Western defence alliance Nato has set 2 per cent as a bottom line for defence spending by member countries.
Read MoreLabor has accused the Coalition of ‘plucking a number out of thin air’ after it pledged to significantly boost Australia’s defence budget.
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Honestly, it sometimes feels like a disproportionate amount of hate gets lumped onto insects like wasps when it should be given to mosquitoes instead. They might not sting, but there is no misery quite like being bitten all over and spending the next week feeling the itchiest you have ever felt in your life. And that’s before we even get into the disease risk.
It isn’t fun being an insect bite-prone person, which undeniably increases the ire that you might direct at mosquitoes compared to one of those annoyingly smug individuals that claim they never get bitten. However, as with most annoying things, they can be a great conduit for humor and silly memes on the topic. If we didn’t have the unfortunate experience of mosquito bites, we wouldn’t be able to relate to all the dumb images that delight in them, such as what can be found if you scroll a little further.
Despite Trump’s 32% tariff and past criticism, Taiwan has vowed to boost defence spending and strengthen economic ties with Washington.
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Nvidia shares plummeted 8% after the U.S. banned its H20 chip sales to China, impacting equities and the crypto market.
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Sometimes, when you’re with someone for a long time, you might find that you sort of accidentally live with them. You’re spending the night most nights, and you realize it has been weeks since you’ve been home. You didn’t talk about moving in together, but you just sort of do. And this can happen under your nose despite all your best intentions. And it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Maybe you wanted to live together anyway and now you can do so without the pressure of putting a label on it and making it a big deal. You can be low-key about it.
The problem arises, though, when you start to think about money. Why is it always money that gums up the works? If we all had enough of it, then maybe everything would be okay. But we live in the real world and that’s not going to happen.
You literally never know how a marriage will shake out. Many singles are advised to be extremely careful about whom they marry because that is the most important choice they’ll ever make in their life. But marrying someone upstanding, attractive, hard working, and happy doesn’t guarantee that it’s all going to work out for both of you in the end. The dynamics of a relationship come to a full 180 once you wake up one day and are bound together by law. Your partnership might have been fun and fancy free when it was merely a relationship, but once the excrement hits the fan, it’s all gloom and doom.
The relationship doesn’t even really have to change for things to go completely awry. Every monogamous relationship comprises two people with their own interiority and emotional state that can’t be fixed by merely jumping the broom and running off into the sunset.
You literally never know how a marriage will shake out. Many singles are advised to be extremely careful about whom they marry because that is the most important choice they’ll ever make in their life. But marrying someone upstanding, attractive, hard working, and happy doesn’t guarantee that it’s all going to work out for both of you in the end. The dynamics of a relationship come to a full 180 once you wake up one day and are bound together by law. Your partnership might have been fun and fancy free when it was merely a relationship, but once the excrement hits the fan, it’s all gloom and doom.
The relationship doesn’t even really have to change for things to go completely awry. Every monogamous relationship comprises two people with their own interiority and emotional state that can’t be fixed by merely jumping the broom and running off into the sunset.
Roommates can either be a saving grace or a pain in the tuchus. If you have a responsible roommate who pays their rent on time, cleans up after themselves, and is friendly but not too friendly, you will probably feel pretty good about the arrangement. If you’re the roommate who sends the collective money to the landlord and your other roommates fail to send their money on time, you’re going to be spending a lot of time stressing about someone else’s rent that they should be worrying about. If you’re lucky, you’ll pay your rent on a portal, so you don’t have to handle your roommate’s money at all, but that seems to be more of an exception than the rule. As long as you’re living with someone, their financial choices become your business if they consistently prove they aren’t responsible enough to prioritize their needs over their wants.
Rubio said Washington’s goal is for member states to prioritize defense spending to enable the alliance to become “stronger and more viable.”
Read MoreThere’s nothing like taking the day to pamper yourself. Whether you’re going all out and getting a scrub down at a day spa or you’re slapping some cream on your face in the bathroom mirror, it’s important that you treat yourself every now and again. You put so much effort into your job, into your family, into your hobbies that it’s easy to forget yourself. You wake up feeling tired and drink an extra cup of coffee to compensate, neglecting to address the underlying problems.
What can help turn this around are rest days. Not just days when you catch up on chores and end up deep cleaning your entire house, but actual rest days. This can mean lounging in bed with a good book, getting lost in its pages, and ignoring the time of day. It can mean spending all afternoon petting your dog (he wouldn’t mind that). Or it can mean sitting back with a good list of memes.
Many may argue that spending your spare time browsing memes is just about the most risk-averse act imaginable. It is the epitome of staying comfortable in your comfort zone, a kind of managed inertia that drip-feeds you mild entertainment for hours upon hours every day.
While the procrastination element of it can’t be ignored, we also cannot turn a blind eye to the endless possibilities for adventure that come with exploring the world of internet humor. It can expose you to random ephemera and ways of thinking that you may not have seen otherwise, and whether you like it or not it still adds to the expansion of your mind.
When you dive into a meme list like this, it promises to open up some of these kinds of opportunities. All you have to do is keep on scrolling and enjoy the randomness that will shortly be coming your way.
Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz wants to alter Germany’s strict fiscal rules to massively boost defence spending, the Greens are standing in his way.
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The estimated spending related to the expo was based on the assumption that 28 million people will visit the event through October.
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Bitcoin’s fundamentals held up well during the latest dip, suggesting underlying strength, Swissblock analysts said.
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LONDON/BERLIN – The conservatives and the Social Democrats agreed to seek a loosening of Germany’s debt brake to allow higher defence spending, as well as proposing to create a 500 billion euro ($529 billion) infrastructure fund, their leaders said on Tuesday.
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Gaming can get expensive—especially when you’re an unsupervised child with Mommy or Daddy’s credit card. This 15-year-old was happy to spend his uncle’s money on his gaming, but when the swift hand of justice came around, he quick saved and bailed before the final boss.
While it behooves many parents to think the best of their children, when a non-gaming adult discovers 100’s of PlayStation charges on their credit card, perhaps it’s time to start considering plausible alternatives. It’s possible that your little angel child is spending $25 on in-game purchases that make their character look like a glow stick or maybe there’s a new treasurebox that can only be unlocked through an online DLC. I understand giving your kid the benefit of the doubt when it comes to tomfoolery, but this uncle caught his nephew red-handed stealing from the family cookie jar.
Read on for the full story that’ll leave non-gamers baffled at the expenses that can rack up to make your Fortnite character do a sassy little front flip at the end of each game.
If there’s anyone who knows about wasting money for extravagant hair purposes, it’s me. I’ve spent the past 4 years throwing money into the furnace that is being bleach blonde. I think it’s worth every penny, mainly because I do it on a budget. Every hairstylist I’ve ever met wants you to dye your blonde roots every 4-6 weeks, and by that, they mean every 4 weeks. There’s no way I can justify spending $250 a month on just staying blonde, so I let my roots grow out and spend that every 2 months. I had to leave my last hairstylist, whom I was loyal to for over a year because she wouldn’t stop insisting I get my hair done monthly without even considering what that would do to me financially. So many hairstylists are clueless about how much an average person who is not Christy Turlington is willing to spend on an unnecessary luxury service.
Living with someone is the quickest way to see their true colors. With their guard down, Q-tips scattered on the floor, their dishes undone, and the bedroom door left ajar, there’s no room for secrets when you share an abode. However, when you move in with your best friend, the unlikeliest character reveals can often leave friendships in tatters, especially when one roommate is a frivolous mooch who feels entitled to their friend’s emergency savings account… Like the college girl in this next story.
When you’re in your early 20s and don’t really know anything about the real world yet, moving in with your best friend seems like the dream–a real-life Disney Channel Original Movie. Except, what most people don’t expect is the high probability of ending up hating that person they thought they loved so much by the end of their lease. And let me tell ya from experience, best friendships rarely last when you become roommates.
Saint Angela of Foligno was a wife and mother who had little interest in the spiritual life until about age 40. After her husband and children died, Angela entered the Secular Franciscans, spending the rest of her life in prayer and service.
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Former first lady Fabiola Yáñez renounces state security detail that was strengthened in wake of her gender violence allegations against ex-president Alberto Fernández; Milei and Bullrich had criticised her use of proection officers, revealing it had cost state at least US$147,000 since last August. Leer más
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Saint John, traditionally thought to be the “Beloved Disciple,” was the writer of the fourth Gospel, and presumably, the only apostle who was not martyred. He is also the disciple to whom Jesus entrusted his mother from the cross. Symbolized as an eagle, Saint John’s Gospel “soars” in its theological treatment of the Good News.
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Everybody always talks about how the days after Thanksgiving are the prime time for holiday leftovers, but I disagree. Those are the leftovers of only one meal. Christmas leftovers are the leftovers of Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas Day breakfast, Christmas Day dinner, and all the various cookies, pies, and fudges explicitly made for Christmas. I am swimming in leftovers as we speak, and so help me, God, if I’m not able to finish them off before New Year’s Eve, there’s going to be heck to pay.
If you’re also spending the next week eating leftovers, you’ll need some entertainment while you do it. It’s too late for Christmas movies now, and there aren’t many great New Year’s movies, excluding When Harry Met Sally. I don’t think you have any other options than scrolling through hilarious memes while eating all the leftover cheesy potatoes, so your sister can’t eat them first.
With Australians spending millions during the holiday season, experts warn that too-good-to-be-true deals could leave shoppers falling victim to online scams.
Read MoreElon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the newly established Department of Government Efficiency under President-elect Trump, aiming to cut federal spending and eliminate waste. Their effort is compared to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, emphasizing the need to avoid ideological purges, factionalism, and short-term chaos that led to long-term damage in China.
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Merry Christmas Eve! The most hyped holiday of the year is about to arrive, and I hope you all are spending it doing precisely what you want to do. I’m sure many of us are at our homes or our parents’ homes, sitting around the tree and looking at the old funny ornaments like there’s no tomorrow. Whether you’re preparing the broiled cornish game hen or arranging stocking stuffers, I’m sure you need something to take a load off of your busy Christmas Eve. Are you in desperate need of a breather before the man with the sack comes to town? I’m so glad you asked because I’m blessing you with the gift of random memes. That’s right, these memes are that secret extra present you never knew you wanted, but now that you’ve got them, you can’t believe you once lived without them. Savor them, and have a Merry Christmas.
Donald Trump’s key demand that 38 Republicans defied to avoid a government shutdown #Australia #News
Congressional Republican hardliners who are normally ardent supporters of Donald Trump have stuck to their belief that government spending needs to be pruned and defied the president-elect’s warnings of revenge.
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BRASILIA/SAO PAULO – Brazil’s lower house and Senate were voting on Thursday evening on a government package of three proposals aimed at cutting spending, although some of the included changes are expected to ultimately scale back their fiscal impact.
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‘8,800km commute’: Chinese student travels to Australia weekly to attend university #Australia #News
International student Guangli Xu has taken an unusual approach to spending his final semester at RMIT. He says flying from his hometown to Melbourne once a week to attend classes is “comparable” to the cost of living in Australia’s second-most populous city.
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Nobody wants to spend holidays with people they hate. The holidays mean time off work, which means spending several days with nothing much to do with whoever you’ve chosen to spend said holiday with. If you’re a kid, you usually don’t have a choice about which dysfunctional relatives you spend Christmas and Thanksgiving Day with. If you’re a pushover adult, you might spend your little time off work with family members who make you want to pull your hair out. But there is another way, as one teenage Redditor found out. This 17-year-old took to the site to ask whether she was wrong for rejecting spending Thanksgiving with her mom and her new boyfriend. She has an older brother who she would rather spend the holiday with and is feeling uncomfortable that this boyfriend is attempting to fill a fatherly role. As expected, her mom freaked out about this rejection.
[VOA] For decades, Nigeria has relied on imports to meet fuel demand, spending about $15 billion annually. Now, new alliances aim to cut these expenses by investing in homegrown energy, targeting affordable petrol for consumers and boosting the economy.
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He also said European nations needed to do more “heavy lifting” in terms of boosting defence spending.
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Saint Paul of the Cross dedicated his life to the memory of Christ’s passion and death. Known as the Passionists, the Congregation of the Passion that he founded is committed to preaching the good news of Christ crucified, and to caring for the poor. The Passionists take a fourth vow to promote the Passion of Jesus.
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[Unicef] Johannesburg, Nairobi, Dakar, Amman — UNICEF and the Learning for Well-being Institute publish new findings that suggest that key social spending in Africa predominantly prioritises older children while spending on the youngest significantly lags behind, in sharp contrast to G20 countries.
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When presenting the 2025 Budget in mid-September, Milei defined his fundamental fiscal principle as first defining the available revenue and then adjusting the spending to it – modernising the university system to that end could be an interesting application of that principle. But instead his primitive proposal is literally to cut university spending in half with his chainsaw. Leer más
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Hey friend, are you feeling down? Did the temperature outside decrease by 8-10 degrees, causing visions of 5 months of nights in with seasonal sadness to dance in your head? Maybe you’re feeling let down by the start of a new school year or the end of a constant stream of summer activities. It’s much more likely that a constellation of circumstances has led you to a low point in your life that a mere stranger could never predict. I extend my sincerest apologies for the gross generalizations and assumptions I made mere moments ago.
It really doesn’t matter what bad things are going on in your life. You could’ve stepped in gum this morning or broken your leg last night, and the same things will make you feel better: spending time with loved ones, getting some much-needed sunlight, and scrolling through 32 of today’s most compelling and intriguing memes.
This man learned that his wife’s over-spending was the reason they were dipping into the red every month, so he brought in the heavy artillery: His frugal mother who raised him and his 2 siblings as a single mother on a meager income… And his wife did NOT like that.
When your parents give you your first allowance as a kid, your mind races and you start thinking of all the fantastic things you’ll buy with the $20 bill in your hand. You could buy a Hot Wheel, some candy, maybe even a movie! But as soon as the stars in your eyes fade from some frivolously silly purchase, you realize that the money’s quickly dwindled and you have nothing left. Most people take that lesson into adulthood, learning to taper their spending and mitigate their losses, but the woman in this next story learned that her daily ‘little treat’ at Starbucks was literally starting to bankrupt their family.
Keep scrolling to read the details of how a marriage was tested when a frugal mother-in-law saves the day with a stringent budget.