A FORMER United States marine who had sex with a 12-year-old British girl after grooming her on the internet has been deported.

Toby Studabaker, 35, was sentenced to four-and-a-half years imprisonment in April 2004 after he pleaded guilty to child abduction and inciting a child to commit gross indecency.

Studabaker now faces four charges in the US of sexually exploiting the same girl, from the Greater Manchester area.

He flew to Paris with the girl after an arranged meeting at Manchester Airport in July 2003. The following night they drank vodka in a hotel before having sex in their room.

After an international manhunt, the pair travelled to Strasbourg and then Stuttgart, Germany. The girl flew back to Manchester four days after leaving the country and Studabaker was arrested in Frankfurt on the same day. Studabaker, from Michigan, could not be charged with unlawful sex or rape as he is not a British citizen and the intercourse took place abroad.

A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said: “Toby Studabaker will face trial in the US for four charges brought under Michigan and Chicago state law.”

At his sentencing, Manchester Crown Court heard Studabaker met the girl on a website aimed at children and struck up an e-mail relationship with her.

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For Pok Rui Bin, 29, drinking Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 after 12-hour workdays in Beijing means mixing it with green tea. The advertising copywriter’s cocktail of choice is just one of many regional recipes that Global Managing Director Mike Keyes is getting used to now that his brand is available in 135 countries. What appeals to Pok about the Tennessee whiskey, he says, is the smooth smoky flavor, “and how it’s hand-crafted and all comes from this one special place…I love that American West stuff.”

Allowances can be made for Pok’s poor sense of direction, and for the green tea mixer, since he’s never been to the U.S. But he has been to the Jack Daniel’s Web site, which is translated into 14 languages. The lifting of trade barriers in several countries, a weakening U.S. dollar, and the spread of cocktail culture to cities such as Beijing, Sofia, Moscow, and New Delhi have been pushing the whiskey brand’s export sales by double digits. And though several brands closely identified with America—like Marlboro («www.businessweek.com»), Starbucks («www.businessweek.com»), McDonald’s («www.businessweek.com»), and American Express («www.businessweek.com»)—have been lightning rods for anti-U.S. sentiment overseas, American whiskey has remained so immune that parent company Brown-Forman («www.businessweek.com») expects to sell more than 4.8 million cases abroad next year, marking the first time since its founding in 1866 that more Old No. 7 will be poured abroad than in the U.S. Overseas Whiskey Lovers

After losing favor and showing almost no growth in the 1980s and into the 90s, whiskey sales, especially of premium and superpremium whiskeys, have been steadily climbing in the U.S.—at the expense of cheaper brands and beer. The drinking tastes of Generations X and Y are proving to be different from those of baby boomers. And that trend is found abroad, too. In Moscow, for example, bar managers say that the younger nightclub set increasingly prefers American whiskey to vodka or the more familiar Scotch whisky.

Pavel Kamakin, bar manager of the Moscow nightclub 16 Tonn, hosted a Jack Daniel’s birthday concert and party earlier this month as part of a promotion by the local distributor. Kamakin says Jack is a close second in popularity to Jameson Irish Whiskey. And, he adds, customers who plan to drink a lot like those brands for their smoothness over the “hotter” Scotch whisky and ubiquitous vodka. Jack Daniel’s sales are up 41% from five years ago, to 45,000 cases.

In general, overseas markets have been good to all American whiskey. Fortune Brands’ («www.businessweek.com») Jim Beam Kentucky Bourbon, Jack Daniel’s nearest rival, saw global sales reach nearly 6 million cases, with 45% of that consumed abroad. Fortune’s Maker’s Mark premium bourbon has shown double-digit growth for 13 straight years, with a growing following outside the U.S. But Jack Daniel’s is the first major brand to become a majority exporter. A Strong Brand Story

While a weak dollar has helped, overseas pricing still makes Jack Daniel’s a premium pour, especially compared with local brands. A key growth feeder is “the consistency of the brand’s story,” as reflected in Jack Daniel’s marketing of its small-town roots, says Allyson Stewart-Allen, a director of International Marketing Partners, who studies international brand performance. That, says, Stewart-Allen, is also one of the reasons Jack Daniel’s has ducked overseas backlash against brands that are overtly American: “Jack Daniel’s is less likely to experience boycotting from overseas markets because of the way it has played on the values of craftsmanship and intimacy via its use of small-town America visuals, in other words, the heartland of the U.S.”

Automaker BMW is Germany’s most admired employer and a pioneer in profit sharing. So it came as a shock Sept. 30 when an investigative television documentary exposed the Nazi-era misdeeds of BMW’s controlling shareholder family, the Quandts. The Silence of the Quandt Family highlighted how patriarch Gьnther Quandt, grandfather to the generation now controlling BMW («www.businessweek.com»), built a blood-stained wartime fortune on the back of slave labor and how he sidestepped postwar recrimination.

The reclusive Quandt family responded to the documentary five days later, on Oct. 5, pledging to back a research project into the family’s Nazi past and its role under the Third Reich, opening family archives and documents to an independent historian. Testimony from Former Slave Laborers

“The accusations that have been raised against our family have moved us,” said the family in a statement. “We recognize that in our history as a German business family, the years 1933 to 1945 have not been sufficiently cleared up.” BMW, which was taken over by the Quandts after the war, was not implicated in the documentary and made no comment about the allegations.

The program stunned Germany and triggered a raft of newspaper stories with headlines such as “The Quandts’ Bloody Billions” and “A Fortune Stained in Blood.” The hour-long documentary included interviews with former slave laborers who testified to the devastating conditions and atrocities which took place at Gьnther Quandt’s battery company, Accumulatorenfabrik AG (Afa). Afa produced highly specialized batteries for the Nazi war machine, used in U-boats and V-2 rockets. It also produced munitions. “We were treated terribly and had to drink water from the toilets. We were also whipped,” said Takis Mylopoulos, a forced laborer who worked in Quandt’s Hannover plant.

Based on documents unearthed by the filmmakers, Quandt estimated a “fluctuation of 80 prisoners per month,” in his battery factory—a likely reference to expected deaths per month, the film claims. It also says that Quandt, who joined the Nazi party in 1933, wielded close family ties to the Nazi elite to grow his battery business. Sven Quandt, a grandson of Gьnther and the only family member to appear in the documentary, says that he and his siblings cannot be held responsible for their grandfather’s activities. Quandts Rejected Pleas for Reparations

Afa had factories in Hannover, Berlin, and Vienna and was supplied with slave laborers from concentration camps who died by the hundreds, according to the documentary. One former Danish slave laborer testified in the film that he and other survivors, who were deported to a German concentration camp and sent to work at Afa, returned to Germany in 1972 to plead for financial support from the Quandts, since the harsh working conditions at Afa had resulted in lifelong ailments.

The Quandts turned them away, the film says. “It’s for me a step in the right direction that the Quandt family, after so many decades, finally is willing to face its history,” says Carl-Adolf Sцrensen, a former Danish resistance fighter who was sent to the Hannover-Stцcken concentration camp in 1943. Sцrensen wants the Quandts to admit that Afa relied on slave labor from the camp. Escaping Justice

The Silence of the Quandt Family was broadcast by Norddeutsche Runkfunk (NDR), an affiliate of the national ARD network, and was based on five years of research by authors Eric Friedler and Barbara Siebert. It premiered at the Hamburg Film Festival on Sept. 30 and was aired without notice on television later that night, at 11:30 p.m., reaching an estimated audience of 1.3 million. Some German commentators surmise the broadcast was not announced in advance for fear of legal interference from the Quandts to block the program. ARD officials denied the speculation and said they decided to air the program only after the Film Festival premiere.