new zealand 51

Celebrating community rugby highlights of the past decade. Strikes off scrums can be some of the best in rugby, the unpredictability and excitement of which is what can make the game far superior at times to other codes. See below for these –  such clips are in no particular order.  Footage: Club Rugby Mike Lewis...

Though the Met Gala is held each year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the glitzy event is known less for its engagement with art and more for tapping the fashion industry. That changed this year, in large part because the Met Gala made a concerted effort to show off connections between fashion and art. Taking place in tandem with the Costume Institute’s newly unveiled Met exhibition “Costume Art,” last night’s Met Gala carried the theme “Fashion Is Art,” a decidedly broad topic that allowed attendees to go in a variety of different directions. Some went far back in time, looking to ancient Greek and Roman statues. Others reached for more recent influences. The painter Amy Sherald, for example, went for one of her own paintings . There are plenty of art-and-fashion crossovers these days, some more successful than others. That was the case at the Met Gala, too. Below, here are our thoughts on nine of last night...

In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, sending a cloud of ash and hot gas sweeping through the ancient Roman town of Pompei. The writer Pliny the Younger—whose uncle, Pliny the Elder, died in the eruption—watched the catastrophe unfold from a vantage point across the Bay of Naples, later describing how inhabitants had tied pillows over their heads to protect themselves from falling debris and carried torches to find their way through the darkness. In 2024, archeologists discovered the skeletons of two of the volcano’s victims, likely killed as they tried to reach the sea, just outside Pompeii’s southern gates. The first skeleton was of a young man, who is thought to have died in a pyroclastic surge—a rush of superheated gas and hot ash that can literally boil blood. In an eerie echo of Pliny the Younger’s account, the second skeleton, that of a somewhat older man, was found with a terracotta bowl near his head. According to researchers, who published their fin...

Using artificial intelligence, researchers may have identified the previously unknown subject of a sketch by Northern Renaissance artist Hans Holbein, and reidentified the sitter for a related Holbein drawing. The study , carried out by Karen L. Davies and Hassan Ugail, was published in the journal npj Heritage Science . Holbein was born in Germany but moved to England to escape the European Reformation, initially under the patronage of Oliver Cromwell and Henry VIII’s ill-fated second wife, Anne Boleyn. He worked as a portraitist in the Tudor court starting around 1526 until his death in 1543. Both of the artworks in question—known as Anne Boleyn and An unidentified woman —are part of the Royal Collection Trust, which owns some 85 drawings by Holbein. Only 30 of these drawings, the study points out, are related to paintings whose subjects are clearly identified. Until now, this left historians to rely on inscriptions from 18th-century copies ...

Oriental-Rongotai stormed Helston Park for a seven tries to three win in their fifth round fixture on Saturday, which was for the Ash Pointon Cup. Ories scored seven tries – all converted by fullback Jordan Soli – and led 28-5 at halftime. Soli also scored a hat-trick of tries, whilst centre Daniel Tafili scored one...

It’s springtime in the art world, and that can mean only one thing. Not the Venice Biennale, though that is no doubt where many dealers, collectors, and artists are this week. No, we’re talking about the May marquee sales. This year’s sales arrive, as always, at something of an inflection point for the market. Following two years of sales declines, the global art market returned to modest growth of 4 percent last year, according to the most recent Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report. The total sales figure of $59.6 billion was buoyed not by collectors piling back into contemporary art but by a surge of high-quality consignments in the November sales, namely that of Leonard Lauder’s collection at Sotheby’s, which was headlined by a $236.4 million Klimt . While there are no works in the spring sales season expected to approach that eye-watering result, that doesn’t mean there aren’t trophy works. The major houses...