Thieves steal crown jewels in 4 minutes from Louvre Museum
Paris(AP/PTI): In a minutes-long strike Sunday inside the world's most-visited museum, thieves rode a basket lift to the Louvre, forced a window into the Galerie d'Apollon — while tourists pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in the corridors — smashed display cases and fled with priceless Napoleonic jewels, officials said.
It was among the highest-profile museum thefts in recent memory and comes as Louvre employees have complained of worker and security understaffing.
One object was later found outside the museum, according to Culture Minister Rachida Dati. French daily Le Parisien reported it was the emerald-studded crown of Napoleon III's wife Empress Eugénie — gold, diamonds and sculpted eagles — recovered just beyond the walls, broken.
Dati called the strike the work of “professionals,” describing it on TF1 TV network as “a four-minute operation carried out without violence.”
Images from the scene showed confused tourists being steered out of the glass pyramid and adjoining courtyards as officers closed nearby streets along the Seine.
Also visible was a lift braced to the Seine-facing facade near a construction zone — an extraordinary vulnerability at a palace-museum.
A museum already under strain
Around 9:30 am, several intruders forced a window, cut panes with a disc cutter and went straight for the vitrines, officials said. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said the crew entered from outside using a basket lift.
The choice of target compounded the shock. The vaulted Galerie d'Apollon in the Denon wing, capped by a ceiling painted for Louis XIV, displays a selection of the French Crown Jewels. The thieves are believed to have approached via the riverfront facade, where construction is underway, used a freight elevator to reach the hall, took nine pieces from a 23-item collection linked to Napoleon and the Empress, and made off on motorbikes, according to Le Parisien.
Daylight robberies during public hours are rare. Pulling one off inside the Louvre — with visitors present — ranks among Europe's most audacious since Dresden's Green Vault museum in 2019, and the most serious in France in more than a decade.
It also collides with a deeper tension the Louvre has struggled to resolve: swelling crowds and stretched staff. The museum delayed opening during a June staff walkout over overcrowding and chronic understaffing. Unions say mass tourism leaves too few eyes on too many rooms and creates pressure points where construction zones, freight routes and visitor flows meet.
Security around marquee works remains tight — the Mona Lisa is behind bulletproof glass in a bespoke, climate-controlled case.
It's unclear whether staffing levels played any role in Sunday's breach.
The Louvre has a long history of thefts and attempted robberies. The most famous came in 1911, when the Mona Lisa vanished from its frame, stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia and recovered two years later in Florence.
Today the former royal palace holds a roll call of civilization: Leonardo's Mona Lisa; the armless serenity of the Venus de Milo; the Winged Victory of Samothrace, wind-lashed on the Daru staircase; the Code of Hammurabi's carved laws; Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People; Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. More than 33,000 works — from Mesopotamia, Egypt and the classical world to Europe's masters — draw a daily tide of up to 30,000 visitors even as investigators now begin to sweep those gilded corridors for clues.
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All you need to know about India’s first Sunday Budget
New Delhi: This year’s Budget is drawing special attention because it is being presented on a Sunday. While Sunday is normally a holiday, Parliament will function as usual for the Budget presentation.
India's Union Budget is presented on February 1 each year, a practice that began in 2017. The idea behind this change was to give Parliament enough time to discuss, approve and put Budget proposals into action before the new financial year begins on April 1. Earlier, Budgets were usually presented at the end of February.
A similar situation arose in 1999, when February 28 fell on a Sunday. To avoid presenting the Budget on a holiday, then Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government, presented it a day earlier on February 27, a Saturday.
Until 1999, Union Budgets were presented in the evening, around 5 pm. This practice came from British colonial times, when announcements were timed to suit working hours in London.
Yashwant Sinha changed this tradition by presenting the Budget at 11 am. Since then, 11 am has remained the standard time for Budget presentations in India.
