Dozens of lucky French motorists were treated to bargain-basement prices when an automatic diesel dispenser malfunctioned and charged €0.30 a litre.
A total of 189 motorists were able to take advantage of the price mix-up overnight at a Cora supermarket in the city of Montbeliard near the Swiss border, local police and the supermarket’s management said.
A long queue of vehicles formed at the petrol station, which would normally have charged €1.396 a litre , after word spread of the cheap price.
In a little over two-and-a-half hours, between 10,000 and 11,000 litres of diesel were purchased, costing the petrol station about €12,000.
Parisians must keep clothes on
French police have warned Parisians to keep their clothes on or face fines and even imprisonment as residents began flocking to parks and the banks of the River Seine to bask in the summer sun.
In a statement posted on its website, the Paris police prefecture outlined rules for basking in the sun outdoors and at the popular Paris Plages annual event that has sandy beaches and deckchairs laid out on the river bank.
Police said it is not forbidden “when the thermometer rises a few degrees to put on your best bathing suit and find a little corner of grass or the welcoming banks of the Seine to put down your towel.” But it noted that bathing suits should not be worn in official city parks and that dress should be “decent and in accordance with good morals and public order.”
Those wearing inappropriate dress could be fined at least €38 and face fines of up to €3,750 and two years in jail if suspected of soliciting sex, police said.
And nudity is completely out of the question. “Any outfit that allows for the genital area or breasts to be seen constitutes sexual exhibition and is punishable by a year in prison,” police said.
Violinist gets Stradivarius back
The absent-minded passenger who left a Stradivarius violin worth millions of euros on a train in Switzerland last week was identified as a top concert violinist by the BernerZeitung yesterday.
Alexander Dubach, an acclaimed exponent of the works of Paganini, forgot the precious instrument last Friday when he got off the suburban train at Bern, near his home in Thun. It was handed in at the station’s lost-property office on Sunday after a police appeal for help. Pascal Tretola, the fellow passenger who returned the violin, told the paper that he had not been able to take it back any earlier because he had to work on Saturday.
“There were some drunks in the train, which is why I took the violin case to make sure nothing happened to it,” he said, adding that he had suspected it was valuable.
Sacked over teddy bear invasion
Two top generals in Belarus have been sacked after an air drop of teddy bears by Swedish pilots. A total of 879 teddies bearing slogans supporting human rights were dropped with parachutes by two advertising agency employees from a plane they were piloting.
The incursion into Belarus airspace on July 4 was initially denied by officials in the former Soviet state. But President Alexander Lukashenko called a meeting last week to scold authorities for allowing such a “provocation”.
The President – nicknamed “Europe’s last dictator” – subsequently sacked both Belarus’s air defence chief and the head of the border guards service.
Thomas Mazetti and Hannah Frey, the two Swedes behind the stunt, said they wanted to show support for Belarusian human rights activists and embarrass what they see as the country’s fiercely pro-Lukashenko military.