Work of prominent climate change denier, Willie Soon, was funded by energy industry

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And...now it's global cooling!

A prominent academic and climate change denier's work was funded almost entirely by the energy industry, receiving more than $1.2m from companies, lobby groups and oil billionaires over more than a decade, newly released documents show.

Over the last 14 years Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, received a total of $1.25m from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and a foundation run by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, the documents obtained by Greenpeace through freedom of information filings show.

According to the documents, the biggest single funder was Southern Company, one of the country's biggest electricity providers that relies heavily on coal.The documents draw new attention to the industry's efforts to block action against climate change - including President Barack Obama's power-plant rules.

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Researcher Willie Soon

Unlike the vast majority of scientists, Soon does not accept that rising greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial age are causing climate changes. He contends climate change is driven by the sun.

In the relatively small universe of climate denial Soon, with his Harvard-Smithsonian credentials, was a sought after commodity. He was cited admiringly by Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who famously called global warming a hoax. He was called to testify when Republicans in the Kansas state legislature tried to block measures promoting wind and solar power. The Heartland Institute, a hub of climate denial, gave Soon a courage award.

Soon did not enjoy such recognition from the scientific community. There were no grants from Nasa, the National Science Foundation or the other institutions which were funding his colleagues at the Center for Astrophysics. According to the documents, his work was funded almost entirely by the fossil fuel lobby.

"The question here is really: 'What did API, ExxonMobil, Southern Company and Charles Koch see in Willie Soon? What did they get for $1m-plus," said Kert Davies, a former Greenpeace researcher who filed the original freedom of information requests. Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center, of which Davies is the founder, shared the documents with news organisations.

"Did they simply hope he was on to research that would disprove the consensus? Or was it too enticing to be able to basically buy the nameplate Harvard-Smithsonian?"

From 2005, Southern Company gave Soon nearly $410,000. In return, Soon promised to publish research about the sun's influence on climate change in leading journals, and to deliver lectures about his theories at national and international events, according to the correspondence.

The funding would lead to "active participations by this PI (principal investigator) of this research proposal in all national and international forums interested in promoting the basic understanding of solar variability and climate change", Soon wrote in a report to Southern Company.

In 2012, Soon told Southern Company its grants had supported publications on polar bears, temperature changes in the Arctic and China, and rainfall patterns in the Indian monsoon.

ExxonMobil gave $335,000 but stopped funding Soon in 2010, according to the documents. The astrophysicist reportedly received $274,000 from the main oil lobby, the American Petroleum Institute, and $230,000 from the Charles G Koch Foundation. He received an additional $324,000 in anonymous donations through a trust used by the Kochs and other conservative donors, the documents showed.

Greenpeace has suggested Soon also improperly concealed his funding sources for a recent article, in violation of the journal's conflict of interest guidelines.

"The company was paying him to write peer-reviewed science and that relationship was not acknowledged in the peer-reviewed literature," Davies said. "These proposals and contracts show debatable interventions in science literally on the behalf of Southern Company and the Kochs."

In letters to the Internal Revenue Service and Congress, Greenpeace said Soon may have misused the grants from the Koch foundation by trying to influence legislation.

Soon did not respond to requests for comment. But he has in the past strenuously denied his industry funders had any influence over his conclusions.

"No amount of money can influence what I have to say and write, especially on my scientific quest to understand how climate works, all by itself," he told the in 2013.

As is common among Harvard-Smithsonian scientists, Soon is not on a salary. He receives his compensation from outside grant money, said Christine Pulliam, a spokeswoman for the Center for Astrophysics.

The Center for Astrophysics does not require scientists to disclose their funding sources. But Pulliam acknowleged that Soon had failed to meet disclosure requirements of some of the journals that published his research. "Soon should have followed those policies," she said.

Harvard said Soon operated outside of the university - even though he carries a Harvard ID and uses a Harvard email address.

"Willie Soon is a Smithsonian staff researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a collaboration of the Harvard College Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory," a Harvard spokesman, Jeff Neal, said.

"There is no record of Soon having applied for or having been granted funds that were or are administered by the University. Soon is not an employee of Harvard."

Both Harvard and the Smithsonian acknowledge that the climate is changing because of rising levels of greenhouse gas concentrations caused by human activities.

Pulliam cast Soon's association with the institutions as an issue of academic freedom: "Academic freedom is critically important. The Smithsonian stands by the process by which the research results of all of its scholars are peer reviewed and vetted by other scientists. This is the way that the scientific process works. The funding entities, regardless of their affiliation, have no influence on the research."

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Yoga and other New Age practises lead to the Dark Side, says Irish priest

Calling down Satanic forces in the Belly of the Beast?

Fr. Roland Colhoun, who is based in the Waterside, issued caution when saying mass in Drumsurn two Sundays ago, when he says he was drafted in at short notice. He said his sermon was based on the devil and exorcism.

"I mentioned a number of things that are part of the new age movement. It's so embedded in our culture now that it has gained a kind of a respectability, but the new age practices, they're certainly not good for us and the Church is very concerned about people employing them and has written specific documents on the new age movement. There is a great body of research (theological, spiritual and physiological) already done on it."

Fr. Colhoun said he mentioned yoga and Indian head massage. "The Indian head massage, while I haven't done a great study into it, the difficulty is that it involves the laying on of hands on another person's head. There is a risk when you do that because that is a rite we use in the sacramental practice for the communication of the Holy Spirit in baptism and confirmation, and ordination as well," said Fr Colhoun, "but if you do that outside of a sacramental rite you're running the risk of communicating a bad spirit, not the Holy Spirit."

Fr. Roland Colhoun

Regarding yoga, Fr. Colhoun said the medical journals have taken great interest in yoga and the case studies of yoga practitioners who gained injuries and long term disabilities.

"Pope Francis said 'do not seek spiritual answers in yoga classes'. Yoga is certainly a risk. There's the spiritual health risk. When you take up those practices from other cultures, which are outside our Christian domain, you don't know what you are opening yourself up to. The bad spirit can be communicated in a variety of ways. I'm not saying everyone gets it, or that it happens every time, and people may well be doing yoga harmlessly, but there's always a risk and that's why the Pope mentioned it and that's why we talk about that in terms of the danger of the new age movement and the danger of the occult today. That's the fear."

Fr. Colhoun said yoga or Indian head massage "don't have their origins in Christianity".

"There is definitely power from them, but where it's from the Church is nervous and that's why it fits into the sermon on the devil," said Fr Colhoun who accepts some people may be bemused by his comments, but said: "I would refer people to the evidence. The Church documents are written on it. It's not an exhaustive study as the new age movement keeps changing. The documents give great caution about their practices."

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Big pharma is America's new Mafia

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Pharmaceutical companies have more power than ever, and the American people are paying the price—too often with our lives.

By now you have probably seen John Oliver's comic take on the pharmaceutical industry's influence on doctors' prescribing habits. Media outlets from Mother Jones to the Wall Street Journal commented admiringly, and even the American Medical Association felt compelled to declare they were "committed to transparency" around drug company payments to doctors.

But satire will do very little to focus on the real problem if we're distracted by the humor inherent in self-important doctors being bought off by a steak. What's not funny is that America is the most medicated nation on earth, with some 70 percent of Americans taking prescription drugs—yet we have worse health outcomes than other industrialized countries. Part of the problem may be the drugs themselves. As Slate's devastating expose on the fraud in clinical drug trials shows us: We don't know much about the drugs we prescribe.

But as physicians, we have very little good information to go on. Even our most prestigious journals publish research based on falsified studies , according to Charles Seife, a journalism professor whose class spent a semester trying to figure out why the data don't get corrected once research fraud comes to light. "As a result," Seife writes, "nobody ever finds out which data is bogus, which experiments are tainted, and which drugs might be on the market under false pretenses."

If no one knows which data is bogus, we obviously have a big problem in conventional medicine. Perhaps we shouldn't be so focused on marketing shenanigans, and more concerned about the original study data before something becomes standard of care. Standard of care, of course, is driven by "research" that is incorporated into academic guidelines and is the basis of customer demand.

Understanding consumer demand takes very little study—just turn on the TV. Every year pharmaceutical companies spend over $3 billion on direct-to-consumer ads. These ads work: a patient who requests a specific drug will get it most of the time. (We are, by the way, the only country besides New Zealand that allows this.) But the question of how something becomes part of a recommended guideline is less obvious—and has a lot to do with pharmaceutical money paid to academic physicians in research and consulting fees.

Many of these physicians "leaders" then get to influence prescribing practices—since researchers and consultants are, well, experts. Consider the 2004 Cholesterol guidelines that resulted in an explosion in the use of statin drugs—eight out of nine of the doctors who wrote those guidelines were in receipt of money from statin manufacturers . The Harvard psychiatrist credited with hyping the use of stimulant drugs for ADHD—that has resulted in nearly 15 percent of our youth being medicated—received $1.6 million from producers of stimulant drugs. Prestigious medical journals—the ones that often define medical guidelines—allow physicians consulting for pharmaceutical companies or paid medical writers to extol the virtues of the drugs they are selling.

I hate to ruin the fun, but practicing physicians are influenced far more by guidelines, esteemed academic physicians, and opinion pieces in prestigious journals than we are by a deli platter and a smiling drug rep. We look to the world of academic medicine because, well, where else can we turn? Pharmaceutical companies know this and have worked hard to sway the leadership. Now the question comes up if we can trust the data that the leadership relies on. One wonders how deep the deception goes. In fact, the heavy influence of pharmaceutical dollars inspired the former editor-in-chief of the , Dr. Marcia Angell, to conclude, "It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines."

That's why so many practicing physicians and patients alike were relieved that Obamacare would force pharmaceutical companies to come clean about how much money they're throwing at some doctors. Sure, it's fun to ridicule a middle-aged doctor ogling the drug rep's cleavage while stuffing pens in his pocket or wolfing down a falafel sandwich—but this guy isn't really the problem and everybody knows it. While $90 million went to drug-company sponsored meals in 2013, according to the Open Payments database, at least $1.4 Billion went to research. If we can believe that doctors can be bought with a slice of pizza pie, then we cannot underrate the influence of research monies.

And by the way, that $1.4 billion is probably a fraction of what is spent on researchers. Obamacare allows a four-year delay in the reporting of research grants for reasons that really don't make any sense. An explanation from Medscape does little to satisfy: "The thinking is that if there were public transparency, it might stifle companies from getting involved in very early research.... And that's again to specifically protect that research space."

Whether or not the research space needs protecting is a matter of debate. Certainly we have so much research that it's impossible for a working physician to get through it—some 800,000 articles are published annually. In response, the Cochrane Collaboration was formed in the 1990s to perform systematic reviews of the literature. Dr. Peter Gotzsche, the Director of the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen, has seen enough over the last two decades to sum up his findings in a book whose title says it all:

"Much of what the drug industry does fulfills the criteria for organized crime in US law," Dr. Gotzsche said in a recent interview . "And they behave in many ways like the mafia does, they corrupt everyone they can corrupt, they have bought every type of person, even including ministers of health in some countries...The drug industry buys the professors first, then chiefs of departments, then other chief physicians and so on, they don't buy junior doctors."

Gotzsche isn't the only one accusing pharmaceutical companies of wrongdoing beyond the marketing malfeasance they're famous for. In Australia, during the Vioxx class action suit brought against Merck, company emails were released revealing that Merck employees planned to "neutralize" and "discredit" doctors who criticized the drug. "We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live," a Merck employee wrote, according to . Apparently, uncooperative physicians were targeted to lose academic appointments and research funding for telling the truth about the negative side effects they observed.

This is troubling—but even more so in light of the fact that it's now widely accepted that prescription drugs can be dangerous and over the years dozens have been recalled. "Our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Our drugs kill around 200,000 people in America every year, and half of these people die while they do what their doctors told them—so they die because of the side-effects," said Dr. Gotzsche in his recent interview. "The other half die because of errors—and it's often the doctors that make the errors because any drug may come with 20, 30 or 40 warnings, contraindications, precautions...and then the patients die."

This is a hard pill for any of us to swallow. We should be able to trust our doctors, who should in turn be able to trust "the science." As amusing as Oliver's "epic takedown" of doctors was, the trouble isn't physicians prescribing a new drug because a drug rep brings us a platter of tacos, the problem is whether the drugs we have to choose from are truly safe and effective in the first place.

Of course pharmaceutical companies are here to stay—and on the whole that's a good thing. But to prevent a power dynamic that may deny us fully accurate drug data, physicians, and patients need more transparency—not just about the money, but about the drugs we are putting in our bodies.

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Israel opens floodgates forcing hundreds of Gazans to evacuate

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Palestinians ride horse carts as they evacuate their animals in the village of Al-Moghraga after it was flooded by rain water, near central Gaza Strip February 22, 2015.

Over 80 houses have been flooded and hundreds of Palestinians forced to evacuate after Israel opened the gates of several dams on the border with the Gaza Strip, inundating the Gaza Valley in waters up to 3 meters high.

In the wake of a recent severe winter storm in the region, Israeli authorities opened the floodgates to discharge the accumulated water. Residents of eastern Gaza reported injuries as well as deaths of livestock and poultry, caused by the Israeli action which allegedly came without prior notification, Gaza's Civil Defense Directorate (CDD) said Sunday.

"The [Israeli] army opened the floodgates of a canal leading to central Gaza, which resulted in the removal of sand mounds along the border with Israel," the CDD announced, according to Palestinian News Agency . "Opening the levees to the canal has led to the flooding of several Palestinian homes, and we had to quickly evacuate the afflicted citizens."

No casualties were reported as a result, but more than 80 families had to flee after their homes filled with water levels sometimes reaching more than three meters, the Gaza Ministry of Interior said in a statement.

The flood forced the closure of the main road connecting al-Mughraqa district and Nusseirat refugee camp south of Gaza city, leaving hundreds of Palestinians trapped in the floods, a difficult prospect for approximately 110,000 Palestinians left homeless by Israel's assault last summer.

If Israel opens more dams, further harm could be caused, CDD spokesman Mohammed al-Midana warned, noting that the water was flowing from Israeli territory through the valley and into the Mediterranean Sea.

Local agriculture was also affected, Brigadier Gerneral Said Al-Saudi, chief of the civil defense agency in Gaza, told . "We are appealing to human rights organizations and international rights organizations to intervene to prevent further such action."

Those who had been evacuated from the affected area were placed in makeshift shelters in al-Bureij refugee camp and in al-Zahra neighborhood in the central Gaza Strip, according to the local news agency. The shelters were sponsored by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

This is not the first time Israeli authorities have opened the Gaza Valley dams. Almost every year without prior notice, Israel opens the floodgates to their dams in the direction of Gaza to discharge massive quantities of excessive water that accumulated during heavy rains or snowfall in the Naqab region.

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North Carolina lobbyists can officially screw politicians legally

© Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast

A clandestine sexual relationship between a lobbyist and a government official they lobby may sound unethical, but the North Carolina Ethics Commission says it's perfectly legal.

North Carolina government officials who are having secret sex with lobbyists need fear no more: The state's ethics commission has decided such illicit relationships are completely fine.

Yes, what could go wrong?

Joal H. Broun, the secretary of state's lobbying compliance director, sent a letter to the commission on December 15 inquiring whether, um, intimacy between lobbyists and the people they are lobbying violates ethics laws. On Friday, the commission released its answer: The passionate and unwise may carry on!

The opinion, which is almost romantic if you can get past the legal jargon, essentially says that your body is a temple and sharing it with anyone else is a priceless gift—emphasis on priceless: Sex has no value, according to the commission, and so it doesn't need to be disclosed.

"Consensual sexual relationships do not have monetary value and therefore are not reportable as gifts or 'reportable expenditures made for lobbying' for purposes of the lobbying law's expenditure reporting provisions," the commission says.

It's difficult to read that without squinting skeptically, but consider how difficult it would be to disclose a sexual relationship as a gift. Would different acts carry different weight? Isn't that really subjective? Things would get complicated quickly.

Less black and white is the commission's contention that fostering sexual relationships with a government official does not qualify as a form of "goodwill lobbying." According to the Raleigh News & Observer , goodwill lobbying is "an indirect attempt to influence legislation or executive action, such as the building of relationships."

In an editorial published under the headline the Beaufort Observer denounced the opinion, including the idea that sex has no monetary value. The paper suggested that the latter idea may lead to the legalization of prostitution: "[S]ince the Ethics Commission has now ruled that sex has no value how will prostitution ever be prosecuted any more in this state? If sex has no value, how can prostitution be illegal?"

North Carolina has had what seems like an unusually high number of lobbyist-government official affairs become matters of public debate.

In 2012, two of Thom Tillis's staff members resigned over a span of three days because of relationships with lobbyists that the then-state House speaker said displayed "very bad judgement."

Although it wasn't known whether such relationships violated the law, Tillis, now a U.S. senator, reportedly made clear that he would initiate his own policy banning the behavior. "I'm going to require the resignation of the staff," he said. "What these people are guilty of is very bad judgement and what I am going to do is to remove any doubt from that in the future."

While the idea of lobbyists and the people they lobby engaging in sexual relationships certainly seems ill-advised, it's not clear why anyone would think the commission declaring it legal would have any impact.

After all, if you're a lobbyist or a government official, chances are you may not be very ethical to begin with. Perhaps making sex between the two professions perfectly fine would just make it less enticing.

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America's prison system looks more and more like its torture sites

© AFP 2015/ CHANTAL VALERY

In the years following the beginning of the Bush administration's "war on terror," a series of revelations have exposed the horrific torture practices used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, CIA "black sites" and other prisons abroad, as a matter of state policy.

These barbaric practices, which were documented in stomach-churning detail in the CIA torture report released last year, are rooted in the aims of US imperialism to plunder and dominate the world, and to suppress by force all opposition to its predatory aims. But the same ruling class that is waging imperialist war abroad is waging a class war at home, presiding over the enormous enrichment of the financial oligarchy at the expense of the working class.

There is no hard line between the foreign and domestic policy, a fact that was given concreteness this week in the revelation, published in the Guardian newspaper, that one of the top interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had pioneered the methods he used at the torture camp working as a detective in Chicago.

According to the , Richard Zuley obtained at least one wrongful murder conviction by methods that he would later use at Guantanamo Bay: Prolonged shackling in "stress positions," threats against family members, threats that the accused could be subject to the death penalty if they did not confess and demands that those under torture implicate themselves and others.

The newspaper cites the example of one Chicago woman who Zuley kept shackled to a wall for more than 24 hours, until she confessed that she and her ex-boyfriend had committed a murder. She remains in prison to this day. Another, Lathierial Boyd, was released in 2013 after spending 23 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Zuley's background and his outstanding ability to extract confessions was noticed by administrators at Guantanamo Bay, who set him to work in a team of torturers at the prison.

Among Zuley's victims, according to the , was Ould Slahi, author of the recently-published book , in which he recounts being tortured, sexually assaulted and beaten to within an inch of his life at the prison, to the point where he would sign any confession his torturers would put before him.

The revelations, declared the , express "a continuum between police abuses in urban America" and the torture perpetrated in the name of the war on terror. The case of Zuley is hardly an aberration, however. The American ruling class presides over a country that incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than any other in the world, where the brutal treatment of prisoners is a daily reality.

A recent report from the ACLU, for example, documents the horrific conditions facing over 80,000 people in solitary confinement in the US prison system, including the mentally ill, mentally handicapped and children. The barbaric practice has been declared a form of torture by the United Nations.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 95 percent of those subjected to solitary confinement reported developing symptoms of psychological illness, such as panic or anxiety attacks and hallucinations. In Texas alone, there are more than 100 prisoners who have spent more than 20 years in tiny cells for 22 hours a day, with virtually no direct contact with any other human beings.

Domestic prisons, which are increasingly being used to hold those accused of terrorism, often as a result of entrapment by intelligence agencies, are likewise introducing rules similar to those in force abroad. Next week, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the body that oversees civilian penitentiaries, will implement a new rule that, in the words of law professor David M. Shapiro "all but prevents prisoners incarcerated in the United States and suspected of connections to terrorism from speaking with their families."

Shapiro notes that another set of recently-introduced methods "make an unprecedented inroad into the attorney-client privilege, permitting federal agents to intercept communications between certain prisoners deemed a threat to national security and their attorneys." He adds that prisons in New York and Colorado have already used these methods.

The prison system, which is topped off by the continued barbaric practice of state-sanctioned execution, is only part of a broader apparatus, including a massive and militarized police force that kills with impunity and an intelligence system that spies on the population in violation of basic democratic rights. Whether under Democrats or Republicans, Bush or Obama, the state functions ever more openly as an instrument of violence and repression.

If the methods utilized at Guantanamo and elsewhere represent in part the "export" of techniques used within the US, it is also true that the brutal methods honed by the ruling class abroad will be and are being transferred ever more directly back into the United States, applied to suppress the growth of political opposition to war and social inequality.

The reemergence of torture, forced confession, and other "medieval" practices is part of the repudiation of democratic legal and political forms of society under the pressure of growing social inequality.

The American financial aristocracy, which makes its wealth through fraud and swindling, and the degraded thugs they hire to carry out their dirty work in prisons, precincts, and torture chambers, see the legal norms of due process and equality under the law as mere impediments to their wanton plunder, violence and murder.

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Putin to the rescue: Bilateral agreements with Russia give Greece a strategic spot in the EU's 'energy landscape' - is more to come?

While mainstream media promulgate a fictitious message of Russian threats in the Baltic, Vladimir Putin's next big play lies far to the south, writes Oliver Tickell. The gross intransigence of the EU, the IMF, the European Central Bank and Germany are forcing Greece into a powerful new economic and energy alliance with Russia that will reshape Europe - and for the better.

We could see Greece simply renouncing its manifestly unpayable and unjust €320 billion national debt, and quitting the Eurozone straitjacket - while receiving an emergency liquidity package from Russia to support the launch of the New Drachma.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will , the reports today - along with all other mainstream news media.

How do we know this? Because the UK's Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has said so. Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia watch out - the Russian peril is fast coming your way.

"There are lots of worries", Fallon told the newspaper.

"I'm worried about Putin. There's no effective control of the border, I'm worried about his pressure on the Baltics, the way he is testing NATO, the submarines and aircraft ... They are modernising their conventional forces, they are modernising their nuclear forces and they are testing NATO, so we need to respond."

Covert attack by Russia on the Baltic states is , Fallon insisted.

Now where did we hear that before? Ah yes. On 16th December 1998 President Bill Clinton said that that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein presented "a clear and present danger " to the stability of the Persian Gulf and the safety of people everywhere.

We all know where that led: the Iraq war followed a few years later. We also know that the claim was a monstrous untruth: Saddam had no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. So why should we believe Fallon now? Where is his evidence? He has none. When you already know the truth, who needs evidence?

Fallon - and NATO - should keep their eyes on the ball

But while Fallon's attention is focused on the imaginary threat to the Baltic states, there is another country that really could be 'at risk' - and not because of cyber-attack, invasion by 'green men' or a campaign of destabilisation emanating from the Kremlin.

No, the EU, the European Central Bank, the IMF and European finance ministers have already been doing all the destabilisation that's needed - forcing Greece into a deep programme of austerity that has seen the economy shrink by 25% over five years, the closure of vital public services, mass unemployment and the forced sell-off of public assets.

And now the Greeks - and their newly elected Syriza government - have had enough. This week the Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras flatly refused to renew the €240 billion 'bailout' package, which comes with all the austerity strings, and he today advanced proposals for a 'six-month assistance package' free of harsh conditions to give Greece time to renegotiate its debt.

The standoff continues, and will be decided tomorrow by EU finance ministers. It's not looking good: Germany has already stated that the Greek proposal . But if the finance minsters don't agree, then what?

You guessed it: Tsipras will turn to Russia. Earlier this month Tsipras and Putin agreed on a range of bilateral ties , including the construction of a pipeline that would carry Russian natural gas from the Turkish border across Greece to the other countries of southern Europe.

This follows the re-routing of the 'South Stream' pipeline, which had been due to cross Bulgaria but was effectively blocked by the EU's retrospective application of energy market rules, under heavy pressure from the USA. Last November and December Putin negotiated the pipeline's realignment across Turkey with Turkish President Erdogan - right up to the Greek border.

Following the agreement between Putin and Tsipras, which came complete with an invitation to Moscow on Victory over the Nazis day, 9th May, the pipeline link to the major countries of southern Europe is now complete, at least on paper. And once it's built, Greece will effectively control - and profit from - that gas supply, and take a strategic position in Europe's energy landscape.

But Greece is a NATO member!

Greece's increasingly warm relationship with Russia is already causing concern among other EU and NATO countries. German Defense Minister Ursula von Der Leyen has saidthat Greece was

This provoked a fierce retort from Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos who branded the attack as - noting that

Statements that replace the EU and NATO's institutional bodies are unacceptable as blackmailing", he added.

So if Tsipras's refinancing proposal is refused tomorrow will Greece quit NATO and the EU, to join the Eurasian Union? Not if Mr Putin gets his way: Greece is worth much more to Russia as an ally within the EU and NATO than outside - where it can veto more trade sanctions against Russia, block the TTIP and CETA trade deals with the USA and Canada, and oppose NATO's increasing belligerence from within.

But we could see Greece simply renouncing its manifestly unpayable and unjust €320 billion national debt, and quitting the Eurozone straitjacket - while receiving an emergency liquidity package from Russia to support the launch of the New Drachma.

In fact, we could see a re-run of important elements of the Ukraine play of December 2013, when Russia offered a support package under which it would buy $15 billion in bonds from Ukraine, supporting its collapsing currency, and supply it with deeply discounted gas - £268 per cubic metre rather than the maarket price of $400.

A $15 billion purchase of New Drachma denominated Greek bonds would be a superb launch for Greece's new currency, and would firmly cement Greece's long term alliance with Russia, providing it with a valuable long term bridgehead into both the EU and NATO.

This move would also give inspiration and confidence to progressive political movements across Europe that take inspiration from Syriza's fight for economic justice - in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, the UK and beyond - and bear the powerful message: there is an alternative.

And while NATO, the EU, the USA and their loyal servants, among them the UK's Michael Fallon, deliberately whip up a fictitious threat in the Baltic, ignoring the real danger they face to the south, the masterly Mr Putin would once again make fools of them all.

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