Morning Briefing

"Hundreds of thousands of people are struggling to feed their families in the parts of Syria hardest hit by violence, activists and aid workers say, with access to food cut off by ruined infrastructure, rocketing prices and, say some, security forces who steal and spoil food supplies," the Washington Post reports. Last month, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) "scaled up assistance to reach a quarter-million people" and "is planning to increase that to 500,000 by the end of this month," according to the newspaper. "[T]he government in March introduced a system of price-fixing for essential foods that has stabilized the cost of bread, sugar and meat -- although they remain much higher than they were a year ago," the Washington Post writes, adding, "Despite efforts to mitigate the problem, around half of Syrians may live in poverty, said Salman Shaikh of the Brookings Institute in Doha, who argued that this is increasing anti-government feeling" (Fordham, 5/1).