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.

The Union of Strongmen of the Perm region gave a T-shirt depicting the Russian President to Arnold Schwarzenegger during the 2016 Arnold Amateur Strongman World Championship that takes place every year in Columbus, Ohio. "The Russian terminator!" — the actor commented on the present.

Vladimir Putin seems to be gaining support in the USA, despite not being warmly covered by the media over the last few years, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was happy to accept the T-shirt.

After Russia's Syrian operation, the American press has granted the Russian President backhanded compliments, comparing him favorably to its own leaders.

"American strategists could learn a thing or two from Russia's in-and-out Syrian war— The Wall Street Journal admits regretfully. It took Mr. Putin just six months to show the world that a modest military input can decisively tilt the balance of power, and that not every Middle East intervention descends into a quagmire".

By the way, Russian politicians clarified the sudden reduction of our planes in Syria in these terms:

"If the Syrian authorities, despite necessary domestic policies and propaganda, follow the Russian leadership, they will be able to overcome this crisis with dignity. If they lose their way - again this is my personal opinion - a very difficult situation could arise. But no matter what possibilities the Syrian army has, the Russian Air Force will enable it to outflank its rivals", the Permanent Representative of Russia to the UNO Vitaly Churkin said in an interview in February.

Bashar Assad and his team ignored the warning and adopted a defiant attitude at the negotiations: no compromise with the opposition; and no federalization of the country or granting the Kurds a special status enclave.

Only winners can dictate such terms, and this is not how Putin negotiates with his most difficult opponents.

The sudden termination of the Syrian operation was a response to the unfair demand that Russia be flexible. Contrary to the US, we didn't try to obtain total obedience from the Syrian leader as a senior partner, we simply refused to assist him in his civil war. That immediately changed the balance of power and caused the government to come to certain terms with the opposition.

Hillary Clinton is one of the top ​contendants in the Pop Idols 2016 reality show that will decide the next nincompoop to be given the reigns of the deadly globe-spanning American empire.

Unfortunately for America's nutty aunt being part of this contest means being asked mildly inconvenient questions that don't begin to scratch the surface of her insane, brain-dead and blood-soaked exploits so far.

Thus she has recently been reminded the last time she was helping steer the bodies-sowing American empire she handed over an area the size of Britain to a head-chopping lunatic cult. CNN with the goodies:

The Democratic front-runner -- who has suffered a spate of losses in recent primaries but maintains a firm pledged delegate lead over Sanders -- did, however, fire back after his campaign manager Jeff Weaver said Clinton supported a foreign policy that gave rise to ISIS.

"That is beyond absurd," Clinton said. "They're saying a lot of things these days and I'm going to let them say whatever they choose to say. But ISIS was primarily the result of the vacuum in Syria caused by Assad first and foremost. Aided and abetted by Iran and Russia, so I think that let's put responsibility where it belongs."