NEW YORK (AP) – Egypt’s antiquities chief, speaking Wednesday at a preview of a King Tut exhibition, renewed his attacks on museums he claims have refused to return artifacts that rightfully belong in Egypt.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said he had a wish list of objects he wants returned. He singled out several museums, including the Saint Louis Art Museum, which he said has a 3,200-year-old mummy mask that was stolen before it was acquired by the museum.

“We’re going to fight to get these unique artifacts back,” he said at the New York preview of Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, an exhibition that has traveled to five other U.S. cities and London.

Last week, he said he turned over to Homeland Security “all the evidence that I have to prove that this mask was stolen, and we have to bring it back.”

On Wednesday, Saint Louis Art Museum spokeswoman Jennifer Stoffel said the institution “had correspondence with Hawass in 2006 and 2007 and has not heard anything on the matter since.”

At the time, she said the museum shared information with Hawass on the mask’s provenance and said, “we would do the right thing … if there was something that refuted the legitimacy of the provenance.”

The St. Louis museum has said it bought the mask from an art dealer in the United States in 1998 after checking with authorities and the international Art Loss Register to see if it had been stolen. It said it also approved the purchase with the Egyptian Museum.

Over the centuries, thousands of Egyptian antiquities have been taken out of Egypt – some stolen, some removed by famed archaeologists. Many are now housed in the world’s greatest museums.

New York is the final stop for the Tut exhibition, which opened Friday. It is being shown at the Discovery Times Square Exposition – a venue Hawass on Wednesday called “too commercial.”

He said he wished it were the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

King Tut “deserves to be at the Met, and not in this hall,” Hawass said.

A blockbuster exhibition on the boy-king was first shown at the Met in 1979.

“We’re delighted that the Tut material is back in New York,” said Met spokeswoman Elyse Topalian. “The Met had discussions about the possibility of being a venue for the exhibition” but was unable to house it because “of the financial concerns that accompanied it,” which included charging a separate fee for the exhibition along with its regular museum admission, she said.

The admission to the Tut exhibition is $27.50 for adults, with a portion going to fund antiquity conservation efforts in Egypt.

Topalian also said that the Met would not have had any curatorial oversight over the exhibition.

The current Tut exhibit features about 130 objects – more than twice the number in the 1979 show – including more than 50 of Tut’s burial objects. It includes a golden diadem inlaid with colored glass and semiprecious stones that was found still on the head of the mummy when Howard Carter discovered Tut’s tomb in 1922. The crown was not part of the 1979 exhibition.

King Tut’s chariot also is a new addition; it will be the first time that it will travel outside Egypt. Its arrival at the exhibition has been delayed by the volcanic ash that suspended flights from Europe. It will be installed within the month.

The current show provides new information about the life and death of Tutankhamun and his ancestors based on recent discoveries made through DNA and CT scans.

For example, the tests revealed that Tut fractured a leg shortly before he died, and the accident likely occurred on the chariot, said exhibition curator David P. Silverman.

“It’s a traveling chariot he used in military campaigns and hunting,” he said. “One of the wheels was replaced in ancient times, probably after an accident.”

Hawass also announced that a set of four foundation deposits – similar to time capsules – and a limestone fragment with a text indicating a tomb was hidden nearby were recently discovered in the Valley of the Kings.

He said this discovery gave him hope he would soon find the tombs of Ankhesamun, Tut’s wife, and that of Nefertiti, his stepmother.

The Valley of the Kings was used from about 1550 B.C. to 1070 and contains 80 tombs.

Hawass also has made a request for the return of the Rosetta Stone, housed in the British Museum in London, and an ancient bust of Nefertiti, wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, at Berlin’s Egyptian Museum.

He said the pieces would be displayed in the new Grand Museum in Cairo, slated to open in 2012.

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On the Net: www.discoverytsx.com

Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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WASHINGTON (AP) – A former U.S. Navy colleague of John F. Kennedy is donating a cane used by the former president during World War II to the National Museum of American History.

Retired Lt. Cmdr. Ted Robinson of the U.S. Navy Reserve is donating the cane to the Smithsonian museum’s political history division at a ceremony Wednesday in Washington.

Robinson was aboard a vessel that picked up Kennedy and 10 surviving crew members after their PT-109 was rammed by a Japanese destroyer in 1943. Shortly after, Kennedy and Robinson were tent mates on the South Pacific island of Tulagi where Kennedy recovered from his injuries.

Robinson has held onto the cane ever since Kennedy used it at Tulagi during his recovery. He eventually wrote a book about his encounter with the future president.

Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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OLD SALEM, N.C. – The April 20, 2010 issue of the Winston-Salem Journal reports that the Old Salem Toy Museum will close for good on May 17.

The museum’s collection of more than 2,500 toys, including primitive examples that date to as early as 225 A.D., will be sent to auction. According to the newspaper report, museum officials have not yet selected the company that will produce the auction, but rumors persist that a deal has already been struck with Noel Barrett Antiques & Auctions of Carversville, Pennsylvania.

Barrett, who politely declined comment when contacted by Auction Central News, would be a likely choice. His firm has handled many prestigious collections, including the Ward Kimball collection, the Washington Dolls’ House and Toy Museum collection, and the Mary Merritt Doll & Toy Museum collection, to name but a few.

The Old Salem Toy Museum was launched in 2002 by Tom Gray and his mother, Anne P. Gray, members of a well-known North Carolina family of philanthropists. The Gray family fortune descended from Tom Gray’s grandfather, James A. Gray and great-uncle, Bowman Gray Sr., both former chairmen of the board of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Proceeds from the auction will be used to acquire and conserve Moravian and Southern decorative art objects. Auction Central News will report new details as they become available.

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The exhibition, timed to coincide with the 140th anniversary of Lenin’s birth on Thursday, was made possible under the country’s new Russia-friendly president.

In Soviet times, dozens of museums were dedicated to the life of the charismatic founder of the Soviet Union. Leningrad, the cradle of the revolution now once again called St. Petersburg, had 11 of them. Kiev opened its Lenin Museum in 1938, even though Lenin had never been to the Ukrainian capital.

But when the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, the collection was dismantled and packed away in storerooms. The statue of Lenin that had dominated Kiev’s main square was destroyed, as were similar monuments throughout the country.

The former Lenin Museum was transformed into an arts center called the Ukrainian House, which inherited the collection.

“We had tried to persuade the authorities to revive the collection over the years, but the answer was always ‘it’s not the right time,’” said Nataliya Zabolotna, director of the Ukrainian House.

The right time came after Viktor Yanukovych became president early this year, replacing Viktor Yushchenko, who had sought to break with Russia and bring Ukraine closer to Europe.

Like Russia, Ukraine has seen a rise in nostalgia for the Soviet period, in part because of the economic downturn. Zabolotna noted the “emotional attraction” of the past for many Ukrainians, but said the exhibition was not intended to glorify Lenin.

“This exhibition is not just to shake off the dust from the museum’s trash, and obviously not to revive Lenin’s cult, but to put it into the modern context,” she said. “A dialogue between pathos and irony, propaganda and criticism, documentary and mystification, this is what the exhibition is about.”

The exhibition includes paintings by modern artists depicting Marilyn Monroe and a half-naked Madonna performing for the Bolsheviks in a mockery of their rule.

A reconstruction of Lenin’s room in the Kremlin shows a table and lamp with an iconic green glass shade, leather armchairs on each side. On the table are writing materials and various souvenirs, including a bronze monkey that was a gift from the American oil tycoon Armand Hammer.

Also on display are porcelain plates with the notorious communist saying, “He who does not work does not eat.”

An inscription on a telephone presented to Lenin in 1923 on his birthday reads “To an honorary electrician of the Kiev (telephone) network.”

In addition to Lenin’s old socks, the exhibition includes the “kosovorotka,” the long peasant shirt Lenin wore while in hiding in the months ahead of the October 1917 revolution, and a copy of the suit he was wearing when shot during a failed assassination attempt the following year.

“All these things give a sense of an epoch, a long historic period, a system of values that many of us were brought up on,” said Nina Sheyko, the exhibition’s curator.

In a separate hall, black-and-white Soviet documentaries playing across a large screen show Lenin and the “heroic days” of the young socialist state.

Muted notes of “Appassionata,” the Beethoven piano sonata that was Lenin’s favorite, filled the exhibition halls.

Most of the people who visited the exhibition on Tuesday, the day after the opening, were elderly. They stood for long periods in front of the exhibits, which filled three floors, taking in the details of Lenin’s life.

“He was an outstanding personality. But the historic situation forced him to be cruel, maybe too cruel. It was a revolution, and a revolution cannot be done without cruelty,” said retiree Grygoriy Zaychyk.

A few young people looked around with interest.

“I thought all this did not exist any more,” said Igor Mazur. “Good that it has been preserved. This is history, whatever it was, and it should be preserved for those who will come after us.”

Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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