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(MENAFN - AFP) Fines imposed against owners renting their Paris apartments out on Airbnb surged more than tenfold in the first half of 2017 thanks to more rigorous monitoring, city authorities said Friday. Thirty-one owners of 128 units were slapped with a total of 615,000 euros (723,000) in fines for renting them out for more than the city limit of 120 days per year, city hall official Ian Brossat told AFP . "These numbers do not reflect an explosion in the number of rental offers but in the effectiveness of the monitoring" by a team of 25 agents deployed by the city, Brossat said. "We are pleased to see that the courts have a heavier hand than before," he added. The maximum fine for the offence doubled in November to 50,000 euros. Paris is one of Airbnb's top markets, with some 65,000 sites listed. Another 35,000 are available from similar online platforms . The city has slapped limits on the short-term rental of apartments and rooms as they compete with hot...

FAYETTEVILLE -- Fayetteville Police are investigating a double homicide at the Barrington Place apartments - formerly known as Cambridge Arms. Two bodies were discovered around 5 a.m. Thursday at an apartment in the 300 block of Barcelona Drive. Click here to view a map of the area Authorities said a man and a woman were found shot to death in apartment #28 C, after someone passing by the rear of the apartment noticed a broken glass door . One body was found near the back door, while the other was in the kitchen. Police and family members identified the victims as 18-year-old Shaniqua Simmons and 29-year-old Jacoy Mahorn. "My sister's gone," cried Anita Simmons , who also lives in the complex. "She is fun. She is outgoing. She liked to have fun. She tried to live her life. She was so young." Simmons said her sister worked at the Sonic on Cliffdale Road and had spent all of Wednesday with Mahorn. She said the two were just friends, and she doesn't kno...

by: Julius Whigham II and Bill DiPaolo, Palm Beach Post Updated: Aug 12, 2017 - 6:25 PM RIVIERA BEACH, Florida - Quick action by neighbors and firefighters -- and a little luck -- saved three infants trapped inside a burning apartment on Friday that police say was set on fire by their father after a domestic dispute with the children’s 19-year-old mother. Using hammers, chairs and whatever they could grab to smash through hurricane windows, neighbors entered a burning second-floor unit at the Stonybrook Apartments. They handed a 3-year-old boy and a 1-year-old boy out the window. >> Read more trending news “They kept pounding and pounding. They were using hammers and chairs, anything they could get their hands on. They wouldn’t stop until they got those kids out,” said Riviera Beach Mayor Thomas Masters . A 1-month-old girl was still inside, residents told firefighters when they arrived about 6 p.m. Firefighters were unable to see through the heavy smoke. A thermo- imaging ...

Valentina Livshits says the mysterious visitors came to her in Rostov-on-Don about a month ago, offering to buy her plot of land in the center of the southern Russian city at a knockdown price. The two men said they were "realtors" who "must report to the head of the city administration" about their "work with residents," Livshits, 62, told RFE/RL's Russian Service . "They got very upset when I refused. They vowed that the court wouldn't rule in my favor and that I'd simply be kicked out of my home," she said. Stories of similar ominous visits to the neighborhood by unidentified men had been bubbling for weeks before a massive fire tore through the area on August 21, damaging or destroying 123 residential buildings and killing one man . Numerous locals believe the blaze was deliberately set amid a battle for land in a rundown district that locals call "Govnyarka," or "Crapville." The neighborhood is not far fr...

The search began before dawn; the train had just crossed the border of Tajikistan into Uzbekistan. We were only three hours into the four- day train ride between Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, and Moscow. An Uzbek border guard , clad in brown fatigues , boarded the train — a Soviet-replica, green, with a silver roof — and began yelling. He moved through the car, searching passenger after passenger, ripping apart belongings, interrogating everyone about terrorism and narcotics, and scanning flip phones and cheap Nokias for “sex photos” (pornography is banned in Uzbekistan). The passengers endured this, unfazed. Almost all of them were migrants traveling to Russia for work. They’d seen this routine before. It was March. Across Tajikistan, thousands of people — mostly young men — were departing for or preparing to leave for Russia. The long Russian winter was nearing its end; construction projects in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg were slowly coming back to life. Tajikistan, t...

Rich and Poor. Credit: Flickr/Sandra Cohen Rose and Colin Rose. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0). Originally published on  Everyday Feminism . The brownstone I lived in for eight months in 2009 and 2010 had few amenities – the building often smelled like leaking pipes, the carpets were threadbare in many places, and the steam heater in the corner was completely out of my control, resulting in quite a few freezing mornings and sweltering nights. It did, however, have a gas stove and oven which, the landlord had told me, was pretty new and “worked great.” Unfortunately, everything else in the unit was electric, which meant that I’d need to set up separate utility accounts and pay for the gas every month just to run the stove and range. “It’s like $10 to turn it on and then another $20-$30 per month depending on how much you use it,” she explained. Yeah, I’m just not going to do that, then,  I thought, doing the math in my head. At that point, $30 was just a little bit less than my tak...