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    Christian Louboutin Makes a Splash at Paris Fashion Week

    Christian Louboutin enlisted the French Olympic synchronized swimming team to introduce his new Miss Z stilettos at Paris Fashion Week.Christian Louboutin made a splash at Paris Fashion Week on Friday night: He staged “Paris is Louboutining,” a synchronized swimming spectacle at the Piscine Molitor.The Art Deco pool, designed by Lucien Pollet in 1929, was transformed into a watery burlesque that would sink Esther Williams with envy. Mr. Louboutin enlisted the photographer and music video director David LaChapelle for art direction, Blanca Li for choreography, a troupe of 14 dancers and 15 members from the French Olympic artistic swimming team for an underwater performance done entirely in his new Miss Z stilettos. The musician LP sang on the pool deck.Even before the Paris Olympics, Mr. Louboutin had been taken with the idea of using athletes to present his collection. He envisioned something surprising, “where you would not expect athletes and you would not expect shoes,” Mr. Louboutin said before the show. “I thought, basically, swimming.”Known for his slick red-leather-soled shoes, Mr. Louboutin also has a love of dance, camp and glamour. His first job was at the Folies Bergère, and he got his start designing shoes for showgirls. He has collaborated with Crazy Horse, Paris’s tastefully nude cabaret, and staged his Loubi shows, the dance and music presentations he orchestrates to showcase new collections, with various choreographers and performers.“Paris is Louboutining” took the concept to another level. The entire revue was fabulously over the top, beginning with its title, a play on the documentary “Paris Is Burning.”Members of the Olympic swim team slid down a giant mule …via Christian Louboutin… and into the pool for their synchronized performance.via Christian LouboutinWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, 103, Dies; His Tenure Leading UNESCO Was Stormy

    He was the first Black African to head a major international organization, but complaints about his tenure led the U.S. and Britain to pull out of it.Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, a Senegalese civil servant and politician who became the first Black African to head a major international organization when he was elected director general of UNESCO — but whose contested tenure there led the United States and Britain to pull out — died on Tuesday in Dakar, Senegal. He was 103.His death, at a hospital, was announced on the website of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which was established to promote international cooperation in those domains.Mr. M’Bow, a rare survivor among the continent’s first generation of independence leaders, had served as Senegal’s education and culture minister when he rose to the top post at UNESCO in 1974. Over the next 13 years he turned the agency into a spearhead for grievances in the developing world and the Soviet bloc, mainly over Western cultural dominance, while entrenching himself behind a phalanx of handpicked bureaucrats at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.His resistance to Western influences, as well as accusations of misspending and nepotism, contributed to decisions by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to pull their countries out of UNESCO in disgust, the U.S. in 1984 and Britain in 1985. Britain rejoined in 1997, the United States in 2003.The withdrawal by the U.S. was particularly disastrous for UNESCO, as American contributions had provided a quarter of its budget. For years afterward, the agency was seen by critics as the poster child for U.N. bloat and politicization.Criticism of Mr. M’Bow centered on his promotion of what came to be known as a “new world information order,” a vague body of recommendations that many in the West regarded as a threat to freedom of the press, while its advocates saw it as an attempt to break the perceived Western monopoly on the reporting and dissemination of news.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Paris Throws a Final Olympics Bash

    Tens of thousands cheered, clapped, danced and sang to celebrate French athletes and to relive, one last time, the Games that uplifted a nation.Paris threw its last Olympics party on Saturday, a buoyant, nostalgia-tinged celebration of the 2024 Games that drew tens of thousands of cheering spectators to the streets of the French capital for a parade of athletes and an outdoor concert around the Arc de Triomphe.The festivities started with smoky blue, white and red fireworks, echoing the start of the opening ceremony on the Seine. Flag-waving crowds then roared and sang France’s national anthem as more than 300 French Olympic and Paralympic contestants paraded up the Champs-Élysées on a giant white runway.“Thank you all,” Teddy Riner, the French judo legend, told ecstatic spectators as they sounded air horns and chanted athletes’ names. “It was incredible!”Medal-winning athletes were later decorated with state honors, some of them by retired French sports legends, and a handful were honored by President Emmanuel Macron himself. France won 64 medals, putting it in the top five of the Olympics medals count. And it earned 75 medals at the Paralympics.Athletes paraded up the Champs-Élysées on a giant white runway.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersAfter night fell, the Olympic cauldron floated into the air one last time and a highlight reel of the Games was projected onto the Arc de Triomphe. Performers from the opening and closing ceremonies also returned for an encore on a ring-shaped stage around the famous monument (including Philippe Katerine, a.k.a blue Smurf guy). French fencers, rugby players and others led the concertgoers through giant karaoke sessions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Eiffel Tower Will Keep Olympic Rings Permanently, Mayor Says

    “I want the two to remain married,” Mayor Anne Hidalgo of Paris said in a newspaper interview.The giant Olympic rings that were installed on the Eiffel Tower for the 2024 summer Games will become a permanent fixture on the monument, the mayor of Paris revealed on Saturday.Mayor Anne Hidalgo said that it was a “beautiful idea” to combine a quintessentially French icon, the Eiffel Tower, which was originally built for the 1889 World’s Fair, with a global one. The five interlaced rings of blue, red, yellow, black and green, which represent the different continents, were installed this summer between the tower’s first and second floors, more than 200 feet above the ground.“I want the two to remain married,” Ms. Hidalgo said in an interview with Ouest-France, a newspaper.The Eiffel Tower, already one of the most widely recognized monuments in the world, with about seven million visitors per year, has been a prominent symbol of this year’s Olympic Games, which ended earlier this month, and of the Paralympic Games, which will end on Sept. 8.Medals won by athletes are encrusted with pieces of the famous landmark; Celine Dion made a triumphant comeback by singing from the tower during the opening ceremony; and the monument has become a stunning backdrop for beach volleyball and blind football.Olympic competitors pass the Eiffel Tower at the start of the women’s road race in August.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesMs. Hidalgo said that she had written to President Emmanuel Macron of France to notify him, because the Eiffel Tower is “part of our national cultural heritage.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Paris, Uncharacteristically Giddy, Bids Au Revoir to the Olympics

    A joyous Games, a cleaned-up Seine and improvements to the region brought cheer to Parisians as they handed off the Summer Olympics to Los Angeles.There were French firemen flipping like acrobats, a musician playing a piano that hung vertically in the air, and Olympic athletes overwhelming the stage and forming a mosh pit around the French electro-pop band Phoenix.The Paris Olympics ended much as they began, with a raucous spectacle before a joyous crowd, a generous supply of strobe lights, smoke and fireworks. And then the actor Tom Cruise rappelled off the stadium roof to collect the Olympic flag from the gymnast Simone Biles and carry it off on his motorcycle, à la “Top Gun” and “Mission: Impossible” to Los Angeles, where the next summer Olympics is set to take place in 2028.“Together, we have experienced the Games like nothing we have ever lived before,” said Tony Estanguet, the president of the Paris Olympics organizing committee, adding that of all the records broken, among them was one for marriage proposals. “From one day to the next, time stood still and a whole country got goose bumps.”As Paris bids au revoir to the Olympic Games, many are reluctant to let go of its magic: of the adrenaline-fueled excitement, of the party free of political debate, of the sense of time deliciously suspended, like the glowing Olympic cauldron that has hovered wistfully over the city every night.The beach volleyball venue became one of the most popular, and most photographed, at the Games.Daniel Berehulak/The New York TimesThe Olympic cauldron hovering over the city.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Travis Scott Is Accused of Assaulting a Security Guard in Paris

    The rapper, who was in France for the Olympics, was taken into police custody at the George V hotel, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.The star rapper Travis Scott was detained on Friday in Paris, where he was visiting for the Summer Olympics, after a conflict with a security guard at a luxury hotel, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.The prosecutor’s office said Mr. Scott, 33, whose real name is Jacques Bermon Webster II, had assaulted a security guard at the George V hotel, in the city’s Eighth Arrondissement.“The security guard had intervened to separate the rapper from his bodyguard,” the office said in a statement.There are no known charges against Mr. Scott. It was unclear later Friday whether he was still in custody. The Paris prosecutor’s office said it had referred the case to the judicial police.Representatives for Mr. Scott said in a statement, “We are in direct communication with the local Parisian authorities to swiftly resolve this matter and will provide updates when appropriate.”Mr. Scott, a multiplatinum artist in the United States with a string of No. 1 albums, was arrested this summer in Miami Beach, Fla., after what the police called a disturbance on a yacht. He was charged with trespassing and disorderly intoxication. His lawyer said at the time that he had been “briefly detained due to a misunderstanding.”On Thursday night, Mr. Scott had posted on Instagram from the crowd of the men’s basketball game between the United States and Serbia, snapping photos of the American stars LeBron James and Stephen Curry.In 2021, 10 fans died as a result of a crowd crush at Mr. Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston, his hometown. A grand jury declined to indict Mr. Scott and others who oversaw the festival, and settlements have been reached in the lawsuits over the deaths.Aurelien Breeden More

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    Doug Emhoff Stresses a Personal Push Against Antisemitism

    At an event in Paris to commemorate a 1982 attack on a Jewish deli there, Kamala Harris’s husband said, “Part of fighting hate is living openly and proudly as a Jew.”When Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, landed in Paris this week, the Summer Olympics were naturally on the schedule. He met with the champion sprinter Noah Lyles, watched the U.S. men’s basketball team rally against Serbia and is to lead the American presidential delegation at the closing ceremony on Sunday.But Mr. Emhoff, the first Jewish spouse of an American vice president or president, also used his trip to focus on an issue that is far more sobering and also deeply personal: a surge of antisemitism in the United States and around the world since the war between Israel and Hamas erupted in October.“It is a poison coursing through the veins of democracy and democratic ideals,” Mr. Emhoff said on Friday at a commemoration of a deadly 1982 attack on a storied Jewish deli in Paris. Six people were killed in that attack, including two Americans, and 22 were wounded.“Part of fighting hate is living openly and proudly as a Jew and celebrating our faith and our culture,” Mr. Emhoff said as helicopters buzzed overhead, a reminder of the tight security that France has imposed during the Olympics. “I love being Jewish, and I love the joy that comes with being Jewish. And I’m not going to let anyone tell me how to be Jewish.”Mr. Emhoff has emerged as the Biden administration’s most visible face in the struggle against antisemitism. He has convened Jewish leaders at the White House, called former President Donald J. Trump “a known antisemite,” and drawn on his faith to offer comfort to Jewish Americans anguished by the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.He is also, of course, the spouse of a presidential candidate. And to that end, he attended a private fund-raiser in Paris for Ms. Harris’s campaign, though he made no direct mention of her presidential bid in his public statements — even to the scores of journalists who watched him grab lunch at L’As du Falafel, a celebrated falafel spot, on Friday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Paris Bridge of Olympic Joy and Its Violent Past

    If the Olympic Games have made of Paris a midsummer night’s dream, perhaps the Pont du Carrousel has been its heart, a dimly lit bridge over glittering water, a merry-go-round of incarnations as the weeks have passed.The broad bridge spans the center of Paris, leading from the Quai Voltaire on the Left Bank of the Seine River to three vaulted openings into the Louvre courtyard on the Right Bank. It has always been a place for lovers to linger, joggers to pause, selfie seekers to snap and Paris wanderers to succumb to wonderment.There are few better places to drink in the city. The Grand Palais and Eiffel Tower rise to the west. To the east loom the domed Académie Française and, in the distance, the Notre-Dame Cathedral, now almost restored after the 2019 fire. The cleaned-up river is ever-changing, now churning after a downpour, now glassy still.France was in a somber mood through much of the summer. Then the Paris Olympics began two weeks ago, replacing social fracture with patriotic rapture, dissolving fences of division into bridges of understanding, none more unifying than the Pont du Carrousel, at least for now.Walking and cycling at the entrance to the Pont du Carrousel in Paris on Thursday.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesThe bridge spans the Seine from Quai Voltaire on the Left Bank to a grand entrance into the Louvre courtyard on the Right Bank.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More