Last week there was an article from Iraq on the recent salvage excavations in the southern part of the country. Today’s Los Angeles Times has an article on looting in southern Iraq. “It may well be that more stuff has come out of the sites than was ever in the Iraqi museum,” said Elizabeth Stone of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. U.S. officials suspect that Sunni and Shiite paramilitary groups take a cut from the sale of looted artifacts.

In Australia, some 2,000 people showed up to view an excavation at the Old Sydney Burial Ground beneath the city hall. Most of the bodies had been moved before the hall was built in the nineteenth century. “But the reason we keep finding bodies is because of the convicts. A lot of the convicts were just put in the ground,” said city historian Shirley Fitzgerald.

The Euphronios krater was given a “hero’s welcome” in Italy on Friday, and it will go on display with other allegedly looted artifacts returned from museums and galleries abroad in an exhibition titled “Nostoi: Recovered Masterpieces.”

Antiquities collector and Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee Shelby White has also reached a deal with the Italian government.

Archaeologists looking for historical sites in England’s Wyre Forest will be able to use images of the ground’s surface created by lasers fired from an airplane. The technique is known as “Light, Detection, and Ranging.”

A former Marine pilot thinks that landing gear recovered in a shrimper’s net off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida, was once part of a PB4Y-1 from World War II. It is known that such a plane crashed nearby during a training session in 1945.

The New York Times delves into the scandal at the Greek Culture Ministry’s Central Archaeological Council.

Here’s more information on the recent opening of an intact burial chamber belonging to a fifth-dynasty Egyptian priest and politician named Neferinpu.

Paint pigments used at the Maya site of Copan were mixed with muscovite mica, suggesting that parts of Rosalila temple glittered in the Honduran sun.

 An oceanographic surveying consultant working for Odyssey Marine Explorations, Inc., has paid more than $216,000 to settle insider trading charges. Ernesto Tapanes is said to have bought 42,000 shares of the company’s stock after he spotted an anomaly off the coast of Gibraltar, (a wreck known by the code name Black Swan), and then sold the stock after the discovery and its cargo of coins was announced.

A new genetic study suggests that the Lapita, the ancestors of today’s Polynesians and Micronesians, were probably East Asians and Taiwanese who island-hopped through Near Oceania.  

National Park Service archaeologists will dig at Abraham Lincoln’s childhood home in Knob Creek, Kentucky.

Italian officials say that their campaign to recover stolen antiquities is working–illegal excavation was down four percent from 2006. “The figures show how, at the moment, international trafficking is surely declining,” said General Giovanni Nistri of the Carabinieri’s art squad. Thefts from museums had also declined.

And, an American man has returned a boomerang he stole from an Australian museum 25 years ago. “I removed this back in 1983 when I was younger and dumber,” the man wrote in his apology.

Talk about the so-called “Jesus tomb” continues today. This article in The Jerusalem Post says that opposition from Ultra-Orthodox religious affairs authorities will prevent the reopening of the Talpiot tomb.