Something about this picture breaks my heart a little for some reason. God bless her for all she does. Where would we be without her?
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| U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton boards her plane following a
meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Friday, June 29,
2012, in St. Petersburg, Russia. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari, Pool) |
There
was a brief background briefing with a senior official that sheds some
light on the progress of her meeting with Lavrov today. Since it is
short, I will share the whole thing here along with some photos of their
day.
Background Briefing on Syria
Special Briefing
Senior Department Official
Senior Official
St. Petersburg, Russia
June 29, 2012
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL:
So before we sat down to dinner, the two ministers spent almost an hour
one-on-one talking about Syria. They were talking, first and foremost,
about preparing the meeting in Geneva tomorrow.
QUESTION: (Inaudible.)
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: They talked through all of the remaining areas of difficulty and difference. There
are still areas of difficulty and difference. But out of respect to
Kofi, they agreed that we should all go to Geneva tomorrow to try to
produce a result. We may get there tomorrow. We may not.
In
addition to talking about this political transition roadmap and the
importance of that, they also talked more broadly about Syria. And the
question was: Why do we need to care about Syria? And it’s not simply
about the suffering of the Syrian people and the danger that the country
itself will unravel, but the Secretary made the point that there are
real dangers for the wider region. We’ve seen the tensions between Syria
and Turkey just this week. We’ve seen the impact on Lebanon. You could
have a seriously destabilizing impact on Jordan. You could have an
impact on Israel. So it’s really incumbent upon the Security Council
members and regional states to exercise leadership and do what we can to
help end the violence and get to a political transition.
The
rest of the dinner – when we sat down to dinner, the rest of the dinner
was a whole host of other issues which we can go through later – Middle
East peace, all of the bilateral issues, strengthening – following up
on the President’s meeting with President Putin, et cetera. We’ll go
over those later.
QUESTION: Thank you.
