LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Steve Carell has inhabited many different roles, from a 40-year-old virgin, a bumbling office manager and a Vegas magician, but it is an evil villain in animated film "Despicable Me 2" where he finds a close connection as a real-life dad.

Carell, 50, who appears again as Gru in "Despicable Me 2," and as a dysfunctional dad in independent comedy "The Way, Way Back," both out in theaters this week, is also exploring new challenges in his career with the hopes of more dramatic roles.

The actor talked to Reuters about his similarities to Gru, not getting pigeon-holed and donning suits for "Anchorman 2."

Q: Now that he's a dad, was there any fear that Gru wasn't going to be quite as despicable as the first film?

A: I feel like you still see that dark side of him and when push comes to shove, he is an evil mastermind and he always will be. He's reformed, he can't be that anymore because he has kids. His career has to change but his sense of self doesn't really.

Q: Which part of Gru's story did you relate to in this film?

A: I have two little kids so I don't really relate to him as a super spy, but I do relate to him as a dad for sure, and the fact that he has a daughter that's getting to the age that she's interested in boys and dating, I have a daughter that is just on the verge of that age, so I think I related to that most of all.

Q: Are your priorities changing in your career now that you're getting older and your kids are getting older?

A: I've been doing some more dramatic work, I'm writing something now and eventually I might direct something. I've got some other things in the fire, but that's just to keep it interesting and exciting.

It's interesting how this movie mirrors what a lot of parents go through when they have kids, because initially, when you have kids, the focus becomes the kids. I know that became the case with my wife and I, almost at the expense of everything else, it became all about our kids. Which is fine, but within that, you can't lose your sense of self, you can't lose your career and what motivates you and what nourishes you. I think that's the character of Gru, he's at odds with himself, so he needs to find something that's not being a villain but is equally satisfying.

Q: Were you ever concerned you could get pigeonholed into a certain character from your comedy roles?

A: I've done big commercial movies and little independent movies, and I've played jerks and suicidal Proust scholars, and I feel like I've been really lucky to play all the different types of characters I play, so no, I don't worry about that. If I do get pigeonholed, it's nothing I can really control.

Q: You recently returned to "The Office" for the finale in May, was it difficult saying goodbye second time round?

"I feel like I really said goodbye to it the first time. When I came back, it was primarily to honor the show and out of respect for all of my friends and the people who created it, I just wanted it to be a simple tip of the hat to the show and not to take away from the goodbye and the farewell that all of those people were having, because I felt like I already had mine and I didn't want to step on their moments."

Q: Your upcoming film "Anchorman 2" has been getting a lot of attention. How is it getting back into the suits?

A: So much fun. It felt the same. The first time around, none of us knew what we were doing or whether it would be funny. We thought it would be funny, but you never know...if it's going to work or why it works necessarily, but that one we all felt like it could be really funny, and this, we have the same feeling about. It was just fun to do, it was ridiculous, we laughed until we cried everyday.

Q: How do you pay homage to the first film and also take the storyline forward with a sequel?

A: I think if you like the first one, you'll like this one as much. I don't want to oversell it, I don't want to hype it too much, I haven't seen it, I've just shot it. But based on what we've filmed, it seems like it's going to be a truly funny movie.

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Paul Casciato)

U.S. companies start reporting their second-quarter results this week, led by aluminum producer Alcoa, the first company in the Dow Jones industrial average to announce results. Other major companies reporting include JPMorgan and Wells Fargo.

Analysts predict that earnings growth for companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 3 percent in the second quarter. While growth is down from 5 percent in the first quarter, earnings are still expected to reach record levels.

Investors and traders will search for evidence that companies are increasing revenues, not just cutting costs to boost profits. Sales growth is predicted to fall 0.3 percent in the second quarter.

"We'll be looking to see where revenue comes in," said Jim Dunigan, an executive vice president of investments at PNC.

After the market closed Monday, Alcoa reported a wider second-quarter loss due to weak aluminum prices.

Alcoa lost $119 million, or 11 cents per share, in the April-through-June quarter. That compared with a loss of $2 million, or break-even on a per-share basis, a year earlier.

Alcoa fell 5 cents, or 0.6 percent, to $7.87 in after-hours trading.

The Dow rose 88.85 points, or 0.6 percent, to close at 15,224.69. The Standard & Poor's 500 index gained 8.57 points, or 0.5 percent, to end at 1,640.46.

Dell was among the big gainers in the S&P 500 index. An advisory firm recommended that company shareholders support a plan to take the computer company private. Founder Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners have offered to buy Dell for $24.4 billion, or $13.65 a share. Dell rose 41 cents, or 3.1 percent, to $13.44.

The Russell 2000 index, an index of small-company stocks, closed at an all-time high 1,009.25. The index past the 1,000 mark for the first time Friday and has gained 18.8 percent this year, a sign that investors are more willing to take on risk.

In other trading, the Nasdaq composite rose 5.45, or 0.2 percent, to 3,484.83, the smallest gain of the major indexes.

The index was weighed down by a slump in Intel. The chipmaker fell after a Citigroup analyst wrote that weak PC sales and waning demand for smartphones would stunt the company's growth. Intel, which makes up 2.2 percent of the Nasdaq, fell 88 cents, or 3.6 percent, to $23.18.

Other chipmakers also declined. Qualcomm dropped 96 cents, or 1.6 percent, to $59.99.

In government bond trading, the yield on the 10-year government note pulled back from a two-year high of 2.74 Friday. It fell to 2.64 percent on Monday.

The yield had jumped after the government reported strong U.S. hiring for June on Friday. Investors believe that the improving jobs market will prompt the Federal Reserve to ease back on its bond-buying program. The Fed is buying $85 billion in bonds each month to keep interest rates low and spur borrowing and investing.

For the first five months of the year stocks moved higher, supported by the backdrop of low interest rates, a recovering housing market and increased hiring. The S&P 500 index gained 17 percent by May 21 and stood at a record 1,669.

But the stock market pulled back when Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said that the central bank might consider easing its stimulus.

The S&P 500 dropped as low as 1,573 on June 24, about 5.7 percent below its record close.

Since then stocks have gradually recouped losses as investors appear to be getting more comfortable with higher interest rates.

"Interest rates, even though they've risen, are still incredibly low," said Brent Schutte, a market strategist at BMO Private Bank. "Right now, increases in rates are a good thing because it means the economy is doing a little bit better."

The rising rates are still making bond investors nervous though.

Investors pulled a net $900 million from U.S. stock funds for the week ending June 26, but they withdrew $28.1 billion from bond funds over the same period, according to data from the Investment Company Institute.

That sell-off may boost stocks as investors look to reinvest their proceeds from bonds.

In commodities trading, the price of oil was little changed at $103.14 a barrel. The price of gold rose $22.20, or 1.8 percent, to $1,234.90 an ounce.

Among other stocks making big moves today;

Priceline rose $33.47, or 3.9 percent, to $888.60 after investment bank Morgan Stanley raised its price target for the online bookings company. Analysts at the bank believe that Priceline can climb as high as $1,010 as it continues to grow internationally and worries about shrinking profits dissipate.

SUN VALLEY, Idaho (Reuters) - Liberty Media Corp chairman and cable pioneer John Malone, whose offer to buy Time Warner Cable Inc was rejected by its management, sees Time Warner Cable as a buyer of other cable operators in an industry that needs to be consolidated.

Cable companies need larger scale through consolidation, whether through mergers or joint ventures, the so-called "King of Cable" told reporters on the sidelines of the annual Allen and Co media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Malone's Liberty Media, which has a 28 percent stake in cable operator Charter Communications, has been circling Time Warner Cable. Liberty also has a 1 percent investment in Time Warner Cable.

"(Time Warner Cable) should be a consolidator because they're the second biggest," he said.

Time Warner Cable, with roughly 12 million subscribers, is the No. 2 U.S. cable provider behind Comcast, which has more than 21 million video customers.

Since the 72-year-old Malone jumped back into the U.S. market with Liberty Media's investment in Charter earlier this year, analysts have predicted a wave of cable consolidation. The U.S. cable TV market faces rising programming costs as well as technology threats from upstarts such as Netflix, which offers movies and TV shows to subscribers online.

Malone recently made an offer for Time Warner Cable, which was rejected by its management because they believe it is not beneficial to shareholders, Reuters has reported.

When asked Thursday if he wants to buy Time Warner Cable, he answered only "that's a tough question." While Malone indicated Time Warner Cable could do its own deals, he left open the scenario that Charter could still buy the company.

"Whether A merges with B, B buys A or A, B and C get together to do a joint ventures to do things that have to be done in larger scale, that's really the message I'm trying to deliver," he said, without specifying which companies those letters represent.

Companies have to get bigger to thrive, he said.

"Comcast is large enough to do OK," Malone said. "The rest of the industry needs consolidation, in our view, in order to get scale economics."

In terms of the kind of deals Malone likes, he said that "buying the guy (geographically) next door makes the most sense," referring to a decade-long push by larger companies to swap local cable systems with one another to create larger clusters.

"Horizontal mergers are the safest, usually have the most synergies and are the easiest, but a lot of that has already been done in the industry," he said. "At this point you tend to look more for scale."

Time Warner Cable, which has long viewed Cablevision as an acquisition target because it makes sense geographically in the New York area, has reached out to smaller operators Cox and Cablevision about creating larger clusters in some of its main markets, Reuters has reported.

"Obviously if you find you could buy the guy next door, that's the best, but those opportunities are somewhat limited," Malone said.

Malone, a former investor in satellite provider DirecTV, also said he thinks the two largest satellite players should merge "because scale economics in the media business drives down costs and makes it possible for larger investment."

Dish Network has attempted to buy DirecTV but U.S. regulators blocked the deal in 2002.

(Reporting by Liana B. Baker; Editing by Ron Grover, Nick Zieminski and Andrew Hay)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama raised U.S. concerns directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday over Moscow's handling of former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, but there was no sign of a breakthrough on Washington's demand that Russia expel him.

Obama and Putin spoke by phone in a discussion that White House spokesman Jay Carney said earlier would largely be about Snowden, who is wanted in the United States for disclosing secret surveillance programs. Carney had accused Russia of providing Snowden a "propaganda platform" to air his complaints about the United States.

A White House statement about the Obama-Putin call offered no indication that Putin was prepared to send Snowden back to the United States.

"The two leaders noted the importance of U.S.-Russian bilateral relations and discussed a range of security and bilateral issues, including the status of Mr. Edward Snowden and cooperation on counter-terrorism in the lead-up to the Sochi Winter Olympics," the statement said. The Sochi Olympics are in 2014.

The high-level contact came during intense diplomatic wrangling over Snowden, who has been holed up in a transit area at a Moscow airport since arriving from Hong Kong on June 23. He is seeking asylum in either Russia or in one of three countries in Latin American that have offered to take him: Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia.

Snowden, 30, is wanted on espionage charges, accused of taking records about secret U.S. surveillance of internet and phone traffic and releasing them to the news media. The disclosures have raised Americans' concerns about domestic spying and strained relations with some U.S. allies.

Putin has so far refused all U.S. entreaties to return Snowden to the United States.

'DOING THE RIGHT THING'

The case presents Putin with an international headache as he prepares to host Obama and other world leaders at a G20 summit in St. Petersburg.

"I can't imagine Mr. Putin wants this thing hanging around as it is necessary to get ready for the summit in September," said James Collins, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia who is director of the Russia and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said it would raise concerns in the U.S.-Russian relationship if Moscow were to accept an asylum request from Snowden.

"However we are not at that point yet. They still have the opportunity to do the right thing and return Mr. Snowden to the United States and that's what our hope is," she told reporters.

The White House and the State Department complained that the Russian government had permitted Snowden to meet with human rights groups at the Moscow airport. Snowden told activists on Friday he was seeking temporary asylum in Russia and had no regrets about spilling U.S. spy secrets.

"Providing a propaganda platform for Mr. Snowden runs counter to the Russian government's previous declarations of Russia's neutrality," Carney said.

He said it was "also incompatible with Russian assurances that they do not want Mr. Snowden to further damage U.S. interests."

In Moscow, Putin's spokesman repeated earlier conditions that Snowden should stop harming the interests of the United States if he wants asylum.

The drama has tested U.S.-Russian relations, although no lasting damage has been apparent so far.

"My sense is that both Washington and Moscow have lots of experience in compartmentalizing these kinds of issues when you've got spies or defectors," said Steven Pifer, a Russia expert who is director of the Brookings Institution's Arms Control Initiative. "They can fence that off from the rest of the relationship."

(Additional reporting by Deborah Charles; Editing by Peter Cooney)

The display of emotion at talks with Chinese officials, which included wiping his eye, was rare for Kerry, whose wife Teresa Heinz Kerry, 74, was rushed to a Boston hospital on Sunday from their summer home on Massachusetts' Nantucket island with "seizure-like" symptoms.

The State Department has provided few details about her condition beyond saying that doctors have ruled out a stroke, heart attack or brain tumor as causing her symptoms.

A philanthropist and heiress, Heinz Kerry was improving and remained in fair condition at Massachusetts General Hospital, the State Department said on Tuesday.

"Teresa is doing better, under evaluation and, we hope, improving," Kerry said at the opening session of the annual U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue. "I want to thank everybody for the remarkable outpouring of good wishes.

"We are very, very humbled by the expressions of support. I think she is coming along. And I know when she is able to she will thank everybody herself," he said in an emotional tone.

Heinz Kerry, who was born in the southern African nation of Mozambique, was married to Republican Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz III, an heir to the Heinz food fortune, until his death in a 1991 helicopter crash.

She married Kerry, who at the time was a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts, on Nantucket in 1995.

Kerry's second wife, Heinz Kerry is the chairman of the Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies. She is active in environmental issues, has served on numerous boards and has been awarded 10 honorary degrees, according to the Heinz Endowment.

(Reporting by Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Bill Trott)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Tesla Motors Inc on Thursday unveiled a system to swap battery packs in its electric cars in about 90 seconds, a service Chief Executive Elon Musk said will help overcome fears about their driving range.

The automaker will roll out the battery-swapping stations later this year, beginning along the heavily-traveled route between Los Angeles and San Francisco and then in the Washington-to-Boston corridor.

"There are some people, they take a lot of convincing," Musk said at an event at Tesla's Los Angeles design studio. "Hopefully this is what convinces people finally that electric cars are the future."

Electric cars have been slow to catch on with consumers because of their high price, limited driving range and lack of a charging infrastructure. Tesla has been working to address some of those issues with fast-charging stations and now with the battery-swapping technology.

A battery pack swap will cost between $60 and $80, about the same as filling up a 15-gallon gas tank, Musk said. Drivers who choose to swap must reclaim their original battery on their return trip or pay the difference in cost for the new pack.

Musk demonstrated two Model S battery pack swaps in the time it took for a car on a screen above the stage to fill up with gas, about four minutes.

The stations will cost about a half a million dollars each to build. They will be located alongside Tesla's fast-charging stations, which take around 30 minutes to charge the car's battery.

Musk told Reuters earlier this week that the battery-replacement network would entail an investment of $50 million to $100 million.

In contrast to several traditional automakers that have rolled out electric vehicles that failed to live up to expectations, Tesla has sold thousands of its luxury electric cars. Investors have embraced the company's strategy and Tesla shares have nearly tripled this year.

The announcement comes a month after Better Place, an electric vehicle company whose business was centered around battery swapping, said it would liquidate.

(Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

That was until last June, when Erica, 52, was diagnosed with a rare form of uterine cancer -- myxoid leiomysarcoma (LMS). Fewer than 150 patients in the United States have the disease, which is poorly understood and for which research is virtually unfunded.

"Our life was totally altered," said Rick Kaitz, 58 and an attorney. The couple, married for 27 years, have two adult daughters. "We were enjoying life, cutting back on work. The kids were out of the house and we were very much in touch."

Now, Kaitz is on family medical leave and is the main caregiver at home, driving back and forth to the , and on a quest to find a cure to save his wife.

"I think what drives me is trying to figure out this cancer," he told ABCNews.com.

Since the early 1990s, the couple has ridden or volunteered with the(PMC), which raises money for cancer research and treatment at Dana-Farber through an annual bike-a-thon that crosses the state. For much of that time, Erica Kaitz has been on the PMC's head staff.

In the last three decades, the organization has raised $375 million, more than any other single athletic fundraising event in the country.

And now Rick Kaitz has organized a PMC team of more than 100 runners and cyclists to raise $1.5 million for the foundation he created -- the Erica Kaitz LMS Research NOW Fund at Dana-Farber so that scientists can study these rare sarcomas.

Erica was diagnosed with what her doctors thought was a benign uterine fibroid. A partial hysterectomy revealed that it was an LMS, a cancer with no standard of care for treatment.

Sarcoma in general occurs in less than 1 percent of the population, said , medical oncologist at Dana-Farber and Erica Kaitz's doctor.

"LMS is a sub-type of soft-tissue sarcoma," she said. "It can originate in any part of the body, but the uterus is one of the more common locations of this uncommon cancer."

About 85 percent of all women have uterine fibroids, according to George, and the chances of a suspected fibroid being this type of sarcoma are about 1 in 10,000.

"The challenge is that we don't have any way of identifying which ones of those fibroids may later be identified as sarcoma."

Some doctors speculate that new non-invasive techniques for removing fibroids -- more common now than surgery -- can actually unleash these hidden and aggressive sarcomas.

"The challenge is, we need better tools to ID these rare tumors up front to see if we need to change management at the beginning," she said of treatment for common fibroids.

LMS is so rare it is considered an "orphan disease," one that so few patients have, that there is insufficient funding for research and treatment, and pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to create potential drugs because profits will be negligible.

But the Kaitz fundraising will enable the Dana-Farber research team, led by , senior vice president for experimental therapeutics, to learn more in collaboration with other scientists from top universities.

Demetri was instrumental in demonstrating that Gleevec -- one of the first examples of targeted cancer therapies -- was effective in treating gastrointestinal stromal tumor, a form of sarcoma. His work has led to the FDA approval of several other "smart drugs" for cancer.

An estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Americans are diagnosed with sarcomas each year. Of those, only about 3,000 to 4,000 are leiomysarcomas.

"Erica has a particularly unusual subtype -- at most only 5 to 20 a year," said Demetri. "It looks like it acts differently than other sarcomas and we worry that its behavior is more aggressive."

Though there are many clinical trials for sarcomas and LMS, there are few for her subtype myxoid, which means "mucus."

After his wife's diagnosis, Rick Kaitz consulted with three top medical institutions -- Dana-Farber, New York's Memorial Sloane Kettering and Duke University in North Carolina -- and each offered different opinions on how to best treat the disease. None could promise a good outcome.

"One thing we learned, and this is not the case with all rare cancers, it's really kind of trial and error," said Rick Kaitz. "It's like going to Vegas and playing craps. You see if something works and then you try something else. You really don't know what is driving [the cancer] and what works and what doesn't work."

Erica Kaitz underwent a second surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, but a month later, there was explosive tumor growth in her abdominal and pelvis. Doctors at Dana-Farber began chemotherapy with IV treatment, once every three weeks.

"Things slowed down," said her husband, but after seven cycles over 21 weeks, "it stopped working."

For the last 10 months, doctors have tried a variety of drug therapies.

"In the most successful type of targeted therapy [in other sarcomas], we have identified the mutation and the short circuit and the cell that shuts off the short circuit," said lead researcher Demetri. "In Erica's type, nobody knows where the short circuit is or what they are. The challenge to develop an elegant targeted therapy is basically impossible."

He said Kaitz's funding may help scientists understand more about this class of tumors and help a larger group of patients down the road, but may not provide any benefit for Erica.

"What does it take to be game-changing?" asked Demetri, who will also ride in the PMC race. "It's important to manage public and private expectations. We are incredibly grateful for the support of orphan research. It's hard to get research funding even for the common diseases and for the rare ones, almost impossible."

But with such a complex challenge, even "a billion dollars" may not yield immediate answers. "But, as I tell Rick and Erica," he said, "you never know when we are going to trip over the next discovery."

Today, Erica Kaitz is "hanging in there," according to her husband, who does all the cooking, shopping and organizing of her multiple medications.

"It's been a total role reversal," he said.

She suffers side effects from therapy and Kaitz worries about cardiac damage with the latest drug. "For her, it gets a little old and tiring," he said. "She has no hair and fatigue and it's hard making the bowels work."

"She appreciates everything I am doing but I don't think she particularly likes being the patient," he said. "We don't spend a lot of time talking about regression and we try to enjoy the good days, and there are a fair number. But many days are not so good."

Rick Kaitz said he feels as if he has become a "research scientist" as he desperately works against the clock to raise funds to save his wife. He also knows that in the $35 billion war on cancer, his foundation's $1.5 million contribution is "peanuts."

"But it's peanuts that will be driving the largest LMS research initiative ever taken," said Kaitz. "It's exciting, but it's also pretty pathetic. I am not poo-pooing breast cancer or prostate cancer -- no one wants to get any cancer, but you are better off with one of those rather than one that is not understood."

A group of researchers with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) assessed all of the world's birds, amphibians and warm-water reef-building corals 16,857 species in total and analyzed their exposure tochange, as well as a long list of biological and ecological characteristics that would affect each species' sensitivity and adaptability to changes in their natural habitat. These wildlife groups were chosen because they are relatively well-studied and they cover terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments.

Up to 83 percent of birds, 66 percent ofand 70 percent of corals that they identified as highly vulnerable to climate change are not on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the study found. The Red List is the most widely recognized inventory of the planet's most endangered species. Species on the list are considered the most threatened with extinction and have generally experienced a sharp decline in population or a shrinking geographic range.

The researchers also made maps showing clusters of the most vulnerable animals that are not on the Red List. The most highly threatened but unlisted birds are concentrated in the Amazon basin and eastern South America, Europe, the Congo basin, parts of North America, northern and central Asia and Australia. The most vulnerable amphibians are bunched in the Amazon basin, Eurasia, southern North America to Mesoamerica and Madagascar, while at-risk but unlisted corals are concentrated in the Caribbean and southern Red Sea, the researchers wrote.

"The findings revealed some alarming surprises," study leader Wendy Foden, of the IUCN Global Species Programme, said in a statement. "We hadn't expected that so many species and areas that were not previously considered to be of concern would emerge as highly vulnerable to climate change. Clearly, if we simply carry on with conservation as usual, without taking climate change into account, we'll fail to help many of the species and areas that need it most."

Previous research has shown that birds, amphibians and corals are all facing existential threats due to climate change and other environmental factors. A study in the journal PLoS One last year found thatare on the rise mainly because of habitat destruction for agriculture development. Amphibians have seen a precipitous decline in the past several decades. Their permeable skin and water-and-land life cycle make them especially vulnerable to changes in the environment, and the deadly spread of the chytrid fungus has sent frog populations plummeting worldwide. As for corals, warming oceans could mean more frequentfor the reef-builders and eventually lead to mass die-offs.

The IUCN study was detailed this month in the journal .

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The simple, but elegant garment created by Hollywood costume designer Helen Rose for the then 18-year-old Taylor is an oyster shell-colored, floor-length satin gown with a fine silk gauze off-the-shoulder illusion neckline.

The dress, which was a gift from MGM film studios, has a top estimate of 50,000 pounds ($75,300). Rose also designed Grace Kelly's wedding dress for her marriage to the Prince of Monaco.

By the time Taylor married Hilton she was already a veteran actress and was just a year away from her Oscar-nominated performance in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's "A Place in the Sun".

The A-list of old Hollywood - Greer Garson, Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Esther Williams, and Van Johnson - were among the many stars who came to congratulate the bride.

The star of "Cleopatra" surpassed Michael Jackson as the highest-earning deceased celebrity in a survey released by Forbes in October 2012, with her estate pulling in $210 million, much of it from a 2011 auction of jewels, costumes and art work.

The auction of Taylor's jewels took in $116 million, more than double the record for a single collection, and set new marks for pearls, colorless diamonds and Indian jewels.

Taylor, who died in 2011 at the age of 79, was married eight times, twice to actor Richard Burton, and had a career spanning seven decades.

She first gained fame in 1944's "National Velvet" at age 12, and was nominated for five Oscars, winning best actress for "Butterfield 8" (1960) and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966), which also starred Burton.

(Reporting by Paul Casciato; Editing by Michael Roddy)

Danny Werfel told reporters Monday that after becoming acting IRS chief last month, he discovered inappropriate and wide-ranging criteria in lists screeners use to single out groups for careful examinations. He did not specify what terms were on the lists.

Werfel's comments suggest the IRS may have been targeting groups other than tea party and other conservative organizations for tough examinations to see if they qualify. The agency has been under fire since last month for targeting those groups.

Werfel said he has suspended use of those lists. Investigators have previously said agency officials abolished targeting of conservative groups in those lists in May 2012.