“Sell fresh CC,” promised one salesman who offered teaser credit card numbers for samples in New Jersey and Canada. “Visa, MasterCard, Amex. Good Prices. Many countries!!!!!”

Electronic crime is maturing, according to security experts, and with its evolution, clever criminals are adopting conventional approaches that reflect cold business sense - from supermarket-style pricing to outsourcing to specialists acting as portfolio managers, coders, launchers, miners, washers and minders of infected “zombie” computers.

The price of carbon permits for 2008 rose by 4% as investors took the view that tighter emissions rules which came into effect this year, will mean permit shortages in the future.

Under the EU’s market-based rules, big polluters such as power generators, cement and steel makers are granted allowances permitting them to emit an agreed level of carbon dioxide each year. But if they miss their target, they are forced to buy permits from companies that have undershot their allowances, or they face financial sanctions.

Today’s provisional figures showed that, overall, industries covered by the scheme across the EU, emitted almost 1.88bn tonnes of carbon dioxide against combined allowances of 1.91bn tonnes. Among the big countries France and Germany came in well below their permitted levels while the UK, Italy and Spain overshot their targets.

Two companies offering tours of Manhattan hotspots frequented by Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha - the characters of the hit HBO series and soon-to-be movie - are locked in a legal dispute over the brand. Which is odd because they appear to be worlds apart.

In the blue corner is On Location Tours, a veteran of the Sex and the City obsession industry that takes dozens of the show’s fans (largely women) on three-hour bus tours. The trip intersperses visits to shops, bars and the cupcake store where Miranda went when she needed a sugar fix, with video clips of the Emmy award-winning series.

Eighteen of the girls, aged between 6 months and 17, are in state custody. The rest are being found foster homes.

Jeffs, head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was jailed in November for 10 years for being an accomplice to rape.

Saudi Arabia would be likely to develop nuclear weapons if Iran acquires them, according to the report, prepared by a committee staff member after interviewing hundreds of individuals in Washington and the Middle East last July through December.

High-level US diplomats in Riyadh with access to Saudi decision makers said an Iranian nuclear weapon frightens the Saudis “to their core” and would compel the Saudis to seek nuclear weapons, the report said. The American diplomats were not identified.

Muslims protested Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in London in 2006. Al Qaeda has tried to stoke that anger.

The breakout from the Bagram Air Base by Mr. Libi and three cellmates — they picked a lock, dodged their guards and traversed the base’s vast acreage to freedom — embarrassed American officials as deeply as it delighted the jihadist movement. In the nearly three years since then, Mr. Libi’s meteoric ascent within the leadership of Al Qaeda has proved to be even more troublesome for the authorities.

William Pottinger was sentenced after pleading guilty to manslaughter at an earlier hearing at Reading Crown Court.

The court had heard his wife Gillian, who suffered from a mental illness, weighed just 28.5kg when her body was found.