There’s a small grassless public garden in a residential area just off Hama’s Street 40, delineated by a modest black metal fence, and full of olive trees, their leafy branches laden with small unripe fruit. There are also nine fresh graves here, of locals that neighbors say were killed during the Syrian security forces’ recent bloody assault on this deeply scarred, rebel city. The dead were buried here, they say, because it was difficult to get the bodies to the nearby cemetery, just a few kilometers away. The heavy shelling and tanks in the streets got in the way, the locals explain, and so this garden had to do.

There are a brother and sister buried here, side by side, with simple handwritten pieces of cardboard instead of tombstones. “The martyr Safwan Hassan al-Masry,” reads one, where a 20-year old man was laid to rest. The next heap of mounded earth has a sign that reads, “the martyr Bayan Hassan al-Masry,” covering his 16-year old sister. They died on Wednesday, Aug. 3, just a few days after troops stormed this city that the Assad regime had encircled for about a month. “They were trying to escape the shelling,” says a man who emerges from one of the nearby homes and gives his name as Abu Abboud. The siblings were traveling by car, he says, and were shot at a checkpoint. Their bloodied bodies remained untouched in their vehicle for some four hours, until the spray of bullets whizzing through the air thinned enough to enable a few men to retrieve them. (See the bloody protests in Syria.)

“There were many bodies in the streets,” says another man, Abu Ibrahim, 26, as he reverently walks among the graves, most of which are covered with drying palm fronds and other branches. “We reached the ones we could reach, but the security forces took many bodies.”

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Hama’s streets are deserted. They are strewn with debris, not so much from the shelling that left gaping holes in many of the four or five-storey residential buildings along the city’s main thoroughfares, several of which are now blackened, but from the desperate, makeshift barricades set up by residents in a bid to block Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s tanks. There are piles of broken cinderblocks, doors torn from their hinges, sheets of decorative wrought iron. At Roundabout 40, along a main road, there are even two fire trucks, now burnt. “It didn’t stop them,” says a resident as he surveys the damage. “It didn’t even slow them down.”

Much of the army that stormed this scarred, proudly rebellious city almost two weeks ago withdrew to its outskirts on Aug. 9. Although most foreign journalists are banned from entering Syria, TIME did so clandestinely. It witnessed convoys of dozens of tanks, transported on flatbed trucks, rolling out of Hama along the main highway toward Homs, some 40 kilometers away, followed by ramshackle trucks flying the Syrian flag and full of troops, their weapons haphazardly pointed at passing civilian cars. (As the World Protests, Syria’s Isolated Regime Sticks to Its Guns)

Still, there remain military units in Hama’s Assi Square, scene of the massive protests that roiled Assad’s regime for weeks. It’s a no-go zone for civilians. There are also clusters of tanks at several key locations around Hama, including in front of the city’s two main hospitals, Al-Hourani and Al-Bader, which residents say have been emptied of patients. TIME could not verify the claim because troops were rigorously checking the IDs of anyone who attempted to enter the medical facilities. By some accounts, security forces were killing wounded protesters in the hospitals. Em Mahmoud, who has been a nursing veteran for 22 years and who works at a private 30-bed hospital not far from Roundabout 40, says several injured protesters were brought into her facility, too afraid to seek treatment in the main facilities. One was shot in the chest, another in the knee. “Soldiers came into the hospital looking for wounded protesters,” she says. “We hid the three that we had, we moved them on gurneys and in wheelchairs toward the back entrance and from there we drove them to a safe house.”

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Turns out, not even celebrities have skin this nice.

A British advertising watchdog is cracking down on two L’Oreal foundation ads after a Liberal Democrat MP, Jo Swinson, complained that they pass off airbrushing as makeup results. Swinson, who’s known for crusading against advertisers who portray unrealistic and “misleading” images of women, has brought complaints against a Julia Roberts LancÔme ad and a Christy Turlington Maybelline ad (both LancÔme and Maybelline are owned by L’Oreal) to the Advertising Standards Authority, reports the Guardian.

(PHOTOS: Doctored Photos: The Art of the Altered Image)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Army’s chief medical facility, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, retired its ceremonial flags on Wednesday, as it closes its historic facility after more than a century of treating wounded American fighters and presidents.

The complex in northwest Washington near the Maryland border shifts most of its operations in August and finally shuts its doors on September 15 as a part of a consolidation with the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

The new facility will be called the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and will have campuses in Bethesda and Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

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PHILADELPHIA – A career criminal suspected of shooting five people, two of them fatally, inside a suburban home over an alleged insurance-fraud scheme was killed by SWAT team members after a six-hour standoff Monday, authorities said.

Since leaving prison last year, Mark Richard Geisenheyner, 51, had been vowing revenge on Paul Shay, one of the victims of a weekend shooting in rural Montgomery County, authorities said.

Geisenheyner broke into Shay’s vacation home late Saturday and said, “Guess you never thought you’d see me again,” before shooting Shay in the head, Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Ferman said Monday, citing a survivor’s account.

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