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Hello and welcome to NewsHour.
It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London.
I'm Tim Franks.
We're beginning in the Middle East, but not Gaza.
We'll get to the big developments there in a moment.
We're starting in Syria, where, just to remind you how quickly history can turn,
this time last year Bashar al-Assad was still in power,
his family's dynastic dictatorship having gripped the country for decades.
The country's still ragged and gasping from its years of civil war.
Well,
today Syria is holding its first parliamentary election
since the fall of Assad and the takeover of the one-time Islamist militant now interim President Ahmed al-Sharah.
It's not direct democracy, as many of us would recognise it,
nor is it happening across the whole of the country.
We'll get into that in a moment with our correspondent in Damascus.
But before that, a flavour of opinion from the capital that our team there have gathered.