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Egypt's Chief of Antiquities Says He's Not Staying On

Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief antiquities official for almost a decade and a cabinet minister since January, said Thursday that he would not stay on in a newly formed government.

Egypt’s prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, resigned Thursday, and the army asked his replacement, Essam Sharaf, to form a caretaker cabinet.

“If the government will ask me again, I will not accept this job,” Mr. Hawass said in a telephone interview.

He also posted on his blog a list of some two dozen sites that have been looted or vandalized since the beginning of the uprising that led to the fall of Hosni Mubarak. Among them were the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s storerooms at its excavation site in Dahshur, south of Cairo, which he said were attacked twice....
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