Five Corkonians, five French farms, five days. What could possibly go wrong, wonders Esther N McCarthy

More than 20,000 residents in Nantes, one of the largest cities on France’s Atlantic coast, were evacuated from their homes today while experts defused an unexploded Allied bomb from the Second World War.

FRANCE and Holland will begin vaccination programmes immediately in a bid to ward off bird flu as Europe braces itself for the next migration of millions of birds from Africa where the disease is spreading rapidly.