Just as average Americans are preparing to pay their taxes for next month's deadline, it's now been revealed once again that some of the country's richest and most profitable corporations paid $0 in taxes last year, and many are even getting massive refunds.

USA Today assembled a list of 27 multinational corporations that posted between $56 million and $4.6 billion in profits in 2015, yet got money back from the government rather than paying federal taxes. Some of these corporations are household names, and they represent multiple industries ranging from media, to technology, to healthcare, to transportation.

Many of these negative tax bills are due to accounting loopholes that allow profitable global giants, like American Airlines, to write off losses amounting to billions of dollars. Even though American Airlines owed $1.5 billion in federal taxes, the company successfully wrote off $4.7 billion in losses, amounting to a $3.2 billion refund from Uncle Sam. When adding up the refunds, these 27 companies — a mere snapshot of a much larger, systemic issue in the tax code — are responsible for over $11 billion in tax revenue that would have otherwise gone to public services:

We often complain that the New York Times is laggard in informing Americans about the true face of Israeli society. Well, Isabel Kershner has an excellent piece in the New York Times today about a new plan to fence off Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem originated by what passes for the Israeli left so as to preserve the Jewish state, and Kershner says the campaign has a "jingoistic" flavor. The Palestinian leader Saeb Erekat is quoted calling the plan "racist."

The contentious plan, promoted by a group of liberal Israeli Jews and adopted in principle by the center-left Labor Party, would unilaterally fence off most of East Jerusalem's Palestinian neighborhoods and transfer responsibility for their 200,000 residents from City Hall to the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank.

Kicked off with advertisements under the heading "Saving Jewish Jerusalem," the campaign's almost jingoistic tone seems intended to appeal to the broadest Jewish constituency, including Israel's growing political center and conservative "nationalist camp."...

The new campaign describes Jerusalem's Palestinian residents as imperiling the security, demographic balance, standard of living and economy of the city. It argues that a majority of people 18 and under in the city are Palestinian and plays on fears raised by the recent surge of Palestinian attacks against Israeli Jews.

When the Ankara government carried out a brutal media crackdown at the weekend and then saw minimal Western protest as a result, President Erdogan knew he had the upper-hand - to leverage the refugee crisis.

It seems more than strange that, only three days before a high-profile summit was to take place between European Union leaders and Turkey on Europe's refugee crisis, the Ankara authorities carried out an audacious assault on democratic rights.

The violent police seizure of Turkey's biggest opposition newspaper, Zaman, and its immediate cowing into a tame pro-government publication represents the most brazen authoritarian move to date by the ruling AK party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkish opposition politicians denounced the full-frontal assault on independent media as tantamount to a coup d'état by Erdogan.

But the Western response to the draconian display of state power was more muted than ever. There was hardly any Western media coverage of the Zaman seizure. Both Washington and the EU merely issued perfunctory statements of "concern," and breathlessly urged Ankara to respect "free speech" and "core European values."

It's not only the right-wing think tanks (such as the Hudson Institute and the Rand Corporation) that urge America to invade countries that pose no threat against the US, but also liberal think tanks (such as the Open Society Foundation and the Brookings Institution) that urge firebombing of cities and even ethnic cleansing in order to defeat foreign leaders whom the American aristocracy want to overthrow.

Though there is space here to mention just a few examples of these "liberal" psychopaths, these will be representative ones.

The real coalition against Daesh is the "4+1": Russia, Syria, Iran, Iraq plus Hezbollah. Their advances on the ground, and on the record, speak for themselves. The US-led-from-behind coalition is mostly for show.

When Palestinians defend themselves by throwing stones, they're called terrorists, while Israel threatens Palestinians' life on a daily basis and is considered innocent. Moreover, U.S. politicians have said many times that Israel has the right to defend itself; do you think they want to imply that the people of Palestine do not have the right to defend themselves?

The whole narrative across the West is framed by the multiple ramifications of the Israel lobby - with fuel to the fire constantly added by Zionists and American, French and British Zio-cons. They control key media outlets and always employ the same crude tactics to discredit critics; ANY criticism of Israel - which is usually directed to the framework of an apartheid state, and the state's internal and foreign policy - is blasted as "anti-Semitic". Criticism of Zionism has never had and will never have anything to do with anti-Semitism. Arguably the best deconstruction of this myth is available in the book aptly titled "Deconstructing Zionism", edited by Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder (Bloomsbury, 2014). A subplot of the myth is the "Israel has the right to defend itself" meme - which turns reality around to justify any repressive or frankly fascist Israeli attack. On top of it, Palestinians are not considered equal citizens to Israelis (the notorious, perennial Golda Meir maxim "there are no Palestinians") and the Israeli elite overwhelmingly regards Arabs as inferior beings.

What is the worst possible outcome for the presidential election of 2016? Assuming that an election will actually take place, that is an easy question to answer - Hillary Rodham Clinton as the next president of the United States. She is truly evil in every sense of the word, and the implications of what four (or eight) years of Hillary would mean for our nation are almost too terrible to imagine. That is why it is so depressing watching what is happening to the Republican Party right now. The civil war in the Republican Party is ripping it to shreds, and as a result of all this warfare every plausible scenario for what will happen the rest of the way ends with Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 election.

Iran has test-fired several ballistic missiles from silos across the country, the Revolutionary Guard reported. The US has previously imposed missile-related sanctions against Tehran over the testing of the new intermediate-range Emad ballistic missile.

The test on Tuesday was intended "to show Iran's deterrent power and also the Islamic Republic's ability to confront any threat against the Revolution, the state and the sovereignty of the country," the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps statement published on its website said.

The Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian media did not specify which missiles were used in the test. The underground silos in Iran were first revealed to the public in October 2015, almost coinciding with the revelation of the Emad ballistic missile, and were said to be capable of firing "Iranian missiles of varying ranges." Iranian news channel Press TV used archive footage of an October test of the Emad missile when reporting the Tuesday test.

A right-hand pledge of allegiance to Donald Trump is "disgusting" and a "fascist" gesture, reminiscent of Nazi rallies, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League has said.

On Monday Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump again raised his right arm to ask supporters to pledge their support to him ‒ an act which many have likened to Adolf Hitler's infamous 'sieg heil'.

Abraham Foxman, who escaped Nazi Germany in the 1940s, thinks the action by Trump is an intentional "fascist gesture."

"He is smart enough... to know the images that this evokes. Instead of asking his audience to pledge allegiance to the United States of America... he's asking them to swear allegiance to him," Foxman told the Times of Israel.

The former National Director of the ADL - a group set up to fight anti-Semitism and "defamation of the Jewish people" - said footage of the pledge is as "disgusting as anything I thought I would ever witness in the United States of America."

Daniel Larison recaps the War on Yemen:

The Saudi-led intervention has been going on for over eleven months, and in that time it has failed in all of its stated objectives. The Houthis have not been driven from the capital, the former president has not be restored to power (not that most Yemenis would want him there now anyway), and the intervention certainly hasn't produced the stability that the Saudis laughably claimed to be bringing. [...]

Yemenis have been sorely deprived of basic necessities for almost an entire year thanks to the Saudi-led blockade, and the majority of the population is starving or at great risk of doing so. At least four-fifths of the population is in need of humanitarian assistance. The country's health care system has all but collapsed, medical facilities are coming under repeated attack (including repeated bombings by coalition aircraft), medicine and fuel are in short supply, and the lack of access to clean water has made the spread of disease much worse. Every problem Yemen had before the intervention has grown far worse than it was, and the country's infrastructure has been wrecked by the coalition bombing campaign that the U.S. supports. [...]

Since the Saudis and their allies started pummeling Yemen with indiscriminate bombing and the use of inherently indiscriminate cluster munitions last March, the U.S. has been reliably backing the Saudis in this unnecessary and indefensible war with weapons, refueling, and intelligence.The U.S. has helped the Saudis to whitewash and obscure their crimes, and the Obama administration has done this despite credible reports from multiple human rights organizations and the U.N. that the Saudi-led coalition is likely guilty of war crimes and possibly even crimes against humanity.

The U.S. not only continues to whitewash the Saudi crimes but is still actively propagandizing and reinforcing the false Saudi claim that Iran is in cahoots with the Houthis. I have yet to see even one picture from the war in Yemen that shows any Iranian weapon or munition. There are lots of pictures though that show Houthis using weapons they pilfered from incompetent Saudi troops or their proxies.

Tragedy strikes as military alliance recklessly prepares for imaginary threat.

On Monday, a Norwegian military exercise turned tragic for a civilian commuter in rural Nord Toendelag County in central Norway. Norwegian police and military officials report that one person was killed when a tank collided with a car as it crossed a country roadway.

The tank intercepted the roadway as part of the Cold Response NATO exercises taking place in the sparsely populated section of Norway.

According to Lt. Col. Aleksander Jankov, speaking on behalf of the Norwegian Armed Forces, the tank involved in the accident was a Norwegian "armoured recovery vehicle."