Word: unionizers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...versus $384,000 for U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and $391,000 for German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Sarkozy's official income is also dwarfed by that of European pay champion, Ireland's Bertie Ahern, who pulls in a cool $446,000. Nadine Morano, spokeswoman of Sarkozy's ruling Union for a Popular Movement party, argued that the increase was insignificant when viewed in broader terms. "Think about certain soccer players or television personalities," she said. "The raise requested is in no way unusual." Except, of course, that neither of those positions are paid with taxpayer money...
...Public discomfort over Sarkozy's raise may be accentuated by its timing. In just three weeks, the nation is set to undergo strikes potentially more paralyzing than those in October protesting cutbacks in certain public sector pension regimes. Union leaders have jumped on Sarkozy's pay hike to highlight what they call the President's reformist hypocrisy: clarifying and normalizing governmental pay scales by lifting them, while harmonizing public and private sector pension plans by scaling those downward. "There's a feeling the political class is helping itself while the French people are left on the sidewalk to fend...
...agony continues for civilians prone to Janjaweed attack and for the 2.5 million people who have fled in fear for their lives and now make do in cramped huts built from sticks and straw in aid camps like the three arranged around the edge of El Fasher. An African Union (AU) force of 7,000 soldiers, police officers and cease-fire monitors has failed to stop the violence, but they've been good business for local merchants. The peacekeepers, after all, have cash to spend, as do the United Nations staffers, some of whom are paid daily allowances of more...
...Fasher University, says the town is in the grip of a construction boom driven by the demand for housing. Locals have rented their homes to the new arrivals, and are building new ones. "Plots out here," he says waving at the land beyond the university close to the African Union base, "were just left empty. They were worth maybe $1,000 three or four years ago. Now the same ones are being bought for $15,000." All the retail space has been rented out in the new office block, which will become Darfur's tallest building on its completion...
...building a second, which he hopes will push his rental earnings above his university salary. But he has mixed feelings about the overall impact of the boom on Darfur. "The per capita income has increased because many people are finding work with the [aid organizations] and the African Union or the United Nations, and then there is a knock-on effect of more purchases in the market," he says, sitting on the mud-brick wall around the land where his new house will rise. "But in the field of peace nothing has improved...