COUP IN KYIV?

It's not a treaty - no legal bind. It's a memorandum. And if your country is worried about it, your country should deal with it.

Moscow (AFP) - A United States surveillance drone has been intercepted above the Ukranian region of Crimea, a Russian state arms and technology group said Friday.

"The drone was flying at about 4,000 metres (12,000 feet) and was virtually invisible from the ground. It was possible to break the link with US operators with complex radio-electronic" technology, said Rostec in a statement.

The drone fell "almost intact into the hands of self-defence forces" added Rostec, which said it had manufactured the equipment used to down the aircraft, but did not specify who was operating it.

"Judging by its identification number, UAV MQ-5B belonged to the 66th American Reconnaissance Brigade, based in Bavaria," Rostec said on its website, which also carried a picture of what it said was the captured drone.

For the United States, one of the big long-term risks is that Ukraine ends up pushing Russia and China much closer together -- a shift in the geopolitical tectonic plates that would have a long-lasting impact. Sensing itself under pressure in Asia over the last two years, Beijing has been casting around for political support. The first foreign trip that Xi Jinping made on taking over as China's president in March 2013 was to Moscow. And since he returned to office nearly two years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been happy to play nice with China as he indulges his anti-Western posturing. In October, the two countries signed a large number of energy deals, including an agreement for Russia to supply $85 billion of oil; after years of talks, they are also getting close to an agreement on a major gas pipeline. Beyond the booming business ties, both countries believe that chipping away at the foundations of U.S. power serves their interests.

It's not a treaty - no legal bind. It's a memorandum.

"When I was a boy I used to come up to London and see houses like these and think 'Wow. Who lives there?'" says Paul Palmer, gazing up at a pair of seven-storey mansions in Park Lane across the road from Hyde Park. "Now I know – no one. These are owned by two different companies registered at the same address in the British Virgin Islands. They haven't been occupied for at least seven years, apart from when the squatters were there in January."

There are an estimated 1m empty homes in the UK, and as empty properties officer for Westminster council, Palmer is responsible for about 3,000 of them. Every day, he visits some of the ritziest addresses in the capital and does his best to get them lived in again. What makes his job unique is the staggering value of the properties on his books: some of his Mayfair mansions are worth as much as £50m, even in their dilapidated state. What makes his job difficult is that many of the biggest and most expensive are owned not by dusty old dowagers down on their luck but by mystery investors hiding their identities behind offshore companies.

The trend for foreign ownership has snowballed to the point that more than half of the 55 properties on the most expensive stretch are now registered to offshore companies or foreign owners.

Russia has vetoed a draft UN resolution criticising Sunday's secession referendum in Ukraine's Crimea region - the only Security Council member to vote against the measure.

China, regarded as a Russian ally on the issue, abstained from the vote