French mayor's grave warning: 'You'll be better off not dead'

Published on Saturday 8 March 2008 18:39

FRANCE

The mayor of a village in south-west France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them.

In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that "all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish".

It added: "Offenders will be severely punished."

The mayor, who turned 70 on Wednesday and is standing for election to a seventh term, said he was forced to take drastic action after an administrative court in the nearby town of Pau ruled in January that the acquisition of adjoining private land to extend the cemetery would not be justified.

CUBA

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine internet connections has been mounting challenges to the Cuban government, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcon, the president of the National Assembly. Alarcon seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines such as Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Alarcon's reputation in some circles.

Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution, said: "This is going to get out of the government's hands because the technology is moving so rapidly."

Cuban officials have long limited the public's access to digital media, tearing down unauthorised satellite dishes and restricting the number of internet cafs open to Cubans.

CANADA

Macabre goings-on have been witnessed in Canada – incidents which would not be out of place in a David Lynch film.

Three times in less than a year, a right foot in a running shoe has been found off one of three different islands in the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia. Police are struggling to find who the feet belonged to and even if there are any links between the discoveries.

"It is very unusual," Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Annie Linteau said. Linteau added that two of the feet were size 12. Police are not releasing the size of the third.

Last August, a foot was found inside a man's Reebok sneaker on Gabriola Island, just a few days after another foot was discovered by beachcombers on Jedidiah Island.

The remains of a third right foot were found on the east side of Valdez Island on February 8. Linteau said the coroner's office is doing DNA testing.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a former professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, said the feet could have drifted from as far as 1,000 miles away.

"Left footwear and right footwear often tend to wash up at different times at different places because they float differently," Ebbesmeyer said. "There are beaches that collect mostly rights and other beaches that collect mostly lefts. The winds or the currents sort out left and right footwear."

Ebbesmeyer speculated the feet belonged to people who have gone missing while out on the water. Other people speculated they could be remains from the crash of a small plane in the area about a year ago, which involved four men whose bodies have not been recovered.

Gabriola Island fire chief Rick Jackson said he believed the Fraser River from the mainland of British Columbia was the source."It wouldn't surprise me if these things may have come from the interior of BC," Jackson said.

AUSTRALIA

An Australian who took a new car on a 2,000-mile, six-day test drive from the city to the outback has been arrested.

The 30-year-old convinced a car dealer in Melbourne to lend him a A$40,000 (18,500) Honda Accord sedan and drove the equivalent of London to Istanbul before he was arrested near the town of Tennant Creek, deep in the outback of the Northern Territory.

Tennant Creek police constable James Gray-Spence said the man was arrested without incident at a roadblock on his way north to Darwin after he failed to pay for fuel at a hamlet.

Not surprisingly, the test drive was the longest known to Australian police.

COMING UP

Spain is holding a general election today amid tight security.

The country's main political parties cancelled closing campaign rallies on Friday after a former councillor from the governing Socialist Party was shot and killed in an attack blamed on Basque separatists ETA.

The Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is hoping to retain the power he won four years ago, in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings which killed 191.

Many Spaniards blamed the terrorist outrage on his predecessor Jos Mara Aznar's support for the US-led invasion of Iraq.

MOVERS & SHAKERS

SUSAN RUUSUNEN

A Finnish court has dismissed charges against the prime minister's former girlfriend, who wrote a kiss-and-tell autobiography about their affair.

Susan Ruusunen's book, Prime Minister's Bride, detailed the nine-month fling she had with prime minister Matti Vanhanen in 2006 after meeting him on an internet dating site.

Vanhanen initially filed a complaint only against the publisher of the book, and prosecutors then brought criminal charges against both the publisher and Ruusunen, a mother of three, for violation of privacy and making financial gain through criminal activity.

The court ruled that publishing details of Vanhanen's personal life was not illegal because there was a different threshold for privacy for politicians in the public eye.

DREW BARRYMORE

US actress Drew Barrymore, left, has donated $1m to the World Food Programme, which the UN agency said would be used to feed thousands of children in Kenya. Barrymore, 33, a WFP ambassador against hunger, announced her pledge on The Oprah Winfrey Show to kick off the agency's $3bn Fill The Cup campaign that aims to feed 59 million hungry children in developing countries for a year.

PADRE PIO

The body of the mystic monk Padre Pio, one of the Catholic world's most revered saints who died 40 years ago, has been exhumed to be prepared for display to his devotees.

The body of the Capuchin friar, right, who was is said to have had the stigmata – the wounds of Christ's crucifixion – on his hands and feet, is to be conserved and put in a part-glass coffin for several months from April 24.

A Church statement said the body was in "fair condition", particularly the hands, which Archbishop Domenico D'Ambrosio, who witnessed the exhumation in the southern Italian town where Pio died, said "looked like they had just undergone a manicure". A spokesman for the monastery at San Giovanni Rotondo said he believed morticians would be able to conserve the face of the bearded monk well enough for him to be recognisable.

BAI LING

Actress Bai Ling, arrested last month on suspicion of shoplifting at Los Angeles International Airport, was fined $200 last Wednesday after pleading guilty to disturbing the peace.

The 37-year-old actress, who has appeared in such films as The Crow and Red Corner, was also ordered by a judge to pay several hundred dollars in fees, including court costs.

OH, REALLY

Eat a whale and save the planet, a Norwegian pro-whaling lobby has made the claim that harpooning the giant mammals is less damaging to the climate than farming livestock.

Environmental group Greenpeace dismissed the survey, saying almost every kind of food was more climate friendly than meat.

A survey by the Norwegians, focused on whale boats' fuel use, showed that 1kg (2.2lbs) of whale meat represented 1.9kg (4.2lbs) of greenhouse gases against 15.8kg for beef, 6.4kg for pork and 4.6kg for chicken.

"It turns out that the best thing you can do for the planet is to eat whale meat compared to other types of meat," said Rune Froevik of the High North Alliance, which represents coastal communities in the Arctic.

"Greenhouse gas emissions caused by one meal of beef are the equivalent of eight meals of whale meat," the study said.