Matthew Keys, deputy social media editor for Reuters.com, is seen in his online profile in this undated photo.

SAN FRANCISCO | Fri Mar 15, 2013 9:58pm EDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A Reuters.com editor maintained his innocence after being suspended with pay on Friday following a federal indictment on charges he aided members of the Anonymous hacking collective.

Matthew Keys, 26, a deputy social media editor, was indicted on Thursday by a federal grand jury in Sacramento, California, on three criminal counts. The alleged events occurred before he joined Thomson Reuters, the indictment indicated.

New York attorney Tor Ekeland said he had been hired by Keys to represent him and that his client "maintains his innocence."

Ekeland told Reuters he was assembling a legal team and that Keys "looks forward to contesting these baseless charges."

On Friday, Keys exchanged tweets with some well-wishers on Twitter, telling one of them, "I'm okay."

Thomson Reuters Corp computer systems in December 2010. A story on the Tribune's Los Angeles Times website was soon altered by one of those hackers, the indictment said.

Court filings said Keys had worked for a Tribune-owned television station in Sacramento, operating its Twitter and Facebook feeds. An FBI agent said in a search warrant application that a former colleague told the agency that Keys had been terminated in October 2010.

Keys joined Reuters in New York in January 2012. As deputy social media editor, he promoted stories through Twitter and other means. He lives in Secaucus, New Jersey, the Justice Department said.

Ekeland and a California lawyer working for Keys, Jay Leiderman, laid out a number of defenses, starting with the argument that Keys was acting as a freelance journalist when he was invited to join the Internet Relay Chat channel with elite hackers.

"He was in the chat room interviewing," Leiderman said.

Ekeland said in a video interview with the Huffington Post that while he understood that Keys used the screen name AESCracked at times during the chats recovered by authorities, someone else might have been using that name when AESCracked promised to provide Tribune logon credentials.

Ekeland also said the damage Keys was accused of causing was minor. "It's just sort of a juvenile defacement of a minor story on the L.A. Times website—which he didn't do," Ekeland told the Huffington Post. The maximum for conviction on all three counts would be 25 years in prison, although actual sentences handed down by judges are often far less than the maximum.

Keys wrote on a personal blog and on a Reuters blog that he had previously obtained access to an elite group of hackers, including one known as Sabu.

Sabu, later identified as Hector Xavier Monsegur, became an FBI informant, court records show. Monsegur was publicly identified last year and has pleaded guilty to participating in multiple hacking conspiracies. He is awaiting sentencing.

Ekeland represented alleged AT&T iPad email hacker Andrew Auernheimer, aka "Weev," who was convicted last November on hacking conspiracy and identity fraud charges.

Leiderman's clients include Anonymous member Christopher Doyon, who calls himself Commander X. Doyon was charged with hacking Santa Cruz County, California, computers, but jumped bail and has told Leiderman he is in Canada, Leiderman said.

Keys is scheduled to be arraigned on April 12 in Sacramento, according to the court docket.

The case in U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California, is United States of America v. Matthew Keys, 13-82.

(Editing by Ciro Scotti and Peter Cooney)

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1 of 3. People arrive at a district court in New Delhi January 3, 2013. The December 16 attack on the physiotherapy student and a male companion provoked furious protests close to the seat of government in New Delhi and has fuelled a nationwide debate about the prevalence of sexual crimes in India, where a rape is reported on average every 20 minutes.

NEW DELHI | Thu Jan 3, 2013 8:22am EST

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Five Indian men were formally charged in court on Thursday with the gang rape and murder of a physiotherapy student in a case that has generated widespread anger about the government's inability to prevent violence against women.

The December 16 attack on the 23-year-old student and a male companion provoked furious protests close to the seat of government in New Delhi and has fuelled a nationwide debate about the prevalence of sexual crime in India, where a rape is reported on average every 20 minutes.

The woman died of her injuries in hospital in Singapore, where she had been taken for treatment, on Saturday.

The five are accused of assaulting the woman on a bus in New Delhi, leaving her with such severe injuries that she died two weeks later. They were not present in court.

A sixth accused is under 18 and is due to be tried separately in a juvenile court.

A public prosecutor read out charges including murder, gang rape and criminal conspiracy. The court will examine the charges on Saturday, duty magistrate Surya Malik Grover said.

Murder carries the death penalty in India.

The father of the woman said earlier he backed the chorus of calls for those responsible to be executed.

"The whole country is demanding that these monsters be hanged. I am with them," the father told reporters in his home village of Mandwara Kalan in Uttar Pradesh state. The woman was born in the village but the family later moved to New Delhi.

She has not been identified and nor have members of her family, in accordance with Indian law.

In a sign of the depth of feeling surrounding the case, the bar association at the court said none of its members was willing to represent the accused. The court is expected to assign a defense lawyer for the men.

Advocates dressed in black robes protesting outside the court called for fast justice. In the northern state of Kashmir, school girls marched with black ribbons over their mouths and demanded harsh punishment for the accused.

The case is due to be processed by a new, fast-track chamber set up in response to the crime.

While the fast-track procedure has broad support, many lawyers worry new that legislation written in haste could be unconstitutional and oppose introducing the death penalty for rape.

"A swift trial should not be at the cost of a fair trial," Chief Justice Altamas Kabir said on Wednesday.

ANGER

Police have said the accused have admitted to torturing and raping the student "to teach her a lesson". She fought back and bit three of them, a police source told Reuters, and the bite marks are part of the evidence against them.

After throwing her from the private bus, the driver tried to run the victim over but she was pulled away by her companion, a senior police official told Reuters.

Police have prepared a dossier of evidence and charges against the accused, which is believed to run to 1,000 pages, including testimony from the woman's friend who survived the hour-long attack and a man who said he was robbed by the same gang prior to the rape.

Days of protests in New Delhi and other cities followed the attack. Many of the protesters have been students, infuriated by what they see as the failure of the government to protect women.

In the northeastern state of Assam on Wednesday, village women beat a politician and handed him to police for what they said was the attempted rape of a woman, police said. Anti-rape protests have also broken out in neighboring Nepal.

The government has set up two panels headed by retired judges to recommend measures to ensure women's safety. One of the panels, due to make recommendations this month, has received some 17,000 suggestions from the public, media reported.

India's chief justice inaugurated the first fast-track court for sexual offences on Wednesday - a long standing demand of activists to clear a court backlog.

A review of India's penal code, which dates back to 1860, was presented to parliament last month, before the attack, and widens the definition of rape, another demand of activists.

That bill is now likely to be revised further, with chemical castration and the death penalty in rape cases among proposals under consideration.

"We want the laws to be amended in such a stringent way that before a person even thinks of touching a girl, he should feel chills down his spine," said lawyer Suman Lata Katiyal, protesting at the south Delhi courthouse.

Hanging is only allowed in the "rarest of rare" cases according to a 1983 Supreme Court ruling. It was used for the first time in eight years in November when the lone surviving gunman from a 2008 militant attack on Mumbai, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab from Pakistan, was executed.

(Additional reporting by Diksha Madhok, Annie Banerji and Satarupa Bhatgtacharjya in NEW DELHI; and Gopal Sharma in KATHMANDU; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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HYDERABAD, Pakistan | Sat Dec 22, 2012 1:56am EST

HYDERABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - A mob broke into a Pakistani police station and burnt a man accused of desecrating the Koran alive, police said Saturday, in the latest violence focusing attention on the country's blasphemy laws.

The man was a traveler and had spent Thursday night at the mosque, said Maulvi Memon, the imam in the southern village of Seeta in Sindh province. The charred remains of the Koran were found the next morning.

"He was alone in the mosque during the night," Memon said. "There was no one else there to do this terrible thing."

Villagers beat the man then handed him over to police. A few hours later, a crowd of around 200 stormed the police station, dragged the man out and set him on fire, said Usman Ghani, the senior superintendent of police in Dadu district.

Ghani said around 30 people had been arrested for the murder and seven police detained for negligence.

At least 53 people have been killed in Pakistan since 1990 after being accused of blasphemy, according to the Center for Research and Security Studies, and accusations are becoming more frequent.

Blasphemy in Pakistan is punishable by death but it is not specifically defined by law. During court cases, lawyers often do not wish to repeat evidence against the accused for fear of being blasphemous themselves.

People have been arrested for just discussing or writing about Islam, making mistakes in homework or not joining protests against a film insulting Islam. In some cases, the accusers have had financial disputes with those who are accused.

Most recently, international attention focused on the case of Rimsha Masih, a Christian teenager accused of having some burnt pages of a child's exercise book quoting the Koran in a bag of rubbish she was carrying.

The case was dismissed last month after a neighbor came forward to say she was framed, possibly to chase Christians out of her neighborhood.

In the past two years, two senior Pakistani officials who suggested reforming the laws have been shot dead, one by his own bodyguard. Lawyers threw rose petals at the killer and the judge who convicted him was forced to flee the country.

(Additional reporting by Mehreen Zahra-Malik; Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Nick Macfie)

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A gallery worker walks past Seagram murals by Russian-born American painter Mark Rothko during a media view of the first major exhibition dedicated to his late works at the Tate Modern in London September 24, 2008.

LONDON | Wed Oct 10, 2012 11:50am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - A Polish man accused of scrawling his signature on a painting by Mark Rothko worth tens of millions of dollars in a British museum pleaded not guilty to criminal damage on Wednesday.

Wlodzimierz Umaniec listened expressionlessly via video-link to the allegation that he stepped over a wire in front of Rothko's "Black on Maroon" in London's Tate Modern gallery on Sunday and wrote "Vladimir Umanets '12 A potential piece of yellowism" on the canvas.

The 26 year-old Polish national, who has lived in Britain for the last three years but has no fixed address in the country, was refused bail and will appear in court again on October 16.

His lawyer told the local London area Camberwell Green magistrates court that Umaniec would be denying the charge and was willing to stand trial.

"This may be cynical but he might welcome it, so he can have the discussion he wishes to have about the art," said defence solicitor David Clark.

The Tate Modern closed briefly on Sunday after witnesses reported the damage.

No precise value has been put on the damaged painting, but earlier this year Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow" sold for 53.8 million pounds ($86 million)in New York - the highest price paid for a piece of post-war art at auction.

(Reporting By Isla Binnie, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Colorado shooting suspect James Eagan Holmes (far right) makes his first court appearance in Aurora, Colorado, July 23, 2012.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. | Thu Aug 9, 2012 10:04pm EDT

CENTENNIAL, Colo. (Reuters) - Accused Colorado gunman James Holmes, charged with murder over a shooting rampage last month at a movie theater in a Denver suburb, has a "mental illness" and tried to get help before the shooting, his defense attorney said in court on Thursday.

Holmes' public defender, in a hearing on media access to court files in the case, repeatedly made references to his client's unspecified mental illness, giving the first clear sign that Holmes' lawyers might be considering an insanity defense.

"He tried to get help with his mental illness," Daniel King said of his client, a 24-year-old former neuroscience graduate student at the University of Colorado who faces 24 counts of first-degree murder and 116 counts of attempted murder.

Holmes is accused of bursting into a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" in the Denver suburb of Aurora and opening fire in the crowded theater, killing 12 people and wounding 58 others.

Holmes, who seemed to have not shaved for days, appeared in court on Thursday wearing maroon prison garb and shackled at his hands and ankles, with his dyed hair fading to pink in some places from its original reddish-orange.

He seemed alert but disinterested in his third appearance in a Colorado courtroom since the July 20 mass shooting. He mostly stared straight ahead and did not talk to his lawyers.

"Mental illness is the only possible defense available in this case. It is hardly a whodunit," Craig Silverman, a former chief deputy district attorney in Denver who now practices law privately, told Reuters.

"By saying it repeatedly in open court, Holmes' lawyers provide the sound bite that will be the basis of the defense," he said. "It wasn't just for the court to hear but it was for the people in the courtroom and for people in the press to report."

Court papers filed by defense attorneys two weeks ago said Holmes had been a patient of the medical director for student mental health services on campus before he filed paperwork to drop out of the competitive graduate program.

That psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, reported Holmes to a campus threat assessment team and a campus police officer over concerns about her patient, according to media reports.

Lawyers for Fenton and the campus police officer declined to comment to Reuters on those reports. The university has also declined to comment on the reports but said it had hired a former federal prosecutor to probe its dealings with Holmes.

As in many states, mental health care providers in Colorado must warn authorities of potential violent behavior only when a patient has communicated a serious threat of imminent physical violence against a specific target.

PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY

Judge William Sylvester said he would consider a request by 20 media organizations to unseal and make public documents detailing the murder case against Holmes, and would issue a written ruling later.

Lawyers representing news organizations sought the release of the papers in a written motion that said sealing them "undermines our nation's firm commitment to the transparency and public accountability of the criminal justice system."

In the motion, lawyers for the media outlets, including The New York Times Co., The Associated Press, The Denver Post, and CBS News, argued that the U.S. Constitution and state case law requires a presumption of openness. Thomson Reuters is not a party to the motion.

In most court cases, documents are available to the public.

Both prosecutors and defense lawyers objected, saying that it was too early to open the file because the investigation was still ongoing.

"The harm, judge, is very real with the release of the file at this point," defense attorney King said.

Media lawyer Steven Zansberg argued that the decision to close the bulk of the file made it difficult for the public to understand what happened during the shooting, and why.

The media has recently been successful in getting some documents unsealed in the case of Jared Loughner, who was charged last year in a deadly shooting spree that killed six people and gravely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

As the Holmes case gets further along, there may be other parties who express concerns over what is sealed. Attorneys representing families of the victims may insist that certain photographs from the crime scene not be released, for example.

Holmes is being held without bond and in solitary confinement at the Arapahoe County jail.

(Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Writing by Mary Slosson; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Anthony Boadle)

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