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
These shy, scaly anteaters are the most trafficked mammals in the world
CAPE TOWN, South Africa: They are hunted for their unique scales, and the demand makes them the most trafficked mammal in the world.
Wildlife conservationists are again raising the plight of pangolins, the shy, scaly anteaters found in parts of Africa and Asia, on World Pangolin Day on Saturday.
Pangolins or pangolin products outstrip any other mammal when it comes to wildlife smuggling, with more than half a million pangolins seized in anti-trafficking operations between 2016 and 2024, according to a report last year by CITES, the global authority on the trading of endangered plant and animal species.
The World Wildlife Fund estimates that over a million pangolins were taken from the wild over the last decade, including those that were never intercepted.
Pangolins meat is a delicacy in places, but the driving force behind the illegal trade is their scales, which are made of keratin, the protein also found in human hair and fingernails. The scales are in high demand in China and other parts of Asia due to the unproven belief that they cure a range of ailments when made into traditional medicine.
There are eight pangolin species, four in Africa and four in Asia. All of them face a high, very high or extremely high risk of extinction.
While they’re sometimes known as scaly anteaters, pangolins are not related in any way to anteaters or armadillos.
They are unique in that they are the only mammals covered completely in keratin scales, which overlap and have sharp edges. They are the perfect defense mechanism, allowing a pangolin to roll up into an armored ball that even lions struggle to get to grip with, leaving the nocturnal ant and termite eaters with few natural predators.
But they have no real defense against human hunters. And in conservation terms, they don’t resonate in the way that elephants, rhinos or tigers do despite their fascinating intricacies — like their sticky insect-nabbing tongues being almost as long as their bodies.
While some reports indicate a downward trend in pangolin trafficking since the COVID-19 pandemic, they are still being poached at an alarming rate across parts of Africa, according to conservationists.
Nigeria is one of the global hot spots. There, Dr. Mark Ofua, a wildlife veterinarian and the West Africa representative for the Wild Africa conservation group, has rescued pangolins for more than a decade, which started with him scouring bushmeat markets for animals he could buy and save. He runs an animal rescue center and a pangolin orphanage in Lagos.
His mission is to raise awareness of pangolins in Nigeria through a wildlife show for kids and a tactic of convincing entertainers, musicians and other celebrities with millions of social media followers to be involved in conservation campaigns — or just be seen with a pangolin.
Nigeria is home to three of the four African pangolin species, but they are not well known among the country’s 240 million people.
Ofua’s drive for pangolin publicity stems from an encounter with a group of well-dressed young men while he was once transporting pangolins he had rescued in a cage. The men pointed at them and asked him what they were, Ofua said.
“Oh, those are baby dragons,” he joked. But it got him thinking.
“There is a dark side to that admission,” Ofua said. “If people do not even know what a pangolin looks like, how do you protect them?”
