Stuff on Syria and neighbours .... November 16 and last few days

From AP
Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad    have firmly seized the momentum in the country's civil war in recent weeks, capturing one rebel stronghold after another and triumphantly planting the two-starred Syrian government flag amid shattered buildings and rubble-strewn streets....

From Quartz:
Thirty journalists—half of them foreign reporters, half of them Syrian—have been kidnapped or gone missing in Syria, the Associated Press reported this week. The number is unprecedented. Syria today is the scene of the single largest wave of kidnappings in modern journalism, more than in Iraq during the 2000s or Lebanon during the 1980s.  A combination of criminality, jihadism and chaos is bringing on-the-ground coverage of the war to a halt......

From France24:
Thousands of Syrian refugees have poured into Lebanon over the past two days as fighting between government forces and rebels has flared near the border, a local official said Saturday....

From Reuters:
... Albanian 'No' deals blow to Syria chemical weapons plan. lbania rejected on Friday a U.S. request to host the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons, dealing a blow to a U.S.-Russian accord to eliminate the nerve agents from the country's protracted civil war......

From Reuters:
The president of Iraqi Kurdistan called on Turkey's Kurds to back a flagging peace process with Ankara on Saturday, making his first visit to southeastern Turkey in two decades in a show of support for Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.
Masoud Barzani's trip to Diyarbakir, the main city in Turkey's Kurdish-dominated southeast, comes as Ankara finalizes billions of dollars of energy deals with his semi-autonomous region and amid mutual concern over the ambitions of Kurdish militias in the chaos of neighboring Syria....

From BuzzFeed:
The World Cup in Qatar is still  over eight years away, but the designs for their first stadium in Al Wakrah have already been released. The architectural firm that designed the stadium based off the dhow boat that Qataris traditionally used for pearl diving. But for those who have no clue what a dhow boat looks like Al Wakrah stadium looks like something else entirely — a vagina........

From WashingtonPost:
When people think of Turkey, they think of a westernized Islamic democracy where the rights of all of its citizens are respected, including religious minorities.  Unfortunately, the sad reality is that Turkey treats members of religious minority communities – including Alevi Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Syriacs, Jews and Orthodox Christians – as second-class citizens........

From EurasiaReview:
A total of 4,000 illegal Ethiopians are ready for deportation, sources told Arab News on Friday.
This comes in the wake of Saudi Arabia deporting 82 workers on Wednesday and 22 on Thursday.
Muhammed Hassan Kabiera, Ethiopia’s ambassador, said the embassy was informed by Saudi officials that some 23,000 Ethiopians had so far handed themselves in. The authorities are now processing their paperwork....

From NYTimes:
A wave of attacks against Shiite Muslims in Iraq   killed at least 47 people and wounded dozens on Thursday, security officials said, as they were marking the holy day of Ashura, which commemorates the killing of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, 1,300 years ago......