A chance find in a child’s hands, decades of excavation work, thousands of artifacts – and, finally, the civil war. After about 35 years, archaeologist Hartmut Kühne’s research project at the Tell Sheikh Hamad site in Syria will draw to a close this year. He and his team have reconstructed how people in the area lived 3,000 years ago, down to the smallest details. How severely the war has affected the excavation site in the meantime is still completely uncertain.

In his last Facebook post, Sarmad Alladin left no doubt about it – he was proud of his body. And he wasn’t nicknamed “Mr. Muscle” for nothing. A snapshot shows the 18-year-old, a student in England, flexing his biceps. A few hours after the post, he was dead. According to experts, the cause of death was a diet pill called “DNP Burn.” He had probably bought it on the Internet.

It is a cloudy evening in Hanoi. The air is clammy, cool, and humid. Night is falling, and people want to get home. They have put on their facemasks and donned brightly colored helmets. On scooters by the thousand, they sputter along past the shops of the city’s historic center and sidewalk food vendors.