Category: Arts

For the first time since the start of the conflict, leaked documents obtained by a U.S.-based magazine have confirmed that Russia has issued Syria two loans totalling USD 1 billion, which were then amended to USD 700 million. These loans are designed to benefit Russian oligarchs and state enterprises, several of which are sanctioned by the United States and the European Union.

Source: The Syria Report

Mahmoud Muhammad al Etma, the head of al Sanamayn city council north of Daraa governorate was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in al Sanamayn city on March 24, 2022. The city is under the control of Syrian regime forces.

SNHR is still trying to reach eyewitnesses for more details on the incident.

SNHR condemns all killings of civilians and calls on controlling forces to assume their responsibility for protecting the civilian population in areas under their control and to launch an investigation into this incident and reveal its conclusions to the public.

There will be no stability in Syria without a genuine political process moving towards democracy, implemented according to a set timetable.

Source: Syrian Network

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Oleg Syromolotov, said that Western mercenaries are fighting with the nationalist extremists in Ukraine, and most of them have committed bloody crimes against the residents of Donbass before the start of the Russian special military operation to tear out the military characteristic of Nazism of Ukraine.

“a new phenomenon was represented by Kyiv regime, with the help of its Western sponsors and financiers, recruiting mercenaries from Daesh , Jabhat al-Nusra and other terrorist organizations in Syria to fight in Ukraine”, Syromolotov said in a statement on Monday .

He added that those terrorists clashed in Syria with the Russian soldiers and felt the moral defeat, meanwhile “they want to take revenge on the Russians.”

Syromolotov stressed that terrorists from the Middle East will not be able to rescue the Ukrainian extremist nationalists.

Source: Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)

In 2021, bilateral trade between Syria and the United States totalled USD 10.58 million. Syria enjoyed a positive trade balance of USD 8.2 million, exporting USD 9.39 million worth of goods to the U.S. and importing USD 1.19 million, according to the US Department of Treasury.

Source: The Syria Report

Following the harsh US, EU, and non-EU sanctions on Russia, Damascus appears to be bracing itself for what may be the most severe shortages in food and oil commodities the country has witnessed in decades. On February 24, the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Syrian cabinet held an emergency session to draft a plan to mitigate the conflict’s potential consequences on Syria, namely increases in the prices of wheat, oil, and international shipping rates, and supply chain disruptions.

Source: The Syria Report

• On February 24, Russia reported that Idlib militants violated the ceasefire regime in Greater Idlib twice in Latakia province;

• On February 24, Israeli warplanes attacked several targets in the Damascus countryside. Three people reportedly were killed.

Source: South Front

Qatar Charity (QC) has started delivering a new batch of relief aid to tens of thousands of Syrians at IDPs camps as part of its winter drive ‘Warmth and Peace’, aiming to help them survive during the harsh cold, strong winds, rain and snowfall.

The field teams distributed aid in the camps of Afrin, Azaz and Idlib. The aid included nearly 10,000 food packages, 1,000 blankets and 1,000 hygiene kits, in addition to distributing 5,000 bundles of bread daily for 12 days. Qatar Charity, during the coming period, is expected to handover 682 residential caravans to the affected families, provide 3-month rents to other affected and local families, and distribute 460,000 bundles of bread during the next three months to benefit 18,000 families. Besides, 2,800 blankets, and warm clothes are expected to be distributed to the families.

More than 272,000 people are expected to benefit from the emergency response drive launched by Qatar Charity. It is worth mentioning that the snowstorm has brought more misery for the displaced Syrians, with 62 camps damaged and 724 camps destroyed due to the heavy snowfall.

As Syrian and other IDPs and refugees are currently suffering from a harsher winter and heavy rain, frost and snow, Qatar Charity urges benefactors in Qatar to donate to the campaign to help the vulnerable.

 

Source: Qatar Charity

The restoration and rehabilitation works for the historic Afqa spring in Palmyra are almost completed.

“The restoration works included removing rubble and debris from the river’s stream in addition to restoring the archaeological cave and its exit, which was damaged due to terrorist attacks,” Director of Antiquities Department in Homs Hossam Hamish said in a statement to SANA reporter.

He added that the restoration works also included the excavation of the entire main stair leading to the stream, the rebuilding of the wall above the archaeological cave using brocaded stones similar to ancient ones, and the discovery of some archaeological levels adjacent to the site of the spring in order to restore the historical site of the spring as it was before.

Hamish went on to say that the project, which is implemented by a Syrian-Russian archaeological team under the supervision of the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums, is co-financed by the Russian Association for preserving Historical and Cultural Heritage “the Voluntary Exploratory Corps”, in addition to a number of archaeologists from the Heritage Institute in Moscow and the Kabardino-Balkaria Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian company OKN- Project.

The historical Afqa spring is an archaeological spring and cave engraved in rock about six thousand years ago and was sabotaged in the attacks of Daesh terrorist organization.

Source: Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)

Benjamin Whitely headed to a Safeway supermarket in Washington D.C. on Tuesday to grab some items for dinner. But he was disappointed to find the vegetable bins barren and a sparse selection of turkey, chicken and milk.

“Seems like I missed out on everything,” Whitely, 67, said. “I’m going to have to hunt around for stuff now.”

Shortages at U.S. grocery stores have grown more acute in recent weeks as new problems — like the fast-spreading omicron variant and severe weather — have piled on to the supply chain struggles and labor shortages that have plagued retailers since the coronavirus pandemic began.

The shortages are widespread, impacting produce and meat as well as packaged goods such as cereal. And they’re being reported nationwide. U.S. groceries typically have 5% to 10% of their items out of stock at any given time; right now, that unavailability rate is hovering around 15%, according to Consumer Brands Association President and CEO Geoff Freeman.

Part of the scarcity consumers are seeing on store shelves is due to pandemic trends that never abated – and are exacerbated by omicron. Americans are eating at home more than they used to, especially since offices and some schools remain closed.

The average U.S. household spent $144 per week at the grocery last year, according to FMI, a trade organization for groceries and food producers. That was down from the peak of $161 in 2020, but still far above the $113.50 that households spent in 2019.

A deficit of truck drivers that started building before the pandemic also remains a problem. The American Trucking Associations said in October that the U.S. was short an estimated 80,000 drivers, a historic high.

And shipping remains delayed, impacting everything from imported foods to packaging that is printed overseas.

Retailers and food producers have been adjusting to those realities since early 2020, when panic buying at the start of the pandemic sent the industry into a tailspin. Many retailers are keeping more supplies of things like toilet paper on hand, for example, to avoid acute shortages.

“All of the players in the supply chain ecosystem have gotten to a point where they have that playbook and they’re able to navigate that baseline level of challenges,” said Jessica Dankert, vice president of supply chain at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a trade group.

Generally, the system works; Dankert notes that bare shelves have been a rare phenomenon over the last 20 months. It’s just that additional complications have stacked up on that baseline at the moment, she said.

As it has with staffing at hospitals, schools and offices, the omicron variant has taken a toll on food production lines. Sean Connolly, the president and CEO of Conagra Brands, which makes Birds Eye frozen vegetables, Slim Jim meat snacks and other products, told investors last week that supplies from the company’s U.S. plants will be constrained for at least the next month due to omicron-related absences.

Worker illness is also impacting grocery stores. Stew Leonard Jr. is president and CEO of Stew Leonard’s, a supermarket chain that operates stores in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. Last week, 8% of his workers – around 200 people – were either out sick or in quarantine. Usually, the level of absenteeism is more like 2%.

One store bakery had so many people out sick that it dropped some of its usual items, like apple crumb cake. Leonard says meat and produce suppliers have told him they are also dealing with omicron-related worker shortages.

Still, Leonard says he is generally getting shipments on time, and thinks the worst of the pandemic may already be over.

Weather-related events, from snowstorms in the Northeast to wildfires in Colorado, also have impacted product availability and caused some shoppers to stock up more than usual, exacerbating supply problems caused by the pandemic.

Lisa DeLima, a spokesperson for Mom’s Organic Market, an independent grocer with locations in the mid-Atlantic region, said the company’s stores did not have produce to stock last weekend because winter weather halted trucks trying to get from Pennsylvania to Washington.

That bottleneck has since been resolved, DeLima said. In her view, the intermittent dearth of certain items shoppers see now are nothing compared to the more chronic shortages at the beginning of the pandemic.

“People don’t need to panic buy,” she said. “There’s plenty of product to be had. It’s just taking a little longer to get from point A to point B.”

Experts are divided on how long grocery shopping will sometimes feel like a scavenger hunt.

Dankert thinks this is a hiccup, and the country will soon settle back to more normal patterns, albeit with continuing supply chain headaches and labor shortages.

“You’re not going to see long-term outages of products, just sporadic, isolated incidents __ that window where it takes a minute for the supply chain to catch up,” she said.

But others aren’t so optimistic.

Freeman, of the Consumer Brands Association, says omicron-related disruptions could expand as the variant grips the Midwest, where many big packaged food companies like Kellogg Co. and General Mills Inc. have operations.

Freeman thinks the federal government should do a better job of ensuring that essential food workers get access to tests. He also wishes there were uniform rules for things like quarantining procedures for vaccinated workers; right now, he said, companies are dealing with a patchwork of local regulations.

“I think, as we’ve seen before, this eases as each wave eases. But the question is, do we have to be at the whims of the virus, or can we produce the amount of tests we need?” Freeman said.

In the longer term, it could take groceries and food companies a while to figure out the customer buying patterns that emerge as the pandemic ebbs, said Doug Baker, vice president of industry relations for food industry association FMI.

“We went from a just-in-time inventory system to unprecedented demand on top of unprecedented demand,” he said. “We’re going to be playing with that whole inventory system for several years to come.”

In the meantime, Whitely, the Safeway customer in Washington, said he’s lucky he’s retired because he can spend the day looking for produce if the first stores he tries are out. People who have to work or take care of sick loved ones don’t have that luxury, he said.

“Some are trying to get food to survive. I’m just trying to cook a casserole,” he said.

Source: Voice of America

The oldest cuneiform alphabet in history was discovered in Ugarit (Ras Shamra), an ancient city located on the Syrian coast, dating back to 1500 BC.

This alphabet was found transcribed on small cuneiforms “clay tablets” in the Royal Palace of Ugarit, discovered in 1948; and according to archaeologists, the Ugaritic writing system is the oldest alphanumeric writing system in the world.

The Syrians, in the early 13th century BC, invented a cuneiform writing system easier to learn and use than Sumerian and Akkadian, and it is the Ugaritic cuneiform writing system, which is considered the oldest in the world with an integrated grammatical system.

The tablets were discovered at the archaeological sites of Ras Shamra (Ugarit) and Ras Ibn Hani in the coastal province of Lattakia show that there were schools to teach reading and writing in many languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian, Minoan Cypriot, Hittite cuneiform texts and the Hurrian cuneiform texts.

According to historian, Mahmoud al-Sayyed, the Ugaritic cuneiform writing system consists of 30 cuneiform alphabetic signs or symbols, 27 of which are consonants and the remaining three are phonetic.

The Ugaritic alphabet was also the basis for the invention and appearance of the Phoenician alphabet that was invented in the year 1000 BC. C, and the Aramaic alphabet and other alphabets that were derived from Phoenician and Aramaic, such as Hebrew, Greek, Nabataean, Palmyrene, Syriac, and South North Arabic.

Source: Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)

Entissar El Sisi, spouse of President Abdel Fattah El Sisi has greeted the Egyptian people and the Copts on Christmas.

On her social media pages, the First Lady said that Christmas celebrations reflect the Egyptian people’s genius as regards the values of fraternity, love and co-existence among followers of the divine messages.

Source: State Information Service Egypt

Syrian plastic artist Randa Hijazi, who is an expatriate in Canada, was able to win the silver medal for her participation in an art exhibition held in Paris.

“Two years ago, I was accepted into the Department of Artists and Sculptors of Quebec, Canada, to be the first Syrian artist to be accepted in this department,” Artist Hijazi said in a statement to SANA.

She added “After the activities and events stopped in the last period due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the annual exhibition of the department’s artists returned in the French capital, Paris, in September of last year, with its 51st session.”

Artist Hijazi noted that the exhibition’s jury, consisting of seven international judges, chose the three winning works in the first places as she won the silver medal for a painting in a surreal style that talks about the restrictions that limit the development of women.

She indicated that the result was issued on the last day of last year to conclude 2021 with a new artistic achievement abroad.

The exhibition, which was held in the Royal Hall of Saint Madeleine Church in Paris, included 90 artworks, including paintings and sculptures, by 65 male and female artists.

In 2020, Syrian artist, Randa Hijazi, won a competition to choose the design of a monument belonging to the International Lions Club Association, to be placed later in one of Canada’s public squares.

Source: Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)