Global

We once again owe the great reporter Seymour Hersh a serious debt for his reporting, in this case for his London Review of Books articles on President Barack Obama's war making, now published as a book called The Killing of Osama bin Laden. Despite the title, three of the four articles are about Syria.

But there is a shortcoming in how Hersh tells history, as in how many reporters do. I've watched Hersh do interviews about the topic on Democracy Now and never once heard him mention the U.S. public. In his book, the public gets one mention: "The proposed American missile attack on Syria never won public support, and Obama turned quickly to the UN and the Russian proposal for dismantling the Syrian chemical warfare complex." Taken in isolation, that sentence suggests what I think is an important causal relationship. Taken in the context of a book that spends many pages offering other explanations for Obama's decision, that one sentence seems to be simply stating two unrelated incidents in chronological order.

A previously little-known law firm called Mossack Fonseca, based in Panama, has recently been exposed as one of the world's major creators of 'shell companies', that is, corporate structures that can be used to hide the ownership of assets. This can be done legally but shell companies of this nature are widely used for illegal purposes such as tax evasion and money laundering of proceeds from criminal activity. See 'Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption: The Panama Papers' https://www.transcend.org/tms/2016/04/giant-leak-of-offshore-financial-records-exposes-global-array-of-crime-and-corruption-the-panama-papers/

Bernie Sanders may have been chivalrous when he told a beleaguered Hillary Clinton, “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” But when it comes to actually reading some of Clinton’s confidential exchanges, that’s another matter.

A note on those notorious spoilers: I'll be talking about plot elements of "Captain America: Civil War" in this review, but for your spoiler protection I’ll avoid revealing anything specific that’s not in the trailers. But if you’ve somehow managed to avoid those in hopes of a pure, virginal Civil War experience, consider yourself warned!

It’s no secret that Your Friendly Neighborhood Geek Speak Writer is a big fan of the movies that make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Since Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, they’ve shamelessly embraced both the fun and the drama of superhero stories in a way few movies before them had the courage to. But while most of them have been excellent, a few have fallen just short of the mark. So on a scale of, say, Avengers 1 to Avengers 2, where does the latest installment fall?

On April 1, 2016 President Barack Obama addressed the closing session of the Nuclear Security Summit and praised "the collective efforts that we've made to reduce the amount of nuclear material that might be accessible to terrorists around the world."

"This is also an opportunity for our nations to remain united and focused on the most active terrorist network at the moment, and that is ISIL," Obama said. Some observers might argue that the US, itself, now represents the world's "most active terrorist network." In doing so, they would merely be echoing the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who, on April 4, 1967, railed against "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government."

While Obama hyped the fact that "a majority of the nations here are part of the global coalition against ISIL," he also noted that this same coalition was a major recruiting conduit for ISIS militants. "Just about all of our nations have seen citizens join ISIL in Syria and Iraq," Obama admitted, without offering any thoughts as to why this situation exists.

As a defender for the Columbus Crew SC, Michael Parkhurst likes to make the most out of every opportunity he’s given. Parkhurst was glad one of his opportunities wasn’t taken away from him when the Black and Gold defeated the Houston Dynamo 1-0 April 23 at MAPFRE Stadium.

Parkhurst, Columbus’ captain the last three seasons, was inadvertently given a red card for denying a goal-scoring opportunity in the 86th minute of a 3-2 home win over New York City FC on April 16. In an April 18 match report, the referee cited a case of mistaken identity and said the red card should have been given to Tyson Wahl. Three days after that, Wahl’s red card was also rescinded.

“I don’t like to miss games. That’s for sure,” Parkhurst said after the win over Houston improved the Crew SC to 2-3-2 overall after the first seven matches. “I figured it would get overturned but you never know. Crazy things have happened before.

“Not only did they switch from me but they rescinded it from Tyson. That was nice. Both of us were able to play this weekend and keep that rhythm going. I think the partnership has been pretty good.”

It’s been nearly two years since a mob of entitled straight white males took on the uncreative handle of “Gamergate” (Can we stop with the “gate”s already?) to harass and threaten women in gaming-related geek spaces under the guise of “ethics in journalism.” In that time they managed to bring attention to the ugliness faced by women in the game industry and games journalism and get mentioned as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but they didn’t actually manage to stop video games from occasionally being about people other than them.
 

That’s because most big game companies have decided to stay on the side of Good. Even Intel, which slipped up by removing their ads from the Gamergate-targeted web site Gamasutra, aggressively made up for it by not only reinstating the ads but publicly supporting other targets like game critic Anita Sarkeesian and the LGBT-geared GaymerX convention.
 

But while their motives may forever remain unclear, there’s a lot of evidence pointing to a Gamergate victory in the case of Nintendo’s firing of Gamergate-targeted marketing specialist Alison Rapp.

If the bombing occurs when the bombs that have been dropped from U.S. airplanes explode, then the United States just bombed Germany and has been bombing Germany every year for over 70 years.

There are still over 100,000 yet-to-explode U.S. and British bombs from World War II lying hidden in the ground in Germany. Notes the Smithsonian Magazine: