According to the BBC he Ford Motor Company has said in a letter to it’s employees at their Southampton UK plant that future Ford Transit production was “under review” and may be cut in half and/or moved abroad.

Ford at Southampton employs about 1350 people and produces over 70,000 Ford Transit vans a year.

The Transit has long been the staple van in use for light haulage and multi-drop deliveries in the UK beating off most competition and having a reputation pretty-good reliability in the face of constant ‘misuse’.

Ford has been making the Transit at Southampton since 1971 and is largely supplied with body panel pressing from Frod at Dagenham so I’d guess there could be a possibility of jobs being at risk there too. Aparently, the current rumour suggests 50% of production could be moved to Turkey.

It seems that Turkey has blocked access for it’s citizens to Youtube (again).

As with the block on the 7th of March, it looks like it could be Greek/Turkish trolls getting into a flamewar which has caused the Turkish courts to mandate a block.

The Turkish courts do not seem aware of internet trolls and how you are not supposed to feed them.

In Turkey itself, making fun of the state is a criminal offence and can be punished by imprisonment.

Apparently, the block is being actuated by Turkish ISPs using DNS to send an alternate landing page. Until the block is lifted, the Turkish people will be having to utilise proxies outside the country or possibly making a connection by one of the head-end youtube IP addresses.

Thankfully the Turkish ISPs have better prudence than to use the blocking methods of the Pakistan ISPs which broke the DNS trust model and severed youtube access for many other countries for several hours.

The last ban was lifted after 3 days when youtube contacted the Turkish courts with proof that the alleged offending video had been removed.