Two a penny

.Uunseeded Michael Llodra has cruised to his fourth career title, beating fellow Frenchman and doubles partner Julien Benneteau 6-3, 6-4 in the Marseille Open final.
Both men then combined to land the doubles title with a 6-4, 6-3 win against Austrian Julian Knowle and Swede Robert Lindstedt.
Llodra, 29, who lost to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in last year’s final, never looked in danger on serve against Benneteau, firing 14 aces including one on his first match point.
“After I lost in the final here last year I’m glad I managed to get over it,” Llodra said.
The world number 79 had only two break points in the match and converted both to win in an hour and 10 minutes. .
“I had set myself one aim this year and that was to win a tournament in France at last.
Eighth-seeded Benneteau battled for almost three hours to beat Tsonga in the semi-finals but refused to blame his loss on fatigue. I lost as a result of Michael Llodra,” he said.
“My previous matches have been tough and long but that is not the reason why I lost. I’ve had no break points.
“I can only say ‘hats off to him’ as he served extremely well.
Llodra had luck on his side when he broke serve in the first set thanks to a volley that hit the net before falling behind.
“It’s tough to end a tournament this way but I couldn’t do anything,” added the world number 39, who has yet to win an ATP title.
He looked in total control throughout and a superb backhand passing shot earned him another break in the second set.
He looked in total control throughout and a superb backhand passing shot earned him another break in the second set.
-

.Frenchman Julien Benneteau will seek to win the first tournament of his career after beating second seed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the semi-finals of the Open 13 tournament in Marseille.
Eighth-seeded Benneteau beat his compatriot Tsonga 7-6 (13-11), 5-7, 7-6 (7-3) in a fiercely contested match over two hours and 57 minutes.
Benneteau, who defeated world number one Roger Federer at the Paris Masters in November, will contest the fourth final of his career at the age of 28.
He will now face compatriot Michael Llodra, who prevailed 6-1, 7-6 (7-3) over German Mischa Zverev.
Tsonga levelled things up by winning the second set, battling back from 5-3 down to cancel out Benneteau’s advantage, but the world number 39 refused to be cowed and sewed up victory in a tense deciding tie-break.
Defending champion Tsonga broke first in the opening set but Benneteau fought back to take it to a tie-break that he eventually won after a titanic tussle.
“He makes fewer errors with his forehand.
“Julien has really improved,” said Tsonga, the world number nine.”
Benneteau enthused: “It was a great match, an intense battle. .
“But I’m proud to have held on until the end. I was afraid because I was leading 5-3 in the second set and I couldn’t see it out.
“I have to build on what I did here, where’ve I’ve gone after matches against players ranked higher than me. I’m not going to put crazy pressure on myself to win my first tournament though.”
-

.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.
-

.Leonardo Da Vinci’s remains are to be exhumed to allow scientists to establish whether the Mona Lisa is a disguised self-portrait.
Scientists and historians from Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage have sought permission to open the artist’s tomb in France’s Loire Valley.
They hope to find his skull which they can use to reconstruct his face to discover whether his famed masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, is in fact a self-portrait in disguise.
Scholars have suggested Da Vinci’s presumed homosexuality and love of riddles led him to paint himself as a woman.
Mystery has surrounded the identity of the Mona Lisa for centuries.

.
Speculation on the sitter has also ranged from Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant, to Da Vinci’s mother

.France coach Marc Lievremont has forgiven Mathieu Bastareaud for lying about being attacked after a loss to New Zealand last year and named him in a 30-man squad for the Six Nations championship.
The 21-year-old centre had said he was attacked by up to five people as he returned to the team hotel following a 14-10 defeat by the All Blacks in Wellington last June. .
Back in France, after being told CCTV footage showed him entering the hotel uninjured, he admitted lying and said he had fallen in his bedroom because he was drunk.
“Bastareaud deserves to be back because he is performing well with his Stade Francais club and because he has started to do the community service he has been sentenced to.
“The unhappy episode of this summer is forgotten,” Lievremont said.
Half-back Frederic Michalak, winger Cedric Heymans, centre Florian Fritz and full-back Maxime Medard were left out of a squad already without suspended scrum-half Julien Dupuy plus prop Fabien Barcella and centre Damien Traille, who are both injured.”
The France coach also recalled 32-year-old scrum-half Jean-Baptiste Elissalde, fly half Benjamin Boyet, wings Aurelien Rougerie and Julien Malzieu and full-back Clement Poitrenaud. It doesn’t mean they are too old or forgotten or rejected,” Lievremont said.
“There are some players we rely on, we appreciate but who have not performed as well in recent weeks.
France will start its Six Nations campaign against Scotland at Murrayfield on February 7.
Another surprise was the call-up of newcomer Fabrice Estebanez, a 29-year-old former rugby league international, who plays either at centre or fly half with Brive.
Backs: Jean-Baptiste Elissalde, Morgan Parra, Benjamin Boyet, Francois Trinh-Duc, Mathieu Bastareaud, Fabrice Estebanez, David Marty, Yannick Jauzion, Vincent Clerc, Benjamin Fall, Julien Malzieu, Aurelien Rougerie, Alexis Palisson, Clement Poitrenaud.
Forwards: Thomas Domingo, Luc Ducalcon, Sylvain Marconnet, Nicolas Mas, William Servat, Dimitri Szarzewski, Sebastien Chabal, Romain Millo-Chluski, Lionel Nallet, Pascal Pape, Julien Bonnaire, Thierry Dusautoir (c), Imanol Harinordoquy, Alexandre Lapandry, Fulgence Ouedraogo, Louis Picamoles.
-

.Filmmaker Roman Polanski won more damages on Tuesday (local time) from French publications that printed photographs of him at his Swiss home where he is confined pending extradition proceedings in a child sex case.
A Paris court convicted the magazines VSD and Voici and the weekly newspaper Journal de Dimanche of breaching Polanski’s privacy by publishing zoom-lens pictures of him and his children without permission.
Polanski is under house arrest while Swiss authorities consider a demand by the United States to deport him to face charges of having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in California in 1977.
It ordered them to pay a total of 16,000 euros ($24,700) in fines, costs and compensation to him and his wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner.

.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.”
-

.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.
-

.France has deported to Egypt a radical imam who for months had been inciting followers in Paris area mosques to rise up against the West, the government said.
Described as dangerous, Ali Ibrahim Al-Sudani was detained and sent back to Egypt under an emergency deportation order, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said in a statement. .
The Egyptian national was the 29th imam or Islamic preacher to have been deported from France since 2001, according to the interior ministry.
Mr Sudani, aged around 27, showed “contempt for our society’s values and incited violence,” he added.
French security agencies had been tracking Sudani since 2008 and found his Jihadist teachings to be “quite hardline,” said an official close to the case.
In all, 129 Islamic radicals have been expelled from French territory, it added.
-

.France has become the third country to close its embassy in Yemen, one day after the United States and Britain closed theirs.
All three countries cited the same reason – continuing threats from terrorist group Al Qaeda.
The closures increase the pressure on Yemen to deal with its Al Qaeda cell, which has been blamed for the failed attempt to blow up an American airliner on Christmas Day.
Germany and Japan are now conducting only essential business from their embassies.
Reports from Yemen say security forces have lost track of six trucks full of arms and explosives. .