A Rush to Save Ancient Artifacts in Gaza Highlights All That Has Been Lost A bombing delay enabled rescue of some objects, but archaeologists fear the wider loss of antiquities from the many cultures living there over thousands of years. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/w...

Why New York can be a risky place for dealers and museums to hold [stolen] art Could the Manhattan district attorney's seizures be putting people off sending [stolen] artworks to the city? www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/09/04/w...

On If Objects Could Talk, the newest series from Getty Podcasts, artifacts from Getty's antiquities collection leave the museum vault and come alive to share their side of the story. Coming September 8, 2025. podcastingtoday.co.uk/getty-launch...

Missing from the New York Times obit of the diamond magnate Maurice Tempelsman, who died Saturday, is his role as a conduit for some of the most important examples of looted Classical art to have survived antiquity. A thread... www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/b...

Ashraf Eldarir, an Egyptian doctor, became involved in the “more financially lucrative” trade of smuggling antiquities into the US Eldarir pleaded guilty to four charges of smuggling and is due to be sentenced at a court in New York today. www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/20...

New Case: Pandava. This sandstone sculpture of Pandava, depicting a warrior from Hindu mythology, was stolen from the Prasat Chan temple within Cambodia's Koh Ker complex, likely in the 1970s under the Khmer Rouge.

New Yorker: HOW A BILLIONAIRE OWNER BROUGHT TURMOIL AND TROUBLE TO SOTHEBY’S Patrick Drahi made a fortune through debt-fuelled telecommunications companies. Now he’s bringing his methods to the art market. apple.news/AXoxC9-sdSCy...

The identity documents of indigent people were purchased or stolen as part of an elaborate scheme to fraudulently circumvent a 50-year-old global ban on the rhino horn trade. www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025...

New Case: Portrait head of Caracalla The Manhattan DA seized this bronze portrait of the Roman emperor Caracalla from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in May 2023 as part of a sweeping investigation of the looting of the ancient site of Bubon, Türkiye.

James Baldwin’s message was simple: we’re afraid of love, because we’re afraid of exposing our true selves. To manage that fear, we “other” the groups we don’t belong to in order to avoid a reckoning with ourselves.

The FBI has tracked down and returned another manuscript signed by Hernan Cortez, one of 15 pages stolen from Mexico's National Archives before 1993. No criminal charges filed because it "changed hands several times over" in the decades since its disappearance www.fbi.gov/news/stories...

WSJ: The White House plans to conduct a far-reaching review of Smithsonian museum exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of America’s 250th anniversary to ensure the museums align with President Trump’s interpretation of American history. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

New Case: The Serpent King When the National Gallery of Australia acquired this statue of Nagaraja, or Serpent King, in 2006, NYC dealer Subhash Kapoor provided an ownership document saying it had been in a Japanese collection since 1969.

RIP Maurizio Fiorilli, the Italian state prosecutor whose years-long investigation of American museums and the illicit antiquities trade changed the art world — and paved the way for other nations to reclaim their stolen culture, too.

Manhattan DA has announced the recent return of looted antiquities to several countries: - 31 antiquities to the people of Italy; - two 6th century C.E. Visigoth pendants to Spain; - and a 17th century C.E. Jesuit manuscript to Hungary. manhattanda.org/d-a-bragg-an...

For ARTnews, I looked into the four artworks by Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Diane Arbus now being auctioned online by the US government with connections to the 1MDB scandal. Three were gifted to Leonardo DiCaprio by Jho Low and one was forfeited by a producer of THE WOLF OF WALL STREET.

The text tells how the Sumerian storm god Ishkur was trapped in the netherworld, causing chaos on earth due to the lack of rain. Ishkur’s father Enlil summons a divine assembly and asks them to retrieve Ishkur. No gods volunteer, but, surprisingly, a lone fox does. archaeology.org/news/2025/07...

Meanwhile over on the other site:

This case illustrates how organized crime groups use the US art market for trade-based money laundering — precisely the issue targeted in the new bipartisan legislation championed by several senators and @combatlooting.bsky.social

The French culture minister Rachida Dati is to face trial in Paris on charges of alleged corruption and “influence peddling” Dati is accused of having secretly worked as a lobbyist for the carmaker Renault-Nissan while she was in the European Parliament. www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/07/23/f...

Picasso's "Nature Morte au Crane de Taureau, Basquiat's Redman One & other high value artworks purchased with criminal proceeds connected to fugitive financier Low Taek Jho and the 1MDB scandal are up for auction via U.S. Marshals Service asset recovery division. www.txauction.com/auctions/308...

Entire annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts: $210 million

Iran’s leaders reach back to pre-Islamic times to stoke nationalism www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

New explosive letters from the Rockefeller family archives, obtained by Project Brazen, detail how a prized Cambodian antiquity – the Harihara statue – landed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection after a failed $1.8 million sale attempt. whalehunting.projectbrazen.com/explosive-ro...

Thai and Cambodian Troops Fire at Each Other as Relations Implode Shots were heard at 8.20 a.m. and came from an area about 650 feet east of Prasat Ta Muen Thom, an ancient Khmer-Hindu temple along the disputed border, according to the Thai army. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/w...

Unearthing a Network: Seven arrested in Spain over the illegal sale of archaeological material. art-crime.blogspot.com/2025/07/unea...

Palestinian archaeologists with Heritage Guardians Team from the Khan Younis-based Mayasem Association for Culture and Arts are racing to safeguard ancient objects from bombed museums, private collections, and historical sites www.arabnews.com/node/2609058...

The bipartisan Art Market Integrity Act would require art dealers and auction houses to comply with anti-money-laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing regulations under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) www.fetterman.senate.gov/fetterman-co...

Allegations of fraud, tax evasion, misappropriation of funds, abuse, and exploitation shatter the polished veneer of Guggenheim-Asher, an ultra-high-end firm whose clients included celebrities like Tom Cruise and corporations such as Sony and Coca-Cola. news.artnet.com/market/promi...

Howard Carter’s pilfering of small, beautiful, valuable and mostly uninscribed objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun – a category of objects which belonged entirely to the Egyptian people, and were not his to take – has long been an open secret in Egyptology.

Filings by four big banks flagged more than $1.5 billion in Epstein transactions — including thousands of wire transfers for the purchase and sale of artwork for rich friends, fees paid to Mr. Epstein by wealthy individuals, and payments to numerous women www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/b...

The official DHS account is now tweeting about “your homeland’s heritage”

Relooted, one of the most anticipated video games of 2025, allows players to take stolen African artifacts from Western museums and return them to their home countries. AJ+ talked to one of the creators... www.instagram.com/reel/DMETOk6...

Why no charges still against alleged art thieves Dirk Obbink of Oxford or the British Museum’s curator Peter Higgs, both exposed years ago. Mock trial finds art thefts are hard to prosecute. observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

NYRB: The Collector as Autocrat Even as he assembled a world-class art collection, Albert C. Barnes always saw himself as an embattled underdog. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

The Old Bronzes and the Sea A new investigation suggests the Riace bronzes, long a point of pride for Calabrians, were not found in the land of Ulysses but, rather, smuggled there airmail.news/issues/2025-...

British Museum faces legal threat over Elgin Marbles deal www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07...

For British Museum chairman George Osborne, the ambitious cultural exchange ofThe Bayeux Tapestry is a template for what he hopes could be a much more controversial loan deal, involving the Parthenon Sculptures, sometimes known as the Elgin Marbles. www.ft.com/content/ed62...

New Case: This fascinating case (courtesy of Sarah Krienen and Dr. Johannes Schwartz) involves an item not often associated with the return of Nazi looted art; a Proto-Corinthian Oinochoe (jug). It was spirited out of Greece in 1943 by German engineers somewhere near the Corinth Canal.

News: Manhattan DA returns 28 looted antiquities to Türkiye, including a silver oinochoe and silver phiale seized from the @metmuseum that were part of the famous Lydian Hoard. Most of hoard was returned to Türkiye by the Met in 1993 after years of litigation. manhattanda.org/d-a-bragg-an...

An 80-year-old American novelist Eleonor "Gay" Courter and her 82-year-old husband Philip are among several people facing a possible trial in France over the illegal sale of gold bars plundered from an 18th-century shipwreck www.cbsnews.com/news/stolen-...

I'm glad to be able to contribute to MOLA with this rather unusual case of the repatriation of a Greek antiquity due to Nazi-era provenance.

Bayeux Tapestry to return to England for first time in 900 years France loans Depiction of Norman Conquest to UK in exchange for Sutton Hoo burial ship www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07...

“There are weighty ethical implications for a loan policy that appears to overlook the intellectual consequences of looting.” David Gill

Andor and the Antiquities Trade: Why antiquities matter so much in a galaxy far, far away "the show uses ancient artwork as a playing piece in intrigue.. It’s tempting to make a case that antiquities, and the long memory they provide, are inherently subversive." apollo-magazine.com/andor-luthen...

Can a Museum Be the Conscience of a Nation? Freakonomics interviews Nicholas Cullinan, the new director of the British Museum, who seems to think so. “I’m not afraid of the past,” Cullinan says — talking about looted objects and thefts from the storerooms. freakonomics.com/podcast/can-...

From 1718 to 1720, Andrea Scandar (d. 1748) was sent by Pope Clement XI on a manuscript hunting tour to Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, from which he brought back 61 objects now in the Vatican Library. In this post I have compiled a list of all the manuscripts that he acquired during his trip. #BookHistory

A “disturbingly informative” museum that displays human remains is in crisis - The New Yorker cc: @damienhuffer.bsky.social apple.news/Acqa72PrXStG...

Case of the Day: This case involves a terracotta figurine of the stylised head and torso of a man, one of a very many belonging to the Iron Age Nok culture of central Nigeria coveted since at least the 1940s. mola.omeka.net/items/show/999