Bee attack leaves dozens of people injured in French town
Passersby were stung over a period of about 30 minutes on Sunday morning, according to the prefecture of Cantal, in south-central France. Firefighters and medical teams treated the victims, while police set up a security perimeter until the bees stopped their attack.
The three people in critical condition were evacuated to a local hospital. Pierre Mathonier, the mayor of Aurillac, told BFM TV on Monday that their condition had improved.
One of them was a 78-year-old person who had to be resuscitated after a cardiorespiratory arrest, he said.
The mayor said the incident may have been related to Asian hornets threatening a beehive that was installed on the roof terrace of a hotel more than a decade ago, and had caused the bees to become aggressive.
Mathonier said the beekeeper had removed the beehive and relocated it outside of the town.
Lt Col Michel Cayla, in charge of the local fire services, said he had never experienced such an attack. 'In terms of the number of victims, the panic among the people and the severity of some of the injuries, it was striking,' he told broadcaster TF1.
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The Independent
31 minutes ago
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How a junior trader paid for the banking crisis – while the big bosses never joined him in the dock
The wheels of British justice are appallingly slow. Back in 2016, I wrote that the conviction of Tom Hayes, the bank trader jailed for conspiring to manipulate the Libor interest rate, was unsafe. Today, finally, the Supreme Court has agreed to quash his conviction. The case of Carlo Palombo, the other trader who had his conviction quashed today, was not linked to Hayes. Palombo received four years in 2019. When ex-Citi and UBS banker Hayes was found guilty in 2015, he was sentenced to 14 years, an astonishing long term for a white-collar criminal in this country. That was reduced to 11 years on appeal, but as I remarked at the time, you get less for killing someone. There is no doubt he was being made an example of. There was considerable public anger at the way bankers had walked scot-free from the financial crisis – still is – and Hayes was seen as discouraging others. He was portrayed as being at the centre of a web, setting the benchmark rate used for millions of personal loans; he was therefore the worst of the worst, an arch-villain who profited from ordinary folks; he, everyone seemed to agree, deserved every moment spent inside. But in his case, there literally were no others. A year later, in a blow to the Serious Fraud Office, which brought the prosecutions, six brokers were acquitted of conspiring with him to fix the interbank rate. On their acquittals, in his cell at HMP Lowdham Grange, Hayes could be forgiven for raging against the iniquity of a system that saw his life ruined. Particularly, as in the professional hierarchy, Hayes was a junior. We were supposed to believe that others never condoned what he did. It simply never rang true that he was able to act without anyone above him at the bank knowing and agreeing. That unease only increased with details emerging about his personality. 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Times
32 minutes ago
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One day in February 1668 the naval official Samuel Pepys bought a book. Given his bibliophile tendencies, this was a regular occurrence, but The School of Venus was no ordinary volume. Pepys had dithered over the purchase for weeks, eventually deciding that he really should read this 'most bawdy, lewd book' just once, for information. Later that day, after an enjoyable evening in his private chamber, he burnt it, 'that it might not be among my books to my shame'. Fortunately for us, Pepys's embarrassment did not stop him from recording this and many other pleasurable episodes in another, equally racy book: his diary, which he kept throughout the 1660s and in which he confessed to many incidents that blushing Victorian editors deemed unfit for publication. Not until the 1970s did the most explicit extracts make it into print, albeit with Pepys's polyglot (the complicated multilingual shorthand in which he recorded his most private thoughts) untranslated. 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32 minutes ago
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Guernsey's top political committee will share the responsibility for external relations, after the arrest of Deputy Jonathan Le Tocq on Monday morning. Former Chief Minister Deputy Le Tocq had been the lead for Policy and Resources (P&R) liasons with foreign officials for the last nine his arrest earlier this week on suspicion of telecommunications offences, the remaining four members of P&R voted to stop him participating in P&R business until the investigation is over. In a statement P&R said it would "formally consider the future lead for external relations in due course, in the meantime, external relations commitments will be covered by other P&R members." Earlier this month Deputy Le Tocq said officials from Guernsey's States would be attending four party conferences, including the Reform UK event, for the first time. 'Avoid speculation' In an email to States members on Monday night, seen by the BBC, P&R President Deputy Lindsay de Sausmarez encouraged her colleagues to "avoid any speculation" on the investigation. Guernsey Police said Le Tocq has been released without charge and while the investigation was ongoing they would not provide a "running commentary". Last month Le Tocq finished ninth in Guernsey's general election with 8,002 votes. He failed in an attempt to be elected as President of P&R, as he was beaten by Deputy Lindsay de Sausmarez. In 2014 he defeated former deputy Alister Langlois to become chief minister, after the resignation of Peter Harwood.
