French mayor who ran town from prison replaced!

DRAVEIL, France: A French mayor who continued to run his town near Paris from jail after being convicted for rape has been formally replaced following months of pressure and criticism from women’s rights groups.

The town council in Draveil elected deputy mayor Richard Privat late on Tuesday to replace Georges Tron who resigned from his cell at the end of May after more than 25 years at the helm.

Tron, a junior minister under right-president Nicolas Sarkozy, began serving a three-year sentence in February for raping a council employee who the court found had been pressured into sex. His decision to carry on running Draveil, a town of 30,000 people in the southern suburbs of Paris, outraged opposition councillors and women’s rights groups.