Trader faces trial over alleged $7B fraud

The French trader accused of a multi-billion-dollar fraud at banking giant Societe Generale will go on trial next year, a lawyer for the bank said Tuesday. Jerome Kerviel will face charges including forgery, breach of trust, and introducing fraudulent data into the bank’s data system, Societe Generale lawyer Jean Veil told CNN. He faces a penalty of up to five years in prison and a fine of up to €375,000 euros ($538,000), Veil said

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Five great travel booking sites

The following five sites have proven the most consistently useful for the editors of Budget Travel, who do thousands of searches a year. Dohop.com Strictly for booking plane trips entirely outside of the U.S., such as a flight between Paris and Rome. The site runs simultaneous searches of multiple airports serving the same city — five airports in London, for instance — and it retrieves fares from no-frills independent carriers like EasyJet and Ryanair, which many better-known travel sites overlook.

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Journey to North Korea, Part II: The Packrat Dictatorship

In 2007 and 2008, photojournalist Tomas Van Houtryve visited North Korea by infiltrating a communist solidarity delegation. In the second story in his three-part TIME.com series, Van Houtryve describes the surveillance he was subjected to and the bizarre majesty of the mausoleum of Kim Il Sung. After dinner at the end of my second day, I was pulled aside by my guides

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The Dilemma of ‘Virginity’ Restoration

Once lost, virginity can never be replaced — but modern medicine now offers women a near-perfect physical simulation of their lost innocence. Hymenoplasty, the surgical reconstruction of the hymen broken during a women’s first experience of intercourse, or, increasingly, during demanding exercise or as a result of a collision or fall by women who’ve never had sex, has prompted a growing number of young betrothed women in France to make a last-ditch attempt to avoid the humiliation, repudiation, and possibly violence that could result from husbands and families discovering from blood-free bridal sheets that their wedding night had not been their first sexual experience.

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Ronnie Biggs, the self-styled ‘gentleman crook’

Britain’s most celebrated fugitive — "the last of the gentlemen crooks," as he liked to describe himself — was born Ronald Arthur Biggs in Lambeth, south London, on August 8, 1929. The youngest of five children, his criminal career began at the age of 15 when he was arrested for stealing pencils from a local shop.

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