s a double-whammy of Syrian statements on Tuesday. Its correspondent in Beirut, Anthony Shadid, landed interviews with presidential adviser Bouthaina Shaaban and with Rami Makhlouf, the powerful maternal cousin of President Bashar Assad, who represents the financial front of the regime. Shadid was allowed

sed, had given strict orders not to fire at demonstrators with live ammunition - and expressed his sorrow for the senseless loss of life in Daraa. Shaaban, dressed in black, firmly noted that the people of Daraa "are our sons and our peoples". She promised an immediate investigation into the bloody ev

already wounded in the head and chest and bleeding in the drainage pipe and then whisked away to an ambulance. Precisely how he died after that, Mr. Shaaban said, was unclear. By all accounts, he was then taken in an ambulance to Misurata, a coastal town to the west that fought perhaps the most ferociou