Saudi Arabia says the increase in the kingdom’s military spending in 2015 was almost entirely due to its aggression against Yemen as Riyadh struggles with a rising annual budget deficit.

Economy Minister Adel Fakeih said Monday that Saudi Arabia’s expenditure in 2015 increased by 13 percent to hit 975 billion riyals (USD 260 billion), adding that about 20 billion riyals (USD 5.3 billion) of that figure was in military and security, which he attributed to the war on Yemen.

Since launching its attacks on Yemen on March 26, Riyadh has been resisting calls for disclosing the costs of the war, which largely consists of airstrikes.

More than 7,500 people have been killed in Yemen over the past months. Riyadh says the campaign was meant to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and restore power to the fugitive former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi. The United Nations says more than 2,500 of the fatalities have been civilians.

The Reuters news agency estimated earlier this year that Saudi Arabia would spend approximately USD 175 million per month to support its campaign, adding that a further USD 500 million will be allocated to a potential ground invasion.

The significant increase in the military spending comes against the backdrop of falling oil prices in the international markets which has badly affected Saudi Arabia as the country relies on oil for roughly 90 percent of its revenue.The Saudi economy minister posted a 98-billion-dollar budget deficit for 2015, adding that the kingdom will face a deficit of USD 87 billion for the next year. To make up for the heavy expenditures of the Yemen war and its rising deficits, Riyadh has adopted a series of austerity measures at home by increasing the cost of fuel and some services up to 80 percent. That has already triggered a nationwide dissatisfaction with many urging the rulers to stop the aggression against Yemen in order to avoid further economic woes.
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From Russia Today

Europe in 2015: Right-wing forces rise on back of worst refugee crisis since WWII

Published time: 29 Dec, 2015 17:06

Demonstrators march towards the prefecture in Ajaccio during a protest on December 26, 2015, a day after demonstrators vandalised a Muslim prayer hall and trashed copies of the Koran, following a night of violence that left two firefighters and a police officer injured © Yannick Graziani / AFP

Recently, three in five EU citizens told pollsters that they do not approve of migrants coming from outside the continent. With more than 1 million arriving in 12 months, rising tension is finding outlets at the ballot box and on the street.

Merkel faces backlash against Germany’s open-door policy

Angela Merkel’s Germany, the continent’s unspoken leader, has borne the main brunt of the inflows, while failing to persuade neighboring states to follow its lead. But, perhaps due to the historical guilt of Nazism, and a restrictive public discourse, growing anger has not yet gone mainstream.

Merkel’s own cabinet has backpedaled furiously in the past several months, re-introducing border controls, putting more and more countries on black lists, and making it more difficult for migrants to secure permanent residence. Whether this will divert the people smugglers’ routes is unclear, but with over three-quarters of Germans telling EU’s Eurobarometer survey immigration was one of their two biggest concerns, Merkel had better hope she is not shuttering an empty stable.

Nordic social conscience put to the test

Historically, the socially-oriented Nordic states have been a prime destination for asylum seekers, with Sweden regularly receiving more applications per 100,000 of the population than any other European country, and Finland and Norway not far behind.
But these are also some of the most homogeneous, cohesive societies in Europe, and the mass arrival of migrants has been highly noticeable, and has divided communities.

The partisan media reports these outbreaks either as understandable grievances boiling over, or evidence of racism, but with more migrants on the way, and no practical solutions in sight, Europe will have to get used to the hum of low-level confrontation with its migrant population, and the booming proclamations of triumph from its right-wing parties.
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From Ynet News

Holocaust denial on the rise in Eastern Europe

After Lithuania changed the definition of ‘genocide’ and Baltic countries have turned murderers of Jews into national heroes, Holocaust researchers are accusing the State of Israel of standing idly by as history is being re-written. The testimonies are fading away, the memorial sites are turning into entertainment centers, and the historical story is seen as just another “Jewish narrative”: If anyone thought that Holocaust denial was a marginal phenomenon among a few anti-Semites and Israel haters, evidence shows that is it a much wider, more well-established and dangerous phenomenon that is receiving reinforcement on the ground from eastern European countries.
In Lithuania, for example, people are doing everything to downplay the significance of the horrors of the war as a unique event in the history of mankind, and in Ukraine a famous mass murder site has turned into a thriving jogging spot.

According to Dr. Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, many countries have adopted an intentional policy leading to de facto Holocaust denial. While researchers and historians are trying to fight the new phenomenon and to get western Europe to join the battle, the State of Israel is actually standing back and doing nothing.
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