Ann Romney and working moms

(CNN) -- My Twitter feed was on fire after an appearance Wednesday night on CNN's AC360, where I said that I thought it was wrong for Mitt Romney to be using his wife as his guide to women's economic struggles when she "had never worked a day in her life."

Democrat's comment about Ann Romney creates Twitter firestorm

Oh my, you should read the tweets and the hate mail I got after that. The accusations were flying. I don't know what it means to be a mom (I have 2 children). I obviously don't value the work that a mother does and how hard it is (the hardest job I have ever had); and I absolutely hate anyone who doesn't have the same views as I do (hate is a strong word).

Spare me the faux anger from the right who view the issue of women's rights and advancement as a way to score political points. When it comes to supporting policies that would actually help women, their silence has been deafening. I don't need lectures from the RNC on supporting women and fighting to increase opportunities for women; I've been doing it my whole career.

Protesters take to streets amid Syria's fragile truce

(CNN) -- Guns largely fell silent in Syria Thursday after an early morning cease-fire took effect and cast an eerie calm over restive cities and towns that had been pounded by government forces in recent days.

Amid the fragile truce, opposition groups called for peaceful demonstrations as though to test whether the government would stick to its word.

Anti-regime protesters came out onto the streets in several cities including Idlib, Homs, Deir Ezzor and Raqqa, according to the Local Coordination Committees (LCC), a network of opposition activists across Syria. It said troops opened fire at a checkpoint in Hama to prevent people from protesting.

Opposition activists reported sporadic violence and said President Bashar al-Assad had failed to pull back troops from population centers, another key condition of a United Nations-backed peace plan brokered by special envoy Kofi Annan.

Adib al Shishakly a member of the Syrian National Council, an umbrella group of exiles, said Damascus had not abided by all six points of Annan's peace plan.

Sarkozy Election Funding Probe Opens

French prosecutors have opened a preliminary investigation into allegations that the country's richest woman secretly funded President Nicolas Sarkozy's election campaign, a judicial official said Wednesday.

Sarkozy has denied claims that his 2007 campaign received the equivalent of roughly $199,000 Cdn in secret cash from 87-year-old L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, and called the reports an effort to smear him.

A mushrooming scandal surrounding Bettencourt's fortune, including suggestions of large-scale tax evasion, has destabilized Sarkozy's conservative government and inched closer in recent days to the president himself.

On Wednesday, the prosecutor's office in the Paris suburb of Nanterre opened a new preliminary investigation into statements by a former accountant for Bettencourt, Claire Thibout, the judicial official said. The official was not authorized to be publicly named because the investigation is ongoing.

Thibout told investigators that Bettencourt's chief financial adviser gave 150,000 euros in cash to Eric Woerth, treasurer of Sarkozy's conservative UMP party, in March 2007. Sarkozy was elected two months later.

Woerth's wife until recently worked as an investment adviser to the L'Oreal heiress. Woerth is now Sarkozy's labour minister and in charge of an unpopular pension reform set to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Opposition politicians are demanding that Woerth resign amid the Bettencourt scandal.

Sarkozy has vigorously defended Woerth. On Tuesday, Sarkozy denounced the allegations as "libel that aims only to smear, without the slightest basis in reality."

Woerth, who has been treasurer for Sarkozy's conservative party for eight years, said Tuesday he was "outraged" by the claim and said he has "never received the slightest euro that wasn't legal."


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