The move, expected later on Thursday, will allow Iranians to get access to the latest Apple phones and newest software that have only been available on Tehran's black market since sanctions were first imposed in 1992.

The U.S. has ramped up tough measures against Iran in recent years to slow development of the Islamic Republic's disputed nuclear program, blacklisting a wide range of Iranian companies and government officials.

The United States believes Iran is enriching uranium to levels that could be used in nuclear weapons, but Tehran says its program is for peaceful purposes.

The easing of sanctions on technology may be an attempt by the U.S. government to develop goodwill with Iranian citizens before the Iranian national elections next month.

Social media played a big role in the wake of Iran's disputed 2009 presidential elections, used by the opposition "Green Movement" to marshal global attention to their cause, and later inspiring protesters in the Arab Spring revolts of 2011.

The U.S. government first eased some technology restrictions after the election in 2010, allowing U.S. companies to export to Iran some basic software and free Internet services such as chat and email.

But the move on Thursday goes further, allowing companies to sell software and hardware to Iranian citizens, Wendy Sherman, undersecretary for political affairs at the U.S. State Department, said in an interview on the BBC Persian service late on Wednesday.

"We have no desire to cut off communications," she said in the interview, which first announced the looser rules. "We in fact want to encourage communications in every way we can."

The English transcript from Sherman's interview was provided by the National Iranian American Council, a non-profit group that has long urged the U.S. government to ease restrictions on Iran that hurt ordinary citizens but do little to hinder the government's actions.

(Reporting by Anna Yukhananov, additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

Yet this week, Republicans suddenly dropped their opposition, finally allowing Democrats to send both nominees on to the the full Senate.

On Thursday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved the nomination of Gina McCarthy to head the EPA on a party-line vote, 10-8. On the same day, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee voted 12-10, also along party lines, to advance Labor Secretary nominee Thomas Perez.

The EPA vote came one week after Republicans refused to even show up for a vote on McCarthy, leaving Democrats short of a quorum. GOP committee members had previously demanded that McCarthy answer a staggering 1,100 questions about the EPA — she currently heads the agency's air pollution office — and then insisted they still needed more information.

As for Perez, he finally received a vote after Republicans on the HELP committeeprevious votes. Most recently, they used an arcane procedural rule to prevent the committee from voting.

That Republicans finally stopped delaying the committee votes does not mean they've suddenly been placated. Rather, they're gearing up for a battle in the full Senate, where they'll have more power to block the nominations indefinitely via threatened filibusters.

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) has said he'll force a 60-vote threshold on Perez, and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) has alreadyon McCarthy's nomination. Given that both nominees garnered zero GOP votes in committee, it's clear they'll face stiff opposition in the full Senate.

Perez's nomination in particular could prove problematic, since leading Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have labeled him a "," andabout his tenure with the Justice Department's civil rights division.

"His willingness, time and again, to bend or ignore the law and to misstate the facts in order to advance his far-left ideology lead me and others to conclude that he'd continue to do so if he were confirmed to another, and much more consequential, position of public trust," McConnell said in alast week.

In response, Democrats have mulled a so-called "" of simply changing Senate rules to weaken the filibuster and allow them to approve both nominees, even in the face of unified GOP opposition.

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Taxpayers, beware. Pritzker is a deep-pocketed doyenne with a family history of dodging taxes or siphoning them away from the public for her own family's gargantuan private gain. If you want to see how she'll oversee a $10 billion government agency, look at her own wealth redistribution record.

Most notoriously, Pritzker headed up subprime lender Superior Bank. Even after it went under in 2001 and left 1,400 mostly poor and minority customers destitute, Pritzker was pushing to expand its toxic subprime loan business. As I've reported previously, Pritzker and her family escaped accountability by forking over a discounted $460 million settlement over 15 years after the bank collapsed.

One of the Obamas' oldest Chicago friends and an intimate confidante of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Pritzker served as a top national finance chairwoman and bundler for the 2008 presidential campaign. She is an heir to the Hyatt Hotel and Pritzker family fortunes. According to Forbes, her grandfather and his sons also created the industrial conglomerate Marmon Holdings, which the family sold to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway for $4.5 billion.

To protect her family's multibillion-dollar fortune, Pritzker's enterprises park their money in the very same kind of offshore trusts Obama attacked GOP rival Mitt Romney over. But Obama lapped up nearly $800 million in campaign and inaugural funding raised by Pritzker. A former Pritzker tax lawyer pioneered tax-avoidance strategies for the family, which allowed them to pay $9 million in taxes instead of $150 million in estate taxes after patriarch A.N. Pritzker died. As Forbes notes: "There are now 11 Pritzkers on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans." Nice lawyering if you can get it.

Exempted from Obama's poisonous class-warfare demagoguery, Pritzker also chaired Chicago's failed Olympic Village Subcommittee while serving as president of Pritzker Realty Group, a top Illinois mega-developer that would have reaped untold millions in project work if then Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and the White House had secured the 2016 Olympic bid.

Former Pritzker executive and Obama campaign treasurer Martin Nesbitt also served on the Olympic committee, while holding the chairmanship of the Chicago Housing Authority under Daley brother of former Obama Chief of Staff William Daley. Cronies of a feather.

One of the most lucrative schemes milked by these developers and perfected in Chicago is a mechanism called tax increment financing. When I worked in Seattle covering corporate welfare and city government, I became strange bedfellows with a diverse alliance of libertarians and Ralph Naderites who rightly oppose "public-private partnership" deals between developers, statist Democrats and corporate welfare Republican politicians. These "public-private partnership" scams inevitably involve tax increment financing gimmickry to siphon off tax dollars to subsidize developers/builders/contractors, who then reward politicians with big campaign donations.

TIF schemes totaling hundreds of millions of tax dollars were at the heart of the Obama/Daley/Pritzker Chicago Olympics bid. And a huge franchise of Pritzker's Hyatt Hotels Corp. was the beneficiary of a $5.2 million TIF subsidy approved by Chicago Dems last year. It's part of a massive redevelopment project with the Obamas' hometown University of Chicago that robs local schools to subsidize well-connected corporations.

Don't take my word for it. As a radical leftwing local activist put it: "It's not fighting economic blight; it's a way of taking from everyone and giving to the 1 percent." From Chicago to Chicago on the Potomac, it's dirty statist business as usual.

Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.

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Wilmington Mayor Marty Orr says it's a "tragic loss."

Will County Sheriff's Department spokesman Ken Kaupas (KOW'-puhs) says the bodies of the two boys and two girls, aged 15 to 17, were recovered Tuesday from Forked Creek near Wilmington.

Kaupas says the teens had been missing since Monday evening. Authorities don't know exactly when the accident occurred. Kaupas says the driver likely lost control after hitting a patch of water or ice. The car tore through a guard rail and plunged into the water.

Wilmington is 60 miles southwest of Chicago.

The answer almost undoubtedly will be yes, as the tough-guy former agent played by Gerard Butler gets to kick a whole lot of badass butt while trying to rescue the president. Although this is the sort of film in which the fate of the world hinges, when all is said and done, on the outcome of a one-on-one martial arts contest, director Antoine Fuqua's notably bloody child of Die Hard still generates a fair amount of tension and produces the kind of nationalistic outrage that rock-ribbed Americans will feel in their guts. Foreign revenue should be hefty as well, especially in countries where many viewers will get a thrill watching Washington get the sort of treatment usually reserved for places like Baghdad and Kabul.

Either due to incredible clairvoyance on the parts of first-time screenwriters Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt or just through one of those twists of fate, the film arrives just as North Korea has made anti-U.S. saber-rattling an almost daily exercise. So it seems uncannily timely that the brilliant bad guy here is a (supposedly) rogue North Korean who leads a bunch of skilled commandos on a raid of the White House that nets them the president and several key members of his staff as hostages. No doubt bootleg copies of the film will make their way to Kim Jong Un, who might be simultaneously offended and delighted at the opportunity to further rouse his subjects by showing them how much the enemy hates them.

At its core, however, "Olympus" is like an '80s or '90s genre item in which Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson outwitted and outmuscled shrewd, more formidably armed opponents. Like Eastwood in "In the Line of Fire," Butler (who also produced) plays a disgraced presidential agent sidelined and haunted by a fluky failure (detailed in a 10-minute prologue) who suddenly and inadvertently finds himself back in the thick of a crisis.

If seemingly far-fetched, the attack by the North Korean paramilitary team is nonetheless ingenious and pulled off with somewhat disturbing ease, given that the White House is described as the best-fortified location on Earth. It's also quite violently staged. While President Asher (Aaron Eckhart) receives the South Korean premier and his entourage, a C-130 comes roaring in very low over Virginia and D.C. Knocking out two Air Force fighter jets, the terrorist-piloted plane heads down the mall and over toward the White House, strafing civilians while a second wave of gunmen launch a ground attack on the presidential mansion.

Inside, the premier's alleged head of security shows his true colors as the plot's mastermind. Kang (Rick Yune) quickly displays the diabolical genius worthy of any Bond villain (which Yune once played, as another North Korean in "Die Another Day"). He rounds up the president, Secretary of Defense (Melissa Leo, in an enjoyably fierce performance) and a bunch of other top officials and takes them down to the White House's massively secured emergency underground bunker, where he tortures and kills some of his hostages and dictates terms, the keys being the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from near the Korean demilitarized zone and the removal of the Navy's 7th Fleet from the area.

Enter Mike Banning (Butler), who knows the White House inside and out due to his years serving not only the president but entertaining his young son Connor (Finley Jacobsen), who's somewhere in the building and whom Kang wants as the ultimate bargaining chip. The bulk of the film thus becomes an elaborate cat-and-mouse game between Banning, who, against great odds, taunts Kang and gradually reduces his minions' numbers in several ambushes and one-on-one struggles, and the North Korean megalomaniac, who begins extracting the secret codes that will allow him to control the American nuclear arsenal.

Meanwhile, stuck with sedentary roles as officials sweating it out at the Pentagon heavily linked by video, phones and computers are, among many others, Speaker of the House (and acting President) Trumbull (Morgan Freeman); Secret Service director Jacobs (Angela Bassett); and Gen. Clegg (Robert Forster), the gung-ho head of the Joint Chiefs.

The ordeal is an all-night affair, and unfortunately much of the White House action plays out in a murky, muddy darkness that has a very washed-out look; cinematographer Conrad W. Hall could have taken a tip or two from the incredible nocturnal, low-light-level work his father Conrad L. Hall did two decades ago in "Jennifer Eight." Quite a bit of the action is obscured as a result.

To his credit, though, Fuqua sustains the suspense until near the end of two hours; only in the final confrontation between Banning and Kang does the face-off seem over-extended and borderline risible. Willing to go for an R rating when a more inclusive one might have increased box office, the filmmakers deliver some pretty tough and brutal scenes, not the least of which has Kang mercilessly kicking and beating Leo's defiant Secretary of Defense.

After a string of increasingly lame and embarrassing projects, Butler took charge on this one as a producer here in a role carefully crafted in a time-honored action-hero mold. He comes off pretty well, as a sort of junior-league Mel Gibson with a bit less of the fiery-eyed craziness and wacky humor but plenty of grit and no shortage of appeal. In one-dimensional generic roles, most of the other performers deliver as expected, though Yune's exceptional looks and air of piercing intelligence pretty much maxes out what anyone could do with this sort of laser-focused villain figure.

The extensive CGI work is variable pretty good where it counts most but sketchy around the edges. Trevor Morris wallpapers the action with a constantly churning score.

"Olympus Has Fallen," a FilmDistrict release, is rated R for strong violence and language throughout. 120 minutes.

___

Motion Picture Association of America rating definition for R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

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Eggs, eggshell fragments and dozens of clutches were nestled in the stratigraphic layers of the Tremp geological formation at the site of Coll de Narg in the Spanish province of Lleida, which was a marshy region during the Late Cretaceous Period, the researchers said.

"Eggshells, eggs and nests were found in abundance and they all belong to , sauropods in particular," the study's leader, Albert Garca Sells from the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Palaeontology Institute, told Spanish news agency SINC this week.

"Up until now, only one type of dinosaur egg had been documented in the region: Megaloolithus siruguei," Sells added. His team found evidence of at least four other species: Cairanoolithus roussetensis, Megaloolithus aureliensis, Megaloolithus siruguei and Megaloolithus baghensis. Megaloolithus eggs are thought to be associated with sauropods, long-necked dinosaurs that were among some of the largest to roam the planet.

The Coll de Narg area is considered one of the most importantareas in Europe, the researchers said, adding that their study shows it was used by several dinosaurs from the Late Campanian age (around 71 million years ago) to the Late Maastrichtian age (around 67 million years ago).

"We had never found so many nests in the one area before. In addition, the presence of various oospecies (eggs species) at the same level suggests that different types of dinosaurs shared the same nesting area," Sells said, adding that thecould help scientists determine the date of future findings at the site.

"It has come to light that the different types of eggs are located at very specific time intervals," Sells explained to SINC. "This allows us to create biochronological scales with a precise dating capacity. In short, thanks to the collection of oospecies found in Coll de Narg we have been able to determine the age of the site at between 71 and 67 million years."

The findings are published in the March issue of the journal Cretaceous Research.

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Dr. Hannah Gay and colleagues Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga of the University of Massachusetts and Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reported on the child's case at a medical meeting in Atlanta on Sunday.

"The breakthrough has been exciting and I'm very hopeful that that's going to lead to future research that will give us some answers," said Gay, a Mississippi pediatrician and soft-spoken mother of four adult children.

But the attention is difficult for a woman "much more comfortable talking to children than adults," said her husband, Paul Gay. "She didn't anticipate this kind of explosion of attention."

Dr. Gay, a 59-year-old native of Jackson, Mississippi, likes to spend time designing needle points, singing in her church choir and reading theology or medical literature when she's not working 12-hour days treating patients, in a state with the nation's highest poverty rate.

"She is the most unlikely person in the world to be getting this kind of international attention, really," said Jay Richardson, her former pastor at the Highland Colony Baptist Church. "You don't ever hear her talking about herself or trying to promote herself in any way. She's a quiet, humble person. Extremely intelligent. Very committed to her faith. Very involved in her church. Very committed to teaching children the bible."

Except for six years working in Ethiopia as a missionary, Dr. Gay has spent the bulk of her academic and professional career at the University of Mississippi, where she received her undergraduate and medical degrees and met her husband of 37 years. She has worked the better part of her career at the university's medical center serving the state's youngest victims of HIV.

During that time, Dr. Gay has published several articles about ways to keep mothers from passing HIV infection to their babies and participated in the federally sponsored Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Group, which studied the use of the aggressive treatment of children who are at high risk of infection.

Her daughter Ruth Gay Thomas says as an AIDS specialist her mother has had to fight the battles of her patients, overcoming access to healthcare and the stigma that comes along with being infected with HIV in the United States.

"She practices compassion and huge, unimaginable amounts of patience with her patients and their families," Thomas said. "She really has to embody a whole lot more than just the smart doctor that knows the right medications to give."

To treat her own rheumatoid arthritis, Dr. Gay takes medicine that affects her immune system. "She has that in common with her patients, but it's been a problem because with her compromised immune system, she can't have as much of a hands-on touching of her patients that was always so satisfying for her," her husband said.

When a rural hospital in Mississippi delivered a premature baby girl in July 2010 from a mother who had just tested positive for HIV during labor, it was only natural that they would turn to Dr. Gay. The child's mother had not received any prenatal care, nor had she gotten any treatment for her HIV infection, putting the baby at high risk of becoming infected.

Dr. Gay chose to start the baby on the full treatment regimen of three potent drugs when she was just 30 hours old, even before the child's infection was confirmed.

It was a bold move. Most babies exposed to HIV in the womb or during labor would have been given a six-week course of one or two drugs intended to reduce the risk of acquiring infection until tests could confirm she was infected.

"The doctor made a judgment call that the risks for this baby were so high that they were going to assume the baby was infected," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health or NIH.

Some critics have questioned Dr. Gay's decision, which may have exposed the child to the risk of toxic medications without confirmation of her infection.

"This was a gutsy call that turned out to be correct," said Fauci, adding that if it had turned out that the baby was not infected, they could have withdrawn the drugs. "They made the right guess."

Dr. Gay continued to treat the child until January 2012, when she was 18 months old and her mother stopped bringing the child in for appointments. Gay's team tracked her down in the fall of 2012, but the mother had not given her child any HIV medication since January.

Before restarting treatment, Gay did several tests, fully expecting that the virus had come roaring back. But none of the tests detected the virus. That's when she brought in colleagues Luzuriaga of the University of Massachusetts and Persaud of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who did a series of ultrasensitive tests. They were only able to find trace amounts of genetic material from the virus, but nothing capable of rekindling the infection.

The child, now 30 months old, remains off medication and continues to fare well. "We can't find any virus to treat at this point," Dr. Gay said.

She said it is not clear what the child's story will mean in the wider scheme of HIV research, but she hopes it may lead to a cure for other babies infected at birth.

"I guess the message that I want to get across to the public very strongly is, we don't know yet if we can create the same outcome in other babies." she said. "It's far too early to draw too many conclusions. There's not a cure in sight this week."

Dr. Gay said she is glad that this is happening in Mississippi and hopes it boosts the state's reputation.

"But it's a whole lot bigger than this one child, the University Medical Center or the state," she said. "It may take a long time, but I hope it will point us in the right direction to come up with a cure we can consistently apply to other babies worldwide."

Colleagues at the medical center are planning a celebration for Dr. Gay to "let her know how proud we are," said Amy Smith, a nurse practitioner who works with the doctor. "She's the type that wouldn't want a big fuss made about her, but we're going to do it anyway."

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen and Emily Le Coz; Editing by Jilian Mincer and Claudia Parsons)

The world's biggest oil company by market value has hired Barclays Plcas an advisor for the sale of nearly half of its 60 percent stake in Castle Peak Power Co Ltd as part of its plan to divest non-core assets.

Talks to sell the entire stake to CLP Holdingsand state-owned China Southern Power Grid had stalled due to disagreements over valuations, the sources said. CLP owns 40 percent of Castle Peak.

The auction may attract interest from infrastructure funds, Japanese trading houses and sovereign wealth funds, they added without specifying names.

The process is in its early stages and potential suitors are assessing whether to bid for the stake. First-round bids are due in early April.

China's cash-rich state power groups have also been scooping up assets worldwide, with dominant power distributor State Grid Corp establishing a presence in the Philippines, Spain, Brazil and Portugal.

STILL INTERESTED

CLP, controlled by Hong Kong's wealthy Kadoorie family, remains attracted to the stake because Castle Peak offers guaranteed returns, one source familiar with CLP's strategy said.

But "the ball is in Exxon's court now," the source added.

Castle Peak operates three coal-fired power stations and has a generation capacity of 6,908 megawatts.

CLP and Power Assets Holdings Ltd , Hong Kong's other power supplier that is controlled by tycoon Li Ka-Shing, garner an annual return of 9.99 percent on net fixed assets until 2018 under a program known as Scheme of Control.

The sources, who declined to be identified as the sale process is confidential, said the 60 percent stake was valued at around $3 billion last March. Around half of that plus a premium would bring the deal value closer to $2 billion, they said.

Exxon Mobil said in an emailed statement that it does not comment on rumors or speculation and that it routinely assesses its global portfolio of businesses.

A CLP spokeswoman and a Hong Kong-based spokesman for Barclays declined to comment.

CLP posted a 10.5 percent drop in its earnings last year because of weak performances at its operations in Australia and India. Hong Kong accounts for the bulk of CLP's earnings.

(Additional reporting by Anna Driver and Charlie Zhu; Editing by Michael Flaherty and Edwina Gibbs)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Bob Dylan has become the first rock star voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the century-old arts organization announced Tuesday.

The iconic singer-songwriter was one of seven named for induction into the group, which honors artists in music, literature and visual arts.

Voted into the academy's core membership were the novelist Ward Just, known for his stories set in Washington, D.C.; minimalist artist Richard Tuttle and painter and printmaker Terry Winters. The academy announced three honorary choices, all from overseas: Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, South African writer Damon Galgut and Belgian artist Luc Tuymans.

Academy officials couldn't decide whether Dylan belonged for his words or his music, executive director Virginia Dajani told the Associated Press, so they settled on making him an honorary member.

"The board of directors considered the diversity of his work and acknowledged his iconic place in the American culture," Dajani said. "Bob Dylan is a multi-talented artist whose work so thoroughly crosses several disciplines that it defies categorization."

Meryl Streep, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, who directed "No Direction Home," a 2005 documentary about Dylan, have been similarly honored by the academy.

While he isn't the first musician to be named to the group, his predecessors have come mainly from the classical world. Dajani and other officials have said that the academy is reluctant to vote in rock performers because they already have organizations, such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to honor them.

The 71-year-old Dylan's song list includes "Blowin' in the Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Like a Rolling Stone."

He's used to breaking barriers. Dylan was the first rocker to receive a Pulitzer Prize, an honorary award in 2008, and the first to be nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, for his memoir "Chronicles: Volume One."

An induction and awards ceremony will be held in May. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, who was inducted into the organization last year, will give the keynote address, entitled "Rock `n' Roll."

The New York-based academy, which was founded in 1898, consists of 250 artists, musicians and writers. Openings occur upon a member's death, with current inductees nominating and voting in new ones.

European space officials and Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) signed a deal Thursday (March 14) to launch a Mars orbiter mission in 2016 and a rover in 2018 as part of what is now a joint ExoMars program.

The Mars exploration agreement outlines the two agencies' responsibilities for the upcoming unmanned missions. In 2016, ESA will provide the Trace Gas Orbiter to study the atmosphere of Mars to measure its chemical composition, as well as an entry, descent and landing demonstrator module.

For the 2018 mission, ESA will provide the carrier and the , which will search forexisted in the past or present, collecting samples from as deep as 6.5 feet (2 meters) beneath the surface of the Red Planet.

"It will be the first Mars rover able to drill to depths of 2 m, collecting samples that have been shielded from the harsh conditions of the surface, where radiation and oxidants can destroy organic materials," ESA officials said in a statement.

Roscosmos, meanwhile, will supply the rockets to launch both Mars missions, as well as the 2018 descent module and surface platform. Both space agencies will provide scientific instruments and will work together on the scientific goals of the missions, according to ESA officials.

ESA director-general Jean-Jacques Dordain called Thursday's agreement a "momentous occasion" for the ExoMars program after meeting with the head of Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, at the ESA headquarters in Paris. Dordain said in a statement that the agreement "will demonstrate the competitiveness of European industry, be important for preparing a solid participation of ESA in future international exploration missions and address the key question ofwhether life ever arose on Mars."

last year due to budget cuts in its planetary science program, but ESA officials said the U.S. space agency will still contribute some communications and engineering support for the new Mars missions.

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