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Interpol Issues Notice for Lebanese Man Suspected of Trafficking in Looted Antiquities

FILE - the entrance hall of Interpol's headquarters in Lyon, central France on Sept.27, 2017. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani, File)
FILE - the entrance hall of Interpol's headquarters in Lyon, central France on Sept.27, 2017. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani, File)
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Interpol Issues Notice for Lebanese Man Suspected of Trafficking in Looted Antiquities

FILE - the entrance hall of Interpol's headquarters in Lyon, central France on Sept.27, 2017. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani, File)
FILE - the entrance hall of Interpol's headquarters in Lyon, central France on Sept.27, 2017. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani, File)

Interpol has issued an international warrant for a Lebanese man suspected of trafficking stolen antiquities, weeks after he was questioned in Lebanon, judicial officials said Friday.

The Red Notice was unsealed 10 months after a criminal court in New York issued an arrest warrant for Georges Lotfi, 82, charging him with criminal possession of stolen property as well as possessing looted artifacts.

The officials did not give further details about the Interpol warrant, which is a non-binding request to law enforcement agencies worldwide that they locate and provisionally arrest a fugitive. The notice is not an arrest warrant and does not require Lebanon to arrest Lotfi, The Associated Press reported.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said the American judiciary sent the case related to Lotfi to Lebanon and asked authorities in the Mediterranean nation to follow up on him.

When Lotfi was summoned for questioning by Lebanese authorities earlier this year, the officials said he denied charges that he had stolen antiquities, saying instead he had bought them from archeologists and sold them to a museum in the US.

They said it later became clear that the 27 antiquities were stolen in 1981 from a warehouse in Lebanon. The Interpol Red Notice that was posted online said Lotfi is charged with criminal possession of stolen property in the first degree, second degree and third degree.

Lotfi currently lives in Lebanon, which is home to invaluable archaeological sites.

The officials said US authorities said they would repatriate the antiquities to Lebanon on condition that Lebanese authorities put Lotfi under arrest.

The officials said that once Lebanon formally receives the Interpol warrant, authorities in the country should summon Lotfi for questioning and confiscate his passport.

Lotfi’s case is not the first of its kind. Smuggling and looting antiquities was not uncommon in Lebanon during the chaos of the 1975-90 civil war.

In 2018, Lebanon received a trio of ancient artifacts looted from the country during its civil war and recovered recently by New York authorities.

The treasures included a marble bull’s head dating to about 360 B.C. excavated at a Phoenician temple in south Lebanon decades ago. The other two were marble torsos from the 4th and 6th century B.C.

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Varieties

Study Says Climate Change Will Even Make Earth’s Orbit a Mess

In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
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Study Says Climate Change Will Even Make Earth’s Orbit a Mess

In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)

Climate change is already causing all sorts of problems on Earth, but soon it will be making a mess in orbit around the planet too, a new study finds.

MIT researchers calculated that as global warming caused by burning of coal, oil, gas continues it may reduce the available space for satellites in low Earth orbit by anywhere from one-third to 82% by the end of the century, depending on how much carbon pollution is spewed. That's because space will become more littered with debris as climate change lessens nature's way of cleaning it up.

Part of the greenhouse effect that warms the air near Earth's surface also cools the upper parts of the atmosphere where space starts and satellites zip around in low orbit. That cooling also makes the upper atmosphere less dense, which reduces the drag on the millions of pieces of human-made debris and satellites.

That drag pulls space junk down to Earth, burning up on the way. But a cooler and less dense upper atmosphere means less space cleaning itself. That means that space gets more crowded, according to a study in Monday's journal Nature Sustainability.

“We rely on the atmosphere to clean up our debris. There’s no other way to remove debris,” said study lead author Will Parker, an astrodynamics researcher at MIT. “It’s trash. It’s garbage. And there are millions of pieces of it.”

Circling Earth are millions of pieces of debris about one-ninth of an inch (3 millimeters) and larger — the width of two stacked pennies — and those collide with the energy of a bullet. There are tens of thousands of plum-sized pieces of space junk that hit with the power of a crashing bus, according to The Aerospace Corporation, which monitors orbital debris. That junk includes results of old space crashes and parts of rockets with most of it too small to be tracked.

There are 11,905 satellites circling Earth — 7,356 in low orbit — according to the tracking website Orbiting Now. Satellites are critical for communications, navigation, weather forecasting and monitoring environmental and national security issues.

“There used to be this mantra that space is big. And so we can we can sort of not necessarily be good stewards of the environment because the environment is basically unlimited,” Parker said.

But a 2009 crash of two satellites created thousands of pieces of space junk. Also NASA measurements are showing measurable the reduction of drag, so scientists now realize that that “the climate change component is really important,” Parker said.

The density at 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth is decreasing by about 2% a decade and is likely to get intensify as society pumps more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, said Ingrid Cnossen, a space weather scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who was not part of the research.

Cnossen said in an email that the new study makes “perfect sense” and is why scientists have to be aware of climate change's orbital effects “so that appropriate measures can be taken to ensure its long-term sustainability.”