I am an avid board game player. I'm not much for the classics like chess or go, preferring the more modern ones. But, regardless, as a person who appreciates the delicate balance between strategy and tactics, I have to say I am impressed with Russian President Vladimir Putin's sense of timing.

Because if there was ever a moment where Putin and Russia could inflict maximum pain on the United States via its Achilles' heel, the financial markets and its unquenchable thirst for debt, it was this month just as the coronavirus was reaching its shores.

Like I said, I'm a huge game player and I especially love games where there is a delicate balance between player power that has to be maintained while it's not one's turn. Attacks have to be thwarted just enough to stop the person from advancing but not so much that they can't help you defend on the next player's turn.

Ukrainian radicals have shot a round from a flare gun at the Russian embassy in Kiev, hitting the building's roof as they staged a rally outside the mission. Despite a heavy police presence, officers apparently stood idly by.

Russia's diplomatic mission in Kiev suffered the assault late on Saturday as a crowd of mostly far-right radicals gathered in front of the embassy and pelted its premises with flares and smoke pellets. At one point, someone also fired a flare gun round, which hit the building's roof to loud cheers from the crowd, which was chanting anti-Russian slogans, a video published on social media shows.

The radicals failed to set the building on fire but they desecrated a Russian flag by tearing it apart in front of the mission.

With hysteria over the coronavirus on the rise, Chechnya's Ramzan Kadyrov has urged his people to keep calm, not to shun traditional medicine, and worry less about what is beyond their control - after all, everyone is mortal.

Kadyrov, the long-time head of his majority Muslim Republic, has offered his take on today's biggest issue - the coronavirus pandemic.

Arguing that the fears over the disease that manifests itself with flu-like symptoms have been blown out of proportion, Kadyrov called on the public to come to their senses and stop overthinking the problem.

According to recent statistics, there are at least 200 people diagnosed with coronavirus in Israel, but no fatal cases have been reported so far. In the meantime, the number of coronavirus cases in the world has surpassed 155,000, with over 5,800 confirmed fatalities.

The Israeli Justice Ministry has postponed the beginning of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial, Reuters reported, citing local media. The trial initially set to open on 17 March will begin on 24 May "due to developments related to the spread of the coronavirus".

Russian and Turkish forces in Syria's province of Idlib have had to shorten their first joint patrol mission aimed at maintaining truce in the area to avoid harming civilians used as human shield by terrorists.

On Sunday, Turkey and Russia set out on their first joint patrol along the security corridor in Idlib, agreed as part of a ceasefire deal reached by presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in early March. The route of the patrol went along the strategic M4 highway, which links Syria's city of Aleppo to the coastal western province of Latakia and passes through the territories held by various militant groups.

Yet, the Russian and the Turkish forces had to make some frantic last-minute changes to the patrol routes. The move was linked to the information about some terrorist groups allegedly planning to attack the patrol and provoke it into some military response, all while using women and children as human shields to stir up tensions in a region which has just seen a major flare-up. Any such incident could lead to a new outbreak of violence and disrupt the agreement aimed at avoiding further bloodshed.

US President Donald Trump's test for Covid-19, which he took after being in contact with at least two Brazilian officials who had the virus, has come back negative, the White House announced.

"Last night after an in-depth discussion with the president regarding Covid-19 testing, he elected to proceed. This evening I received confirmation that the test is negative," the statement put out by Trump's physician, Sean P. Conley, read.

While initially brushing off concerns about him potentially contracting the deadly virus at the reception he hosted for a Brazilian delegation at Mar-a-Lago, Trump acquiesced, telling a news conference on Saturday that he had taken the test.

It's not just that he sold out to billionaires in order to be able to compete with Bernie Sanders who refused to do that and didn't need to, but it's the case also because Biden lied shamelessly in order to win overwhelmingly the black vote in South Carolina where most of the Democrats are Blacks — he had to misrepresent to black voters not only his policies but himself in order to achieve his first-ever (and crushing) win of a state primary in his long career of three campaigns for the U.S. Presidency. And, so, that's what he did, and he won his first-ever state primary outside of his own state of Delaware — he played South Carolina's Blacks for suckers, and they swallowed his bait in one huge gulp, and the billionaires (virtually all of them white) then created for him the campaign that suddenly turned everything around in his favor — all of this being based upon lies.

Biden won the nomination by lying rampantly and by treating black voters as if their race is their entire identity — as if they are nothing more than their race. For white voters, that's called "racism," and Biden treated black voters that way, as being racists themselves. The ploy, contemptuous of Black voters, worked, and the extent to which it worked shocked political professionals of both Parties. It destroyed the campaign of Bernie Sanders, who was arrested in Chicago during the early 1960s for his participation in an anti-segregation demonstration against the City's government, and who has consistently advocated for the poor.

On March 7th, I opened an article about the unprecedentedly sudden turn-around in the Democratic Party's Presidential contest: "Without the support of Blacks in the recent Democratic Party primaries, Joe Biden would still be the political failure in U.S. Presidential campaigning that he had always been." And I closed by comparing the honesty of Sanders's pitch to Blacks versus the rabid dishonesty of Biden's pitch to them.

But now I have found that Biden's exploitation of Blacks for their votes was even worse than I (or perhaps, anyone) ever knew.

Israeli will use counter-terrorism technology to detect coronavirus patients and those who skip mandatory quarantine, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday.

All foreigners entering the country are required to self-isolate for 14 days. All schools, restaurants, cafes, gyms and most of businesses have been shut in a bit to contain the spread of the virus.

"We will track patients, including with the help of digital technology that we have been using in the battle against terrorism," Netanyahu said in a televised address.

Syria has managed to score a victory in the nine-year war, while Turkey is "pulled agonizingly" in several directions, a former deputy director of the US spy agency CIA said.

"Syria's [President Bashar] Assad has won — at least militarily, "John McLaughlin wrote in an article titled "SYRIA: IS THE END GAME APPROACHING?".

The Syrian Arab Army has been fighting against a host of foreign-backed terrorist groups, which have been wreaking havoc on the country since 2011. The Syrian government has managed to win back control of almost all regions from Takfiri elements. Syria has now been engaged in a liberation operation in Idlib Province, the last major bastion of terrorists in the country.

Daniel Lazare at Strategic Culture headlined on March 8th "Israel Hits a Brick Wall" and described the reasons behind the political deadlock in which that apartheid nation has long been frozen. Frankly, I had had no idea of the reasons, and I won't try to summarize here Lazare's (to me) revelatory description of Israel's impasse, because anyone who has any interest in understanding Israel should read that brief article for themselves. But I'll mention two things in it that stood out for me, by quoting from it, and briefly discussing each passage:

(1) "For purposes of immigration, Israel uses the old Nazi definition of a Jew as anyone with one or more Jewish grandparents. As strange as this may sound, Israel's founders figured that anyone Jewish enough to suffer under Nazi oppression should be Jewish enough to find refuge in the Jewish state - and so the Nazi standard became law."