World News from the BBC.

Lawyers for the Estate of the late American pop singer Michael Jackson have signed his biggest recording contract worth up to 250 million dollars. The deal with the music label Sony is said to involve ten album projects over seven years and includes previously unreleased recordings.

US Treasure Secretary Tim Geithner has warned that unemployment in the United States is unlikely to go down substantially this year. In testimony before a Congressional Committee, Mr.Geithner and other senior economic officials set up measures intended to stimulate job creation. Our economic correspondent Andrew Walker reports.

The picture they painted to Congress was one of an employment situation that has stabilized. But it takes 100,000 new jobs a month to make it dentin unemployment. Mr.Geithner doesn't expect that to happen this year. In fact, the unemployment rate could rise in the coming month. He set out since proposals intended to help employment. Nonetheless, one member of the Congressional Committee, from President Obama's own Democratic Party said Mr.Geithner's testimony was out-of-touch and left her dismayed. She said there was no sense of urgency about tackling the unemployment problem.

The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he has told the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that he doesn't want Iran to have nuclear weapons. Mr.Tayyip Erdogan said he had full confidence in the guarantees that Iran had provided that its nuclear program was purely for civilian purposes. He suggested it instead the country should warn Israel to dispose of the nuclear weapons which he said it possessed.

And police in Italy have used the social networking site Facebook to track down a suspected Mafia hit-man they have been looking for for ten years. Police said that Pasquale Manfredi in whose allege have killed several people was a regular user of Facebook and traced his Internet connection to an apartment in southern Italy. They said they found Manfredi chatting online with some his reported 200 registered friends.

BBC News.