A French court has jailed the Algerian singer Cheb Mami for five years for abducting a former partner and forcing her to undergo an attempted abortion.

Cheb Mami, whose real name is Mohammed Khalifati, was found guilty at a trial in Bobigny, a Parisian suburb.

He had denied the charges, telling the court that he had been “manipulated” by his entourage.

The singer is credited with bringing Algeria’s popular Rai folk music to an international audience.

The maximum sentence was 10 years and the prosecution had asked for seven.

Prosecutors had said that Cheb Mami was one of a group who abducted and beat the woman, a French photographer, in the Algerian capital, Algiers, in 2005.

Still pregnant

They said she came to Algeria believing she was on a business trip, a few days after telling Cheb Mami, 42, that she was pregnant.

Cheb Mami expressed remorse during the trial, pictured in this court sketch

She said that she was drugged and taken to a villa in Algiers. There, three people tried to perform an abortion.

On her return to France, she discovered she was still pregnant and later gave birth to a daughter, now aged three.

France issued an international arrest warrant for Cheb Mami after he skipped bail in Paris in May 2007 and fled to Algeria.

He returned to Paris on Monday, saying he wanted to attend the trial, and was arrested at Orly airport.

He had denied involvement in the attempted abortion and said he was being persecuted because he was a successful Arab star.

The star showed no emotion as the verdict was read out.

But during the trial he had expressed remorse and asked for the woman’s forgiveness.

He broke down in tears and admitted making a “serious mistake” but said he did not love the woman and felt “trapped” when she told him she was pregnant.

Cheb Mami blamed his former manager Michel Lecorre - also known as Michel Levy - saying he was behind the plot.

“I was in a panic and I agreed,” he said. “I did nothing to stop him.”

Michel Lecorre was sentenced to four years for plotting and organising the assault.

The court also issued arrest warrants for two of the singer’s aides, Hicham Lazaar and Abdelkader Lallali.

They were convicted in absentia of involvement in the case and were sentenced to three and six years in jail respectively.

A rogue trader at a London oil broker caused his employer to lose $10m (£6m) after making unauthorised trades.

PVM Oil Futures said it was a “victim of unauthorised trading” on Tuesday, 30 June, and said it was now conducting a full investigation.

The rogue trader, believed to be Steve Perkins, has been suspended.

PVM said it had informed the Financial Services Authority and the InterContinental Exchange (ICE), the location for much European oil trade.

Firms have systems to pick up oddities and anomalies… The question is how fast were they able to get on top of it and deal with it Nick McGregor, Redmayne Bentley

The trades are thought to have caused a jump in the price of Brent crude oil on Tuesday. PVM said it was now conducting business as normal.

“As a result of a series of unauthorised trades, substantial volumes of futures contracts were held by PVM. When this was discovered, the positions were closed in an orderly fashion. PVM suffered a loss totalling a little under $10m,” the company said in a statement.

“There are a range of procedures that are followed to look at trading patterns, price movement and levels of activity,” explained David Peniket, the president of ICE Futures Europe, which trades futures and energy and commodity contracts.

“It will investigate and follow up, and where appropriate, action will be taken,” he added.

Rogue trade

On Tuesday morning, the price of Brent crude rose about $2 a barrel in the space of an hour, hitting $73.50 a barrel before reversing sharply in volatile trade.

In that time, contracts for 16 million barrels of oil changed hands - 32 times the normal level - equivalent to double the daily production of Saudi Arabia.

OTHER ROGUE TRADES June 2008 - Morgan Stanley loses £79m after London-based trader Matthew Piper is found to have deliberately mis-priced trades in the credit markets Feb 2008 - Unnamed employee at US trading giant MF Global loses his company more than $140m (£86m) after placing unauthorised bets on the future direction of wheat prices Jan 2008 - Jerome Kerviel costs French bank Societe Generale 4.9bn euros ($6.9bn; £4.2bn) after he makes unauthorised and incorrect bets on market movements

By the time PVM sold the futures contracts the trader had bought, the price had fallen, which is why PVM booked losses of $10m, Nick McGregor at Redmayne Bentley told the BBC.

“In the very small hours, while volumes are relatively low during Asian trading because most of London is asleep, an awful lot of business went through and as it turns out it all came from the same source,” Mr McGregor said.

“This all happened within an hour at about two o’clock in the morning, and of course in a thin market at that sort of time, it doesn’t take an awful lot to move the price.”

With volume so thin, the trade stood out, which is why the “rogue trade” has emerged so quickly, he added.

“Firms have systems to pick up oddities and anomalies, but of course at two o’clock in the morning, I am sure it rang a little bell. The question is how fast were they able to get on top of it and deal with it,” he said.

Oil is the world’s most heavily traded commodity, with trading centred on the ICE in London and the New York Mercantile Exchange or Nymex.

Brokerages like PVM place orders on behalf of large banks and hedge funds.

On Friday morning, Brent crude oil hovered above $66 a barrel in light holiday trading.

Sri Lanka spinner Muttiah Muralitharan will miss the first Test with Pakistan after hurting his knee while fielding during a practice session on Thursday.

Off-spinner Suraj Kaluhalmulla and left-arm spinner Rangana Herath have been brought in as replacements.

“I was hoping to play but when (physio) Tommy Simsek saw the scans we realised I needed to rest,” said Muralitharan.

Security is high in Sri Lanka with the Galle Test coming four months after a terror attack on the team in Pakistan.

The terrorist ambush outside the Gadaffi Stadium in Lahore killed six police officers and a driver and saw seven Sri Lanka players wounded.

One of those players was batsman Thilan Samaraweera, who scored two consecutive double-hundreds during the tour.

606: DEBATE Have your say on Pakistan’s tour of Sri Lanka

A bullet lodged in Samaraweera’s thigh during the attack, raised concerns for his cricket future, but new Sri Lanka captain Kumar Sangakkara says Samaraweera has fully recovered and has prepared well for the series, which starts on Saturday.

“He has made a good return to cricket,” said Sangakkara.

“He has played in some practice matches. We are enthusiastically looking forward to see him play in the first Test.”

Opening batsman Tharanga Paranavitana, who sustained a chest wound in the attack, will also be taking part in an international match for the first time since the ambush.

The risk of him tearing his tendon in the first Test is very high Sri Lanka captain Kumar Sangakkara

The Test at the Galle International Stadium in Sri Lanka will be the first time the pair have faced each other on the Asian subcontinent since the attack, although they did meet in the final of the ICC World Twenty20 at Lord’s in England last month.

Pakistan won that clash, overhauling Sri Lanka’s total of 138-6 with eight balls remaining.

Sangakkara said he was hopeful that Muralitharan, who has taken a record 770 Test and 505 one-day wickets, would be available for the second Test on 12 July.

“The risk of him tearing his tendon in the first Test is very high,” said Sangakkara.

“I don’t think we want to risk him getting injured for a long time just for the sake of one Test. Hopefully he will be fit by the second Test.”

The two countries are scheduled to play five one-day internationals and a Twenty20 match after the three-Test series.

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Sri Lanka (from): Kumar Sangakkara (capt), Malinda Warnapura, Tharanga Paranavitana, Mahela Jayawardene, Thilan Samaraweera, Tillakaratne Dilshan, Angelo Mathews, Chamara Kapugedera, Ajantha Mendis, Rangana Herath, Suraj Mohamed, Thilan Thushara, Nuwan Kulasekera, Dhammika Prasad, Kaushal Silva, Suranga Lakmal.

Pakistan (from): Younus Khan (capt), Salman Butt, Khurram, Manzoor, Mohammad Yousuf, Misbah-ul-Haq, Shoaib Malik, Kamran Akmal, Umar Gul, Saeed Ajmal, Mohammad Aamer, Danish Kaneria, Abdul Razzaq, Abdur Rauf, Fawad Alam, Faisal Iqbal.

The social networking site Facebook has come under fire for planned changes to its privacy settings.

It wants to “simplify” the process so users only have to set them once, instead of for each individual feature.

Facebook says the change will help people share more information with one another.

However, critics argue the new set up could lead to members being persuaded to share too many personal details - their date of birth for example.

Tom Royal is from Computeractive magazine.

He said: “I’m a little bit worried about the settings recommended by Facebook because as far as I can see it’s actually sharing quite a lot of information with quite a few people.

“That’s not something we’d advise people to do. We’d very much recommend people choose the ‘limited’ option instead.

‘One size fits all’

“For example, just your date of birth can be a security question for lots of internet applications.”

Facebook argues a ‘one size fits all’ approach will make things more straightforward for users.

“The effect of more and more settings has made controlling privacy on Facebook too complicated,” according to the site’s chief privacy officer Chris Kelly.

It’s also phasing out regional networks like London and Manchester because Kelly says “they don’t adequately reflect a world where people choose the audience they want to share with”.

The number of people using Facebook has risen above the 20 million mark this year in the UK.

It is the most popular social networking site in the world, with 200 million members globally.

A majority of public sector employees do not know about environmentally friendly IT targets set out in government’s Greening ICT Strategy.

The strategy calls for government IT to be carbon neutral by 2012, with office carbon emissions down 11.5% by 2011.

One of the commissioners of the report says there are scattered trends toward compliance with the strategy.

However, a survey of IT managers in the public sector showed 60% did not know there were any targets to aim for.

The report, titled “The Path to Green Government”, was produced by environmental charity Global Action Plan and commissioned by networking giant Cisco.

It is estimated that information and communication technology (ICT) accounts for one-fifth of the Government’s carbon emissions. The Greening ICT Strategy was intended to put the government in a leadership role in the sustainable use of ICT.

A large proportion of carbon emissions can be blamed on the manufacture of new equipment, so a principal focus of the initiative is to make the best use of existing equipment.

However, there is more to the plan once procurement is slimmed down, according to Cisco’s head of public sector Neil Crockett.

“There is another, much bigger debate about how ICT can enable other things to happen, like building management, travel reduction, flexible working,” he said.

‘Pockets of excellence’

The Global Action Plan study was conducted by direct surveys of ICT managers in the public sector - local and national government, education, healthcare and so on - as well as a questionnaire in the magazine Computer Weekly.

Some 60% of respondents said that they were unaware of the Greening ICT Strategy, and among those who were aware, nearly one-third said that they had made no changes to their own ICT usage and procurement, and had no plans to make any such changes.

The problem, according to Global Action Plan director Trewin Restorick, is poor collaboration and knowledge sharing across the sector.

government electricity usage is continuing to rise, and it is likely that one of the big reasons for this is the proliferation of computers, laptops, chargers, lobby televisions and the air conditioning of server rooms Rebecca Willis, Sustainable Development Commission

“What we saw was pockets of excellence, areas where the public sector is making both cash savings and carbon savings through smarter use of ICT,” he told BBC News.

“But what we discovered was that those pockets of activity tended not to be part of a wider strategy within the public sector. They were very much piecemeal initiatives, which suggests they were being driven by keen individuals.”

One straightforward route to knowledge sharing is that between IT managers and those who pay for the energy that the equipment consumes; more than two-thirds of respondents said that they were neither responsible for paying for the energy, nor did they see the bill.

Less than half had calculated their department’s “carbon footprint”.

“For an ICT manager, if they’re not paying the energy bills - which are both volatile and going up - they have no interest in knowing what the long term impact of the product is,” he said. “So you get managers buying stuff without thinking about utilising the assets they’ve got.”

While the longer term goal to ameliorate the effects of climate change are a driving force for compliancy, in 2010 the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs’ Carbon Reduction Commitment scheme will come into effect.

Under the scheme, each large private sector business and public sector organisation will tally up its carbon emissions, with a price tag of 12 pounds per tonne of emissions. Organisation will be placed into league tables; depending on where they fit, they will or will not get the money back.

The concern is that public sector money can, if the sector performs badly, be siphoned off into the private sector - a loss both in monetary and in ideological terms.

“‘Health service money goes to Tesco’s’ is not a great headline,” said Mr Restorick.

Groundswell

Catalina McGregor, government deputy champion of the Cabinet Office’s CIO/CTO Council Green ICT Delivery Group, said a report from her office due for release in late August will comprehensively detail how each department is doing in unprecedented detail, from intelligence departments all the way to museums.

While its results are mixed, she told BBC News that signs of progress were widespread and that Mr Restorick’s assessment may be a bit wide of the mark.

Lots of firms spend money to keep their servers cool

“I’m a little gun-shy to say that folk aren’t working well together, because they are,” she said. “It’s very rare that something central is taken up by local [offices] to this extent on a voluntary basis. It’s true that there are no ‘big sticks’, no incentives, no budgets; but there is a groundswell of support for the green ICT programme.”

Rebecca Willis, vice chair of the government’s green watchdog the Sustainable Development Commission, pointed out that despite commitments from government, signs of overall change were still lacking.

“The Greening ICT Strategy is an encouraging step towards making government IT more sustainable,” she told BBC News.

“However, government electricity usage is continuing to rise, and it is likely that one of the big reasons for this is the proliferation of computers, laptops, chargers, lobby televisions and the air conditioning of server rooms. It’s clear that ambition levels need to be raised.”

Tickets for a public memorial service for Michael Jackson in Los Angeles on Tuesday will be available via the internet, organisers have revealed.

Details were announced by AEG Live, the star’s promoter, which owns the Staples Center where the service will be held.

Eleven thousand free tickets are to be issued for the service.

Fans wishing to attend must register at staplescenter.com for their tickets and names will later be chosen at random, it was announced.

The star had been rehearsing for his London concerts at the Staples Center, in central Los Angeles.

In a press conference, family representative Ken Sunshine said they wanted to accommodate as many fans as possible.

“It is all about the fans,” he said.

Some UK embassy staff detained in Tehran and accused of inciting protests after disputed elections will face trial, a top Iranian cleric says.

Guardians Council chief Ahmad Jannati said: “Naturally they will be put on trial, they have made confessions.”

Nine embassy staff were held in Tehran last weekend. Britain says all but two have now been freed.

EU governments are to summon Iranian ambassadors to protest against the detention of the embassy staff.

An EU official told the BBC that, in addition, visas for Iranians holding Iranian diplomatic passports would be suspended.

The official said other measures, including the withdrawal of EU ambassadors from Iran, would be considered if the two British embassy staff were not released.

After the election, the enemy could not stand people’s joy and made an effort to poison the people Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati Britain and Iran’s fraught history

Protests gripped Tehran and other Iranian cities after June’s presidential election, amid claims the vote had been rigged in favour of the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Guardians Council - Iran’s supreme legislative body, which Ayatollah Jannati heads - on Monday ratified the disputed result, following a partial recount.

‘Velvet revolution’ plan

Ayatollah Jannati did not say how many employees would be tried or on what charges.

“In these incidents, their embassy had a presence, some people were arrested,” he told the thousands of worshippers at Friday prayers, according to news agencies.

Ayatollah Jannati said on Friday: “After the election, the enemy could not stand people’s joy. The enemy made an effort to poison the people. They had planned a velvet revolution before the election.”

He said the UK Foreign Office had warned of possible “street riots” around the 12 June election and had advised its nationals to avoid public places.

BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says Ayatollah Jannati’s speech marks a significant deterioration in the already bad relationship between London and Tehran.

‘Deeply concerned’

Tehran has repeatedly accused foreign powers - especially Britain and the US - of stoking unrest after the election.

Britain has protested strongly against the arrests and rejected the Iranian allegations as baseless.

IRAN UNREST 12 June presidential election saw incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad re-elected with 63% of vote Main challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi called for result to be annulled for electoral fraud Street protests saw at least 17 people killed and foreign media restricted Your questions answered Q&A: Election aftermath How Iran is ruled Who’s who in Iran Send us your comments

In the fallout from the crisis, Tehran expelled two British diplomats and the UK responded with a similar measure.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Britain was urgently seeking clarification from Iran about a possible trial and remained “deeply concerned” about the two staff members in detention.

“We are confident that our staff have not engaged in any improper or illegal behaviour,” he said.

Five of the nine employees were reportedly released on Monday and Iranian state media said on Wednesday it had freed three more, but British and EU officials say two remain in custody.

Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported this week that one of the detainees had played a “remarkable role during the recent unrest in managing it behind the scenes”.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last month described Britain, as the “most evil” of its enemies.

The issue of how to deal with Iran is set to dominate the summit of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised nations in Italy next week.

Some EU countries have urged caution, arguing that Europe should engage with Iran, not isolate it.

But if the embassy staff are put on trial, the EU may have few other options than to tighten the diplomatic screw, correspondents say.

Library ballot boxes

Meanwhile, the governor of one of Iran’s biggest cities, Shiraz, has denied reports that a number of sealed ballot boxes in its main library contained votes from last month’s election.

Ebrahim Azizi said the boxes were from previous polls and that the interior ministry had ordered they be archived there.

Earlier this week, an Iranian journalist posted pictures on the internet of several ballot boxes sitting on the floor of the library.

Historians say the distrust between the UK and Iran stems from the 1800s, when Iran - then Persia - was forced to concede territory to Russia in a treaty drafted by a British diplomat.

In more modern times, British operatives backed a CIA-organised coup in 1953 against an elected Iranian government.

In 2007, Iran seized 15 British navy personnel on patrol in waters between Iraq and Iran and held them for 12 days, during which time they were paraded on national television.

Britain is also among the most vocal opponents of Iran’s nuclear programme, saying its aim is to develop atomic weapons, a claim denied by Tehran.

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