Frequent reports in the media of civilian shelling can be desensitizing. After the 20th headline, one just isn't shocked the way one was the first time one hears of it.

The mind involuntarily, callously murmurs, "so what else is new?"

Well here is a video to remind one what this shelling actually entails.

While going through numerous articles and analytical commentaries by Russian, Arabic and Western political experts on the success of ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), one may start to believe that something inexplicable or even inconceivable is happening, and that the entire world is looking helplessly on at the events in the Middle East. For some reason it has only crossed the minds of a few that any phenomenon can be explained not only by facts but also by elementary logic. There's no secret as to why ISIS has gained a firmer foothold in the region and is gradually expanding the borders of its influence and control. In order to better understand these, we need to go back in time to trace the moment when this group was formed in order to remind ourselves who stands to gain from it's unbelievably rapid rise to power.

1. Originally ISIS was created to fight the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and at this stage it was not by any means the most powerful military group of the anti-Syrian opposition. The formation of this terrorist unit was largely facilitated by the USA and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh provided financial assistance while Washington trained ISIS fighters in camps in Jordan and Turkey. There are reports that a number of the training camps was built in Saudi territory. In these camps, in addition to purely military training, the militants under the supervision of instructors from the CIA and the Pentagon as well as Saudi special forces, were brainwashed in accordance with the ideology of the Salafi movement. At the same time, Saudi Arabia, along with a number of private Islamic sponsors in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, provided the money for the recruitment of Islamists and terrorists from failing radical movements into the ranks of ISIS. Among those enlisted were Algerians, Moroccans, Libyans, Egyptians, Yemenis, Afghans, Chechens, Dagestanis and EU citizens of different origins. It's a well known fact that ISIS is mainly composed of Iraqis and Syrians, although these are generally used as cannon fodder.

After the corporate media and the CIA and George Soros manipulators tried to engineer Green Party-turned-Brazilian Socialist presidential candidate Marina Silva into the Brazilian presidency following the classic CIA textbook aerial assassination of Socialist Party presidential standard-bearer Eduardo Campos, these same forces are at it again on behalf of Social Democratic Party candidate Aecio Neves. Although Neves was polling in second place to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff before the first-round presidential election on October, the death of Campos and his senior aides in a highly suspicious plane crash on August 13, forced Neves into third place in polls. Silva, a favorite of Soros and his international network of cash-flush non-governmental organizations, was propelled into second place.

However, thanks to an aware Brazilian investigative journalism press corps, Silva's connections to Soros and his team of interventionists and hedge fund tycoons was exposed. With Brazilian voters wise to Silva's puppet strings to Soros and other global bankers, she managed to only come in third on October 5. Silva subsequently endorsed Neves, Soros's second selection to take over the reins of presidential power in Brazil from Rousseff.

Neves's chief economic adviser and the man who would become Finance Minister in a Neves presidency is Arminio Fraga Neto. A former close friend and associate of Soros and his Quantum hedge fund, Fraga is hoping that a Neves presidency will open up Brazil to "market forces," the very same forces that have declared economic war on Venezuela and are attempting to swindle Argentina through vulture funds run by Soros's Wall Street friends. Fraga, a habitué of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is also a former executive with Salomon Brothers and a former president of the Brazilian Central Bank. Fraga has also been linked to Goldman Sachs through a Manhattan real estate deal involving the purchase of a $7.5 million condominium from a former Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers executive. Fraga's membership of the elitist Council on Foreign Relations and Group of 30 puts Fraga in the same camp as such Wall Street villains as Alan Greenspan, David Rockefeller, former Bank of Israel chairman Jacob Frenkel, and Wall Street apologist/columnist Paul Krugman, and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

A newly-released report has shed further light on the Turkish government's links to the ISIL militants, showing that Ankara is helping the Takfiri terrorist recruits cross the border into Syria.

A reporter working for Britain's Sky News has obtained documents showing that the Turkish government has stamped passports of foreign militants seeking to cross the Turkey border into Syria to join the ISIL terrorists.

Passports from different countries were recovered in a village near Syria's strategic town of Kobani across the Turkish border.

Turkey has time and time again been accused of backing ISIL terrorists in Syria.

Swedish forces have "established contact with something" and are lowering equipment into the water near the island of Ingaro outside of Stockholm where the search for an alleged foreign submarine is currently underway, local media reported Tuesday.

"I can also see that they are lowering some equipment, but I do not have information about this. We are not commenting on the operation in detail," a spokesman for the Swedish Armed Forces is quoted as saying by the Aftonbladet newspaper.

According to the Swedish Dagens Nyheter newspaper, Swedish forces have "established contact with something". Three military ships, including the HMS Stockholm corvette, a patrol boat and a minesweeper, have reportedly gathered in a small area in Ingarofjarden in Stockholm's archipelago and monitoring devises are being lowered into the water.

Swedish forces first launched a major operation off the coast of Stockholm on Friday after receiving information, reportedly from a civilian, about the presence of an unknown underwater object in the region, suspected to be a foreign submarine.

Cheered by tens of thousands of citizens, columns of Serbian tanks, armored cars, and thousands of infantry men paraded down Nikola Tesla Boulevard, Thursday, in New Belgrade. The parade's destination was the Palace of Serbia, where international leaders, dignitaries and high ranking generals of foreign militaries stood in bleachers to look on. Among them, most importantly, was Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a ceremonial event surrounding this occasion, he was awarded the Order of the Republic of Serbia, the nation's highest honor.

Last Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Belgrade from occupying Nazi forces. A few of the remaining WWII veterans also stood in the dignitaries section, to remember fallen comrades in the great anti-fascist war of liberation.

The event was not just one commemorative, it was in its own right quite historic. For one, it was the first Serbian military parade since 1918, and the first military parade in Serbia since 1985, when it was the core republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or SFRY. A "Strizhi" air show of Russian MiG fighters over the Belgrade skies captivated the audience below, while Serbian armoured personnel carriers crawled in formation to the WWII partisan march, Po Šumama i Gorama ("In the Forests and Mountains").

"Conspiracy Theory!!!" cried the New York Times in its recent attempt to defend John McCain against revelations that show the Senator from Arizona providing material support to terrorism. The NY Times was called into action to "debunk" the evidence that McCain had met with terrorists, cannibals, and ISIS militants in Syria after the photographs of those meetings began circulating in the alternative media and more mainstream figures began to pick up on and run with them over the last few months.

From the New York Times, Rick Gladstone writes,

Senator John McCain was one of the earliest advocates of American military action against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. So it has been vexing for Mr. McCain to be battling persistent - and false - Internet rumors that he not only helped invent the group but also knows its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Muslim world and America's latest Public Enemy No. 1.

The rumors are based partly on images of a Syrian fighter who resembles Mr. Baghdadi, seen in photographs with Mr. McCain - some originally posted on Twitter by the senator - during his visit in May 2013 to northern Syria. He met members of the Free Syrian Army, an insurgent group that opposes ISIS and that President Obama, in a speech Wednesday on his new strategy for battling ISIS, has vowed to strengthen.

Nurtured by conspiracy blogposts, social media and photo-altering tricks, the false rumors of Mr. McCain's relationship with ISIS have taken on a life of their own.

If Republicans gain control of the US Senate following the November midterm elections, President Barack Obama should expect an old rival in a powerful position to push for US ground troops in Iraq and Syria.

Sen. John McCain, who lost the 2008 presidential election to Obama, is currently the most senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. If his party wins a majority in the Senate, as it is expected to do, McCain would become chairman of the committee, which oversees defense policy and the military.

The longtime senator from Arizona said over the weekend that he would use his perch on the committee to advocate sending ground troops to buttress US-led airstrikes against extremist group Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL), which has come to control large areas of Iraq and Syria since the latter's civil war brought the group to prominence.

"Frankly, I know of no military expert who believes we are going to defeat ISIS with this present strategy," McCain said at a Pacific Council on International Policy conference, according to The Huffington Post.

When it comes to dealing with Ebola in the United States, former Congressman Ron Paul (R) and his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), don't see eye to eye.

In an interview with Fox News radio host John Gibson last week, Rand Paul argued that a ban on people traveling from west African "ought to be considered."

"It's not like AIDS," he explained. "AIDS is difficult to transmit. You're not going to go into a cocktail party and have someone cough and get AIDS. If you are in a cocktail party with someone with Ebola and they cough, you are at risk for getting Ebola."

The Kentucky senator said that a "temporary hiatus on flights" was "only reasonable."

But as BuzzFeed pointed out on Monday, Ron Paul urged people to put the situation in "perspective."

Hong Kong's Beijing-backed leader Leung Chun-ying told media that if the government met pro-democracy protesters' demands it would result in the city's poorer people dominating elections.

In an interview with foreign media, carried in the Wall Street Journal and International New York Times, the embattled chief executive reiterated his position that free elections were impossible.

Demonstrators have paralyzed parts of Hong Kong with mass rallies and road blockades for more than three weeks, in one of the biggest challenges to Beijing's authority since the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests of 1989.

Leung's comments were published just hours before talks between senior government officials and student leaders to end the impasse are scheduled to take place later on Tuesday.

China has offered Hong Kongers the chance to vote for their next leader in 2017. But only those vetted by a committee expected to be loyal to Beijing will be allowed to stand - something protesters have labelled as "fake democracy".

Leung said that if candidates were nominated by the public then the largest sector of society would likely dominate the electoral process.

"If it's entirely a numbers game and numeric representation, then obviously you'd be talking to the half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than US$1,800 a month," Leung said in comments published by the WSJ and INYT.

Semi-autonomous Hong Kong has one of the biggest income divides in the world, with growing discontent at increased inequality and exorbitant property prices fueling the protests which turned increasingly violent at the end of last week.

There are fears any further clashes between police and protesters could derail Tuesday's discussions.