News Flash: Hawass Cuts Off Egyptian Cooperation with the Louvre

Zahi Hawass and mummy he believes is Queen Hatshepsut
He's threatened to do something like this numerous times. Now Zahi Hawass, the combative head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, has apparently done it---severed ties with a major museum, the Louvre, over an antiquities ownership dispute.
Paul Schemm of the Associated Press reports:
Egypt said Wednesday its antiquities department severed ties with France's Louvre museum because it has refused to return what are described as stolen artifacts, one of the country's most aggressive attempts yet to reclaim relics from some of the world's leading Egyptology collections....With ambitious plans for a Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Jean Nouvel, the Paris museum has strong motivation to cultivate good relations in the Middle East. An Abu Dhabi newspaper, The National, has already posted the Agence France-Presse version of the Hawass story.The Louvre's press office said that a national committee made up of specialists from France's museum world and other experts will meet by the end of the week to decide the issue, with final approval given by the Culture Ministry.
What about all those other Hawass-harassed museums? Is this just the beginning?
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LEE ROSENBAUM
I'm a veteran cultural journalist who writes frequently for the Wall Street Journal's "Leisure & Arts" page. I'm a regular cultural contributor on New York Public Radio (WNYC). I've been profiled on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer's Art Beat and in the Chicago Reader. I've appeared as an art-market commentator on BBC-TV and have published numerous Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. I am author of The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf) and have lectured on cultural property issues at the New Acropolis Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, on deaccessioning at Columbia Law School, the University of Iowa and a conference of the Museum Association of New York, on museum governance and cultural property issues at Seton Hall University, and on arts blogging at American University.
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