At least two million residents of the Syrian city of Aleppo have been left without running water, the Associated Press reports, citing the United Nations’ children’s agency. The U.N. has called for a “humanitarian pause” to allow for repairs to be made to the contested city’s infrastructure.

The Wall Street Journal has reviewed a copy of an internal State Department cable, signed by 51 officials across the department’s Syria desk and submitted to the department’s “dissent channel,” calling for targeted military strikes against the Syrian government and a regime change.

A series of seven nearly simultaneous suicide bombings ripped through two regime-held cities in Syria on Monday, Agence France-Presse reports, leaving more than 120 people dead and many more wounded. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.

Virginia State Senator Richard Black, who is perhaps best known to Gawker readers as a guy who melted down at a teacher over fictional depictions of sex and violence, recently met and shook hands with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is best known the world over for unrepentantly slaughtering thousands of his own people. Black said after the summit that he was “very proud to meet his excellency, the president.”

Syrian government forces have reclaimed Palmyra from the Islamic State, the Associated Press reports. ISIS has held the ancient city since May.

Look who’s feeling confident: Syrian President Bashar al Assad, who made a surprise visit to Moscow to see Vladimir Putin yesterday. It was Assad’s first trip outside Syria since civil war broke out in 2011.

Civil defense groups in Syria have accused Bashar al-Assad of using chlorine gas in at least 35 attacks on civilians since mid-March, the Guardian reports. “Whenever the regime loses an area or a city it arbitrarily takes revenge on civilians,” said White Helmets’ leader Raed Saleh. “It is targeting civilians.”

Bashar al-Assad was sworn in for his third seven-year term as President of Syria today, one day sooner than citizens expected. He won a sham election last month where opposition forces were cut out of the voting process.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is quoted as saying he has no intention of quitting and insists he will remain in charge. Although more than 100,000 people have been killed in Syria's conflict, al-Assad says the issue is not up for discussion at upcoming peace talks.

If the U.S. attacks Syria, it should "expect everything," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad tells CBS News' Charlie Rose in their Damascus interview, part of which was broadcast this morning.

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad sat down with Charlie Rose for an extended interview on Sunday morning, his first with an American network since Barbara Walters was beyond charmed with the “mild-mannered” dude in December 2011.

Nick Taranto — Harvard/Dartmouth alum, former Goldman banker, Marine infantry officer, and current CEO of cooking startup Plated.com — writes in The Huffington Post today that he met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad this one time, back in 2008, on a trip with his Harvard friends. Holy fucking shit! Assad was awesome. DUDE.

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Someone would prefer the U.N. stay out: U.N. inspectors sent to investigate the alleged chemical-weapons attack that hit a Damascus suburb last week apparently came under sniper fire and were forced to turn back.

For the first time since Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad began an open war against protesters and rebels in the Middle Eastern nation, the United States has openly acknowledged that Assad is using nerve gas to kill his citizens.

According to the anti-regime human-rights group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, as many as 80 men were found killed execution-style in an Aleppo suburb on Tuesday, many with their hands bound behind their backs. The group claims to have documented the massacre's aftermath — details of which are still obscure — in a series of extremely graphic videos it posted to its Facebook page.

One of Lebanon's senior security officials, Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hassan, was killed along with seven others this morning in a massive explosion in an affluent section of Beirut. According to the New York Times, the explosion—the origin of which is still unclear—overturned cars and shattered windows for blocks. To judge from the pictures, the death toll is likely to rise.

Emails obtained by The Daily Telegraph through a Syrian opposition group lay bare an uncomfortably close relationship between The View matriarch Barbara Walters and the former press aide of genocidal tyrant Bashar al-Assad.

In kind of a hodge-podge Daily Show segment, Jon Stewart zipped through two stories connected only by the thinnest of transitions: Syrian President Assad's email being hacked and the renaming of a small lake formerly known as Jew Pond. It still worked, though.

The Guardian got its hands on a cache of violent Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad's emails from last year, and the upshot, so far, is that the guy bought a bunch of songs on iTunes. We made a Spotify playlist of them.