The former French President Jacques Chirac has been found guilty of corruption after a long-running trial. He was convicted of embezzlement and breach of trust by creating

fictitious

jobs for members of his party when he was mayor of Paris. Mr Chirac was given a suspended two-year sentence. He is the first former head of state in France to be convicted since the wartime

collaborationist

leader Marshal Petain. Hugh Schofield reports.

Mr Chirac's lawyer said that the former president

categorically

contested the guilty verdict. However, he did not have it in him to continue the combat, so he decided not to appeal. The lawyer said that Mr Chirac was at least happy that the court had recognised he did not personally enrich himself from the embezzlement. The charges go back more than 20 years to when Mr Chirac was the powerful mayor of Paris and controlled the system in which municipal funds were used to pay his political party staff.

Reports from Bahrain say that a blogger and human rights activist, Zainab al-Khawaja, has been arrested during a protest on a main road leading to the capital Manama. Activists have called for her release. Eyewitnesses say security forces used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse protesters. Sebastian Usher reports.

Zainab al-Khawaja is the daughter of a well-known dissident who was sentenced to life in prison after the mass protests in February and March on charges of plotting a coup. Zainab herself has been briefly arrested before and staged a hunger strike to try to get her father and other members of her family released. Her blog has been one of the most