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superace168 By ROB GILLIES TORONTO (AP) — Canada is already examining possible retaliatory tariffs on certain items from the United States should President-elect Donald Trump follow through on his threat to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian products, a senior official said Wednesday. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico if the countries don’t stop what he called the flow of drugs and migrants across southern and northern borders. He said he would impose a 25% tax on all products entering the U.S. from Canada and Mexico as one of his first executive orders. A Canadian government official said Canada is preparing for every eventuality and has started thinking about what items to target with tariffs in retaliation. The official stressed no decision has been made. The person spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly. When Trump imposed higher tariffs during his first term in office, other countries responded with retaliatory tariffs of their own. Canada, for instance, announced billions of new duties in 2018 against the U.S. in a tit-for-tat response to new taxes on Canadian steel and aluminum. Many of the U.S. products were chosen for their political rather than economic impact. For example, Canada imports $3 million worth of yogurt from the U.S. annually and most comes from one plant in Wisconsin, home state of then-House Speaker Paul Ryan. That product was hit with a 10% duty. Another product on the list was whiskey, which comes from Tennessee and Kentucky, the latter of which is the home state of then-Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Trump made the threat Monday while railing against an influx of illegal migrants, even though the numbers at Canadian border pale in comparison to the southern border. The U.S. Border Patrol made 56,530 arrests at the Mexican border in October alone — and 23,721 arrests at the Canadian one between October 2023 and September 2024. Canadian officials say lumping Canada in with Mexico is unfair but say they are happy to work with the Trump administration to lower the numbers from Canada. The Canadians are also worried about a influx north of migrants if Trump follows through with his plan for mass deportations. Trump also railed about fentanyl from Mexico and Canada, even though seizures from the Canadian border pale in comparison to the Mexican border. U.S. customs agents seized 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border last fiscal year, compared with 21,100 pounds at the Mexican border. Related Articles National Politics | Trump selects longtime adviser Keith Kellogg as special envoy for Ukraine and Russia National Politics | Trump’s tariffs in his first term did little to alter the economy, but this time could be different National Politics | Southwest states certify election results after the process led to controversy in previous years National Politics | Trump fills out his economic team with two veterans of his first administration National Politics | Trump chooses controversial Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH Canadian officials argue their country is not the problem and that tariffs will have severe implications for both countries. Canada is the top export destination for 36 U.S. states. Nearly $3.6 billion Canadian (US$2.7 billion) worth of goods and services cross the border each day. About 60% of U.S. crude oil imports are from Canada, and 85% of U.S. electricity imports are from Canada. Canada is also the largest foreign supplier of steel, aluminum and uranium to the U.S. and has 34 critical minerals and metals that the Pentagon is eager for and investing in for national security. “Canada is essential to the United States’ domestic energy supply,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said. Trump has pledged to cut American energy bills in half within 18 months, something that could be made harder if a 25% premium is added to Canadian oil imports. In 2023, Canadian oil accounted for almost two-thirds of total U.S. oil imports and about one-fifth of the U.S. oil supply. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is holding a emergency virtual meeting on Wednesday with the leaders of Canada’s provinces, who want Trudeau to negotiate a bilateral trade deal with the United States that excludes Mexico. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Wednesday that her administration is already working up a list of possible retaliatory tariffs “if the situation comes to that.”

By BILL BARROW, Associated Press PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Newly married and sworn as a Naval officer, Jimmy Carter left his tiny hometown in 1946 hoping to climb the ranks and see the world. Less than a decade later, the death of his father and namesake, a merchant farmer and local politician who went by “Mr. Earl,” prompted the submariner and his wife, Rosalynn, to return to the rural life of Plains, Georgia, they thought they’d escaped. The lieutenant never would be an admiral. Instead, he became commander in chief. Years after his presidency ended in humbling defeat, he would add a Nobel Peace Prize, awarded not for his White House accomplishments but “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” The life of James Earl Carter Jr., the 39th and longest-lived U.S. president, ended Sunday at the age of 100 where it began: Plains, the town of 600 that fueled his political rise, welcomed him after his fall and sustained him during 40 years of service that redefined what it means to be a former president. With the stubborn confidence of an engineer and an optimism rooted in his Baptist faith, Carter described his motivations in politics and beyond in the same way: an almost missionary zeal to solve problems and improve lives. Carter was raised amid racism, abject poverty and hard rural living — realities that shaped both his deliberate politics and emphasis on human rights. “He always felt a responsibility to help people,” said Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend of Carter’s in Plains. “And when he couldn’t make change wherever he was, he decided he had to go higher.” Carter’s path, a mix of happenstance and calculation , pitted moral imperatives against political pragmatism; and it defied typical labels of American politics, especially caricatures of one-term presidents as failures. “We shouldn’t judge presidents by how popular they are in their day. That’s a very narrow way of assessing them,” Carter biographer Jonathan Alter told the Associated Press. “We should judge them by how they changed the country and the world for the better. On that score, Jimmy Carter is not in the first rank of American presidents, but he stands up quite well.” Later in life, Carter conceded that many Americans, even those too young to remember his tenure, judged him ineffective for failing to contain inflation or interest rates, end the energy crisis or quickly bring home American hostages in Iran. He gained admirers instead for his work at The Carter Center — advocating globally for public health, human rights and democracy since 1982 — and the decades he and Rosalynn wore hardhats and swung hammers with Habitat for Humanity. Yet the common view that he was better after the Oval Office than in it annoyed Carter, and his allies relished him living long enough to see historians reassess his presidency. “He doesn’t quite fit in today’s terms” of a left-right, red-blue scoreboard, said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who visited the former president multiple times during his own White House bid. At various points in his political career, Carter labeled himself “progressive” or “conservative” — sometimes both at once. His most ambitious health care bill failed — perhaps one of his biggest legislative disappointments — because it didn’t go far enough to suit liberals. Republicans, especially after his 1980 defeat, cast him as a left-wing cartoon. It would be easiest to classify Carter as a centrist, Buttigieg said, “but there’s also something radical about the depth of his commitment to looking after those who are left out of society and out of the economy.” Indeed, Carter’s legacy is stitched with complexities, contradictions and evolutions — personal and political. The self-styled peacemaker was a war-trained Naval Academy graduate who promised Democratic challenger Ted Kennedy that he’d “kick his ass.” But he campaigned with a call to treat everyone with “respect and compassion and with love.” Carter vowed to restore America’s virtue after the shame of Vietnam and Watergate, and his technocratic, good-government approach didn’t suit Republicans who tagged government itself as the problem. It also sometimes put Carter at odds with fellow Democrats. The result still was a notable legislative record, with wins on the environment, education, and mental health care. He dramatically expanded federally protected lands, began deregulating air travel, railroads and trucking, and he put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy. As a fiscal hawk, Carter added a relative pittance to the national debt, unlike successors from both parties. Carter nonetheless struggled to make his achievements resonate with the electorate he charmed in 1976. Quoting Bob Dylan and grinning enthusiastically, he had promised voters he would “never tell a lie.” Once in Washington, though, he led like a joyless engineer, insisting his ideas would become reality and he’d be rewarded politically if only he could convince enough people with facts and logic. This served him well at Camp David, where he brokered peace between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Epypt’s Anwar Sadat, an experience that later sparked the idea of The Carter Center in Atlanta. Carter’s tenacity helped the center grow to a global force that monitored elections across five continents, enabled his freelance diplomacy and sent public health experts across the developing world. The center’s wins were personal for Carter, who hoped to outlive the last Guinea worm parasite, and nearly did. As president, though, the approach fell short when he urged consumers beleaguered by energy costs to turn down their thermostats. Or when he tried to be the nation’s cheerleader, beseeching Americans to overcome a collective “crisis of confidence.” Republican Ronald Reagan exploited Carter’s lecturing tone with a belittling quip in their lone 1980 debate. “There you go again,” the former Hollywood actor said in response to a wonky answer from the sitting president. “The Great Communicator” outpaced Carter in all but six states. Carter later suggested he “tried to do too much, too soon” and mused that he was incompatible with Washington culture: media figures, lobbyists and Georgetown social elites who looked down on the Georgians and their inner circle as “country come to town.” Carter carefully navigated divides on race and class on his way to the Oval Office. Born Oct. 1, 1924 , Carter was raised in the mostly Black community of Archery, just outside Plains, by a progressive mother and white supremacist father. Their home had no running water or electricity but the future president still grew up with the relative advantages of a locally prominent, land-owning family in a system of Jim Crow segregation. He wrote of President Franklin Roosevelt’s towering presence and his family’s Democratic Party roots, but his father soured on FDR, and Jimmy Carter never campaigned or governed as a New Deal liberal. He offered himself as a small-town peanut farmer with an understated style, carrying his own luggage, bunking with supporters during his first presidential campaign and always using his nickname. And he began his political career in a whites-only Democratic Party. As private citizens, he and Rosalynn supported integration as early as the 1950s and believed it inevitable. Carter refused to join the White Citizens Council in Plains and spoke out in his Baptist church against denying Black people access to worship services. “This is not my house; this is not your house,” he said in a churchwide meeting, reminding fellow parishioners their sanctuary belonged to God. Yet as the appointed chairman of Sumter County schools he never pushed to desegregate, thinking it impractical after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision. And while presidential candidate Carter would hail the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed by fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson when Carter was a state senator, there is no record of Carter publicly supporting it at the time. Carter overcame a ballot-stuffing opponent to win his legislative seat, then lost the 1966 governor’s race to an arch-segregationist. He won four years later by avoiding explicit mentions of race and campaigning to the right of his rival, who he mocked as “Cufflinks Carl” — the insult of an ascendant politician who never saw himself as part the establishment. Carter’s rural and small-town coalition in 1970 would match any victorious Republican electoral map in 2024. Once elected, though, Carter shocked his white conservative supporters — and landed on the cover of Time magazine — by declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” Before making the jump to Washington, Carter befriended the family of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., whom he’d never sought out as he eyed the governor’s office. Carter lamented his foot-dragging on school integration as a “mistake.” But he also met, conspicuously, with Alabama’s segregationist Gov. George Wallace to accept his primary rival’s endorsement ahead of the 1976 Democratic convention. “He very shrewdly took advantage of his own Southerness,” said Amber Roessner, a University of Tennessee professor and expert on Carter’s campaigns. A coalition of Black voters and white moderate Democrats ultimately made Carter the last Democratic presidential nominee to sweep the Deep South. Then, just as he did in Georgia, he used his power in office to appoint more non-whites than all his predecessors had, combined. He once acknowledged “the secret shame” of white Americans who didn’t fight segregation. But he also told Alter that doing more would have sacrificed his political viability – and thus everything he accomplished in office and after. King’s daughter, Bernice King, described Carter as wisely “strategic” in winning higher offices to enact change. “He was a leader of conscience,” she said in an interview. Rosalynn Carter, who died on Nov. 19 at the age of 96, was identified by both husband and wife as the “more political” of the pair; she sat in on Cabinet meetings and urged him to postpone certain priorities, like pressing the Senate to relinquish control of the Panama Canal. “Let that go until the second term,” she would sometimes say. The president, recalled her former aide Kathy Cade, retorted that he was “going to do what’s right” even if “it might cut short the time I have.” Rosalynn held firm, Cade said: “She’d remind him you have to win to govern.” Carter also was the first president to appoint multiple women as Cabinet officers. Yet by his own telling, his career sprouted from chauvinism in the Carters’ early marriage: He did not consult Rosalynn when deciding to move back to Plains in 1953 or before launching his state Senate bid a decade later. Many years later, he called it “inconceivable” that he didn’t confer with the woman he described as his “full partner,” at home, in government and at The Carter Center. “We developed a partnership when we were working in the farm supply business, and it continued when Jimmy got involved in politics,” Rosalynn Carter told AP in 2021. So deep was their trust that when Carter remained tethered to the White House in 1980 as 52 Americans were held hostage in Tehran, it was Rosalynn who campaigned on her husband’s behalf. “I just loved it,” she said, despite the bitterness of defeat. Fair or not, the label of a disastrous presidency had leading Democrats keep their distance, at least publicly, for many years, but Carter managed to remain relevant, writing books and weighing in on societal challenges. He lamented widening wealth gaps and the influence of money in politics. He voted for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and later declared that America had devolved from fully functioning democracy to “oligarchy.” Yet looking ahead to 2020, with Sanders running again, Carter warned Democrats not to “move to a very liberal program,” lest they help re-elect President Donald Trump. Carter scolded the Republican for his serial lies and threats to democracy, and chided the U.S. establishment for misunderstanding Trump’s populist appeal. He delighted in yearly convocations with Emory University freshmen, often asking them to guess how much he’d raised in his two general election campaigns. “Zero,” he’d gesture with a smile, explaining the public financing system candidates now avoid so they can raise billions. Carter still remained quite practical in partnering with wealthy corporations and foundations to advance Carter Center programs. Carter recognized that economic woes and the Iran crisis doomed his presidency, but offered no apologies for appointing Paul Volcker as the Federal Reserve chairman whose interest rate hikes would not curb inflation until Reagan’s presidency. He was proud of getting all the hostages home without starting a shooting war, even though Tehran would not free them until Reagan’s Inauguration Day. “Carter didn’t look at it” as a failure, Alter emphasized. “He said, ‘They came home safely.’ And that’s what he wanted.” Well into their 90s, the Carters greeted visitors at Plains’ Maranatha Baptist Church, where he taught Sunday School and where he will have his last funeral before being buried on family property alongside Rosalynn . Carter, who made the congregation’s collection plates in his woodworking shop, still garnered headlines there, calling for women’s rights within religious institutions, many of which, he said, “subjugate” women in church and society. Carter was not one to dwell on regrets. “I am at peace with the accomplishments, regret the unrealized goals and utilize my former political position to enhance everything we do,” he wrote around his 90th birthday. The politician who had supposedly hated Washington politics also enjoyed hosting Democratic presidential contenders as public pilgrimages to Plains became advantageous again. Carter sat with Buttigieg for the final time March 1, 2020, hours before the Indiana mayor ended his campaign and endorsed eventual winner Joe Biden. “He asked me how I thought the campaign was going,” Buttigieg said, recalling that Carter flashed his signature grin and nodded along as the young candidate, born a year after Carter left office, “put the best face” on the walloping he endured the day before in South Carolina. Never breaking his smile, the 95-year-old host fired back, “I think you ought to drop out.” “So matter of fact,” Buttigieg said with a laugh. “It was somehow encouraging.” Carter had lived enough, won plenty and lost enough to take the long view. “He talked a lot about coming from nowhere,” Buttigieg said, not just to attain the presidency but to leverage “all of the instruments you have in life” and “make the world more peaceful.” In his farewell address as president, Carter said as much to the country that had embraced and rejected him. “The struggle for human rights overrides all differences of color, nation or language,” he declared. “Those who hunger for freedom, who thirst for human dignity and who suffer for the sake of justice — they are the patriots of this cause.” Carter pledged to remain engaged with and for them as he returned “home to the South where I was born and raised,” home to Plains, where that young lieutenant had indeed become “a fellow citizen of the world.” —- Bill Barrow, based in Atlanta, has covered national politics including multiple presidential campaigns for the AP since 2012.Jimmy Carter: Many evolutions for a centenarian ‘citizen of the world’

Jimmy Carter: Many evolutions for a centenarian ‘citizen of the world’

Canada is already examining tariffs on certain US items following Trump’s tariff threat

NoneINEC Plans To Phase Out Of Voter’s CardNick Bosa is likely to play, Dre Greenlaw officially activated

By ROB GILLIES TORONTO (AP) — Canada is already examining possible retaliatory tariffs on certain items from the United States should President-elect Donald Trump follow through on his threat to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian products, a senior official said Wednesday. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico if the countries don’t stop what he called the flow of drugs and migrants across southern and northern borders. He said he would impose a 25% tax on all products entering the U.S. from Canada and Mexico as one of his first executive orders. A Canadian government official said Canada is preparing for every eventuality and has started thinking about what items to target with tariffs in retaliation. The official stressed no decision has been made. The person spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly. When Trump imposed higher tariffs during his first term in office, other countries responded with retaliatory tariffs of their own. Canada, for instance, announced billions of new duties in 2018 against the U.S. in a tit-for-tat response to new taxes on Canadian steel and aluminum. Many of the U.S. products were chosen for their political rather than economic impact. For example, Canada imports $3 million worth of yogurt from the U.S. annually and most comes from one plant in Wisconsin, home state of then-House Speaker Paul Ryan. That product was hit with a 10% duty. Another product on the list was whiskey, which comes from Tennessee and Kentucky, the latter of which is the home state of then-Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Trump made the threat Monday while railing against an influx of illegal migrants, even though the numbers at Canadian border pale in comparison to the southern border. The U.S. Border Patrol made 56,530 arrests at the Mexican border in October alone — and 23,721 arrests at the Canadian one between October 2023 and September 2024. Canadian officials say lumping Canada in with Mexico is unfair but say they are happy to work with the Trump administration to lower the numbers from Canada. The Canadians are also worried about a influx north of migrants if Trump follows through with his plan for mass deportations. Trump also railed about fentanyl from Mexico and Canada, even though seizures from the Canadian border pale in comparison to the Mexican border. U.S. customs agents seized 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border last fiscal year, compared with 21,100 pounds at the Mexican border. Related Articles National Politics | Trump selects longtime adviser Keith Kellogg as special envoy for Ukraine and Russia National Politics | Trump’s tariffs in his first term did little to alter the economy, but this time could be different National Politics | Southwest states certify election results after the process led to controversy in previous years National Politics | Trump fills out his economic team with two veterans of his first administration National Politics | Trump chooses controversial Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH Canadian officials argue their country is not the problem and that tariffs will have severe implications for both countries. Canada is the top export destination for 36 U.S. states. Nearly $3.6 billion Canadian (US$2.7 billion) worth of goods and services cross the border each day. About 60% of U.S. crude oil imports are from Canada, and 85% of U.S. electricity imports are from Canada. Canada is also the largest foreign supplier of steel, aluminum and uranium to the U.S. and has 34 critical minerals and metals that the Pentagon is eager for and investing in for national security. “Canada is essential to the United States’ domestic energy supply,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said. Trump has pledged to cut American energy bills in half within 18 months, something that could be made harder if a 25% premium is added to Canadian oil imports. In 2023, Canadian oil accounted for almost two-thirds of total U.S. oil imports and about one-fifth of the U.S. oil supply. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is holding a emergency virtual meeting on Wednesday with the leaders of Canada’s provinces, who want Trudeau to negotiate a bilateral trade deal with the United States that excludes Mexico. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Wednesday that her administration is already working up a list of possible retaliatory tariffs “if the situation comes to that.”PHILADELPHIA — Saquon Barkley ran for touchdowns of 70 and 72 yards, putting him in the Eagles franchise record book.Might he also run his way into an MVP award or a Super Bowl berth for Philadelphia?The Eagles (9-2) have reeled off seven straight wins since the bye, including Sunday’s 37-20 victory over the Los Angeles Rams, and [...]

First 12-team CFP set: Oregon seeded No. 1, SMU edges Alabama for final spotOn Thursday, Fox News host and pundit Tomi Lahren floated the idea that the failed nomination of Matt Gaetz for attorney general was really an “Art of the Deal” plan orchestrated by Donald Trump. Gaetz announced that he was withdrawing his name for consideration as a series of stories about his alleged sexual misconduct began to emerge. But during an appearance on Fox’s “The Story,” Lahren saw a victory for Trump. “I think this whole thing was very strategic and in my estimation it has the ‘Art of the Deal’ written all over it,” Lahren told host Martha MacCallum. “Obviously, Matt Gaetz was a very controversial pick, some would say maybe the most controversial pick that Trump could of selected. So now whoever he picks as his second choice, they'll probably receive a little bit less scrutiny, they won't have as much heat on them.” x YouTube Video Lahren further argued that Trump’s other nominees would also have less “heat” and that Gaetz’s departure “kind of gave cover for some of the other controversial picks.” MacCallum then asked Lahren if she thought Gaetz himself was a part of the storyline she was forwarding. “This is all just my theory and my speculation, but I wouldn't put it past him. I think that this is a very strategic team,” she concluded. The nomination and withdrawal is an early black eye and political loss for Trump and the first since his election win. Trump gave up on Gaetz , according to reporting from The Bulwark, and called Gaetz to tell him he simply didn’t have the votes to confirm him. Lahren’s attempt to spin victory from a clear defeat is symptomatic of the role that Fox News and its stable of hosts and pundits play in the right-wing media world. Prominent leaders like Trump can never fail in this version of how the world works, but are master manipulators who control events—even when things go poorly for them. It is the sort of tortured logic that led Fox News figures to promote election conspiracies after Trump lost to President Joe Biden in 2020 and it cost the network nearly $800 million . Unfortunately, millions of conservative viewers rely on Fox News’ version of events to guide them and inform them, and it leads to a crisis of misinformation that ends up in votes for figures like Trump. Campaign ActionBy Jonathan Spicer and Maya Gebeily ISTANBUL/DAMASCUS (Reuters) - After 13 years of civil war, Syria's opposition militias sensed an opportunity to loosen President Bashar al-Assad's grip on power when, about six months ago, they communicated to Turkey plans for a major offensive and felt they had received its tacit approval, two sources with knowledge of the planning said. Launched barely two weeks ago, the operation's speedy success in achieving its initial goal - seizing Syria's second city, Aleppo - took almost everybody by surprise. From there, in a little more than a week, the rebel alliance reached Damascus and on Sunday put an end to five decades of Assad family rule. The lightning advance relied on an almost perfect alignment of stars for the forces opposed to Assad: his army was demoralised and exhausted; his main allies, Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah, were severely weakened by conflict with Israel; and his other key military supporter, Russia, was distracted and losing interest. There was no way the rebels could go ahead without first notifying Turkey, which has been a main backer of the Syrian opposition from the war's earliest days, said the sources, a diplomat in the region and a member of the Syrian opposition. Turkey has troops on the ground in northwest Syria, and provides support to some of the rebels who were intending to take part, including the Syrian National Army (SNA) - though it considers the main faction in the alliance, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), to be a terror group. The rebels' bold plan was the brainchild of HTS and its leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the diplomat said. Because of his former ties to al Qaeda, Golani is designated as a terrorist by Washington, Europe and Turkey. However, over the past decade, HTS, previously known as the Nusra Front, has tried to moderate its image, while running a quasi-state centered on Idlib, where, experts say, it levied taxes on commercial activities and the population. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's government, which struck a deal with Russia in 2020 to de-escalate fighting in northwestern Syria, has long opposed such a major rebel offensive, fearing it would lead to a new wave of refugees crossing its border. However, the rebels sensed a stiffening of Ankara's stance towards Assad earlier this year, the sources said, after he rebuffed repeated overtures from Erdogan aimed at advancing a political solution to the military stalemate, which has left Syria divided between the regime and a patchwork of rebel groups with an array of foreign backers. The Syrian opposition source said the rebels had shown Turkey details of the planning, after Ankara's attempts to engage Assad had failed. The message was: "That other path hasn't worked for years - so try ours. You don't have to do anything, just don't intervene." Reuters was unable to determine the exact nature of the communications. Hadi Al-Bahra, head of the internationally-recognized Syrian opposition abroad, told Reuters last week that HTS and SNA had had "limited" planning together ahead of the operation and agreed to "achieve cooperation and not clash with each other". He added that Turkey's military saw what the armed groups were doing and discussing. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, speaking in Doha on Sunday, said Erdogan’s effort in recent months to reach out to Assad failed and Turkey "knew something was coming". However, Turkey's deputy minister for foreign affairs, Nuh Yilmaz, told a conference on Middle Eastern affairs in Bahrain on Sunday that Ankara was not behind the offensive, and did not provide its consent, saying it was concerned about instability. Turkey's foreign and defence ministries did not respond directly to Reuters questions about an HTS-Ankara understanding about the Aleppo operation. In reply to questions about Turkey's awareness of battlefield preparations, a Turkish official told Reuters that the HTS "does not receive orders or direction from us (and) does not coordinate its operations with us either." The official said that "in that sense" it would not be correct to say that the operation in Aleppo was carried out with Turkey's approval or green light. Turkish intelligence agency MIT did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reuters was unable to reach a representative for HTS. VULNERABLE The rebels struck when Assad was at his most vulnerable. Distracted by wars elsewhere, his military allies Russia, Iran, and Lebanon's Hezbollah failed to mobilise the kind of decisive firepower that had propped him up for years. Syria's weak armed forces were unable to resist. A regime source told Reuters that tanks and planes were left with no fuel because of corruption and looting - an illustration of just how hollowed out the Syrian state had become. Over the past two years morale had severely eroded in the army, said the source, who requested anonymity because of fear of retribution. Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International, a Middle-East focused think-tank, said the HTS-led coalition was stronger and more coherent than any previous rebel force during the war, "and a lot of that is Abu Mohammed al-Golani’s doing". But, he said, the regime's weakness was the deciding factor. "After they lost Aleppo like that, regime forces never recovered and the more the rebels advanced, the weaker Assad’s army got," he said. The pace of the rebel advances, with Hama being captured on Dec. 5 and Homs falling on or around Sunday at the same time government forces lost Damascus, exceeded expectations. "There was a window of opportunity but no one expected the regime to crumble this fast. Everyone expected some fight," said Bassam Al-Kuwatli, president of the Syrian Liberal Party, a small opposition group, who is based outside Syria. A U.S. official said on condition of anonymity that while Washington had been aware of Turkey’s overall support for the rebels, it was not informed of any tacit Turkish approval for the Aleppo offensive. The White House National Security Council did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Turkey's role. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday said that Russia's abandonment of Assad led to his downfall, adding that Moscow never should have protected him in the first place and then lost interest because of a war in Ukraine that never should have started. Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday noted his country's role in weakening Hezbollah, which sources told Reuters withdrew its remaining troops from Syria on Saturday. GAZA FALLOUT Sources familiar with Hezbollah deployments said the Iran-backed group, which propped up Assad early in the war, had already withdrawn many of its elite fighters from Syria over the last year to support the group as it waged hostilities with Israel - a conflict that spilled over from the Gaza war. Israel dealt Hezbollah heavy blows, particularly after launching an offensive in September, killing the group's leader Hassan Nasrallah and many of its commanders and fighters. The rebel offensive in Syria began the same day as a ceasefire came into effect in the Lebanon conflict on Nov. 27. The sources familiar with Hezbollah said it did not want to engage in big battles in Syria as the group focused on starting a long road to recovery from the heavy blows. For the rebel alliance, the withdrawal of Hezbollah presented a valuable opportunity. "We just wanted a fair fight between us and the regime," the Syrian opposition source said. Assad's fall marks a major blow to Iranian influence in the Middle East, coming so swiftly after the killing of Nasrallah and the damage done by Israel to Hezbollah. Turkey, on the other hand, now appears to be Syria's most powerful external player, with troops on the ground and access to the rebel leaders. In addition to securing the return of Syrian refugees, Turkey's objectives include curbing the power of Syrian Kurdish groups that control wide areas of northeast Syria and are backed by the United States. Ankara deems them to be terrorists. As part of the initial offensive, the Turkey-backed SNA seized swathes of territory, including the city of Tel Refaat, from U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. On Sunday, a Turkish security source said the rebels entered the northern city of Manbij after pushing the Kurds back again. "Turkey is the biggest outside winner here. Erdogan turned out to be on the right - or at least winning - side of history here because his proxies in Syria won the day," said Birol Baskan, Turkey-based political scientist and former non-resident scholar at Middle East Institute. (Additional reporting by Laila Bassam in Beirut, Tuvan Gumrukcu and Matt Spetalnick in Washington in Ankara; Writing by Tom Perry; editing by Frank Jack Daniel)