Eideard

The only flag Mubarak salutes

President Hosni Mubarak’s power may have visibly crumbled before the world on Jan. 25 when protesters took to the streets of Cairo, but his personal wealth will likely be intact when he leaves office as pledged at the end of the year, or sooner if the crowds have their way.

Experts say the wealth of the Mubarak family was built largely from military contracts during his days as an air force officer. He eventually diversified his investments through his family when he became president in 1981. The family’s net worth ranges from $40 billion to $70 billion, by some estimates.

“The business ventures from his military and government service accumulated to his personal wealth,” said Professor Amaney Jamal. “There was a lot of corruption in this regime and stifling of public resources for personal gain.”

Jamal said that Mubarak’s assets are most likely in banks outside of Egypt, possibly in the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

“This is the pattern of other Middle Eastern dictators so their wealth will not be taken during a transition, she said. “These leaders plan on this…”

Gross national income is $2,070 per family in Egypt, according to the World Bank. About 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, according to a 2010 report by the CIA.

“Gamal and Alaa are partners in the biggest trade and industrial companies in Egypt, practically paying nothing,” Aladdin Elaasar wrote in his book of Mubarak’s two sons. Elaasar said the sons have shares in Chili’s restaurants, Hyundai and Scoda auto dealerships, Vodafone, and several luxury hotel and residential properties.

The Mubarak family owns properties in London, Paris, Madrid, Dubai, Washington, D.C., New York and Frankfurt, according to a report from IHS Global Insight…

Whatever Mubarak’s wealth is, Jamal said it is certain that whenever the president actually leaves office, there will be an investigation into his assets.

“There’s not much of a cover-up,” she said. “The people have already outed him as a corrupt leader.”

There will be the question of how much cooperation is received from foreign governments, bankers, financiers in reporting how much Mubarak stole during the years of his regime.

Meanwhile, the range of his reported wealth exceeds Carlos Slim, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

With critical decisions ahead on the war in Afghanistan, President Obama is about to receive an unusual opportunity to reshape the Pentagon’s leadership, naming a new defense secretary as well as several top generals and admirals in the next several months.

It is a rare confluence of tenure calendars and personal calculations, coming midway through Mr. Obama’s first term and on the heels of an election that challenged his domestic policies. His choices could have lasting consequences for his national security agenda, perhaps strengthening his hand over a military with which he has often clashed, and are likely to have an effect beyond the next election, whether he wins or loses.

That is all the more reason that Mr. Obama’s choices are certain to face scrutiny in a narrowly divided Senate, whose Republican leadership has declared itself intent on defeating him.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said he plans to retire next year, while the terms of four members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are scheduled to end: Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman; Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman; Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief; and Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations…

At the top of the new pantheon of military power, the president needs a heavyweight to succeed Mr. Gates, an unexpected holdover from the Bush administration who stayed longer than many expected to become perhaps the most influential member of the Obama cabinet…

Any commander in chief is theoretically free to replace his top civilian and military subordinates whenever he chooses, but it rarely happens all at once.

RTFA. Long, it contains all the what-ifs and scary-terrorist-under-the-bed scenarios plus a few Cold War clangers thrown in for good measure.

I presume the Republicans will try to build a furious defense against any change, any progress in modernizing our military – and worst of all – any attempt to reduce taxpayer welfare to the military-industrial corporations who still own the oldest geezers in the Republican Party.

Bought a baby for £150 to qualify for council housing

An embarrassing failure to prevent a banned criminal from entering Britain has led to major concerns over the country’s border controls.

The breach raises questions over the effectiveness of ‘facial recognition’ scanners, installed at a cost of millions of pounds to try to prevent known criminals and terrorists from entering the country.

Earlier this year a convicted immigration offender, who had been deported at the end of her prison sentence and banned from re-entering the UK, managed to get past one of the scanners and into the country, raising fears that such abuses could be widespread.

It is the second blow in a week for the Home Office’s electronic border controls, after the department had to cancel a £750 million contract with the US company Raytheon to operate an “e-Borders” scheme.

The automated gates at the centre of the security breach were installed as a replacement for human immigration officers. They measure unique details about the traveller’s face as they pass through, and compare those measurements with details stored on a microchip within the new biometric travel documents known as e-passports.

The Home Office has installed the technology at eight airports including Gatwick and Stansted at a cost of £9 million, with plans to introduce it at Heathrow soon.

The investigation that exposed the flaw was only triggered because the woman who got past the scanner took the unusual step of going public when she appeared at an industrial tribunal, thus alerting the authorities to the fact that she had re-entered the UK.

As a long time geek, I think technology can resolve a helluva lot of questions. Proven technology.

Meanwhile, over in the 51st state, you’re moving from fuzzy-minded followers who were in control of the Labour Party – to a coalition of “less foolish, we hope” beancounters. Good luck with that.

Endorsing vaccines as the world’s most cost-effective public health measure, Bill and Melinda Gates say that their foundation will more than double its spending on them over the next decade, to at least $10 billion.

The change could save the lives of as many as eight million children by 2020, Mr. Gates calculated. He said he hoped his gift would inspire other charities and donor nations to do the same…

For starters, Mr. Gates wants to make sure that 90 percent of the world’s children get shots for routine childhood diseases like measles, diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus. Right now, almost 80 percent do. But with 134 million children born each year, it is a constant struggle to keep up, and efforts can be interrupted by factors like war, natural disasters, bad roads and corrupt officials.

Then he assumes that two new vaccines against rotavirus and pneumococcal disease, which are major killers of malnourished children, are adopted as routine immunizations in most poor countries and reach 80 percent of all children by 2020.

Even in wealthy countries, the introduction of any new vaccine can be tricky because of bureaucratic and logistical delays and because unexpected rumors can spring up, like the persistent one that polio vaccine is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls…

Mr. Gates has criticized many wealthy nations for giving what he considers too little to foreign aid. On what he described as a “list of shame” in the annual letter he released this week, he noted that the United States is last on the list of 22 wealthy nations when aid is measured as a percentage of GDP.

However, Italy recently cut its foreign aid in half, which will drop it to the bottom of next year’s list, and while at Davos, Mr. Gates took a jab at Italy’s famously wealthy and vain premier, Silvio Berlusconi, telling a German newspaper, “Rich people spend a lot more money on their own problems, like baldness, than they do to fight malaria.”

Rumors in the USA are mostly confined to Republican/Libertarian cheapskates who hate to contribute to anything – including children’s health – that might diminish their personal wealth. And, of course, the religious nutball set who can come up with a different heretical plot for every day of the week.

The military will phase out its “stop-loss” program, the contentious practice of holding troops beyond the end of their enlistments, for all but extraordinary situations, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has announced.

The decision to phase out stop loss by 2011 comes in combination with an announcement that soldiers affected by the program will receive a $500-a-month bonus while they are in extended service.

Currently, the Army is the only service that uses the stop-loss program. As of January, 13,217 soldiers had tours extended under the stop-loss policy.

Gates said the change is one he has wanted to implement since he became secretary of defense…

Gates also announced at a wide-ranging news conference that the Defense Department will pay for families of fallen troops to travel to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to be present for the return of their deceased family members.

The announcement about funding the trips to Dover comes as the Pentagon prepares to allow the media to record the return of fallen troops from overseas, if the families of the troops permit it…

He briefly talked about his own trip to Dover earlier this week, getting emotional as he described going to the back of the plane carrying the coffins.

“I went to the back of the plane by myself and spent time with each of the transfer cases,” he said, his voice beginning to choke up. “I think I’ll stop there.”

RTFA. More openness in this branch, this secretary of war, than there has been since you know when.

Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense – and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen – appeared on separate TV shows, Sunday, and said the same thing two completely opposite ways.

The United States believes Iran has stockpiled enough nuclear fuel to make a bomb, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said on Sunday.

“We think they do, quite frankly,” Mullen said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program when asked whether Iran has enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon.

“And Iran having nuclear weapons, I’ve believed for a long time, is a very very bad outcome — for the region and for the world,” Mullen said.

Sure sounds like imminent danger – to any ignorant American voter who hasn’t a clue of the differences between low-grade fissile material and weapons grade – and what it takes to grow from one to the other.

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Warren Buffett has overtaken Bill Gates to become the richest American in the Forbes 400 list, Bloomberg said, citing a recalculated list to be published later this month.

The magazine, in its October 27 issue, recalculates the effect of September’s financial news on the wealthiest Americans, those who make up its Forbes 400 list, the agency said.

The Berkshire Hathaway chairman added $8 billion to his net worth in a 33-day period, August 29 to October 1, to reach $58 billion, the agency said, citing the magazine.

Buffett overtook the Microsoft co-founder, whose net worth declined $1.5 billion to $55.5 billion during the 33-day period, the agency said.

Bill Gates had been number 1 on the Forbes list for 15 consecutive years.

Bill is probably heartbroken, eh?

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The United States will not likely launch another regime-changing war “anytime soon,” but American troops will remain in Iraq and Afghanistan for years, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday.

Robert Gates says U.S. troops in Iraq will serve in advisory or counterterrorism capacities “for years to come.” Failure in either nation “would be a disastrous blow to our credibility, both among our friends and allies and among potential adversaries,” Gates said…

Gates said not to expect troops to leave Iraq after the upcoming U.S. election.
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Does this really encourage you to buy a Windows-based PC?