A French pensioner has appealed to authorities to help him finally remain in charge of his own taxes and not those of his namesake, whose yearly taxes he has been paying for the last 15 years.

Having a popular name does have some advantages. It’s easy to remember and people never look at you funny when you say it. However, it’s not all good, as the protagonist of today’s story will tell you. Francis Lopez, an 83-year-old man from Montpellier, France shares the same name, the same birth date, the same city, and even most of the digits in his social security number with another man, and for some reason, authorities always send him his namesake’s taxes as well. Lopez has been paying someone else’s taxes for 15 years, but because of a new tax withholding law, he is afraid that it will really start to cost him.

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Convinced that their home is haunted by a ghost, a French couple have been sleeping in a small tent installed on the balcony of their apartment for over a month.

Patricia and David C. and their two children moved into an apartment in the social park of Semcoda, in Replonges, France, last September. Built in 2016 on land that previously accommodated an old hangar, their new home was spacious, well-lit and modern, but the family didn’t get to enjoy it for two long, as bizarre things started happening. Patricia claims that her daughter started seeing strange things around the house soon after they moved in, and after a while the whole family became convinced that paranormal activity was at play inside their apartment. Things got so bad that they had to install a tent on the balcony to get a peaceful night’s sleep, and they have been using it for over a month.

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Xavier Bouget, an 80-year-old pensioner from France’s Brittany region, and Blanchon, a majestic white pigeon, have been best friends for two years, ever since the Frenchman rescued the bird from becoming a cat’s lunch.

Xavier first met his unlikely companion two years ago, while walking to his house in the town of Gommenec’h. He noticed this small, almost featherless pigeon chick fall out of its nest, in a desperate attempt to escape a hungry cat. He didn’t think to help it at first, but when he got home and mentioned it to his wife, Marie-Françoise, she asked him why he didn’t pick it up. So he went back to get the small pigeon chick, which had miraculously managed to escape the purring predator until his return. Xavier came home with the frail bird in his bird, not knowing that it would soon become his best and closest friend.

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Known as La maison dans la Loire (the House in the Loire), the three-storey building looks like the victim of a flood that once swept it away, but appearances can be deceiving…

Walking along the river Loire, near the town of Lavau-sur-Loire, just a stone throw away from Nantes, you’re bound to spot a rather unusual sight – a tilted building located right in the middle of the river. You’d think it was brutally swept away by some catastrophic flood, but it was actually placed there deliberately by a company that specializes in salvaging wrecks, at the request of a French artist. Today, the House in the Loire is one of the highlights of river cruises on the Loire.

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An impressive trompe-l-oeil fresco painted in the coastal city of Boulogne-Sur-Mer was recently crowned France’s most beautiful street artwork for 2020.

Every year, a popular French portal dedicated to urban art hosts a national competition to crown the nation’s most impressive street art. Thousands of votes are cast, and for last year, the title went to an amazing artwork created by Spanish street artist Gonzalo Borondo, on the city’s rue Jules Baudelocque, last summer. From the right angle, it looks like an elaborate metal gate, with detailed bas-reliefs on either side, but a closer look reveals it to be just an optical illusion.

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If you want to make it as a glamour influencer on social media, you have to look the part, and one way to achieve that is by using fake books as decorations.

French Instagram superstar Maddy Burciaga has come under fire for allegedly promoting fake expensive books are the perfect props to decorate one’s home. In an Instagram story, the 27-year-old shows off fake copies of Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent books, adding that the real books are quite expensive in bookshops and boutiques. But if you’re not actually interested in reading the books, but just want to show off to your followers, you can just get these blocks of cardboard that look like books, for just a fraction of the price. Her promotional campaign didn’t go as planned.

Burciaga, who rose to fame after appearing on a number of French television shows, like “The Angels”, or “The Villa of Broken Hearts”, commands a following of over 2.4 million people on Instagram alone, so her Insta story quickly went viral, and garnered generally negative reactions.

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A 58-year-old French woman has been fight to get her life back, after being wrongfully declared dead by a court, during a long-running dispute with a former employee.

Jeanne Pouchain has been trying to prove she is alive and well for three years, ever since a labor court declared her dead, allegedly acting on information provided by one of her former employees, who she was in a legal dispute with. The verdict not only ended a decade-long lawsuit between Pouchain and her ex-employee, it also ruined her life as a citizen. Her name was wiped from official records, she lost her ID card, her driver’s license, medical insurance, bank account, everything. It was like she didn’t exist anymore.

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Sylvain, a heavily tattooed school teacher from Essonne, in France, risks losing his job, because some parents don’t approve of his full-body tattoo, which includes his face.

The 35-year-old teacher, who goes by Freaky Hoody on social media, recently went on French television channel BFM TV to complain about the threat of losing his job strictly based on his appearance. He claims that his superiors have asked him to no longer teach kindergarten children, after receiving complaints from parents regarding his unconventional looks. Apparently, these people don’t even have children in the classes he teaches, but they have an issue with his tattoos, which cover the vast majority of his body, including his face, and even his eyeballs.

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If you find yourself walking thorough the forest of Rambouillet, just west of Paris, and happen to see an animal resembling a kangaroo, know that your eyes aren’t playing trick on you, the French forest has been home to up to 150 wallabies for over 40 years.

The colony of red-necked Bennett’s wallabies living in Rambouillet Forest can be traced back to a small group of animals that were brought into a zoological reserve in the nearby village of Emance, during the 1970s. A few of them escaped through holes in the fencing, and were never retrieved. They’ve been living in the wild for decades and researchers believe that the woods may now be home to around 150 wallabies. The forest provided them with shelter and sustenance, they had no natural predators to fear, and the climate was apparently very similar to that of their native Tasmania. The biggest threat to the wallabies of Rambouillet are passing cars.

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Frederic Desnard, who worked as a manager at a Parisian perfumery until 2015, sued his former employer because his job was so boring that it made him depressed and forced him to quit. He recently won the trial and a $45,000 compensation.

We originally featured this bizarre court case back in 2016, when Frederic Desnard made international news headlines for suing French perfumery Interparfum for $400,000 for making him work a boring job that at one point made him suffer an epileptic fit and left him feeling depressed. He also claimed that the company signed him off work for several months, and later used his prolonged absence as an excuse to fire him in 2014. Last week, after four years of litigation, 48-year-old Desnard won his case, and a compensation of $45,000.

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A French woman is facing up to 10 years in prison and a hefty fine of up to 150,000 euros ($170,000) for remarrying her ex-husband without his knowledge, in order to prevent him from moving on with his life.

The unnamed woman, who worked as a high-ranking judge in Hauts-de-Seine, France’s Ile-de-France region, reportedly decided to take revenge on her ex-husband, after he had left her for another woman. To add insult to injury, the woman had been dumped for the sister of a French minister that she herself had worked as a judicial adviser for. Her bizarre plan involved remarrying her husband without his knowledge or consent, so as to prevent him from moving on with his life alongside his new partner.

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Officials in the French city of Roubaix recently revealed that the 187 photovoltaic panels that were supposed to generate green electricity for the local library had been installed six months ago, but not connected to the building’s electrical grid…

In June of 2019, thew city of Roubaix announced with great fanfare that it had acquired 187 solar panels meant to generate part of the electricity required by the local library. The panels were installed by local company Sunretec at a cost of 103,000 euros ($113,000), but somehow everyone forgot to actually connect them to the library’s electrical grid, which means that for six months the panels didn’t produce any of the electricity consumed by the Roubaix library.

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We’re no strangers to weird stories here on OC, but this one’s a bit too weird even for us. A French burglar intentionally left traces of DNA all over the crime scene just so he would end up in prison and watch encrypted TV channel Canal+ for free.

A monthly subscription to French premium television channel Canal+ costs around 10 euros ($11), but inmates in French prisons can apparently watch it for free, which was apparently a good enough reason for an ex-con to commit a crime and get himself caught. Over the course of the summer, the unnamed 25-year-old man committed a series of burglaries in the Toulouse suburb of Colomiers, but there was something about his modus operandi that left investigators scratching their heads. He left traces of saliva over the crime scenes, as if he wanted his DNA to be identified.

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A zoo in southeastern France recently condemned the “stupidity” of some of its visitors after shocking photos of a 35-year-old female rhino with the names “Camille” and “Julien” scratched on its back went viral on social media.

La Palmyre Zoo, in the French city of Royan, allows visitors to touch some of the animals in its care when they approach the fence of their enclosure. It is designed to be a “moving” experience that allows visitors to appreciate the “beauty and diversity of nature”, but for some it’s simply an opportunity to display their ignorance and cruelty. Case in point, the people who shockingly used their fingernails to scratch their names onto the back of a female rhino when it approached the fence of its pen. Photos of the “signed” animal went viral online last week, sparking outrage all over the world.

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In what has been described as one of the most daring rackets in history, one or more individuals used a silicone mask to impersonate France’s minister of defense, Jean-Yves Le Drian, and scam an estimated €80 million ($90 million) from wealthy victims.

Jean-Yves Le Drian served as France’s defense minister from 2012 to 2017, and is currently the country’s Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs. He is an important political figure in his homeland, but also a relatively obscure one, which is why investigators believe he was chosen as the target of one of the boldest identity thefts in recorded history. One or more scammers used a custom silicone mask and a cleverly decorated office to fool various members of government and wealthy businessman into thinking that they were being contacted by Mr. Le Drian who requested financial help to pay the ransoms of journalists captured by Islamists in the Middle East. Some of the victims saw through the ruse, but many complied and donated millions.

The scam was simple yet pretty well thought out. Scammers would pose as a member of Le Drian’s inner circle and contact both french and foreign businessmen to arrange a conversation with the esteemed “minister”. In the beginning, the conversations were carried out over a phone, with the scammer impersonating the French minister reproducing Le Drian’s voice almost to perfection.  But, then, in order to make the  whole thing even more believable, they switched to video calls via Skype.

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