All posts tagged: Trove

Three Swiss Museums Return Trove of Benin Bronzes to Nigeria

Three Swiss Museums Return Trove of Benin Bronzes to Nigeria

Published by Jenni Sidey

Three Swiss museums have returned 18 royal and religious artifacts from the Kingdom of Benin to Nigeria, marking another significant repatriation of the so-called Benin Bronzes. A handover ceremony took place today at the University of Zurich between Swiss Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider and Nigeria’s Minister of Culture, Hannatu Musa Musawa. The university returned 14 objects from its Ethnographic Museum, while two additional Benin Bronzes came from Museum Rietberg Zurich and another two from the Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève.  Related Articles The Benin Bronzes refer to the approximately 5,000 bronze sculptures, ceremonial objects, and ivory carvings looted by British forces from the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, during the 1897 punitive expedition. Scattered across museums and private collections worldwide via illicit channels, the bronzes have become emblematic of efforts by formerly colonized countries to reclaim cultural heritage, as well as the broader—and often contentious—debate over the ethics of ethnographic collections.  Among the artifacts returned by Switzerland is a Benin Eroro, a four-sided ceremonial bell that played a central role in royal rites, …

Defense Department publishes trove of records : NPR

Defense Department publishes trove of records : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

An image recorded on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission in 1969 shows the shadows of astronauts, along with a highlighted area above the horizon showing “unidentified phenomena,” according to the Defense Department. NASA/via Defense Department hide caption toggle caption NASA/via Defense Department Cold War reports of mysterious rotating saucers; recent sightings of metallic elliptical objects floating in mid-air. Those and other reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs — the military’s term for UFOs — are described in a trove of documents released by the Department of Defense on Friday. In all, the Pentagon released more than 160 records, citing President Trump’s call for unprecedented transparency in giving the public access to federal and military records related to unexplained encounters with strange phenomena. President Trump said via Truth Social that with the documents and other records available to the public, “the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!” The records are posted to a specialized web portal, war.gov/info, which will house additional files as they’re …

The Pentagon Releases New Trove of Declassified UFO Files

The Pentagon Releases New Trove of Declassified UFO Files

Published by skeptic

Trump first teased the release in February in a Truth Social post. The Pentagon coordinated the release in partnership with the White House, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the Energy Department, NASA, and the FBI. Many of the files in this new drop contain documents that are already publicly available. However, some versions of these known documents in the new files contain more pages, or fewer redactions, than previously released versions. More than 60% of Americans believe that the government is concealing information about UAP, according to YouGov, while 40% think UAP are likely alien in origin, according to Gallup. Congress has held hearings into whether there’s been a decades-long program to recover “non-human” technologies, yet evidence remains elusive. Courtesy U.S. Department of War “If it’s just more blobby photos or redacted documents that don’t have any details in them, it’s more of the same,” Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester who studies the search for alien life, says of the new files. “What we need are actual scientific results from …

Gold Trove Linked to Famed Aegina Treasure Discovered on Greek Isle

Gold Trove Linked to Famed Aegina Treasure Discovered on Greek Isle

Published by Jenni Sidey

Excavations at Kolona, an archaeological site on the Greek island of Aegina, have uncovered a trove of gold jewelry dating to the Middle Bronze Age. The discovery was made inside a large stone building near a defensive wall built during the ancient settlement’s expansion, just outside what is generally considered the site’s inner area. The site, located near Aegina’s modern northwest harbor, was under continuous excavation last year, with the jewelry hoard marking one of the season’s highlights, according to the Greek Ministry of Culture. Related Articles Among the discoveries was a variety of gold ornaments: disc-shaped pendants, some double-sided and others featuring biconical elements; delicate gold plaques; and beads of carnelian—a reddish-orange chalcedony quartz, also known as “sunset stone,” which was associated with courage in ancient Rome. All together, the items likely comprise a single piece of jewelry, likely a necklace or pendant. Archaeologists noted that some of the unearthed gold bears similarities to objects associated with the so-called Aegina Treasure, a Minoan gold hoard reportedly discovered on the island of the same name. …

Volunteers turn a fan’s recordings of 10,000 concerts into an online treasure trove

Volunteers turn a fan’s recordings of 10,000 concerts into an online treasure trove

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the inside track from Roisin O’Connor with our free weekly music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This On July 8, 1989, a young music fan named Aadam Jacobs, with a compact Sony cassette recorder in his pocket, went to see an up-and-coming rock band from Washington for their debut show in Chicago. After a blast of guitar feedback, 20-year-old Kurt Cobain politely announced to the crowd at the small club called Dreamerz: “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.” With that, the band, then a quartet, launched into the riff-heavy first song, “School.” Jacobs surreptitiously recorded the performance, documenting the fledgling band in raw, fiery form more than two years before Nirvana’s global breakthrough with the album “Nevermind.” Jacobs went on to record more than 10,000 concerts, with increasingly sophisticated equipment, over four decades in Chicago and other cities. Now a group of devoted volunteers in the U.S. and Europe is methodically cataloging, digitizing and uploading them one by one. The …

The V&A’s Gilbert Galleries review – a fabulous treasure trove that must be seen to be believed | Art

The V&A’s Gilbert Galleries review – a fabulous treasure trove that must be seen to be believed | Art

Published by Sam Flores

We periodically hear when a masterpiece is “saved for the nation”, usually when a museum is obliged to raise eye-watering sums to prevent the export or sale of an artwork deemed of national significance. Museums also occasionally purchase at auction for the same purpose. They are, however, swimming in a pool among the superwealthy, with many news-making record sales subsequently disappearing into someone’s private yacht or bathroom. It is this marketplace that makes it a momentous occasion when an entire private collection is bequeathed to the nation, usually upon the benefactors’ death. From the Wallace Collection in the 19th century to the 2025 acquisition of the Schroder treasure by the Holburne museum in Bath, museums are willing custodians of collections of such quality as can only be acquired through capital vastly exceeding their own. How they choose to present that gift is a curatorial issue in itself. ‘Love of beautiful things’ … Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert. Photograph: The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum The Gilbert collection was …

Women’s prize for fiction longlist reveals ‘treasure trove’ of ‘unheard voices’

Women’s prize for fiction longlist reveals ‘treasure trove’ of ‘unheard voices’

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter British authors Kit de Waal and Lucy Apps are among the writers long-listed for the 2026 Women’s prize for Fiction. Described by Julia Gillard, Australia’s former prime minister and chair of judges, this year’s selection of 16 novels is a “treasure trove” that explores “the messy business of being human”. Also in contention for the £30,000 prize are Katie Kitamura for her tense story of an aging actor in Audition, and Susan Choi for the family saga in her sixth novel Flashlight, which transports the reader from Indiana to North Korea. Both titles also featured on last year’s Booker Prize shortlist. De Waal, who chaired the judging panel for the Women’s prize last year, was selected for The Best of Everything, the tenderly told tale of Paulette, a Caribbean mother in mourning. open image in gallery Sixteen titles make up the …

Epstein files hand French prosecutors trove of new leads

Epstein files hand French prosecutors trove of new leads

Published by Sam Flores

Jean-Luc Brunel and Daniel Siad. WIKIPEDIA/FRANCETV The publication of 3.5 million documents linked to the sprawling case involving sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has confronted the French justice system with an unprecedented situation and a Herculean task. How can it process the mountain of freely accessible data now before it, which could potentially contain a multitude of offenses, whether sexual or financial, committed on French soil? On Wednesday, February 18, Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau announced the opening of two investigations entrusted to five magistrates. One will focus on “human trafficking,” covering what is commonly called solicitation or recruitment, and the other on “financial offenses of money laundering, breaches of probity, or tax fraud.” The investigations will be conducted in collaboration with the National Directorate of the Judicial Police, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office and several national offices. The head of the Paris prosecutor’s office pledged to make use of “the full body of data” that makes up the Epstein files, taking into account reports received in the form of complaints from victims or advocacy groups, information …

A Vast Trove of Exposed Social Security Numbers May Put Millions at Risk of Identity Theft

A Vast Trove of Exposed Social Security Numbers May Put Millions at Risk of Identity Theft

Published by skeptic

After years spent finding and investigating data breaches, Greg Pollock admits that when he comes across yet another exposed database full of passwords and Social Security numbers, “I come to it with some fatigue.” But Pollock, director of research at the cybersecurity company UpGuard, says he and his colleagues found an exposed, publicly accessible database online in January that appeared to contain a trove of Americans’ sensitive personal data so massive that his weariness lifted and they sprang to action to validate the finding. The UpGuard researchers point out that not all of the records represent unique, valid information, but the raw totals they found in the January exposure included roughly 3 billion email addresses and passwords as well as about 2.7 billion records that included Social Security numbers. It was unclear who had set up the database, but it seemed to contain personal details that may have been cobbled together from multiple historic data breaches—including, perhaps, the trove from the 2024 breach of the background-checking service National Public Data. It is common for data …

Intuit Art Museum in Chicago Gifted Trove of Artworks

Intuit Art Museum in Chicago Gifted Trove of Artworks

Published by Jenni Sidey

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. The Headlines BAILEY’S BEQUEST. The Intuit Art Museum (IAM) in Chicago, one of the country’s top museums dedicated to self-taught artists, has been gifted 61 works through two donations, reports The Art Newspaper. The largest of the two, numbering 47 pieces, comes from the estate of late Chicago collector and founding supporter of the museum, Jan Petry (1939-2024). The second comes from the Los Angeles-based scholar and African American art collector Gordon W. Bailey. The gifts will help the museum’s goal to exhibit more works by women artists of color, and “bring new artists’ stories into our galleries,” said Debra Kerr, president and chief executive of the museum. Emery Blagdon, James Castle, Ulysses Davis, Sybil Gibson, and Mose Tolliver are just some the artists whose works will be added to the museum’s collection. LADDER TO LIBERTY. The Merchant’s House Museum in New York’s NoHo neighborhood has been hiding a secret for centuries, writes ARTnews. The preserved, historic Manhattan home appears to have once served as a refuge for fleeing slaves. …