Twenty-one couples have shared a joint wedding in Somalia, where the traditional lavish celebrations are increasingly unaffordable at a time of economic slump.
The function was held on Tuesday at a hotel in Hargeisa, capital of Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland, and was arranged by Telsom, a telecoms company that employs all the bridegrooms.
The Horn of Africa region is staunchly Muslim, so the men and women celebrated separately.
The expense of a traditional wedding, especially when economic times are hard, is driving some young Somalis to leave their homeland.
America has begun the initial steps to final outsourcing of it’s last dominant industry. As before, a recession is the key to making the move. Even as we speak, the oil/gas and oil/gas services industries, always a US dominated industry, has begun mass layoffs. From Schlumberger to Baker to Halliburton and dozens of smaller firms, tens of thousands of jobs are either already gone on being shoved into the guillotine.
America has always been the dominant player in the oil/gas services field as it had led the way, back in the late 1800s, in oil and later gas exploration and exploitation. Oil services companies do everything that it takes to deliver the product to their clients, the major private and national oil companies. This includes everything from locating deposits, up to 10km under the ground, to drilling to them, to developing the wells and managing production, to transferring the product to refineries and storage facilities. As such, these companies employ an immense amount of technology and industry.
The sharpest contraction in US growth for more than a quarter of a century, a collapse in Japanese factory output and an emergency package of help for the struggling countries in Eastern Europe provided fresh grim evidence today of the paralysis in the global economy.
Amid fears that the downturn triggered by the credit crunch has turned into the worst slump in output since the 1930s, data from Washington showed that the havoc wreaked by the problems on Wall Street last Autumn was far worse than originally believed.
