Roger Rolland's battle with French bureaucracy to prove he's alive.

Ah bureaucracy.

Don't you just love it?

Of course it's everywhere, but perhaps the French are masters of it.

Or should that be the most adept at making a mess of it?

Just ask Roger Rolland.

Roger Rolland (screenshot TF1 news)

He's very much alive - something to which his family, friends and now television viewers in France can attest.

But French bureaucracy, it seems, has had a hard time believing it and has certainly needed some convincing.

At the end of May the 67-year-old received a call from his local chemist telling him that the social security office had been in touch informing him they were refusing to reimburse the cost of supplying a prescribed medicine a week earlier because...get this...Rolland was dead.

"It certainly gave me something to think about and I had to keep asking my wife to reassure me I was still alive," he told TF1 news with something approaching a smile on his face.

But as he was to discover, proving to French bureaucracy that he was still alive was far from being a laughing matter and would be harder than he thought.

First of all he made his way down to the local health insurance office where he repeated what his chemist had told him.

After plenty of hunting around, an employee discovered that somehow the death certificate of another person had made its way into his file and there had obviously been an administrative error.

As the daily newspaper France Soir reports, the error was rectified immediately and Rolland was able to return home safe in the knowledge that French bureaucracy knew he was alive.

Wrong!

A couple of weeks later the pensions office sent a letter to his home, addressed to his heirs.

Rolland was on the blower immediately to explain that there had been a mix up and...well let's allow him to take up the story as to what happened next.

"The person the other end of the line told me that I would have to provide a certificate proving I was still alive," he said.

"So I went to the town hall to see if one could be supplied...only to be told that no such certificate existed."

While Rolland was busy trying to acquire some sort of non-existent official document to prove he was alive, his wife, Josette, took matters into her own hands.

She rang the pensions office, managed to get hold of the person who had sent the letter to her husband's heirs and was told to, "Have him sign a sworn statement (une attestation sur l’honneur) that he's still alive."

"It was surrealist," Josette told France Soir.

Quite.

End of story?

Not exactly.

The pensions office now had their records straight, but Rolland thought it perhaps wise to contact the office handling the supplementary pension fund to which he was also entitled - just in case.

And that was definitely a smart move, because according to their records, he had been dead since February!

While her husband remains somewhat phlegmatic about the whole mix-up Josette is less understanding.

'It's still amazing that the social security office which made the error in the first place, didn't bother to inform the other departments," she told France Soir.

"If something similar happened to someone more fragile and less able to understand bureaucratic red tape, it could well end up with their being dead - officially and for real."

Déclaré mort par erreur

French supermarket sees sense over rubbish bin "thief"

Sometimes you just have to admit that it's a mad, bad world in which those at the top of the heap are in charge and make the rules and those at the bottom - well they just have to like it and lump it.

But sometimes - especially when the regulations are enforced and the outcome is just so barmy, the cause of the so-called "little man" can be helped by the support of those around him and justice can be done.

Monoprix (screenshot from BFM TV report)

Such is surely the case of Kader, a 59-year-old employee of the French supermarket chain Monoprix in the southern city of Marseille.

Last Monday he was sent home from his job and threatened with being sacked.

His crime?

He had supposedly "stolen" six melons and two lettuces.

Except there's a very good reason for the inverted commas.

As the regional daily La Provence reported, Kader had simply retrieved them from a bin at the back of the store where, as out-of-date products, they were waiting to be collected and taken to the nearest landfill.

It appeared that such behaviour was tantamount to "misconduct" and as far as Monoprix rules were concerned employees weren't allowed to take home food even if it were destined for landfill; it said as much in the work contract Kader had signed.

"I didn't know," the shelf-filler who had been working for the store for the past eight years told the newspaper.

"I'm so ashamed. I've never, ever stolen anything in all my years of working," he continued.

"I told my manager, 'If I've stolen something, call the police'. I'm not a thief and I've never taken a thing in my life."

Management at the store remained stumm, refusing to talk to the local media.

But the story soon spread and was reported nationally.

Kader repeated what he had told La Provence on national radio Europe 1.

"When I passed the rubbish bin I saw the melons and lettuce ready to be thrown away," he said

"I thought they were in a reasonable state so I decided to take them home - just to eat," said the father of six.

The unions were soon on the case, pointing out that Monoprix's main shareholder, Casino , had just reported record profits but according to company rules, "appeared ready to fire a man for taking home food that was going to be thrown away."

A demonstration was held outside the shop. Kader's colleagues were interviewed and expressed how "pathetic" they found management's decision.

Monoprix's official Facebook page started receiving complaints and there were calls from some Internauts for a boycott of the store.

And an online petition was started, calling for Kader to be reinstated.

So much bad publicity and on such a scale for a management stance that was surely both as untenable as it was ridiculous.

The Powers that Be at the store finally caved in on Friday, seeing sense and reducing Kader's penalty to a simple one-day reprimand for having failed to follow company regulations.

Regulations which the national daily France Soir says the company had hidden behind in an attempt to explain its (over)reaction and which officially aimed, "To protect human health by avoiding the consumption of spoiled products."

Kader spoke to the local commercial television station, LCM, after he had received news that he was being reinstated.

"I was moved by the reaction of the media, my colleagues and the unions," he said.

"I would just like to thank everyone for the support they've given me."

Boris Boillon hangs on as France's ambassador to Tunisia - but for how long?

Views are split as to whether it could soon be curtains for France's man in Tunisia, Boris Bouillon.

Even though rumours just won't go away that the man dubbed "Sarkoboy" by some in the French media could soon be on his way home, he's still in the job.

And that could be down to Jean-David Levitte, a high-ranking French diplomat and sherpa, or the civil servant who undertakes the preparatory political work prior to summits, to the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Speculation that Boillon would be returning to France surfaced at the beginning of April with a report in France Soir that a replacement had been found for the 41-year-old.

Yves Marek, a career diplomat and "native son" would soon be taking over, the paper assured its readers.

According to the French weekly news magazine Nouvel Observateur, Marek was an "astute choice" to succeed Boillon who had come in for plenty of criticism - not least from those in his new host country - for making as much of a mess of his start to his new post as the French had in their mishandling of Tunisia's "Jasmine revolution".

But as the end of April nears, Boillon is still in his job and, as far as Nouvel Observateur is concerned, that's largely down to the support of Levitte.

Boillon made a mess of things almost immediately after touching down in Tunisia.

During his very first press conference, he appeared dismissive and aggressive towards one journalist and a video of the encounter soon made its way on to the Net.

Not surprisingly it didn't go down well with Tunisians and even though Boillon appeared on national television a day later to apologise, many wanted him out.

(screenshot from Facebook page Boris Boillon Degage)

A Facebook campaign was launched calling for Boillon to be replaced and an online petition was started urging France to appoint another Ambassador who would "meet more closely the expectations of Tunisians as they wrote a new page in their history."

Remember, this is in a country which used social networking tools so effectively to rally support during the revolution.

Not great news then for Boillon and he rather kept his head down during the visit of two members of the French government, the finance minister, Christine Lagarde, and the European affairs minister, Laurent Wauquiez, a couple of weeks later.

Marek's name began circulating as the most likely successor. The 44-year-old's diplomatic credentials were impeccable and he was seen by many Tunisian Internauts as a child of the country's resistance to the former leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

But that was also his undoing, according to Nouvel Observateur, because he was suspected of having been too much in favour of regime change during the Jasmine revolution, and besides, Levitte wanted to protect Boillon - his protégé.

The one person who perhaps could have given Tunisians what they seemed to want more than anything - Boillon out and Marek in - suggested Nouvel Observateur, was the French foreign minister Alain Juppé.

Just before Easter he was on official business in Tunisia to announce €350 million in aid to help, as TF1 reported, "rebuild a relationship undermined by the France's diplomatic faux pas and mishandling of the events during Tunisia's 'Jasmine revolution'."

It could also have been a golden opportunity to announce a change at the embassy, but it didn't happen.

As far as Nouvel Observateur is concerned that's partly because Juppé has inherited staff and advisors from his predecessor in office, Michèle Alliot-Marie, and he is also being "held hostage by a diplomatic service" unwilling to admit it misjudged the Jasmine revolution in the first place and as a consequence unable to come to terms with its mistakes.

So Boillon is to stay and Marek's services will be deployed elsewhere?

Well all is not lost for those in Tunisia who would like to see Sarkoboy sent home.

On Monday BFM TV ran a report once again suggesting France considered his continued presence in Tunisia could be too much of an embarrassment.

Adriana and Christian Karembeu separate

It's official. What the French daily France Soir calls, "One of the most glamorous couples of French showbiz" are to separate.

Adriana Karembeu (screenshot from interview with Belgian daily La Dernière Heure/Les Sports in Feb 2011)

After almost 13 years of marriage the model Adriana Karembeu and her husband, the former French international football player Christian, are to split, according to an interview Adriana gave in Thursday's edition of the weekly magazine Paris Match.

The news doesn't exactly come as a surprise says France Soir, "Especially not to readers of celebrity magazines," as rumours had been circulating for some time that the Slovakian-born model was not happy with their lifestyle, her husband's hectic schedule and "the fact that they didn't appear to have a life together."

"I wanted to makes things clear," she told Paris Match.

"We have always been a very high-profile couple and in recent weeks I've been upset to see photographs of me with other men appearing in the press and speculation that I had a lover," she continued.

"The truth is I've never cheated on my husband but we haven't been together for a couple of months now."

While Adriana maintains in the interview that she had informed her husband about her decision to "go public" his version of how he found out is quite different.

Christian, a member of France's 1998 World Cup winning side has recently published a book (together with journalists Anne Pitoiset et Claudine Wéry) "Kanak" in which he recounts his childhood in New Caledonia and the story of his family.

He has been giving a series of interviews to promote the book but, "Had not alluded to the separation," Adriana told Paris Match, "Because he didn't know what to say. When I 'phoned him to tell him that I had granted you an interview, he seemed relieved."

But that wasn't quite the story Christian told on RTL radio on Wednesday.

"I think she's quite simply going to announce our separation," he said when asked for his reaction to details that had been leaked of the interview that was to appear in Paris Match the following day.

"I'm not in the habit of talking about my private life in public," he continued.

"But I didn't know about this interview when it happened, I was told about it afterwards."

Whatever the case their separation is official and marks the end of a relationship which began, as the French daily Aujourd'hui en France - Le Parisien says, "In the most romantic of manners aboard a Paris-Milan flight in 1996".

They were married in 1998.

Escaped UK schizophrenic found teaching in French school

Lewis Alexander Mawhinney applied for a job as a German teacher in the southern French town of Digne-les-Bains in December last year.

The 26-year-old, originally from Northern Ireland, apparently came with excellent qualifications.

As the national daily France Soir reports, because the local education authority was particularly short on German teachers, it immediately offered him a job under contract at two of its schools; the Pierre-Gilles-de-Gennes lycée and the Maria-Borrely collège.

He began on January 3. But not all was as it at first appeared.

Cloth embroidered by a schizophrenia sufferer (from Wikpedia, author - cometstarmoon)

"We had no reason to complain about his behaviour and I never heard the slightest negative comment about him from his colleagues, pupils or parents," Pascale Garrec the director of the lycée is quoted as saying in the regional daily Midi Libre.

"It was during a conversation outside of the professional context that I became concerned over some of the 'peculiarities' about comments he made."

Among them were claims made by Mawhinney that he was a secret service agent working for Scotland Yard, and that led Garrec to alert the local police.

His behaviour in the classroom was also somewhat unusual according to pupils who spoke to another regional daily La Provence, and some of them found him "weird".

"He didn't seem to know the rules of German grammar," one pupil told the paper.

"When we asked him a question, he wouldn't reply immediately and instead would give us the answers the next day after having searched the Internet."

Another commented on the teachers apparent "normality" inside the classroom but odd habit of "putting on his gloves to open and close the door so as not to leave fingerprints."

Investigations revealed that the man described as "discreet" had in fact escaped from a clinic in the Northern Ireland capital Belfast in 2008, where he was being treated for schizophrenia after a knife attack on a man the previous year.

Mawhinney has been fired from his post and is being held in a psychiatric unit in the town awaiting his return to Belfast.

France's Rolex-wearing "Ferrari priest" is a free man

Antoine Videau was a bad man; a very, very bad man. But he won't be returning to prison.

Antoine Videau (screenshot from video on Corse Matin report)

As the regional daily Corse Matin reports, the 64-year-old, who was convicted last year of embezzlement, had his sentence reduced on Wednesday by an appeals court and is now effectively a "free man".

In place of the original three years with one year suspended, the man who has been variously dubbed the "Ferrari priest" or the "Rolex priest" in the French media has now been given two years with 16 months suspended.

As he has already served eight months, he will not be returning behind bars.

But the court also ruled that he still had to pay €1.3 million in compensation and put him on probation for three years.

For over 20 years the former priest on the island of Corsica had embezzled more than two million euros and, as the national daily France Soir writes, obviously believed that, "Charity begins with oneself."

Videau had been responsible for managing church property, and when he appeared in court last year, it became evident of just how well he had been doing his job - for his own benefit.

He had cashed in cheques from parishioners, pocketed revenue from a convent on the island which had been converted into a Chambre d'hôtes (bed and breakfast) and diverted funds from the will of an archbishop who died in 1998 and for whom he was the executor into the 28 bank accounts he held on the island nicknamed the Île de Beauté and the Côte d’Azur.

As well as proudly wearing a Rolex, he wasn't averse to turning up at Mass driving a (different) sports car and perhaps most famously organised a "cultural trip" to Las Vegas.

Speaking after Wednesday's ruling Videau's lawyer said the gap between the two decisions had given the courts time to "take measure more accurately the allegations made against his client."

"After the commotion that accompanied the original trial, this hearing was much calmer," Jean-Michel Marriagi told reporters.

"But the civil claims (for compensation) are excessive and don't respect certain rules so there will most certainly be an appeal in the court of cassation."

Hmmmn.