Spyker bought Saab for $74m in January 2010
Saab-owner Spyker has announced that its funding deal with China’s Hawtai Motor Group has fallen through, throwing its plans to resume production at the Swedish carmaker into doubt.
Spyker said the agreement had been terminated because Hawtai had been unable to secure shareholder approval.
The deal had been unveiled on 3 May, with Hawtai pledging to invest 150m euros ($221m; £134m) into Spyker.
Spyker said it would continue work to secure short and medium-term funding.
It added in its statement that it would continue discussions with Hawtai, but would now talk to other potential Chinese partners as well.
No-one from Sypker or Saab has been available to comment regarding the implications on the planned restart of production.
In exchange for the 150m euros, Hawtai was to take a 30% stake in Spyker and it had also reached an agreement on sharing manufacturing and technology.
“It’s living by the day, it’s not just having money to pay its future obligations, it’s what it owes its suppliers already”
Tom Muller Car industry analyst
Netherlands-based Spyker bought Saab for $74m (£45m) in January 2010 from General Motors, but it has struggled to revive the Swedish company.
It stopped all production at Saab on 6 April, saying suppliers had halted deliveries after they had not been paid.
Spyker’s purchase of Saab was helped by a 400m euro ($570m; £350m) European Investment Bank (EIB) loan facility.
The company said it was now continuing talks with the EIB to access a further 29m euros from these funds.
Car industry analyst Tom Muller said Saab was in a tough position.
“It’s living by the day, it’s not just having money to pay its future obligations, it’s what it owes its suppliers already,” he said.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The gold trade fuels conflict in eastern DR Congo
Three suspected gold smugglers from the Democratic Republic of Congo have been charged with fraud in a Kenyan court.
Their names appear on a list of DR Congo’s 15 most-wanted gold smugglers, accused of stealing 2.5 tonnes of gold between July 2010 and February 2011.
The men, arrested this week in Nairobi with 400kg of gold, deny the charges.
Congolese officials see Kenya as a major hub in the illegal gold trade, which fuels conflict in the mineral-rich east of DR Congo.
In March, Kenya and DR Congo agreed to jointly investigate the trade.
A Congolese diplomat in Nairobi, Bob Katamba, told the BBC that one of the suspects who appeared in court on Thursday, Jean-Claude Mudeke Kabamba, was believed to the ring leader of the trade.
He said it was alleged he went by the alias “General Kabamba” and was believed to be gun-running for the Mai Mai rebel group in eastern DR Congo in exchange for gold.
Kenyan police say a computer with valuable information about the clandestine trade was also seized this week.
Gen Kabamba and two other suspects, Ruphin Kazadi Elumba and Jean-Claude Dyansangu Kanza, were charged with conspiracy to defraud a gold buyer of $1.4m by posing as legal gold dealers.
The BBC’s Odhiambo Joseph in Nairobi says the men are due back in court next Tuesday. Police say they expect to press more charges as their investigation is still going on.
In February, a Kenyan official investigating a suspected case of gold smuggling was shot dead in Nairobi.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
By Michael Blastland
After 25 years, cancer clusters near nuclear power plants are still being investigated. It’s a battle with the forces of chance.
This is an experiment. No real cancers are involved. But that’s the point. We’re going to see if we can make a game of pure chance look like something real and meaningful.
Why? Because this week an official report in the UK stated that radiation from nuclear power stations does not cause increased levels of childhood leukaemia.
A conspiracy, allege critics. Statistical lies, say others. The problem is obvious, they argue.
The Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE), first investigated the question 25 years ago. It’s still at it.
And the reason, both for some people’s scepticism and for COMARE’s 25-year struggle to find a definitive answer, is the role of chance.
Can we recreate the problem? Here goes.
First, make some random dots for a graph. You can do this in Excel or similar by typing the formula for a random-ish number and copying it, say 100 times. Do this for the two axes of the chart and you have the coordinates for a random-ish scattering of 100 dots.
Basic spreadsheets will turn this into a chart in one click or two. Remove the grid lines and the axes and it looks like this.
What we see are some big spaces, small patterns or lines and – hey presto – clusters, and all by chance. Now imagine that each of those dots is a case of cancer dropped into the population. So let’s superimpose them on any old bit of map.
And then note, for example, those suspicious concentrations on one side of Wolverhampton, while the other side is strangely unaffected.
In other words, how easy it is to take chance distributions and start to speculate about meaning in them. Our experiment is crude. It takes no account of population density, for example, but the principle is straightforward – chance often appears like something meaningful.
If that sounds like a dismissal of people’s fears about cancer around nuclear power plants, well, it’s not meant to be. For the acute difficulty, still – after 25-years of investigations – is how to be sure what kind of cluster we see at two sites in particular. A cluster of chances with mixed causes, a bit like our dots? Or a cluster from one cause, such as radiation. And if from one cause, which one?
Those who think this an idiotic question are locked in another argument over chance.
“Until we have an accepted explanation, the case isn’t closed”
For even if it is concluded that a cluster is bigger than we’d expect from chance and mixed causes alone – as indeed it is in a couple of cases – we have to reconcile this with the fact that there were similar clusters at sites that had been identified for plants that were not subsequently built.
That is, maybe the clusters are real clusters, but maybe the cause is not radiation, but a virus, for example. Perhaps this is caused, according to one hypothesis, by population movement of the type we see when lots of people come together for a big construction project.
So it may all be down to population movement, and simply a matter of chance that this movement happened in some cases to be linked to a nuclear power station.
Maybe. Because the report recommends continued monitoring of the data. Until we have an accepted explanation, the case isn’t closed.
COMARE’s 14th report, called “Further consideration of the incidence of childhood leukaemia around nuclear power plants in Great Britain” is long and complicated. But if you want to see what the slog of statistical sleuthing looks like, it’s well worth reading.
Unrelated, but also worth a good look, are a set of animated graphical storyboards from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which now has an ONS YouTube channel.
The expertise in the ONS is one of the most untapped resources in public argument. But maybe it’s beginning to see more daylight.
The ONS now has a YouTube channel
Stick with it during the small print at the beginning and follow the charts, for example, on jobs and the recession, here.
Others include graduate earnings, the effect of bad weather on GDP, and savings for retirement. Exemplary briefings all.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
All four were friends from the same village of Afghan refugees in Pakistan
The US military commander in Afghanistan has said the killing of Osama Bin Laden may weaken al-Qaeda’s influence on the Taliban. Even so, warned Gen David Petraeus, Afghanistan could still become a potential refuge for international terror groups. Meanwhile, members of Congress have been calling for US troops to hasten their withdrawal. Paul Wood reports from Kabul on the course of the Afghan war now that Osama Bin Laden is dead.
The news conference had been called, said the Afghan official, to show us four children recruited by the Taliban as suicide bombers.
A shocked hush fell over the room when they were actually brought in. They seemed ridiculously young, small figures dwarfed by the soldier leading them onto the stage.
We discovered later that they were aged just eight to 10. In their brightly coloured shalwar kameez – freshly pressed for the occasion – they giggled, not sure what to make of the TV cameras and flashes.
Hopping nervously from foot to foot, Faizil, recited the story of what had happened to them.
The mullah at his mosque told them the bomb would not kill them, he said, only infidels. He would survive and be given money for his family.
We met them later at the juvenile detention centre in Kabul. The story in the news conference had had a slightly rehearsed quality. We wanted to check if it was true.
“We didn’t know about suicide attacks at all. We believed what our mullah told us”
Nyaz Eight-year-old recruit
Sitting on a wooden bench in a room with bars on the windows, they answered a string of questions from me.
“There was a mullah in the village mosque who encouraged us to go for jihad,” said Ghulam, who told me he was nine-and-a-half.
“He would always tell us to go to Afghanistan, wear a suicide vest and blow it up to kill infidels.”
All four were friends from the same village of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. All four had been told the same story, that they would survive the bombing.
Eight-year-old Nyaz said: “We didn’t know about suicide attacks at all. We believed what our mullah told us.
“But when we got to the border we asked someone if it was right that after a suicide attack, you could survive. He said ‘no,’ so we asked a policeman to show us the bus that goes back to our home. But he arrested us.”
They said the mullah had put them on a bus to Afghanistan, telling them they would be picked up at the border by a Taliban contact; “a stylish man with shaved beard and short hair”. He would take them to be trained and given bombs.
“It was early morning when we went to the mosque to study. The mullah sent us directly to the bus station.
A 14-year-old girl, flanked by her father, declares her desire for martyrdom, in a recording by the Taliban
“He didn’t allow us to go back home once and he even didn’t allow us to have breakfast,” said Ghulam.
So they hadn’t told their families they were leaving, and didn’t know how to contact them now.
He thought of his mother worrying about him and he started to cry. So did the others.
A Taliban spokesman told me the children were telling lies fed to them by the Afghan authorities.
He said the Taliban’s constitution forbade using anyone under 18, “without beard”, being used for military operations.
The children seemed credible to me. Over two hours of discussion, their stories remained consistent, with lots of detail.
One of the little boys told me that after their arrest, one of the policemen had taken him to a room, put a gun to his head and attempted to rape him, before some other policemen arrived to stop it.
They were also upset because a guard had thrown their hats on the roof of the detention centre, where they could not get them.
In the news conference, we were told they were aged 12-14, but they all maintained they were much younger.
Twelve is the age of criminal responsibility in Afghanistan. The prosecutor is deciding what to do with them now. They may be charged with intending to carry out a crime, which would mean they wouldn’t see their families for a long time.
Where does this sad story fit into the post-Osama Bin Laden narrative in Afghanistan?
During the long years of the anti-Soviet jihad, there were no suicide bombings here.
“Martyrdom operations” were brought to Afghanistan by al-Qaeda. It is now a tactic the Taliban have made their own. That is part of Osama Bin Laden’s legacy here.
The Afghan intelligence services say so many bombings are being carried out that the insurgents have to recruit child “martyrs”. To Afghan officials, this shows how close the Taliban are to al-Qaeda, in ideology, and perhaps in organisation too.
The Americans still hope the Taliban – or part of it – can be split off from al-Qaeda.
A peace deal might then be possible because – so the argument goes – the Taliban could return to Afghanistan without bringing al-Qaeda with them.
A negotiated settlement may be the only way to end this war. But many Afghans are worried about the cost of such a deal.
Amrullah Saleh, the former Afghan intelligence chief, organised a rally of several thousand people opposed to talks with the Taliban.
He told me afterwards: “We want dignified peace. We don’t want the massive aspirations of the anti-Taliban constituency, which is not ethnic, to be undermined by talking to the Taliban.”
He went on: “If we see the national interest of Afghanistan undermined, and we see our people are pushed again into margins through a deal, we would prefer a dignified resistance than a disgraceful peace.
“I want to become a martyr. I want to take revenge on the Americans, Jews and Christians”
Anonymous recruit Aged 14
“That would be peace by name but in reality would be the end and death of a pluralistic Afghanistan.”
So far, anyway, the Taliban show no signs of coming in.
They put out a video at the weekend. Half a dozen fighters paraded with their weapons and one read a statement. Osama Bin Laden’s blood would “nourish the sapling of jihad in Afghanistan,” he said.
Another video was passed to us this week. It was discovered in a raid on a Taliban safe house in southern Afghanistan.
A girl in a burka sits in a darkened room.
“I want to become a martyr,” she says. “I want to take revenge on the Americans, Jews and Christians. I won’t leave any Westerners on this sacred land.”
She was just 14 years old, we were told. And by her side sat her father.
“My daughter wants to carry out a suicide attack because infidels have invaded our country,” he said.
The cameraman was from the Taliban and can be heard prompting her replies. They shot the same answers from three different angles.
It was the raw footage for a “martyrdom video” to be used after an attack. The intelligence source who supplied the tape said the girl on it had already blown herself up.
There will be many more such videos. Whatever Osama Bin Laden’s death means, it will not bring the rapid end of the war in Afghanistan.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
