IOC President Jacques Rogge says he's optimistic that Saudi Arabia will send female athletes to the Olympics for the first time at this summer's London Games.

Rogge tells The Associated Press the IOC is in talks with Saudi Arabia on the "practicalities" of including women on its Olympic team.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has landed robotic explorers on the surface of Mars, sent probes to outer planets and operates a worldwide network of antennas that communicates with interplanetary spacecraft.

Its latest mission is defending itself in a workplace lawsuit filed by a former computer specialist who claims he was demoted — and then let go — for promoting his views on intelligent design, the belief that a higher power must have had a hand in creation because life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone.

Amateur cybersleuths have been hunting malware, raising firewalls and fending off mock hack attacks in a series of simulations supported in part by Britain's eavesdropping agency.

The games are intended to pull badly-needed talent into the country's burgeoning cybersecurity sector, according to former security minister Pauline Neville-Jones, who spoke at a closing ceremony held Sunday at the Science Museum in the English port city of Bristol.

Sunday was "fun day" for Beyonce and Jay-Z: The new parents enjoyed a concert by R&B singer The-Dream in New York.

The couple jammed to the singer-songwriter in the VIP section of SOB's, a small club that houses a few hundred people.

A semiofficial Iranian news agency reports that a ceremony in honor of Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi has been canceled after failing to receive official permission.

The Monday report by Ilna says two Iranian cinema groups issued a statement saying "cultural custodians" did not allow the ceremony to be held.

An elderly gorilla that lives at a U.S. zoo has a new companion: a bunny named Panda.

The Erie Zoo's gorilla, Samantha, has been without a full-time friend since the death of Rudy, a male gorilla, in 2005.

F. Sherwood Rowland, the Nobel prize-winning chemist who sounded the alarm on the thinning of the Earth's ozone layer and crusaded against the use of man-made chemicals that were harming earth's atmospheric blanket, has died. He was 84.

Rowland died Saturday at his home in Corona del Mar of complications from Parkinson's disease, the dean of the University of California, Irvine's physical sciences department said Sunday.

A rowdy band of bloodsuckers, gunslingers, wily wise guys, jaded private eyes, hardboiled reporters and good girls gone bad, stuck in an attic together for 80 years, is going its separate ways.

Nearly three dozen movie theater posters from the Golden Age of Hollywood found in a Pennsylvania attic are expected to fetch $250,000 at auction in Texas this month. They were stuck together with wallpaper glue when they were purchased for around $30,000 at a country auction last fall in Berwick, near Wilkes-Barre in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Long before Richard Nixon rose to power and fell from grace, he was just another man in love.

Decades before he became known to some as "Tricky Dick," Nixon was the one penning nicknames (sweet ones) to his future bride in gushy love notes that reveal a surprisingly soft and romantic side of the man taken down by Watergate. Nixon shared the stage with Patricia Ryan in a community theater production and six of the dozens of letters they exchanged during their two-year courtship will be unveiled Friday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum as part of an exhibit celebrating the 100th birthday of the woman Nixon playfully called his "Irish gypsy."

In her first interview since Whitney Houston's death, daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown said she's "doing as good as I possibly can" and recalled the tender last moments she shared with her superstar mother before her sudden death last month.

"She's always with me," said the 19-year-old, Houston's only child and sole heir. "Her spirit is strong, it's a strong spirit. I feel her pass through me all the time."