US lawmakers have reacted angrily after the US military awarded a US$35 billion aircraft deal to Europe's Northrop Grumman/EADS group, in a major blow to US manufacturers Boeing.
"It's stunning to me that we would outsource the production of these airplanes to Europe," Senator Sam Brownback said. "I'll be calling upon the secretary of defense for a full debriefing."
The US Defense Department announced on Friday that it was awarding the deal for a fleet of in-flight refueling craft to the Northrop Grumman/EADS team.
The surprise choice of EADS marks the European group's entry into the lucrative US defense market, where so far it had had only a marginal presence.
Boeing voiced strong disappointment and said it would ask for an explanation.
While European political and industry leaders have hailed the decision, many Republicans have been left seething.
"We should have an American tanker built by an American company with American workers," Representative Todd Tiahrt said.
Boeing, the second leading US defense contractor after Lockheed Martin, had been considered the favorite for the contract.
The contract for the newly named tanker, the KC-45, is one of the largest Pentagon contracts in recent years and the first order on a tanker valued at more than US$100 billion in more than 30 years.
Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman and EADS will provide up to 179 tankers.
The stunning victory for EADS comes as its chief executive Louis Gallois seeks to build up the company's presence in the defense sector, judged to be less cyclical than civil aeronautics.
Gallois said the contract was a "great subject of pride" for the company and would "encourage it to pursue its strategy in the United States."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy's spokesman David Martinon said Sarkozy had called Gallois "to pay homage to this historic success."
Airbus will assemble the tankers in Mobile, Alabama, and has vowed to transfer assembly of its commercial 330 aircraft there, creating jobs.
Alabama Senator Richard Shelby welcomed the decision.
The contract was expected to bring up to 1,800 jobs to the Mobile area and 5,000 to the state, he said.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has