Events in Waikato: Chiefs, Magic and running event all on the calendar
● Inside Out exhibition, now, Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato
From bold outdoor landmarks to the intimacy of a gallery setting, the exhibition celebrates Waikato's public art. Photographs of landmark sculptures in our region are presented with smaller works by the same artists. Free entry.
● French Film, now until June 18, Lido Cinema Hamilton
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NZ Herald
2 hours ago
- NZ Herald
French police probe fake Disneyland ‘marriage' with 9-year-old
French police were on Sunday probing the circumstances of a bizarre stunt at Disneyland outside of Paris, with a group of adults suspected of hiring the theme park and paying hundreds of extras to stage a fake marriage for a 9-year-old Ukrainian girl. Two people were held for questioning in
1News
2 days ago
- 1News
Napoleon's iconic bicorne hat, personal treasures expected to fetch millions in Paris
After Hollywood's Napoleon exposed the legendary emperor to a new generation, over 100 relics — which shaped empires, broke hearts and spawned centuries of fascination — are on display in Paris ahead of what experts call one of the most important Napoleonic auctions ever staged. His battered military hat. A sleeve from his red velvet coat. Even the divorce papers that ended one of history's most tormented romances — with Josephine, the empress who haunted him to the end. Two centuries after his downfall, Napoleon remains both revered and controversial in France — but above all, unavoidable. Polls have shown that many admire his vision and achievements, while others condemn his wars and authoritarian rule. Nearly all agree his legacy still shapes the nation. 'These are not just museum pieces. They're fragments of a life that changed history,' said Louis-Xavier Joseph, Sotheby's head of European furniture, who helped assemble the trove. 'You can literally hold a piece of Napoleon's world in your hand.' From battlefields to boudoirs ADVERTISEMENT Busts are on display in an exhibition of Napoleon's belongings created by French designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac at the Sotheby's auction house in Paris. (Source: Associated Press) The auction — aiming to make in excess of 7 million euros (NZ$13.4 million) — is a biography in objects. The centrepiece is Napoleon's iconic bicorne hat, the black felt chapeau he wore in battle — with wings parallel to his shoulders — so soldiers and enemies could spot him instantly through the gunpowder haze. 'Put a bicorne on a table, and people think of Napoleon immediately,' Joseph said. 'It's like the laurel crown of Julius Caesar.' The hat is estimated to sell for at least over half a million dollars. For all the pageantry — throne, swords, the Grand Eagle of the Legion of Honour — the auction's true power comes from its intimacy. It includes the handwritten codicil of Napoleon's final will, composed in paranoia and illness on Saint Helena. There is the heartbreakingly personal: the red portfolio that once contained his divorce decree from Josephine, the religious marriage certificate that formalized their love and a dressing table designed for the empress. Her famed mirror reflects the ambition and tragedy of their alliance. 'Napoleon was a great lover; his letters that he wrote are full of fervour, of love, of passion,' Joseph said. 'It was also a man who paid attention to his image. Maybe one of the first to be so careful of his image, both public and private.' ADVERTISEMENT A new generation of exposure The auction's timing is cinematic. The 2023 biopic grossed over US$220 million (NZ$366.5 million) worldwide and reanimated Napoleon's myth for a TikTok generation hungry for stories of ambition, downfall and doomed romance. The auction preview is open to the public, running through June 24, with the auction set for June 25. Not far from the Arc de Triomphe monument dedicated to the general's victories, Djamal Oussedik, 22, shrugged: 'Everyone grows up with Napoleon, for better or worse. Some people admire him, others blame him for everything. But to see his hat and his bed, you remember he was a real man, not just a legend.' 'You can't escape him, even if you wanted to. He's part of being French," said teacher Laure Mallet, 51. History as spectacle A woman walks past a throne in an exhibition of Napoleon's belongings created by French designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac at the Sotheby's auction house. (Source: Associated Press) ADVERTISEMENT The exhibition is a spectacle crafted by celebrity designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, famed for dressing Lady Gaga and Pope John Paul II. 'I wanted to electrify history,' Castelbajac said. 'This isn't a mausoleum, it's a pop culture installation. Today's collectors buy a Napoleon artefact the way they'd buy a guitar from Jimi Hendrix. They want a cabinet of curiosities.' He's filled the show with fog, hypnotic music and immersive rooms. One is inspired by the camouflage colours of Fontainebleau. Another is anchored by Napoleon's legendary folding bed. 'I create the fog in the entrance of the Sotheby's building because the elements of nature were an accomplice to Napoleon's strategy,' the designer said. Castelbajac, who said his ancestor fought in Napoleon's Russian campaign, brought a personal touch. 'I covered the emperor's bed in original canvas. You can feel he was just alone, facing all he had built. There's a ghostly presence." He even created something Napoleon only dreamed of. 'Napoleon always wanted a green flag instead of the blue, white, red tricolore of the revolution," he said, smiling. "He never got one. So I made it for Sotheby's.'
Otago Daily Times
15-06-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Bottom trawling doomed after Attenborough film
At the age of 99, documentary film-maker David Attenborough has achieved his greatest triumph. With a single film clip, he has signed the death warrant for one of the world's most destructive industries: bottom trawling. The companies and countries that do it will go down fighting and it will take time, but they will go down. His film Ocean got a simultaneous global release last month to build pressure for a ban on bottom trawling before the third United Nations Ocean Conference last week in the French city of Nice. The ban did not happen last week, and it won't happen everywhere at once, but it is inevitable once enough people have seen that clip. You can't forget it. It's long shots from underwater cameras at the mouth of an enormous net (you can't see the sides or the top). The bottom of the net, weighed down so it scrapes along the seabed, swallows up everything in its path — fish, crustaceans, plants, mud — as it advances inexorably, faster than a walking pace, throwing up a plume of muck in its wake. These bottom trawlers have been working at sea for more than a century, but nobody had ever seen this scene before. No diver would survive where the cameras were, presumably fixed to the net's mouth by some rig that let them see the whole process. It is a nightmare vision of mass death and destruction. No doubt the owners of the commercial trawler that Attenborough's producers hired for this sequence were well paid, but they unwittingly sold out their whole industry. Bottom trawlers are responsible for the bulk of the damage humans have done to the oceans. More than half the fish they catch are "bycatch", thrown back into the water dead or dying because the trawlermen are only after a couple of species that bring a good price. The "clean shave" they give the bottom leaves nowhere for juvenile fish to hide. The first fishing boats that pulled big nets behind them, the so-called "Brixham trawlers" of the early 1800s, were sail-driven, but by the 1870s there were steam trawlers in Britain that could drag much bigger nets and catch ten times as many fish. The global fishing catch then may have been as little as 5 million tonnes annually, but it went up fast. With the advent of "factory freezers" in the mid-20th century — big ships that could travel to distant waters, catch up to 400 tonnes of fish every time they released their nets, and mechanically gut, fillet and fast-freeze the ones they wanted, dumping the rest — total catch reached 30 million tonnes a year by 1950. It peaked at 130 million tonnes in 1996, by which time almost every major fishery in the world was being depleted. Humans have even changed the structure of ocean fish populations. Big, predatory "table fish" (the kind people like to eat) have declined by two-thirds, while the biomass of smaller prey fish, facing fewer predators, has gone up. The worst of it is while the official United Nations goal is to have 30% of the world's oceans in "maritime protected areas" by 2030, most of those still allow bottom trawling. We cannot rebuild healthy oceans unless that is stopped in the safe zones where fish populations should be able to recover, which is why Attenborough has made that his primary goal. It did not happen at the third United Nations Ocean Conference, but it was being heavily debated there. The European Union and the United Kingdom will be moving on the issue soon, and where they go others will follow. But if they really do stop bottom trawling those zones, what will people eat? "We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton," warns Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia. But we may be spared that fate by the dramatic rise in the consumption of farmed fish. Half the protein people eat from all marine and freshwater sources is already from fish farms, and the ratio is rising. Moreover, the "fish in/fish out" number is steadily improving. It really used to be the "little fish in/big fish out" ratio, with 3 tonnes of little fish ground up for fish meal and fish oil to produce 1 tonne of salmon or trout, but now fish feed is mostly plant-based, and even big cage-raised predators are net neutral, one in/one out. So, the oceans, while still in terrible shape, are getting better, at least as far as fish are concerned. Now all we have to do is reverse the acidification process, stop sea-level rise, and keep the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (the Gulf Stream) from collapsing. Can you start next week? — Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
