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French court gives a former electrician and his wife a two-year suspended sentence for stealing artworks worth over £40 million A French court has convicted a retired electrician and his wife of concealing 271 stolen artworks by Picasso, and ordered the couple to give them back to the artist's family. The verdict on Friday in the southern city of Grasse wraps up an unusual case centering around works that were unknown to the public for decades and have an estimated worth 60-100 million euros (£43-72 million).

Nearly 1,500 priceless paintings including works by Picasso and Matisse that were stolen by the Nazis have been discovered in a flat in Munich, a news report said Sunday. -excerpt- The report said the works were thought to be worth around one billion euros ($1.3 billion dollars) on today's market.

If you needed more proof that art theft is a futile, dead-end job, look no further than the Kunsthal heist of 2012. After the theft of seven masterpieces worth tens of millions of dollars ——a Picasso, two Monets, and a Matisse, among others—it appears that the mother of one of the suspects said she burned their cache of high-priced art partly because the thieves couldn't find any buyers.

Federal agents carried out coordinated raids on four Southern California museums and a Los Angeles art gallery early today, the first public move in a five-year investigation of an alleged smuggling pipeline that authorities say funneled looted Southeast Asian and Native American artifacts into local museums. Shortly after 7:30 a.m., search warrants were served on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pasadena's Pacific Asia Museum, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego. The warrants gave agents broad authority to search the museums' galleries, offices, storage areas and computer archives for objects and...

German cultural institutions have issued a catalogue detailing thousands of objects of art that disappeared from Berlin at the end of the second world war, in the hope of pricking the conscience of governments to return them. The detailed inventory, which one critic said read like a "book of mourning" for lost German artefacts, contains a staggering array of treasures, most of which are believed to have been seized by foreign soldiers in 1945. They include sculptures by Nicola Pisano, a delicate relief by Donatello, late Gothic Madonnas and an exquisite array of Baroque works rendered in stone and wood....

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has a new "most wanted" list. This one's not for criminals, but for art. After much analysis, the bureau has come up with its list of the top 10 art crimes, and it's asking the public for help in solving them. FBI investigators are on the hunt for Rembrandts, Renoirs, stolen treasures from Iraq, two Van Goghs, and Munch's "The Scream." "We see ties to organized crime," FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker told reporters in Washington. "There have been reported ties to everything from the insurgency in Iraq to some theories that some of...

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The Federal Bureau of Investigation unveiled a new unit on Wednesday to tackle the multi-billion dollar market in stolen art and announced the FBI's first recovery of artifacts looted from Iraq after the U.S. invasion. The objects, eight Mesopotamian stone seals about 5,000 years old, were purchased in Iraq by a U.S. marine as a souvenir of his tour of duty. He handed them to the FBI in Philadelphia after an archeologist confirmed their authenticity and said they had been stolen from one of Iraq's many archeological sites. The soldier paid a trinket salesman about $300 for...

PALM BEACH, Fla RESTING on a coffee table in Jose Fanjul's mansion on Jungle Road is an inscribed silver box, a gift from King Juan Carlos of Spain. Another table bears a silver-framed wedding photo of Mr. Fanjul and his bride greeting the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Elsewhere in the house, silver-rimmed photos of Mr. Fanjul and Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush are displayed prominently. An Impressionist work by the Spanish artist Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, "Girl in the Silvery Sea," hangs in a living room corner. Mr. Fanjul opened a thick album and showed a...