They Are Called Garbage People

Amid piles of waste, and surrounded by toxic fumes from burning rubbish, a small group of people hunt for food to eat and plastic to sell for recycling.


This is not the life Alia wanted for her children.


For the past three years, she has set off at 07:00 every day on a two-hour journey to the dump in Tell Beydar, north-east Syria, often taking Walaa with her.


Alia's eldest daughter, born when Alia was barely in her teens, stays at home to take care of a younger child.


Alia and Walaa do not return until sundown. By this time, the family is starving.  "I have always dreamt that my daughters would study like other girls," Alia says.


"But now they are like me, they don't know how to read or write at all."


The US military dump, though, is their only source of food and income.  "People shame us; they call us garbage people," says 25-year-old Alia.  READ MORE...

Woman Who Joined ISIS Wants to Return to US

A woman who left Alabama to join the Islamic State in 2014 now says she regrets her actions and is hoping to return to the United States.

"If I need to sit in prison, and do my time, I will do it.… I won’t fight against it," Hoda Muthana, now 28, told The News Movement from the Roj detention camp in Syria, according to The Associated Press. "I’m hoping my government looks at me as someone young at the time and naive."

Muthana, who was born in New Jersey to Yemeni immigrants and was raised in Alabama, ran away from home at the age of 20 to join ISIS. Raised in a conservative Muslim household, she told her family she was going on a school trip but instead flew to Turkey and crossed into Syria using funds from secretly cashed tuition checks.

Once she arrived in Syria, Muthana says she was detained in a guest house reserved for unmarried women and children.  READ MORE...

Ancient City of Palmyra

ARCHAEOLOGISTS CONDUCTING A STUDY TO ESTIMATE THE MAXIMUM PRODUCTIVITY OF THE LAND AROUND PALMYRA ARE REVEALING NEW INSIGHTS THAT QUESTIONS THE HISTORICAL NARRATIVE.

Palmya is located in present-day Homs Governorate, Syria. Archaeological finds date an early settlement to the Neolithic period, with the first documented mention of the city dating to the early 2nd millennium BC.

Palmyra’s wealth was generated through a system of trade networks, funding the construction of monumental projects such as the Great Colonnade, the Temple of Bel, and the distinctive tower tombs.  READ MORE...

Living in Fear

For many Syrian refugees fleeing war and human rights abuses, Europe was meant to be a sanctuary. So it was a shock when they began bumping into their torturers while out shopping or in a cafe. In fact, many of those involved in the Syrian government's notorious interrogation facilities are hiding in plain sight in European cities.


Feras Fayyad (above) misses his home in Syria desperately. He's been living in Berlin for six years now, one of more than 800,000 Syrian refugees in Germany. But he rarely visits Sonnenallee, the predominantly Arab district of his adopted city that's become known as "Little Syria", even though it's full of restaurants and shisha cafes that remind him of home.


"It's a bit scary to walk here for a person who is known as a member of the opposition to the regime," he says during a rare excursion to the area. "This is why I don't come here."


What Feras fears is other Syrians who might still be affiliated with Bashar al-Assad's government and could be acting as the eyes and ears of the state overseas. Back home Feras - an award-winning documentary director whose films describe the systematic bombing of the civilian population by the Syrian military - was arrested and tortured by the state security service.


He eventually managed to escape - but even here in Europe he doesn't feel safe among other expat Syrians.


"It's difficult to know who is [a member of] the intelligence services," he says. "They open stores or they have a business here - and they are still working as spies.


"You don't know when you're going to bump into somebody who was involved in your torture or involved in hurting you inside Syria."


Feras may sound paranoid, but there's a firm basis for his fears. Bill Wiley, who runs the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an NGO that builds cases against the Syrian government using their own official state documents retrieved from the war zone, agrees that the Syrian diaspora in Europe is a fertile recruiting ground for Syrian spies.


He says some are paid to spy while others do so in exchange for their families' safety back in Syria. "There's various means to recruit people - we know they're doing it and I would be shocked if they weren't doing it," he says.  READ MORE...

"Kunga" in Syria

PARIS, FRANCE—Science News reports that analysis of a genome obtained from a 4,500-year-old equine skeleton discovered in northern Syria’s royal burial complex at Umm el-Marra suggests the animal had a donkey for a mother and a hemippe, a type of Asiatic wild ass that went extinct in 1929, for a father. 

The resulting hybrid animal could be a kunga, a horselike animal mentioned in texts written on clay tablets and depicted in Sumerian artwork several hundred years before horses arrived in the region. 

Paleogeneticist Eva-Maria Geigl of Institut Jacques Monod explained that donkeys can be timid and the Asiatic wild ass was untamable, but a hybrid of the two could have been valuable in warfare and useful for pulling wagons. 

Read the original scholarly article about this research in Science Advances. For more on kunga burials, go to "Mesopotamian War Memorial."

World's Most Expensive City

REUTERS...Tel Aviv's climb to the top of rankings was attributed mainly to the soaring value of Israel's currency


Tel Aviv has been named as the most expensive city in the world to live in, as soaring inflation and supply-chain problems push up prices globally.


The Israeli city came top for the first time in a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), climbing from fifth place last year and pushing Paris down to joint second with Singapore.


Damascus, in war-torn Syria, retained its place as the cheapest in the world.  The survey compares costs in US dollars for goods and services in 173 cities.


The EIU said the data it collected in August and September showed that on average prices had risen 3.5% in local currency terms - the fastest inflation rate recorded over the past five years.


Transport has seen the biggest price increases, with the cost of a litre of petrol up by 21% on average in the cities studied.


Tel Aviv's climb to the top of the EIU's World Cost of Living rankings mainly reflected the soaring value of Israel's currency, the shekel, against the dollar. The local prices of around 10% of goods also increased significantly, especially for groceries.  READ MORE...

Syria's All Female Militia

 Sasha Ingber writes...


In northern Syria, east of the Euphrates River, a women’s militia has been battling ISIS -- and battling the odds.

"We just want peace. We just want women to live safe," says Lana.

She is a 32-year-old YPJ fighter -- no spouse, no children. She says she’s one of 35,000 mainly Kurdish women who’ve joined the cause.

"It's like to be one soul in, in many bodies," she tells Newsy.

The militia started in 2013, as a way of protecting neighborhoods during the civil war. Then they started fighting ISIS terrorists who captured, sold and enslaved women and girls. In the strife came opportunity for women to rewrite the rules governing their lives.

"What they are doing is one of the most far-reaching experiments in women's equality, any place in the world. Every town they took from ISIS has a male and a female head of the civil council. There's a women's council in every town. There are women judges trying cases," says Gayle Tzemach Lemmon.   READ MORE

COMMENT:  As a white male Vietnam Veteran, it amazes me how all the other countries throughout the world put females into combat zones and yet the United States does not think that is appropriate for American females.  We have females in the military but not a whole lot of them are sent into combat zones.

Why do American Females NOT WANT to be by the side of their male counterparts in a combat zone?

If we ever have a war fought inside the United States, I am pretty sure that you will see females fighting beside males...  and, perhaps that is what should happen to WAKE UP Americans...  that we are not as special as we think we are...