Ancient statues smuggled from Nigeria being returned home

Who stole 2,000-year-old figurines made by Nok culture still under US investigation

Two of the figurines American officials formally returned to the Nigerian government on Thursday. These roughly 2,000-year-old sculptures are the work of the Nok culture and were stolen from the Nigerian national museum.

On display for the ceremony were seven pieces of figurines, which resembled bits of cylindrical gingerbread men thanks to the orange hue of the terracotta..

By Wynne Parry, Live Science/MSNBC

A handful of roughly 2,000-year-old figurines began a journey back home to Nigeria Thursday after being seized at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City.

At a repatriation ceremony held at Homeland Security Investigation offices on the west side of Manhattan, Nigeria's Consul General Habib Baba Habu took legal possession of the terracotta sculptures, which he said had been stolen from the country's national museum.

Habu called today a special day. "It is the day that America has extended a gift of friendship that we will never forget," he said.

Ancient artifacts

On display for the ceremony were seven pieces of figurines, which resembled bits of cylindrical gingerbread men thanks to the orange hue of the terracotta. The two best preserved pieces, a head and torso, and a pair of legs standing on a pedestal, appeared to have once belonged to a single figure.

All are the work of the Nok culture, which existed within what would become Nigeria from more than 2,000 years ago, before disappearing in the early centuries of the first millennium. (Timeframes for their existence vary.) [Image Gallery: Ancient Rock Art of Sudan

Each of the six terracotta heads bore a distinctive face, which is typical of Nok sculpture, Habu said, explaining that the ancient artisans drew from individual people in normal life, depicting them riding horses or donkeys, for example, or with farm tools.

Nok artisans were prolific, many similar figurines have left Nigeria, Habu said: "Many of them are at museums all over the world, some were taken out legally."

Nigeria has laws that control the export of Nok pieces; however, the sculptures have flooded out of the country. In the 1990s, so many reached the European art market that the prices dropped sharply, according to a New York Times article in 2000.

A modern journey

During today's ceremony, two ornate, hardwood boxes sat near the figures. The statues had been packed within these boxes while being shipped as air cargo into the United States.

During a routine inspection in Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris more than a year ago, French customs officers spotted the statues. Although they could not seize them, they notified Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in New York, the items' destination. American officials met the suspicious cargo when it arrived, officials said.

An investigation has since verified that these sculptures were cultural artifacts, not handy crafts and personal effects as described on customs' documents. That investigation is ongoing, and officials declined to give details on who they believed was responsible for attempting to smuggle the items into the United States.

"Often times brokers here in the United States receive a large number of shipments for a large number of people then distribute them. Often times, they have very little to do with the actual shipment," said James Hayes, special agent in charge of HSI New York.

This appears to be the case in this instance, said Robert Perez, director of CBP's New York Field Operations.

It's not yet clear who was responsible for removing them from Nigeria.

"From what we know the items were stolen from the national museum in Nigeria," Habu said. "There is no report of the items being stolen so now the director-general of the Nigerian museum and antiquities is now being subjected to an investigation." [Faux Real: A Gallery of Art Forgeries

Returning home

American officials plan to also return three additional items — two more Nok figurines and a carved ivory tusk — that were seized in Chicago.

Habu said he plans to have everything shipped back to Nigeria in August, where they will be returned to the museum.

He pointed to the two matching pieces, which appeared to have come from a single figurine.

"I am going to ask the government if they will agree to get expert restorers to put this back," he said.

Officials declined to assign a monetary value to the statues, saying as cultural artifacts they are priceless.

Each of the terracotta heads bore a distinctive face, which is typical of Nok sculpture.

Former Celebrity Adult Film Actress Jenna Jameson

Jenna Jameson (born Jenna Marie Massoli; April 9, 1974)is an American entrepreneur and former pornographic actress, who has been called the world's most famous adult-entertainment performer and "The Queen of Porn."[8] She started acting in erotic videos in 1993 after having worked as a stripper and glamour model

Jenna Jameson poses for a portrait while working in a club in Los Angeles. Date: October 29, 1997. Image: Evan Hurd.

Jenna Jameson poses for a portrait in Los Angeles. ca. 1999. Image: Kurt Krieger.

Adult film star Jenna Jameson arrives at the HBO 2006 Golden Globe Awards after party held at the Aqua Star Pool/Restaurant at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Date: January 16, 2006. Image: Paul Mounce.

By 1996, she had won the "top newcomer" award from each of the three major adult movie organizations. She has since won more than 20 adult video awards, and has been inducted into both the X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) and Adult Video News (AVN) Halls of Fame.

Jameson founded the adult-entertainment company ClubJenna in 2000 with Jay Grdina, whom she later married and divorced. Initially a single website, this business expanded into managing similar websites of other stars and began producing sexually explicit videos in 2001. The first such movie, Briana Loves Jenna (with Briana Banks), was named at the 2003 AVN Awards as the best-selling and best-renting pornographic title for 2002. By 2005, Club Jenna had revenues of US$30 million with profits estimated at half that. Advertisements for her site and films, often bearing her picture, have towered on a 48-foot-tall billboard in New York City's Times Square. Playboy TV hosts her Jenna's American Sex Star reality show where aspiring porn stars compete for a Club Jenna contract.

On July 25, 2012, Jameson will host the 10th Annual Diamond G-String Contest at Delilah's. Jameson who is retired from stripping is married to UFC fighter Tito Ortiz.

Retired Horace Mann Teacher Admits to Sex With Students

By Jenny Anderson, New York Times

Tek Young Lin was revered at the Horace Mann School. He was different from other teachers — a Buddhist who carefully tended to his elaborate gardens, a chaplain and a cross-country coach. He was so beloved that the English department chairmanship was named in his honor.

But there was something else about Mr. Lin: a focus he placed on certain students, a fascination that some said looked like infatuation.

Last week, in an interview, Mr. Lin, now 88, acknowledged that there was something to those whispers. He said he had had sex with students, “maybe three, I don’t know,” crossing boundaries he said were not so clear years ago.

“In those days, it was very spontaneous and casual, and it did not seem really wrong,” he said.

A New York Times Magazine article this month that exposed sexual abuse at Horace Mann, a preparatory school in the Bronx, has spurred thousands of alumni to express their feelings online and a number of victims to reach out to one another. Two law enforcement agencies have opened Horace Mann abuse hot lines. The school has pledged to “work together to understand what may have happened and why,” and last week, after accusations against Mr. Lin began to surface in online postings, Horace Mann removed his name from the English department chairmanship.

The teachers named in the magazine article, which recounted abuse that occurred 20 or more years ago, are all dead. But since its publication, some graduates of the school have made accusations against former teachers who are still alive, including Mr. Lin.

Because of New York’s statutes of limitations, it is unlikely that Mr. Lin could be prosecuted or sued for any actions that occurred when he was at Horace Mann; he retired voluntarily in 1986.

The Times has interviewed three former students who described inappropriate contact by Mr. Lin. One said he refused Mr. Lin’s request for sex; another said there had been physical contact, but no sex. One, who said he was 14 or 15 when the inappropriate contact began, said that Mr. Lin had sexual contact with him several times over several months, and that they had had a relationship that lasted years.

Mr. Lin, who lives near Santa Cruz, Calif., said no coercion had been used. “The only thing I can assure you of was that everything I did was in warmth and affection and not a power play,” he said. “I may have crossed societal boundaries. If I did, I am sorry.”

Thomas M. Kelly, the head of school, declined to comment directly on Mr. Lin’s statements, but a spokesman for the school’s public relations firm said: “If what Mr. Lin has told The New York Times is true, the conduct in which he says he engaged was appalling. We urge him to cooperate with law enforcement authorities.” Mr. Lin said no authorities had contacted him.

In the phone interview, which lasted about a half-hour, he cited his fading memory and his advanced age. He recalled facts like the names of four of his five headmasters and provided details about one particular encounter, most of which were confirmed by the student involved.

Mr. Lin was articulate in the interview, sometimes philosophical and a bit puzzled by the resurfacing of the past. “I’m surprised they remember,” he said, referring to the students. “It was all so casual and warm.”

The era had not yet come when a teacher would be viewed automatically with suspicion for inviting a student to his home. Sexual scandals in institutions like the Roman Catholic Church and Pennsylvania State University were still decades away. Mr. Lin himself said he had acted “occasionally out of impulse,” adding, “In those days, the ’60s and ’70s, things were different.”

All three students cited Mr. Lin as a positive influence in their lives, even today, and seemed reluctant to speak, not wanting to hurt the reputation of a man who had opened their eyes to philosophy and literature, and whose strict grammar rules they remembered today.

Mr. Lin, whose Web site says he was born in the East Indies, came to the United States as a teenager in 1941, enlisted in the Army and served in the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. According to Michael Lacopo, the final headmaster under which Mr. Lin served, he was working at Macy’s after the war and responded to an advertisement for Horace Mann.

Small and delicate, he was known for his passion for grammar, for the cherry trees he planted all over the Horace Mann campus, in Riverdale, and for his classroom in Tillinghast Hall, which overflowed with plants and palm trees.

His Zen-like presence in a notoriously non-Zen-like environment offered students a unique outlook on the world. Long after Mr. Lin retired, some alumni started a Facebook page, “Fans of Tek Young Lin,” and many kept in touch with him.

Mr. Lacopo said he was shocked by Mr. Lin’s admissions. “He was one of the hardest-working, gentlest men, from my perspective, who was on the staff,” he said.

One of the three students expressed mixed feelings about Mr. Lin’s admission. He said Mr. Lin was right to acknowledge the relationships — but to not know it was wrong? “Delusional might not be the right word,” said the man, grappling with feelings of disappointment and anger. “But to not have the awareness that there’s a built-in power dynamic with a teacher and student?”

He said that he was 17 when Mr. Lin asked him to sleep over, and that his parents did not view it as strange.

The two slept on mats on the floor in their underwear. Mr. Lin asked to give him a massage. The teacher straddled his back and rubbed against him. The next morning, Mr. Lin caressed him. “It was like it was another person,” the man said. But nothing more happened, he said.

He said he never spoke to Mr. Lin again, and soon started to see a therapist.

None of the students who accused Mr. Lin of inappropriate contact said they had told the school, and Mr. Lin said administrators did not know. “Oh no, it was very discreet,” he said. “It seemed O.K. in those days.”

Mr. Lin remembered one particular encounter with a student. “He was a violinist,” he said. “When he came to dinner, he played Schubert’s ‘Serenade,’ and we talked about that early movie ‘Four Daughters.’ ”

Mr. Lin said he did not touch that student, an account the man says is true. Mr. Lin wanted to have sex, but the student said he refused. He did not recall the movie, and said the “Serenade” he had played was Haydn’s, not Schubert’s.

“There was nothing malicious in what he was doing to me,” he said. “He probably fell in love with me and he confused sexual desire with his ability to think rationally as a teacher.” He said he felt what had happened to others was much worse.

While at Horace Mann, Mr. Lin lived in Yonkers and had pictures of former Horace Mann students hanging on his walls, said a former student, who was 14 or 15 when Mr. Lin initiated sexual contact with him. He called these boys his “pillars.”

The man said that Mr. Lin used phrases like “I just want to cuddle” and that Mr. Lin would not do anything he did not want him to do.

“Did Tek behave in a way that was inappropriate? Absolutely,” he said. “Was he warm, was it a wonderful relationship? He opened up areas of philosophy to me. Yes.”

He recalled Mr. Lin’s tears when one of his weeping cherries was trimmed. “He was a very sensitive man,” he said.

During the interview last week, Mr. Lin said he was now traveling the country to try to reunite with the nine surviving members of his World War II battalion.

Reflecting on his age, he said: “You can’t see the shore of youth and you only see the shore of death, the shore you are going to. I have a healthy outlook to dying.”

He said he now understood that he might have crossed a line.

“At the time it seemed it happened and it was done, but apparently it wasn’t, and if I had in any way harmed them, hurt them, I am truly, truly sorry,” he said. “I hope if they have been hurt, they will overcome that hurt, and I should be very happy to help in any way I can.”

William Glaberson and Ariel Kaminer contributed reporting.

BIAFRA: On The 45th Anniversary Of The First Shot

May 30, 1969: In New York, at United Nations building, American David Mayrock burned himself to death carrying a placard on which he wrote: "Stop Genocide, Save Nine Million Biafrans," on Biafra's second Independence Anniversary. Prior to Mayrock, on March 30, 1969, a French woman in Paris, France, burns herself to death near the Nigerian Embassy in protest against Yakubu Gowon's-led genocidal campaign against the Igbo nation. May they continue to rest in peace and may their death not be in vain!

Classic Fashion Modelling Shots

Talitha Getty seated on steps wearing Moroccan copper crown, Berber wedding dress, and canvas boots from London. Photographer: Maurice Hogenboom. Location:Marrakech, Morocco. ca. April 1971. A Conde Nast Archive


J. Paul Getty, Jr. and wife Talitha, wearing Moroccan caftans on the terrace of their holiday home in Marrakech. Photographer: Patrick Lichfield, ca January, 1970. Location: Marrakech, Morocco. A Conde Nast Archive


Yves Saint Laurent Exbition: Vogue fashion editor Andre Leon Talley and super model Iman arriving at the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Exhibition on YSL. Photographer: Tony Palmieri. Date: December 06, 1983. Location: Manhattan, New York, New York. A Conde Nast Archive


Model Beverly Johnson sitting on a rocky beach, wearing a textured knit cardigan by Bonnie Casin's Knittery, with white cotton panta by Jones, a choker neclace and a white bangle bracelet. Photographer: Francesco Scavullo. Location: New York, New York. Date: December 1975. A Conde Nast Archive


Fashion designer Stephen Burrows with model Beth Ann Harding at the opening party for Tommy. Photographer: Sal Traina. Date: March 18, 1975. Location: New York, New York. A Conde Nast Archive

Classic Modelling Shots

Top model Iman. Image: Frederic Meylan, November 07, 1986. Location: New York, New York.




Beverly Johnson, walking a Great Dane, and wearing a houndstooth zip-front jacket and pants by Jack Winter, a belted turtleneck, a muffler by Yves Gonnet and a beret by Veaumont. Photographer: Francisco Scavullo, August 1974. Location: New York, New York. A Conde Nast Collection



A model presents a creation by Kenyan designer Nzioki during a fashion show held as part of the Origin Africa Designer Showcase in Nairobi. april 28, 2010.Image: Thomas Mukoya. Location:Nairobi, Kenya.


Black models on Fashion Runway. Image: Hill Street Studios. Location: Gardena, California.



Wenda Parkingson modelling in a train. Image: Norman Parkinson. 1951



Wenda Parkinson models an Aquascutum coat with Zulu men dancing behind her in South Africa. Image: Norman Parkinson. Location: South Africa, 1951

Portrait: Nudity and Beauty

Nude man and performer Grace Jones. Image Douglas Kirkland. Circa. 1980



Portrait of a Negress by Marie Guilhelmine. Image: The Gallery Collection. Date Created: 1799-1800



Smokey, a female pimp, with her girls at home. Image: Evan Hurd/Sygma. Location: Los Angeles, CA. A Sygma Collection



Black nude woman by Robert McIntosh. Created by Robert McIntosh. Date: 1936.



Artist Eric Fisch with nudes in bathroom. Image: Louie Psihoros. Location: New York, New York...(Undated)



Papua New Guinea woman in Turfi. Image: Nick Rains; November 29, 2007

Ehirim Files Mind Power from the University Presses and other Publications

The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With The President By Taylor Branch, Simon Schuster, New York: 707pp; $35.00

"Taylor Branch admires Clinton within reason, but when there are two sides to an argument he is apt to see things from Clinton's point of view. He conveys well the vituperative rage of the Republicsns at Clinton's theft of their 'small is better' programs and the anti-government rhetoric that had been their sole argument alive resource. The climatic episode here was the repeal of much of the welfare system and substitution of work requirements; a decision on which Branch comments too briefly.'"

-------David Bromwich, The New York Review of Books


Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the age of Jim Crow by Raymond W. Smock, Ivan R. Dee/Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

"The co-editor of the Booker T. Washington Papers reconsiders the man who rose from slavery to a position of power and influence that no black leader had achieved in American history. Mr Smock sees him as a field general in a war of racial survival, his 'compromise' a practical attempt to solve an immense problem. 'A masterwork of concision and compacted power.'"

-------Donald L. Miller, Library of African American Biography.


Boxing: A Cultural History by Kasia Boddy, The University of Chicago Press; 492pp, $29.95

"At nearly five hundred densely packed pages...boxing would seem to include everything that has ever been written, dipicted or in any way recorded about boxing... As Kasia Boddy's masterwork of bricolage sweeps on, there comes to be something wonderfully Joycean -- oceanic, indefatigable, slightly deranged -- in the very quantity of data she has amassed. To read Boddy's book is to confront dozens -- hundreds? -- of inspired mini-essays."

-------Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books.


Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting by John Maxwell Hamilton; Louisiana State University Press, $45.00

"Hamilton, a former fereign correspondent and public servant who is currently dean at Louisiana State University's Manship School Mass Commubnication, spurns plodding narrative in favor of an intelligent tour, full of unexpected pleasures and plums. Where else might we stumble across a reporter's account of the Battle of New Orleans? Or the Senior James Gordon Bennett's sharp-edged view of the coronation of Queen Victoria?"

-------James Boylan, Founding Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and Professor Emeritus of Journalism and History at the University of Massachusetts, Armherst.


The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550-1700; by Patricia Badir, University of Notre Dame Press, 320ppm $40.00

"[Badir's] fascinating narrative traces the evolution of the Magdalene from the Reformation to the Restoration and raises provocative questions about the mnemonic function of religious art, the power of beautiful images in an iconoclastic culture, and the place of effect, longing, and embodiment in aProtestant poetics."

-------Huston Diehl, University of Iowa

D-Day: The Battle of Normandy by Anthony Beevor, Pengium, London, 608pp, $32.95

"With Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor reinvented grand narrative history for the late 20th Century, combining, as Orlando Figes put it in the Sunday Telegraph 'a soldiers understanding of war with the narrative of a novelist.' Now he brings that characteristic combination of skills to bear on the D-Day landings and the subsequent battle for Normandy, when the largest invasion fleet the world had ever known converged on Nazi-occupied France."

-------London Review of Books

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times by Harold Evans, Little, Brown & Company; New York: 580pp, $27.99

"The 'Vanished Times' of the subtitle speak to an era when journalists made things, part of a complicated daily manufacturing apparatus of typesetting and printing that always ended in the satisfying plop of a physical object...No one was more satisfied than Evans, who saw in newspapers a route out of those humble, stout beginings that crop up again in narratives that hew to the Great Man theory of history. (It made sense that Evans would go on to write 'The American Century' and 'They Made America,' works that suggest history was made by those with their hands on the levers of wondrous machines).'"

"Harold Evans remains one of the great figures of modern journalism...His auto-biography is both gripping and timely."

-------The Economist

The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and Race in America by Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers; University of Virginia Press, $22.95

"This stimulating discussion brings needed historical perspective to 2008's election season brouhaha over then candidate Obama's longtime minister, Wright, who was lambasted for making what we were widely considered to be racially divisive remarks from his pulpit after September 11."

-------Publishers Weekly