Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters of Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi chant pro-Mursi slogans, during a rally in front of the Sultan Hassan and Refaie mosques in the old town of Cairo November 30, 2012.

CAIRO | Mon Feb 18, 2013 6:30am EST

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's constitutional court rejected five articles of a draft election law on Monday and sent the text back to the country's temporary legislature for redrafting in a ruling that may delay a parliamentary poll due in April.

"The court has returned the draft parliamentary electoral law to the Shura Council after making five observations on five articles which it found unconstitutional," a court statement said.

It did not immediately disclose which parts of the law had been censured, but the court said it would issue a fuller statement later in the day.

A source in President Mohamed Mursi's office said before the decision that if the court found fault with the law, it could delay passage of the law, and hence the election, by a couple of weeks, but probably not months.

Mursi had been expected to promulgate the electoral law by February 25 and set a date two months later for voting, probably in more than one stage for different regions because of a shortage of judicial poll supervisors.

The constitutional court, made up partly of judges from ousted former President Hosni Mubarak's era, has intervened repeatedly in the transition, dissolving the Islamist-dominated parliament elected after the 2011 pro-democracy uprising.

Its composition was changed by the new constitution passed by a referendum in December.

Mursi was criticized in October for issuing a decree giving himself powers to override the judiciary. He backed down and dropped the decree weeks later following widespread protests.

(Reporting by Marwa Awad; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

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NEW YORK | Fri Feb 8, 2013 5:17pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Paintings from the private collection of U.S. singer Andy Williams, amassed over six decades, could fetch more than $30 million when they are sold at auction in May, Christie's said on Friday.

Works by Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn are expected to be the top sellers of the portion of the collection that will be auctioned at Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art sale on May 15-16.

De Kooning's 1984 "Untitled XVII" and Diebenkorn's 1976 "Ocean Park #92" are expected to sell for about $5 million each.

"Williams' highly personal choices in Post War and Contemporary artworks reflect the dynamic energy of New York and Los Angeles in the 50s and 60s," Robert Manley, an international director at Christie's, said in a statement.

Christie's described de Kooning's "Untitled XVII" as a masterpiece of his final years of painting.

"The lyrical 1984 work demonstrates the artist's supreme confidence at the height of his fame, after six decades of painting," the auction house said.

Williams, best known for his rendition of the song "Moon River," died in September at the age of 84. The paintings in the collection are from his two homes and his Moon River Theater in Branson, Missouri.

Williams was first interested in Modern Art and had purchased works by Picasso, Paul Klee and Henry Moore before turning to the other painters.

Picasso's 1927 painting "Figure Feminine Sur la Plage," from Williams' collection, will be up for sale during Christie's Impressionist & Modern Art sale in New York on May 8-9.

"He had the exceptional ability to recognize quality in every category that he turned his attention to - a rare gift among collectors," Manley said about Williams.

The remainder of the collection will be sold this year in sales in New York, London and Paris.

(Reporting by Noreen O'Donnell; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Eric Beech)

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DENVER | Sat Feb 16, 2013 6:37pm EST

DENVER (Reuters) - The Democratic-controlled Colorado House of Representatives approved a package of strict gun-control measures late on Friday, in a state rocked by two of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history.

After a marathon session that stretched late into the evening, the state House voted to advance the proposals with little support from Republicans, but with a boost from Vice President Joe Biden, who called several wavering Democratic lawmakers and urged them to vote for the measures.

The proposals passed on a voice vote, with a formal vote scheduled for Monday. The bills must also pass a final vote in the state Senate, also controlled by Democrats, before it heads to Governor John Hickenlooper's desk.

Among the proposals are bills that would require background checks for all gun purchases - paid for by applicants - a ban on ammunition magazines with more than 15 rounds and a measure to allow colleges in the state to ban concealed weapons on campus.

"We had a full and fair debate, which is exactly how the process is supposed to work," House Speaker Mark Ferrandino said in a statement. "Opinions were sharply divided, but we got our work done, and I thank members on both sides of the aisle."

House Republican leader Mark Waller characterized the bills as a "knee-jerk reaction" to last year's massacre of school children in Connecticut and moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado.

"They (Democrats) are passing these without any evidence that there will be any impact on public safety," Waller told Reuters on Saturday.

Colorado has been shaken by two of the worst mass shootings in recent U.S. history. In 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Littleton shot dead a teacher and 12 students before turning their guns on themselves.

Last July, a gunman opened fire inside an Aurora theater, killing 12, and wounding 58 others. The accused shooter, James Holmes, is awaiting trial on multiple counts of first-degree murder and attempted murder.

Emotions ran high during debate in Denver on Friday.

Several Democrats said they had received death threats for supporting gun control bills, and a gun-rights lobbyist was escorted out of the Capitol after a Republican lawmaker complained she was told a gun-rights group would run ads against her if she supported any of the bills.

And a Colorado-based manufacturer of ammunition magazines threatened to leave Colorado if a ban on high-capacity magazines becomes law, taking some 600 jobs with them.

Democrats amended the magazine-limit bill to allow the company to continue to sell the magazines for out-of-state use, leading Waller to call the Democrats hypocritical.

"Democrats stood in the well of the House and recounted all the mass shootings nationwide, then put in the amendment that says the company can sell magazines in every other state, including those that had tragic shootings," he said.

Biden's call to lawmakers during the debate asking them "to stay the course" is evidence state Democrats are being pressured to advance the president's gun-control agenda, Waller said.

Hickenlooper, a Democrat, said this week he supported the magazine limits and universal background check measures, but was undecided on the college campus ban.

(Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Todd Eastham)

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David Feldman (R) , vice president of the Mona Lisa Foundation, shows similarities on a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and depicting Mona Lisa to his brother Stanley, an art historian, during a preview presentation in a vault in Geneva in this September 26, 2012 file photo.

GENEVA | Wed Feb 13, 2013 10:42am EST

GENEVA (Reuters) - New tests on a painting billed as the original version of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci's 15th century portrait, have produced fresh proof that it is the work of the Italian master, a Swiss-based art foundation said on Wednesday.

The tests, one by a specialist in "sacred geometry" and the other by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, were carried out in the wake of the Geneva unveiling of the painting, the "Isleworth Mona Lisa", last September.

"When we add these new findings to the wealth of scientific and physical studies we already had, I believe anyone will find the evidence of a Leonardo attribution overwhelming," said David Feldman vice-president of the foundation said.

The "Mona Lisa" in the Paris Louvre for over three centuries has long been regarded as the only one painted by Leonardo - although there have been copies - and claims for the Swiss-held one were dismissed by some experts last year.

But it also won support in the art world, encouraging the Zurich-based Mona Lisa Foundation - an international group which says it has no financial interest in the work - to pursue efforts to demonstrate its authenticity.

Feldman, an Irish-born international art and stamp dealer, said he was contacted after the public unveiling of the portrait - which shows a much younger woman than in the Louvre - by Italian geometrist Alfonso Rubino.

LEONARDO'S GEOMETRY

"He has made extended studies of the geometry of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man" - a sketch of a youth with arms and legs extended - "and offered to look at our painting to see if it conformed," Feldman told Reuters.

The conclusion by the Padua-based Rubino was that the "Isleworth" portrait - named for a London suburb where it was kept by British art connoisseur Hugh Blaker 80-90 years ago - matched Leonardo's geometry and must be his.

The Zurich institute, the Foundation said, carried out a carbon-dating test on the canvas of its painting and found that it was almost certainly manufactured between 1410 and 1455 - refuting claims that it was a late 16th century copy.

Earlier brush-stroke studies presented last September by U.S. physicist and art lover John Asmus concluded that both the "original" version and the Louvre crowd-puller were painted by the same artist.

The authenticity of the foundation's painting, discovered by Blaker in an English country house in 1913, has been fiercely challenged by British Leonardo authority Martin Kemp, who argued last year that "so much is wrong with it."

Feldman and foundation colleagues retort that Kemp has never followed up on invitations to come to see it.

Documents show that a painting of his wife Lisa was commissioned around the turn of the 16th century by Florentine nobleman Francesco del Giacondo. In French, the Louvre version is known as "La Giaconde" and "La Giaconda" in Italian.

Supporters of the "younger" version say it was almost certainly delivered unfinished to del Giacondo before Leonardo left Italy in 1506 and took up residence in France, where he died in 1519 in a small Loire chateau.

From the Giacondo house, it probably eventually found its way to England after being bought by a travelling English aristocrat, this account runs, while the Paris version was probably painted by Leonardo around 1516 in France.

(Reported by Robert Evans, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Sony Corp's logo is pictured at the company headquarters in Tokyo April 12, 2012.

TOKYO | Mon Feb 18, 2013 4:09am EST

TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp on Monday slashed the price of its struggling Vita handheld games console in Japan in a bid to spur sales of the device as gamers switch to free or cheap games played on tablet computers and smartphones.

The maker of Playstation consoles trimmed the price of its 3G Wifi version by 10,000 yen ($110) to 19,980 yen, with all other models also reduced, it said in a statement.

Tablets and smartphones are encroaching on the gaming market, with handheld consoles in particular suffering. Sony this month trimmed its forecast for handheld sales, including the Vita and older PSP, to 7 million machines in the year ending March 31 compared with an estimate of 16 million at the start of the business term.

The Vita price comes ahead of a rare Playstation gathering in New York on February 20, when Sony is expected to reveal the successor to its Playstation 3 home console.

(Reporting by Tim Kelly; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

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NEW YORK | Thu Feb 7, 2013 4:40pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. watched with approval on Thursday as the cast of upcoming Broadway show "Motown: The Musical" tore through the storied record label's hits at a 42nd Street rehearsal studio.

The show traces Gordy's rise from a struggling boxer and autoworker to a music mogul who made stars of Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, The Jackson 5 and others.

"So many other people were telling the story in different ways who were never there and never understood it, just for the sake of exploitation," Gordy, 83, a producer of the show, told Reuters.

The media preview featured hits ranging from The Contours' "Do You Love Me" - sung as a segregated audience in Birmingham, Alabama, breaks through a rope to hear the group - to "Dancing in the Street" by Martha and the Vandellas.

Director Charles Randolph-Wright, who grew up in South Carolina in the 1960s, said Motown was in his DNA.

"Motown opened the emotional door to the civil rights movement," he told Reuters. "Motown is the thing that brought people together. We started dancing to the same music and listening to the same music."

Gordy's relationship with Ross - the couple had a daughter together - is shown beginning in Paris, to the hit "My Girl" by The Temptations.

"That's the love story in our show," Randolph-Wright said.

The musical begins previews on March 11 and officially opens on April 14. It features a book by Gordy and music and lyrics from the Motown catalog.

Although the show is from Gordy's perspective, it doesn't duck some of the criticism that surrounded him, especially in Motown's early days, Randolph-Wright said.

As Gordy explained: "At one time, people were feeling that how could a black kid from Detroit do a Motown without being a crook, without being in the Mafia, without being something bad, because it was such a big endeavor."

Gordy, the creator of what was once the largest black-owned business in the United States, was an inspiration to him, Randolph-Wright said.

"Berry Gordy was someone who had his own company, who literally changed the world with what he did," he said. "And to see that, it gave me and so many people like me - black, white, whatever color - that gift of possibility."

Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Gordy, said it was "hard to have a greater honor than having Berry Gordy respect you as an artist."

Valisia LeKae, who appeared in "The Book of Mormon," plays Ross. "It is the soundtrack of people's lives," LeKae said of the music. "I definitely expect people to sing along."

(Reporting By Noreen O'Donnell, editing by Jill Serjeant and Xavier Briand)

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