Article content Bashar al-Assad, for all his autocratic power, cultivated a relatively modest public image. Recommended Videos He flaunted nothing like the mega-yachts and network of marble baroque and rococo palaces of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or the gaudy glamour and custom space-age private jet with nightclub-style lighting and silver armchairs of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi. As Syria’s leader for nearly 25 years, Assad and his immediate family “lived, in a way, a normal life in front of people,” said Ammar Mahayni, a retired businessman who for decades lived a block away from the Assad family residence in Damascus. “His children went to normal schools” alongside ordinary if well-to-do Damascus residents, he said, rather than attend elite academies or boarding schools abroad. The family drove regular cars and wore plain “jeans and a T-shirt” out and about. “My sister used to see his daughter in a club swimming pool, sitting with her friends.” But moderation is not what crowds of jubilant Syrians found when they streamed into the newly empty Assad family properties after his ouster this week, to marvel at their contents – and grab what they could, even chandeliers, according to photos taken at the scene and footage widely circulated online. In a video posted to social media, a crowd of people rush up and down the staircase of one of Assad’s homes, including one person carrying out a large Louis Vuitton shopping bag. Another video at the same residence shows someone holding up a Dior garment bag. The Washington Post verified the location of the videos. Looters, along with the simply curious, left in their wake a littering of boxes of designer items including from Hermes and Cartier, on top of a whirlwind of loose paper, smashed furniture and fallen portraits. Video posted to Instagram shows an expansive garage filled with an array of luxury cars on the compound of Assad’s presidential palace. “Save me a Lamborghini,” one man calls out while driving through. The Post verified the video was filmed in the same structure that CNN reported was part of the presidential palace compound, where Aston Martins, Cadillacs, Lamborghinis and Ferraris were housed, but it’s unclear when exactly the video was taken. “It was a surprise for us to see the garage full of cars because he never drove in fancy cars, or even his son,” Mahayni said. “Believe it or not, the people around him were more of a show-off than himself.” While no fan of looting in general, Mahayni said he could recognize what some of the looters might have been thinking: “They were poor. He took everything. We had the right to take it.” The Assad family long ran a complex patronage system, which included shell companies and facades. “These networks penetrate all sectors of the Syrian economy,” the State Department said in a 2022 report to Congress on the Assad family’s wealth. Citing reporting by nongovernmental organizations and the media, the department said this network “serves as a tool for the regime to access financial resources via seemingly legitimate corporate structures and non-profit entities.” The network’s companies were able to “launder money from illicit activities and funnel funds to the regime.” Assad’s hidden life of luxury stands in stark contrast to life in the rest of his country. The State Department in 2022 estimated the Assad family net worth to be between $1 billion and $2 billion. The department noted that the estimate’s imprecision reflected the spread and concealment of the extended family’s wealth across various real estate portfolios, corporations, accounts and tax havens, under different names or obscured ownership. Compare that with the entire country’s GDP, which stood in 2021 at $9 billion – a precipitous drop from prewar figures many times higher. About 3 in four 4 require humanitarian assistance, and more than half struggle to find enough food, according to the United Nations. Many grievances over Assad’s rule centred on corruption, poverty and autocracy. “If you asked me, ‘How do you describe Bashar Assad,’ I would never talk about his lifestyle, because it didn’t matter,” Mahayni said. “What mattered is the secret police that he deployed, the different security departments he created.” As president, Assad cracked down on Arab Spring-era uprisings and waged a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Bashar and his wife, Asma al-Assad, long exerted major influence over the wealth of Syria. “Bashar al-Assad is not known for flaunting his luxury lifestyle. ... He is known, nonetheless, for extorting the business community, known for being exceptionally corrupt,” said Karam Shaar, a political economist and nonresident senior fellow at the New Lines Institute. “One can argue that the only constant in Bashar al-Assad’s rule has been corruption,” Shaar said. Assad utilized crony capitalism, allowing friends and relatives to benefit from the opening up of the country’s economy. Those profits translated to money for him personally and for those entwined in his web of patronage, and to fund the regime and the war – but did not translate to increased tax revenue for the state, Shaar added. Asma al-Assad had major influence, such as over a committee meant to manage Syria’s economic crisis, including decisions on food and fuel subsidies, the State Department said. An effusive 2011 Vogue profile of the first lady titled “A Rose in the Desert” – which was later taken down and mostly scrubbed from the internet – heralded the Assads’ supposed down-to-earth nature, a narrative the family was emphasizing even then. “Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment,” the article says of Asma, referring to her as “a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement.” The article’s publication came just before Assad’s deadly crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations, when Assad’s status as a violent authoritarian was cemented. The reporter of the article distanced herself from the article, and the Hill reported that the Syrian government paid an international lobbying firm to help arrange the interview.None
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OXFORD, Ohio (AP) — Reece Potter scored 19 points off the bench to help lead Miami (OH) past Sacred Heart 94-76 on Sunday. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * OXFORD, Ohio (AP) — Reece Potter scored 19 points off the bench to help lead Miami (OH) past Sacred Heart 94-76 on Sunday. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? OXFORD, Ohio (AP) — Reece Potter scored 19 points off the bench to help lead Miami (OH) past Sacred Heart 94-76 on Sunday. Potter went 8 of 8 from the field (3 for 3 from 3-point range) for the RedHawks (7-4). Kam Craft scored 12 points and added five rebounds. Brant Byers had 10 points and shot 4 for 7, including 1 for 4 from beyond the arc. Tanner Thomas finished with 15 points for the Pioneers (4-8). Sacred Heart also got 11 points from Griffin Barrouk. Fallou Gueye also had 10 points. Miami (OH) took the lead with 9:42 remaining in the first half and never looked back. Potter led their team in scoring with nine points in the first half to help put them up 50-30 at the break. Miami (OH) was outscored by Sacred Heart in the second half by a two-point margin, but still wound up on top, while Potter led the way with a team-high 10 second-half points. Miami (OH)’s next game is Monday against Defiance at home, and Sacred Heart hosts Manhattanville on Sunday. ___ The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar. Advertisement
VANCOUVER — British Columbia business owner Joe Chaput will spend $5,500 a month on security guards during the holiday season and plans on upgrading his store’s video camera system for around $5,000 more. He’s not selling luxury brands or expensive jewels. Chaput sells cheese, and at Christmas, cheese is a hot commodity. He is the co-owner of specialty cheese store les amis du Fromage, with two locations in Vancouver. While cheeselifting is rare in their Kitsilano store, the outlet in East Vancouver is hit in waves, with nothing happening for a month, then three of four people trying to steal their inventory within a week. “Sometimes, you miss it. Sometimes, you catch it. The way shoplifters behave ... they tend to gravitate toward expensive things,” said Chaput. Expensive cheese is on shoplifters’ Christmas list, he said. “They tend to do the classic examples of staying away from customer service and trying to go to a different part of the store so they can be left alone to steal.” Chaput isn’t alone. Police say food-related crimes on are the rise in Canada and as prices climb for items such as cheese and butter, they become lucrative on the black market for organized crime groups, not to mention theft for local resale. Sylvain Charlebois, the director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-food Analytics Lab, said a black market tends to emerge as soon as food prices surge. “Organized crime will steal anything (if) they know they can sell it and so, they probably would have known who their clients are before even stealing anything at all, and that’s how a black market is organized,” said Charlebois. He said he believes there are two categories of people shoplifting — those who do so out of desperation because they can’t afford the food, or organized criminals, profiting from sales on the black market. Mounties in North Vancouver made cheesy headlines when they ran into a man with a cart of stolen cheese in the middle of the night in September. The cheese, valued at $12,800, was from a nearby Whole Foods Store. While the cheese was recovered, it had to be disposed of because it hadn’t been refrigerated. Const. Mansoor Sahak, with the North Vancouver RCMP, said officers believe cheese is targeted because it’s “profitable to resell.” “If they are drug addicts, they will commit further crimes with that or feed their drug habits. It’s a vicious cycle,” said Sahak. Sahak said meat is also a top target for grocery thieves, with store losses sometimes in the thousands. “So, we’re not surprised that this happened,” said Sahak. Police in Ontario have been chasing down slippery shoplifters going after butter. Scott Tracey, a spokesman with Guelph Police Service, said there have been eight or nine butter thefts over the last year, including one theft last December worth $1,000. In October, two men walked into a local grocer and filled their carts with cases of butter valued at $936, and four days later a Guelph grocer lost four cases valued at $958. Tracey said he has looked at online marketplaces and found listings by people selling 20 or 30 pounds of butter at a time. “Clearly, somebody didn’t accidentally buy 30 extra pounds of butter. So, they must have come from somewhere,” said Tracey, “I think at this point it appears to be the black market is where it’s headed.” He said the thefts seem to be organized, with two or three people working together in each case. Police in Brantford, Ont., are also investigating the theft of about $1,200 worth of butter from a store on Nov. 4. Charlebois said retailers could invest in prevention technologies like electronic tags, but putting them on butter or cheese is rare. He said up until recently grocery store theft has been a “taboo subject for many years.” Stores didn’t wanted to talk about thefts because they didn’t want to alarm people but now they feel they need to build awareness about what is “becoming a huge problem,” said Charlebois. Chaput, the cheese store owner, said he had been running the East Vancouver store for 15 years while managing the store in Kitsilano for 30 years, and he loves his customers. “It’s really one of the best parts of our businesses, seeing familiar faces and making new customers. It’s why we come to work, really. Partly it’s the cheese, and partly it’s the people,” said Chaput. He said his strategy to combat would-be thieves is to give them extra customer service to make it harder for them to steal. He admits, however, that the shoplifting causes him stress. “It’s challenging. You’re busy trying to run your business day to day and take care of customers and take care of employees. Having to deal with criminals, just kind of scratches away. It can be a bit exhausting,” said Chaput. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 15, 2024. Nono Shen, The Canadian PressGet ready for a shave that's simply sublime! Uncover the top 5 shaving foams. From the velvety lathers to the gentle, skin-friendly products, these creams promise a clean, completely irritation-free shave every time. Stop worrying about cuts, and razor burns, and say hello to a cool, smooth, confident you! No matter if you're a novice razor or a veteran one, these amazing foams will elevate your shaving to the next level. Shaving is a customary grooming process for most of the men and a good product can be critical to get a comfortable shaving experience. In this article, we explore five popular shaving products that cater to various needs and preferences. 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