A riddle and a bet about a country – Konrad Voelkel's Blog – Mathemagically

Today I'm blogging about a country which is about 530,000 km² in land mass, has about 23 million inhabitants and was re-united in the year 1990. It's motto is "God, Nation, Revolution, Unity". Do you know which one I'm talking about?

 
 
 
 
(some whitespace so you won't see the solution too fast in your browser or feed reader)
 
 
 
 
to give you a hint: look at the picture below.
 
 

(image licensed from Wikimedia commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license)

 
 
 
 
 
 
(some more whitespace... scroll down to see the solution)
 
 
 
 

It's Yemen. Other facts: they have a 40% unemployment rate and drinking alcohol is legal although the law is similar to the Scharia (the islamic law). For the more interesting news, take a look at Wikipedia, especially the article Foreign relations of Yemen - 2010 embassy closures.

The USA are already spending lots of money to the Yemen government, officially to hunt Al Qaida groups. Since the beginning of 2010, the newspaper noise about Yemen has increased so much that I decided to bet on it:

2010 will be the year Obama sends troops to Yemen.

By "military" I mean any americans paid by the US, so some security company like Blackwater counts, too. I guess 2011 or 2012 will be the year they "officially" declare some kind of war or UN mission or something along these lines, but I save this for the 2011 bet. For now, take a look at the Google results for "Obama sends troops to Yemen". The moment I'm writing this, there is only one result.

Let's hope I will be wrong (and remember me in 2011 that I lost my bet!)

Tags: 2010, riddle, war