Sergei Filin, artistic director of Russia's Bolshoi Ballet, speaks to journalists as he leaves a hospital accompanied by his wife Maria (L) in Moscow February 4, 2013.

MOSCOW | Thu Mar 14, 2013 6:54am EDT

MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin's spokesman said on Wednesday that an acid attack that severely injured the Bolshoi Ballet's artistic director would not ruin the theatre's reputation.

Putin has not spoken publicly about the January 17 attack, which shocked many Russians, revealed discord in the theatre and left doctors fighting to save victim Sergei Filin's eyesight.

The Bolshoi "is an element of Russian culture. It is a social, cultural and simply Russian brand and this can hardly damage it", Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

"The Bolshoi Theatre is a group of people, a mini-society," he said. Such problems can arise in any other society," he told journalists who asked about the attack and its aftermath.

"This is not about the Bolshoi Theatre, it's about people."

A masked assailant splashed acid in the face of Filin, 42, as re returned home from the Bolshoi, causing severe burns and damaging his eyes.

A top dancer at the Bolshoi, Pavel Dmitrichenko, has been charged along with two alleged accomplices, and all three are being held in custody while the investigation continues.

Dmitrichenko, 29, confessed in a police video to organizing the attack but said in court that he did not intend Filin's assailant to use acid.

But about 300 performers at the Bolshoi wrote a letter urging Putin to order a new inquiry, saying they believe Dmitrichenko confessed due to police pressure.

Longtime Bolshoi Theatre director Anatoly Iksanov, meanwhile, has aired suspicions that Dmitrichenko was part of a wider conspiracy.

Some Russians have expressed shock over the attack on a senior figure at Russia's premiere cultural institution, but for others it only reinforced a negative impression of the theatre.

One of Filin's predecessors, Alexei Ratmansky, called the Bolshoi a "sewer" plagued by hangers-on, ticket scalpers and "half-crazed fans" in a Facebook posting after the attack.

Peskov said the Kremlin had not received the letter from the Bolshoi performers, but he suggested it would not be appropriate for the president to get involved.

"Putin is following the investigation, like everyone else, but ... this is not the prerogative of the president, it is the prerogative of the law enforcement organs, and they are working on it," he said.

Police released a statement on Wednesday saying that "the investigators are doing their work honestly."

"The Moscow police have deep respect for the work of the artists of the Bolshoi Theatre, respect their opinion and assure them that those who work in the police are also professionals in their field," it said.

(Reporting by Alexei Anishchuk; Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Michael Roddy)

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1 of 2. Vincent Pomarede, curator of painting department at the Louvre Lens Museum, poses front of Eugene Delacroix 's painting, ''Liberty Leading the People (28 July 1830) (La Liberte guidant le peuple) in ''La Galerie du Temps'' (Gallery of Time) during a media day on the eve of the inauguration of the Le Louvre Lens Museum, in Lens, northern France, in this December 3, 2012 file photo.

PARIS | Fri Feb 8, 2013 12:04pm EST

PARIS (Reuters) - A woman has defaced Eugene Delacroix's painting "Liberty Leading the People" with a black marker as it hung in an outpost of the Louvre gallery in northern France.

Police arrested a 28-year-old woman on Thursday for writing "AE911" across the bottom of a painting so closely identified with the French Republic that its image once graced the 100-franc note and it has been reproduced on postage stamps.

Painted in 1830, the work was on loan from the main Louvre in Paris to the new Louvre-Lens gallery in northern France inaugurated last December by President Francois Hollande.

"AE911Truth" is the name of a website called "Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth" whose backers say they are seeking to establish the truth of the September 11, 2001 suicide airliner attacks on New York's Twin Towers.

"It had really become an icon, a sort of symbol of the Republic which has remained famous throughout the ages," said Vincent Pomarede, head of the Louvre's painting department.

"We have a very passionate relationship with all our paintings and when something like this happens it's really hard to handle," he said.

Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People" was painted after the 1830 July Revolution as a symbol of reconciliation following the overthrow of Bourbon King Charles X and the ascent to the throne of his cousin Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans.

The work, depicting a bare-breasted woman brandishing a tricolor flag and leading her people over the bodies of the fallen, was later adopted as a revolutionary emblem in the 1848 uprising which overthrew the Orleans monarchy.

It subsequently disappeared from public view before resurfacing in the Louvre after the advent of the Third Republic in 1871, after which its place in the French national consciousness was sealed.

The Louvre confirmed on Friday it had managed to save the painting as the black marker had not penetrated the upper layer of varnish and has been successfully removed.

Opened in December, the 150 million euro ($195 million) art center in Lens houses temporary exhibitions as well as a rotating collection of works from the Louvre museum in Paris.

It was conceived in an effort to regenerate a dreary northern region of France, once known for its mining industry, but now in economic decline.

While the Louvre in Paris looks out onto manicured lawns and flowerbeds of the Tuileries Gardens, Louvre-Lens sits on a disused coalmine and offers views onto slag heaps and a stadium housing the local football club.

(Additional reporting By Pierre Savary; Editing by Brian Love and Paul Casciato)

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KADUNA, Nigeria | Thu Jan 3, 2013 8:26am EST

KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) - Gunmen have killed four people and burned down a police station in northeast Adamawa state, the police said on Thursday, the latest such attack in a region where Islamist sect Boko Haram has its stronghold.

A soldier, a policeman, a civilian and her grandchild were killed by unknown gunmen and a local government office was destroyed in the town of Song, near the border with Cameroon, Adamawa police spokesman Mohammed Ibrahim told Reuters. He said it happened around midnight on Wednesday.

At least 37 people have now died in Nigeria's northeast in the last 10 days alone in violence presumed to be linked to Islamist militancy, the biggest threat to stability in Africa's main oil exporter.

There was a similar attack in another town in Adamawa last week when police said one person was killed, although local media reports, quoting eye-witnesses, said 20 died.

Authorities in the northeast have in the past played down their own casualties in fighting with Boko Haram.

The sect, which is loosely based on the Afghan Taliban, killed hundreds last year in a campaign to impose sharia, or Islamic law. Nigeria's more than 160 million people are split roughly equally between Christians and Muslims.

Boko Haram's violence remains focused mostly on security forces in the northeast, although its attacks have spread across the north and to the capital Abuja.

President Goodluck Jonathan has been unable to stop the rebellion despite waves of military offensives in the northeast and other parts of northern and central Nigeria where Boko Haram has a strong presence.

Jonathan said this week that most suspects behind major bombings in Nigeria had been arrested and attacks by what he called "terrorists" would be over soon.

Around 3,000 people have been killed in violence linked to Boko Haram since the group's uprising in 2009, human rights groups say.

(Reporting by Isaac Abrak; Writing by Joe Brock; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)

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1 of 3. Tribesmen attend a funeral of a paramilitary soldier who was kidnapped and executed by Taliban militants at Darra Adam Khel December 30, 2012. Pakistani Taliban militants have executed 21 paramilitary force men who were captured in attacks on their posts late last week, government officials said on Sunday.

PESHWAR, Pakistan | Sun Dec 30, 2012 11:36am EST

PESHWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani militants, who have escalated attacks in recent weeks, killed at least 41 people in two separate incidents, officials said on Sunday, challenging assertions that military offensives have broken the back of hardline Islamist groups.

The United States has long pressured nuclear-armed ally Pakistan to crack down harder on both homegrown militants groups such as the Taliban and others which are based on its soil and attack Western forces in Afghanistan.

In the north, 21 men working for a government-backed paramilitary force were executed overnight after they were kidnapped last week, a provincial official said.

Twenty Shi'ite pilgrims died and 24 were wounded, meanwhile, when a car bomb targeted their bus convoy as it headed toward the Iranian border in the southwest, a doctor said.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has noted more than 320 Shias killed this year in Pakistan and said attacks were on the rise. It said the government's failure to catch or prosecute attackers suggested it was "indifferent" to the killings.

Pakistan, seen as critical to U.S. efforts to stabilize the region before NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, denies allegations that it supports militant groups like the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network.

Afghan officials say Pakistan seems more genuine than ever about promoting peace in Afghanistan.

At home, it faces a variety of highly lethal militant groups that carry out suicide bombings, attack police and military facilities and launch sectarian attacks like the one on the bus in the southwest.

Witnesses said a blast targeted their three buses as they were overtaking a car about 60 km (35 miles) west of Quetta, capital of sparsely populated Baluchistan province.

"The bus next to us caught on fire immediately," said pilgrim Hussein Ali, 60. "We tried to save our companions, but were driven back by the intensity of the heat."

Twenty people had been killed and 24 wounded, said an official at Mastung district hospital.

CONCERN OVER EXTREMIST SUNNI GROUPS

International attention has focused on al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.

But Pakistani intelligence officials say extremist Sunni groups, lead by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) are emerging as a major destabilizing force in a campaign designed to topple the government.

Their strategy now, the officials say, is to carry out attacks on Shi'ites to create the kind of sectarian tensions that pushed countries like Iraq to the brink of civil war.

As elections scheduled for next year approach, Pakistanis will be asking what sort of progress their leaders have made in the fight against militancy and a host of other issues, such as poverty, official corruption and chronic power cuts.

Pakistan's Taliban have carried out a series of recent bold attacks, as military officials point to what they say is a power struggle in the group's leadership revolving around whether it should ease attacks on the Pakistani state and join groups fighting U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.

The Taliban denies a rift exists among its leaders.

In the attack in the northwest, officials said they had found the bodies of 21 men kidnapped from their checkpoints outside the provincial capital of Peshawar on Thursday. The men were executed one by one.

"They were tied up and blindfolded," Naveed Anwar, a senior administration official, said by telephone.

"They were lined up and shot in the head," said Habibullah Arif, another local official, also by telephone.

One man was shot and seriously wounded but survived, the officials said. He was in critical condition and being treated at a local hospital. Another had escaped before the shootings.

Taliban spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan claimed responsibility for the attacks.

"We killed all the kidnapped men after a council of senior clerics gave a verdict for their execution. We didn't make any demand for their release because we don't spare any prisoners who are caught during fighting," he said.

The powerful military has clawed back territory from the Taliban, but the kidnap and executions underline the insurgents' ability to mount high-profile, deadly attacks in major cities.

This month, suicide bombers attacked Peshawar's airport on December 15 and a bomb killed a senior Pashtun nationalist politician and eight other people at a rally on December 22.

(Additional reporting by Saud Mehsud in DERA ISMAIL KHAN and Gul Yousufzai in QUETTA; Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Michael Georgy and Ron Popeski)

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A boat fishes for sharks off the beach at Boucan Canot on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, September 27, 2011.

ORLANDO, Florida | Thu Aug 9, 2012 11:27am EDT

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - Survivors of shark attacks - now trying to save the animals that took their limbs and, in some cases, nearly their lives - want U.S. restaurant-goers to know they may be eating a threatened species in their shark fin soup.

Out of 32 samples taken across the country of the Chinese delicacy with identifiable shark DNA, 26 bowls, or 81 percent, contained fins from sharks listed as endangered, vulnerable or near threatened, according to a report released on Thursday by the Pew Environment Group.

The study was based on tests of the soup in 14 U.S. cities, and shark attack survivors collected the soup samples.

The survivors hope the study will help convince the public that the ultimate price of shark fin soup is more than the typical $100 listed on menus.

Nearly one-third of shark species are in danger of extinction, and up to 73 million sharks are killed each year for their fins, Pew said.

President Barack Obama signed a law last year to tighten a ban on the practice of removing sharks' fins and throwing the fish back into the ocean to die. Fins also can come from legal, regulated fishing.

"What better voice is there than ours?" said Mike Coots, 32, of Kauai, Hawaii, a surfer whose right leg was ripped off by a tiger shark in 1997.

The survivors group has lobbied Congress to close loopholes in the shark fin ban. It also works through the United Nations to encourage the establishment of shark sanctuaries around the world.

Their efforts began after Debbie Salamone, a competitive ballroom dancer, had her Achilles tendon severed by a shark off Florida's coast in 2004.

The shark encounter eventually lead her to refocus her life's work on protecting the animals from extinction and recruiting other shark attack survivors around the globe to help with her mission.

"Most of us have forgiven," said Salamone, 46, who is now a Pew spokeswoman. "If you care about the ocean, you need to care about sharks."

SECRET SOUP SAMPLES

For the shark fin soup study, shark attack survivors fanned out to a total of 51 restaurants in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Las Vegas, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, the Washington, D.C., area, Fort Lauderdale and Orlando in Florida, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Krishna Thompson, 46, whose leg was stripped to bone by a shark during a 2001 wedding anniversary trip to the Bahamas and later amputated, said he collected soup samples from six or seven different restaurants in New York.

"I would always take the soup to go," Thompson said.

Once outside the restaurants, Thompson said he would label the soup containers for submission to DNA testers at Stony Brook University.

"Hating sharks helps no one," said Thompson, who nearly died from blood loss and organ shutdown after his shark attack.

The most egregious soup sample, from a restaurant in Boston, contained the endangered scalloped hammerhead shark, according to the report.

DNA from sharks listed as vulnerable was found in seven soup samples from Orlando, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Albuquerque.

Another 18 soup samples contained shark considered near threatened, according to the findings.

The remaining samples contained shark meat that could not be specifically identified due to the quality of the DNA or the lack of useable DNA. In three cases, the only identifiable meat came from chicken or other fish, according to the report.

John Breall, a San Francisco lawyer who represents Asian-American restaurateurs, importers and civic leaders, is fighting a new California ban on the possession or sale of fins, which he calls "anti-Chinese." Breall told Reuters he was surprised by the Pew group's findings.

"There are major shark fisheries on the east and west coasts, sustainable fisheries, and these supply the vast majority of shark meat and shark fins," Breall said.

Breall said most of the shark from the sustainable fisheries is spiny dogfish, which "are reproducing at a huge rate." The Pew study lists spiny dogfish as vulnerable.

(Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Vicki Allen)

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1 of 7. An Afghan National Army soldier keeps watch near the site of an incident in Kabul August 2, 2012.

KABUL | Thu Aug 2, 2012 8:26am EDT

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan security forces killed five insurgents and wounded one during a pre-dawn raid in Kabul on Thursday, with authorities saying they had thwarted a mass attack and captured intelligence pointing to the militant Haqqani network.

Soldiers from Afghanistan's spy agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), launched the raid just after midnight, entering a single-story house compound on the fringes of Kabul which the insurgents were using as a base.

"They planned mass attacks in different parts of Kabul disguised in burqas," the NDS said in a statement, referring to the head-to-toe covering worn by many Afghan women and sometimes used by insurgents to evade detection.

Police said two insurgents escaped during a gun battle that raged for five hours around the isolated compound, where the insurgents had been amassing weapons in a newly built brick house.

The militants had three vehicles loaded with explosives and suicide-bomb vests, as well as large stores of rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons, and planned to occupy a high-rise building to attack the city's business heart.

The Taliban issued a statement denying that Thursday's operation had targeted their fighters, although the insurgents often play down their defeats and inflate successes.

The NDS said target maps and telephone numbers recovered from the compound had numbers for the Haqqani network based outside Afghanistan.

Haqqani network militants, allied with the Taliban and largely based in northwest Pakistan's lawless border lands, have been blamed by NATO-led forces in Afghanistan for several high profile attacks in recent months.

Dozens of militants launched a coordinated assault in central Kabul on April 15, occupying a high-rise construction site and pounding the city's diplomatic and government centre with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire in an attack that took 18 hours to quell.

On June 22, Afghan security forces backed by foreign advisers fought a day-long battle with insurgents after a Taliban attack on a lakeside hotel on Kabul's outskirts.

But security forces and NATO-led foreign troops say the sporadic attacks do not point to weaknesses in Afghan forces and intelligence ahead of a withdrawal by most foreign combat troops to be completed by 2014.

"PROGRESS"

The United States is pressing Pakistan to step up its efforts to root out militants, in particular the Haqqanis.

Pakistan has strong traditional links with the Afghan Taliban and other militant groups but it denies accusations it uses them as proxies to gain leverage in Afghanistan ahead of any settlement to the war, or in case a civil war breaks out after foreign troops leave.

Pakistan has also long complained that the United States has overlooked its contribution to the fight against militants.

NATO's top commander in Afghanistan, U.S. General John Allen, met Pakistani counterparts in Islamabad on Thursday to discuss cross border security in the wake of hundreds of rocket attacks in eastern Afghanistan which Afghan officials have blamed on the Pakistan army.

Pakistan has denied the accusation.

"We are making significant progress toward building a partnership that is enduring, strategic, carefully defined, and that enhances the security and prosperity of the region," Allen said in a statement after his talks.

The NATO-led force in Afghanistan has acknowledged an 11 percent spike in attacks over the past three months since the start of the summer fighting period, although overall the number of foreign soldiers killed is down on last year.

Eighty-five were killed in June and July against 119 over the same period last year.

(Writing by Rob Taylor; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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