But...
- by the end of March, we learnt that "A senior Brazilian government source said Rousseff will decide on which fighter jet to choose after her trip to India, her visit to Washington in April, and the French presidential election in May." Source : AFP
- The newspaper La Folha de Sao Paulo stated that Brasil may link its order to the Indian's so as to get commercial advantages... but this information has been denied by the Indian MoD. This interesting since later, other sources also claimed that Indian offered to share some information with Brazil... Wait and see.
- A&C has published an article with picture from GoogleEarth showing the accuracy of Scalp EG employed to destroy the Al Jufra airbase in Libya. Thanks to Olybrius on MP.net, you can see the pictures there.
- In the previous message, we had reported (thanks to Shiv Aroor), that an MP had asked for an inquiry in the Rafale selection process in India. The Minister of Defence AK Antony has agreed, hence the negotiations are temporarily blocked.
- The website Mer & Marine has published an article about the beginning of the Rafale M F1 retrofit : the operation has costed € 300M, will take 18 months per Rafale, and the aircraft should reintegration operational service between 2014 and 2017 under the F3 standard.
- Alain Bernard, the gold-winning Olympic swimmer, who's also a gendarme, has been offered a flight onboard the Rafale... How lucky him ! :-D
More to come...
Tmor,
ReplyDeleteWith respect to point no.4, It's a misconception that negotiations between the Indian government and Dassault have been blocked. There has been no such statement from the government-what you see is spin from the usual suspects-
"Antony, however, made it clear that the contract negotiation committee would proceed with its work even as the probe takes its own course."
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-04-12/india/31330579_1_rafale-antony-finance-ministry
This is the last line of a recent report by the Times of India. If this was a real criminal misconduct investigation, the tender itself would have been shelved; what is happening is a routine bureaucratic review. Nothing more.
Thanks for your comment, Justin P.
DeleteI didn't see it before. Hopefully, people read the comments !