The Globalist - David Cassels' Current World Issue Blog

Saudi Arabia's  King Salman  has fired his top military commanders and reshuffled his cabinet in a shake-up of key security and government ministries, according to royal decrees. Those dismissed include the Saudi army's chief of staff, and the heads of the ground and air defence forces. First Lieutenant General Fayyad bin Hamed al-Ruwayli was appointed the new chief of staff. Tamadur bint Youssef al-Ramah was appointed as deputy labour minister in a rare senior post for a woman in the kingdom. "He [Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman] is the person who is running the country. There should not be any doubt about it," said James Dorsey, senior fellow at the S Raja Ratnam School of International Studies, Singapore. "One has to keep in mind that in effect the crown prince has changed the government structure of Saudi Arabia," he said, adding that it's a one-man rule as opposed to the past when decisions were taken by consensus. "I think we are...

US entrepreneur Elon Musk will attempt to fly the world's most powerful rocket later from the Kennedy Space Center. His Falcon Heavy vehicle is designed to have more than twice the lifting capacity of any existing launcher. Because of the historic high failure rate of maiden flights, the rocket will only carry a dummy payload, however. Mr Musk has decided this should be his old cherry-red Tesla sports car. A mannequin wearing a space suit will be strapped to the driving seat. The entrepreneur says David Bowie's classic hit Space Oddity will be looping on the radio in the roadster as it is hurled into an elliptical orbit that stretches out to Mars' orbit around the Sun. "[The car will] get about 400 million km away from Earth, and it'll be doing 11km/s," he told reporters in a briefing on Monday. "We estimate it will be in that orbit for several hundred million years, maybe in excess of a billion years." Three cameras attached to the car ...