PARIS: Paris’s Moulin Rouge cabaret club, whose landmark windmill sails fell down in April, received new blades on Monday just 10 days before the Paris Olympic torch is due to pass the venue.
One of the most visited tourist attractions in the French capital, Moulin Rouge plans to install the four new temporary sails for a special ceremony on July 5.
The red aluminum and steel blades arrived by lorry early on Monday at the club, located in the touristy Pigalle district.
The first blade or sail was attached with the aid a crane under the gaze of curious and pleased locals.
Over the next four days, the three other sails will be winched up onto the terrace before being bolted into place and the electric cables linked up.
Moulin Rouge officials said it would take a further four days to remove the tarpaulin and scaffolding that has enveloped the windmill since the night of April 25.
The first three letters on the cabaret’s facade — M, O and U — also fell off. No-one was injured in the incident.
“Our little Moulin Rouge is back! We’re so happy,” exclaimed Raymonde Rogojarski, looking at the windmill on the way to take her eight-year-old daughter to school on Monday morning.
“It’s very moving to see the sails back so soon,” added Rogojarski.
She said she lived “just round the corner” from the club, which has put on risque nightime entertainment since it opened in 1889 and been immortalized by French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Mathieu Feltz, another local, got off his bike to take a picture of the first blade being bolted into place.
“I was stunned when the sails fell off,” he said.
“This morning, I came past here on the way to work. It’s interesting to see how they put the blade back up.”
The sails are only provisional and will not rotate but they enable the landmark to look the part in time for the Paris Olympics.
“The Olympic torch is due to pass the Moulin Rouge on July 15, so it’s very important for us to be ready by then,” said Virginie Clerico, the Moulin Rouge brand manager.
In late April, the management confirmed the incident was not a “malicious act.”
The birthplace of the can-can and the location for Baz Luhrmann’s film “Moulin Rouge,” the club has remained open to the public since April 25.
For the ceremony on July 5 to celebrate the arrival of the new sails, the venue has promised an outdoor “sound and light show, with a score of performers dancing the French can-can” on the street.
Paris’s Moulin Rouge gets new sails in time for Olympics
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Paris’s Moulin Rouge gets new sails in time for Olympics
- One of the most visited tourist attractions in the French capital, Moulin Rouge plans to install the four new temporary sails for a special ceremony on July 5
Judge declares 4 men wrongly accused of 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent
- The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families
- Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999
TEXAS, USA: A Texas judge on Thursday declared four men who were wrongfully accused of the 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent, formally clearing their names in a courtroom for the first time since the killings of four teenage girls that haunted the city for decades.
“You are innocent,” state District Judge Dayna Blazey said during a hearing in a packed Austin courtroom.
The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families, and for a city that was shaken by the brutality of the crime and investigators’ inability to solve it for decades. Blazey called her order “an obligation to the rule of law and the obligation to the dignity of the individual.”
Cold case detectives announced last year that they had connected the killings to a suspect who died in a 1999 standoff with police in Missouri.
Two of the original four suspects, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn, were in the packed courtroom with family members to hear prosecutors tell the judge that they are innocent. Robert Springsteen, who was initially convicted and spent several years on death row, did not attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010.
“Over 25 years ago, the state prosecuted four innocent men ... (for) one of the worst crimes Austin has ever seen,” Travis County First Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger said at the opening of the hearing. “We could not have been more wrong.”
A declaration of “actual innocence” would also be a key step for the men and their families to seek financial compensation for years they spent in jail or in prison.
“All four lived under the specter of the yogurt shop murders. These four never had the chance to live normal lives,” Strassburger said.
The murders shocked Austin and confounded investigators for years
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed and he was released.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 had revealed another male suspect.
“Let us not forgot that Robert Springsteen could be dead right now, executed at the hands of the state of Texas,” Springsteen attorney Amber Farrelly said at the hearing.
Connection to a new suspect revealed
The case effectively went cold until 2025. It got new public attention when an HBO documentary series explored the unsolved crime.
Investigators announced in September that new evidence and reviews of old evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 murder in South Carolina.
Austin investigators also found that Brashers had been arrested at a border checkpoint near El Paso two days after the yogurt shop killings. In his stolen car was a pistol that matched the same caliber used to kill one of the girls in Austin.
Police also noted similarities in the yogurt shop case to Brashers’ other crimes: The victims were tied up with their own clothing, sexually assaulted and some crime scenes were set on fire.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
