Infuriated by loud drumming outside the Gielgud Theatre, where Mirren is portraying the queen in the play "The Audience", she burst out in full costume during the interval on Saturday night to tell them to shut up, with a few swear words thrown in for good measure.

"I'm afraid there were a few 'thespian' words used. They got a very stern royal ticking off but I have to say they were very sweet and they stopped immediately," Mirren told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Mirren, 67, who last month added the best actress gong at Britain's top theatre honors to the Academy Award she won for the 2006 film "The Queen", said the drumming had got so loud it was disturbing cast and theatre-goers alike.

Audience members said they had tried unsuccessfully to silence the drummers, but the sight of one of Britain's most prestigious actors dressed as the monarch did the trick.

Footage captured on mobile phone and aired on Sky News showed an angry Mirren, attired in tiara and pearls, accosting the drummers, waving her arms and gesticulating angrily before the music was brought to a sudden stop.

"I literally walked straight off stage, straight up the stairs and straight out the stage door and banged my way through the crowd who were watching and said 'stop, you've got to stop right now' only I might have used stronger language than that," she told the newspaper.

"They were very sweet and stopped the minute they knew I wasn't just a batty old woman haranguing them on the streets of Soho on a Saturday night.

"I felt rotten, but on the other hand they were destroying our performance so something had to be done."

Liam Emerson, the musical director of the Batala London drummers who had been hired to advertise a gay festival later in May, said they had not intended to disturb anyone.

"Her language was very blue, which looking back on it is probably quite funny really," he told Sky News. "But once I realized it was Helen Mirren and we were right next to a theatre we kind of stopped and politely apologized."

(Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by Mike Collett-White)

Drug policy reform advocates called the report historic, though it made no specific proposals and said there was "no significant support" among the OAS' 35 member states for legalizing cocaine, the illicit drug with the greatest impact on Latin America.

"This is the first time any multilateral organization anywhere has done something like this," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

The $2.2 million study was commissioned in response to calls by some Latin American leaders at last year's Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, for a rethinking of the war on drugs. Reform advocates call the more than $20 billion that Washington has spent on counterdrug efforts in Latin America over the past decade a damaging waste of taxpayer money.

The report says "greater flexibility" in dealing with the drug problem "could lead to the possibility of amending domestic legislation or promoting changes to international law."

It urges "assessing existing signals and trends that lean toward the decriminalization or legalization of the production, sale and use of marijuana. Sooner or later decisions in this area will need to be taken."

The study, which was presented by outgoing OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza in Bogota, examines four different scenarios for confronting the illicit drug trade, which has fueled violent crime and corruption, especially in drug production and transit countries, including destabilizing governments.

The most controversial scenario would involve countries unilaterally abandoning the fight against drug production and trafficking in their territory in order to reduce violence.

President Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala, a hard-hit cocaine transit country along with neighboring Honduras, made headlines before the Cartagena summit when he said he was tempted to put his country on such a path.

The report's authors conclude, however, "that there is no absolute link between the drug problem and the insecurity experienced by many citizens in the Americas."

Accompanying Insulza on Friday was Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, whose country remains the No. 1 source of cocaine consumed by U.S. citizens.

Santos said the report presented "simple, realistic options" for future action in order to "reduce the deaths, the violence that drug trafficking wreaks, the consumption of drugs and the profits of criminals."

The 400-page study emphasizes drug abuse as primarily a public health issue and suggests drug abusers should not be criminally prosecuted but rather treated as ill.

"Decriminalization of drug use needs to be considered as a core element in any public health strategy," it says.

That echoes the approach of the U.S. government. But it diverges from Washington's longstanding opposition to legalizing marijuana despite the fact that voters in two states Colorado and Washington have done that.

Nadelmann said the U.S. government has in the past suppressed any multilateral attempt to promote discussion of alternatives to the current drug war.

"The notion that the OAS would actually convene 50 people, including a number of my allies and people associated with reform, and then have this open-ended discussion and then produce a report that was not subject to intensive political review and censorship is actually extraordinary," he said from New York.

Rafael Lemaitre, spokesman for the White House's drug czar, said in response to the report that "any suggestion that nations legalize drugs like heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine runs counter to an evidenced-based, public health approach to drug policy and are not viable alternatives."

The report was released two weeks before Guatemala hosts the OAS General Assembly, where the subject of drugs tops the agenda.

Nadelmann said the report reflects to a large degree of interest in Latin America with voter-driven marijuana legalization in the United States.

Uruguay's president, Jose Mujica, is pushing marijuana legalization and wants to put the government in charge of sales.

Other findings of the study:

Drug abuse is the 15th direct cause of death in the OAS' northern countries , 40th in Andean countries and 52nd in Central America. That supports arguments that the United States and Canada bear more responsibility for illicit drug demand.

Retail sales of illicit drugs account for 65 percent of drug profits, while farmers or producers get 1 percent

___

Associated Press writers Vivian Sequera in Bogota, Colombia, and Luis Alonso in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Washington's top tax official was fired on Wednesday as President Barack Obama sought to stem a rising tide of criticism over the Internal Revenue Service's improper targeting of conservative groups for special scrutiny.

With three congressional probes of the IRS looming and Republicans' calls for firings at the agency growing louder, Obama said he told Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to demand the resignation of Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner. Lew had done so, the president said.

"I'll do everything in my power to make sure nothing like this happens again by holding the responsible parties accountable, (and) by putting in place new checks and new safeguards," Obama told reporters in the White House's East Room.

Obama's remarks came on a day in which he tried to regain the initiative amid a series of controversies that have threatened his second-term agenda. The Democratic president said new leadership was needed at the IRS to restore public confidence in the tax agency, whose reputation for political independence has taken a hit because of scandal.

"Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it," Obama said. "I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but especially in the IRS, given the power that it has and the reach that it has into all of our lives."

The IRS revelations have added to a sense of a White House under siege, and a president struggling to recover his political footing in the face of fast-moving events.

Republicans continue to attack the administration's handling of militants' deadly attack last year on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. On Monday, the Justice Department came under fire for seizing phone records of journalists from the Associated Press as part of a criminal probe into intelligence leaks.

Obama spoke after meeting with senior Treasury officials on ways to quell the growing uproar after a government report found that poor management led to an "inappropriate" focus on claims by conservative groups for tax-exempt status.

Obama, who had been accused by Republican critics of reacting too passively to the scandal, promised to work "hand in hand" with Congress to fix the IRS. But he acknowledged the realities of a politically divided Washington, and urged lawmakers to deal with the matter in a way that does not "smack of politics or partisan agendas."

Republicans signaled, however, they were not satisfied with Miller's resignation and that they were determined to find out whether the White House encouraged, or knew about, the effort within the tax agency to single out conservative groups for more scrutiny.

Several, including Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, also complained they were misled by Miller and another top IRS official, Lois Lerner, over whether the agency had targeted conservative groups.

Many Republican lawmakers are sympathetic with groups associated with the conservative Tea Party movement, which have complained since 2010 about overly aggressive IRS agents.

"More than two years after the problem began, and a year after the IRS told us there was no problem, the president is beginning to take action," Senate Republican Minority leader Mitch McConnell said.

"If the president is as concerned about this issue as he claims, he'll work openly and transparently with Congress to get to the bottom of the scandal no stonewalling, no half-answers, no withholding of witnesses," McConnell said in an apparent reference to congressional Republicans' frustration with what they view as the administration's lack of cooperation in the Benghazi probe.

WERE LAWMAKERS MISLED?

Obama's announcement of Miller's firing came at the end of a day in which Republicans stepped up their calls for action against the agency chief.

McConnell and other Republicans, pointing to the IRS' acknowledgement that Miller knew about the targeting of conservative groups in 2012, have said that neither Miller nor his predecessor, Douglas Shulman, ever told lawmakers about the problem.

Miller had been on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to meet privately with lawmakers about the IRS scandal.

Max Baucus, a Democrat who heads the Senate Finance committee and will lead one of the investigations, said he did not believe Miller was forthcoming enough when they met on Tuesday.

"At one point, Acting Commissioner Miller knew about it and yet these practices were still going on," Republican Representative Charles Boustany of Louisiana, a member of the Ways and Means Committee, told Reuters.

In a message to colleagues after Obama's announcement, Miller said that there was a "strong and immediate need" to restore public trust in the nation's tax agency.

"This has been an incredibly difficult time for the IRS given the events of the past few days," Miller wrote.

Miller, a veteran IRS bureaucrat who took over as the agency's temporary chief six months ago, was still scheduled to testify on Friday before the House Ways and Means Committee, the first of three congressional panels to hold hearings on the IRS scandal. The Justice Department has launched a criminal probe.

Underscoring Republicans' determination to press forward with the IRS investigation, Republican Representative Darrell Issa of California, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, asked Miller earlier on Wednesday to make sure that five mid-level IRS employees would be available for questioning.

Before the announcement of Miller's firing, CNN quoted a congressional source as saying Miller had said the IRS had pinpointed two "rogue" employees in the agency's Cincinnati office as being principally responsible for "overly aggressive" reviews of requests for tax-exempt status by Tea Party groups.

Democrats also have expressed outrage over the IRS' actions, but mostly have avoided chastising the Obama administration.

Sander Levin, the leading Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, called Obama's announcement a "vital first step in achieving accountability" for the IRS and urged officials to impose a series of recommendations made in the report by the Treasury Department's inspector general.

TOUGH TALK

Earlier, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner summed up many Republicans' attitude toward the IRS scandal, saying: "My question isn't about who is going to have to resign. My question is who is going to jail over this scandal."

The audit issued on Tuesday by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration described a series of problems within the IRS that led the agency to use "inappropriate criteria" for evaluating tax-exempt groups, in part by singling out scores of conservative Tea Party and "Patriot" organizations for increased scrutiny.

But the audit did not find evidence the IRS actions were motivated by partisan interests - a conclusion some Republicans do not accept. The notion of a federal agency targeting conservatives based on ideology feeds into a Republican narrative of growing government intrusion under Obama.

For the IRS and the administration, the stakes are particularly high in the scandal because the tax agency has an increasingly significant role in checking the tax status of non-profit groups that dabble in politics, and in enforcing parts of Obama's overhaul of the healthcare system.

Nevada Republican Senator Dean Heller is among those who plan to push legislation that would suspend $440 million of IRS funding intended to help enforce "Obamacare."

MORE RESIGNATIONS TO COME?

Republicans have also called for the removal of Lerner, head of the IRS tax-exempt organizations office. Lerner apologized on behalf of the agency when she revealed the targeting of conservative groups last week.

Aides to Republican lawmakers probing the IRS said that as their bosses seek to determine whether the White House acted improperly, another focus of congressional investigators will be an Obama political appointee: IRS chief counsel William Wilkins.

He is the top legal adviser to the IRS, which has a quasi-independent status within the U.S. government. Wilkins takes the lead on all litigation involving the IRS, from Swiss banking probes to cases against tax protesters.

Wilkins' office was made aware of the targeting of conservative groups as early as August 2011, according to the inspector general report.

The report does not make clear whether Wilkins - who reports to the Treasury Department's general counsel - himself knew of the targeting in 2011, or when he first learned of it.

Another question is whether Wilkins, whose office employs about 1,600 lawyers, might have taken the matter elsewhere within the Obama administration.

The IRS issued a statement saying Wilkins did not participate in the August 2011 meeting, which the agency said involved "staff attorneys several layers below Wilkins."

The inspector general report puts much of the blame for the targeting on incompetence by lower-level employees and dysfunction among managers, but Republicans are aiming higher.

"I refuse to believe that lower-level officials would be making those kinds of decisions," Boustany said, adding it was too early to call for any particular official's ouster.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced on Tuesday he was opening an FBI probe into the scandal, said the criminal investigation could include looking into possible violations of the Hatch Act, a law prohibiting political activity by federal employees.

(Additional reporting by Mark Felsenthal, Roberta Rampton, John Whitesides, Thomas Ferraro, Richard Cowan, Kevin Drawbaugh, Patrick Temple West, Dena Aubin and Nanette Byrnes; Editing by David Lindsey and Peter Cooney)

The Atlanta-based private school says about 500 students will receive undergraduate degrees Sunday, becoming what are known as "Morehouse Men."

It is Obama's second graduation speech of the year. Last Sunday, he urged graduates of Ohio State University in Columbus to become vigorous participants in their democracy.

After the speech, Obama is scheduled to attend a Democratic Senate fundraiser in Atlanta.

Obama's third and final commencement address of the season comes Friday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

The 330-foot-wide (100 meters)will miss Earth by 600,000 miles (960,000 kilometers) when it zips by on Saturday (March 9). The space rock flyby will come just days after the 33-foot (10 m) asteroid 2013 EC approached within 230,000 miles (370,000 km) of us early Monday (March 4).

When asteroid 2013 ET passes Earth, it will be at a range equivalent to 2.5 times the distance between the planet and the moon, making it too faint and far away for most stargazers to spot in the night sky. But the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy, run by astrophysicist Gianluca Masi, will webcast a live telescope view of the space rock's flyby on Friday (March 8), beginning at 2 p.m. EST (1900 GMT). You can access the free broadcast here: .

There is no danger that 2013 ET will hit Earth, researchers say, just as 2013 EC posed no threat. But their flybys are slightly unsettling nonetheless, since bothwere discovered a mere few days ago.

Indeed, many space rocks are hurtling undetected through Earth's neck of the cosmic woods. Astronomers estimate that the number of near-Earth asteroids tops 1 million, but just 9,700 have been discovered to date.

Undetected objects can strike Earth without warning, as the surpriselast month illustrated. The 55-foot (17 m) asteroid that caused the Feb. 15 Russian fireball detonated in the atmosphere before astronomers even knew it existed.

While many scientists stress the urgent need for expanded and improved asteroid-detection efforts, there is some good news: Humanity is unlikely to go the way of the dinosaurs anytime soon.

NASA researchers have identified and mapped the orbits of 95 percent of the 980 or so near-Earth asteroids at least 0.6 miles (1 km) wide, which could threaten human civilization if they hit us. None of these behemoths are on a collision course with Earth in the foreseeable future.

For comparison, the asteroid believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago likely measured about 6 miles (10 km) across, scientists say.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter . Follow us , or . This article was first published on .

A strike by just technical workers could have slowed or even halted production of Boeing airplanes, with the workers key to solving engineering issues on the factory floor.

It also could have complicated a wide-ranging review of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner by the Federal Aviation Administration and a probe by the National Transportation Safety Board, after charred batteries on two 787s prompted a grounding of the entire fleet in January.

Last month, a second, larger SPEEA bargaining unit representing 15,500 professional engineers narrowly accepted a similar contract.

"The votes by technical workers and engineers in recent weeks will allow us to come together and focus on the challenges and opportunities we face this year," Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Ray Conner said in a statement.

Members of the technical workers bargaining unit voted 4,244 to approve the contract and 654 voted to reject it, with two abstentions, union representatives in Seattle said after votes were tallied.

The technical workers are represented by the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA).

The decision announced on Monday ends a contract negotiation that began nearly a year ago.

Last month, the technical workers, a bargaining unit with about 7,500 members, narrowly rejected the same contract and authorized union leaders to call a strike.

The professional engineers also authorized the union to call a strike, but that decision became moot because the contract they approved prohibited workers from striking while a contract is in effect.

That would have meant the technical workers would have struck alone had they walked out.

The contracts covering both groups provide 5 percent annual pay raises in each of the next four years, up from 3.5 percent for technical workers in Boeing's original offer.

The contracts eliminate a pension for new hires, leaving them with a 401(k) plan. Current workers have both a pension and a 401(k).

Some of the technical workers may have voted against the offer last month because they earn lower salaries than professional engineers and are more concerned about their retirement savings, the union said.

Technical workers earn about $79,000 a year on average, while professional engineers earn about $110,000.

"Like most new employees at Boeing, technical workers and engineers will now receive the company's 'enhanced 401(k)' and not the defined benefit pension," SPEEA said in a statement.

"By the end of the new agreement, SPEEA-represented technical workers, and also the engineers, will have received eight straight years of 5 percent salary increase pools, with guaranteed minimum wage increases each year of the contract."

The pools provide money to distribute among employees for raises of varying amounts. All workers are assured a minimum raise.

(Reporting by Alwyn Scott; Editing by Paul Tait and Ryan Woo)