The Syrian Army is unearthing a mass grave consisting of at least 40 corpses, many of them women and children. They were butchered by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in the recently liberated ancient city of Palmyra.

The grave was discovered by engineers and "popular defense forces" in the Masakin al-Jahizia neighborhood of the city, which lies only 500 meters from the ancient ruins, SANA reports.

So far the army has recovered 25 corpses. Among those killed by IS were three children and five females. As the excavation proceeded, 15 more corpses were unearthed - all of them women and children.

The great German statesman Otto von Bismarck once said, "Political judgement is the ability to hear the distant hoof-beats of the horse of history." The Kremlin's decision to establish a military base on the disputed Kuril Islands in north-east Asia must be considered a matter of political judgement. Moscow intends to write history with the hope that history will, thereafter, be kind to it.

Nonetheless, it has been a low-key 'announcement', made inter alia by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu during a routine meeting of his ministry's board in Moscow on Friday. Perhaps, it cannot even be regarded as an 'announcement'.

Shoigu simply disclosed that a team from the Russian Pacific Fleet is being dispatched to the disputed islands on a 3-month mission to determine the feasibility of building a naval base at a suitable location somewhere on the Greater Kuril Ridge.

Hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan have reportedly flared up overnight, with reports of gun and mortar fire coming from the border. Moscow has called for an end to hostilities. Both Azeri and Armenian defense ministries accused each other of provoking the escalation. Azerbaijan said Armenian troops opened fire 127 times over 24 hours along the border. They are using mortars and heavy machine guns, the statement released on Saturday said.

Armenia said Azeri troops went on the offensive overnight and are using tanks artillery and military aircraft. Militias in the unrecognized Karabakh republic, the focal point of the conflict, claimed they shot down an Azeri helicopter gunboat. Azerbaijan has denied those reports. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called on all sides in the conflict to immediately cease hostilities, the Kremlin spokesman said.

The United States Army in Europe plans to significantly bolster its military presence in Eastern Europe, US European Command officials said on Wednesday.

By February 2017, the US military plans to maintain a "permanent footprint" of three combat brigades stationed on the continent. The deployments will include 250 combat vehicles, including tanks, armored personnel carriers, Bradley and Paladin Fighting Vehicles, howitzers and thousands of troops.

The 4,200-strong rotation, positioned along NATO's border with Russia, including deployments in Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Romania, will come in addition to 62,000 US personnel already stationed in Europe.

"This is a big step in enhancing the Army's rotational presence and increasing their combat equipment in Europe," US General Philip Breedlove said.

On March 4th, a short, anonymous letter was posted on the internet. In a few paragraphs, the letter raised the same criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping that is constantly raised in the western press: accusing him of "centralizing power" and breaking away from "collective leadership." The letter further accused Xi of antagonizing the United States and mismanaging China's affairs. The letter condemned Xi's anti-corruption campaign, saying it made government bureaucrats afraid to do their work. It also condemned Xi's call for tighter control of government media, and, with words that have been described as "bombastic", demanded that he step down.

The author or authors of the letter, who signed it simply as "Loyal Communist Party Members," have so far remained anonymous. While very little information about the letter has been discovered, one thing is overwhelmingly clear: the western press loves it. After columnist Jia Jia was briefly detained and released, the western press speculated, without any evidence, that this was somehow related to this mysterious publication.

As of March 28th, the western press continues to talk about the letter and promote unsubstantiated claims about arrests related to it. Wen Yunchao, a professional anti-China dissident based in New York City, claims his family was arrested in retaliation for the letter. The US press is repeating Wen's claim almost as if it is a known fact, despite the reality that neither Wen Yunchao nor his arrested relatives are members of the Communist Party.

This letter could represent as few as a single party cadre, assuming its author or authors are even part of the 86 million-strong Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As an organization following the "party of a new type" model pioneered by Lenin, the CCP presents a unified public face and keeps its arguments internal. Despite the Party's reputation for iron-clad discipline, any organization with 86 million members can be expected to have, at least, a few internal disagreements.

China has warned the US that it will protect its sovereignty in the disputed waters of the South China Sea and rejects attempts to use international laws and freedom of navigation as a pretext to undermine its national security interests.

In a meeting with US President Barack Obama at the fourth Nuclear Security Summit in Washington DC, his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping said that while he believes in the peaceful resolution of conflicts through direct talks, China will take steps to protect its national interests and sovereignty. "China will firmly safeguard the sovereignty and related rights in the South China Sea," Xi said in a meeting, according to Xinhua news.

While acknowledging that Beijing "respects and safeguards the freedom of navigation and overflight other countries are entitled to under international law," Xi stressed that China will "not accept any freedom of navigation as an excuse to undermine China's sovereignty and national security interests."

The US has been taking steps to counter China's growing influence in the region and has increased its regular naval patrols in the South China Sea as part of "freedom of navigation" drills near the disputed islands chain. Washington has also increased air surveillance in addition to stepping up US-led war games with its Asian allies. In response China deployed its surface-to-air missile systems on Woody Island earlier this year, in addition to military aircraft.

Woody Island is the biggest island in the Paracel chain in the South China Sea. China laid claim to the island in the 1950s, but the rights to the area, which is at the heart of economically important shipping routes in the South China Sea, are being contested by Taiwan, Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam.

In addition to perceived US intrusion into the South China Sea affair, China is apprehensive about the installation of an advanced anti-missile Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system on the Korean peninsula. According to Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang, during the meeting Xi told Obama that China was "firmly opposed" to the US' deployment of THAAD.

Islam, real Islam, is a religion of piety, wisdom and peace, and Muslims, real Muslims are not terrorists. Even though all terrorists that have been caught involved in terrorism are "Muslims", this does not give a blanket description of all Muslims as beings terrorists.

Those who "use" terrorism to spew hatred towards Islam and indiscriminately against all Muslims have their own agenda. These are the true Islamophobes. These people do not need a reason to hate Islam and Muslims. They are now having a field day with the terror issue and using it to feed their hatred and to justify it.

I wanted to start this series of articles with the above statements in order to keep some who will try to put words in my mouth at bay. I had to make my position clear here, because inspired by The Saker, I want to have "my rant".

In making my position clear and saying the above, I emphasize that we need to be able to discern what is what and what is not when it comes to Islam, Muslims and terrorism. In between the two extremes of 1) turning a total blind eye to the violent segment within Muslim communities in fear of being wrongly and unfairly branded as an Islamophobe and 2) clamping down on all Muslims and persecuting them, there is definitely an elusive fine line that needs to be identified. I am yet to see anyone trying to do this.

The EU has been towing the line of option (1) above. The American presidential hopeful Donald Trump is promising to enact option (2).

Option (1) led to the Paris November 2015 and the Brussel March 2016 attacks. This option is not leaving only the EU poised to suffer more terror, but the entire West. Option (2), if ever enacted, has unforeseeable consequences that I will not even try to imagine and discuss.

In between the extremes of fear and hatred, the West finds itself incapable of dealing with the Daesh phenomenon that has infiltrated into its heartland.

While Belgrade is interested in becoming part of the European Union, it would not do so if the cost would be hurting Serbia's relations with Russia, Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said during a Moscow visit. "We want to become part of the European Union since it would serve our interest. We are a country that geographically and politically is part of Europe. But it cannot be done at a cost of our good relations with the Russian Federation," he said at a joint conference with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.

Serbia has been negotiating potential accession to the EU since 2005. Serbia's environmental, agricultural and financial regulations and its judiciary are considered major obstacles as does the issue of Kosovo, Serbia's breakaway region that most of the EU members recognize as a sovereign nation.

Lavrov said the EU, a major sponsor of the Kosovar authorities, is in the position to put pressure on Pristina and protect the remaining Serbian residents of the region. "There is sabotage of the agreements that Belgrade and Pristina reached in August last year with the EU's mediation to create Serbian municipalities in Kosovo," he said.

This sabotage, he said, "does not get any tangible reaction from Brussels. This worries us. We believe that the European Union should confirm its status as an objective mediator and leaned on Pristina to make the Albanian leadership of Kosovo deliver what they signed up to."

Dacic added that Serbia has no intention of joining NATO, an organization that bombed the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan Wars. Serbia is still coping with the consequences of that military action, the minister said. "Belgrade would not engage closer with NATO for the sake of the Serbian people, not Russia," the Serbian official stressed. "Most Serbian citizens stand against becoming a member of the alliance."

Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Spooks, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror

In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos:

(1) As admitted by secret Russian police files that are part of the Hoover Institution's archives, the Russian Tsar's secret police set off bombs and killed people in order to blame and arrest labor agitators. And see this.

(2) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the "Mukden Incident" or the "Manchurian Incident". The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: "Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the 'Incident' was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ...." And see this.

(3) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that - under orders from the chief of the Gestapo - he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland.

(4) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.

(5) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union's Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 - while blaming the attack on Finland - as a basis for launching the "Winter War" against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(6) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.

A UN war crimes tribunal has become an instrument of "revenge" and a place to "settle old scores," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement, criticizing the court's decision to sentence Radovan Karadzic to 40 years in prison on genocide charges.

The Russian Foreign Ministry asserted that the verdict, which is one of the harshest ever meted out by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), appears to be very one-sided, as it attributes the sole responsibility for the Yugoslav civil war to the Serbs.

The ICTY has acquitted numerous other participants of the Yugoslav civil war in the past, including Croatian General Ante Gotovina, Kosovo Albanian Ramush Haradinaj, and Bosnian field commander Naser Oric, according to the statement.

"The civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the NATO bombardments are a tragic chapter in world history," the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "It is hard to imagine that only one side committed all the crimes in that war. The ICTY, however, continues building a myth of the Serbs' sole responsibility for those events."

This kind of approach has undermined interethnic reconciliation in the Balkans, the Foreign Ministry stressed.

Moscow also noticed the date - March 24-which the ICTY chose for announcing its verdict on Karadzic. On March 24, 1999, NATO's coalition forces started its 78-day bombing campaign against the former Yugoslavia - another crime, which the ICTY has refused to investigate.