* Russia says wants answers on NATO troops in eastern Europe

* NATO chief: Russia is violating international commitments

* Russia's Lavrov says force will withdraw after war games (Updates throughout)

By Thomas Grove

MOSCOW, April 3 (Reuters) - Russia has recalled its top military representative to NATO for consultations, Russian news agencies reported on Thursday, widening the rift between Moscow and the Western alliance over Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region.

Russia's action last month has caused the deepest crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War, leading the West to impose sanctions and stirring fears that President Vladimir Putin has territorial designs beyond Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula with its Russian-majority population.

The recall to Moscow of General Valery Yevnevich, a typical form of diplomatic protest, follows a decision by NATO this week to suspend cooperation with Russia in response to its occupation of kraine's Crimea Peninsula.

"We don't see an opportunity to continue military cooperation as usual with NATO," RIA news agency quoted Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov as saying. "We have decided to recall the chief Russian military representative at NATO ... to Moscow for consultations."

NATO simply said it took note of the Russian decision.

Earlier, Russia said it wanted answers from NATO on its activities in eastern Europe after the Western military alliance promised to beef up defences for its eastern members.

That drew a strong reaction from NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who accused Russia of "violating every principle and international commitment it has made, first and foremost the commitment not to invade other countries".

Estonian Prime Minister Taavi Roivas said after talks with Rasmussen in Brussels that allies had accepted Estonia's offer of its Amari air base as a second location for NATO fighter planes to patrol the air space over the three Baltic states. The fighters have until now been based in Lithuania.

NATO has ordered military planners to draft measures to reassure nervous Eastern European countries - which were under Moscow's domination until the end of the Cold War more than two decades ago - but stopped short of calls by Poland to base more forces there.

DIFFERENCES OVER 1997 TREATY

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said any increase in NATO's permanent presence in eastern Europe would violate a 1997 treaty on NATO-Russian cooperation.

"We have addressed questions to the north Atlantic military alliance. We are not only expecting answers, but answers that will be based fully on respect for the rules we agreed on," Lavrov told reporters at a briefing with his Kazakh counterpart.

Rasmussen said he had not received any questions from Russia and said Russian "accusations" were "just propaganda and disinformation."

Foreign ministers from the 28-nation, U.S.-led NATO met this week to discuss responses to Russia's Crimea takeover, including sending NATO soldiers and equipment to allies in eastern Europe, holding more exercises, ensuring NATO's rapid-reaction force could deploy more quickly, and reviewing NATO's military plans.

Military planners have been asked to come back with detailed proposals by April 15.

Rasmussen said what NATO was doing was in line with the 1997 agreement with Russia in which NATO agreed to defend eastern European members through reinforcements rather than by permanently basing substantial additional combat forces there.

"In the same document, Russia pledged to respect territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of other states and refrain from the threat or use of force, and that is exactly what Russia is not doing," he said.

The United States and other NATO allies have already responded to the crisis by offering more planes to take part in regular NATO air patrols over the Baltic States, which were once Soviet republics. The United States has beefed up a previously planned training exercise with the Polish air force.

NATO military chiefs are concerned that an estimated 40,000 Russian forces near the Ukrainian border may signal plans by Putin to move beyond Crimea into eastern and southern Ukraine, which also have significant Russian-speaking populations.

Russian forces seized Crimea after mass protests toppled Ukraine's pro-Russian president. Moscow denounced this as a coup driven by right-wing extremists and said it reserved the right to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine, but denied having any intention to move into other areas of the ex-Soviet republic.

Lavrov responded to criticism over the size of the force along Russia's border with Ukraine by saying Moscow had the right to move troops on its territory and they would return to their permanent bases after military exercises.

(Reporting by Thomas Grove, Alissa de Carbonnel and Alexei Anishchuk in Moscow and Adrian Croft in Brussels, editing by Mark Heinrich)

Global Cooling - The REAL Inconvenient Truth: Part 1

Three months ago, it snowed in Cairo, Egypt for the first time in 112 years.

2013 was the largest one-year temperature drop ever recorded in the United States.

The extent of the Antarctic sea ice is at record highs.

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It’s the Real Inconvenient Truth—right now the world is getting colder. And it’s likely to get even colder for the next 20 years—before a new, stronger cycle of sunspots begins, as they have for eons. They are statistically very, VERY accurate.

But there’s more, and it’s A Sad Truth: there is ample evidence that suggests private scientists and public servants have been manipulating the basic raw data that most everyone relies on to calculate climate change. (This story has great timing as the IPCC–International Panel on Climate Change–just released Part 5 of their most recent major assessment on climate science (even they can’t bring themselves to call it Global Warming anymore).)

There are some investment trends that come out of this new Truth, and some of it is as simple as get long snowmobile makers and get short lawn mowers. One trend is that Global Cooling should bring more seasonality in oil and gas prices, making energy ETF and commodity traders happy.

All of this is part of a new ground-breaking study completed by Unit Economics, an investment think-tank from Boston. They are a non-partisan group with no axe to grind on this issue; like me, they are here to make money for their clients. Show us a trend and we’ll figure out how to profit from it.

In Part I, you’ll understand the big swings in temperature the earth has experienced in the last million years, and the last thousand years, and the last 50 years. In Part II I’ll explain how sunspot activity directly correlates to ALL these temperature changes. And I’ll give you a hot, near-term investment trend to capitalize on this cool idea.

And in Part III, I’ll show you how some original research by Unit Economics has uncovered some disturbing data about the integrity of Global Warming science. And really, all they’re doing is adding to an already big pile.

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

Satellites first started measuring earth’s temperature in 1979. Over the next 20 years, temperatures did rise, by roughly 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9°F). In the 15 years since, that trend has reversed–rendering the total temperature increase since 1979 a mere 0.35°C (0.6°F), well within the range of statistical noise.

The real culprit for climate change is simply—the sun, through a complicated but predictable set of cycles.

Those cycles predicted today’s cooling trend – and they predict it will continue for another two decades and may well lead to the coldest period on earth in the last 1,200 years.

The Earth, the Sun, and the Temperature

The earth’s cycle around the sun stretches and contracts, creating 100,000-year temperature cycles. Our planet also slowly tilts one way and then the other, resulting in 41,000-year temperature cycles.

We know this because scientists have several methods to estimate historic weather, an effort that has produced this general result:

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A few things jump out.

1. The 100,000-year temperature cycles are very apparent – and the current one is peaking.
2. The timeframe of this chart covers ice ages and tropical periods, which means it takes only a small change in global temperatures – only two to four degrees – to separate a very warm world from a very cold one.
3. Through the cycles of the last 800,000 years, the average global temperature is creeping upwards.
4. The magnitude of each cycle seems to be increasing.

Now, this chart should be taken with a grain of salt because the methods we use to conjure these numbers are not perfect. But at least the chart lets us put recent climate changes into historic context – a context that deserves a closer look.

The key takeaway is that the earth has been through some very warm periods and some pretty cold ones. Take the years between 800 and 1200 AD, for example. During these 400 years it was so warm that vineyards spread across central England and bountiful harvests almost doubled Europe’s population.

Then it all changed. By the mid-1300s England’s vineyards were gone and sea ice expanded so much that polar bears crossed to Greenland. This short cold snap was truncated in about 1400, when warmer weather returned for 150 years. Get the idea? Up, then down, then up, then down. And then came the Little Ice Age.

Lasting from 1550 right until 1850, the Little Ice Age froze Austria’s vineyards, forcing parched Austrians to switch from wine to beer. Winter fairs were held on the frozen Thames River for 20 years (you’ve all seen the paintings) and Hudson Bay was littered with ice chunks in mid-summer.

This period of time was so cold it earned the moniker The Dalton Minimum—a reference to the very low number of sunspots then. In the year 1816, storms dumped snow across New England and Quebec in June, lake ice lasted until August in Pennsylvania, and failed crops led to food riots in Britain and France.

So when you get asked, is the world warmer over the last 200 years, since the Industrial Revolution started? Yes, but it has squat to do with industry. That just happens to co-incide with the smallest sunspot activity in “modern” times.

Eventually the world started to warm again. From 1890 to 1934 central Europe barely saw any snow. Another warm spell from 1942 to 1953 had scientists predicting the death of Europe’s glaciers, a forecast invalidated when the world once again cooled.

Here’s some interesting data as we get closer to the present day:

1. Temps continued to fall from 1953 until the mid-1970s – despite rising CO2 levels. This was during the single most industrializing time on earth—and temperatures fell while CO2 levels rose.

2. Another point: if CO2 emissions cause global warming the layer of the atmosphere 5 to 10 km (3-6 miles) above the earth where CO2 interacts with sunlight should be warming more quickly than the earth’s surface. In fact, temperatures at these levels have been unchanged since accurate balloon measurements became available 50 years ago.

3. There has been a large outcry about the decline of Arctic Ice. While Arctic sea ice extent is just above average levels, Arctic sea ice is near record thickness: the volume of ice in the Arctic last fall was 50% higher than 12 months prior, following a very cold summer in 2013 in which temps climbed above freezing only 45 days compared to an average of 90 days.

I bet you didn’t read about that.

4. There’s a lot of ice at the other end of the globe too. In eight of the last ten years global sea ice extent has bested the 30-year average, aided by an Antarctic sheet that in October hit its highest extent since record keeping started in 1979.

5. The Northern Hemisphere had its second, third, and fourth highest snow extents on modern record in 2010, 2011, and 2013. In the United States 2013 brought the largest year-over-year drop in temperature on record and the winter is on track to be labeled the third coldest in 200 years.

Evidence of this cooling is everywhere – even if politicians and the media try to pretend it isn’t. Of course, the media has short memories. Only 40 years ago, in mid-1974 Time magazine ran a cover story entitled “Another Ice Age?” noting a 12% increase in New Hampshire snow cover in 30 years.

Conclusion: over the last 1,200 years the earth has been through several pretty extreme temperature swings. What gives?

The answer lies with the sun. Cold periods coincide with solar minimums, which generally happen every 150 to 200 years. Warm periods coincide with solar maxima, which happen every 700 years or so.

In Part II, you will read about how accurately sunspot activity relates to earth’s temperatures, why the signs are indicating a deep cooling trend for the next 20 years (brrrrrr……), and one near term investment idea in the energy patch that should prosper greatly from this new trend.

Keith Schaefer - Editor/Publisher
Oil and Gas Investments Bulletin
editor@oilandgas-investments.com
Editorial 604-971-1668
Customer Support 877-844-8606
http://www.oilandgas-investments.com/

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate Intelligence Committee voted Thursday to release parts of a hotly contested, secret report that harshly criticizes CIA terror interrogations after 9/11, and the White House said it would instruct intelligence officials to cooperate fully.

The result sets the stage for what could be the fullest public accounting of the Bush administration's record when it comes to waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques." The panel voted 11-3 to order the declassification of almost 500 pages of the 6,300-page review, which concludes the harsh methods employed at CIA-run prisons overseas were excessively cruel and ineffective in producing valuable intelligence.

Even some Republicans who agree with the spy agency that the findings are inaccurate voted in favor of declassification, saying it was important for the country to move on.

"The purpose of this review was to uncover the facts behind the secret program and the results, I think, were shocking," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the committee chairwoman, said. "The report exposes brutality that stands in sharp contrast to our values as a nation. It chronicles a stain on our history that must never be allowed to happen again. This is not what Americans do."

The intelligence committee and the CIA are embroiled in a bitter dispute related to the three-year study. Senators accuse the agency of spying on their investigation and deleting files. The CIA says Senate staffers illegally accessed information. The Justice Department is reviewing competing criminal referrals.

As a result of Thursday's vote, the CIA will start scanning the report's contents for any passages that could compromise national security. That has led to fears in the committee that a recalcitrant CIA might sanitize key elements of their investigation, and demands for President Barack Obama to ensure large parts of the report aren't blacked out.

CIA REPORT TO BE DECLASSIFIEDPlay video

Obama, said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., should "hold onto the redaction pen himself."

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Thursday restated Obama's support for declassifying the document and said intelligence officials would be instructed to conduct the work quickly. CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said his agency would "carry out the review expeditiously," but suggested the process may be difficult.

"We owe it to the men and women directed to carry out this program to try and ensure that any historical account of it is accurate," Boyd said.

The report was produced exclusively by Democratic staffers. It concludes among other things that waterboarding and other harsh techniques provided no key evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to congressional aides and outside experts familiar with the document.

Feinstein and other senators also have cited a series of misleading claims by the CIA over the years about the effectiveness of the program, including in statements the agency made to President George W. Bush and Congress.

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Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. speaks after a closed-door meeti …

Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the intelligence committee's top Republican, joined the vote in favor of declassification despite criticizing the report as a "waste of time." He said the U.S. public should be able to see the report alongside reservations among the GOP members of the committee.

"This is a chapter in our past that should have already been closed," Chambliss told reporters. He said Republicans would dispute some of the conclusions in their own report and insisted the CIA interrogations "led not only to the takedown of bin Laden, but to the interruption and disruption of other terrorist plots over a period of years."

Members of the intelligence community have criticized the investigation for failing to include interviews from top spy agency officials who authorized or supervised the brutal interrogations. They questioned how the review could be fair or complete.

"Neither I or anyone else at the agency who had knowledge was interviewed," said Jose Rodriguez, the CIA's chief clandestine officer in the mid-2000s, who had operational oversight over the detention and interrogation program. "They don't want to hear anyone else's narrative," he said of the Senate investigation. "It's an attempt to rewrite history."

Rodriguez himself is a key figure in the Senate report, not least for his order in 2005 to destroy 92 videotapes showing waterboarding of terror suspects and other harsh techniques.

Senate investigators were unable to talk to relevant CIA officials because of legal constraints posed by a separate investigation ordered by Attorney General Eric Holder. At Holder's direction, John Durham, an independent prosecutor, conducted several criminal probes related to interrogation methods and evidence destruction before dropping them altogether in 2012 — shortly before the Senate panel wrapped up its work.

Congressional aides said the CIA's own field reports, internal correspondence, cables and other documents described day-to-day handling of interrogations and the decision-making and actions of Rodriguez and others.

Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Dan Coats of Indiana and Jim Risch of Idaho voted against releasing the report.

"Too much time, energy and too many resources have been spent investigating a CIA program that ended more than six years ago," Coats said.

Bad blood between Senate aides and the CIA ruptured into the open last month when Feinstein took to the Senate floor to accuse the agency of improperly monitoring the computer use of Senate staffers and deleting files, undermining the Constitution's separation of powers.

Thus far, both senators and the agency have tried to keep the declassification issue separate from their ongoing dispute.

Feinstein expressed hope that most of the summary and findings would escape CIA censors and reach the public within 30 days.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the report's public release is "the only way we can get this relationship with our intelligence agencies right again."

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Secret report on CIA torture to be released

A Senate panel votes to declassify a document on the Bush administration's use of "enhanced interrogation."
Obama supports the move

Beirut (AFP) - Regime tanks and warplanes pounded besieged Mleiha east of Damascus on Friday, pressing a campaign to take control of the opposition-held town, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Fierce fighting raged on the outskirts of Mleiha as rebels tried to defend it, the Observatory said a day after 22 opposition fighters were killed in the army's bombardment.

According to the Britain-based monitoring group, there were four air strikes on Friday on Mleiha, which like much of the Eastern Ghouta area east of Damascus has been under army siege for nearly six months.

Mleiha is strategically located near regime-held Jaramana, which is frequently shelled by the rebels.

State news agency SANA said Thursday that six children were killed in shelling on the Dikhaniyeh neighbourhood there.

An activist on the ground, Abu Saqr, told AFP via Skype that "Assad's regime has been trying for two days to storm" Mleiha.

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A handout picture taken on April 2, 2014 released by the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) sho …

He claimed that the offensive "is being repelled by the (rebel) Free Syrian Army".

Abu Saqr said fighting on the edges of Mleiha was "very fierce" and that the rebels are up against government troops backed by Syrian and Iraqi pro-regime militiamen.

The army's campaign to crush rebel bastions in the Eastern Ghouta area began in March 2013, and its troops blockaded the area completely in October.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians are still living in Eastern Ghouta, suffering from severe food shortages in many towns and villages, as well as bearing the brunt of daily shelling.

Elsewhere, fighting resumed in Latakia in western Syria, where rebels launched a major offensive two weeks ago against several strategic positions in the heartland of President Bashar al-Assad's clan and his Alawite sect.

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A Syrian youth walks near smoke and flames rising from a vehicle in a damaged street following a rep …

Friday's battles focused on a key hill known as Observatory 45, whose summit saw fierce fighting, according to the Syrian Revolution General Commission, a network of activists on the ground.

More than 300 fighters on both sides have been killed in Latakia in the past two weeks, the Observatory says.

Among them was Moroccan jihadist Ibrahim Benchekroun, a former Guantanamo inmate.

Better known as Abu Ahmad al-Maghrebi, he had previously fought US troops in Afghanistan after Al-Qaeda's September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, and was later detained in Pakistan.

In northwestern Syria, rebels took control of Babuleen and Salhiyeh in Idlib province, a year after regime forces had taken them over, said the Observatory.

At least 18 troops were killed in the fighting.

The rebel advance helps tighten their siege on Wadi Deif army base, one of the regime's last significant positions in Idlib.

In Aleppo in the north, at least two people were killed in an air strike on the rebel-held Shaar district.

Hundreds of people, mostly civilians, have been killed in air strikes on rebel areas in Aleppo since the regime launched a major aerial offensive on the city in December.

Seoul (AFP) - South Korea said Friday it had successfully test-fired a new ballistic missile capable of carrying a one-tonne payload to any part of North Korea.

The launch was carried out March 23, just two days before North Korea test fired two medium-range ballistic missiles capable of striking Japan.

The announcement of the test is likely to fuel the current tensions on the Korean peninsula which saw the two rivals fire hundreds of live shells into each other's territorial waters earlier this week.

The new South Korean missile, capable of carrying a one-tonne payload up to 500 kilometres (310 miles), was developed under an agreement reached in 2012 with the United States to almost triple the range of the South's ballistic missile systems.

The United States stations 28,500 troops in South Korea and guarantees a nuclear "umbrella" in case of any atomic attack.

In return, Seoul accepts limits on its missile capabilities and had previously operated under a range and payload ceiling of 300 kilometres and 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds).

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South Korean amphibious assault vehicles during a joint landing operation by US and South Korean Mar …

Given the ambitions of nuclear-armed North Korea's own missile programme, the South had long argued for the limits to be extended.

The 2012 agreement, which was denounced as a provocation by Pyongyang, allows the South to deploy missiles with a maximum range of 800 kilometres.

While the maximum payload for that range remains 500 kilograms, the two parameters are inversely linked, so that for shorter ranges corresponding payload increases are allowed.

Just one month ago, inter-Korean relations appeared to be enjoying something of a thaw.

In February the two rivals had rare, high-level talks, after which they held the first reunion in more than three years for families divided by the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea and South Korea Exchange FirePlay video

Even when annual South Korean-US military exercises began at the end of February, the protests from Pyongyang were relatively muted, and there was talk of further high-level meetings and greater cooperation.

But the mood soon soured, and recent weeks have seen North Korea conduct a series of rocket and missile tests, culminating last month in the test-firing of the two medium-range ballistic missiles.

On Monday, North Korea conducted a live-fire drill along the disputed maritime border. After some shells crossed the boundary, South Korea responded and the two sides fired hundreds of artillery rounds into each other's waters.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un warned this week that the situation on the peninsula was "very grave" and vowed to "thoroughly crush" what he called a US-engineered policy of hostility.

Related video

Seoul says the ballistic missile can deliver a one-ton payload to any part of North Korea.
Developed with U.S. agreement