By Ken Olshansky

If, indeed, an attack took place...

CNN - Dutch journalist Sander van Hoorn was on the ground in Syria today, reporting on the deadly attack in Damascus that killed four top officials in Bashar Assad’s inner circle. His take? “It was the most bizarre scene.”

The attack took place in the heart of Damascus. And Van Hoorn reports, “Nobody has given me a good explanation for how it could be that only one hundred meters from the site of the supposed blast, people were just acting as if nothing had happened.

The key words there are ‘the supposed blast.’ When asked about conflicting reports of what actually happened, Van Hoorn said this: “I was in the hotel, so I should have been able to hear it. I didn’t.” FULL POST

By Lucky Gold

Losing hope in the concept of two states

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was in Jerusalem on Monday, joining the effort to revive the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. It won’t be easy.

“I’m worried and frustrated, too,” said Blair. “We’ve managed to keep this whole process from collapsing but that’s not the same thing as getting it moving.”

Appearing on Amanpour, Blair warned that if the process does collapse, “the consequences are really serious. It’s not just a question of disorder and instability – although that’s always a risk – it’s also that people end up losing hope in the concept of two states.” FULL POST

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.

Sherry Rehman, Pakistan's Ambassador to the U.S., talks about the reopening of her country's supply lines and the seven months it took to get a non-apology from the U.S. to her country.

By Lucky Gold, CNN

I am the president

Mexico’s presidential election has yet to be certified, but despite a recount and allegations of vote buying, Enrique Peña Nieto does not hesitate to claim victory.

“I am the president by a decision of the majority of Mexicans,” he said Thursday on Amanpour. “This is a whole process that is very strictly following the law…In the month of September, the electoral tribunal will legally designate me as president.”

When he is confirmed as president, a top priority will be ending the spiral of violence and drug-related crime that have left over fifty thousand dead since 2006. FULL POST

By Lucky Gold, CNN

Colonel Abdalhamid Zakaria, a doctor and defector from the Syrian army, appeared Monday on Amanpour and described the appalling conditions in the Aleppo military hospital where he worked until his defection.

Now a member of the Syrian Free Army, Col. Zakaria spoke from Istanbul, recalling how at Aleppo hospital he had treated Syrian soldiers, most of whom “were shot from behind when they refused to kill the civilians.”

As for the civilian patients, he said they were treated “only when the regime is looking for further investigations.”  But if they had no information to divulge, “the regime will kill them directly by many ways.”

Among those lethal methods, he detailed “calcium injections, intravenously and rapidly causing cardiac arrest, or by using high doses of insulin causing hypoglycemic coma and finally death.”

He added, “Those who were injected are lucky, compared to those left bleeding to death in the dark.” FULL POST

By Lucky Gold

“I was asleep when Debbie woke me up telling me there’s a boarding party arriving.  And the next thing she said – it’s pirates.”

So began the gripping narrative of Bruno Pelizarri and Deborah Calitz, a South African couple kidnapped off the coast of Tanzania by Somali pirates back in October 2010, and only freed last week after nearly two years of intense negotiations.

Now back in Pretoria, South Africa, they appeared Thursday on CNN's Amanpour – their first interview since being released.  Bruno recounted the terrifying moment when he had to face the pirates:  “What do you do?  What do you say?”  Somehow remaining calm, he “put a pair of jeans on and went on deck to face them.”

“It felt like it was a dream,” said Deborah.  “It wasn’t real.  There was more fear in their (the pirates’) eyes than we had.”
FULL POST