Eastern and Southern Ukraine’s Right to Secede and Join the Russian Federation

This article answers a multi-faceted question: do the people occupying the region of Eastern and Southern Ukraine have the right to secede from Ukraine and merge with the Russian Federation? It also evaluates the legal status of the economic sanctions imposed upon the Russian Federation for its alleged interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine.The argument proceeds from the assumption that the international legal system does not repose on a foundation of empirical validity, but rather upon sets of authoritative statements, insusceptible of verification. In this context, the article constructs an argument based upon relevant public international law texts, interpreted according to contemporary jurisprudential thought and principles of statutory construction partially embodied in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969, the implied right of secession contained in the UN General Assembly’s Declaration on Friendly Relations of 1970, and the need to achieve pragmatic results to legal questions. The argument thus avoids traditional doctrinal analysis and the mud of history.In short, the people occupying the region of Eastern and Southern Ukraine have the right to secede from Ukraine and merge with the Russian Federation, and the economic sanctions imposed against the Russian Federation for its presumed interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine are illegal under the United Nations Charter and the World Trade Organisation.

Economic Sanctions Against the Russian Federation Are Illegal under Public International Law

In response to the Russian Federation’s purported ‘annexation’ of Crimea and the conflict between separatists in the Donbass region and the central government of Ukraine, the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Australia, the principal countries, have imposed economic sanctions upon Russian officials, firms, and private individuals. The economic sanctions imposed upon the Russian Federation violate public international law on three grounds: 1) lack of authorisation under the United Nations Charter; 2) inapplicability of Art. XXI GATT (‘Security Exceptions’); and 3) lack of legal authority based on the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts. Fidelity to the ‘rule of law’ requires an immediate withdrawal of all economic sanctions. By contrast, the international community ‘ought to’ condemn Ukraine’s indiscriminate killing of innocent citizens living in the Donbass region and support the efforts of the Russian Federation to provide humanitarian aid to the region

Integrated modeling and characterization of local crack chemistry

The MULTEQ computer program has become an industry wide tool which can be used to calculate the chemical composition in a flow occluded region as the solution within concentrates due to a local boiling process. These results can be used to assess corrosion concerns in plant equipment such as steam generators. Corrosion modeling attempts to quantify corrosion assessments by accounting for the mass transport processes involved in the corrosion mechanism. MULTEQ has played an ever increasing role in defining the local chemistry for such corrosion models. This paper will outline how the integration of corrosion modeling with the analysis of corrosion films and deposits can lead to the development of a useful modeling tool, wherein MULTEQ is interactively linked to a diffusion and migration transport process. This would provide a capability to make detailed inferences of the local crack chemistry based on the analyses of the local corrosion films and deposits inside a crack and thus provide guidance for chemical fixes to avoid cracking. This methodology is demonstrated for a simple example of a cracked tube. This application points out the utility of coupling MULTEQ with a mass transport process and the feasibility of an option in a future version of MULTEQ that would permit relating film and deposit analyses to the local chemical environment. This would increase the amount of information obtained from removed tube analyses and laboratory testing that can contribute to an overall program for mitigating tubing and crevice corrosion

Outer Regions of the Milky Way

With the start of the Gaia era, the time has come to address the major challenge of deriving the star formation history and evolution of the disk of our MilkyWay. Here we review our present knowledge of the outer regions of the Milky Way disk population. Its stellar content, its structure and its dynamical and chemical evolution are summarized, focussing on our lack of understanding both from an observational and a theoretical viewpoint. We describe the unprecedented data that Gaia and the upcoming ground-based spectroscopic surveys will provide in the next decade. More in detail, we quantify the expect accuracy in position, velocity and astrophysical parameters of some of the key tracers of the stellar populations in the outer Galactic disk. Some insights on the future capability of these surveys to answer crucial and fundamental issues are discussed, such as the mechanisms driving the spiral arms and the warp formation. Our Galaxy, theMilkyWay, is our cosmological laboratory for understanding the process of formation and evolution of disk galaxies. What we learn in the next decades will be naturally transferred to the extragalactic domain.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, Invited review, Book chapter in "Outskirts of Galaxies", Eds. J. H. Knapen, J. C. Lee and A. Gil de Paz, Astrophysics and Space Science Library, Springer, in pres

Synthetic drilling fluids - a pollution prevention opportunity for the oil and gas industry

Offshore oil and gas operators use specialized drilling fluids, referred to as {open_quotes}muds,{close_quotes} to help maintain well control and to remove drill cuttings from the hole. Historically, either water-based muds (WBMs) or oil-based muds (OBMs) have been used for offshore wells. Recently, the drilling industry has developed several types of synthetic-based muds (SBMs) that combine the desirable operating qualities of OBMs with the lower toxicity and environmental impact qualities of WBMs. This report describes the operational, environmental, and economic features of all three types of muds and discusses potential EPA regulatory barriers to wider use of SBMs

Comparative study of density functional theories of the exchange-correlation hole and energy in silicon

We present a detailed study of the exchange-correlation hole and exchange-correlation energy per particle in the Si crystal as calculated by the Variational Monte Carlo method and predicted by various density functional models. Nonlocal density averaging methods prove to be successful in correcting severe errors in the local density approximation (LDA) at low densities where the density changes dramatically over the correlation length of the LDA hole, but fail to provide systematic improvements at higher densities where the effects of density inhomogeneity are more subtle. Exchange and correlation considered separately show a sensitivity to the nonlocal semiconductor crystal environment, particularly within the Si bond, which is not predicted by the nonlocal approaches based on density averaging. The exchange hole is well described by a bonding orbital picture, while the correlation hole has a significant component due to the polarization of the nearby bonds, which partially screens out the anisotropy in the exchange hole.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, RevTeX, added conten

Worst-case MOSFET parameter extraction for a 2μm CMOS process

This paper will describe the process by which realistic nominal and worstcase DC MOSFFT model parameter sets were determined and validated for a 2μm CMOS technology. The steps involved in this task, which will be detailed, ranged from the definition of a suitable circuit simulator model. through the collection of statistical parametric data, to the generation and verification of the worstcase model sets obtained from this data