Joan Juliet Buck tells Brooke Baldwin that Syria's Assads lied to her about their country's inner turmoil when she interviewed them for a feature in Vogue magazine shortly before the start of the uprising.

The wives of the British and German ambassadors to the UN have released a video calling on Asma al-Assad to speak out against the government crackdown in Syria.

Against a backdrop of truce violations, Syria's foreign minister says troops backing the government will be pulled from the country's urban centers. But even as he visited China and UN observers arrived in Damascus, attacks on rebels were continuing.

Arab governments have employed the services of western PR companies to clean up their image - even as they are conducting brutal crackdowns on their citizens. Al Jazeera's Listening Post has this report.