A Ritzy Paris Building Where Millionaires Will Live Next to Former Homeless People

Wallets, please. Merci. Police here have arrested three chronic train robbers but are still looking for their victims, who are thought to number around 170. The accused men, from Marseille and Nice, relieved more than 100 first-class rail passengers of their luggage, cash, and jewelry on the Paris-Nice, Paris-Marseille, and Lyon-Geneva lines. They were “skilled and quick,” a local police chief told The Guardian, which described how one would “disguise himself in a variety of wigs and women’s clothing and take a seat next to unsuspecting passengers. Subtly, that thief and two accomplices would take wallets, luggage left at people’s feet or bags left unattended, without raising suspicions. They then got off at the next station.”

When CCTV footage caught the theft of a bag containing nearly $50,000 worth of jewelry from a passenger departing Aix-en-Provence, police launched an investigation that eventually led to a Marseille apartment, where they discovered a stash “including 150 pieces of luggage, 170 wallets, hundreds of pairs of sunglasses, fountain pens, camera equipment, gadgets and expensive shoes.” Also $137,000 “in small denominations of cash.” One victim was tracked down in San Francisco; in 2019 he’d been on his way to the Cannes Film Festival when his belongings disappeared, among them a $70,000 watch.

A couple in southern China sued their estranged 29-year-old daughter—whom they’d had little contact with after they left her to be brought up by an aunt when she was two—in an attempt to force her to buy an apartment for her biological brother. (Him they kept.) “The woman, surnamed Zhang … considers her aunt’s family to be her biological family,” reported the South China Morning Post. “It was only recently when Zhang used her savings to buy an apartment for her cousin whom she grew up with, that her parents suddenly reappeared in her life.”

No doubt eager to make it up to their daughter for all that lost time, the couple filed a lawsuit against her, asking 500,000 yuan ($72,000) for “parental maintenance.” The court found that Zhang was not obligated to buy an apartment for her brother but ruled that “she must pay the maintenance, with the amount to be negotiated with the parents,” said the newspaper. (Under the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China, Article 26, “Adult children have the duty to support, assist, and protect their parents.” No matter what.) Cue the outrage, with Zhang receiving overwhelming support in online posts. “It’s so lucky that Zhang didn’t grow up in her family of origin,” noted one commenter.

One way to reduce energy consumption, according to Switzerland’s environment minister, is to shower together. (To be clear, not all 8,740,472 Swiss; just two at a time.) Simonetta Sommaruga suggested citizens “could ‘turn off the computer when you don’t need it, or turn off lights, or shower together,’” reported The Times of London. “The proposal was met with mockery on social media, forcing Sommaruga to clarify her position.… She said the tip was intended for young people and conceded that ‘after a certain age, showering together is no longer suitable for everyone.’” (Sommaruga is 62.) “It is not the first time the Swiss authorities have suggested joint showers to save energy,” said the newspaper. “In 1985 the federal energy office published a brochure which advocated the measure under the slogan: ‘Less waste and double pleasure.’”

It all started with Leonardo DiCaprio, or rather with a movie he starred in more than two decades ago. The Beach made Thailand’s Maya Bay a destination, with 6,000 visitors a day by the time it was closed for a breather in 2018. (Earlier this year it reopened, with a cap on tourists to minimize wear and tear.) Back in 2000, The Beach “drew criticism for the impact of the shoot on the once pristine sands” of the bay, said The Guardian. “The film-makers planted dozens of coconut trees to give a more ‘tropical’ feel … and were accused of ripping up vegetation growing on sand dunes. However, the US production studio 20th Century Fox insisted it left the beach exactly as it had found it and that it had removed tonnes of rubbish.”

Naturally, there were lawsuits. And Thailand’s Supreme Court has just ruled that the country’s Royal Forest Department is responsible for rehabilitating the bay, and has 30 days to come up with a plan.

Maybe it’s a sitcom. Can the very rich live happily side by side with low-income neighbors in a renovated former Renault garage on the Left Bank? (And vice versa, for that matter?) The site—called Scène des Loges—“has been chosen for a housing development aimed at multi-millionaires on the one hand and down-and-outs on the other,” reported The Times of London. Plans include “47 opulent flats with balconies up to 20 metres [65 feet] long and unencumbered views of the Eiffel Tower,” and prices as high as $10.5 million. Plans also include “35 council flats, some earmarked for low and middle-income workers, such as teachers and restaurant staff, unable to afford private sector prices in Paris; others for people ‘in a situation of social isolation or exclusion’ whose lives have been ‘often marked by repeated spells [of living] in the street.’”

Égalité in action! Although the newspaper noted that “Paris planning rules stipulate that council flats [affordable housing] must constitute at least 30 per cent of any new housing development.” And there will be separate entrances. —George Kalogerakis

George Kalogerakis, one of the original editor-writers at Spy, later worked for Vanity Fair, New York, and The New York Times, where he was deputy op-ed editor. A co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War, he is a Writer at Large for AIR MAIL