Buttercup: Westley, what about the R.O.U.S.’s?
Westley: Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.
— The Princess Bride

Ah, Westley, yes they do (just as yourself found out real fast) and the real world’s biggest, ugliest and nastiest rodent of unusual size resides in Syria — in fact, Bashar al-Assad has gotten so big, so ugly and so nasty he’s spilling out of his own, private fire swamp.

Fighting on Monday in Homs and other Syrian cities left some 160 dead on Monday, and, ominously, Syrian troops fired into Lebanon and Turkey, killing 3 persons. The Syrian crisis has escalated into a civil war, and now it is threatening to involve Syria’s neighbors (Via Informed Comment).

(Illustration found here).

Juan Cole also reports this morning of those 160 killed: About 23 of the dead were Syrian security forces, and 8 were members of the Free Syrian Army. The rest, killed by sniper and other fire, were civilians.
Assad’s boys just love shooting non-combatant regular folks, especially children.

All this rat-like shit took place as a UN-brokered truce plan was set to take effect today, but once again Assad lied about his intentions, which apparently is to hold onto power even if it means killing anything that moves.
From Aljazeera English this morning:

Syrian tanks shelled the central city of Hama and parts of Homs came under mortar fire, opposition activists said, on the day President Bashar al-Assad had agreed to halt the use of heavy weapons and withdraw forces from urban areas.
Tanks were still present in both cities, activists told the Reuters news agency.
“Shelling woke me this morning at 8:30am (local time) and I can now hear one shell every 10 minutes or so,” said Waleed Fares, describing what he said was mortar fire striking neighbourhoods in the centre and east of Homs, the hub of a 13-month-old uprising.
In Hama, Manhal Abu Bakr reported hearing shelling overnight and said tanks were still patrolling the city.
“At 2:00am we heard two shells fall and the sound of tanks moving around the streets,” he said.
“There is no gunfire now.
They shell us at night so that it is hard to film,” he said over Skype.
Internet video, which Abu Bakr said was filmed in Hama overnight, showed nighttime explosions in a built-up district.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said most cities were relatively calm on Tuesday after heavy bloodshed in recent days, but reported no clear sign of troop withdrawals.

Reportedly, Assad has killed more than 9,000 civilians since the unrest started just a bit more than a year ago — he lied to Barbara Walters last December, blubbering the now-infamous, “We don’t kill our people … no government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person…”
But also added he sleeps good at night:

I did my best to protect the people, so I cannot feel guilty, when you do your best.
You feel sorry for the lives that has been lost, but you don’t feel guilty — when you don’t kill people.

A huge monster rat that lies in the gutter.