Oct. 11 (UPI) — Twenty people were shot, four of whom died, in a shooting in the western Mississippi city of Leland during a celebration for a homecoming football game, in one of three shootings in small towns in the state late Friday.
The shooting in Leland happened late Friday night around midnight on the city’s main street after Leland High School played Charleston High School, sending at least 12 wounded people to local hospitals while four were airlifted to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in critical condition, according to media reports.
“I just want to send our condolences to the families of the deceased and to all those that are being treated,” Leland Mayor John Leetold The Guardian. “We need to be in prayer for our city.”
State Sen. Derrick Simmons told WAPT the shooting had not happened at the game itself, but at a gathering on the city’s Main Street afterward.
According to WLBT, the identities of people who were shot have not been released, and no suspects or arrests have been announced as the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation assists local police on the investigation.
Leland is a town of roughly 4,000 people in Washington County, MS, about 200 miles from the Arkansas-Mississippi border.
Forty miles south of Leland, two people were arrested and charged after a shooting during a football game at South Delta High School in Rolling Fork, MS, although WLBT reported that it was unclear if anybody was injured.
In another shooting, In Heidelberg two people were shot and killed, and another wounded, at Heidelberg High School, roughly 200 miles away from Leland, according to WDAM.
One person was killed on the school’s baseball field, and another shot in a tailgating area near the school’s bleachers, according to Heidelberg Police Chief Cornell White, who said the shooter or shooters remained at large.
The motives and causes of all three shootings have not been announced or are not known, according to the reports.
The Chargers struck a deal Tuesday to acquire Baltimore Ravens outside linebacker Odafe Oweh in exchange for safety Alohi Gilman.
The Chargers, who play at Miami on Sunday and are looking to stop a two-game slide, are getting a pass rusher who had a career-high 10 sacks last season but had yet to collect one in Baltimore’s 1-4 start this season. Oweh was a first-round pick in 2021.
The Ravens, who host the Rams on Sunday, are in need of secondary help with safety Kyle Hamilton recovering from a groin injury that sidelined him last Sunday against Houston. It’s unclear if he will be ready to play against the Rams.
The Chargers and Ravens have close ties, with the teams coached by Harbaugh brothers Jim (Chargers) and John (Ravens), as well as Chargers general manager Joe Hortiz previously working in Baltimore’s front office.
The deal also involved a pick swap, with the Ravens getting a fifth-round selection next year, and the Chargers getting a seventh in 2027.
The Chargers had one sack Sunday in a 27-10 loss to Washington, and this move bolsters an edge rush that is missing Khalil Mack, whose return timeline from a dislocated elbow remains uncertain. The production of outside linebackers Bud Dupree and Caleb Murphy has been underwhelming opposite Tuli Tuipulotu, who had four sacks against the New York Giants.
Gilman started all five games for the Chargers this season with 22 tackles and three passes defensed. This is his sixth season, all with the Chargers, and for his career has five interceptions and 21 passes defensed.
Gilman played at Notre Dame but began his college career at Navy, so returning to Maryland is a homecoming.
Safety is one of the few areas where the Chargers are flush with healthy players. In addition to All-Pro Derwin James, they have Elijah Molden, Tony Jefferson and rookie RJ Mickens, so Gilman was more expendable.
The pioneering Belgian label, founded in Ghent in 1984, staged a free party at the week-long street festival, Gentse Feesten, transforming the city’s historic centre into a vast, open-air dancefloor.
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Renaat Vandepapliere at the Gentse FeestenCredit: Lukas Desmet
With thousands gathering to hear Nastia, Charles Webster (live), LTJ Bukem, and founder Renaat Vandepapeliere himself, the night felt like both a celebration of R&S’s stories past and a bold statement of intent for its future.
Renaat’s set was as fearless as his impeccable, genre defying label with a diverse selection of electronica challenging and delighting the crowd.
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Free party saw acts like LTJ Bukum take to the stageCredit: Lukas Desmet
For Vandepapeliere, the night was a leap into the unknown. “Honestly, I almost backed out myself,” he admitted. “I’ve never played for 6,000 people and I was nervous. I even called around to find someone to replace me, but a few friends convinced me to just go for it.
“The main goal was to take a risk and hopefully entertain some new people. Many had never heard us or the music before.”
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R&S Records Ghent Crew (left to right): Nick Halkes (The Prodigy manager), Sabine Maes, Renaat Vandepapliere, Nastia, LTJ BukumCredit: Lukas Desmet
Risk-taking has always been central to R&S. From the early days of releasing Joey Beltram’s Energy Flash, Model 500 and Aphex Twin, to shaping the careers of CJ Bolland, James Blake and many more, the label has built its reputation on fearless choices.
“We had no idea, we weren’t trying to be anything other than sharing music we liked and believed in,” Vandepapeliere reflected. “Let’s be honest, good music is good music. There is, as I always say, the right time and the right place to play whatever it is.”
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Event brought together people that ‘aren’t necessarily into those sounds’Credit: Lukas Desmet
That philosophy was evident in the Ghent lineup, which spanned genres and generations.
“It’s an opportunity to bring other people into the genre that aren’t necessarily into those sounds,” Vandepapeliere explained. “It has raw authenticity and a depth behind it. I could make a billion lineups like that, there’s so much talent and exciting music to share.”
His own set was guided by instinct and emotion. “It was intuitive, with many influences,” he said. “Today, if a set is different, it could be bad, so my honest opinion is to ask the crowd.”
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Thousands gathered to hear the likes of NastiaCredit: Lukas Desmet
The reaction was telling. He added: “You didn’t see any phones going up and all that. It was random people wondering what the hell was going on, of all ages, which I also find very interesting.”
For Vandepapeliere, who has spent much of his career behind the scenes, the experience rekindled something powerful. “Let’s say it’s actually set a new spark,” he admitted. “I now want to play more.”
Looking ahead, he is keen to build on the success of the Gentse Feesten. He said: “I would love to do more events. I don’t know if it’s possible, but yes, I’d really love to. Keeping it different, keeping it fresh, I think that would be really cool.”
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R&S founder Renaat VandepapeliereCredit: Supplied
But through all the years and transformations of dance music, Vandepapeliere insists the spirit of R&S hasn’t changed.
“We always wanted to be an eclectic label,” he said. “Not really be pushed into a certain corner and have a freedom of expression.
“It’s definitely not about formula. I wanted to be free. That’s all. You have to love what you’re doing and work for it. Nothing comes that easy. It is work, with a lot of failures and a lot of frustration. But hey, that’s the price you have to pay for freedom.”
FABIO WARDLEY is preparing for a huge homecoming bout THIS WEEKEND!
The lifelong Ipswich Town fan will take to the ring at Portman Road as he faces Justis Huni on Saturday night.
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Fabio Wardley will return to the ring for the first time since his brutal knockout win over Frazer ClarkeCredit: Getty
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Boxing – Justis Huni v Kevin Lerena – Kingdom Arena, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – March 8, 2024 Justis Huni in action against Kevin Lerena REUTERS/Andrew Couldridge
A win for Wardley would see him move into pole position for a shot at the WBA heavyweight title.
Bangkok, Thailand – Over several years in the mid-1960s, the crumbling ruins of an ancient temple in northeast Thailand were picked clean by local looters.
Possibly hundreds of centuries-old statues that were long buried beneath the soft, verdant grounds around the temple were stolen.
To this day, all the known artefacts from the pillaging spree, collectively known as the Prakhon Chai hoard, sit scattered thousands of miles away in museums and collections across the United States, Europe and Australia.
In a matter of weeks, though, the first of those statues will begin their journey home to Thailand.
The acquisitions committee of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum recommended the release last year of four bronze statues from the hoard, which had been held in its collection since the late 1960s.
San Francisco city’s Asian Art Commission, which manages the museum, then approved the proposal on April 22, officially setting the pieces free.
Some six decades after the late British antiquities dealer Douglas Latchford is suspected of spiriting the statues out of the country, they are expected to arrive back in Thailand within a month or two.
“We are the righteous owners,” Disapong Netlomwong, senior curator for the Office of National Museums at Thailand’s Fine Arts Department, told Al Jazeera.
“It is something that our ancestors … have made, and it should be exhibited here to show the civilisation and the belief of the people,” said Disapong, who also serves on Thailand’s Committee for the Repatriation of Stolen Artefacts.
The imminent return of the statues is the latest victory in Thailand’s quest to reclaim its pilfered heritage.
Their homecoming also exemplifies the efforts of countries across the world to retrieve pieces of their own stolen history that still sit in display cases and in the vaults of some of the West’s top museums.
The Golden Boy statue on display at the National Museum Bangkok, Thailand, following its return last year from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art [Zsombor Peter/Al Jazeera]
From Thai temples to the Acropolis in Athens
Latchford, a high-profile Asian art dealer who came to settle in Bangkok and lived there until his death in 2020 at 88 years of age, is believed to have earned a fortune from auction houses, private collectors and museums around the world who acquired his smuggled ancient artefacts from Thailand and neighbouring Cambodia.
In 2021, Latchford’s daughter, Nawapan Kriangsak, agreed to return her late father’s private collection of more than 100 artefacts, valued at more than $50m, to Cambodia.
Though never convicted during his lifetime, Latchford was charged with falsifying shipping records, wire fraud and a host of other crimes related to antiquities smuggling by a US federal grand jury in 2019.
He died the following year, before the case against him could go to trial.
In 2023 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York agreed to return 16 pieces tied to Latchford’s smuggling network to Cambodia and Thailand.
Ricky Patel of the New York field office of the Department of Homeland Security, delivers remarks during an announcement of the repatriation and return to Cambodia of 30 Cambodian antiquities sold to US collectors and institutions by Douglas Latchford and seized by the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, New York City, United States, in August 2022 [Andrew Kelly/Reuters]
San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has also previously returned pieces to Thailand – two intricately carved stone lintels taken from a pair of temples dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries, in 2021.
While Thailand and Cambodia have recently fared relatively well in efforts to reclaim their looted heritage from US museum collections, Greece has not had such luck with the British Museum in London.
Perhaps no case of looted antiquities has grabbed more news headlines than that of the so-called “Elgin Marbles”.
The 2,500-year-old friezes, known also as the Parthenon Marbles, were hacked off the iconic Acropolis in Athens in the early 1800s by agents of Lord Elgin, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Greece at that time.
Elgin claimed he took the marbles with the permission of the Ottomans and then sold them in 1816 to the British Museum in London, where they remain.
Greece has been demanding the return of the artefacts since the country’s declaration of independence in 1832 and sent an official request to the museum in 1983, according to the nongovernmental Hellenic Institute of Cultural Diplomacy.
“Despite all these efforts, the British government has not deviated from its positions over the years, legally considering the Parthenon marbles to belong to Britain. They have even passed laws to prevent the return of cultural artefacts,” the institute said.
A woman looks at the Parthenon Marbles, a collection of stone objects, inscriptions and sculptures, on show at the British Museum in London in 2014 [File: Dylan Martinez/Reuters]
‘Colonialism is still alive and well’
Tess Davis, executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, a Washington-based nonprofit campaigning against the illicit trade of ancient art and artefacts, said that “colonialism is still alive and well in parts of the art world”.
“There is a mistaken assumption by some institutions that they are better carers, owners, custodians of these cultural objects,” Davis told Al Jazeera.
But Davis, who has worked on Cambodia’s repatriation claims with US museums, says the “custodians” defence has long been debunked.
“These antiquities were cared for by [their] communities for centuries, in some cases for millennia, before there was … a market demand for them, leading to their looting and trafficking, but we still do see resistance,” she said.
Brad Gordon, a lawyer representing the Cambodian government in its ongoing repatriation of stolen artefacts, has heard museums make all sorts of claims to defend retaining pieces that should be returned to their rightful homelands.
Excuses from museums include claiming that they are not sure where pieces originated from; that contested items were acquired before laws banned their smuggling; that domestic laws block their repatriation, or that the ancient pieces deserve a more global audience than they would receive in their home country.
Still, none of those arguments should keep a stolen piece from coming home, Gordon said.
“If we believe the object is stolen and the country of origin wishes for it to come home, then the artefact should be returned,” he said.
Old attitudes have started breaking down though, and more looted artefacts are starting to find their way back to their origins.
“There’s definitely a growing trend toward doing the right thing in this area, and … I hope that more museums follow the Asian Art Museum’s example. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go,” Davis said.
The Kneeling Lady on display at the National Museum Bangkok, Thailand, following its return last year from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art [Zsombor Peter/Al Jazeera]
Much of the progress, Davis believes, is down to growing media coverage of stolen antiquities and public awareness of the problem in the West, which has placed mounting pressure on museums to do the right thing.
In 2022, the popular US comedy show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver dedicated a whole episode to the topic. As Oliver said, if you go to Greece and visit the Acropolis you might notice “some odd details”, such as sections missing from sculptures – which are now in Britain.
“Honestly, if you are ever looking for a missing artefact, nine times out of 10 it’s in the British Museum,” Oliver quips.
Gordon also believes a generational shift in thinking is at play among those who once trafficked in the cultural heritage of other countries.
“For example, the children of many collectors, once they are aware of the facts of how the artefacts were removed from the country of origin, want their parents to return them,” he said.
Proof of the past
The four bronze statues the San Francisco museum will soon be returning to Thailand date back to the 7th and 9th centuries.
Thai archaeologist Tanongsak Hanwong said that period places them squarely in the Dvaravati civilisation, which dominated northeast Thailand, before the height of the Khmer empire that would build the towering spires of Angkor Wat in present-day Cambodia and come to conquer much of the surrounding region centuries later.
Three of the slender, mottled figures, one nearly a metre tall (3.2 feet), depict Bodhisattva – Buddhist adherents on the path to nirvana – and the other the Buddha himself in a wide, flowing robe.
Tanongsak, who brought the four pieces in the San Francisco collection to the attention of Thailand’s stolen artefacts repatriation committee in 2017, said they and the rest of the Prakhon Chai hoard are priceless proof of Thailand’s Buddhist roots at a time when much of the region was still Hindu.
“The fact that we do not have any Prakhon Chai bronzes on display anywhere [in Thailand], in the national museum or local museums whatsoever, it means we do not have any evidence of the Buddhist history of that period at all, and that’s strange,” he said.
Plai Bat II temple in Buriram province, Thailand, from where the Prakhon Chai hoard was looted in the 1960s, as seen in 2016 [Courtesy of Tanongsak Hanwong]
The Fine Arts Department first wrote to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum about the statues’ illicit provenance in 2019, but started to make progress on having them returned only when the US Department of Homeland Security got involved on Thailand’s behalf.
Robert Mintz, the museum’s chief curator, said staff could find no evidence that the statues had been trafficked in their own records.
But they were convinced they had been looted and smuggled out of Thailand – and of Latchford’s involvement – once Homeland Security provided proof, with the help of Thai researchers.
“Once that evidence was presented and they heard it, their feeling was the appropriate place for these would be back in Thailand,” Mintz said of the museum’s staff and acquisition committee.
‘Pull back the curtain’
The San Francisco Asian Art Museum went a step further when it finally resolved to return the four statues to Thailand.
It also staged a special exhibit around the pieces to highlight the very questions the experience had raised regarding the theft of antiquities.
The exhibition – Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities – ran in San Francisco from November to March.
“One of our goals was to try to indicate to the visiting public to the museum how important it is to look historically at where works of art have come from,” Mintz said.
“To pull back the curtain a bit, to say, these things do exist within American collections and now is the time to address challenges that emerge from past collecting practice,” he said.
Mintz says Homeland Security has asked the Asian Art Museum to look into the provenance of at least another 10 pieces in its collection that likely came from Thailand.
Thai dancers perform during a ceremony to return two stolen hand-carved sandstone lintels dating back to the 9th and 10th centuries to the Thai government in 2021, in Los Angeles, the US. The artefacts had been exhibited at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum [Ashley Landis/AP]
Tess Davis, of the Antiquities Coalition campaign group, said the exhibition was a very unusual, and welcome, move for a museum in the process of giving up looted artefacts.
In Thailand, Disapong and Tanongsak say the Asian Art Museum’s decision to recognise Thailand’s rightful claim to the statues could also help them start bringing the rest of the Prakhon Chai hoard home, including 14 more known pieces in other museums around the US, and at least a half-dozen scattered across Europe and Australia.
“It is indeed a good example, because once we can show the world that the Prakhon Chai bronzes were all exported from Thailand illegally, then probably, hopefully some other museums will see that all the Prakhon Chai bronzes they have must be returned to Thailand as well,” Tanongsak said.
There are several other artefacts besides the Prakhon Chai hoard that Thailand is also looking to repatriate from collections around the world, he said.
Davis said the repatriation of stolen antiquities is still being treated by too many with collections as an obstacle when it should be seen, as the Asian Art Museum has, as an opportunity.
“It’s an opportunity to educate the public,” Davis said.
“It’s an opportunity to build bridges with Southeast Asia,” she added, “and I hope other institutions follow suit.”
![The Golden Boy statue on display at the National Museum Bangkok, Thailand, following its return last year from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art [Zsombor Peter/Al Jazeera]](https://www.occasionaldigest.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Gold-Boy-2-1747982889.jpg)
![The Kneeling Lady on display at the National Museum Bangkok, Thailand, following its return last year from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art [Zsombor Peter/Al Jazeera]](https://www.occasionaldigest.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Knee-Lady-1747982733.jpg)
![Plai Bat 2 temple in Buriram province, Thailand, from where the Prakhon Chai hoard was looted in the 1960s, as seen in 2016 [Courtesy of Tanongsak Hanwong]](https://www.occasionaldigest.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Temple-2-1747983054.jpg)
