RIYADH - Saudi Arabia will raise wages for most of its army staff, a move that follows a surge in inflation and the kingdom's first military engagement in almost 20 years against rebels in Yemen.
In non-democratic societies, when soldiers do not feel well-paid they revolt. How much of a threat is this in the Magic Kingdom just now?
At about $41 billion, military expenditure accounted for some 33 percent of the budget of the world's top oil exporter last year, according to the finance ministry's website.
At the weekly cabinet meeting on Monday, King Abdullah approved a proposal to raise wages for all soldiers as well as senior officers such as generals and lieutenants. The Defence Minister and the Crown Prince Sultan did not attend the cabinet meeting.
Posted by: Steve White ||
09/01/2010 00:00 ||
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Even with Iraq & Afghanistan, the U.S. was spending less of its budget as a portion of GDP on the military than Saudi Arabia. Now the Saudis will spend even more?!
Posted by: American Delight ||
09/01/2010 6:14 Comments ||
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American Delight, the princelings are spending one third of their budget on troops and weapons, but this is the first time in a generation they've left the parade ground. It seems to me this is not an example we should copy.
Half have left in the past decade. Yemen is practically Judenfrei, where there had been a community since King Solomon sat on the throne, according to legend. There is one Jew in Afghanistan, and one charming lady in my grandmother's home village of Berne, in Lower Saxony. As I recall, she belongs to the synagogue in Bremen.
Soon there will be entire swathes of the world that have no Jews at all, much to the satisfaction of their erstwhile countrymen, stewing in the problems that caused the Jews to flee.
The upcoming release of the film "El Infierno" has been judged far more harshly than many other similar foreign films.
So says the director of the film Luis Estrada in a nationally released story today published in the Mexican daily Milenio.
Estrada announced his film was rated "C". No one under the age of 18 will be admitted to see the film. The next step down is B15, no one under the age of 15 will be admitted. The difference is the basis of Estrada's complaint.
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#1
I have a great idea! How about if old Vlad creates a new TV show? They could call it Man vs. Siberia. It'd be like Man vs. Wild only it would feature Vlad instead of Bear Grylls. Heck, it'd have to be better than Glee or Dancing with the Stars or all kinds of other crap they put on TV. He might even like it so much he'd stop thinking about the Kremlin.
#1
The Soros/NED funded "democratic" opposition who apparently have coordinated their efforts with human rights advocate mafia Oligarch and Chechen terrorist financier Boris Berezovsky in London.
CANBERRA, Australia -- A Greens lawmaker on Wednesday agreed to help the Labor Party form a minority Australian government in a widely anticipated alliance based on a desire to reduce the nation's greenhouse gas emissions.
The lawmaker is the first of six lawmakers from outside the major parties to announce which party they will support to form a government after Aug. 21 elections failed to deliver a winner for the first time in 70 years.
Labour would need an additional three lawmakers to form a minority government, but controls the caretaker administration in the meantime under Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
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Posted by: Steve White ||
09/01/2010 00:00 ||
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Its a long way from over. With the single greens guy signing up with the labor party, it is now 73 firm seats to each side. There are four independent newly elected MPs that remain to be bought convinced to join one side or the other.
Julia Gillard had announced after the election that Labor had the highest 2 party preffered vote, and so had the moral right to rule. Since then the percentages have swung back and forth. At one point this morning, after more than 11 million votes were counted, the conservative side was ahead by just 8 votes. 8 out of 11 million. Now thats one finely tuned electorate.
City officials in Half Moon Bay say the municipal budget is such a mess that it may make sense to disincorporate and turn the place over to San Mateo County.
I'm not sure if disincorporation is right for Half Moon Bay. But it may be the answer for many California cities struggling with too many spending commitments and not enough money. Digging out of budget holes may be harder than simply shutting things down.
Consider Los Angeles County which has 88 cities, many of which it clearly does not need. Several of the smaller cities seem to exist as personal playgrounds for families or particular businesses. Those municipalities -- the now famous Bell just one of them -- have extensive histories of municipal corruption. If such cities were to go away, would they be missed?
A side note: unions have revived legislation in Sacramento that seeks to prevent cash-strapped cities from declaring bankruptcy (Municipalities would have to get permission from a labor-dominated commission first). The consequence of that legislation, were it to pass, might well be to promote more disincorporations -- that is, the shutting down of cities -- since bankruptcy would be all but off the table.
#1
Hmm... a friend of the wife has a 40+ acre estate just up the mountain from Half Moon Bay.
I would think dis-incorporating would be to her tax advantage.
Posted by: Water Modem ||
09/01/2010 14:36 Comments ||
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Disincorporating is not the answer. Get rid of the public unions. They are cannibalizing this country. They won't even leave the bones.
With a new round of layoffs expected this fall, CBS News is being trimmed to the bone. Rebecca Dana on the dramatic drop in ratings, strange BlackBerry blackouts, and eager suitors for anchor Katie Couric.
On Monday, Katie Couric begins her fifth, and quite possibly final, year of hard labor as anchor of the CBS Evening News.
However she chooses to mark the occasion, it will no doubt be more subdued than the tears, dancing, and $10 million promotional campaign that attended her debut on Sept. 5, 2006.
The person who handled ordering business cards vanished, and staffers havent been able to get them since.
#1
These are tough times for everyone, Couric said in a statement provided through her spokesman, but I for one am proud to be working with so many talented, dedicated people who continue to work hard to maintain the highest journalistic standards that have always been associated with CBS News.
I thought their slogan was: "We don need no steenking journalistic standards!"
#7
Wow! The straight razors are out and slicing-n-dicing tonight. I'm awed.
Posted by: Secret Asian Man ||
09/01/2010 19:59 Comments ||
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See BS. That's how they will always be remembered. Adios.
Posted by: Martini ||
09/01/2010 20:02 Comments ||
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"The person who handled ordering business cards vanished, and staffers haven't been able to get them since."
Oh, fercryin'outloud. Trained helplessness; it's obvious they're all lefties. If business cards are really important to your job, get 'em yourself. If you just want cards because they help you get laid make you feel important, fuhgeddabout them.
I manage to get my own business cards somehow.
Lazy useless idiots.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
09/01/2010 20:29 Comments ||
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Hint to any rational CBS management that wants a clue. Subcontract out the work to bilinguals at Univision. The Big U is already pulling more viewers in local markets than CBS. You'll get a cross over market, you'll cut the cost of all the dead wood at Black Rock, you'll get coverage of a major war happening just across your southern border. Couldn't be any worse than your game now. Oh, and the female broadcast personnel are general several levels above your team when it comes to being easy on the eyes without using a search light to glare out the tired wrinkles.
#11
Is that meant to be sarcasm? Because, I, for one, like older news reporters and anchors of male or female persausion delivering the news. They have some gravitas. Young, bubbly news women with hair extensions and sleeveless booby tops don't top my list of sagely reporters. But then, maybe my irritation is the fact that I'm female, and guys (I assume P2k is male and not gay) like P2k are apparently doing the hiring nowadays.
However, please don't confuse news 'readers' with 'reporters'. Time and experience doesn't matter for those who functionally are just readers, whether it be teleprompters or talking points.
#16
Too true P2k, evidenced by our current predicament with the TOTUS and POTUS conjoined, and the fact morons can and do hold positions in the public eye in the first place...
Cricket fans in Pakistan protested over the 'fixing' scandal surrounding the national team by slapping donkeys and pelting them with rotten tomatoes.
Protesters in Lahore led a procession of donkeys with the names of the players accused of taking bribes for no-balls in the fourth Test against England stuck on the foreheads of the animals.
These players have let us and the country down,' a protester screamed. 'We are already facing so many problems because of the floods and terrorism and they took away our one source of happiness.'
Television pictures also showed Pakistanis pelting their team bus with rotten vegetables when it arrived at Lord's in London on Sunday.
#7
Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals - World, US, Paki, they all should be condemning this mistreatment of some poor helpless Donkeys Democrats.
Posted by: Water Modem ||
09/01/2010 14:43 Comments ||
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It's the "giant rat of Sumatra", Moose, the tale of which "the world is not yet prepared" for.
GENEVA: Floodwaters in Pakistan have dislodged and carried landmines to places previously deemed safe, adding increasing risks to the population, the international Red Cross warned on Tuesday.
"Since the beginning of the floods, three children, a woman and a man have been severely injured by landmines in disaster-hit regions," an official from the International Committee of the Red Cross, Luiza Khazhgerieva said.
The ICRC has, in recent weeks, documented incidents of abrupt explosions in areas previously deemed to be free of landmines. In one instance, a woman's leg was blown off after she stepped on a mine while collecting firewood.
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Posted by: Steve White ||
09/01/2010 00:00 ||
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Curiously, there seems to be no mention of whom these rogue landmines might belong to.
This summer the Bureau of Land Management posted signs along a 60-mile stretch of Interstate 8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend, AZ, warning travelers the area is unsafe because of trafficking in drugs and illegal immigrants. BLM spokesman Dennis Godfrey in Arizona said agency officials were surprised by the reaction the signs generated when they were put up this summer. "We were perhaps naive in setting the signs up," he said. "The intention of the signs was to make the public aware that there is potential illegal activity here. But it was interpreted in a different light, and that was not the intent at all."
He said there should be "no sense that we have ceded the land." What you think we SHOULD think has no bearing on what we DO think, eedjit! The feds HAVE ceded that land. Go ahead & prove me wrong.
There are two news articles in different papers today that shine new light on the leadership of the Ground Zero Mosque initiative.
CBS in NYC is reporting that since 1990, El Gamel has had 3 disorderly arrests and has pled guilty twice to Larceny and DWI. Previously, he was reported as behind in his property taxes.
The WSJ is reporting various correspondence and other writings of Iman Rauf in which he repeated praises the Mullah's rule of Iran, and also various anti Israel writings. An example of these is a pro-Anwar Sadat letter in which he seems to imply that the 1979 peace treaty with Israel should be thought of as similar to the treaty that Mohammud made with the Meccan's which was eventually abrogated and which was followed by Mohammud's conquest of Mecca and slaughter of his enemies.
Posted by: lord garth ||
09/01/2010 06:38 ||
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Surprise! Surprise! Not really. No surprise. Only to Bloomberg, BHO and crew, the NYC board that approved the mosque, the islamic apologists, and mooselimbs who might have hanky-panky, hi-jinks, and rubbing salt in wounds in mind.
#2
Four Israels murdered. The four were two couples -- one aged 25 and the other 40. One of the women was pregnant. Five were killed. Well Iman Rauf are you still staying silent on Hamas not being terrorists? How about the 3000 people who cheered in the streets over these Hamas murders? Are you and Daisy still going with taqiyya and kitman?
#3
and also, the NorthJersey record reports that Iman Rauf bought real estate there in the late 1980s and early 90s using Government bonded financing and mismanaged the properties, got sued by tenants, etc.
Posted by: lord garth ||
09/01/2010 11:07 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
GENEVA: Floodwaters in Pakistan have dislodged and carried landmines to places previously deemed safe, adding increasing risks to the population, the international Red Cross warned on Tuesday. 
