1 of 6. The passage of asteroid 2012 DA14 through the Earth-moon system, is depicted in this handout image from NASA. On February 15, 2013, an asteroid, 150 feet (45 meters) in diameter will pass close, but safely, by Earth. The flyby creates a unique opportunity for researchers to observe and learn more about asteroids.

BOSTON | Fri Feb 15, 2013 6:15pm EST

BOSTON (Reuters) - An asteroid half the size of a football field passed closer to Earth than any other known object of its size on Friday, the same day an unrelated and much smaller space rock blazed over central Russia, creating shock waves that shattered windows and injured 1,200 people.

Asteroid 2012 DA14, discovered just last year, passed about 17,200 miles from Earth at 2:25 p.m. EST (1925 GMT), closer than the networks of television and weather satellites that ring the planet.

"It's like a shooting gallery here. We have two rare events of near-Earth objects approaching the Earth on the same day," NASA scientist Paul Chodas said during a webcast showing live images of the asteroid from a telescope in Australia.

Scientists said the two events, both rare, are not related -the body that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, at 10:20 p.m. EST Thursday (0320 GMT Friday) came from a different direction and different speed than DA14.

"It's simply a coincidence," Chodas said.

NASA has been tasked by the U.S. Congress to find and track all near-Earth objects that are .62 miles in diameter or larger.

The effort is intended to give scientists and engineers as much time as possible to learn if an asteroid or comet is on a collision course with Earth, in hopes of sending up a spacecraft or taking other measures to avert catastrophe.

About 66 million years ago, an object 6 miles in diameter smashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, leading to the demise of the dinosaurs, as well as most plant and animal life on Earth.

Scientists estimate that only about 10 percent of smaller objects, such as DA14, have been found.

"Things that are that tiny are very hard to see. Their orbits are very close to that of the Earth," said Paul Dimotakis, a professor of aeronautics and applied physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Asteroid DA14, for example, was discovered last year, and it was found serendipitously by a group of amateur astronomers.

"This is a shot across the bow," Dimotakis said. "It illustrates the challenge of the observation campaign which is now in progress."

The planet is regularly pelted with objects from space, adding up to about 100 tons of material per day, said astronomer Donald Yeomans, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Rocks the size of basketballs come in every day. Things the size of a small car arrive every couple of weeks. Larger meteors are less common, so the frequency of hits decreases, Yeomans added.

DIFFICULT TO SEE AHEAD OF TIME

The rock that broke apart over Russia was believed to be a tiny asteroid, estimated to be about 49 feet - more than twice the size of a small car - and traveling at 11 miles per second, NASA said.

"These things are very faint until they get close enough to the Earth to be seen. An asteroid such as this, which approaches the Earth from the daytime sky, is virtually impossible to see ahead of time because telescopes have to look in the night-time sky to discover asteroids," Chodas told reporters on a conference call.

The asteroid weighed about 7,000 tons, and created a fireball trail visible for 30 seconds - in daylight - as it plummeted through the atmosphere.

Shock waves from the blast shattered thousands of windows and damaged buildings. Many of the 1,200 people injured were hit by flying glass, Russia's Interior Ministry said.

"You can see what sort of destruction and shock wave that a smaller asteroid can produce. It's like Mother Nature is showing us what a tiny one can do," Chodas said.

The Russian fireball was the largest space rock to hit Earth's atmosphere since the 1908 Tunguska event when an asteroid or comet exploded over Siberia, leveling 80 million trees over 830 square miles (2,150 sq km), NASA said.

Asteroid DA14 blazed past the planet at about 8 miles per second. At that speed, an object of similar size on a collision course with Earth would strike with the force of about 2.4 million tons of dynamite, the equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshima-type bombs.

"It's a good thing it's not hitting us, because truth be told there's nothing we could do about it except possibly evacuate, which is not going to be easy given the uncertainty about where the impact would take place," Dimotakis said.

"We would essentially take the hit," he added.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Mohammad Zargham)

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Sergei Filin, artistic director of Russia's Bolshoi Ballet, speaks to journalists as he leaves a hospital in Moscow February 4, 2013.

MOSCOW | Thu Feb 14, 2013 2:25pm EST

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Principal dancer Artem Ovcharenko seems to defy gravity as he glides through the air, then lands silently with a flourish of his arm during a rehearsal at Russia's revered Bolshoi Theater.

Other dancers spin through the air behind him, a few warm up at the side and two ballerinas walk on their toes while Viktor Barykin, the repetiteur or dance coach, barks instructions.

"One, two, three. One, two, three - up! That's not bad," Barykin shouts into a microphone from a seat perched on the front of the stage, taking a male dancer through his steps.

On the surface, it is business as usual at one of the world's great theaters as the dancers prepare for a performance of Yuri Possokhov's contemporary ballet "Classical Symphony".

But dance has also, for some, become a way to escape a drama behind the scenes that has had more twists than many an on-stage plot in the month since a masked attacker threw acid in the face of Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi Ballet's artistic director.

Intrigue and misfortune are nothing new to an institution whose name translates at The Grand Theatre: it has burnt down three times since being built in 1776 under Catherine the Great and was also bombed in World War Two.

But the dancers are now struggling to come to terms with the brutality of the January 17 attack, which has left Filin fighting for his sight and the Bolshoi battling to mend a reputation tarnished by rumors of rivalries, resentments and intrigues.

"It affects some people more, the ones who are more emotional, but on stage you forget everything, you cut yourself off. That's what I do because I can't let it affect me," Ovcharenko, 26, said during a break in the rehearsal.

Ovcharenko, a rising star at the Bolshoi since joining in 2007, embodies the motto that the show must go on.

He says the rigors of a work day that often lasts from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m. leave dancers little time to dwell on the attack. With more roles available than in the past because the Bolshoi now performs more often, there is less reason for envy.

But although he says morale has not been affected, the troupe has clearly been shaken by the attack and by a public row it provoked between the Bolshoi's general director, Anatoly Iksanov, and Nikolai Tsiskaridze, a veteran lead dancer.

"Some people came up with hypotheses, some started suspecting people ... I say 'Forget it, and get back to work'," Ovcharenko said. "I just want peace at the theatre."

POLICE INVESTIGATION

But these are not peaceful times at the Bolshoi. It is hard for dancers to put the attack out of their minds when police are milling around at rehearsals, asking questions, and now treat some of the troupe as suspects.

"Having all these people backstage and in our classes is a bit different," said Joy Womack, the first American to graduate from the Bolshoi Ballet's main training program. Her words are not without a touch of understatement.

She does not conceal that competition for roles and for influence over productions is intense at the Bolshoi and says people with different artistic visions "will butt heads"; but, in that, she sees it as not unusual in the ballet world.

"The Bolshoi is certainly filled with histories and little skeletons packed away in the cupboard," the Californian added. "But every organization is like that."

Like Ovcharenko, she is trying to forget the attack through her dancing, including as a swan in Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake". But if her personal drive and ambition are anything to go by, it is no surprise that the Bolshoi is as competitive as it is.

"I have crazy goals. That's how I got here in the first place," she said, promising to show she can achieve what others had said was impossible. "It's just a matter of how much you want it and how much time you are prepared to put into it."

Scandal has long been endemic behind the cream-colored, eight-columned facade close to Red Square which reopened to great fanfare in 2011 after a $700-million, six-year renovation that restored the theatre's opulent tsarist beginnings, doused its interior in gold-leaf and introduced cutting-edge acoustics.

The theatre's history is laced with tales of tricks to put off rivals: needles left in costumes; crushed glass in ballet shoes; an alarm clock timed to go off during a particularly intense dance sequence; even a dead cat thrown on stage.

Management of the theatre has also seen controversy: in 1995, the departure of the artistic director sparked a wildcat strike by dancers, in turn prompting jeering and foot-stamping from an angry audience that had paid to see "Romeo and Juliet".

In 2003, world media had a field day when Bolshoi bosses tried to fire ballerina Anastasia Volochkova for being too heavy. And in 2011, deputy ballet director Gennady Yanin - then seen as a candidate for the artistic director post - quit after pornographic images of him appeared on the Internet.

Dirty tricks are far from unheard of throughout public life in post-Soviet Russia. But never before has a member of the Bolshoi Theatre had sulfuric acid thrown in his face.

IDENTIFYING ATTACKER

Filin, 42, says he thinks he knows who was behind the attack and that it may be linked to his work as artistic director, but he has named no names in public and police have made no arrest.

One of his predecessors, Alexei Ratmansky, said it was no coincidence that Filin had been attacked and described an atmosphere of intrigue and passion, ticket speculators and half-crazed fans ready to cut the throats of an idol's rivals.

Events since the attack have unfolded like a page-turning whodunit, with the motives still a subject of speculation and no shortage of theories and possible clues.

Complicating matters is the fact that Filin says he had his car tires slashed and emails hacked in the two weeks before the attack, and had received repeated nuisance calls from someone who stayed silent when he answered.

Was it artistic rivalry? Filin is at odds with some of his colleagues over the direction the ballet is heading in, and his role gives him the power to make or break dancers' careers.

Could it be connected to power struggles behind the scenes? Filin's job is much coveted and he has seen off rivals for his position, which he secured in 2011. Such is its importance that a group of cultural figures wrote to President Vladimir Putin last November demanding Filin be replaced by Tsiskaridze.

Was it a nasty twist to a love affair? Some sources close to the Bolshoi have sought to suggest in the media that the attack was a personal matter and nothing to do with his work.

Could there be commercial reasons? The Bolshoi has been criticized over the profusion of touts who sell tickets at vastly inflated prices. The company's policy has long been to sell some tickets cheaply so that not only the wealthy attend - but some fall into the wrong hands for resale.

While some scalpers are small-time, the prices and prestige of the renovated Bolshoi, favored by Muscovites keen to flaunt their new-found wealth, may well be attracting organized crime.

MANY TWISTS

Since the attack, a production of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" has been cancelled due to Filin's absence; a ballerina has said she is afraid to return to Russia from Canada because of a blackmailer; and the long-running row between dancer Tsiskaridze, 39, and veteran manager Iksanov, 60, has worsened.

The two gave interviews to a Russian magazine, Snob, in which they traded blame for the bad atmosphere at the Bolshoi and drew attention to the bitterness behind the scenes. Tsiskaridze then called on the management to resign.

"There is one person in the Bolshoi company who is constantly dissatisfied with whatever the Bolshoi management is doing for the past 12 years," said Bolshoi spokeswoman Katya Novikova. Tsiskaridze criticized the renovation of the Bolshoi under Iksanov, who has denied it was tainted by corruption.

Novikova said Iksanov and Tsiskaridze were not on speaking terms and that lawyers were looking carefully at the allegations Tsiskaridze had made. She doubted they would ever make up because they had been rivals for the general manager role.

Tsiskaridze declined an interview with Reuters but says he is the victim of a witch-hunt and describes the atmosphere as like "back in the days of Josef Stalin", the Soviet dictator who sent millions of opponents to their death or to labor camps.

Tsiskaridze has condemned the acid attack on Filin, a fellow dancer with whom he worked for many years and sometimes shared a dressing room. For all his battles with management, many in the troupe speak highly of the Georgian-born Tsiskaridze and Womack smiled as she described his "jokes and wonderful sarcasm".

Doctors say Filin is likely to recover his sight and work again. The Bolshoi, a symbol of Russian culture that has come through difficult times before in both Soviet and tsarist eras, is also sure to recover - but damage has been done.

"There have long been power struggles but never before was there such criminality and harm done," said Tatiana Kuznetsova, a ballet critic for Kommersant newspaper. "The image is fading."

For the dancers, the overwhelming response is to focus on their dancing to show their appreciation of Filin, whose daily instructions are passed on by Galina Stepanenko, a former principal dancer who has become the acting artistic director.

"When you fall you can only go up. There is nowhere lower to go," Ovcharenko said before going back to finish his rehearsal. "For us, the artists, this is the best way to support our boss, to be on stage and perform well, so that we don't upset him."

(Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

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1 of 5. A visitor to the Justice and Police Museum looks at paintings that are part of the exhibition titled ''Wicked Women'' in Sydney February 13, 2013. The paintings in award-winning Australian artist Rosemary Valadon’s latest exhibition, ''Wicked Women,'' feature femmes fatale in the style of classic film noir movie posters and pulp fiction covers but the faces are of prominent Australian women. The models for the 17 oil paintings in the exhibition include journalists, lawyers, a crown prosecutor, designers, actresses and three female staff members at Sydney's Justice and Police Museum, where the exhibition is being held. Picture taken February 13, 2013.

SYDNEY | Fri Feb 15, 2013 3:59pm EST

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A buxom woman in a low-cut red dress brandishes a pistol, her finger poised to pull the trigger, but a closer look at the painting reveals the woman is model-turned-novelist Tara Moss.

In another painting a woman in a red beret and tight yellow, slit skirt with one hand on her hip and the other holding a cigarette is in fact one of Australia's senior crown prosecutors, Margaret Cunneen.

The paintings in award-winning Australian artist Rosemary Valadon's latest exhibition, "Wicked Women," feature femmes fatale in the style of classic film noir movie posters and pulp fiction covers but the faces are of prominent Australian women.

The models for the 17 oil paintings in the exhibition include journalists, lawyers, a crown prosecutor, designers, actresses and three female staff members at Sydney's Justice and Police Museum, where the exhibition is being held.

"I think that Rosemary was particularly interested in the ideas around women's sexual 'wickedness,' and that was part of what she was interested in exploring," curator Nerida Campbell told Reuters.

The paintings by Valadon took two years to complete and use bold colors and strong lines that produce an almost 3D effect in some cases.

While some of the models had time for multiple sittings, others had as little as half an hour for Valadon to make a quick sketch. Replicas were made of original guns and weapons displayed at the museum for the women to use as they posed.

One room is devoted to the paintings themselves, while the other features sketches. A recording of Valadon's voice leads visitors through her creative process, from photography and modeling to sketching in charcoals and pencil, and ultimately the finished work.

The models relished the chance to show another side to their character, at least for a couple of days.

""Wicked Women" is an exciting series of works because it explores the perception of hot-blooded women in an era when women were expected to be more demure and compliant than they are today," said senior crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen.

"These women, in my view, were portrayed as sassy, sexy and impulsive to the point of dangerousness. I think the work evokes a passionate, gutsy and high-spirited woman who has been strengthened, through hardship, to ultimate resilience."

The public response to the exhibition, which runs until late May, has been good, Campbell said, drawing viewers whose interest ranges from the painting style to simple curiosity about the famous women themselves.

"I think what people find interesting is what Rosemary wanted to do -- subvert the stereotypes and allow modern, independent strong women to imprint their personality on these more sexist original works," she said.

(Reporting by Pauline Askin, editing by Elaine Lies and Belinda Goldsmith)

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1 of 2. A research worker of the Ural Federal University inspects a fragment of a material substance in Yekaterinburg, the province of Sverdlovsk capital in the Ural Mountains, February 18, 2013. Scientists, representing the Ural Federal University, announced on Monday they managed to find elements of the meteorite in the district of the Cherbakul Lake near Chelyabinsk which was later confirmed during a research analysis at a laboratory, according to local media. A meteorite streaked across the sky and exploded over central Russia on Friday, raining fireballs over a vast area and causing a shock wave that smashed windows, damaged buildings and injured 1,200 people.

MOSCOW | Mon Feb 18, 2013 6:14am EST

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A meteor that exploded over Russia's Ural mountains and sent fireballs blazing to earth has set off a rush to find fragments of the space rock which hunters hope could fetch thousands of dollars a piece.

Friday's blast and ensuing shockwave shattered windows, injured almost 1,200 people and caused about $33 million worth of damage, said local authorities.

It also started a "meteorite rush" around the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, 1,500 km (950 miles) east of Moscow, where groups of people have started combing through the snow and ice.

One amateur space enthusiast estimated chunks could be worth anything up to 66,000 roubles ($2,200) per gram - more than 40 times the current cost of gold.

"The price is hard to say yet ... The fewer meteorites that are recovered, the higher their price," said Dmitry Kachkalin, a member of the Russian Society of Amateur Meteorite Lovers. Meteorites are parts of a meteor that have fallen to earth.

Scientists at the Urals Federal University were the first to announce a significant find - 53 small, stony, black objects around Lake Chebarkul, near Chelyabinsk, which tests confirmed were small meteorites.

The fragments were only 0.5 to 1 cm (0.2 to 0.4 inches) across but the scientists said larger pieces may have crashed into the lake, where a crater in the ice about eight meters (26 feet) wide opened up after Friday's explosion.

"We just completed tests and confirm that the pieces of matter found by our experts around Lake Chebarkul are really meteorites," said Viktor Grokhovsky, a scientist with the Urals Federal University and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

"These are classified as ordinary chondrites, or stony meteorites, with an iron content of about 10 percent," he told RIA news agency.

He did not say whether the fragments had told his team anything about the origins of the meteor, which the U.S. space agency NASA estimated was 55 feet across before entering Earth's atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.

The main fireball streaked across the sky at a speed of about 30 km (19 miles) per second, according to Russian space agency Roscosmos, before crashing into the snowy wastes.

TREASURE HUNTERS

More than 20,000 people took part in search and clean-up operations at the weekend in and around Chelyabinsk, which is in the heart of a region packed with industrial military plants.

Many other people were in the area just hoping to find a meteorite after what was described by scientists as a once-in-a-century event.

Residents of a village near Chelyabinsk searched the snowy streets, collecting stones they hoped would prove to be the real thing. But not all were ready to sell.

"I will keep it. Why sell it? I didn't have a rich lifestyle before, so why start now?" a woman in a pink woolen hat and winter jacket, clutching a small black pebble, told state television Rossiya-24.

The Internet filled quickly with advertisements from eager hunters hoping to sell what they said were meteorites - some for as little as 1,000 roubles ($33.18).

The authenticity of the items was hard to ascertain.

One seller of a large, silver-hued rock wrote in an advertisement on the portal Avito.ru: "Selling an unusual rock. It may be a piece of meteorite, it may be a bit of a UFO, it may be a piece of a rocket!"

($1 = 30.1365 Russian roubles)

(Additional reporting by Ludmila Danilova and Gabriela Baczinska, Writing by Alissa de Carbonnel, Editing by Timothy Heritage and Andrew Heavens)

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U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about strengthening the economy for the middle class and measures to combat gun violence during a visit to Hyde Park Academy in Chicago, Illinois February 15, 2013.

CHICAGO | Fri Feb 15, 2013 9:59pm EST

CHICAGO (Reuters) - President Barack Obama acknowledged on Friday that he wished his father had been a bigger part of his life as he argued that stronger families are just as important as gun control in reducing crime and violence in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

Obama returned to his old home neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago with a different take on his gun control message - that it will require an improved home environment for children to reduce the possibility that they will one day resort to violence.

To do that, he said, will require better economic conditions for low- and middle-class Americans, one reason he wants to raise the hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $9, a proposal he offered in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday.

Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, was raised largely by his mother and grandparents in Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama Sr., divorced Obama's mother when the president was two years old, and he was the central figure in Obama's memoir, "Dreams from My Father."

Pointing to a group of teenage boys with whom he had met privately before delivering a speech, Obama said he had not been much different than them.

"Don't get me wrong," he said in the address to high school students at Hyde Park Academy. "As the son of a single mom, who gave everything she had to raise me with the help of my grandparents, I turned out okay."

"But at the same time, I wish I'd have had a father who was around and involved," he told the mainly black audience of about 700.

Obama worked as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago but had a more privileged background than many of the children he addressed on Friday.

Chicago has suffered a surge in gang-related violence and is one of the most violent cities in America. Obama's visit comes a week after his wife, Michelle, attended the funeral in the city of 15-year-old honor student Hadiya Pendleton, who was shot dead a week after participating in the presidential inauguration.

At the start of his second term in office, Obama wants Congress to approve a series of tighter gun controls like requiring background checks for all firearms purchasers and banning assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.

But as he made clear in Chicago it will take improvements in the home environment for children to keep them off the streets and that this will require help from parents, teachers and clergy.

"When a child opens fire on another child, there is a hole in that child's heart that government can't fill," Obama said.

In too many areas, "it can feel like the future only extends to the next street corner or the outskirts of town...There are entire neighborhoods where they don't see an example of somebody succeeding," he said.

Corey Stevens, 17, a high school senior, was one of the students who got to meet with Obama before his speech.

"I think that he needed to come back here and get the message to the people up close and personal and let them know that this needs to stop," said Stevens, who wants to go into law enforcement.

Hadiya Pendleton's father, Nathaniel Pendleton, who was in the audience, had a message for those who have been following his family's tragedy in the news -- get involved.

"You never expect this tragedy to knock on your door... But there are preventative measures," Pendleton told Reuters. "So let's try to prevent it instead of waiting for it to happen."

Father Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest known for his activism against gun violence, agreed with Obama that gun laws alone won't solve the problem.

"We have to look in our urban communities and realize that we have a lack of good schools, lack of employment, abundance of poverty, abundance of folks coming back out of penal institutions with records," Pfleger said. "Until we deal with all those issues, you create the perfect storm for violence."

(Writing by Steve Holland; Additional reporting by Renita D. Young; Editing by Alistair Ball, Mary Wisniewski, David Brunnstrom and Carol Bishopric)

(This story was corrected to read, "...or the outskirts of town..." instead of "...of the outskirts of town...")

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Demonstrators carry a replica of a pipeline during a march against the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington, February 17, 2013.

WASHINGTON | Sun Feb 17, 2013 6:37pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Thousands of protesters gathered on the Washington's National Mall on Sunday calling on President Barack Obama to reject the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline proposal and honor his inaugural pledge to act on climate change.

Organizers of the "Forward on Climate" event estimated that 35,000 people from 30 states turned out in cold, blustery conditions for what they said was the biggest climate rally in U.S. history. Police did not verify the crowd size.

Protesters also marched around the nearby White House, chanting "Keystone pipeline? Shut it down." Among the celebrities on hand were actresses Rosario Dawson and Evangeline Lilly, and hedge fund manager and environmentalist Tom Steyer.

The event came days after a bipartisan group of U.S. senators made the latest call for Obama to approve the $5.3 billion pipeline, seen by many as an engine for job growth and another step toward energy independence.

A new poll by Harris Interactive showed 69 percent of respondents said they support construction of the pipeline, with only 17 percent saying they oppose it.

One of Sunday's main organizers, climate activist Bill McKibben, said that approving the pipeline, which would transport crude oil from the oil sands of northern Alberta to refineries and ports in Texas, would be akin to lighting a "carbon bomb" that could cause irreparable harm to the climate.

"For 25 years our government has basically ignored the climate crisis: now people in large numbers are finally demanding they get to work," said McKibben, founder of the environmental group 350.org.

Other major organizing groups on Sunday included the Sierra Club and the Hip-Hop Caucus.

The proposed TransCanada Corp project has been pending for 4-1/2 years. A revised route through Nebraska, which would avoid crossing sensitive ecological zones and aquifers, was approved by that state's governor last month.

Backers of Keystone, which would transport 830,000 barrels of oil per day, say it would provide thousands of jobs in the United States and increase North American energy security.

Environmentalists oppose the pipeline because the oil sands extraction process is carbon intensive, and say the oil extracted is dirtier than traditional crude oil.

Van Jones, Obama's former green jobs adviser, said if the president approved the pipeline just weeks after pledging to act on climate change, it would overshadow other actions Obama takes to reduce pollution.

"There is nothing else you can do if you let that pipeline go through. It doesn't matter what you do on smog rules and automobile rules - you've already given the whole game way," said Jones, who is president of Rebuild the Dream, a non-government organization.

Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the lone member of Congress to speak at the rally, told Reuters Obama risked creating a "credibility gap" if he approved the pipeline.

"He would have to roll out a very complete and very strong package to offset something that on its own is described by government scientist as ‘game-over' on climate," he said.

Still, some of Obama's core constituents favor the pipeline, including the labor union AFL-CIO's building and construction unit, which sees the potential for job creation for its members, and certain Democratic lawmakers.

In January, nine Democratic senators joined 44 Republicans in urging the president to approve Keystone XL.

(Reporting By Valerie Volcovici; editing by Ros Krasny and Mohammad Zargham)

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