For this week's Feminism Around the World, I thought I'd focus on the countries doing trans rights right (or at least much more right than we seem to be doing!) in the hopes of perhaps encouraging activism toward these ends.

Riz Ahmed set a goal to start 2017 with support for Syria through the Karam Foundation and yesterday the actor posted a celebratory post that their efforts have raised over $100,000.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, when the world remembers the Jews (and other marginalized people) who were murdered in German concentration camps. Back then, before the U.S. finally got involved in WWII, it turned away thousands of Jewish refugees who subsequently were sent back to Germany to die. Today, President Trump is signing three executive actions against refugees.

This week, I came across two fascinating stories equally deserving of coverage for different reasons. So, rather than my usual "main story on top, links to other stories below" format today, I'm only covering two stories. One out of Syria, the other out of Poland — both extraordinary stories of women fighting to stay alive and bring about change where they live.

In Cut Video's latest in their 100 Years of Beauty series, they look at the fashion history of Syria, a country that has seen a huge amount of change in the past 100 years. Check out the video after the jump!

Yesterday, Malala Yousafzai spoke to world leaders encouraging them to pledge $1.4 billion this year to help educate Syrian refugee children, highlighting the fact that the 700,000 refugee children currently living in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and other neighboring countries are out of school. This is of particular importance for Syrian girls, who are often seen as financial burdens to their families, and so are married off at 12 or 13.

How do you spell the sound a lightsaber makes? A linguist weighs in over on Huffington Post.

Banksy's at it again, and this time he's got something to say about the Syrian refugee crisis currently occupying the world's consciousness. His latest project brings him to the Calais refugee camp outside of France.

If you're looking for some way to make the world marginally less terrible today, Chip Zdarsky is currently auctioning off some Sex Criminals and Star Wars swag to raise money for Raja Syria, a Canada Cares group aiming to help a Syrian family of seven relocate to Toronto.

Raise your hand if you've got a few relatives who make you cringe. Does your Thanksgiving table include a Trump supporter or two? Perhaps a racist uncle who thinks Syrian refugees seem "suspicious"? Here's some advice on how to keep your cool.

Sometimes, women have to do things they never thought they would in order to navigate and survive the misogynistic societies in which they live. The New York Times today has a stunning profile of three Muslim women from Syria, each formerly a member of ISIS' all-female Khansaa Brigade, the morality police.

Benedict Cumberbatch s a vocal campaigner for the Syrian refugee crisis, and during his current run as the lead in Hamlet, he's been doing a nightly collection for Save the Children to try and help the children suffering as they flee their war-torn home. However, after Tuesday night's performance, Cumberbatch showed that there are some problems that are so big and so deserving of attention that even a typically unflappable British actor has permission to lose his cool.

Although I've seen a lot of mockery of the Dismaland art installation online, file me in the uncool camp of folks who thought much of its art was ... pretty cool—and I also think the creators' intent to donate all of the project's timber and fixtures to refugee camps near Calais sounds neat, too.

Exemplifying classic Troll behavior, Kenneth Cole has tweeted a grossly insensitive thing on Twitter to try to profit from the conflict in Syria. Gross! Even though this is transparent trolling, it's still gross. That's how gross it is. This isn't how you sell things, jerk.

A Washington Post photographer spotted Senator John McCain (R-AZ) playing poker on his iPhone during Tuesday's hearings on the situation in Syria, and he seems totally unremorseful about it saying the worst thing is that he lost the game.

The Syrian Electronic Army announced in a tweet (appropriately) that they own Twitter.com, and included picture of what appears to be a report from Domaintools.com that lists SEA as the owners of the site. Though when we ran a Domaintools.com report, we got a different result.

What do you do when you're a leader who wants to communicate to the world that you're a hip, in-touch dictator? Get on Instagram, naturally. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is showing off his #yoloswag with photos of himself doing cool things like shaking hands, greeting crowds, visiting the sick, and most certainly not waging a bloody civil war.