “Assad didn’t seize this opportunity to start engaging and restoring his relationship with his people,” he said. Sheikh Mohammed said he was surprised by how quickly the rebels have advanced and said there is a real threat to Syria’s “territorial integrity.” He said the war could “damage and destroy what is left if there is no sense of urgency” to start a political process. Karam reported from London. Associated Press writers Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria and Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad contributed to this report.