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Darkness falls on the Statue of Liberty

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Light goes out on the Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty was plunged into darkness for a few hours after an unexpected power cut late on Tuesday.

The lights illuminating the statue in New York City shut off in what the National Parks Service said was an “unplanned outage”.

There was online speculation that the move was deliberate, to show solidarity with the Day Without A Woman inequality protests on Wednesday.

But the parks service said it was probably down to construction work.

The last rebuilding work after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 is being completed nearby. The statue was shut for a month after damage it sustained during the hurricane.

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The lights eventually came back on just before midnight local time (05:00 GMT on Wednesday).

The Statue of Liberty is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor in New York City, in the United States.

The copper statue, a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and built by Gustave Eiffel.

The statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886.

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The Statue of Liberty is a robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess.

She holds a torch above her head, and in her left arm carries a tabula ansata (a tablet evoking the law) inscribed “July 4, 1776”, the date of the American Declaration of Independence.

A broken chain lies at her feet. The statue became an icon of freedom and of the United States, and was a welcoming sight to immigrants arriving from abroad.

Bartholdi was inspired by French law professor and politician Édouard René de Laboulaye, who is said to have commented in 1865 that any monument raised to American independence would properly be a joint project of the French and American peoples.

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Due to the post-war instability in France, work on the statue did not commence until the early 1870s.

In 1875, Laboulaye proposed that the French finance the statue and the Americans would provide the site and build the pedestal.

Bartholdi completed the head and the torch-bearing arm before the statue was fully designed, and these pieces were exhibited for publicity at international expositions.

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