The partial "ceasefire" in Syria definitively ended April 28 when a strike by regime or Russian warplanes destroyed a hospital in Aleppo, killing scores, including several children and two doctors—one, the city's last pediatrician. (BBC News, The Guardian, Daily Mail) The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed grave concern over a "monstrous disregard for civilian lives," and urged all sides in the Syrian conflict to refrain from targeting civilians. (Jurist) How much time did Democracy Now devote to this that day? A total of two lines of regurgitated wire copy that was not even featured on the front page of the program's website. (There was a follow-up blurb on Aleppo, of similar harsh brevity, on May 2.)

An exhaustive investigation, written up as "The Assad Files" by Ben Taub, appears in this week's issue of New Yorker magazine. It reports the findings of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), an independent investigative body founded in 2012 in response to the Syrian war. Over the past four years, its network—aided by a high-placed mole—has smuggled more than 600,000 documents out of Syria, many "from within Assad's highest level security committee, called the Central Crisis Management Cell." Established after the initial 2011 uprising against the Bashar Assad dictatorship, the cell met daily in Damascus and was chaired by Mohammad Said Bekheitan, a leader of the ruling Baath Party. CIJA lawyers say the documents clearly implicate Assad and his circle in war crimes including the systematic torture and execution of opponents. Stephen Rapp, a former chief UN prosecutor in the Rwanda genocide cases, told the New Yorker: "When the day of justice arrives, we'll have much better evidence than we’ve had anywhere since Nuremberg."

Among the luminaries at the Bernie Sanders rally in Brooklyn's Prospect Park this Sunday, April 17, is to be Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), who has emerged as one of the populist candidate's foremost partisans. Gabbard made headlines in February when she stepped down from the Democratic National Committee to endorse Sanders. Her resignation statement (video online at Facebook) railed against "interventionist wars of regime change," winning easy applause from the peaceniks. "As a veteran of two Middle East deployments, I know firsthand the cost of war.," she promisingly opened. But scratch the surface of her rhetoric just a little and it quickly becomes apparent that Gabbard's politics are downright sinister...

"Hillary Clinton gets to Donald Trump's right on Israel." That's the dead, dangerously wrong headline in a March 21 Washington Post op-ed by Paul Waldman. The fodder for this falsehood is Clinton's address before AIPAC, where she dissed Trump's recent statement that he would be "neutral" between the Israelis and Palestinians. In utterly predictable verbiage, she said: "Yes, we need steady hands, not a president who says he's neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday, and who knows what on Wednesday, because everything's negotiable." Responds Wladman: "In Trump's defense (yes, I just wrote those words), when this subject comes up he’ll say as loudly as anyone else how 'pro-Israel' he is, but when he used that term he was talking about being an arbiter in negotiations."

In Brazil's biggest protests since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, thousands have poured into the streets in cities cities across the country to denounce President Dilma Rousseff's appointment of her predecessor and political mentor, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, as chief of staff. Days of nationwide demonstrations reached a climax as Lula was sworn in on March 17. In Brasilia, riot police fired pepper spray to disperse protesters who massed outside the presidential palace, chanting "Dilma out!" Demonstrators say Rousseff transparently appointed Lula in order to give him immunity as he comes under investigation in a corruption scandal at the state oil company Petrobras.

A prominent veteran of the Tiananmen Square protests in China has dubbed US presidential hopeful Donald Trump a "privileged comeback king" and a threat to values of freedom that the United States represents. Taiwan-exiled Wuer Kaixi made his comments after Trump described the 1989 protest movement in Beijing as a "riot." Wuer Kaixi wrote on Facebook: "Speaking personally, after 27 years in exile from that 'riot'... I think I can speak for all fellow exiled and imprisoned Chinese in condemning Trump... I am not alone in appealing to the very same Americans who offered Chinese such as myself refuge when our own government deserted us to put aside partisan disputes and unite against Trump."

An ISIS commander described by the Pentagon as the group's "minister of war" was announced to have been likely killed in a US air-strike in Syria on March 8. Abu Omar al-Shishani AKA "Omar the Chechen" ranked among the most-wanted militants under a US program that offered up to $5 million for information leading to his removal from the battlefield, Reuters reports. The conspiranoid website Levant Report responds to this development with the headline "ISIS Leader Omar al-Shishani Fought Under US Umbrella as Late as 2013." As is often the case with conspiranoid claims, there is a grain of truth here worthy of examination, but it hardly justifies the click-bait headline...

The Syria Ceasfire Monitor and Syrian Observatory on Human Rights report that the (partial) ceasefire that took effect Feb. 26 has in fact seen plenty of violations. Over 135, inlcuding many civilians, have been killed in regime and Russian air-strikes—and not only on ISIS and Nusra forces, which are officially excluded from the ceasefire, but in "truce areas" not controlled by these groups. But, as sources from the New York Times to The New Arab note, there has indeed been a significant lull in the fighting, which has allowed civil movements to re-emerge in the "free" areas. Residents have been once again taking to the streets under the slogan "The Revolution Continues," chanting and singing for the "fall of the regime," and waving the pre-Baathist flag adopted during the early, largely peaceful stages of the revolution—before the proliferation of armed Islamist factions with black jihadist banners. This has happened repeatedly over the past several days in Idlib, Darayya, Aleppo and elsewhere. Very inspiring video footage of the demonstrations has been posted to Facebook.