Last night's brave effort on Wall Street should help London claw back some of Monday's losses, according to early indications.The FTSE 100 is predicted to rise about 20 points early on after the Dow Jones narrowed its deficit to 41 points, helped by strength among heavyweight tech issues.Over here, Rio Tinto is selling Alcan Composites, part of the Alcan Engineered Products division, to Swiss firm Schweiter Technologies for $349m. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. Last week, Rio announced the sale of 56% of the Alcan Engineered Products Cable business to Platinum Equity.Tobacco giant Imperial Tobacco, best known for its Lambert & Butler cigarettes in the UK, said performance in the year to end-September remains in line with management's expectations. The integration of Gauloises and Gitanes maker Altadis is going well, the company said, and is on track to deliver the expected synergies. Several of the UK's leading building contractors including Balfour Beatty, Kier and Carillion were landed with heavy fines today by the Office of Fair Trading after a four-year investigation into collusion and price-fixing in the building industry.Trainers and tracksuits group JD Sports has raised both first half profits and like for like sales, but warns the outcome for the year will depend on crucial Christmas trade. Profit before tax for the 26 weeks to 1 August rose 11% to £10.1m on revenue up 8.4% to £324m. Like for like sales rose 0.7% and are 'satisfactory' in the six weeks to 12 September, up 0.8%. Education IT specialist RM said trading so far this year has been in line with expectations. As mentioned at the time of its interim results on 11 May, the company expects revenue to grow this year as a result of its participation in numerous Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programmes.Oil production from Emerald Energy's Khurbet East field in Syria has topped 4.5m barrels, The oil exploration firm said current daily gross oil production is about 16,400 barrels per day. Attempts to recover oil from Khurbet East No.7 well proved fruitless. The company had regarded this as a long shot.