Nippon Steel shares soar as Trump reviews US Steel takeover

By AFP
April 7, 2025


US Steel and Nippon Steel announced the proposed $14.9 billion merger in December 2023 - Copyright AFP/File Richard A. Brooks

Nippon Steel shares soared Tuesday after US President Donald Trump launched a review of the company’s proposed takeover of US Steel that was blocked by his predecessor Joe Biden.

Trump said Monday he had directed a government panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), to conduct a review of the acquisition.

This will “assist me in determining whether further action in this matter may be appropriate”, the president said in a White House memo to his Cabinet.

US Steel shares closed up 16 percent Monday, and Nippon Steel gained as much as 11 percent in Tokyo on Tuesday.

CFIUS, tasked with analysing the national security implications of foreign takeover of US companies, has 45 days to submit its recommendations to Trump.

US Steel and Nippon Steel announced the proposed $14.9 billion merger in December 2023. It was originally meant to close by the end of 2024’s third financial quarter.

However, months of scrutiny by US antitrust authorities and CFIUS — which failed to reach a consensus for its recommendation — forced then-president Biden to make a decision on the deal himself.

Biden had criticised the deal for months, while holding off on a move that could hurt ties with Tokyo, but he blocked it in his last weeks in office on national security grounds.

The two companies then filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s “illegal interference” in the transaction.



– ‘Urgent threat’ –



The review Trump ordered on Monday involves “identifying potential national security risks associated with the proposed transaction and providing adequate opportunity to the parties to respond to such concerns”, his memo said.

US Steel said in a statement that the move by Trump “validates our Board’s bold decision to challenge President Biden’s unlawful order”.

“Today’s decision by President Trump is pivotal as we work to deliver on new and historic levels of investment in American steelmaking,” US Steel added.

But David McCall, president of the United Steelworkers union, criticised Trump’s move.

“Regardless of how much scrutiny the proposed USS-Nippon deal receives, it does not alter the urgent threat it poses to our national and economic security, the long-term future of the steel industry or our members’ jobs,” he said.

Trump said during his 2024 campaign he wanted US Steel ownership to remain in the United States.

In February, after meeting Japan’s prime minister, Trump said Nippon Steel would make a major investment in US Steel, but no longer attempt to take over the troubled company.

Todd Tucker, director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, said unions were concerned that the two companies would not invest enough to ensure the long-term sustainability of the US steel industry.

Unless the companies commit to long-term competitiveness, “they and the Trump administration should be worrying about whether they’ll have the social license to operate,” he said.

Two Nepalis swept away by Annapurna avalanche


By AFP
April 8, 2025


The 8,091-metre (26,545-foot) Annapurna is a dangerous and difficult climb, and the avalanche-prone Himalayan peak has a higher death rate than Everest 

- Copyright AFP PRAKASH MATHEMA

Nepali mountaineers on Tuesday searched for two people swept away by a powerful avalanche on the world’s 10th highest mountain Annapurna, officials said.

The 8,091-metre (26,545-foot) Annapurna is a dangerous and difficult climb, and the avalanche-prone Himalayan peak has a higher death rate than Everest.

Three men were climbing the mountain as part of the first ascent of this spring season when a “huge avalanche swept down” around midday Monday, said expedition company Seven Summit Treks.

The trio were ferrying oxygen cylinders used for the summit push for later climbers, when they were hit by huge blocks of snow. It swept away two climbers — Ngima Tashi and Rima Rinje — who work with Seven Summit Treks.

“Our focus is on search and rescue… helicopters have also been deployed,” Thaneswar Guragai from the company said Tuesday.

One of them managed to keep hold, the company said in a post.

“We’ll do our best to locate and rescue our men,” the company said.

Nepal is home to eight of the world’s 10 highest peaks and welcomes hundreds of adventurers each spring, when temperatures are warm and winds typically calm.

Avalanches and landslides are common in the upper reaches of the Himalayas, especially during the winter season.

Scientists have said that climate change spurred by humans burning fossil fuels is making weather events more severe, super-charged by warmer oceans.

World’s ‘exceptional’ heat streak lengthens into March

Scientists say the current period is likely to be the warmest the Earth has been for the last 125,000 years.

By AFP
April 8, 2025


Parts of Europe had extreme rainfall while others experienced record dry conditions - Copyright AFP STRINGER

Global temperatures hovered at historic highs in March, Europe’s climate monitor said on Tuesday, prolonging an unprecedented heat streak that has pushed the bounds of scientific explanation.

In Europe, it was the hottest March ever recorded by a significant margin, said the Copernicus Climate Change Service, driving rainfall extremes across a continent warming faster than any other.

The world meanwhile saw the second-hottest March in the Copernicus dataset, sustaining a near-unbroken spell of record or near-record-breaking temperatures that has persisted since July 2023.

Since then, virtually every month has been at least 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than it was before the industrial revolution, when humans began burning massive amounts of coal, oil and gas.

March was 1.6C above pre-industrial times, extending an anomaly so unusual that scientists are still trying to fully explain it.

“That we’re still at 1.6C above preindustrial is indeed remarkable,” said Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London.

“We’re very firmly in the grip of human-caused climate change,” she told AFP.

Scientists had predicted the extreme run of global temperatures would subside after a warming El Nino event peaked in early 2024, but they have stubbornly lingered well into 2025.

“We are still experiencing extremely high temperatures worldwide. This is an exceptional situation,” Robert Vautard, a leading scientist with the United Nations’ climate expert panel IPCC, told AFP.



– ‘Climate breakdown’ –



Scientists warn that every fraction of a degree of global warming increases the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall and droughts.

Climate change is not just about rising temperatures but the knock-on effect of all that extra heat being trapped in the atmosphere and seas by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.

Warmer seas mean higher evaporation and greater moisture in the atmosphere, causing heavier deluges and feeding energy into storms.

This also affects global rainfall patterns.

March in Europe was 0.26C above the previous hottest record for the month set in 2014, Copernicus said.

Some parts of the continent experienced the “driest March on record and others their wettest” for about half a century, said Samantha Burgess of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which runs the Copernicus climate monitor.

Bill McGuire, a climate scientist from University College London, said the contrasting extremes “shows clearly how a destabilised climate means more and bigger weather extremes”.

“As climate breakdown progresses, more broken records are only to be expected,” he told AFP.

Elsewhere in March, scientists said that climate change intensified a blistering heatwave across Central Asia and fuelled conditions for extreme rainfall which killed 16 people in Argentina.

– Puzzling heat –



The spectacular surge in global heat pushed 2023 and then 2024 to become the hottest years on record.

Last year was also the first full calendar year to exceed 1.5C — the safer warming limit agreed by most nations under the Paris climate accord.

This single year breach does not represent a permanent crossing of the 1.5C threshold, which is measured over decades, but scientists have warned the goal is slipping out of reach.

According to Copernicus, global warming reached an estimated 1.36C above pre-industrial levels in October last year.

If the 30-year trend leading up to then continued, the world would hit 1.5C by June 2030.

Scientists are unanimous that burning fossil fuels has largely driven long-term global warming, and that natural climate variability can also influence temperatures from one year to the next.

But they are less certain about what else might have contributed to this record heat spike, or how this impacts our understanding about how climate might behave in future.

Vautard said there were “phenomena that remain to be explained” but the exceptional temperatures still fell within the upper range of scientific projections of climate change.

Experts think changes in global cloud patterns, airborne pollution and Earth’s ability to store carbon in natural sinks like forests and oceans could be among factors contributing to the planet overheating.

Copernicus uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations to aid its climate calculations.

Its records go back to 1940 but other sources of climate data — such as ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons — allow scientists to expand their conclusions using evidence from much further in the past.

Scientists say the current period is likely to be the warmest the Earth has been for the last 125,000 years.

Once-dying Mexican river delta slowly nursed back to life


By AFP
April 8, 2025


Conservationists have cleared invasive shrubs and planted thousands of native trees in the Colorado River Delta, part of a Mexican region bordering the United States - Copyright AFP Guillermo Arias

Daniel Rook

In a drought-hit Mexican border region at the center of growing competition with the United States for water, conservationists are working to bring a once-dying river delta back to life.

On a stretch of the Colorado River, which on the Mexican side of the frontier is mostly a dry riverbed, native cottonwood and willow trees have been planted in place of invasive shrubs.

It is the fruit of two decades of work by environmentalists along the lower part of the river from the US-Mexican border to the upper estuary of the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez.

“If we give a little water and care to certain sections of the river, we can recover environments that had already been completely lost,” said Enrique Villegas, director of the Colorado River Delta program at the Sonoran Institute, a US-Mexican civil society group.

The Colorado starts in the Rocky Mountains and winds its way through the southwestern United States, feeding cities and farmland along the way.

By the time it crosses into Mexico most of its water has already been consumed.

What is left is diverted to supply border cities like Tijuana and to irrigate agricultural land.

It means Tijuana and nearby areas are at the mercy of how much snow falls in the Rockies, said Marco Antonio Samaniego, an expert at the Autonomous University of Baja California.

“We don’t live off what rains in Tijuana. We live off what snows in those mountains,” he said, adding that several years of below-average precipitation had reduced reservoir levels in the United States.

Growing competition for resources sparked a recent diplomatic row when the United States refused Mexico’s request for water due to shortfalls in sharing by its southern neighbor under a decades-old treaty.

“The basis of all the problems,” Villegas said, is that “there is more water distributed among all the users of the Colorado River than actually exists.”



– Wildlife returns –



Over the years, dams and diversions reduced the river to a trickle and turned a delta that once teemed with birds and other wildlife into a dying ecosystem.

So conservationists secured land as well as irrigation permits, cleared invasive shrubs and planted thousands of native trees.

In 2014, water was allowed to surge down the Colorado River through a dam at the border for the first time in years to encourage the natural germination of native species.

“After years of this type of work, we now have a forest of poplars and willows on 260 hectares (642 acres) on a stretch of the Colorado River. Fauna has returned. Many birds have returned,” Villegas said.

The rejuvenation has also brought back another native — the beaver — a species that had largely disappeared from sight in the area, Villegas said.

“On the one hand, it’s a biological indicator that if you give nature a habitat then it returns and begins to reproduce. But they’re also knocking down trees that we planted,” he said.

At Laguna Grande, a lush oasis surrounded by dusty fields that is a centerpiece of the restoration project, coots and other birds swim contentedly in wetlands while herons startled by visitors clumsily take flight.

Nearby, on land, underground hoses feed water to trees sprouting from the dusty ground.

The Colorado River Delta is an important rest point for migratory birds including the yellow-breasted chat, vermilion flycatcher and endangered yellow-billed cuckoo, according to conservationists.

The wetlands and forest of Laguna Grande contrast starkly with parched agricultural land nearby where farmers such as Cayetano Cisneros are facing increasingly tough conditions.

“Years ago, we sowed maize, we sowed cotton, we sowed everything, and we didn’t suffer because of water,” the 72-year-old said on his dusty ranch.

These days, “the Colorado River no longer carries water,” he said. “The environment is changing a lot.”

If more of the delta and other such areas are to be nursed back to health, people must change their use of water, conservationists note.

“We can all improve our awareness of water consumption,” Villegas said.

“This drought is just a warning.”

WWIII

Philippines adds speedy warship to maritime arsenal

By AFP
April 8, 2025


The Philippine navy's BRP Miguel Malvar, a newly-acquired frigate from South Korea - Copyright Department National Defense Philippines (DND)/AFP Handout

The Philippines took possession of the first of two corvette-class warships with “advanced weapons and radar systems” on Tuesday as it faces growing pressure from Beijing in the disputed South China Sea.

The arrival of the 3,200-ton BRP Miguel Malvar is part of a two-ship deal with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries in 2021.

Its sister ship, the BRP Diego Silang, was formally launched in Ulsan, South Korea, last month but has yet to begin the journey to the Philippines.

Corvettes are small, fast warships mainly used to protect other vessels from attack.

The arrival of the ship marked “a critical step toward developing a self-reliant and credible defense posture”, the Philippine defence department said in a statement.

It follows months of confrontations between Philippine and Chinese vessels in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims almost in its entirety despite an international ruling its assertion has no merit.

“(The) Miguel Malvar is here today not only to serve as a deterrent and protector of our waters but also as an important component in joint and combined operations” with allies, Philippine defence chief Gilberto Teodoro said at a Subic Bay naval base ceremony.

The deal for the two ships was first unveiled in 2021, five years after Hyundai Heavy Industries had won a contract to build two new frigates for the Philippine Navy.

The military said last month that the two corvettes would “significantly enhance the country’s naval capabilities amid growing security challenges in the West Philippine Sea”.

On Tuesday, the Philippine Coast Guard separately welcomed the donation of 20 Australian surveillance drones its commander said could extend its vessels’ coverage area by a “significant distance”.

Using drones will “save fuel and it will be less risky for our people”, Commandant Ronnie Gil Gavan said at a ceremony in coastal Bataan province.

The Philippines has been deepening ties with allies and more aggressively pushing back on Beijing’s sweeping South China Sea claims since President Ferdinand Marcos took office in 2022.

In December, Manila said it planned to acquire the US mid-range Typhon missile system in a push to secure its maritime interests.

Beijing warned such a purchase could spark a regional “arms race”.

Last week, the United States said it had approved the possible sale of $5.58 billion in F-16 fighter jets to the Philippines, though Manila said the deal was “still in the negotiation phase”.

ANTI-DEI IS SEXISM,RACISM AND CHAUVINISM

Pentagon chief fires US military representative to NATO

HEGSETH WAS NEVER IN COMBAT HE WAS A PR FLACK

By AFP
  April 8, 2025


A logo of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at NATO headquarters in Brussels on February 15, 2024 - Copyright AFP/File JOHN THYS

W.G. DUNLOP

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired a senior US officer assigned to NATO, the Pentagon announced Tuesday, saying her removal was due to a loss of confidence in her ability to lead.

Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield is the latest in a string of top officers to be dismissed by Donald Trump’s administration, part of a rare major shakeup of senior US military leadership since the president returned to office in January.

Hegseth removed Chatfield “from her position as US representative to NATO’s military committee due to a loss of confidence in her ability to lead,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement, without providing further details.

Chatfield is a helicopter pilot by training who has previous deployments to the Pacific and Gulf in support of carrier strike group and amphibious ready group operations, according to her NATO biography.

She was also a senior military assistant to the supreme allied commander for Europe, served as the deputy US military representative to NATO’s military committee, and taught political science at the US Air Force Academy, among other positions.

Democratic lawmakers slammed her removal, with Representative Adam Smith saying “our country is less safe because of President Trump’s actions,” while Senator Jack Reed said the move was “unjustified” and “disgraceful.”



– Other top officers sacked –


“The silence from my Republican colleagues is deeply troubling. In less than three months, President Trump has fired 10 generals and admirals without explanation, including our most experienced combat leaders,” Reed said.

Chatfield’s dismissal comes after Trump fired General Timothy Haugh, the head of the highly sensitive US National Security Agency, and his deputy Wendy Noble at the apparent urging of far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.

He also dismissed officials from the National Security Council (NSC) last week.

The New York Times reported Thursday that six people from the NSC were fired after Trump met with Loomer the previous day, including three senior officials on the body that advises the president on top foreign policy matters from Ukraine to Gaza.

In February, Trump abruptly fired the top US military officer, general Charles “CQ” Brown, without explanation, less than two years into his four-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Hegseth also announced the removal of admiral Lisa Franchetti — the first woman to lead the Navy — as well as the vice chief of staff of the Air Force and three top military lawyers.

And in January, admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman to lead one of the six US military services, was removed as the head of the Coast Guard, with an official citing alleged “leadership deficiencies.”

Trump has had a contradictory relationship with America’s armed forces, at times lauding their power but also claiming they were depleted and in need of rebuilding by his administration.

Myanmar garment manufacturers warn US tariffs imperil quake recovery


By AFP
April 8, 2025


At least 3,600 people were killed in an earthquake that struck Myanmar on March 28, with thousands more injured - Copyright AFP/File Sai Aung MAIN

Myanmar’s garment manufacturers have warned US tariffs threaten to hobble the country’s recovery from a devastating earthquake, as the death toll rose to 3,600.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs will see the Southeast Asian country hit with a 44 percent tax on US imports as it reels from last month’s tremor which razed thousands of homes, schools and monasteries in its central belt.

Junta spokesman Zaw Min Tun said 160 people remained missing from the March 28 quake as fatalities hit 3,600 on Monday evening, with 5,017 people injured.

The Myanmar Garment Manufacturers Association (MGMA) said the tariffs due to take effect from Wednesday were causing “considerable concern” in an industry employing more than 500,000 people, mostly young women.

“Amid Myanmar’s current challenging context, the new tariffs will increase the vulnerability of Myanmar businesses that have been struggling to stay afloat,” the group said in a statement on Monday evening.

“The recent devastating earthquake… will only exacerbate the many challenges confronting Myanmar businesses and communities,” it added.

According to the Office of the US Trade Representative, bilateral trade was worth an estimated $734 million last year, with Myanmar exports worth $656.5 million — down 23.5 percent from a year earlier.

The earthquake has compounded the economic woes of a country gripped by a civil war since the military seized power in a 2021 coup.

With the junta at the helm, Myanmar has become internationally isolated and sanctioned while its territory has split into areas controlled by the military, anti-coup guerillas and ethnic armed factions.

Half the population of 51 million live in poverty while more than 3.5 million people are displaced.

The MGMA asked the United States to consider “a more lenient rate in light of the country’s multiple crises”.

Myanmar has already been hit hard by Trump’s overhaul of Washington’s foreign policy.

In one of his first acts back in office, he paused a refugee scheme through which Myanmar citizens fleeing the war-torn country ranked among the largest number of beneficiaries in recent years.

Trump’s decision to eviscerate Washington’s humanitarian budget — spearheaded by his top donor and the world’s richest man Elon Musk — has also battered the nation.

The World Food Programme said it was forced to slash vital aid to one million people in Myanmar starting this month after the cuts contributed to “critical funding shortfalls”.

S Korea opposition leader frontrunner in snap presidential election


By AFP
April 8, 2025


South Korea's main opposition leader Lee Jae-myung is the front runner in snap elections - Copyright AFP/File Yasuyoshi CHIBA

Claire LEE

He lost the last presidential election by the narrowest margin in South Korean history, but now Lee Jae-myung is the front-runner in snap polls triggered by the ex-leader’s impeachment over martial law.

The opposition leader is likely to step down this week so he can secure the Democratic Party’s nomination. A charismatic former child factory worker turned lawyer, Lee is as popular as he is divisive.

In the polls, Lee sits well ahead of any rivals, with 34 percent supporting him.

After an industrial accident left him with a disability, the former school dropout rose to political stardom partly by highlighting his rags-to-riches tale.

But his bid for the top office in 2022 was overshadowed by a string of scandals, and he ended up losing to Yoon by just 0.73 percentage points.

He currently faces five criminal trials on charges including bribery in connection with a firm that is suspected of illicitly transferring $8 million to North Korea.

Five individuals connected to Lee’s various scandals have been found dead, many in what appeared to be suicides.

Lee “is seen as a politician’s politician — willing to play dirty to beat the (conservative) People Power Party,” Karl Friedhoff at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs told AFP.

“Even then, he couldn’t beat Yoon — someone with literally no political experience — in the previous election.”



– ‘Loyal fan base’ –



South Korea has been in leadership limbo since lawmakers suspended Yoon Suk Yeol for sending armed troops into parliament in a botched attempt to suspend civilian rule. He was stripped of office by a court last week, triggering fresh elections on June 3.

Lee, 61, live-streamed his frantic drive to parliament and scramble over the perimeter fence as he and other MPs voted down the martial law declaration. Since then, Lee has consistently been regarded as the leading contender for the presidency.

He is also widely recognised for his extensive political experience. He served as mayor of Seongnam, near Seoul, for eight years and as governor of Gyeonggi Province, the most populous province surrounding the capital, for more than three years.

“It is fair to say Lee exhibited strong political leadership during his tenure as both mayor and governor, which helped him build a loyal fan base — which is not something every politician can achieve,” Park Sang-byung, a political commentator, told AFP.

Last year, a man stabbed Lee in the neck to prevent him from “becoming president”, with the politician suffering a wound to his jugular vein and undergoing emergency surgery.



– ‘Flexible person’ –



Yoon and PPP’s extreme support base, including far-right YouTubers and religious figures, brand Lee a dangerous and corrupt North Korean sympathiser.

Lee has also faced calls from within his party to resign over his scandals.

But a landslide victory for the Democratic Party in last year’s parliamentary elections helped Lee consolidate power.

“Since the Democratic Party will control both the administration and legislature if Lee Jae-myung gets elected, the country’s political diversity might be limited,” Shin Yul, a political science professor at Myongji University, told AFP.

But he added that Lee would be well-equipped to tackle the various challenges facing the country, including North Korean aggression and the volatile Trump administration, which recently imposed a 25 percent tariff on South Korean exports.

“Based on Lee Jae-myung’s track record, it is evident that he is a flexible person. He also has not always been predictable,” Shin said.

“This adaptability suggests he is likely to handle various situations pragmatically, which could be a significant advantage when dealing or negotiating with people like Trump.”

UN urged to probe sonic weapon allegedly used on Serbian protesters


By AFP
April 8, 2025


A device resembling a sonic cannon on a police vehicle in Belgrade on the day of the protests - Copyright AFP STRINGER

Serbian activists delivered a petition with more than half a million signatures to the UN in Belgrade Tuesday demanding an international investigation into the alleged use of sonic weapons against protesters during last month’s massive anti-corruption demonstrations.

Serbia’s largest protest in decades descended into panic, triggered by an unexplained noise. Social media footage showed crowds fleeing, prompting claims that a sonic weapon or “sound cannon” was used on the protesters — something authorities have strongly denied.

Several Serbian civil society groups say they collected over 3,000 testimonies, with some protesters reporting lasting health issues.

Some protesters said they heard a noise resembling that of a plane about to crash, while others said it sounded like a car rushing toward them.

The petition was launched by the KreniPromeni (Go for Change) movement calling for an independent international investigation into the incident.

It also urges that those who ordered, enabled or used such a weapon be held accountable.

“The nearly 600,000 people who signed this petition reflect a high level of civic awareness,”movement president Savo Manojlovic told reporters.

Photos published after the protest show a police vehicle with a large device mounted on its bonnet.

Military analyst Aleksandar Radic told AFP it resembled a US-made LRAD 450 acoustic device.

Interior Minister Ivica Dacic confirmed police possess such equipment but denied its use on protesters, while president Aleksandar Vucic dismissed the claims as “lies”.

An official investigation was announced, with assistance requested from both the FBI and Russia’s FSB security service.

FSB experts later reportedly arrived in Belgrade, though details remain unclear.

The controversy hit the headlines again this week after former deputy premier Cedomir Jovanovic referred to a sonic weapon by accident on television, unaware a live broadcast had begun.

“Someone played it, like music — a thunderous sound,” he said. “It wasn’t to injure, just to scare — like a car charging at you,” he added.

He said he was later questioned by police.

Serbia’s student-led protest movement began in November after the newly renovated concrete roof of Novi Sad train station collapsed, killing 16 people.

Anger over the incident, which some Serbs see as evidence of pervasive corruption, has exploded into the Balkan nation’s biggest upheaval since the 1990s.

Frail David Hockney celebrated in vast Paris retrospective


By AFP
April 8, 2025


The show opens at the Louis Vuitton Foundation on Wednesday

 - Copyright AFP JUSTIN TALLIS

Adam PLOWRIGHT

Increasingly frail but with undimmed passion, Britain’s David Hockney has put aside his health worries to shape what he describes as the biggest exhibition of his vast career.

With around 400 works assembled over four floors, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris has put on a stunning tribute to one of the world’s best-selling living artists.

Although titled “David Hockney, 25” and mostly focused on the last quarter-century of his life, it contains paintings from the very start of his career, as well as his blockbuster time in California in the 1960s.

In the last of 11 rooms, there are several unseen creations from the last two years, including a self-portrait in acrylic and a striking meditation on the afterlife inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy.

“It’s enabled him to look back in a positive way,” Norman Rosenthal, guest curator and a long-time friend of Hockney, told AFP ahead of the opening to the public on Wednesday.

“He’s very, very happy with the exhibition.”

Hockney, 87, insisted on overseeing the show, even taking an interest in the colour of the walls and sending back corrections for the texts written to inform visitors.

“He says it is the biggest exhibition of his career,” Louis Vuitton Foundation curator Suzanne Page told AFP. “He’s been very involved.”

– Twilight years –

Born in 1937 to working-class parents in the northern English town of Bradford, Hockney has painted everything from the fields of his native Yorkshire to the sun-soaked private homes of California.

The Paris show includes an entire room of portraits, as well as vivid landscapes and memorable moonlight scenes that he produced while living in Normandy, northern France, from 2019 to 2023.

There are also touches of his trademark humour.

In his most recent self portrait he is smoking a cigarette and wearing a yellow badge that reads “End Bossiness Soon”.

The subtitle for the exhibition reprises a line he wrote to friends during the Covid-19 lockdowns when sending them pictures from Normandy: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring.”

But there are also hints of a man in his twilight years contemplating his mortality — and perhaps his last major show.

An evolving digital creation of a sunrise in Normandy, which he produced like many others on his iPad, concludes with a quotation from French writer Francois de La Rochefoucauld.

“Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long,” it reads.

Now in a wheelchair and with 24-hour care at his home in London, Hockney told The New York Times in a recent interview that he was grateful to be alive.

“Even last year, I thought I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “But I still am.”

He travelled to Paris ahead of the opening this week and was spotted around the elaborate Frank Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton Foundation wearing one of his classic colourful tweed suits.

Having steadily lost his hearing in recent decades, he stayed in a private room during the opening party on Monday, which was attended by French first lady Brigitte Macron among other VIPs.

– Smoking ban –

Some of his more recent work, including the iPad renderings from Normandy, have drawn mixed reviews but the exhibition also contains some of the classics from his portfolio that are usually in private hands.

These include the enigmatic “Portrait of An Artist (Pool with Two Figures)”, which depicts Hockey’s former lover staring into a Californian pool.

It sold for $90.3 million at auction in New York in 2018, briefly setting a record for a living artist.

Last year, six paintings by Hockney appeared in the top 100 most valuable works acquired at auction, according to data from the art market consultancy Artprice.

Rosenthal, one of Britain’s most respected art figures, speaks of Hockney in the same breath as Picasso or Monet.

“I think this exhibition proves that his work over 60 years has a level that never changes,” he explained. “There’s incredible variety and yet amazing consistency.”

And Hockney continues to produce.

“He’s reached a certain age and he’s aware of it. He’s a great smoker but I think he wants to go on,” Rosenthal continued. “He paints every day.”

A photo of Hockney holding one of his beloved Camel cigarettes featured on posters advertising the show, which have been banned from the Paris metro for contravening anti-smoking laws.

He described the decision as “complete madness”.

“David Hockney, 25” runs until September 1, 2025.