By Charles GlassBlue cloth, stretched like the fabric in which Christo enfolded Berlin's Reichstag, swaddles a six-story building in central Damascus. When the Hotel Semiramis opened in 1952, its owners advertised it as "the newest hotel in the world's oldest city." His family, Christian merchants who own a travel agency and freight company, has committed $10 million dollars to the Semiramis project in the belief that businesspeople and tourists will fill its rooms in post-war Syria. Early in the Syrian war, a U.N. worker told to me that the United Nations delivered tons of food, containers of medicine and truckloads of schoolbooks to all parts of the country. I asked how it managed to get the aid where it was needed, despite the risks of violent death and kidnapping.

Source: Forbes April 27, 2017 14:09 UTC