Damascus

Locals in Syria's once vivid capital city of Damascus, which has been torn by a six-year-long civil war, are trying to stick to their daily lives and forget about the violence ongoing across the country. 

The Syrian authorities have confirmed that Al-Zabadani resort town, 25km from Damascus, has recently been liberated by the Syrian Army after a fierce battle with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militants. Residents, who left the city more than five years ago, have started to return homes.

Five people were killed in a missile strike against the International Fair in Damascus, the Syrian Center for Human Rights said.

Nearly half a million Syrians have returned to their homes so far this year, including 440,000 internally displaced people and more than 31,000 returning from neighbouring countries, the United Nations' refugee agency said on June 30. 

Most returned to Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, it said, on the view that security had improved in parts of the country.

Hundreds of Syrian rebels began leaving the besieged Damascus district of Barzeh yesterday as part of an evacuation deal with the government, state media and a war monitor reported. 

State television said fighters and their relatives had started departing Barzeh for rebel-held Idlib province in northwest Syria. 

Syrian rebels and their families began leaving a northern district of the capital on Monday, state television said, in the first evacuations from Damascus in the country's six-year war, reported AFP.

"Armed men and some of their families have begun leaving Barzeh on 40 buses heading towards northern Syria," the station said in a news alert.

A large explosion hit in the area of Damascus International Airport followed by a fire in the same place early on Thursday the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said, Reuters agency reports.

The cause of the blast was not clear, it added.

Syrian migrants living in Istanbul have brought their rich food culture to the city, with many of them opening restaurants across the city over the past few years. 

One Mecca for this burgeoning scene is Akşemsettin Street in the Fatih district of Istanbul, where a number of restaurants offer a "fusion" of Syrian and Turkish tastes. 

A bomb blast hit a bus convoy waiting to enter Aleppo on April 15, killing and wounding dozens of people after an evacuation deal between Syria's warring sides halted and stranded thousands at two transit points on the city outskirts.

This is one of those stories about a technology invented and then forgotten. For example, when the Romans invented concrete and then another civilization reinvented it thousand years later. Well, it turns out that the skilled Damascus blacksmiths had produced blades containing carbon nanotubes at least 400 years before modern science began to understand their strength.