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The Most Iconic Venues of the Paris Olympics

La Dame de Fer (The Iron Lady) needs no introduction and is still going strong at 135 years old. (AP)
La Dame de Fer (The Iron Lady) needs no introduction and is still going strong at 135 years old. (AP)
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The Most Iconic Venues of the Paris Olympics

La Dame de Fer (The Iron Lady) needs no introduction and is still going strong at 135 years old. (AP)
La Dame de Fer (The Iron Lady) needs no introduction and is still going strong at 135 years old. (AP)

There will be no shortage of iconic venues at the Paris Olympics.

From the Palace of Versailles to the Place de La Concorde and of course, the Eiffel Tower, organizers have made sure the City of Light’s most famous landmarks will take center stage during the Olympics.

Competitions will be held right in the heart of the city, in the Seine River and inside historic buildings such as the Grand Palais.

Paris is also making use of its existing sports infrastructure, including the Roland Garros tennis stadium and Stade de France, the national soccer stadium.

Here’s a look at the most iconic spots that will host competitions during the July 26-Aug. 11 games in the French capital, according to The AP.

- EIFFEL TOWER

La Dame de Fer (The Iron Lady) needs no introduction and is still going strong at 135 years old. Men's and women's volleyball players get to compete at the feet of the 330-meter (1,083-foot) behemoth. They will be watched by nearly 13,000 fans at the temporary Eiffel Tower Stadium on the nearby Champ de Mars, where Parisians and tourists like to have picnics on the grass or watch July 14 firework displays.

-PALACE OF VERSAILLES

Once the residence of French royalty, the chateau is one of the most popular tourist spots in Paris. Louis XVI — the Sun King — and Queen Marie Antoinette held lavish banquets at Versailles before they were beheaded during the French revolution. During the Paris Games, equestrian riders will gallop at the heart of the palace’s gardens. Modern pentathlon events will also take place there.

-GRAND PALAIS

The palace with its green-tinged glass roof was built for the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900. More than 6,000 tonnes of steel were used to build the nave. Fencing and Taekwondo fans will get to watch events here.

-HOTEL DE VILLE

The imposing-looking City Hall has a massive façade stretching high and wide, and gives off a golden hue when lights are switched on at night. It's been around since 1357. Having stood the test of time, it seems rather fitting to start the marathon from its paved forecourt.

-LA CONCORDE

Place de la Concorde will always have its place in France’s gory past. It is where France’s banquet-loving king and queen were guillotined in 1793. Prominent French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre met the same fate a year later. It’s also been home to the Luxor Obelisk for nearly 200 years. The idea to transport imposing obelisks to Paris came about at the turn of the 19th century, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s military campaign in Egypt. This summer breakdancers as well BMX freestylers, 3-on-3 basketballers and skateboarders will share the attention at La Concorde.

-LES INVALIDES

The gloriously decorated Pont Alexandre III bridge connects the right and left banks of the Seine River. People crossing the bridge can catch cycling and triathlon events, or look down to watch swimming events in the Seine River, before walking over toward a grassy esplanade which leads to Les Invalides. It's the more common name for Hôtel des Invalides, which houses Napoleon's tomb. A haven for military enthusiasts, the much-admired Paris landmark has a giant golden dome standing at 107 meters (351 feet) and is covered with nearly 13 kilograms (29 pounds) of gold leaf. Perhaps fittingly, giving its military feel, Olympic archers will set their sights here.

-TROCADERO

From its elevated position, the Trocadéro faces the Eiffel Tower in a stare-down contest between famed landmarks. It's where hordes of kilt-wearing Scottish soccer fans congregated at the 1998 World Cup, singing “We're the famous Tartan Army" as they danced and drank heartily. It should offer a great vantage point for watching triathlon, road cycling, marathon and race walking events.

-BERCY ARENA

The 20,000-seat indoor arena has witnessed much sporting drama over the years. Frenchman Paul-Henri Mathieu lost in the fifth set of the deciding rubber against Russian Mikhail Youzhny in the 2002 Davis Cup final. Tennis great Novak Djokovic has won the Paris Masters a record seven times at the arena, which has also hosted regular-season NBA games and international handball matches. Oh, and Madonna and French rocker Johnny Hallyday held concerts inside the the pyramid-shaped building. Located a stone’s throw from the Finance Ministry, it will host artistic gymnastics, basketball and trampoline events.

-PARC DES PRINCES

The 48,000-seat stadium is home to soccer club Paris Saint-Germain and where France superstar Kylian Mbappé played for seven years before leaving the club this year. France used to regularly play rugby and soccer matches at “Le Parc." Fourty years ago soccer great Michel Platini led France to its first European Championship title at the stadium. Parc des Princes will host soccer matches during the Paris Games, including the men's and women's finals on Aug. 9 and Aug. 10, respectively.

-STADE DE FRANCE

Another French soccer great, Zinedine Zidane, will always have a special place in the history of the Stade de France. The attacking midfielder scored the first goal when France's national stadium was inaugurated in 1998. Later that year he celebrated France's first World Cup trophy there after scoring two goals in the 3-0 win over Brazil in the final. The 80,000-capacity stadium hosted the track and field world championships in 2003 as well as many international soccer and rugby games since. It will hold athletics competitions on a new-look purple track as well as rugby sevens matches.

-STADE VELODROME

“A jamais les premiers” (Forever the First). That's how passionate Marseille fans goad supporters from cash-rich arch rival Paris Saint-Germain, by reminding them that Marseille remains the first — and only — French side to win the Champions League, back in 1993. Marseille's 67,000-capacity Stade Velodrome boasts one of the most fervent atmospheres in European soccer and hosts a total of 10 Olympic soccer matches, including two semifinals. The US men's and women's teams each play a group-stage game there.

-LA DEFENSE ARENA

Situated near a vibrant business hub some around 11 kilometers (7 miles) northwest of central Paris, the boat-shaped arena has hosted seminars and club rugby matches of Racing 92 since 2017. Now it will host Olympic swimming thanks to its multipurpose structure. The Arena's façade is made up of aluminium and glass scales and looks impressive when lit at night.

-STADE YVES-DU-MANOIR

The stadium is located the northwest suburb of Colombes and links the city's Olympic past and its present. In 1924 it was the main venue for the Paris Games. It's more low-key this time around, hosting field hockey matches.

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Wave of Low Temperature Brings Rare Snowfall to Shanghai

A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
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Wave of Low Temperature Brings Rare Snowfall to Shanghai

A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)

A wave of low temperature sweeping southern China brought rare snowfall to ​Shanghai on Tuesday, delighting residents of the financial hub as authorities warned that the frigid weather could last for at least three days.

The city, on China's east coast, last ‌experienced a heavy snowfall ‌in January ‌2018. ⁠And ​just ‌last week, Shanghai basked in unusually high temperatures of 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), which local media said had caused some osmanthus trees to bloom.

"The weather seems rather ⁠strange this year," said 30-year-old resident Yu Xin.

"In ‌general, the temperature ‍fluctuations have ‍been quite significant, so some people ‍might feel a bit uncomfortable," she said.

Chinese state media said other areas experienced sharp temperature drops, including Jiangxi and ​Guizhou provinces, which sit south of China's Yangtze and Huai ⁠rivers. Guizhou province is expected to experience temperature drops of 10 to 14 degrees Celsius, the Zhejiang News reported.

Across China, authorities have also shut 241 sections of major roads in 12 provinces including Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang due to snowfall and icy ‌roads, state broadcaster CCTV said.

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Researchers Find Antarctic Penguin Breeding Is Heating up Sooner, and That’s a Problem

View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)
View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)
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Researchers Find Antarctic Penguin Breeding Is Heating up Sooner, and That’s a Problem

View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)
View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)

Warming temperatures are forcing Antarctic penguins to breed earlier and that's a big problem for two of the cute tuxedoed species that face extinction by the end of the century, a study said.

With temperatures in the breeding ground increasing 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) from 2012 to 2022, three different penguin species are beginning their reproductive process about two weeks earlier than the decade before, according to a study in Tuesday's Journal of Animal Ecology. And that sets up potential food problems for young chicks.

“Penguins are changing the time at which they’re breeding at a record speed, faster than any other vertebrate,” said lead author Ignacio Juarez Martinez, a biologist at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. "And this is important because the time at which you breed needs to coincide with the time with most resources in the environment and this is mostly food for your chicks so they have enough to grow.''

For some perspective, scientists have studied changes in the life cycle of great tits, a European bird. They found a similar two-week change, but that took 75 years as opposed to just 10 years for these three penguin species, said study co-author Fiona Suttle, another Oxford biologist.

Researchers used remote control cameras to photograph penguins breeding in dozens of colonies from 2011 to 2021. They say it was the fastest shift in timing of life cycles for any backboned animals that they have seen. The three species are all brush-tailed, so named because their tails drag on the ice: the cartoon-eye Adelie, the black-striped chinstrap and the fast-swimming gentoo.

Suttle said climate change is creating winners and losers among these three penguin species and it happens at a time in the penguin life cycle where food and the competition for it are critical in survival.

The Adelie and chinstrap penguins are specialists, eating mainly krill. The gentoo have a more varied diet. They used to breed at different times, so there were no overlaps and no competition. But the gentoos' breeding has moved earlier faster than the other two species and now there's overlap. That's a problem because gentoos, which don't migrate as far as the other two species, are more aggressive in finding food and establishing nesting areas, Martinez and Suttle said.

Suttle said she has gone back in October and November to the same colony areas where she used to see Adelies in previous years only to find their nests replaced by gentoos. And the data backs up the changes her eyes saw, she said.

“Chinstraps are declining globally,” Martinez said. “Models show that they might get extinct before the end of the century at this rate. Adelies are doing very poorly in the Antarctic Peninsula and it’s very likely that they go extinct from the Antarctic Peninsula before the end of the century.”

Martinez theorized that the warming western Antarctic — the second-fasting heating place on Earth behind only the Arctic North Atlantic — means less sea ice. Less sea ice means more spores coming out earlier in the Antarctic spring and then “you have this incredible bloom of phytoplankton,” which is the basis of the food chain that eventually leads to penguins, he said. And it's happening earlier each year.

Not only do the chinstraps and Adelies have more competition for food from gentoos because of the warming and changes in plankton and krill, but the changes have brought more commercial fishing that comes earlier and that further shortens the supply for the penguins, Suttle said.

This shift in breeding timing “is an interesting signal of change and now it’s important to continuing observing these penguin populations to see if these changes have negative impacts on their populations,” said Michelle LaRue, a professor of Antarctic marine science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She was not part of the Oxford study.

With millions of photos — taken every hour by 77 cameras for 10 years — scientists enlisted everyday people to help tag breeding activity using the Penguin Watch website.

“We’ve had over 9 million of our images annotated via Penguin Watch,” Suttle said. “A lot of that does come down to the fact that people just love penguins so much. They’re very cute. They’re on all the Christmas cards. People say, ‘Oh, they look like little waiters in tuxedos.’”

“The Adelies, I think their personality goes along with it as well,” Suttle said, saying there's “perhaps a kind of cheekiness about them — and this very cartoon-like eye that does look like it’s just been drawn on.”

Varieties

100 Vehicles Pile Up in Michigan Crash Amid Snowstorm

This image taken from video provided by WZZM shows part of a severe multi-car pileup leading Michigan State Police to shut down an interstate south of Grand Rapids Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Ottawa County, Mich. (WZZM via AP)
This image taken from video provided by WZZM shows part of a severe multi-car pileup leading Michigan State Police to shut down an interstate south of Grand Rapids Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Ottawa County, Mich. (WZZM via AP)
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100 Vehicles Pile Up in Michigan Crash Amid Snowstorm

This image taken from video provided by WZZM shows part of a severe multi-car pileup leading Michigan State Police to shut down an interstate south of Grand Rapids Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Ottawa County, Mich. (WZZM via AP)
This image taken from video provided by WZZM shows part of a severe multi-car pileup leading Michigan State Police to shut down an interstate south of Grand Rapids Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Ottawa County, Mich. (WZZM via AP)

More than 100 vehicles smashed into each other or slid off an interstate in Michigan on Monday as snow fueled by the Great Lakes blanketed the state.

The massive pileup prompted the Michigan State Police to close both directions of Interstate 196 Monday morning just southwest of Grand Rapids while officials worked to remove all the vehicles, including more than 30 semitrailer trucks. The State Police said there were numerous injuries, but no deaths had been reported.

Pedro Mata Jr. said he could barely see the cars in front of him as the snow blew across the road while driving 20-25 mph (32-40 kph) before the crash. He was able to stop his pickup safely, but then decided to pull his truck off the road into the median to avoid being hit from behind.

“It was a little scary just listening to everything, the bangs and booms behind you. I saw what was in front of me. I couldn’t see what was behind me exactly,” The Associated Press quoted Mata as saying.

The crash is just the latest impact of the major winter storm moving across the country. The National Weather Service issued warnings about either extremely cold temperatures or the potential for winter storms across several states starting in northern Minnesota and stretching south and east into Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.

A day earlier, snow fell as far south as the Florida Panhandle and made it harder for football players to hang onto the ball during playoff games in Massachusetts and Chicago. Forecasters warned Monday that freezing temperatures are possible overnight into Tuesday across much of north-central Florida and southeast Georgia.

The Ottawa County Sheriff's office in Michigan said multiple crashes and jack-knifed semis were reported along with numerous cars that slid off the road. Stranded motorists were being bused to Hudsonville High School, where they could call for help or arrange a ride.

Officials expected the road to be closed for several hours during the cleanup.
One of the companies helping remove the stranded cars, Grand Valley Towing, sent more than a dozen of its trucks to the scene of the chain-reaction crash. Several towing companies responded in the brutally cold weather.

“We’re trying to get as many vehicles out of there as quickly as possible, so we can get the road opened back up,” manager Jeff Westveld said.