The Manhattan District Attorney's (DA) office has for many years been seizing antiquities from dealers, collectors and even museums. Since 2017, around 6,000 objects have been seized and most of these have now been repatriated to countries of origin like India, Mexico, China and Greece. In April, the DA received a very favourable ruling from the state's supreme court allowing the seizure of the Egon Schiele drawing, Russian War Prisoner (1916), at the Art Institute of Chicago. The museum is now appealing that decision.
After planes with Guatemalan children were loaded in the U.S., then prevented from taking off by a federal judge's decision to temporarily halt the children's removal, the Guatemalan government said on Aug. 31 that it was responsible for recently proposing to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that the unaccompanied Guatemalan minors be returned to their home country. In a statement published to the social media platform X on the
It was 170 years since a village led by the Little Thunders' great-great-grandfather was massacred by the U.S. Army, leaving eighty-six Lakota dead, many of them women and children. As I wrote in a November 2024 feature story for Smithsonian, the episode, which occurred 35 years before the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee, remains little known even today. I also reported how, while the village lay smoldering, Army Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren, a noncombatant topographer attached to the force, collected dozens of Lakota belongings.
Brian Ferriso, director of the Portland Art Museum since 2006, is resigning to become director of the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas. Oregon Public Broadcasting broke the story Friday morning, Aug. 20, citing a press release from the Dallas museum. Ferriso, who has spent the past several years guiding the Portland museum's massive, $111 million redesign and addition, will leave after the unveiling of the completed project on Nov. 20, and will take the reins in Dallas on Dec. 1, 2025.
Grieving British families of the Air India crash victims have received the wrong bodies to bury in a bungled repatriation scheme. A lawyer acting for the bereaved said that the remains of several victims had been wrongly identified, with one family forced to abandon funeral plans after allegedly being told the coffin contained a different, unidentified body.
Higuera, 51, faced an ultimatum: Stay in the US and risk detention or voluntarily say goodbye to her family. "I was really sad that I was leaving my family behind," she said.