Washington - The United States has moved to cut off all Iranian transactions routed through US banks to further tighten sanctions over the Islamic state's nuclear and other illicit activities, the US Treasury Department announced Thursday.

Iranian banks and other institutions could previously send transactions through US banks as long as they were initiated by a non-Iranian or American bank outside the US and ended in a non- Iranian or American bank outside the US.

Washington - Art has not escaped the downward pressure of the economy, as Christie's failed to get even half of the minimum prices expected for a raft of late 19th and 20th Century artworks.

The New York auction house brought in only 47 million dollars instead of the 104 million dollars projected as the minimum values in its auction late Wednesday night.

Nearly 30 per cent of the work for sale found no buyer, including works by Manet, Cezanne, Rothko and de Kooning.

Hamburg - German Bundesliga clubs VfB Stuttgart, VfL Wolfsburg and Hertha Berlin on Thursday stayed on course for a place in the knockout stage of the UEFA Cup with good results from their group games.

Wolfsburg had to come from behind to beat Dutch club Heerenveen 5-1 in the so-called Group of Death.

With AC Milan, Braga and Premier League side Portsmouth also in Group E, the German side went into the game knowing that they could not afford to lose at home.

Washington - President-elect Barack Obama made his first White House appointment on Thursday - picking Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, and will meet with President George W Bush to discuss the transition phase on Monday.

Emanuel, a close friend of Obama's, served as a senior advisor in former president Bill Clinton's White House in the 1990s and oversaw the successful Democratic effort to regain control of the House in 2006.

New York - The World Health Organization on Thursday praised a decision to completely ban smoking and sale of cigarettes inside UN headquarters in New York as well as in other cities.

A smoking ban had been in place, but government delegates attending UN meetings at headquarters in New York, Geneva and Vienna, the three major UN buildings, usually ignore the ban, citing their rights as government officials.

Mexico City - Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Thursday attended the funeral of some of the victims of Tuesday's airplane crash that killed 14 people, and promised a thorough investigation into the accident.

Mexican Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino, 37, died in the crash, along with 13 others.

Calderon - a close friend of Mourino's - and his entire cabinet attended the burial ceremony in the Campo Marte military facility in Mexico City, not far from the site where the Lear Jet 45 crashed.