Russia will always find an adequate response to any external pressures, Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a concert dedicated to the Defender of the Fatherland Day in Russia.

"No one should be under any illusion that it is possible to achieve military superiority over Russia or put Russia under any pressure, we will always have an adequate response to these wild thoughts. Our soldiers and officers have proved that they are ready to act decisively, consistently, professionally and courageously, and perform the most difficult tasks, like an efficient and modern army, which keeps its traditions and military duty, ought to do," Putin said.

The president also noted that the Russian Army is always improving. Putin pointed out that over the last few years, a lot of work has been done to improve the effectiveness of Russia's military administration.

Today is the first anniversary of the deal made between Yanukovich and the "opposition" and guaranteed by foreign ministers Radosław Sikorski of Poland, Laurent Fabius of France and Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany. As we all know, the deal resulted in a withdrawal of the security forces from the Kiev city center immediately followed by an armed insurrection which overthrew the government. Predictably, Poland, France and Germany did not object. I won't recount all of the events which happened since this infamous day, but I think that it is important to look at what has changed in a year. I think that it also makes sense to compare what I had predicted might happen with what actually happened, simply to see if a person if a person with no access to any classified data and who is using only "open sources" for his analysis could have predicted what happened or if this was all a huge and totally unpredictable surprise.

So let's look at my predictions in chronological order.

November 30th, 2013: in "The Gates of Hell are Opening for the Ukraine"

The supposedly "pro-Russian" Eastern Ukrainians

They have no vision, no ideology, no identifiable future goal. All they can offer is a message which, in essence, says "we have no other choice than sell out to the rich Russians rather than to the poor Europeans" or "all we can get from the EU is words, the Russians are offering money". True. But still extremely uninspiring, to say the least.

The future of Yanukovich

I am beginning to fear that this will all explode into a real and very dangerous crisis for Russia. First, I am assuming that the the Eurocrats and the Ukrainian nationalists will eventually prevail, and that Yanukovich will either fully complete his apparent "zag" and reverse his decision, or lose power. One way or another the the Eurocrats and the Ukrainian nationalists will, I think, prevail. There will be more joyful demonstrations, fireworks and celebrations in Kiev, along with lots of self-righteous back-slapping and high-fiving in Brussels, and then the gates of Hell will truly open for the Ukraine.

Britain's aging nuclear power plants are vulnerable to terrorist attacks by unmanned drones that could kill thousands of people, a government adviser has warned.

John Large, an engineer for Britain's Atomic Energy Authority, says ministers are ignoring risks posed by nuclear terror assaults.

Nuclear power stations around the UK suffered 37 security breaches in 2014 - the highest number since 2011.

Large is calling for urgent security reforms. He is also demanding the government set up a major operation to test the resilience of Britain's power plants against prospective attacks.

Too much energy is focused on risk assessments relating to accidents at nuclear power plants than potential terror attacks, the engineer argues.

The Greek government is currently locked in a life and death struggle with the elite which dominate the banks and political decision-making centers of the European Union. What are at stake are the livelihoods of 11 million Greek workers, employees and small business people and the viability of the European Union. If the ruling Syriza government capitulates to the demands of the EU bankers and agrees to continue the austerity programs, Greece will be condemned to decades of regression, destitution and colonial rule. If Greece decides to resist, and is forced to exit the EU, it will need to repudiate its 270 billion Euro foreign debts, sending the international financial markets crashing and causing the EU to collapse.

The leadership of the EU is counting on Syriza leaders abandoning their commitments to the Greek electorate, which as of early February 2015, is overwhelmingly (over 70%) in favor of ending austerity and debt payments and moving forward toward state investment in national economic and social development [1]. The choices are stark; the consequences have world-historical significance. The issues go far beyond local or even regional, time-bound, impacts. The entire global financial system will be affected [2].

The UN would be effective in settling international disputes, if some member-states didn't try to use it for dominating world affairs, Russian Foreign Minister believes, adding that such efforts led to bombings in Serbia, war in Iraq and chaos in Libya.

Sergey Lavrov has called for the UN, about to celebrate its 70th anniversary, to be an independent and effective leader in global decision-making, despite attempts by some of its members to usurp the organization's functions.

"It's time to answer the question: do we really want the see the UN an effective and influential instrument of preserving peace and security or are we ready to allow it turn into the arena of propagandist struggle, with the UN being excluded from the process of finding key solutions to international problems," Lavrov said, at the open debate for the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), held on Monday in New York.

Lavrov listed episodes in recent history, which he sees as violations of the UN charter, caused by a will to dominate world affairs.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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 "launch a campaign of undercover attacks to destabilise the Baltic states on Nato's eastern flank", the Telegraph reports today - along with all other mainstream news media.

Despite its notoriety for being one of the least free states in America, California does still have some lingering freedoms in certain regards. Ever since California mandated that all teachers and students be vaccinated against polio in 1961, the state made sure to allow certain exemptions. In fact, California has some of the best vaccine exemption laws. Residents living there are allowed to keep their children vaccine free, for either religious or personal reasons; a status which it shares with 19 other states.

But unfortunately, in California, no individual right can remain untouched forever. After the measles outbreak in Disneyland, the busybody freak show is out in full force, and they want to cull as many vaccination exemptions as they can.