Manchester United forward Bebe will spend next season on loan at Besiktas with a view to completing a £2 million move to the Turkish club, according to reports.
Bebe, 20, joined United in a shock £7.4 million deal from Portuguese club Vitoria de Guimaraes last summer and has really struggled to make his mark at Old Trafford.
The Portugal Under-21 never played a game for Vitoria was available for £125,000 from his old club Estrela da Amadora just months before he joined United and Sir Alex Ferguson admitted he had only seen the player on video.
Turkish news agency Dogan Haber Ajansi (DHA) claim Bebe, who had only played club football in the Portuguese third division before joining United, has agreed to join Besiktas to get his career back on track.
With Aston Villa forward Ashley Young on the brink of completing a move to United to provide more options out wide, Bebe will be allowed to go out on loan.
If the deal is made permanent it would represent a £5.4 million loss for United.
The BMW Group has today announced an additional £500 million investment in its UK production network over the next three years and confirmed that the UK will be a production location for its next generation MINI models.
The BMW Group chairman outlined his company’s plans for further investment at a meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron at Downing Street this morning.
The investment, the majority of which will be will be used to create new production facilities and equipment at MINI Plant Oxford, will help to safeguard over 5,000 jobs in the MINI vehicle assembly plant in Oxford, the pressings plant in Swindon and the company’s engine plant at Hams Hall near Birmingham.
Mr Cameron welcomed the investment as a “tremendous vote of confidence”:
“I welcome this major investment by BMW Group in UK manufacturing. The production and export of iconic British cars like the MINI is making a real contribution to the rebalancing of the economy that this government is determined to achieve.
“It’s a tremendous vote of confidence in the skills and capabilities of the company’s British workforce and in the future of UK manufacturing.
“The MINI plant in Oxford has been one of our great manufacturing success stories, they should be hugely proud of their achievements. They have shown once again that the UK is a major player in the global automotive industry.”
Mr Cameron also hosted a breakfast meeting with the board of directors of the European Automobile Manufacturer’s Association (ACEA) to discuss the growing confidence in the UK automotive industry. ACEA represents some of the biggest car, truck and bus manufacturers at European and this is the first time the board of directors has come to the UK.
The BMW Group announcement and ACEA meeting today follow news yesterday that Japanese car manufacturer Nissan plans to invest £192 million to build the next version of its Qashqai model in Britain.
Super-dons: A C Grayling is determined to meet Britain's demand for higher education
Richard Godwin
Arriving at AC Grayling’s home is unavoidably like turning up for an Oxbridge tutorial. The professor answers the door, one hand cupping his phone to his ear, one hand restraining his mongrel.
“Don’t worry, she’s very nice. Misty, stop that!” The 18th-century hairdo is accessorised with fleece and tie. He gestures me into a handsome room, landscaped with books – A Short History of Atheism, a slim volume on the Oxford Tutorial, plus various works by AC Grayling catch the eye.
I hope he doesn’t ask me about Aristotle, I’m thinking – but today, it is the professor who faces inquisition.
The philosophy don and soon-to-be president of the British Humanist Association has caused a storm by announcing he plans to leave his post at Birkbeck to set up an elite private university.
The New College of the Humanities will open in London in September 2012 with an X-Men style line-up of academics, including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson and Christopher Ricks. Based in Bloomsbury, it will charge students £18,000 a year for courses in philosophy, history and literature (and combinations thereof), plus law and economics.
The headlines proclaimed a new rival to Oxbridge. Commentators including Mayor Boris Johnson cheered the enterprise, which will exist outside the state sector, funded by £10million of private investment. Reaction from students and fellow academics has ranged from cynical to hopping mad.
Birkbeck student union president Sean Rillo Raczka said: “I’m disgusted that Professor Grayling has started a private college charging £18,000 a year while professing that he believes in free education. Not only is his so-called ‘college’ dubious in itself but it will cater to rich students willing to pay exorbitant fees for a celebrity education, excluding ordinary people.”
Writing in the Guardian, Professor Terry Eagleton called the scheme “disgustingly elitist” and the 14 dons (who each have shares in the institution) “money-grabbing”, warning that if an American-style system of private liberal arts colleges takes root in Britain, it could relegate state-funded universities to second-tier status.
Despite his benign appearance, sipping tea and nuzzling Misty, Anthony Clifford Grayling, 62, is not shy of a fight. For years, he was content to pop up on current affairs programmes pouring a gentle, rationalist perspective on the day’s news from the toby jug of his head.
This year, however, he had the brass balls to publish The Good Book: A Secularist’s Bible, which he still claims is an improvement on the original, despite one of the most toothsome literary savagings in recent memory (“The Good Book is unreadable, not merely just because it is boring but because it is nauseating”, said the Standard’s David Sexton).
If it is disconcerting to be attacked by former associates now, he doesn’t seem too dismayed. The rules of the game, he says, have changed.
He is angry at successive governments’ reduction in funding for universities and has been gestating the idea for a new institution since tuition fees were introduced in 1998. The problems are most acute in the humanities, where the teaching budget has been eliminated altogether (hence the need for most universities to charge £9,000).
Grayling is adamant that in an ideal world, he would not be doing this – but as a rationalist, he realises we do not live in an ideal world. So “the choice is, you can either scream and yell and complain about what’s happening – and what’s happening is terrible. Or you can do something about it.”
He claims that he is not setting up the NCH outside the public system to compete with Oxbridge. That’s “press hyperbole”. But there is excess demand at the top end of the education “market”, and he does not believe we should continue to lose bright pupils to foreign universities, which are more than willing to court their minds and money. He is not looking for profit, though he admires the American system where students pay the “true cost” of a degree – and the NCH will turn a profit.
So what will it look like? The campus will be in Bedford Square, with teaching rooms and libraries shared with the University of London (UCL). There will be around 1,000 undergraduates when it hits full capacity, with candidates applying outside the Ucas system (only those confident of three As need get in touch).
NCH students will graduate with an extra diploma to take into account their extra classes in logic, scientific literacy and applied ethics, plus financial literacy (implemented after consultation with businesses). Students are promised 12 teaching hours per week, including one-on-one tutorials.
It should be stressed that the 14 telegenic X-Dons will not be giving those tutorials – instead, they will be more like visiting lecturers (and handsomely paid for it, Dawkins has admitted).
Most of the teaching will be done by new recruits, who will be offered 25 per cent more than the market rate, plus – and this is quite a promise – liberation from administration. “We’re saying to them: you’ve got to be dedicated teachers, and you’ve got to be dedicated to your work – and we pay you a premium.”
Grayling is irritated at claims that this is an institution for the rich. “Of course we want to be elite in the sense that you want your airline pilot to have been taught at an elite institution – elite but not exclusive, that’s the point.” To this end, in the first year, 20 per cent of places will be subsidised – with one third of those students (so, 6.66 per cent) being educated for free. The aim is to have 30 per cent of places subsidised in later years.
For all that, he admits that “it’s, er, not unlikely that, er, a substantial proportion of pupils will come from that kind of background,” he says – meaning from public schools. Grayling himself has two grown-up children from his first marriage, plus a stepson and daughter from his current marriage to the novelist Katie Hickman: they school at Marlborough and Queensgate respectively. The NCH fee “seems like a lot of money from one point of view, but if you’re really committed, you’d do anything to provide your kids with a good start”. Provided you have the means. “Well, you make the means.”
For all his rheumy-eyed evangelism, there are a couple of worries. He tells me that students will graduate with University of London International degrees, but the university has said that there is “no formal agreement concerning academic matters”. He also says that NCH students will be able to take out loans in the normal manner, which contradicts what the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills tells me: loans are a form of government subsidy, after all, and NCH exists outside the state system. “Oh! Does that mean they’ve changed the game again?” Grayling says when I mention this. Does that mean it will be even less affordable for poor students?
I am also puzzled as to the name: he admits that the Warden of New College, Oxford has emailed him wondering why he chose that. You could have called yourself Bloomsbury College, I say. “Yes, but then you think of Virginia Woolf looking mournful. No, we think New College of the Humanities works pretty well, has the right kind of resonance.”
At around this point, the doorbell rings and I nip to the loo. I count no fewer than nine canisters of hairspray on the “his” side of the sink (Pantene’s Ice Hold would appear to be the favourite). I am still processing this information when I return, to be greeted by Misty. The photographer has arrived: “Misty likes having her photo taken but everyone will say on Twitter that we have the same hair,” Grayling observes.
Tempting though it is to dwell on this (were some of the products Misty’s?), I broach the personalities of some of the academics involved.
“The answer to the question you’re about to ask is a higher education institution exists to teach how to think, not what to think. So the fact that there are a bunch of atheists involved in this doesn’t mean anything.”
Actually, I was going to say that they’re all quite publicity-seeking. He seems rather taken aback. “Ooh is that really so? Well, I don’t know about that so much. Are they? Richard Dawkins gets noticed a lot because of his firm views about things who else?”
Niall Ferguson, who constantly complains that he has been shunned by British academia for his pro-empire worldview?
“Yes, Niall Ferguson yes. He could conceivably be described as fitting the description you mentioned. And Richard Dawkins is perceived as fitting the description ”
And you yourself did commit the not entirely self-effacing act of rewriting the Bible. He mutters that the timing of the university announcement, with The Good Book fresh in mind, is “a nuisance” and even speculates about the coincidence of both of these long-gestated projects coming into the world at the same time: “It does make you think maybe the disposition of the stars has something to do with it.” That’s not very rational, AC!
But still, about that rather astonishing book. He considers the charge of arrogance “a bit surprising” as he feels himself to be “a very modest character. Not, er, aspiring to be a deity or anything like that. But a lot of the criticisms if I allude to Teucer firing his arrows behind the shield of Ajax, you might grasp what I mean.” I don’t. “I mean, the Good Book is made out of Aristotle and Pliny, Seneca and Confucius and all these great people, and I’ve just brought together their insights. So when they criticise it, they’re criticising them, not me.”
But you rewrote them all – and you didn’t credit them!
“Yeah, it was great fun. Terrific!” He giggles. “You think it’s an act of hubris.” He explains that Shakespeare never quoted his sources, so why should he? “And when were Aristotle and Cicero last in the Top 10 of the Sunday Times bestseller list? Now there’s something.” A clever way to make money off someone else’s ideas, I suppose – a charge levelled at him by former UCL colleagues, who claim he has copied their courses for the NCH.
We move on to God, the belief in whom he equates to a belief in fairies, which strikes me as weirdly childish. It leads him to offer the observation that “people who do not unthinkingly adopt the religion of their culture, which 99 per cent of people do, are under a special duty to think harder about ethical questions”. I wonder if, as part of that one per cent of the elect, it was his philosophy that animated him into action. This seems to please him.
“If you’re in a position to make use of the resources you’ve got, like a reputation or money, I think you should. You can’t fiddle while Rome burns.”
As for those who decry him (a protest is planned at his appearance at Foyles today), he would like to remind them that he is on their side.
“There’s a lot of anger around – about the fees, about the constraints,” he says, giving Misty one last stroke. “There is also anger of a different kind, that there a fees at all. I’m angry about that. We wouldn’t be doing this if there were proper resources for universities. It’s an unhappy environment. What we must hope is that really good intentions somehow get us through it.”
Thousands of trafficked children are being abused and murdered by their captors, but UK officials remain indifferent and sceptical
Mark Townsend, crime correspondent
Many victims of child trafficking in the UK remain unknown, as police resources allocated to the crime are shrinking. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
They are vulnerable, abused and, far too often, left to fend for themselves thousands of miles from home. Earlier this month, a petition signed by 735,889 Britons was handed into 10 Downing Street demanding greater protection for the thousands of victims of child trafficking in our towns and cities. But amid a growing furore over the government’s failure to prioritise the issue, evidence is mounting that when it comes to looking out for trafficked juveniles, those in a position to act are guilty of culpable negligence.
An Observer investigation reveals that even in Britain’s care homes, where identified victims of trafficking might expect to feel safe, the story is frequently one of neglect, indifference and sometimes outright scepticism towards their claims.
In a disturbing number of cases, children taken into local authority care and suspected of being trafficked are going missing, many having fallen back into the hands of their tormentors. A freedom of information request revealed that 173 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, all vulnerable to traffickers, went missing from Kent council’s care homes in 2009. The same local authority last week refused a request by senior managers to set up a child trafficking working group. Meanwhile, the numbers of the missing mount, shaming the local authorities who owe abused and exploited children a duty of care.
Hien, from Vietnam, arrived at Heathrow in 2009 as an unaccompanied child. Charity workers now believe that his family had been forced to agree to him being trafficked to Britain, but at the airport the British authorities got to him first. He was initially placed with foster carers and 10 weeks later the 14-year-old moved into supported lodgings. But two days after that Hien disappeared. The traffickers who had arranged his flight to the UK had caught up with him.
Hien resurfaced six months later, when police raided a cannabis factory in the capital. According to campaigners, along with sexual and domestic servitude, forced labour in cannabis factories is one of the most common forms of exploitation of trafficked children.
Hien was arrested on drug charges and appeared before a youth court. Only later, when sent to a young offenders institute and assessed, did it emerge that the teenager was a victim, not a criminal. As a result he was placed into local authority care 15 months ago. A fortnight later he went missing again.
For some juveniles it is a struggle even to get their story believed. Ling came to the attention of police and immigration officials during a raid on a Chinese restaurant in Birmingham. According to her testimony, she had been trafficked from Fujian province two years earlier and forced to work in a brothel. Raped repeatedly and beaten daily, Ling was warned she’d be killed if she tried to escape. The orphaned teenager told officials her life was in danger. Although she should have been placed in local authority care, she was released.
A year later she was re-arrested for holding a fake passport. This time officials passed her details to the national referral mechanism, the government’s system for identifying and protecting suspected trafficking victims. The 16-year-old warned social services that her captors would come for her. During this period, witnesses report a Chinese man loitering outside the building where she lived. In June 2009, the Home Office wrote to Ling explaining they did not believe she had been trafficked. Four days later she disappeared. There has been no recorded sighting of her since.
It is unlikely that Ling and Hien will ever be found. Most who go missing, go missing for good. Only occasionally do they resurface. Some victims are traded between gangs for paltry sums. “Many trafficked children are not perceived to be valuable,” said Christine Beddoe, director of child protection charity Ecpat UK. Children can fetch as little as £300, although Scotland Yard believes some have been sold for as much as £16,000.
Many of the missing are tortured and some undoubtedly murdered, say campaigners. A trafficked five-year-old boy from Nigeria was finally identified several weeks ago, 10 years after being killed and dumped in the River Thames.
According to campaigners, this cycle of neglect and confusion which puts children back in extreme danger could be avoided by the introduction of a simple measure. Experts believe that providing each trafficked child with an independent advocate – a child guardian – to ensure they get access to legal and support services would protect them from the predatory traffickers that target children’s care homes.
Scotland is currently piloting the guardian system. According to Gary Christie, the head of policy and communications at the Scottish refugee council, the scheme allows the professionals engaged with a trafficked juvenile to “better understand the safety issues around that young person”. But 10 days ago, immigration minister Damian Green rejected the idea of extending it to England, telling parliament that child guardians would “bring no extra benefit to the child”, although he admitted during the same debate that there were “severe difficulties” preventing trafficked children in care from disappearing.
It’s the kind of response that outrages the likes of Anthony Steen, the former Tory MP who heads up the Human Trafficking Foundation in the UK. According to Steen: “Mafia gangs circle children’s homes waiting to remove victims.”
Despite such warnings, the government and local authorities appear reluctant to take a more pro-active stance on the children disappearing from Britian’s care homes into the hands of traffickers. No central database exists of suspected or confirmed child trafficking cases. Local authorities do not collate data on numbers of missing children from care, let alone record efforts to find them. No national study into the volume of trafficked children in care has been ordered. The National Register for Unaccompanied Children, set up in 2004 to chronicle and help protect vulnerable juveniles, was shut down last month. Fiona Mactaggart, the shadow minister for women and equalities, says “trafficked children disappear from local authority care every week” and are never found.
Of the statistics that do exist, most corroborate claims that at least half of all trafficked youngsters in state care disappear. Of 80 children identified as trafficked over an 18-month period in northern England, 56% went missing, according to one study.
Human rights campaigner Michael Korsinsky, of the Helen Bamber Foundation, cited cases where traffickers tried to pick up children on false pretences within two hours of their arrival in care. One local authority admitted to campaigners it recently lost more than 20 Vietnamese children inside 24 hours. Two of them left a farewell note in their room, explaining that unless they left their sister would be forced into prostitution. Vietnamese are among the most frequently trafficked into the UK. A restricted government document revealed last year that, nationwide, 48% of Vietnamese children in care had disappeared.
A Home Office source in Croydon said some traffickers even stitched sim cards under a child’s skin, ordering them to insert it within a phone on a given date so they could be tracked down.
During the case of trafficker Kennedy Johnson, who brought in 40 Nigerian children through British airports, the court heard that he targeted council care homes before forcing the girls into the sex trade. His victims are still appearing two years after Johnson was jailed. Fresh victims enter the UK all the time. A Barnado’s briefing reveals how, two months ago, 25 trafficked individuals leapt from a lorry after passing through a north of England port. Eight were juveniles, two of whom were placed in supported lodgings and went missing within 24 hours. Another three children were placed in foster care and vanished after several weeks. Just one has been found.
Meanwhile, the policing resources allocated to tackling child trafficking are risibly small. Senior officers have conceded privately to the Observerthat the Home Office makes little attempt to prioritise the issue. The country’s principle human exploitation unit, Scotland Yard’s specialistcrime directorate-9, does not deal with child trafficking. Instead the issue falls under SCD-5, the Met’s child abuse command, and more specifically Operation Paladin, which safeguards children at London’s ports by investigating and advising on child trafficking matters. SCD-5 currently has only five dedicated officials. Its former head, detective inspector Gordon Valentine, retired on Friday and his replacement has not been granted a dedicated role in Operation Paladin.
This tiny team is dealing with a phenomenon that, although notoriously difficult to quantify, is undoubtedly growing. A three-month “scoping” project at Heathrow airport detected 1,800 unaccompanied children, half aged under 11.
Valentine is not the only leading figure to have left the fight against trafficking. Whitehall sources say that practically the entire original Home Office team on trafficking has now gone. Three weeks ago the all-party group on human trafficking convened to hear from senior policing official Vic Hogg, only to be told he too had left.
Elsewhere, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), the sole government agency to produce reports on child trafficking, has disbanded its child trafficking unit. Only a quarter of police forces have adequate child protection units. One of the most successful initiatives tackling child trafficking, Operation Golf, which disrupted extensive rings operating from Romania, was wound down at the end of last year and publicly there are no plans to resume operations.
Yet more resources, rather than fewer, are required, along with more understanding of the nature of the crime. Prosecutions for child trafficking are notoriously rare, with youngsters typically too fearful of authority to provide sufficient testimony. “If you asked 100 trafficking victims, only two or three would admit to being trafficked,” said one campaigner. One child trafficked into the UK from west Africa said she regretted telling police about her predicament. Beaten routinely during a life of domestic servitude after arriving in Birmingham aged 10, Abby said the failure to prosecute left her vulnerable to reprisal from her traffickers. “The police don’t realise that you put your life in danger to help them.”
Others are trafficked at such a young age they have difficulty recalling the details required for a prosecution. Sarah had not seen white people before when she arrived in the Midlands, aged 12, from Ghana, escorted by her auntie after her parents separated. She too was quickly ensconced in a life of domestic slavery, forced to care for five kids. She was never allowed outside. Then things took a turn for the worse. She describes getting “slapped” a “proper African knock”. They moved to London and that was when the men began arriving.
“That is when I started getting trouble. I was getting beaten by the men, I was smacked and raped. They tied me up and did things.” She was 13. Every time she was raped she “kept bleeding”. Sarah added: ” I was just screaming and saying that I didn’t want to do it. The auntie was saying, ‘Just relax, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t take that long.’” Eventually she was “chucked out”. With nowhere to go she survived on the streets for nine months before a couple took her in. She still lives with them now.
For those young people taken into the care of the state, the nightmare should be over. But the experience of Ling, Hien and hundreds of others reveals that the level of care for juveniles in their situation is often patchy and sometimes downright negligent. A 2008 report by the Conservatives, then in opposition, described child trafficking as “an escalating problem with a weak support structure in place”. One year into the coalition government, ministers have shown precious little sign of doing anything about it.
HUMAN CARGO
■ An estimated 1.2 million children are trafficked worldwide each year.
■ 161 countries are reported to be involved in human trafficking, either as a source, transit or destination country.
■ 95% of victims experienced physical or sexual violence (based on data from selected European countries).
■ 43% of victims are used for forced commercial sexual exploitation, of whom 98% are women and girls.
■ 32% of victims are used for forced economic exploitation, of whom 56% are women and girls.
Source: UN Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (Gift)
‘Man-made’ earthquake strikes Blackpool… and consequences could be severe for UK’s gas drilling industry
By Daily Mail Reporter
Controversial: Gas drilling by Cuadrilla near Blackpool, Lancashire, has been suspended following an earthquake on Friday
Shale gas drilling – known as ‘fracking’ – is the process of fracturing rock deep underground using high-pressure water to extract gas.
The company behind the scheme, Cuadrilla, confirmed that it had been doing this just 1.2 miles from the epicentre of the tremor and has downed tools to investigate.
Experts believe the process could be behind the earthquake, which could have severe repercussions for drilling in the UK.
It follows a 2.3 magnitude earthquake at the beginning of last month, which also occurred near to the site at Preese Hall, near Blackpool.
Today, the British Geological Survey’s head of seismology, Brian Baptie, said the survey recorded the magnitude 1.5 earthquake shortly after midnight on Friday.
He said: ‘Data from two temporary instruments close to the drill site, installed after the magnitude 2.3 earthquake on April 1, indicate that the event occurred at a depth of approximately 2km or 1.2 miles.
‘The recorded waveforms are very similar to those from the magnitude 2.3 event last month, which suggests that the two events share a similar location and mechanism.’
The organisation said it could not say conclusively if the first earthquake, on April 1, was linked to the ‘fracking’ for shale gas but the its website said: ‘Any process that injects pressurised water into rocks at depth will cause the rock to fracture and possibly produce earthquakes.
‘It is well known that injection of water or other fluids during the oil extraction and geothermal engineering, such as shale gas, processes can result in earthquake activity.’
The shale gas exploration scheme near Blackpool has involved drilling a well 1.7 miles down into the earth, and then using ‘fracking’ to stimulate the rock around the well – a process which began in March.
The peace of Blackpool promenade, but beneath the seaside town the search for gas is feared to be causing earthquakes
WHAT IS ‘FRACKING’?
It is a mining technique commonly used to get gas or oil from under land rather than under the sea.
To get the gas out, companies drill down into shale and form a well. They then inject wells with water, small amounts of chemicals and sand to create tiny cracks in the rock, allowing natural gas and sometimes oil to flow upwards into the well.
The technique could add about 40 per cent to previous estimates of global recoverable gas resources, with the largest known reserves are in China, the United States, Argentina and Mexico.
However, It is now feared the process could be the cause of small earthquakes.
Critics such as the Green party say that it is environmentally unsafe because the chemicals could contaminate soil and get into drinking water.
Cuadrilla Resources, the shale gas exploration company, confirmed it had postponed ‘fracking’ operations.
In a statement the company said it had decided to halt the work while it interprets seismic information received from monitoring around the site, following the small quake last Friday.
Mark Miller, chief executive of Cuadrilla Resources, said: ‘We take our responsibilities very seriously and that is why we have stopped fracking operations to share information and consult with the relevant authorities and other experts.
‘We expect that this analysis and subsequent consultation will take a number of weeks to conclude and we will decide on appropriate actions after that.’
Shale gas extraction has been controversial in the US because of claims that cancer-causing compounds used in the process have polluted water supplies – and that the gas can pollute drinking water, with footage of people able to set fire to the water coming out of their taps.
But earlier this month the Commons’ Energy and Climate Change Committee said a ban on shale gas drilling was not necessary in the UK, as there was no evidence that it posed a risk to water supplies from underground aquifers.
Following the news that ‘fracking’ had been suspended at the Lancashire site, WWF Scotland reiterated its call for the process to be banned.
It comes after it was revealed at the weekend that a company was seeking permission for Scotland’s first shale gas exploration at Aith, near Falkirk.
WWF Scotland Director, Dr Richard Dixon, said: ‘Whether the shale gas drilling and the earthquake are linked certainly needs investigated.
‘However, we already know enough about the environmental problems associated with fracking to know that it should be banned in Scotland.
‘Shale gas would be a disaster for the climate and its production could contaminate groundwater. Scotland should follow France’s example and ban it before it even gets going.
‘Scotland should become the home of clean energy not another dirty fossil-fuel. Shale gas projects in Scotland would quickly tarnish our global claim to green credentials.’
Turkey, with its plan to purchase 100 fighter jets — for which it was going to shake hands with Lockheed Martin for $16 billion, but later suspended due to the American aerospace company’s refusal to share technology with it — has also received an offer from Europe, one that includes the sharing of the know-how Turkey wants.
Speaking to Today’s Zaman on the condition of anonymity, a leading executive from European Eurofighter — an aerospace consortium of Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom — said they agree to fulfill Turkey’s demands to that end. “We are ready to share all software codes and critical technologies with Turkey,” the official said. Previously the Lockheed Martin director responsible for the F-35s Turkey initially agreed to buy said that what Turkey wanted was not acceptable because of “financial and cost constraints.” The American company declined to comment on the issue despite Eurofighter’s offer.
Earlier in March, Turkey announced that it was putting the planned purchase of 100 F-35 fighter jets from the US on hold because the Pentagon refused to share the source code used in the software designed for the aircraft, as well as the codes that might be used externally to activate the planes. Lockheed is the Pentagon’s top supplier by sales. It builds the F-16, F-22 and F-35 fighter aircraft, as well as the Aegis naval combat system and THAAD missile defense.
Without the source code, Turkish engineers wouldn’t be able to make any changes to the software that operates the jets. The external flight codes are equally important, if not more so, as they can be used externally to navigate the jets.
Manchester United forward Bebe will spend next season on loan at Besiktas with a view to completing a £2 million move to the Turkish club, according to reports.
