France is bitten by a fear of bedbugs as it prepares to host Summer Olympics
France PM to hold emergency meeting
Paris (AP): They creep, they crawl, they feast on your blood as you sleep. They may travel in your clothes or backpacks to find another person worth dining on on the subway, or at the cinema. Bedbugs go where you go, and they have become a nightmare haunting France for weeks.
The government has been forced to step in to calm an increasingly anxious nation that will host the Olympic Games in just over nine months a prime venue for infestations of the crowd-loving insects.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne called a meeting of ministers for Friday to tackle the bedbug crisis. The country's transport minister, Clement Beaune, met this week with transportation companies to draw up a plan for monitoring and disinfecting and to try to ease what some have called a national psychosis inflamed by the media.
"There is no resurgence of cases," Beaune said, telling reporters that 37 cases reported in the bus and Metro system and a dozen others on trains proved unfounded as did viral videos on social media of tiny creatures supposedly burrowing in the seat of a fast train.
Still, bedbugs have plagued France and other countries for decades. The insects the size of an apple seed that neither jump nor fly get around as easily as people travel from city to city and nation to nation, and they have become increasingly resistant to insecticides. If that's not enough to make you itchy: Bedbugs can stay alive for a year without a meal.
Without any blood, "they can slow their metabolism and just wait for us," said Jean-Michel Berenger, an entomologist who raises bedbugs in his lab in the infectious diseases section of the Mediterranee University Hospital in Marseille. The carbon dioxide that all humans give off "will reactivate them and they'll come back to bite you."
For now, Berenger said, this much is certain: "Bedbugs have infested the media."
Yet bad dreams are most often fed by a touch of reality.
More than one household in 10 in France was infested with bedbugs between 2017 and 2022, according to a report by the National Agency for Health and Food Safety. The agency relied on a poll by Ipsos to query people on a topic that many prefer to avoid discussing because they fear going public with a bedbug problem will stigmatize them.
But silence is a mistake, experts say. No social category is immune to finding bedbugs in their clothing, blankets or mattresses.
"It's not at all a hygiene problem. The only thing that interests (bedbugs) is your blood," said Berenger, the entomologist. "Whether you live in a dump or a palace, it's the same thing to them."
Business is booming for companies that eradicate the little brown insects, a process that often starts with detection by dogs trained to sniff out the special odor that bedbugs give off. If an infestation is confirmed, technicians move in to zap the area with super hot steam. Heat and cold are enemies of bedbugs. One French government recommendation for victims is to put well-wrapped clothes in the freezer.
Kevin Le Mestre, director of Lutte Antinuisible, said his company is getting "dozens and dozens" of calls. In the past, he said, people often didn't react, even to bites.
"Now, as soon as they spot a bite, they don't ask themselves whether it really comes from bedbugs or not. They call us straight away," said a pest control technician for the company, Lucas Pradalier, as he disinfected a Paris apartment. A sniffer dog detected bedbugs in a baseboard and between floorboards.
The French public began moving into panic mode about a month ago after reports of bedbugs at a Paris movie theater. Videos began popping up on social networks, showing little insects on trains and buses.
Now, both Socialists and centrists of President Emmanuel Macron's party want to propose bills to fight bedbugs. Far-left lawmaker Mathilde Panot recently brought a vial of bedbugs to the Parliament to chastise the government for, in her view, letting the creatures run rampant.
Bedbugs, an age-old curse on humans, seemingly disappeared with treatment by harsh, now-banned insecticides. They made a reappearance in the 1950s, especially in densely populated cities like New York. And they travel the world thanks to commerce and tourism.
That adds up to a bedbug challenge for the Paris Olympics starting in July.
"All human population movements are profitable for bedbugs because they go with us, to hotels, in transport," said Berenger.
Beaune, the transport minister, is hopeful that steps can be taken to ease the public's fear. But, he conceded, "It's hell, these bedbugs."
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Bondi Beach shooting suspect conducted firearms training with his father, Australian police say
Melbourne (AP): A man accused of killing 15 people at Sydney's Bondi Beach conducted firearms training in an area of New South Wales state outside of Sydney with his father, Australian police documents released on Monday allege.
The men recorded a video about their justification for the meticulously planned attack, according to a police statement of facts that was made public following Naveed Akram's video court appearance Monday from a Sydney hospital where he has been treated for an abdominal injury.
Officers wounded Akram at the scene of the Dec. 14 shooting and killed his father, 50-year-old Sajid Akram.
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The New South Wales state government confirmed Naveed Akram was transferred on Monday from a hospital to a prison. Neither facility was identified by authorities.
The statement alleges the 24-year-old and his father began their attack by throwing four improvised explosive devices toward a crowd celebrating an annual Jewish event at Bondi Beach, but the devices failed to explode.
Police described the devices as three aluminium pipe bombs and a tennis ball bomb containing an explosive, black powder and steel ball bearings. None detonated, but police described them as “viable” IEDs.
Authorities have charged Akram with 59 offences, including 15 counts of murder, 40 counts of causing harm with intent to murder in relation to the wounded survivors and one count of committing a terrorist act.
The antisemitic attack at the start of the eight-day Hanukkah celebration was Australia's worst mass shooting since a lone gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania state in 1996.
The New South Wales government introduced draft laws to Parliament on Monday that Premier Chris Minns said would become the toughest in Australia.
The new restrictions would include making Australian citizenship a condition of qualifying for a firearms license. That would have excluded Sajid Akram, who was an Indian citizen with a permanent resident visa.
Sajid Akram also legally owned six rifles and shotguns. A new legal limit for recreational shooters would be a maximum of four guns.
Police said a video found on Naveed Akram's phone shows him with his father "reciting their political and religious views and appear to summarise their justification for the Bondi terrorist attack.”
The men are seen in the video “condemning the acts of Zionists” while they also “adhere to a religiously motivated ideology linked to the Islamic State,” police said.
Video shot in October shows them “firing shotguns and moving in a tactical manner” on grassland surrounded by trees, police said.
“There is evidence that the Accused and his father meticulously planned this terrorist attack for many months,” police allege.
