FRANKFURT (Reuters) - In a leafy suburb of Frankfurt, a state-of-the-art plant churns out up to 1 million insulin pens every day in French drugmaker Sanofi's drive to keep its no. 2 spot in the $43 billion-a-year diabetes market.

The facility is part of a hub - nicknamed Insulin City - dedicated to research and development, production, and smart technology for diabetes treatments that Sanofi says will help drive its growth as older blockbusters lose patent protection.

"This site represents an investment of more than 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) and clearly shows our dedication to diabetes," Christian Lerche, head of R&D project direction at Sanofi's diabetes unit, told Reuters.

It is a critical moment for Lerche and his colleagues: while arch-rival and market leader Novo Nordisk has suffered a recent product setback in the United States, competition is mounting from the likes of Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca.

All are eyeing a fast-growing global market in which the total number of diabetes sufferers is projected to leap to well over half a billion by 2030.

Lantus, a synthetic insulin developed at the Frankfurt centre in the 1990s, is currently Sanofi's top-selling drug. Last year it grew almost 20 percent to generate 5 billion euros in sales - but is set to lose patent protection in 2015.

To fend off its rivals, Sanofi is testing an improved version of Lantus in late-stage trials as well as a combination of the product with Lyxumia, a once-daily injection that controls blood sugar levels in a different way.

Investors and medics will get an insight into whether Sanofi has a new winner when data on these studies are made public at the June 21-25 American Diabetes Association annual meeting in Chicago. If positive, the results could prove Sanofi is in good shape to protect its market position.

As part of its plan to broaden its diabetes portfolio beyond drugs and injection pens, Sanofi has also rolled out new devices, like a blood glucose meter plug-in for Apple's iPhone in the United States, which allows diabetics to check their levels on a smartphone. It is currently testing more advanced versions that would e-mail readings to the doctor.

FIERCE COMPETITION

Drugmakers are competing fiercely in the type 2 diabetes market as the number of people with the disease, which is linked to obesity, continues to grow rapidly - including in emerging markets where middle classes are switching to a Western diet.

An estimated 371 million people worldwide are living with diabetes, with China now topping the list, according to the International Diabetes Federation. It predicts as many as 552 million may have the disease by 2030.

Diabetics typically start out on oral medicine but often need to move on to insulin injections to regulate their blood-sugar levels.

One side-effect of taking insulin can be hypoglycaemia, when sugar levels become dangerously low.

The new formulation of Lantus promises to last longer and reduce the incidence of hypoglycaemia seen with the old version - a drawback that Novo Nordisk has highlighted when touting its big new product hope, a novel insulin called Tresiba.

Although Tresiba is approved in Europe, Novo Nordisk suffered a setback in the United States where concerns over potential heart side effects mean new tests are needed, delaying a U.S. launch by several years.

That delay could play straight into Sanofi's hands, provided the improved version of Lantus avoids similar safety issues.

Deutsche Bank analysts expect the latest clinical trials to confirm a good profile for the Sanofi product, increasing investors' confidence that the French group can not only protect but also grow its diabetes business beyond 2016.

Sanofi shares have outperformed the European drugs sector by 16 percent over the past 12 months on growing optimism that the company will find new growth drivers, in diabetes and elsewhere, to offset loss of patent protection on older medicines.

BIOSIMILAR THREAT

Still, the pressure is on. Sanofi needs to make its new Lantus a success because it is likely to face competition from a so-called biosimilar version of the original Lantus made by Eli Lilly, the world's no. 3 insulin maker.

Because Lantus is a complex biological drug, it is difficult to make chemically identical generic versions but rivals can develop a product that is very similar.

"Since Eli Lilly is an established diabetes player, that's quite a threat," said Valentina Gburcik, a healthcare analyst at consulting firm GlobalData.

At the same time, Sanofi faces indirect competition from the growing class of injectable GLP-1 medicines that stimulate insulin production when blood sugar levels become too high.

Sanofi's own Lyxumia is just such a product but the GLP-1 landscape is becoming increasingly crowded. Novo Nordisk is pushing its top-seller Victoza hard in the face of competition from Byetta and Bydureon, which are now sold jointly by Bristol-Myers and AstraZeneca, after they bought out Amylin Pharmaceuticals. Several others are waiting in the wings.

Having launched Lyxumia in Europe, Sanofi is working to develop a pen that would deliver a combination of the treatment with Lantus.

"Lyxumia will take a small market share by itself, but it may grab considerable market share from Lantus biosimilars because the combination shows a much better profile than Lantus alone," Gburcik said.

There is plenty of work to keep the diabetes team in Frankfurt busy. ($1 = 0.7579 euros)

(Editing by Ben Hirschler and Mark Trevelyan)

Philip was "comfortable and in good spirits," Buckingham Palace officials said, but he will need about two months of convalescence following the surgery. Details of his condition were not released.

The queen spent about half an hour at the London Clinic in central London.

Earlier Monday, Philip's son, Prince Edward, made a similar visit. Afterward, Edward told reporters outside the hospital that his father was doing well.

Officials said Philip is expected to be hospitalized for about two weeks before going into convalescence.

They said the royal is "progressing satisfactorily" after the exploratory surgery at the clinic on Friday. Results of various tests are expected this week, but it is not clear if the diagnosis will be made public.

Philip has suffered heart and bladder problems in the past, but he appeared well when he was last seen in public at a Buckingham Palace garden party Thursday.

His birthday was officially celebrated by two extended gun salutes in central London.

The plan, if implemented, is an attempt to address one of Israel's more pressing issues: what to do with an influx of roughly 60,000 African migrants who have sneaked into Israel from Egypt over the past eight years.

Their arrivals have put Israel in a bind. Many Israelis believe that the Jewish state, founded in part as a refuge for Holocaust survivors after World War II, has a responsibility to help the downtrodden. But others fear that taking in tens of thousands of Africans will threaten the country's Jewish character and question the extent of Israel's moral obligations beyond those of other nations.

Most of the migrants have come from Eritrea or Sudan, some fleeing repressive regimes and others looking for work.

Over the past year, Israel has taken a series of steps to halt the influx. It built a fence along the border with Egypt that has reduced the number of new arrivals from hundreds each month to just a trickle. Since last summer, it has imprisoned new arrivals while officials determine whether they meet the criteria for refugee status. Last year, Israel offered some migrants cash to leave voluntarily, warning they would be expelled otherwise.

Thousands of Africans still live in slums in Tel Aviv and other cities. Israel has been unable to deport most of them because they would face harm if they returned to their countries of origin.

According to the document, a state lawyer told the Israeli Supreme Court on Sunday that a deal was reached with an unidentified country to absorb some migrants and that Israel was in talks with two other countries to secure a similar agreement. The details of the arrangement were not disclosed, although the state's lawyer, Yochi Gnesin, said the return of migrants would be "gradual."

Later Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voted in favor of a bill prohibiting migrants from removing money from the country before their final departure.

"We have stopped the infiltration phenomenon into Israel. Last month only two infiltrators entered Israel, compared to more than 2,000 a year ago. Now we are focused on the infiltrators leaving," he said in a statement.

Critics said the deal reflects an abdication of responsibility by Israel and that Israel will not be able to properly monitor the migrants' conditions once they are deported.

Tally Kritzman-Amir, an immigration law expert at the Academic Center for Law and Business in Tel Aviv, said that Israel could neither effectively supervise the conditions of deported migrants nor guarantee they would not be sent back to their home countries in the future.

"It is possible to transfer the migrants to a third country," she said, "but the primary responsibility to the rights of the refugees still lies with Israel."

Under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, states are obligated not to send refugees to countries where they would face physical or political danger. It is not clear whether that obligates signatories, of which Israel is one, to monitor the refugees indefinitely after they are deported.

Few other details on the deal were immediately available. Israeli Army Radio reported the country was in east Africa and did not suffer from any unrest that would harm the migrants. Kritzman-Amir said that would make Uganda and South Sudan, which both have good relations with Israel, likely candidates, but she did not have inside information.

Gnesin said the countries involved in absorbing the migrants were doing so "in exchange for one thing or another," although it was not clear what they would receive in return. The Haaretz daily said that Israel had agreed to provide agricultural expertise as part of the deal.

The Supreme Court on Sunday ordered the government to provide details of the arrangement, including the name of the African country, within seven days.

The Enough Project, the Satellite Sentinel Project and two other groups said in the report released Monday that the LRA has turned to elephant poaching "as a means to sustain itself," and that the militia uses money from the illegal trade in ivory to acquire food and other supplies.

"With prices at record-high levels, trading illegal ivory offers the LRA another way to sustain itself in addition to its habitual pillaging," the report said. "Former senior fighters who defected from the group report that the LRA trades ivory for arms, ammunition, and food."

The report said Kony, a cruel warlord who is accused of using boys as fighters and girls as sex slaves, gave the order to butcher elephants for their ivory as far back as 2010. Former captives say that LRA groups in Central African Republic and Congo "trade ivory with unidentified people who arrive in helicopters."

In February Ugandan troops operating in Central African Republic discovered six elephant tusks believed to have been hidden in the bush by the LRA. Ugandan army officials said at the time that they were acting on information given by an LRA defector who said Kony long ago instructed his fighters to find ivory and bring it to him.

Experts say that Africa's elephants are under increased threat from habitat loss and poachers motivated by rising demand for ivory in Asia. About 70 years ago, up to 5 million elephants are believed to have roamed sub-Saharan Africa. Today fewer than a million remain. The elephants of Central Africa, a region long plagued by armed conflict and lawlessness, are especially vulnerable. Much of the harvested ivory ends up as small trinkets.

The new report said Congo's expansive but poorly protected Garamba National Park, which once was used by LRA commanders as safe haven, is the source of some of the ivory that ends up before Kony. But Garamba's elephants also are being targeted by "members of the armed forces of (Congo), South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda," the report said, citing the concerns of park rangers there.

It said the LRA is part of "the larger poaching crisis that puts wild African elephants at risk of local extinction."

Facing pressure from U.S.-backed African Union troops tasked with eliminating its leaders, the LRA which used to have several thousand men is now degraded and scattered in small numbers in Congo, South Sudan, and Central African Republic. Fewer than 500 LRA rebels are still active in the bush, according to the Ugandan military, but they can conduct hit-and-run operations that terrorize villagers and move across the region's porous borders in small groups.

Kony himself is believed to be highly mobile, but the U.S.-based watchdog group Resolve said in a report in April that he recently directed killings from an enclave protected by the Sudanese military. Until early this year, Resolve's report said, Kony and some of his commanders were operating in Kafia Kingi, a disputed area along the Sudan-South Sudan border where African troops tasked with catching Kony don't have access. Sudan's government denies this charge.

Kony, whose rebellion originated in Uganda before spreading to other parts of Central Africa, was indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2005 for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Last year he became the focus of international attention after the advocacy group Invisible Children released a popular online video highlighting LRA crimes and calling for Kony to be stopped from recruiting children.

Some 100 U.S. military advisers are helping Uganda-led African troops to hunt down Kony and other LRA commanders. Their mission was recently set back by a change in government in Central African Republic, where former rebels who now control the country are reportedly hostile to foreign troops. Anti-Kony operations there have been suspended since April, raising fears among watchdog groups that the LRA could use the opportunity to recruit or regroup.

Poaching has also been rampant in the Dzanga-Sangha reserve in the rainforests of southwestern Central African Republic where more than 3,400 forest elephants roam, conservationists have reported. The political chaos since March has allowed poaching to escalate, and anti-poaching rangers who fled the rebel-controlled areas said that Sudanese hunters are now working in tandem with the armed rebels who overthrew the government in March.

Relations between the two leaders were stiff until Churchill arranged a tete-a-tete with Stalin, with the aid of interpreters, which led to a late-night boozy banquet in 1942, according to files released by Britain's National Archives.

"There I found Stalin and Churchill, and Molotov who joined them, sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds, crowned by a suckling pig and innumerable bottles," wrote Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, of the visit.

The mood was "merry as a marriage-bell," he added, though Churchill was complaining of a "slight headache" when Cadogan came to find him at one in the morning, and "seemed wisely confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine."

The two leaders did not engage in much military talk during the meeting, which went on until three in the morning, but Churchill did probe the Georgian-born dictator about his internal policy.

Asked what was happening with the kulaks, the relatively rich farming class Stalin had vowed to exterminate, he responded "with great frankness" saying that the kulaks had been given land in Siberia but '"they were very unpopular with the rest of the people!"'

The evening was dubbed a success by the author of the note, as the two men got on.

"Certainly Winston was impressed, and I think the feeling was reciprocated," he wrote.

(Reporting By Dasha Afanasieva, editing by Paul Casciato)

The singer-songwriter, who is famed for changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol in a wrangle over musical rights, will release his own work as well as a slate of new music by other artists that he produces, Kobalt said.

The announcement came just hours after the 54-year-old Prince was given a Billboard Icon Award (lifetime achievement) and rocked the Billboard Music Awards ceremony with a version of his "Let's Go Crazy" dressed in electric green trousers and sporting an Afro hair style.

Kobalt, which is also a global independent music publishing company, launched an artist and label services division in 2012, allowing artists to maintain ownership of their work and control over when, how and where they will release their music.

Traditional labels often take ownership or part-ownership of the artist's material and often dictate how it is used, an increasingly important sticking point in an industry where digital music can be instantly available.

"This new venture gives Prince the flexibility and freedom he's always sought in a label partner," Kobalt President Richard Sanders said in a statement.

The Grammy award-winning singer will also provide artist development and recording services for newly signed artists that Kobalt will market and distribute.

Kobalt was set up in 2000 by Swedish businessman Willard Ahdritz and its publishing roster includes former Beatle Paul McCartney, Icelandic singer Bjork and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder.

(Reporting by Paul Casciato; Editing by Michael Roddy)

Lollobrigida, a leading sex symbol of the 1950s and 1960s, said she was selling the jewelry to raise money for stem cell research.

A pair of diamond and natural pearl earrings sold for 2.29 million francs ($2.37 million), an auction record.

The earrings beat the $1.98 million figure set in 2011 from the sale of natural pearl and diamond earrings by Bulgari, owned by late actress Elizabeth Taylor.

Other prized items from Lollobrigida's collection included a Bulgari necklace and bracelet combination, and a Bulgari ring featuring a 19.03-carat cushion-shaped diamond. Each fetched 749,000 francs ($776,056).

The 85-year-old actress attended the auction and said she hoped the money raised would be put towards advancing stem cell research in Italy.

"Jewels are meant to give pleasure and for many years I had enormous pleasure wearing mine," Lollobrigida said in a statement. "Selling my jewels to help raise awareness of stem cell therapy, which can cure so many illnesses, seems to me a wonderful use to which to put them."

The jewelry was part of Sotheby's "Magnificent Jewels and Nobel Jewels" auction, held in Geneva after going on display in London, New York and Rome.

Overall, the auction of more than 600 lots of gems and jewelry fetched 74.8 million francs ($78.2 million).

Other top-sellers included a late 19th-century 74.53-carat fancy yellow diamond owned by the Imperial Majesty Sultan Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last ruler of the Qajar dynasty in Persia.

It sold for 2.85 million francs ($2.95 million), an auction record for a fancy yellow diamond.

A ring featuring a 27.9-carat brilliant-cut white diamond sold for 4.25 million francs ($4.45 million).

($1 = 0.965 Swiss francs)

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy in Los Angeles; Editing by Eric Kelsey and Xavier Briand)

Game Five is in New York on Thursday when the Knicks will have to win to stay alive in the series, while the Pacers can reach the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time since the 2003-04 season.

The Knicks, who scored just 71 points in an 11-point loss on Saturday, failed to show much sign of urgency on Tuesday and trailed by 14 at halftime.

George Hill scored 26 points for Indiana, who outrebounded the Knicks 54-36 and held them to just 35 percent shooting from the field.

Carmelo Anthony scored a team-high 24 points and had nine rebounds but made just nine of 23 shots, while a misfiring J.R. Smith shot 7-for-22.

Paul George added 18 points, 14 rebounds and seven assists for Indiana, who are a perfect 5-0 at home in the playoffs.

(Writing by Jahmal Corner in Los Angeles; Editing by Peter Rutherford)

Terms of the agreement were confidential, but Nokia said on Friday it included a one-time payment to be booked in the fourth quarter, as well as ongoing fees, all to be paid by RIM.

Nokia is one of the industry's top patent holders, having invested 45 billion euros ($60 billion) in mobile research and development over the past two decades.

It has been trying to make use of that legacy to ensure its survival, amid a fall in sales as well as cash. The Finnish firm is battling to recover lost ground in the lucrative smartphone market to the likes of Apple and Samsung.

The agreement with RIM settles all existing patent litigation between the two companies, Nokia said, adding similar disputes with HTC Corp and ViewSonic still stood.

"This agreement demonstrates Nokia's industry leading patent portfolio and enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities in the mobile communications market," said Paul Melin, Nokia's chief intellectual property officer.

Nokia has earned around 500 million euros a year from patent royalties in key areas of mobile telephony.

Some analysts have said it could earn hundreds of millions more if it can negotiate with more companies successfully.

Analysts estimated its June 2011 settlement with Apple was worth hundreds of millions of euros.

($1 = 0.7555 euros)

(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando; Editing by Hans-Juergen Peters and Mark Potter)