中国上海自由贸易试验区
Nothing in English at the moment.
The Autonomy book of short stories
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‘When honey is not honey’
2. Accountable Care Organizations are certain to bring down overall health spending .
The un-obvious reason that we shouldn’t be too confident in the ACO revolution is that bundling payments this way encourages -- in fact, nearly requires -- doctors to band together in much larger practice groups. A small practitioner with a few hundred patients is extremely vulnerable to the possibility that some of those patients will end up requiring much more treatment than their health status classification would predict. A few of those, and you’ve lost money for the year. And what if those patients are also extra-expensive next year? Bankruptcy court looms. So you need a very large practice to make the financials work, so that you can be sure that the extra-expensive patients are balanced out by some extra-cheap ones. This also makes it easier to manage a patient’s entire set of health problems within a single practice.
But as the participant pointed out, consolidation is one of the things that is known to drive up prices in health care markets. When you’re an insurer negotiating with 2,500 individual doctors, you have a fair amount of leverage to keep their fees down. When you’re negotiating with four large practice groups, suddenly you’re not so powerful, because you might lose customers if your policy excludes a quarter of the doctors in town. So it’s not yet clear whether ACOs are actually going to lower costs -- or even work at all.
3. Obamacare works because it gets money from deadbeats who go to the emergency room and then stiff the rest of us for the cost. Actually, hospitals have a pretty effective mechanism for collecting money from the deadbeats: debt collectors. Uncompensated care is definitely a problem, and it will almost certainly fall under Obamacare. But in Massachusetts, which achieved much higher coverage rates than most states will see (90 percent of the state was insured when they started, and they have comparatively few illegal immigrants), such care fell by less than half between 2006 and 2010.
Moreover, this is a relatively small amount of overall health spending -- about $62 billion in 2009, on total health spending in the trillions. Obamacare mostly works by getting young and healthy people to spend more on health care than they otherwise would, thus subsidizing older and sicker people. You can argue that this is unfair, or that it’s merely a down-payment on their own future as old and sick people. But either way, this is the real mechanism for making the insurance expansion affordable to individuals, and the government.
7. Obamacare will reduce the budget deficit
You’re starting to hear noise on the left about getting rid of the employer mandate entirely; it’s proven very difficult to implement, and there’s also fear that it will result in people having their hours cut back, or losing their jobs outright. But that would be extremely expensive. Here’s my colleague Ezra Klein in 2009, describing what an early version of Obamacare looked like without the employer mandate: “It would’ve cost, in other words, 70 percent more and covered 20 percent fewer people.” The difference, he goes onto explain, is the mandate.
10. Obamacare will bend the cost curve.
One more point I heard made at Brookings last week: The consensus about Obamacare among health economists is narrower than the range of opinion among the broader community of public intellectuals, and much narrower than that in the general public. Mostly the experts think that it will be good for the individuals it covers, but that the other beneficial effects promised -- such as bending the cost curve -- aren’t particularly likely. Increasing the demand for a service does not usually drive the price of that service down, especially when supply is constrained, as the supply of doctors is in the U.S.
While hearings continue, appellant Don Petrin of River Sands Drive has hinted the appeal effort will spread beyond Town Hall and the courts, to a secession movement in the waterfront neighborhoods hardest hit by the revaluations.
“I’m not leading that effort, however I will, like many, support that effort,” Petrin said. “Legal advice was solicited and received as to the steps involved, however I have not seen the required petition as yet.”
Petrin was also unimpressed with Monday’s proceedings.
“Unfortunately for the board, the town chose to essentially filibuster the hearing by strategically reiterating the same mundane points over and over again,” he said.
Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off.Trolls and spambots are a problem, but they are a bigger problem for small bloggers and website owners who can't afford filtering software. So is the issue really about trolls and spambots, or does the magazine fear something else?
It wasn't a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter.
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.Down goes science. If you told me 10 or 20 years ago that science would be a casualty of negative social mood, I would think science would suffer. Today, it is clear that science has become political itself, corrupted by government and corporate funding, and turning out junk science at a rate of about 80% in cancer research, as one example. (see: Scientists' Elusive Goal: Reproducing Study Results)
Residents, many who live in rural setting, no longer feel as if California is their state, and they identify little with the central and southern part of the state, he said.
"When they’re that diverse, (the state) should split,” Jones said. “At this point, I don’t care how the state is split as long as they cut me off from Sacramento and beyond.”
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
ARTICLE IV, SECTION 3, CLAUSE 1
When former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank Justin Yifu Lin was recently asked how he invests his money, he said that he puts it all in a bank term deposit. “The money is still growing when I sleep at night,” he quipped. “I don’t have to worry.”Consider this stat in light of the fact that China experienced a cash crunch in June. Everyone is trying to save, yet small and medium sized companies are starved for capital. A massive proportion of capital has been misallocated in the state run sector.
Most Chinese make the same choice. Data released by People’s Bank of China showed that as of August this year, Chinese bank savings had exceeded 43 trillion yuan for three consecutive months, with per capita savings at more than 30,000 yuan.
The deposit insurance system is expected to make banks more competitive, more cautious about the loans they give and more inclined to offer high interest rates in order to attract customers (if interest rate control is indeed liberalized). However, it also means poorly run banks may be allowed to fail. Considering how risky the debts of some banks are, people may no longer be able to sleep at night assured that their bank deposits are “growing.”Think about that paragraph. American banks aren't cautious with their lending and savers are cautious where they put their money because of FDIC. If having deposit insurance makes banks more concerned about failure, thinking the government can let them fail and protect depositors at the same time, imagine how risky their lending is today.
So what other options do we have for our money besides banks? Chinese stocks lost 43 percent of their value from 2009 to 2013 and housing purchase restrictions have made real estate a less attractive option for investment. This is why wealth has started to flow back into the banks.
After years of frenetic development, which included constructing the world's tallest building, Dubai suffered a massive real-estate crash in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with property losing more than 50 percent of its value by 2011 as excessive speculation came home to roost. CIMB noted half-empty buildings continue to plague Dubai's skyline.
On the slate for the Kuala Lumpur area are the 118-story Warisan Merkeka Tower, targeted as the tallest building in Southeast Asia and part of a huge complex that will include two condominium blocks, a hotel tower and an underground subway station, as well as the 28-building Tun Razak Exchange project targeted as an international financial hub, CIMB noted.
The report estimates around 17 million square feet of gross office floor area will come on-stream between 2015 and 2017, adding that even if demand doubles, it won't absorb the influx.
A new study finds that the Federal Reserve should keep buying mortgage-backed securities even as it stops buying Treasury securities, and even as it sells off its existing holding of Treasuries and mortgage bonds.That study is here: The Ins and Outs of LSAPs. LSAPs being Large Scale Asset Purchases, i.e. QE. The NYTimes piece notes the paper states:
But they found little economic benefit in holding mortgage bonds or Treasuries, a basic element of the Fed’s stimulus campaign.
However, amid recent turmoil in some emerging markets and in light of a major Communist Party policy-setting meeting set for November, “China’s new leadership cannot afford to be hit by another unnecessary interbank liquidity squeeze,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch said.As the Chinese article says indirectly, the banks are now aware of the risk and that should change behavior. A cash crunch may be less likely because of the bankers' fear, but if more people think like BoAML and expect a central bank backstop, then behavior won't improve and another crisis will come again, albeit perhaps by some "unforeseen" shock.
“We should keep in mind that China’s central bank has a deep pocket to provide enough RMB liquidity if necessary,” the U.S. bank said, referring to the renminbi, the official name of China’s currency.
Since the turmoil in June, Chinese banks have also improved their own liquidity management and are much better equipped to deal with a possible crisis, it added.
Restless interbank market liquidity and then meet in September exams
Economic Observer newspaper reporter Shi Yao Yao is holidays, went to the bank quarter assessment point.
Shanghai interbank offered rate (shibor) in 28 days varieties rate since September 6 onwards way line, rose to 5.48 percent from 4.48 percent high.
In this regard, an ICBC trader Zhao told reporters, shibor only official online transactions, currently 28 antennas under (Bank, between the various branches of interbank deposit) trading capital prices have risen to 6.27%. He believes that the September 16 ~ 18, 2011 three days before Mid-Autumn Festival, there will be inter-bank liquidity tensions.
A senior lending those funds Qianmou that "if there is once again banking institutions drive up prices, June panic situation will be staged again at the end of September."
Since July, the central bank has been through reverse repo "locked up long short", making short-term financial market liquidity and market interest rates and central bank policy to achieve "desirable" level, the stability of the financial market expectations.
However, an interview with reporters banking practitioners no one can guarantee that the end of June liquidity crisis will not occur again.
"Restless" factor
According Qianmou, as early as mid-May Industrial Bank sensed that the subsequent market liquidity may appear tight situation. "At that time the head office related departments on the one hand they began to ask for lending out money market, on the other hand began between banks with relatively higher price at grant funds, in order to test the market response."
In this regard, an Industrial Bank as counterparty banks responsible person stressed to reporters, ample liquidity in the interbank market, just bank panic caused June liquidity crisis.
The reporter has learned, resulting bank panic situation there are deeper reasons.
According to the Economic Observer reported, at present there are about inter-bank market daily 1.2 trillion to 1.4 trillion yuan of funds for commercial banks lending stock, but far more than the number of banks involved in the dismantling of market imagination. A number of traders told reporters, when the market price is shibor public based on the increase in interest rates of 1% to 2%.
ICBC head office Zhao told reporters, the official bank of Shibor group currently consists of 18 commercial banks to form, but the inter-bank trading rates far higher than their offer.
"This is because as long as the Commercial Bank agrees and authorizes its affiliates can independently participate in the interbank deposit (buy deposits) transactions which only 18 banks but all authorized commercial bank branches to the market at the same time to borrow money. "he told reporters.
This means that as long as there is a bank branch at a high price to borrow money, it will lead to another branch of the same money a higher price. But this two bank branches is available at all branches of the "crowd" competing for capital under the end, the scale of growth in other branches from their own point of view, the behavior will inevitably competing for funds.
Many an interview with reporters that the bank practitioners before commercial banks in deposit and lending rates in unison under the control of the business situation of the times no longer exists.
Qianmou told reporters, according to his understanding of the bank earlier event of default occurs, the majority appear in transactions between branches.
In this regard, there are state-owned lines branch president rather reluctantly told reporters, facing head office assets, deposit appraisal, under pressure from high interest lending or deposit it directly in the market to buy it is quite upset.
"The scale of the end of June, loan ratio assessment is not up to the branch where I want to be fined 10 million yuan or more, if you can spend eight million yuan to buy deposits, which in turn, we are not also save $ 2 million?" He told reporter explained.
There banking analyst told reporters, according to their understanding of the situation from the market and 2013 semi-annual report reactions situation, China and Bank of Communications mobility compared to other state-owned big firms are more tense.
"On one hand, compared to other interbank liabilities Interest rate (banks and other financial institutions Deposits and borrowing funds) interbank deposit rates below (Deposits and Placements) level, which two banks are upside down; the other hand, Chinese banks loan to deposit ratio was 75%, while it reached 81% of the Bank. "banking analysts believe that the two banks at the end of June to the market needs to borrow money to meet regulatory targets.
Rising Head Office
Since entering in September, although the inter-bank money market and short-term liquidity remains stable, and seven overnight repo rates have remained slight fluctuations; still ample supply of short-term funds, but the cross-quarter demand for funds is still weakened, indicating that institutions have begun advance preparations quarter liquidity position. "The end of September, the loan to deposit ratio assessment not affect market liquidity culprit. Because even bank deposits in the central bank strict credit control, the commercial banks can not significantly increase lending, we are taboo individual banks expensive absorb liquidity mobility of our own influence. "one joint-stock Bank department official said.
The lending of funds by senior Qianmou believe that the current market liquidity, size piece of "cake" will not become large, the banks management should not be thinking about how to grab the cake.
Zhao think that compared to the previous state accusing him of capital adequacy, joint-stock banks in the deposit base is weak but still have to make more profitable business dominant ideology, the use of funds mismatch model to make money on the liquidity demand is very strong.
"June's liquidity crisis on the other hand is a joint-stock banks from non-standard credit (short-term funds for long-term use of credit) under a liquidity drying up, desperate to seek matching funds resulting from market volatility." Zhao said.
According to analyst estimates Goldman Sachs Gao Hua, Ping An Bank to invest in other financial institutions, financial products in the first half year and the chain surged 335 percent, 76 percent, to 159 billion yuan, and its size is about 20% of total loans if these assets and credit-related may cause the loan to deposit ratio is underestimated and the amount of loan than to be overestimated. If these investments are regarded as a loan, then the first half of Ping An Bank in 2013 after adjusting for the amount of loan ratio will decline 30 basis points to 1.48 percent, after adjustment loan to deposit ratio will be increased by 13.5 percentage points to 80.4%. Ping An Bank semi-annual report shows that the end of June the bank loan to deposit ratio of only 67%.
A joint-stock bank trader told reporters, compared to the state accusing him of branches involved in financial transactions, is a joint-stock commercial Head Office in more involved in the transaction.
This can range from bank-reported data to be confirmed.
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank and Agricultural Bank Head Office revenues compared to the same period the proportion of total revenue has fallen sharply. CITIC Bank in this regard income rose from 17% to 22%, Ping An Bank rose from 33% to 38%, Industrial Bank rose from 9.2% to 19.6%. "Compared to the same scale and allow branches to complete the deposit growth, Head Office to do so, on the one hand save a lot of branches of artificial salary and bonus expenses; other banks to circumvent the strict central bank deposit ratio control, By increasing the size of a way to increase revenue, but for hundreds of one hundred billion yuan deal size, the need for adequate liquidity to match. "he explained.
And this is before the joint-stock Bank who head for the end of September fluidity view the reason is not optimistic.
But there’s another way that state-owned assets are stripped away that causes much bigger losses, but receives much less attention. Scholars call this "systematic loss" (体制性流失), referring to assets being poorly managed because of the overall system. This includes reasons like poor accountability, perverse incentives and a lack of competition.I've written before about the end of the reform process in 2005. There were plans to allow foreigners into the A-share market, with the main goal that a foreign presence would force market discipline on the state-run sector. The insiders did not want to have their power restricted and when they saw their opening, they put the kibosh on the reforms.
Systematic loss isn’t new. During the massive restructuring of state-owned enterprises more than a decade ago, there was much discussion about how to balance the two kinds of loss. Transactional loss could be addressed through better supervision mechanisms, but it’s difficult to avoid systematic loss if the entire system isn’t changed.
But systematic loss can’t simply be accounted for by macroeconomic factors. The assets of COEs together total over 30 trillion yuan. According to a conservative estimate by a source from SASAC, the inefficiently used assetsheld by these COEs account for about 1 percent of that, or at least 300 billion yuan.300 billion yuan is a very low ball figure. The number is probably a few times that today, although that is still a relatively small number against the entire Chinese economy. However, capital goods seemingly productive today will become unproductive if the economy slows or sinks into a full blown recession. A stress test of those assets would likely come back with a much higher figure.
These funds have gone to waste for years, yielding less than the interest on a bank deposit. Production equipment that some COEs have spent big on has been sitting idle and generating no economic output whatsoever. But these kinds of losses are difficult to discover and quantify. And unlike corruption and other transactional losses, it’s hard to figure out who’s to blame.
Still, it's a free country, a constitutional democracy. If the people behind the Western Maryland Initiative want to spend their time pressing for secession — instead of, say, trying to bring the Republican Party into the 21st Century, recruiting new candidates, registering new voters — have at it, fellas.The author says the people should just move to southern Pennsylvania, the next state to the north. Just as plausible is that southern Pennsylvania, tired of being dominated by Philadelphia, will also secede, or that Western Maryland would simply merge into Pennsylvania.
But I think it's easier just to move to the Idaho panhandle, or southern Pennsylvania.
“Many scientists are concerned that developments in human technology may soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole,” says a statement on the group’s website.The key takeaway here is that technological progress is the problem.
Hundreds of thousands of Catalonians joined hands to form a human chain 250 miles (400km) long, running from the border with neighbouring France to the region of Valencia in a call for Madrid to recognise Catalan independence.There are about 7.5 million people in Catalonia, so there was likely a high single-digit percentage of Catalonians at this event.
Wednesday, was la Diada, or Catalan National Day, when the region commemorates the defeat of its troops in the Spanish war of succession in 1714. And at 5.14pm the human chain – or Via Catalana – linked arms.
"I'm joining the Via Catalana because I think we should be consulted on our future. I think the rise of the independence movement comes from the people while the politicians prefer stagnation to change," said Maria Solé Bundó, who works on the family farm in Baix Penedès.
Núria Ruiz Soto, a hospital worker from Tarragona, said: "I've joined the Via because I think it's a good way of drawing attention to our desire to be an independent state and if they're not willing to listen to us, at least they can see us."
Independence has been a long-running battle between Catalonia and Madrid, but as the recession continues to hit the country harder, demands for a referendum on secession have grown, and the National Assembly of Catalonia called on its supporters to take to the streets to show their strength. Polls suggest as many as 50% of Catalans want independence, and up to 81% support the right to hold a referendum.
Personally, I am still waiting to hear why Catalonian independence would not bring the fiscal death knell of current Spain, and thus also the collapse of current eurozone arrangements and perhaps also a eurozone-wide depression. Otherwise I would gladly entertain Catalonia as an independent nation, or perhaps after the crisis has passed a referendum can be held. When referenda are held during tough times, it is often too easy to get a “no” vote against anything connected with the status quo.And if social mood, and the economy, turn for the worse? Secession is coming.
Is the view simply that “now is the time to strike” and “it is worth it”? Obviously, an independence movement will not wish to speak too loudly about transition costs, but I would wish for more transparency. Or is the view that Spain could fiscally survive the shock of losing about twenty percent of its economy, with all the uncertainties and transition costs along the way? That could be argued, but frankly I doubt it, OMT or not, furthermore other regions would claim more autonomy too. An alternative, more moralizing view is that the fiscal problems are “Spain’s fault in the first place” and need not be discussed too much by the pro-independence side, but I am more consequentialist and marginal product-oriented than that.
A ROMA family has become the first to be forcibly evicted by Dutch authorities and moved to a "scum village" constructed out of shipping containers on the outskirts of Amsterdam.In America, the scum take over a neighborhood and then years later, it is "gentrified." As social mood declines, you may see more proactive policies to keep neighborhoods safe. Based on crime statistics, the charge of racism will be far greater in the United States, but perhaps you missed Mayor Bloomberg's explanation of why stop and frisk mainly targets minorities:
...Eberhard van der Laan, Amsterdam's mayor, admitted that the removal of the family was a draconian measure but insisted that bullying and violent behaviour had left him with no choice.
"The family has been causing problems for years and has a history of vandalism, noise nuisance and threatening behaviour," he said.
The eight members of the gypsy family have compared their container homes, numbers 48a and 48b, to a concentration camp and accused Amsterdam council of "pure racism".
...The housing camps have been nicknamed "scum villages" because their establishment follows a 2011 proposal from Geert Wilders, the leader of a populist Dutch right-wing party, for special units to deal with persistent troublemakers.
"Repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighbourhood and sent to a village for scum," he argued at the time.
“One newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be. But it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murders,” Bloomberg said.See Mayor Bloomberg on stop-and-frisk: It can be argued ‘We disproportionately stop whites too much. And minorities too little’ . The policy is not designed to catch criminals. It is designed to make criminals scared, to keep them from carrying guns or other weapons, and in the process prevent murders. It is the same as the broken windows policy under Giuliani, where cops started cracking down on subway turnstile jumpers and other small offenders to send a message that there would be law and order in the city.
“In that case, incidentally, I think, we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” the mayor said. “It’s exactly the reverse of what they’re saying. I don’t know where they went to school, but they certainly didn’t take a math course, or a logic course.”
...To buttress the mayor’s remarks, his office released a set of statistics. The numbers showed that 87% of the people stopped under stop-and-frisk in 2012 were black or Latino, and that 9% were white. That same year, more than 90% of those identified as murder suspects were blacks or Latino; just 7% were white.
Critics of stop-and-frisk charge that such numbers are irrelevant. They charge that cops indiscriminately go after young black and Hispanic men on bogus grounds, and that nearly nine out of ten people who are stopped are innocent.
So, what about the claim that forcible stops will get guns off the streets? The fact is that only 0.2% of stops yield guns. Further, guns are more likely to be found on white suspects who are stopped, yet about 90% of the stops are of minorities. The NYPD has done much better with other operations, such as gun buy-back programs and focusing on illegal gun trafficking. Stop-and-frisk is fundamentally ineffective when it comes to getting guns off the streets.If stops of whites, who are less targeted by stop-and-frisk, results in more minor violations, then it would seem stop and frisk is achieving the goal of keeping weapons off the streets. White's are less concerned about being stopped and therefore end up caught in more violations.
Nearly 700,000 forcible stops of mostly minority youth – many without reasonable suspicion (the legal standard necessary for police to conduct such stops) – damage the NYPD's ability to fight crime and violence. Rather than reducing crime and violence, the practice likely alienates minority youth and prevents the people we want to communicate with police from even approaching them.
What person will trust the police officer who just forcibly stopped them? If they "see something" they are now less likely to "say something", to borrow the NYPD's public appeal.
Importantly, forcible stops may lead to minor violations such as summonses for possession of open containers of alcohol, or marijuana possession. These types of violations occur more regularly in white neighborhoods. Yet, black New Yorkers are more likely to get summonses because police are stopping them more often, resulting in criminal records which make it more difficult for them to get jobs. In this information age, such a record can be devastating to career opportunities.
de Blasio was born Warren Wilhelm in the Boston-area city of Cambridge, which is home to Harvard University. He eventually moved to New York City where he pursued the career of a bureaucrat, first at the local level, and ultimately in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.Bill de Blasio: Pro-class war, anti-stop-question-frisk, and much more
He changed his name to “de Blasio” and married former lesbian Chirlane McCray, an activist in the black feminist community. They have two children and reside in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood; once a violent ghetto, it has since been gentrified and boasts a famously cosmopolitan atmosphere.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on a 5-0 vote rejected the request from the banking industry seeking to extend the insurance of up to $250,000 to U.S. banks' deposits overseas. The FDIC estimates those deposits are worth about $1 trillion.In 2008, the Fed bailed out foreign banks, let alone foreign branches of American banks. This decision shows that there is neither the funds nor the will to bail out foreigners. In the U.S., bailouts may not last long either in a major crisis, as one major bank may be enough to bankrupt the FDIC.
Everything was going exactly as planned until Putin shoved a whole pack of Big League Chew into Obama's face and told him to go to his room while the grown ups talked.If you watch the O'Reilly clip, you will hear him list all the nations that refused to sign a statement condemning the gas attack in Syria. Among them were Germany and the EU.
Then a funny thing happened. Obama did what he was told. America is backing down.
Russia accomplished this in two ways. First they called for calm... Then they sent their most advanced anti-ship missile systems to Syria. Note... not anti-aircraft. Anti-ship. That's a big difference. They aren't talking about shooting down some planes. They're talking about doing real damage to the US's ability to project power. Walked softly... carry a big stick. This should look familiar. Its the kind of thing America used to do.
After sending those missiles to Syria Russia then rounded up the G20 and effectively made sure they were all in its pocket. Russia called for more information. It asserted that the matter had to go before the UN Security Council and that the US threats were unacceptable.
See the US likes to use the UN for cover when it wants to invade a given country... but the US also likes to ignore the UN when the UN doesn't want to play along. Russia has asserted that the US has no authority to play that game anymore. Russia is calling the US bluff... and the US so far... appears to be folding.
Remember this people.
September of 2013 was the end of the United State's World Super Power Championship Reign.
Russia took the belt.
Russia is the calm cool adult in the room. Russia is calling the shots and the world is listening. For decades the context of every world crisis was "How will the United States respond to this?" Russia has changed that now.
It is now a very different world.
The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.The article goes on to discuss the growing scientific evidence for a period of cooling, rather than warming, with some scientists arguing climate models have too much weight on the effects of carbon dioxide.
....The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.