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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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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