The Louvre museum in Paris said Wednesday that it had recovered a set of gold and silver-encrusted Renaissance-era armor nearly 40 years after it was stolen.

A military antiques expert alerted police after being called in to give advice regarding an inheritance in Bordeaux in January and becoming suspicious about the luxurious helmet and body armor in the family's collection.

Police later identified the items from a database of stolen artworks as having been taken from the Louvre on May 31, 1983, in circumstances that remain a mystery.

Bordeaux prosecutors are now investigating how they ended up in the family's estate.

The armour and helmet are thought to have been made in Milan between 1560 and 1580. They were donated to the Louvre in 1922 by the Rothschild family.

"I was certain we would see them reappear one day because they are such singular objects. But I could never have imagined that it would work out so well -- that they would be in France and still together," said Philippe Malgouyres, the Louvre's head of heritage artworks.

"They are prestige weapons, made with virtuosity, sort of the equivalent of a luxury car today. In the 16th century, weapons became works of very luxurious art. Armour became an ornament that had nothing to do with its use," he said.

There are 100,000 objects on France's database of global stolen artworks, with 900 added last year alone.

According to Jean-Luc Martinez, president-director of the Louvre, the last theft from the world's most-visited museum was in 1998, a portrait by 19th-century French artist Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.

"We're still looking for it," Martinez said.

© 2021 AFP

Facebook on Wednesday said it derailed a deceptive campaign to use hundreds of bogus Instagram accounts to mislead people in Russia protesting the arrest of Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny.

The network off Instagram accounts used hashtag and location "poisoning" typically associated with spam or financial scams to drown out posts by protesters, according to Facebook global threat disruption lead David Agranovich.

The tactic involves coopting hashtags being used as social media markers for hot topics, in this case protests, by unleashing torrents of posts bearing the labels.

"If you have a hashtag that an activist movement is using to organize itself and you fill it with random, unrelated content, you make it less effective," Agranovich said.

"Also, we saw them trying to fill it actually with content that might suppress people or convince people not to protest."

Some of the location tags were places where protesters planned to gather in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Facebook said.

Accounts in the network used celebrity photos or profile photos evidently generated automatically by software, and posts included claims protests were being criticized by a TikTok star and that lots of children were attending rallies, the report detailed.

But it said those orchestrating the campaign relied on recently created accounts to post "large volumes of irrelevant or critical content with particular hashtags and location tags to drown out relevant information and redirect the conversation.".

Some of the Instagram posts suggested people got Covid-19 and died as a result of attending protests, according to samples provided by Facebook, which owns the image-centric service.

The bogus network also "poisoned" hashtags with ads for women's clothing or handbags, Facebook reported.

The US-based social network said its automated systems detected and disabled 530 Instagram accounts being used in the campaign.

Facebook reported that 55,000 people followed one or more of the Instagram accounts.

The deceptive activity was traced only to "individuals operating within Russia," according to Agranovich.

Navalny used Instagram on Wednesday to quip that "everything is fine" and make jokes about prison life in his first message from a detention center outside Moscow.

President Vladimir Putin's most prominent critic said he was being held in the Kolchugino detention center in the Vladimir region northeast of Moscow.

Navalny was sentenced last month to two and a half years in a penal colony for breaching parole terms while in Germany recovering from a poisoning attack.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) revealed on a Milwaukee radio station that he's going to hold up the entire COVID-19 stimulus bill vote in the Senate, tweeted Lisa Desjardins from PBS NewsHour.

Speaking to WISN, Johnson pledged that for 10 hours, he intends to read the entire bill out loud before any debate or amendments can happen, as well as a vote.

"Johnson also says he will try to keep the COVID relief debate and vote-a-rama going through Sunday, trying to recruit 12 or 13 Republicans to be on the floor at all times for that effort," Desjardins tweeted. She explained that Johnson's hope is that his efforts will all take until Sunday.

Senate Minority Leader implied in a Fox News interview that the stimulus may not really even be needed. Reporter Chad Pergram cited McConnell saying that the bill is "wildly out of proportion to where the country stands today....It is a wildly out of proportion response to where the country is at the moment. The vaccines are going out. The economies are opening up."

The COVID-19 stimulus bill had 72 percent support among the American public when it was first announced.