French lottery winner strikes lucky - twice

Some people have all the luck.

A man from the southern French city of Montpellier has won the country's national lottery for the second time.

(screenshot from Loto commercial)

Back in 1996 he scooped the equivalent of €2.8 million (18,9 million French francs at the time) when his numbers came up.

And on Wednesday he pocketed a cheque of €3 million according to the La Française des Jeux (FDJ) the organiser of the France's national lottery, Loto.

What makes the win even more remarkable is that the 50-something has always played exactly the same numbers ever since the lottery was introduced in 1976.

"I chose the numbers randomly and wrote them down," he told the regional daily Midi Libre.

"Clearly I was born under a lucky star."

FDJ reckons the chances of one player winning twice with the same six numbers are one in 363 billion.

Lucky man!

But his double win comes at a price.

To begin with he has chosen to remain anonymous this time around as he had too many requests for money after he revealed his identity following the 1996-win.

And even though he maintains that he invested his previous winnings wisely, he also managed to spend around €1,000 on tickets before landing the jackpot for a second time.

Still it obviously paid off and winning twice isn't going to stop him from playing because, as he admits, he's addicted to the game.

Oh yes - and he doesn't want to rule out the possibility of winning for a third time.

Store manager rescues girl from car - father threatens to file a complaint

It has been hot in France over the past couple of days - very hot.

Temperatures have climbed as high as 40 degrees Celsius in some parts of the country.

(from Wikipedia , author: Lykaestria)

Not only is it inadvisable to leave child alone in a car, it's also dangerous and neglectful.

Everyone surely knows that it's not only inadvisable to leave a child unattended in a car, it's also dangerous as the temperature inside can be life-threatening, even with the windows open.

Some parents though appear to "know better" as in the case of a German couple over the weekend in the town of Villeneuve-lès-Béziers in the south of France.

They left their three-year-old daughter alone in their vehicle in the car park of a supermarket while they went about shopping.

Other customers noticed her by herself in the four-wheel drive and informed the store's management who made three announcements (two in French and one in German) asking the owners of the vehicle to come to the information desk immediately.

There was no response.

In the meantime the store's deputy director, Vincent Touya, had gone out to the car park to see for himself what state the girl was in, and even though the car windows were open slightly, as he told the regional daily, Midi Libre, he had to take immediate action.

"She seemed to be all right but the car was in full sun and the outside temperature was already 30 degrees," he told the newspaper.

"I put in a call to the emergency services and they told me I had to get her out of the car at once," he continued.

"So I took a hammer and broke the window. She was bright red, sweating heavily and when I took her in my arms her hair was soaked as though she had just taken a shower."

He carried the girl into the store and gave her some water and food.

A happy ending and Touya a hero!

Well that's what you would think.

Somehow the parents weren't of the same opinion.



Il secourt un enfant, ses parents portent... par Europe1fr

They were eventually found and according to Touya didn't appear in the least concerned - quite the opposite.

"The mother just continued shopping and filling her trolley," he told Europe 1 radio.

"And the father looked at me as though I were guilty of something."

But it gets worse.

Far from admitting any negligence, the parents insisted that their daughter had been asleep in the car and they hadn't wanted to wake her.

"There wasn't a word of thanks from either of them and the father even said he would file a complaint against me because I had broken the window of his four-wheel drive," said Touya.

"Everyone else in the store was outraged."

Hassan Ayaf - a man with two valid French driving licences

Whenever some sort of bureaucratic balls-up occurs you can be certain that somewhere along the line it's going to have repercussions for Joe Public - or in the following case, Hassan Ayaf.

The 36-year-old father-of-three lives the town of Belaruc-les-Bains, a half-hour's drive from the southern French city of Montpellier.

And that's important to the tale because Ayaf operates bulldozers for a living and as a consequence has to be able to travel from building site to building site without any difficult.

In other words he needs his driving licence.

French driving licence (permis de conduire), car registration document (carte grise) and car insurance (carte verte) - from Wikipedia

But in January last year he received a letter in the post telling him that he had lost his licence.

As he told the regional daily Midi Libre, Ayaf felt that, "His world had fallen apart" as no driving licence equalled no job.

What made the whole thing more incomprehensible, as far as he was concerned, was that he thought he still had enough points left on his licence.

In France a person possessing a full driving licence (or permis de conduire) has 12 points.

Whenever an infraction occurs a certain number of points are lost until at zero (obviously) the licence is withdrawn.

"I didn't understand," he told the paper. "All I did was drive without a seat belt."

But that didn't help his cause in the slightest as his licence had gone and in spite of writing to the local administration insisting that some sort of mistake had been made, he was obliged to wait the required six months by law before he was able to apply to retake his driving test.

"It was a difficult time," he said. "I had to rely on family and friends to drive me to different building sites and often I remained there over the weekend."

In June he received the green light to begin the process of retaking his test - the theory and the practical parts - which lasted until January this year when he passed.

And that meant that Ayaf was now considered a "novice" with, as is the case with all recently-qualified drivers, just six of those precious points to his name and the possibility to gain the remaining six points over a two or three year period.

But wait - this is where Monsieur or Madame French Bureaucracy stepped in to admit its "mea culpa".

Because in February Ayaf received another official letter informing him that the cancellation of his original driving licence had now been quashed.

That's right, he is now the certified holder of two valid driving licences; one as a novice (with six points) and the other as a now re-instated longtime driver (with three points).

Vive la France. Vive la bureaucratie!

Animal cruelty - decision delayed on French teens who set fire to a cat

There are plenty of videos that go viral on the Net showing the horrors of what man can do to animals.

Thankfully a search for the one at the centre of this tale brings up nothing, even though the event was recorded on a mobile 'phone and then posted on the Net.

Sadly though, there are plenty of other examples of similar behaviour; each of them surely equally inexplicable to anyone with even a couple of neurones between their ears.

(source Wikipedia, Author - derivative work: howcheng)

In 2006 two adolescents from the south of France had reportedly spent the night drinking and were "looking for something to do".

The pair, according to a report which appeared at the time in the regional newspaper, Midi Libre, decided to relieve their boredom by locking a cat in a cage, dousing it with petrol before setting light to it and watching it die.

"A sordid story," says the animal charity Fondation 30 millions d'amis on it website after the first of the defendants, now 22 years old, appeared in a court in the southern French city of Nîmes earlier this month.

The Fondation was just one of several animal welfare organisations to file a civil suit against the pair. Others included Respectons, the Fondation Brigitte Bardot and the Société protectrice des animaux (SPA).

Speaking on behalf of Respectons, lawyer Frédérique Ortega outlined what made this case especially, in her terms, "barbaric".

"Beyond the acts themselves, the cruelty of these young people also lay in the fact that they made all the arrangements to disseminate these terrible images," she said.

The court has delayed making a ruling in the case against the 22-year -old until April.

A date has not yet been set to hear the case against the other defendant, who was a minor at the time, and will be appear before a juvenile court.

The maximum penalty for such acts of cruelty to animals, according to the 30 millions d'amis website, is a two-year prison sentence and a €30,000 fine.

In 2009 the case of "Mambo" the dog who survived after being set alight resulted in a 22-year-old woman being handed down a one-year prison sentence with six months suspended and a €6,000 fine.

Her 17-year-old companion received an 18-month probationary sentence

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy's musical homage to Charles Trenet - in Italian

Perhaps you remember France's first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, confirming last December that she would be going back into the recording studio this year to prepare her fourth album.

Well she's reportedly doing just that and everyone has been rather tight-lipped about which songs could be included on the album and who, among France's songwriters, might lend a hand or better still a song, for Bruni-Sarkozy to interpret.

Now though word has trickled out that one of the tracks that could figure on the album is a remake of Charles Trenet's 1943 song "Douce France" but sung in Italian to become of course "Dolce Francia".

Screenshot from LCI news report

It's no done deal though that it'll make the final cut.

"The album will feature songs in French and others in Italian but at this stage we don't know whether this particular one will be included," Bruni-Sarkozy's agent told Agence France Presse.

"I've heard an unreleased preliminary version and it's a good interpretation."

The regional daily Midi Libre has an extract on its site for everyone to judge for themselves how well (or not) they think France's first lady has covered the original.

And the timing of the sneak preview couldn't be better as February 19 marks the tenth anniversary of Trenet's death.

Trenet was a French singer-songwriter whose most famous hits date from the 1930s to the mid-1950s but who continued recording until he died in 2001 and, although he might be considered to be from another era, remains something of a national treasure as far as the French are concerned.

He was described shortly before his death by Radio France Internationale as "one of the last of the legendary French chanson stars" and one who would "inevitably go down in history as the man who wrote the unforgettable 'Le Mer'" a song whose lyrics he claimed to have written in a matter of minutes while on a train and one which was has apparently been covered by more than 400 artists in many languages to become "one of the most famous French songs of all time."



As if to underline Trenet's enduring popularity a poll conducted on behalf of the regional daily Midi Libre reveals that even a decade after his death 60 per cent of those questioned say they liked his songs with the most popular one being "Douce France".

A simple search will pull up any number of English translations of the lyrics, but maybe you should just sit back and enjoy the original in French from the man himself - crackles and hisses included.

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.