By Lucky Gold

We have been facing serious financial difficulties for more than two years

CNN - Can the stalled peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority be revived by the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the region?

On Monday, Christiane Amanpour sat down with Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister, in his Ramallah office on the West Bank, where he expressed serious doubts – not only about the peace talks but about the very existence of the Palestinian Authority he represents:

“It should not be taken as a foregone conclusion that we’re going to be able to make it, to be honest with you, given the pressures on us, both political as well as economic and financial.”

Asked to elaborate on those financial pressures, he told her, “We have been facing serious financial difficulties for more than two years now and the crisis has become very acute to the point of us being unable to meet such basic obligations as wages.” FULL POST

By Mick Krever, CNN

Libya is just a few days out from its first election in decades. And Libya’s game-changing politician is already well-versed in the art of political speech.

“The only victorious party is the Libyan people,” said Mahmoud Jibril, whose National Forces Alliance seems poised to win the election.

Jibril served as Libya’s interim prime minister after Moammar Gadhafi was deposed last October after 42 years of iron-fisted rule.

“The Libyan people have managed to prove one thing: That they are the real decision maker. That the destiny of this country is not in the hands of an individual, of any political force or political party. It’s only in their hands. And this is very comforting to me.” FULL POST

100,000 women die in childbirth each year because of unintended pregnancies. Contraception could cut this number by a third, yet it is not available to more than two hundred million women in the developing world.        Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda gates foundation, is combating this problem from the bottom up – getting birth control in the hands of women all over the world. She says family planning fell off the priority list because it was too difficult fighting from the top down, causing of controversy amongst religious and political leaders.

Gates is a practicing Catholic; and in spite of contraception being counter to Catholic doctrine, she says she wants to take this mission on as part of her life’s work partly because she is a practicing Catholic. She said that in her travels around the world she has seen women suffer because of a lack of family planning, so she believes that giving women the tools to space their births out and prevent high-risk pregnancies honors those parts of her religion which promote social justice and preventing suffering.

CNN’s Juliet Fuisz produced this piece for television.

The international community has been saying that Russia stands in the way of the world uniting to stop the bloodshed in Syria. But on the Amanpour program Tuesday night, Dmitri Simes – a highly connected Russia expert – told Christiane Amanpour that while Putin might not like it, the Russian president would not resist an international intervention in Syria. But in actuality, is it the U.S. elections that are creating a risk-adverse environment preventing stronger efforts to stop Al-Assad's war on his own people? Nicholas Burns, a top U.S. official in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, maintains that the U.S. is indeed laying the roadblocks for peace and Russia is still standing in the way.