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That's kind of conversation to your soul.

That's conversation.

To your soul. And then I'm sorry. Hello, Prestige Heads, and welcome.

I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade Derek Davison,

and we are excited to bring you the news.

So, of course, the big piece of news this week is a ceasefire that was signed with regards Gaza.

We did a whole special on that because that was just too much to talk about in the news episode.

So if you haven't listened to it, please listen to it, and then we get into the details there. So we're not going to talk about it on the news episode this week. So, Derek, let's start with Syria. Also, we just recorded it, and I don't have anything else to say. Also, we just recorded it, and Derek doesn't have anything else to say a little seeing how the sausage the

sassage is made um all right Derek let's start with Syria selecting a new parliament the

syrian interim government on uh sunday um conducted the selection process.

It's an indirect election technically, but I don't think it rises to the level of calling it an election, of selecting a new parliament.

The reason I say that is because this entire thing was basically controlled by the interim president, Ahmed Ashara, who is appointing directly

one-third of the new parliament. It's going to be 210 seats, so he's going to appoint 70 people

directly. The other 140 were, quote-unquote, elected by local committees whose members were appointed by a central election body,

who's and the members of that body were also appointed by Shahar.

So he's had direct oversight over this entire thing.

At least he'll probably wind up with a friendly legislature out of it.

The expectations for this process were not terribly high in terms of diversity,

and that turned out to be correct. That expectation turned out to be correct. They selected 119 members

...