French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen is facing ridicule after her campaign insisted it had ordered the destruction of 1.2 million copies of a party leaflet not because it contained a photo of Le Pen with Vladimir Putin, but because of a typographic error.
Newspaper Libération, which made the original claim, said it could not find any spelling mistakes in the pamphlet, which showed Le Pen with Putin in 2017, the same year she claimed the Russian leader had “a new multipolar vision of the world”.
There was further confusion when Caroline Parmentier, a spokesman for Le Pen’s National Rally party – formerly the National Front – suggested that the original leaflets would be distributed on schedule, and that orders to destroy them were “an isolated initiative by a member of parliament”.
Contestants on the Italian version of Big Brother have decided to continue with their seclusion on the reality TV show despite being told about the war
in Ukraine.
Programme host Alfonso Signorini told viewers: “Terrible things are happening a few hundred kilometres from us. People are dying. … We do not have a solution to this problem. We are here and we do our jobs, and that is to entertain the audience.”
Italian broadcaster RAI has been praised for letting contestants know about Ukraine. Producers of the German version were criticised two years ago after failing to tell housemates about the Covid-19 pandemic for a full month.
A petrol station attendant in Grevenbroich, Germany, is baffled after finding four large goldfish swimming around in the bucket of water she was about to use to mop the pumps.
Nazli Nalca believes the fish must have been dumped by a customer who spotted the bucket had been left unattended. “They were really big, longer than my hand. Three were orange, one dark,” she said.
The goldfish have now been rehomed with OAP Johannes Heidemanns, who said: “The four of them are now swimming in the pond with my koi and the other goldfish, and they’re alive and kicking.”
An 11-year-old from North Macedonia who has been bullied at school for having Down’s syndrome turned up for lessons holding the hand of the country’s president, Stevo Pendarovski.
He told classmates of Embla Ademi in Gostivar: “In North Macedonia, everyone is equal.”
Parents at Embla’s school had launched a petition demanding that she be taught separately from the rest of her year group. But Pendarovski said: “Inclusion is a fundamental principle that we must support in such cases.”
Meanwhile, the Austrian president, Alexander Van der Bellen, has gone viral on social media with his reply to an eight-year-old who wrote to him asking “why is your name so difficult to spell?”
The family of the student, named Milo, posted a response from Van der Bellen, which read: “My ancestors emigrated from the Netherlands (or Holland) around the year 1700. And there, names like Van der Bellen or van der Veen are completely normal names, they are not uncommon. But if it’s too complicated for you, just write Sascha. That’s what my friends call me.”
A 20-year-old Leipzig man who is alleged to have attacked a woman by throwing a guinea pig in her face is being investigated for dangerous bodily harm and violating the Animal Welfare Act.
Police said the incident happened during a 2am argument in the 37-year-old woman’s flat, and that the alleged attacker also struck and spat at his victim. They added that the guinea pig was unharmed but “completely distraught”.
A huge cargo ship loaded with £330m worth of luxury cars sank off the Azores after an onboard fire that raged for two weeks.
Portuguese authorities rescued all 22 crew members but said that up to 4,000 Porsches, Bentleys, Lamborghinis and Volkswagens had been lost when the Felicity Ace was being dragged into harbour in a last-ditch attempt to save some of the vehicles.
The ship was en route from Germany to Rhode Island in the US when the fire broke out. Porsche spokesperson Angus Fitton said he was relieved the crew members were unharmed, adding: “We are already working to replace every car affected by this incident and the first new cars will be built soon.”
Florida governor and possible Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis may have declared that the French would “probably not” fight the Russian army if Vladimir Putin invaded, but relations between the US and France are better elsewhere.
America has handed the French ambassador, Philippe Étienne, a set of stolen artefacts, including five gold bars looted from the site of a 1746 shipwreck and a coin believed to be part of the so-called Lava Treasure collection, lost when a transport ship sank off the coast of Corsica more than
1,700 years ago.
The gold bars, believed to have been looted by American divers when the wreck was discovered in the 1970s, had been listed in an online auction when they were seized by the US government, and had previously appeared on a 1999 episode of the US Antiques Roadshow, with their putative owner claiming they had been discovered in Africa.
Also returned to France was a human skull found in Houston that had been stolen from the Catacombs beneath Paris.
