Shell companies—which exist on paper only, with no real employees or offices—have legitimate uses. But the untraceable shell also happens to be the vehicle of choice for money launderers, bribe givers and takers, sanctions busters, tax evaders and financiers of terrorism. The trail has gone cold in many a criminal probe because law enforcers were unable to pierce a shell's corporate veil.

The international standard governing shells, set by the inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF), is clear-cut. It says countries should take all necessary measures to prevent their misuse, such as ensuring that accurate information on the real (or "beneficial") owner is available to "competent authorities". More than 180 countries have pledged to follow it. A study* scrutinises the level of compliance worldwide. The results are depressing.

Posing as consultants, the authors asked 3,700 incorporation agents in 182 countries to form companies for them. Overall, 48% of the agents who replied failed to ask for proper identification; almost half of these did not want any documents at all. Contrary to conventional wisdom, providers in tax havens, such as Jersey and the Cayman Islands, were much more likely to comply with the standards than those from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. Even poor countries had a better compliance rate, suggesting the problem in the rich world is not cost but unwillingness to follow the rules (see chart). Only ten out of 1,722 providers in America required notarised documents in line with the FATF standard.

According to the fourth point of the 12 February 2015 Minsk 2 accord, Kiev is required to engage the Donbass rebels in "a dialogue" or direct talks. Kiev has never fulfilled this pivotal step - the first in the agreement with a specific deadline. The dialogue was supposed to begin the day after the ceasefire was consolidated, which occurred back in March 2014, and was to address "the modalities of the local elections in accordance with Ukrainian legislation and the Law of Ukraine 'On the temporary order of local government in certain areas of the Donetsk and the Lugansk regions,' as well as with respect to the future operation of these areas on the basis of the Law."

A full year after the agreement and nearly a full year since the ceasefire and subsequent troop pullback, Kiev has refused to engage a dialogue with the Donbass rebel regions' representatives: (1) either on the modalities related to conducting elections in the Donbass, (2) or on the Ukrainian law to be adopted according to Minsk-2 'On the temporary order of local government in certain areas of the Donetsk and the Lugansk regions,' or (3) 'with respect to the future operation of these areas on the basis of the Law,' or, for that matter, (4) on any other subject related to the crisis.

Reading the many stories based on the giant leak of documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca — notorious for its prolific creation of shell companies to hide assets of wealthy malefactors — you might well ask: How much tax revenue do the world's governments lose thanks to this kind of financial engineering?

According to The Hidden Wealth of Nations, a recent book by University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, the answer is that tax evasion costs governments approximately $200 billion per year.

Zucman also estimates that tax avoidance by U.S. corporations — which, unlike tax evasion, is generally carried out in the open and is technically legal — costs governments an additional $130 billion per year. (European and Asian corporations have the same incentives to avoid taxes, but there is not enough data to estimate its scale.)

So as a result of all the different schemes like the ones being unveiled by the Mossack Fonseca leak, governments around the world are dealing with at least a one-third of a trillion dollar annual shortfall that must be made up by cutting spending, borrowing, or taxing the rest of us more than they should.

Initial reports suggest that hundreds of protesters are being arrested outside Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., right now for participating in a peaceful demonstration against corporate money in politics.

With over 53,000 tweets, #DemocracySpring is trending on Twitter and on Facebook, and the protest is still unfolding. However, some noted that even with a massive outcry, mainstream media coverage was nowhere to be found.

The protesters arrived at the U.S. Capitol Building in D.C. after marching 150 miles from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia over the course of a week as a part of the Democracy Spring campaign. Upon arriving, they engaged in a peaceful sit-in outside the Capitol, with the goal of staying there for another week.

The US Central Intelligence Agency, rather than attempt to deter massive leaks of sensitive documents, including classified US government materials, has figured out it is much more advantageous to "cherry pick" certain information and then release it as "major news" to a corporate media eager and willing to run with what they are handed. Such has been the case with the so-called "Panama Papers."

A so-called non-profit entity, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), cherry-picking information from a purported leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. In turn, the findings of this consortium were provided to a network of over 100 media partners, including some of the largest newspapers in the world. What was not reported by the newspapers, all too eager to stenographically report what they were provided by the consortium, is that ICIJ is financially supported by George Soros's Open Society Foundations and the Central Intelligence Agency-directed US Agency for International Development (USAID).

The corporate media played up the connections of various off-shore tax-dodging contrivances and money laundering vehicles to a collection of world leaders. However, instead of focusing on leaders who have direct connections to money laundering and tax evasion, for example, Argentina's neoconservative fascism-friendly president, Mauricio Macri, the ICIJ, as is their usual method, hyped fuzzy "guilt by association" links to specific leaders. Not surprisingly, the chief targets for ICIJ were the CIA's number one and number two foes, respectively—Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

If you haven't heard of the infamous '28 pages' from the 2002 Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, now's your chance. On April 10, 60 Minutes ran a program on the 28 censored pages, which comprised the entire final chapter of the report. The pages are still classified, but several congressman and senators have been able to read them and are currently pushing for their release. They can't talk about the exact details they contain, but several have made general comments about their contents: they show Saudi financing of several of the 9/11 hijackers, while they were in the U.S. You can watch and read the 60 Minutes report here.

According to former Florida Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the investigation and report, the pages implicate Saudi government officials, rich Saudi citizens, and Saudi charities. Graham also made this provocative statement: "I think it's implausible to believe that 19 people, most of whom didn't speak English, most of whom had never been in the United States before, many didn't have a high school education, could have carried out such a complicated task without some support from within the United States." He's right, in more ways than he intends.

The Western media response to Ukrainian PM Yatsenyuk's resignation is laughable. We're supposed to be amazed at the 'revelation' that the Ukrainian government is 'shockingly' corrupt and that Yatz's demise is a 'surprise move', despite the fact that Yatz was the leader of little more than a 'junta' and Yatz himself announced publicly that he was departing over 2 weeks ago. While Victoria Nuland wrings her hands over Ukraine's corruption and the oligarchs and kleptocrats that rule from the shadows, she forgets that 2 years ago it was her and her friends that created the grotesque freak show that is Ukrainian government.

Three very telling things concerning Ukraine have occurred in the last couple of weeks. Number 1 is the broohaha over the Panama Papers and Poroshenko being named. Number 2 is the 'surprising' resignation of Yatsenyuk, and number 3 is the 'shocking' no vote in the Dutch referendum on whether to establish closer tied between the EU and Ukraine. What each one of these events has in common is Ukraine's so-called independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, when the country took a wrong turn down neo-liberalization street and ended up in a economic and cultural hole from which it cannot escape.

Maybe Vladimir Putin, in tandem with an alien reptile species, leaked the Panama Papers to discredit David Cameron and help force a British exit from the EU?

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that "all around, within, beneath, above is death - and we are death." That was around two hundred years ago. If the great English poet were writing today, he might replace the subject with Putin. That's because, according to the British media, "Putin is here and Putin is there, Putin is busy everywhere."

Take the Daily Mail for example. Previously, its main concern was always how various things could give you cancer. Indeed, they've now ran the full alphabetic gamut from age to zebra toys. My personal favorites were cod liver oil, fatherhood, mouthwash and sex. Which non-Mail readers, in their ignorance, probably assume are good for them.

Now, it appears Putin has replaced horrible diseases and English property prices as the Mail's main obsession. In the past two weeks alone, the paper has published some startling, often frightening, stories about the Russian President. Like revealing that Putin "is working with an alien reptile species." If that wasn't spooky enough, UFO hunters apparently have a video of an alien craft flying over his home. "This isn't the first time Putin has been accused of being in cohorts with alien life or receiving cutting-edge technology from them," warns Britain's second most widely read newspaper.

The following day, the Mail screamed that Putin had taken a break from the extraterrestrials to buy a flat for a "beauty queen 40 YEARS his junior." The Mail was concerned about how Wendi Deng might react to the news. Deng is the Chinese businesswoman who most of the western media thinks Putin is currently dating.

However, as the Mail revealed the very next day, "Deng and Putin have never been seen together." Also, as Putin is primarily based in Moscow (with downtime almost always in Sochi) and there is no record of Deng having visited Russia recently, I'd bet my last kopeck that they've never even met. Unless 'Dengput' are having some sort of virtual relationship over Skype, or something. Alas, given that Putin has branded the internet a "CIA project," this is pretty unlikely.

Three men including at least one suicide bomber have attacked a police station in Russia's Stavropol region near the north Caucasus.

Witnesses described hearing at least five explosions as well as automatic gunfire at the scene, though initial reports suggest no civilians or police officers were harmed.

Video purporting to be from the scene showed the blast-damaged front entrance to the remote station, as well as scattered debris and damage to cars and buildings on the street opposite.

Initial reports from the Interfax news agency suggested three suicide bombers had been involved, and that all had blown themselves up while failing to harm anyone else.But a spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Stavropol, who was not named, later said only one of the men was a suicide bomber.

"An attack took place on a regional police station," he said. "One of the attackers blew himself up, two others were killed." A police official told RIA Novosti the incident took place in the Novoselitsk district in Stavropol, and that more details were being "clarified".

The incident took place in a region close the volatile North Caucasus, where Isis militants have claimed a province and bomb attacks on government assets have become increasingly common.Local security forces were prepared for such attacks in Stavropol, the ministry official told Reuters. He said police had activated their "Fortress Plan", putting the station into a military-style defensive state.

War criminal, the term loses its bite typed onto a Microsoft Word document. If you think about what it means to be a criminal in war, operating from within humanity's ultimate inhumane situation, you will discover the devil within us all. So make no mistake about it, condemned ex-pilot Nadezhda Savchenko is not some heroine of the people of Ukraine, but a criminal in a criminal war on a people.

The civil war in Ukraine has been one of the great tragedies of modern times. Even though hardly anyone in the western world realizes or even cares, the United States and her allies instigated the overthrow of a stable government way before the Euromaidan. But, trying to tell this story, in English especially, it always falls on deaf ears. Be that as it may, when Nadezhda Savchenko gave away the positions of two Russian reporters so that her comrades could rain down mortar shells on their position, she committed a crime in war. Now a Donetsk City Court in southern Russia's Rostov Region has found her guilty of complicity in the murder of Russian journalists Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin in eastern Ukraine, and has sentenced her to 22 years in prison. The BBC and Reuters can slice and dice this story all they like, but the fact is the former Ukraine military officer is guilty as sin.

Now, for my bleeding heart American countrymen reading this, please consider this. In America, someone who plants 50 marijuana plants can get 20 years in prison and a $1 million dollar fine. And an accessory to murder will go to jail for between 20 and 30 years, if you catch my intentions here. In a war nobody in Iowa or Ohio gives a damn about, in a country 99 percent of Americans cannot find on map, a young fascist lieutenant thinks it's her duty, and probably funny too, to get journalists killed that are trying to report on this horrific war. But the western press wants you to believe she is Malibu Barbi, that she is the Joan of Arc of both feminine heroism, as well as a victim of evil oppressors. This is ridiculous, and I will show you why. The rise of nazism in Europe, just like the rise of radicalism in the Middle East - is a dangerous trend, hands down.

But what kind of psychopathic Nazi does it take to join an army intent on murdering its own people? While I've no time or space to educate anyone on the war for the Donbass here, the regime of Petro Poroshenko, put in place by the Barack Obama administration, has murdered tens of thousands of innocent civilians, and has displaced over a million more. Russian speaking people in the East of Ukraine have been targeted for extinction, and Washington has blamed the whole mess on Vladimir Putin. Only idiots and people with no conscience at all believe these stories now. As for our heroine, Malibu Nadezhda, she branded herself a fascist when she joined one of Poroshenko's most bloodthirsty and vile units, the Aidar Battalion. In 2014, Savchenko took the moral decision to join an extreme right wing, volunteer personal army of Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyski. This is irrefutable; this is the truth of the matter. But let me clarify for you some more.