Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) on April 12 rejected a request to open an investigation into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. The request by ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda was turned down by Pre-Trial Chamber II, which decided that pursuing this investigation would not be an efficient use of the court's resources. The statement from the Pre-Trial Chamber noted that the prosecutor has not obtained cooperation from sources in Afghanistan, which bodes poorly for any further investigation. The decision also came four days after the US State Department revoked the entry visa for Fatou Bensouda. In March, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US would deny visas to ICC personnel investigating any allegations against the US or its allies. Bensouda had been making inquiries into allegations of war crimes against all participants in the Afghanistan conflict since the fall of 2017.

In Episode 31 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg documents the ugly far-right politics of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and how the 2010 document dump risked the lives of dissidents under authoritarian regimes in places like Zimbabwe—and may have constituted outright collaboration with the repressive dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus. An objective reading of the circumstances around the 2016 Wikileaks dump of Democratic Party e-mails reveals Assange as a Kremlin asset and Trump collaborator, an active agent in a Russian-lubricated effort to throw the US elections—part of Putin's grander design to impose a fascist world order. Weinberg also notes that the ACLU and Committee to Protect Journalists have issued statements warning that the charges against Assange may pose a threat to press freedom. But he argues that even if we must protest his prosecution, we should do so while refraining from glorifying Assange—and, indeed, while forthrightly repudiating him as a dangerous political enemy of all progressive values. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

In the last two weeks, Brazilian Amazonia has seen an alarming increase in targeted killings, with three massacres and at least nine deaths. The Catholic Church's Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) defines a massacre as the killing of three or more people. The most recent killings took place April 3 in a landless peasants’ camp near the hamlet of Vila de Mocotó in the Altamira municipal district, in southwest Pará state, near the Belo Monte mega-dam. This is not far from Anapu, where Sister Dorothy Stang, an American nun who worked with Amazon landless peasant communities, was murdered in 2005.

In Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan province, at least 16 people were killed and over two dozen injured in a blast that targeted members of the Shi'ite Hazara community April 12. Eight of those killed in the blast at a crowded vegetable market were Hazara. "Members of the Hazara community go to the market every day to shop, and we provide them with a security escort," Quetta police chief Abdul Razzaq Cheema told Al Jazeera. This was the latest in a relentless wave of terror against the Hazara people in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. On March 7, three were killed and some 20 injured when a mortar attack struck a gathering in Kabul commemorating the 24th anniversary of the death of Abdul Ali Mazari, leader of the Hazaras' Hizb-e-Wahdat Party and a key figure in the Mujahedeen resistance movement of the 1980s. Assassinated in 1995 by the Taliban, he was recently awarded the title of "Martyr of National Unity." The Kabul ceremony was attended by high officials and billed as a step toward national reconciliation. ISIS took credit for the attack, but the ongoing terror campaign leaves many Afghan Hazaras concerned about the current peace talks with the Taliban. (Dawn, Pakistan, TOLO, Afghanistan, The National, UAE)

Sudan's longtime ruler Omar al-Bashir was removed from power and arrested by the military April 11, following months of popular protests that culminated in clashes between his loyalist security branches and the military. In the prior category is the feared National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS), which two days earlier was met with resistance from army troops when it tried to us repression to clear a protest encampment outside the armed forces headquarters in Khartoum. The NISS, perhaps under pressure from the military, now says the hundreds arrested in the weeks of protests will be released—although it did not say when. Armored vehicles from the military's elite Rapid Support Forces have taken strategic positions around the capital. But protesters continue to fill the streets, chanting: "It has fallen, we won." Opposition leaders are clear they will continue to oppose any attempt at military rule.

In an amusingly grim development April 8, Donald Trump formally designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a "foreign terrorist organization," and Tehran's Supreme National Security Council immediately retaliated by issuing a statement declaring the Pentagon's Central Command  a "terrorist organization."  Both moves mark a first, in applying the designation to actual government entities. Trump's signing statement charged that the IRGC "actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft." Iran's state news agency IRNA said in a statement that the Islamic Republic "declares that it considers the regime of the US a 'state sponsor of terrorism' and 'the Central Command of America, known as CENTCOM' and all forces related to it 'terrorist groups.'"

Nine leading activists of Hong Kong's 2014 Umbrella Movement have been convicted under colonial-era "public nuisance" laws, concluding one of the city's most politically charged trials in years. The nine may face up to seven years in prison. They include the famous "Occupy Trio"—legal scholar Benny Tai, sociology professor Chan Kin-man and Rev. Chu Yiu-ming. The Umbrella Movement was the biggest pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong's history, during which thousands occupied Admiralty, Mong Kok and Causeway Bay from September to December of 2014. (HKFP, BBC News)  In a sentencing statement, Rev. Chu Yiu-ming said: "[M]y heart tells me that with this defendant's dock, I have found the most honorable pulpit of my ministerial career... We have no regrets... We do not give up " (HKFP)

Russia has announced plans for a "rehabilitation center" in the annexed Crimean Peninsula to "re-educate" Muslims considered to be under the influence of "extremist ideology." The move comes less than a week after Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) carried out raids targeting Crimean Tatars thought to be linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir, a pan-Islamist party that is legal in Ukraine. Detained in the raids were 23 civic activists and journalists, all now facing what monitoring group Human Rights in Ukraine calls "fundamentally flawed charges." Human Rights in Ukraine calls it "profoundly disturbing" that the Crimean Muftiate, or Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Crimea, is apparently cooperating in the "rehabilitation center" plan, which was announced this week by Ruslan Balbek, a member of the State Duma's Social and Religious Organizations Committee. Human Rights in Ukraine calls Balbek "one of the first Crimean Tatars to have collaborated with the Russian occupation regime." The plan is moving ahead despite that fact that Russia’s Human Rights Commissioner pledged last month to review the legality of a 2003 court order labeling Hizb ut-Tahrir a terrorist organization. Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in 13 countries around the world, including countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. It operates legally in the United States and United Kingdom. (More at Moscow Times)