From AhramOnline:

[Egyptian] Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs Zahi Hawass has been sentenced to one year in jail on Sunday for refusing to fulfill a court ruling over a land dispute.
The Egyptian criminal court also said Hawass must be relieved of his governmental duties and ordered him to pay a LE1000 penalty.
Hawass failed to adhere to a ruling in favour of his opponent over a land dispute when he was in charge of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA).

Another source reports that he was sentenced to a year of hard labor. 

HT: Explorator

After protests against his leadership, Zahi Hawass resigned from his post as head of Egyptian antiquities.  Now he has returned, according to Ahram:

Zahi Hawass‎, chief of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, announced that he had been re-‎appointed as Minister of Antiquities following a meeting with Prime Minister Essam Sharaf ‎on Wednesday. ‎ Hawass first took up the newly-created post in the cabinet when ex-president Hosni ‎Mubarak installed him late in January.‎ After a number of artefacts had been declared missing in the wake of the 25 January revolution the Egyptian archaeologist had stepped down from his post.

HT: Jack Sasson

A police trap has led to the recovery of 12 objects recently stolen from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.  From the Luxor Times Magazine:

Ahmed Attia Mahmod lives at Dar El-Salam district in Cairo formed a group to attack the Egyptian Museum on 28th January, during the clashes that occurred around the museum which distracted the attention.
This was revealed when he was arrested with a friend of his who owns a coffee shop in the same district and a third partner with 12 objects of the Museum’s missing objects. The perpetrators started to spread videos and pictures of the objects to mobile phones of others trying to find a buyer. The Antiquities police in co-operation with the Armed Forces tracked them and set them a trap with the help of a foreigner who works at the American Embassy in Cairo convening the criminals that he will buy the objects for 50 million dollars when the police and military police arrested them.

The full story is here.  The same source provides a list of all 54 missing objects from the museum.

HT: Jack Sasson

Some important artifacts excavated by Israeli archaeologists in the Sinai Peninsula but since returned to the Egyptian government have disappeared, according to the former director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass.  Hershel Shanks writes of this revelation from a recent interview in which Hawass criticized Israel for not publishing the results of the Kuntillet Ajrud excavations. 

In an editorial in the Jerusalem Post, Shanks declares that both problems have been or shortly will be resolved.

On March 3, the Egyptian press reported that 30 truckloads of antiquities had been moved for safekeeping from the Qantara storage facilities to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Included were “Sinai artifacts that were retrieved from Israel following the signing of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.”

Concerning the publication of the excavations, Shanks reports:

I subsequently inquired about this of Joseph Aviram, president of the Israel Exploration Society. He told me that the publication of the inscriptions had recently been reassigned to two leading epigraphers, Shmuel Ahituv and Esther Eshel. They have completed their work and await only the contribution of excavator Ze’ev Meshel. 
Aviram hopes to have the publication out this year. But, still, that’s 35 years after the excavation.

The artifacts involved include the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions that mention “Yahweh … and his Asherah.”