Syria's three-year conflict is estimated to have killed more than 140,000 people, forced millions to flee the homes, and taken a brutal toll on children increasingly threatened by disease.
On Sunday the United Nations
...a lucrative dumping ground for the relatives of dictators and party hacks...
said millions of children across the Middle East were to be vaccinated against polio
...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set...
after the crippling illness resurfaced in Syria for the first time in 15 years.
Meanwhile,
...back at the chili cook-off, Chuck and Manuel's rivalry was entering a new and more dangerous phase...
some good news emerged with Spanish journalist Marc Marginedas released by jihadists in Syria after six months in captivity, said his employer El Periodico newspaper.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front and the pro-regime Popular Front for the Liberation of Paleostine-General Command had resumed hostilities in Yarmuk.
"The truce has been broken," Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told Agence La Belle France Presse.
The ceasefire had taken hold on February 10 when Al-Nusra withdrew its fighters from Yarmuk after months of fierce battles between rebels and forces loyal to Syria's
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Supressor of the Damascenes...
.
The army laid siege to the camp, trapping tens of thousands of people inside, including Paleostinian refugees and Syrians who had fled violence from other parts of the country.
The camp's population shrunk to 40,000 from more than 150,000 and conditions deteriorated to the extent that residents were forced to eat grass to survive, with some dying of starvation, activists have said.