Two a penny

.Unseeded Frenchman Michael Llodra has pulled off an upset at the ATP Open 13 tournament in Marseille, beating top seed and world number eight Robin Soderling of Sweden 7-6 (7-2), 6-4.
“Against this kind of player you have to seize every opportunity, which I think I managed to do,” the 29-year-old said after the quarter-final match. After winning the first set, I knew he would be nervous.
“I made a lot of effort to come back and win the tie-break.”
Llodra, who beat Cypriot Marcos Baghdatis in the previous round, will play Germany’s unseeded Mischa Zverev in the last four after he beat 19-year-old Frenchman Guillaume Rufin 7-5, 6-7 (4-/7), 6-3. So I took this opportunity to break in the second set.
That means a repeat of last year’s Tsonga-Llodra final remains very much a possibility.
World number 10 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga also came through his quarter-final against Ukraine’s Illya Marchenko, winning 6-3, 6-4.
The 24-year-old’s powerful serve was in full working order and after taking the first set 6-3 he sewed up victory in one hour and 34 minutes.
Current title-holder Tsonga broke Marchenko’s serve in the fourth game of the first set to lead 3-1.
“Even if I didn’t play well, I’m glad I won.
“Against him (Marchenko), you have to be focused all the time because as soon as you drop your game, he immediately takes advantage,” Tsonga said.”
In the other all-French quarter-final, eighth seed Julien Benneteau beat third-seeded world number 13 Gael Monfils 6-3, 7-5.
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.Yvo de Boer, head of the UN’s climate change convention, will resign as of July 1, his office announced.
De Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will join the consultancy group KPMG as global adviser on climate and sustainability and work with a number of universities, the UNFCCC secretariat said.
The announcement came nearly two months after the Copenhagen summit on climate change, seen even by its supporters as a disappointment and by its critics as a chaotic failure. .
The UNFCCC, an offshoot of the 1992 Rio summit, gathers 194 nations in the search for combating the causes of man-made climate change and easing its effects.
“I believe the time is ripe for me to take on a new challenge, working on climate and sustainability with the private sector and academia,” he said.
In a statement Mr de Boer said it had been a “difficult decision” to step down.
“Copenhagen did not provide us with a clear agreement in legal terms, but the political commitment and sense of direction toward a low-emissions world are overwhelming.”
A Dutch national, Mr de Boer was appointed the UNFCCC’s executive secretary in September 2006.
“This calls for new partnerships with the business sector and I now have the chance to help make this happen.
Instead, after nearly two weeks of talks, the summit was only able to yield a general agreement on limiting warming to two degrees Celsius.
He had pinned hopes on a breakthrough in Copenhagen that would unlock a new treaty on climate change that would take effect after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol’s current pledges expire.
The document did not gain approval at a plenary session of the UNFCCC, and it has so far failed to gain the official endorsement of major developing emitters which helped to craft it.
The accord did not spell out the means for achieving this goal, and the pledges made under it are only voluntary.
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.New Manchester City recruit Patrick Vieira says he has a “100 per cent chance” of playing for France at next summer’s World Cup finals, despite having not represented his country since June 2009.
“As I’m an optimist, I’m going to say 100 per cent,” he said in response to a question about his chances of playing in South Africa on the Canal Football Club television show overnight.
“The desire is there, it’s my goal.”
Vieira, who has yet to play for his new club, admitted that he had received “no guarantees” from France coach Raymond Domenech, who he met shortly before Christmas, and conceded that the situation “is not as simple as that”. In my head, I don’t see myself missing the World Cup.
“You have to play, which is the important thing for me.
“But he said that as soon as I’m playing, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be selected,” said Vieira, whose last France appearance saw him captain Les Bleus to a 1-0 defeat against Nigeria in Saint-Etienne last June. I have five months.
He joined City from reigning Italian champion Inter Milan on January 8.”
Vieira, 33, was a member of the France team that won the 1998 World Cup and the 2000 European Championship and has 107 caps.
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.The International Automobile Federation (FIA) is to appeal a French court’s decision to overturn the lifetime ban on former Renault boss Flavio Briatore.
Briatore was let off the hook last week by the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris which found that the FIA sanction, imposed in September for allegedly ordering Nelson Piquet junior to crash at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, was illegal.
New FIA president Jean Todt, however, believes the world governing body has a case against the 59-year-old Italian and that an appeal is in order.
The scandal centred on driver Piquet junior’s claims that the team had ordered him to crash deliberately at Singapore to enable team-mate Fernando Alonso to go on and win.
The decision to appeal means the suspension against Briatore, and the five-year ban handed to the team’s former director of engineering Pat Symonds, remain in force.
He said that the French court’s decision “gives me back my dignity and the freedom which they arbitrarily tried to take away from me.
Briatore has denied all the accusations levelled against him and vowed to fight to clear his name.”
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.A French software engineer said on Friday he was claiming a world record for calculating Pi, the constant that has fascinated mathematicians for millennia.
Fabrice Bellard said he used an inexpensive desktop computer - and not a supercomputer used in past records - to calculate Pi to close toly 2.
That is around 123 billion digits more than the previous record set last August by Japanese professor Daisuke Takahashi, he said.7 trillion decimal places.577 billion digits.
Professor Takahashi, using a T2K Open Supercomputer, took 29 hours to crunch Pi to 2.
The gear cost “a bit less than 2,000 euros” ($3,123), Mr Bellard, who earns a living as a software consultant in digital television in Paris, said in an email exchange.
Mr Bellard took 131 days, comprising 103 for the computation in binary digits, 13 days for verification, 12 days to convert the binary digits to a base of 10 and three final days to check the conversion. The only unusual thing is that it has five 1.
“It is a completely standard PC. Mainstream PCs generally have only one 1-teraoctet disk.5-teraoctet hard disks.
Extracts of the 2,699,999,990,000-digit outcome have been published so that they can be compared to preceding records in order to gain independent verification, Mr Bellard said.”
Bellard has placed on his website details of the achievement, including the use of a high-powered mathematical engine called the Chudnovsky algorithm that chewed through the computation. .
Files containing the digits are also being offered to any outside organisation keen on hosting the record, he said..14159. in a string whose digits are believed never to repeat or end..
“Optimising these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge,” he said.
Bellard said he was “not especially interested” in Pi’s digits but more in taking up the gauntlet of writing the software to carry out the arithmetic.
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.French world number 10 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga has pulled out of the season-opening ATP event in Doha starting Monday with a wrist injury, organisers said Friday.
“I am really disappointed not to be able to participate in this tournament owing to a wrist injury. . I hope to be able to play in the future (in Doha) but for now I hope the tournament goes off well - Happy New Year to everyone,” Tsonga said in a statement.
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Murray has this season switched his opening week focus to Perth, Australia, as he bids for Hopman Cup glory alongside fellow Briton Laura Robson

.Sudanese journalist Lubna Ahmed Hussein says she has donned a full Islamic veil to sneak out of Sudan and travel to France, two months after she was freed from jail for wearing trousers.
On a visit to Paris to promote her new book, Ms Hussein accused Khartoum of trying to block her departure and said she was determined to exercise her right to travel freely.
“They wanted to prevent me from leaving; I resorted to the niqab and managed to leave,” said Ms Hussein, who was jailed for a day in September for violating Sudan’s clothing decency laws by wearing trousers.
“I did not flee Sudan.
“I requested documents to be able to leave, to be able to travel, and this is the only means I found to be able to leave Sudan,” she said. . I am a Sudanese citizen.
Ms Hussein faced a punishment of 40 lashes when she was convicted in July for wearing her green trousers in public.
After she refused to pay the fine, Ms Hussein served a one-day jail sentence.
But a Sudanese court in September ordered her to pay a fine instead, while 10 of the 12 other women arrested with her at a Khartoum restaurant on July 3 were lashed.
The Paris welcome for Ms Hussein came as France was debating measures to prohibit women from wearing the full Islamic veil, which President Nicolas Sarkozy has said is a symbol of women’s subservience.
More than 43,000 women were arrested last year in the Khartoum region by police tasked with enforcing Sudan’s laws on indecent clothing for women.
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The French government announced on Wednesday that within the next two weeks it will be pushing through new tax legislation to make it easier for French firms to attract Islamic financing as the country battles the global credit crunch.

Another tax reform, currently under review by the constitutional council, could allow Islamic sukuk bonds to be issued in France and the opening of Islamic retail banking services to French Muslims in 2010.

In the wake of the financial crisis and G20 call against opaque derivatives trading, French authorities are examining to tap into new sources of credit and offer investors an ethical alternative to traditional investment tools.

Besides implementing legal reforms, Paris argues that Islamic finance and traditional French finance have long shared an opposition to excessive risk-taking. .

Bank and borrower bonds

Islamic sharia law works by prohibiting riba - the payment of interest.

The principles we&rsquore fighting for are very well inscribed in Islamic finance, declared French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, during a major Islamic Finance Summit organised on Wednesday by The Economist Intelligence Unit. An Islamic bank purchases the product for the client instead of loaning him the money. The borrower pays off the loan in instalments with a fee for using the product until the total amount is repaid to the bank.

The bank and the client are in equal partnership, both sharing profit and loss with no fines or interest payments.

The emphasis that Islamic finance places on partnership, as well as the system’s preference for tangible assets, would provide a better link between the financial system and the real economy, according to Lagarde.

However, the bank asks the borrower for strict collateral in a bid to protect itself from default.

Paris vs London

The French government hopes to turn Paris - and not London - into the main Eurozone financial hub for Islamic finance by easing the flow of sharia-compliant investments.

Sharia-compliant funds are also deemed more transparent as they&rsquore required to keep a strict track of their investments to avoid financing immoral activities, such as gambling or alcohol businesses.

The onus is actually on Paris to level the playing field against competitors like London, Hong Kong, and Singapore, said Rushdi Siddiqui, a financial analyst and global head of Islamic finance at Thomson Reuters.

The onus is actually on Paris to level the playing field against competitors like London, Hong Kong, and Singapore, said Rushdi Siddiqui, a financial analyst and global head of Islamic finance at Thomson Reuters.

We used Islamic financing before, but it has now become a key element.

Investment capacity

French firms operating in Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrein or the United Arab Emirates have been quietly tapping into local Islamic financing for years.1 billion dollars of Islamic financing in our portfolio, explains Karel Breda, head of acquisitions, investment and financial advisory MENA (Middle East North Africa) at French utility giant GDF- Suez. We have about 1.

On the downside, Islamic banks have not proved immune to the global economic downturn.

Analysts say that a smaller amount of sharia-compliant funds reaches French firms in Paris, but that most investment deals are done discreetly as companies compete for financing sources.

The collapse of the real estate sector, especially in Dubai, has led to a sharp slump in their profitability and could further reduce Islamic investment in foreign markets like France. Some analysts argue that their investment capacity is overestimated.

banking - finance - Islam - Paris - Sharia
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Islamic banks would like to invest outside but they are already overwhelmed by huge infrastructure projects in their home market, warns GDF Suez Breda

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AFP- Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin confronted the star witness in his smear trial on Wednesday and angrily rejected charges that he plotted to damage Nicolas Sarkozy’s bid for the presidency in 2007.

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Villepin denies any wrongdoing but evidence offered on Monday by General Philippe Rondot, a former senior intelligence official, suggested that he was more involved in the case than he had previously admitted.0pt”Times New Roman”}

&raquo Special Report on France&#039s trial of the decade
&raquo Reporter&#039s notebook from the court
&raquo Who&#039s who in the trial
&raquo How a finance trial turned into a major political scandal
&raquo A glossary of terms in the Clearstream saga
&raquo From Ben Barka to Elf, justice turns a blind eye to political elites
The confrontation came on the ninth day of the mammoth Clearstream trial, in whichVillepin is accused of conspiring to defame Sarkozy by using falsified documents to implicate him in a corruption case.

The whole history of my relations with Nicolas Sarkozy shows that not only did I never try to get revenge but that I overlooked blows that were struck against me, he said.

The silver-haired Villepin, a bitter rival of Sarkozy when the two served in government together under former President Jacques Chirac, dismissed suggestions that he had been motivated by their mutual enmity.

I don’t mind people accusing me of a lot of things but rivalries, underhand blows, no.

The trial is based around a falsified set of lists that first surfaced in 2004, purportedly detailing accounts held at the Luxembourg-based securities clearing house Clearstream by dozens of prominent individuals, including Sarkozy. History shows it.

PLOT

The lists were later shown to be faked but Villepin, who was foreign and then interior minister at the time, is accused of having them passed anonymously to a magistrate investigating kickbacks on an arms sale even though he knew them to be bogus.

They were brought to Villepin’s attention by Jean-Louis Gergorin, a former executive of aerospace group EADS who had close links to intelligence services and who suggested that they might be linked to corruption and organised crime.

He says he asked Rondot to investigate the lists in January 2004 but that there was no suggestion that they might drag Sarkozy into any investigation.

Villepin, who risks five years in prison if found guilty of conspiring to use falsified documents to defame his rival, has said he was not initially aware that Sarkozy’s name was on the lists and did not at first realise they were faked.

However Rondot’s evidence on Monday suggested that, contrary to Villepin’s assertions, he was aware Sarkozy’s name was in the documents well before they were passed to the magistrate.

However Rondot’s evidence on Monday suggested that, contrary to Villepin’s assertions, he was aware Sarkozy’s name was in the documents well before they were passed to the magistrate. .

Rondot’s evidence was especially damaging because, unlike other evidence from prosecution witnesses, it was backed up by copious notes of his meeting with Villepin in January 2004.

I did not ask General Rondot to come that day with his notebooks and his little pencil to a meeting of conspirators.

You don’t plot, you don’t get involved in defamation when you are a politician on the basis of a request for an investigation to General Rondot, he said.

Clearstream trial - Dominique de Villepin - France
. That is not my conception of the Republic

.An 85-year-old West Australian man has died on an Air France flight from Paris to Singapore after the plane’s air-conditioning failed.
Melbourne passenger Ian Dunn told ABC Radio the plane was “insufferably hot” when they boarded in Paris and the pilot had trouble starting the engine.
He said a passenger became ill and the flight was diverted to Romania.
Mr Dunn says passengers were left to sit in the plane in 35 degree Celsius heat, with no food, before they were allowed to leave.
Attempts to revive the man on board the plane failed. .
“We were there on the plane for a further six hours and this heating situation just took over again, the plane just got hotter and hotter,” he said.
“Eventually after six hours, the pilot announced that fuelling had taken place and we would be off.”
Mr Dunn says the air-conditioner began working once the plane had taken off.
“Then he made several attempts to start the plane and eventually came back to us and said ‘I do not have sufficient power to start the engines’; they were his very words.