SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer ignited a feverish backlash in the Jewish community on Tuesday when he invoked a defense of Hitler to suggest that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s atrocities surpassed those of the Nazis. Spicer’s ill-timed comments took place during Passover, the most celebrated Jewish holiday in the United States. Critics pointed out that these seemingly insensitive remarks were part of a larger anti-Semitic rhetoric used by members of the Trump administration. Late Tuesday evening, in a disastrous attempt to apologize and clarify his intentions, Spicer ended up defending Darth Vader and Lord Sauron. Civil rights groups across the country have since demanded Spicer’s resignation.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- On Tuesday, a chemical attack in Syria killed at least 86 civilians, including 30 children and 20 women, according to reports from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The magnitude of the strikes, and the horrific loss of life, forced President Trump to acknowledge the gravity of the vicious genocide unfolding. In a rare departure from the counsel of his unofficial foreign policy adviser, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump told members of Congress and Jordan’s King Abdullah II that he may consider retaliatory action: cutting of all financial aid to Jordan, which is using the funds to harbor Syrian refugees, and walling off the country behind a massive fortification along its borders.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Officials from Turkey and Moscow announced the formal cessation of hostilities in war-ravaged Aleppo on Tuesday. Beginning Wednesday morning, “civilians and moderate rebels with light weapons” will have safe escort to the Idlib province, Turkish sources said. Russia’s U.N. ambassador also confirmed that military actions in the region had ended. Despite the welcome news, countless families have said they will not flee, rejecting displacement in favor of remaining at peril to rebuild the ruins of their home. Leaders in Moscow assured the world that these civilians would also be evacuated safely by Russian troops, the guarantors of the truce. In a deal struck with an American small business late Monday evening, Russia will gain access to “personal storage and relocation vessels” provided by BasketCase, a manufacturer of discount caskets.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin, ally of Syria’s dictatorial Bashar al-Assad, unilaterally declared a 10-hour “humanitarian pause” in the airstrikes and bombings that have rocked eastern Aleppo. Russia’s General Staff Valery Gerasimov announced that the ceasefire would take place between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. on Friday, November 4. Putin said that after destroying countless hospitals and schools filled with children, his troops have become exhausted. “We’re going to need a good 10-hour break to give our boys a rest so they can start slaughtering innocents fresh on Saturday,” he explained.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Liberal America awoke Tuesday morning hungry for another political assault against Donald Trump and his family. They found the seeds of their vitriol in a simple and misunderstood tweet from the presidential candidate’s eldest son. This latest social media uproar not only underscores the progressive rank-and-file’s disdain for Trump, which they long to distill across the more reasonable corners of the nation, it also illustrates how misguided their attacks have become. Trump Jr.’s post read: “If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.” Enraged pundits and Democrats decried the comparison between immigrants and sweets. Refugees are people, they roared, and Skittles are candy. But Trump seems to grasp a deeper truth than his critics will acknowledge. Skittles has a storied history of violence. Its roots reach deep into the Mars empire’s shadowy cabal, with undeniable intimations of terrorism.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin, the ironic international interlocutor for territorial sovereignty, condemned U.S.-led airstrikes on Syria this week, excoriating the West’s aggressive actions as lacking “authority without buy-in from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,” a point Moscow emphasized to the United Nations Secretary-General. Perhaps unbeknownst to Putin, his friend al-Assad, who has decimated thousands of his own people since the 2011 rebel uprisings in his country, is not only buying into the bombings, he’s giddily cheering on American military forces for their assistance in wiping out even larger numbers of the Syrian civilians he detests.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The business news during the first quarter of 2014 has already been filled with executives moving to competing firms, mergers, acquisitions and notable divestitures, such as Google selling off Motorola. Following suit, the world’s premier terrorist organization, al Qaeda, announced that it would be severing ties with its best-known affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which is fighting a ferocious guerrilla war in both of those nations. Al Qaeda, the corporate parent, issued a blunt statement on Monday announcing the divestiture of the Islamic State from all Middle Eastern terror operations. Representatives for al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based headquarters called the move a strategic and necessary business decision similar to Google’s sale of Motorola. "Difficult as it is to sever a business partnership, we believe this move will free our engineers and operations specialists to focus on our core model, which has been suffering since 2011," said a senior al Qaeda press official.

Photo courtesy AP

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- President Obama honored the 12th anniversary of 9/11 this Wednesday during a solemn memorial service in which he remembered the 3,000 victims who perished during al Qaeda's September 2001 terror plots in New York and D.C., but then forgot them moments later by indirectly urging public support for a U.S. strike against Syria to "defend our nation" against enduring threats, though different than the ones faced by the nation in 2001. Analysts warn that U.S. involvement in Syria could reignite anti-American sentiment among militant Islamic terror groups.