The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is currently in the news for indicting former President Donald Trump, but it also continues to repatriates looted and stolen antiquities.

On March 31, the office of Alvin L. Bragg Jr. announced the repatriation of the Khmer Lintel, an 11th century structural element that was looted from Cambodia during the 1990s and smuggled into Thailand. The Khmer lintel formed the support for a temple door and featured carvings of celestial deities dancing together, known as apsaras in Hindu and Buddhist cultures.

According to the DA’s office, after the lintel arrived in Bangkok, it was sold by a local dealer to an American collector and remained in a private collection in Manhattan until its seizure last October.

“This is a beautiful piece that has been sitting in a private collection and hidden from the public view due to the actions of selfish looters,” Bragg said in a statement. “We will continue to make clear that stolen antiquities passing through Manhattan will be tracked down and returned to their countries of origin.”

The District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit has received a lot of press attention for the sheer volume of its recovery work, which includes several recent seizures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the repatriation of more than 950 items valued at approximately $180 million.

The Russian-owned auction house Phillips is in an uncertain financial position, according to audit records that were reviewed by the Guardian.

A recent audit carried out by a UK accounting firm found that the house is relying on guarantees—internal financial deals made with outside backers to secure funds on auctioned artworks—provided by two founders of the house’s parent company, a Russian luxury retailer. These guarantees, plus increasing debts, have reportedly forced Phillips into a situation where it faces “material uncertainty.”

In response to an ARTnews inquiry, a Phillips spokesperson said the questions raised about its financials do not affect its business internally. “Phillips regularly assesses its expenses on a regular basis. There are no planned adjustments to the company’s operations and staffing,” the spokesperson said.

The records reviewed by the Guardian stated that the dynamic could potentially place “significant doubt” on the business’s stability.

Phillips, one of the three largest auction houses in the world, oversees offices in New York, London, and Hong Kong. It is owned by Leonid Fridlyand and Leonid Strunin, the founders of Mercury Group, a Moscow-based luxury retailer.

Last week, a bill introduced by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) received a hearing.

For some congresspeople, this would not be news. For Boebert it is: In her first term, she sponsored 41 pieces of legislation—one set out to impeach President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris; another to require the Department of Homeland Security to treat fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction; a third to prohibit the use of federal funds to research youth gender transitions—and none warranted a hearing.

This turned out to be a problem. Despite being predicted to comfortably win reelection, Boebert prevailed over her Democratic opponent by less than a percentage point. Voters in her district told me the reason was simple: “I don’t think she did shit,” one constituent explained. “She didn’t back one bill, she just talked a lot.”

Now, it seems Boebert has taken that message to heart. In proposing to remove the gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act, she has taken aim at a serious, complex issue in her home state.

In 2020, Coloradans narrowly voted to allow the reintroduction of gray wolves, which had been hunted out of their natural range in the 1940s. Environmentalists say that wolves are an important part of ecosystems, allowing aspens and willows to thrive by mediating the elk population that feeds on them. Because wolves are protected by the Endangered Species Act, it is illegal to kill them—except in the Northern Rocky Mountains, which encompasses Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, because those states have already successfully restored their gray wolf populations. (Endangered species can be killed in self-defense.) Wolves have not yet been officially reintroduced by Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Still, some packs have migrated into the state from Wyoming. These wolves occasionally kill cattle, frustrating ranchers, who view the reintroduction of wolves as harmful and say that the state’s city-dwellers don’t know what it’s like to have their livelihood threatened by carnivorous animals. By removing wolves from the ESA, Boebert wants to allow Colorado ranchers to shoot wolves.

A museum in Munich has taken down a Picasso portrait after a recent intervention from the German culture minister over its disputed ownership.

“I expressly call on the Bavarian state government to finally clear the way for the Bavarian State Painting Collections to agree to an appeal to the Advisory Commission,” Culture Minister Claudia Roth told the Bavarian publication Süddeutsche Zeitung. “This is really overdue now,” she said, hinting at passing a new restitution law.

The Limbach Commission, a government-established body that handles restitutions, has attempted to intervene in the dispute over the 1903 portrait Madame Soler by Pablo Picasso, which has been on display at the Pinakothek der Moderne for almost six decades. But the Bavarian State Painting Collections has not agreed to any mediation so far.

The removal of Picasso’s Madame Soler from public view at the museum is the latest development in a long and bitter dispute between the heirs of art collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the Bavarian State Painting Collections, which bought the painting in 1964. The two parties disagree on whether the painting was sold under duress during the rise of Nazis in Germany.

Madame Soler portrays the wife of Picasso’s friend, the tailor Benet Soler, and was painted during the artist’s Blue Period. The museum has denied that this is a case of looted art, since owner-collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy transferred it across the Swiss border to an art dealer in the early 1930s amid rising antisemitism.

A bronze statue that held court over the Greek and Roman galleries at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for over a decade has been seized after an investigation found it was stolen from a Turkish archaeological site in the 1960s, according to the New York Times.

The statue, which researchers at the museum say is a depiction of the Roman ruler Septimius Severus, is the latest in a string of artifacts that seem to have found a home in the Met’s extensive collection despite coming from illegitimate sources.

The headless bronze statue is one of almost 20 items that have been “characterized as looted” by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in the last three months, the Times reported, and is one of three items recently seized that are on the way back to Turkey.

Also being sent back to Turkey is a bronze head of Severus’s son and heir, Caracalla, who ruled as emperor after his father. Both bronzes are thought to be looted from Bubon, an archaeological site in the southeast “where members of the imperial family were worshiped during the period when Rome ruled the area,” the Times said.

According to the Times, restituting artifacts stolen from sites like Bubon has been a goal of Turkish authorities for years. Investigators said statues often were dug up by local farmers in the 1960s and sold, rather than being reported to the Turkish government.  

Starting tomorrow, states will begin to terminate health care coverage for people who no longer qualify for Medicaid, marking the end to a pandemic-era rule that automatically renewed coverage for Medicaid recipients even if they were no longer eligible. An estimated 15 million Americans, a majority of whom are low-income, are expected to lose their health insurance before the end of the year. 

The emergency policy was created at the start of the pandemic under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act which prevented states from kicking off Medicaid recipients regardless of whether they had filled out the necessary paperwork to re-enroll. During the pandemic, the program saw 20.2 million new recipients over the course of two years, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. With the end of the pandemic-era requirement, states will return to checking people’s Medicaid eligibility by requiring recipients to fill out forms to verify their personal information, income, and household size—a massive administrative effort for families likely economically struggling.

According to a Department of Health and Human Services analysis, the 15 million expected to lose coverage include an estimated 5 million children; Black and Latino households will be disproportionately affected. Others at risk of losing their insurance include: individuals who have moved out of state during the pandemic, people with limited English proficiency, and those with disabilities.

Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, New Hampshire, and South Dakota will be the first states to end coverage. Most states will move to do the same in either May or June. 

Donald Trump is going to be spending a lot of his time in courtrooms this year—and not just fighting Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s newly-filed charges. The recent indictment has raised legitimate questions about how Trump would manage the roles of being both a presidential candidate and a criminal defendant. But the reality is that Trump was already going to have an incredibly busy schedule fending off legal threats. There are as many as 40 other lawsuits and investigations into his behavior before, during, and since his time in the White House.

And three of them—all major, all potentially extremely costly—are set to go to trial at some point in the next ten months. The last of the cases will kick off in early 2024, and all will occur as Trump is trying to get his 2024 presidential campaign into high gear. All will be heard in courthouses within one block of each other in southern Manhattan, and by the end, each case will likely have cost millions of dollars, thousands of billable hours, and weeks of time in front of empaneled juries. Trump will not necessarily have to appear in the courtroom for every hearing in every case—he will be paying attorneys millions to do most of it for him—but the former president is going to have a legally busy, and legally perilous, year ahead—whether Bragg’s charges stick or not.

For starters, there is the lawsuit filed by writer E. Jean Carroll who has accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. Carroll has filed both a defamation lawsuit—alleging that Trump had disparaged her when she first made her accusation saying, by saying, among other things, that Carroll was “not my type”—and a civil lawsuit accusing Trump of battery for the alleged assault. The defamation lawsuit has been temporarily put on hold. But the battery lawsuit is moving forward—made possible by a new New York law that makes it easier for adult survivors of sexual assault to make civil claims against their alleged attackers. The trial will begin April 25 in a federal courtroom a block from the New York City courthouse where Trump will be arrested and fingerprinted on Tuesday in Bragg’s case.

The testimony in the Carroll case is expected to last a week and judging by the flurry of pre-trial motions that have been filed back and forth for months, it has enormous potential to be ugly for Trump. Win or lose, it seems likely to be a high-profile platform for allegations that Trump routinely made aggressive, uninvited sexual advances toward women fairly regularly. Attorneys in the case, for example, are waiting for the judge to rule on whether depositions from other women who say Trump sexually assaulted them should be admissible. They are attempting to demonstrate that his sexual advances on women constituted a “signature crime”—meaning Trump had a modus operandi of preying on women. Never a positive description for a presidential candidate.

Then, there is the massive $250 million civil lawsuit that New York attorney general Letitia James filed against Trump last fall. It’s a sprawling case that accuses Trump of systematically manipulating the values of his various properties. When using them as collateral to get loans and insurance coverage, he would pump up their value, and then drastically undervalue them when it came time to pay taxes. James’ office has been sparring with Trump for nearly four years in the matter, but it will all come to a head on October 2, when the case will go to a full jury trial.

A Michigan college has ended its relationship with the Florida charter school whose principal was pressured to resign after parents complained that her Renaissance art syllabus, which included a picture of Michelangelo’s David, was inappropriate for sixth-graders. 

The Tallahassee Classical School, which was licensed to use Hillsdale College’s classical education curriculum, is no longer affiliated with the small, Christian college, Hillsdale spokesperson Emily Stack Davis said in a statement to MLive.com.

“This drama around teaching Michelangelo’s David sculpture, one of the most important works of art in existence, has become a distraction from, and a parody of, the actual aims of classical education,” Davis said. “Of course, Hillsdale’s K-12 art curriculum includes Michelangelo’s David and other works of art that depict the human form.”

The charter school license was “revoked and will expire at the end of the school year,” Davis added.

Hope Carrasquilla, the principal of Tallahassee Classical School, resigned earlier this month. The high-profile controversy began after the school children were shown Michelangelo’s David, which one parent called “pornographic,” the Tallahassee Democrat reported. The lesson also included Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, both of which contain nudity. 

Large iron staples have been found in Notre-Dame Cathedral’s stonework among the walls, columns, and tribunes. A recent study in the peer-reviewed journal Plos One revealed the find—and suggested that because of the staples, Notre-Dame may be even more significant than experts even realized.

Researchers used a radiocarbon-based dating method to determine that the iron staples were from the 800-year-old monument’s original construction. Historians have long thought that the metal pieces were added during renovations in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This discovery makes Notre-Dame “the first known Gothic cathedral where iron was massively used as a proper construction material to bind stones,” the researchers note. “Whereas other buildings used wooden tie rods stretched between the arches… the first master builder of Notre-Dame de Paris made the bold choice of a system using a more durable material that could be more easily concealed.”

With permission, the team removed some of the staples to examine them more closely and found that they weigh between four-and-a-half and nine pounds each and are approximately 8 to 20 inches in length. Additionally, the researchers found “that several pieces of iron, sometimes from different provenances, were welded together to form each staple.”

It is unclear why different metals were used, but this may reflect the overall duration of the project, which took more than a half-century to complete beginning in 1163.

Editor’s note: The below article is a preview of the lead item in the next edition of  David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out.

Donald Trump has been a one-man stress test for the American political system. The framers did not envision such a dishonest, narcissistic scoundrel winning the highest office of the land. And the system of laws, rules, and norms that began with the Constitution and that has evolved in the past two centuries was not formulated to deal with a demagogue with a cult-like following who would baldly lie about anything and everything, who would aid and abet a foreign attack on the nation, who would flaunt numerous and brazen conflicts of interest, and who would try to blow up the nation’s constitutional order and incite violence to remain in power. But—so far—the nation appears to have survived the authoritarian threat Trump poses. Yet with his historic indictment in New York City on charges related to the $130,000 hush-money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to prevent her from airing the story of her alleged sexual romp with Trump, the failed casino owner who became president is once again about to stress test the nation.

Never has the US judicial system contended with the criminal prosecution of a former president (who is also the leading GOP 2024 aspirant). That almost happened with Richard Nixon. But his handpicked successor, President Gerald Ford, granted the Watergate co-conspirator a pardon. Ford insisted that would allow the country to move on. But in retrospect, his pardon did the United States a disservice by not allowing the nation to establish a precedent for managing the sensitive matter of presidential criminality.

So after years of repeated brushes with the law and other sordid actions—from allegedly violating housing law to hobnobbing with mobsters to possibly committing perjury to mounting  assorted tax  dodges to obstructing justice to plotting multiple schemes for overturning an election—Trump is finally being prosecuted for a caper that involved paying off and silencing an adult film director and star. As did the January 6 insurrectionist riot, this will place tremendous pressure on American politics.

Trump's chaos machine has already been unleashed following his indictment. And now the system is about to be tested like never before, warns @DavidCornDC. pic.twitter.com/gjOn4ztrPR