Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony—326,000 Crowd Is Security Nightmare

As the world prepares for the 2024 Summer Olympics from Paris between July 26 and August 11, Air France is expanding service to the United States and North America to support the increased demand.

One of France's most popular tourist attractions is slowly being brought back to life following a devastating fire.

It was 8:55 p.m., a week before my trip to Tokyo and I was hovering over my laptop with a steady hand on the mouse. The website I was on clearly stated: "Reservations may be booked from 9 p.m., 7 days in advance at the earliest."

Compton Verney, a stately home turned art museum in Warwickshire, is set in 120 acres of Grade II listed classical parkland, designed by Lancelot “Capability” Brown, the most eminent landscape architect of the eighteenth-century. The property also houses the only Capability Brown designed chapel. In 1993, Sir Peter Moores, through the Peter Moores Foundation (PMF) bought the site, including the near-derelict mansion, and gifted it to the specially-created charitable trust Compton Verney House Trust (CVHT). Since then, Compton Verney has been welcoming visitors to its wide range of exhibitions, events and grounds, and this year it celebrates the 20th anniversary with the launch of its first ever sculpture trail and a number of ambitious exhibitions across its six galleries.

“They’re movable pieces of art,” says Budapest-born, London-based decorator Gergei Erdei of his new collection of hand-painted folding pinewood screens. Part of his Objects of Desires series, the six designs include trompe l’oeil columns, wing-footed mythological figures and interlinked geometric shapes. Erdei found inspiration for his pieces, which are over seven feet tall, in a recent retrospective of the Italian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli’s works at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs and in the lacquered screens of multimedia Art Deco creator Jean Dunand; Pompeii’s crumbling frescoes and ancient mosaics informed the mythological design’s soft, ocher hues, which were achieved through multiple coats of acrylic paint. “I keep coming back to Pompeii in my work,” Erdei says. “I find the layers faded by time so beautiful, like veils of history.”

The newest mid-tier credit card on the market launched in select Wells Fargo branches March 9. Now, the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey℠ Visa® Card is available online and nationwide at Wells Fargo branches with a valuable sign-up bonus.

Uber-luxury line Crystal is out with a new world cruise itinerary that might be its most epic ever. It comes with an epic price tag, too.

A luxury space travel company is set to mingle fine dining with suborbital travel.

Some call it a war, others a capture operation or an exile effort. In any case, an excess of wild rabbits in Paris has convinced the authorities to lose them.

If you’re a sakura - or cherry blossom - lover, you’ll likely have Japan and Washington DC on your travel bucket lists. But did you know there are countless places across Europe with equally impressive pink blooms to take in this spring?

Citi is a TPG advertising partner.

The ground-breaking opening ceremony planned for this summer’s Paris Olympics on the Seine River has been scaled back once again, with the previously announced 600,000 free tickets available to the general public, now being cut in half to about 300,000 by invite-only. Though tickets for the momentous July 26 event were initially intended for the general public through an open registration, the nation’s Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin announced last week that 104,000 seats on the lower riverbank will be paid tickets, while 222,000 upper banks seats will remain free, but distributed via a quota system, The Associated Press reported.  “To manage crowd movement, we can’t tell everyone to come,” Darmanin said. “For security reasons that everyone understands, notably the terrorist threat of recent weeks, we are obliged to make it free but contained.” No specific plots have been identified, but there are certainly heightened threats, he noted.