KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - When a racist pitcher beans Jackie Robinson in the head in the new movie about the first black man to play major league baseball, Sherrill Duesterhaus wants everybody in the theater to know it's a lie.

Duesterhaus' father, Fritz Ostermueller, threw the pitch, but it did not hit Robinson in the head and there is no evidence he uttered, "You don't belong here and you never will," as shown in "42," the Warner Bros. Pictures film that opened in April.

"I respect Jackie Robinson, his story is so inspiring and it's good that it is out there, but not at the expense of someone's good name," said Duesterhaus, 66, of Joplin, Missouri.

Duesterhaus said she had been warned by a friend that the film was unflattering to her father, who died of cancer at age 50 when she was 11 years old.

But the scene in which he taunts Robinson and throws at his head was still a shock, she said.

"It just took my breath away," Duesterhaus said. "I thought, 'All these people are sitting here believing this and it didn't happen.' It broke my heart."

She said her father was a "kind and loving man" and neither she nor her mother can recall him talking badly about Robinson or any black player.

Duesterhaus produced an article from a Pittsburgh newspaper in 1947 in which her father said Robinson crowded the plate, making pitching to him difficult. Ostermueller played for the Pittsburgh Pirates at the time.

"I told my wife the night before I pitched that I might have trouble with Robinson - that one of my pitches would hit him, if he didn't move back," Ostermueller said in the article.

"I knew, too, some people would say it was intentional. It wasn't at all, but in his first trip to the plate I hit him. After that, he moved back a couple of inches and showed me some respect."

TRUTH 'WENT SOUTH'

The pitch early in the 1947 season - Robinson's rookie year - sailed toward his head but he deflected it with his arm before falling to the ground, according to several accounts.

Robinson's teammates on the Brooklyn Dodgers yelled at Ostermueller, but no fight broke out on the field as shown in the movie.

A Warner Bros. spokesman, Paul McGuire, had no comment in response to questions about the film and Duesterhaus' concerns.

She said the movie contained other errors, such as showing Ostermueller as a right-handed pitcher, when he threw left-handed.

"I enjoyed the movie," Duesterhaus said, "up until the truth went south."

Jonathan Eig, author of the 2007 book "Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season," said Robinson took verbal abuse from some players but there is no indication Ostermueller wanted to drive him out of baseball or threw at him because he was breaking the game's color barrier.

"I was surprised they chose that moment to dramatize the issue and picked Ostermueller of all people to be the villain," Eig said. "Even as I was watching the movie, I wondered if any of Ostermueller's kids will see this and what they would think."

Eig said Robinson was known to lean into pitches and swing wildly, making him vulnerable to getting hit.

Robinson was hit by more pitches than all but one other National League batter in 1947, and led the league in that category in 1948, according to baseball-reference.com.

Robert Butler, a former film critic for the Kansas City Star who now has an online movie review site, said the movie unnecessarily tainted Ostermueller's reputation.

"In my opinion, it's the result of bad research, laziness or outright malice," Butler said. "It would have been the easiest thing in the world to give (Ostermueller) a different name in the film. That said, anyone who goes to movies looking for true history is fighting a losing battle."

(Editing by David Bailey and Xavier Briand)

A solar-powered airplane that developers hope eventually to pilot around the world landed safely in Phoenix on the first leg of an attempt to fly across the United States using only the sun's energy, project organizers said.

The plane, dubbed the Solar Impulse, took 18 hours and 18 minutes to reach Phoenix on the slow-speed flight, completing the first of five legs with planned stops in Dallas, St. Louis and Washington on the way to a final stop in New York.

The spindly-looking plane barely hummed as it took off Friday morning from Moffett Field, a joint civil-military airport near San Francisco.

It landed in predawn darkness at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, according to a statement on the Solar Impulse's website.

The flight crew plans pauses at each stop to wait for favorable weather. It hopes to reach John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York in about two months.

Swiss pilots and co-founders of the project, Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg, will take turns flying the plane, built with a single-seat cockpit. Piccard was at the controls for the first flight to Arizona.

The lightweight carbon fiber Solar Impulse has a wingspan of a jumbo jet and the weight of a small car and from a distance resembles a giant floating insect.

The plane was designed for flights of up to 24 hours at a time and is a test model for a more advanced aircraft the team plans to build to circumnavigate the globe in 2015. It made its first intercontinental flight, from Spain to Morocco, last June.

The aircraft is propelled by energy collected from 12,000 solar cells built into the wings that simultaneously recharge four large batteries with a storage capacity equivalent to a Tesla electric car that allow it to fly after dark.

The lightweight design and wingspan allow the plane to conserve energy, but make it vulnerable. It cannot fly in strong wind, fog, rain or clouds.

The plane can climb to 28,000 feet and flies at an average of 43 miles per hour (69 km per hour).

The project began in 2003 with a 10-year budget of 90 million euros ($112 million) and has involved engineers from Swiss escalator maker Schindler and research aid from Belgian chemicals group Solvay.

(Reporting by David Bailey, Laila Kearney and Braden Reddall; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

AYLESBURY, England (Reuters) - Group of Seven finance officials agreed on Saturday to press on with measures to deal with failing banks and gave a green light to Japan's efforts to galvanize its economy.

British finance minister George Osborne said the finance ministers and central bankers meeting outside London focused on unfinished banking reforms.

The emergency rescue of Cyprus in March acted as a reminder of the need to finish an overhaul of the banking sector, five years after the world financial crisis began.

"It is important to complete swiftly our work to ensure that no banks are too big to fail," Osborne told reporters after hosting a two-day meeting in a stately home 40 miles outside London.

"We must put regimes in place ... to deal with failing banks and to protect taxpayers and to do so in a globally consistent manner," he said.

Germany has previously come under pressure to give more support to a banking union in the euro zone. The plan could help strengthen the single currency area, but Berlin worries it may pay too much for future bank bailouts if it signs up to a scheme to wind up failing banks.

As at previous international meetings, Japan escaped any censure for printing money on a scale that has pushed the yen sharply lower.

Osborne said the G7 - the United States, Germany, Japan, Britain, Italy, France and Canada - reaffirmed that fiscal and monetary policy should be aimed at domestic concerns, not currency manipulation

"We will not target exchange rates," Osborne said at the end of the meeting at the 17th-century Hartwell House. "I would say that the statement by the G7 of earlier this year was a successful statement and one that has been held to."

Some countries are concerned Tokyo is engineering an export-led recovery that could hinder other regions' ability to grow.

The yen hit a four-year low against the dollar on Friday, beyond the psychologically important 100 yen mark, driven in part by Japanese investors shifting into foreign bonds, a move that had been expected since the Bank of Japan unveiled a massive stimulus plan.

But having urged Tokyo for years to do something to revive its economy, other world powers are not in a strong position to complain now that it is doing so. Then there is the fact that central banks such as the Federal Reserve and Bank of England have printed money in the way the Bank of Japan is.

GROWTH DEBATE

Debate has also heated up about the need for governments to ease up on austerity, something Germany, Britain and Canada view as a mistake but Washington, Paris and Rome are in favor of.

Osborne said there was less disagreement about whether governments should focus on debt-cutting or growth-boosting measures than is commonly assumed.

"Everyone is clear that there needs to be credible medium-term fiscal consolidation ... We also agreed that there needs to be flexibility," he said.

Several officials from visiting delegations questioned why Britain had called the meeting so soon after the IMF discussions in Washington but Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said the informal nature of the discussions had paid dividends.

"Freed from burden to agree a communiqu, the principals engaged more with each than I can recall before and as a result genuinely made real progress in taking forward some of the question and issues that are facing the G7," he said.

(Additional reporting by Gernot Heller, David Milliken and Leika Kihara.; Writing by Mike Peacock; Editing by Mark Potter)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - At first blush the two leading U.S. stock exchanges won a sweeping victory this week in a long-running legal battle over market data - the stock quotes, share prices and other trading information that are highly prized in the electronic marketplace.

But a ruling by the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit may also have opened the door for the Internet companies, brokers and others in the case to achieve a decade-old goal of cutting the fees the exchanges charge for the data.

The court ruled in a decision earlier this week it had no jurisdiction over a case brought by the NetCoalition of some 20 Internet companies, including Google Inc and Yahoo Inc, and the Securities Industry and Finance Markets Association, a 600-member lobby for brokers, bankers and asset managers.

The decision appeared to slam the door on the petitioners and remove a potential obstacle to efforts by the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market to offset sharp drops in revenue from stock transactions by boosting market data sales.

But the court did offer a path for Sifma and the NetCoalition group to mount a new battle, several people close to the case said.

The court indicated the Securities Exchange Act, which governs exchanges and their responsibilities as self-regulatory organizations, requires that the exchanges provide for the "equitable allocation" of reasonable fees, among other dues and charges.

The petitioners have argued the exchanges are effectively monopolies and competition is not sufficient to restrain prices.

"I intend to submit a ... petition," said Roger Blanc, a lawyer with Willkie Farr who represented the NetCoalition, the name by which the case is also called. "As soon as we can put it together, we'll be back before the circuit court."

The case is notable because of the importance of market data in an electronic market that relies on "signal processing," the analysis of data by high-speed computers, to trade.

Sifma and the NetCoalition had sought judicial review of the proprietary data both NYSE and Nasdaq sell after the Securities and Exchange Commission let stand almost all their filings for new schedules and higher prices for market data in recent years.

The petitioners challenged the SEC over more than a dozen filings, saying the fees were exorbitant and regulators had abdicated their duties to ensure data fees were "fee and reasonable," a loosely defined standard the agency must uphold.

Four of the complaints were combined before the appeals court, which has oversight of the SEC, and the two exchanges with the regulators provided a joint opinion in the case.

Market data has been a thorn in the side of the SEC for years, with regulators unable to resolve the issue despite a series of high-profile hearings and studies from 1999 to 2005.

A former senior SEC official said market data is highly contentious with no easy answer.

Although the appeals court said the Dodd-Frank act stripped it of jurisdiction in the case, the court left intact its August 2010 ruling that there must be evidence that competition is constraining the fees the exchanges charge for the data.

The court also said the exchanges cannot enforce fee rules that are inconsistent with the exchange act, and said fees need to be tied to "some type of cost-based" standard to guard against excessive profits.

The latter point could be a boon for the petitioners' cause. They have long contended the cost of producing the data is negligible and the exchanges charge far in excess of its cost.

"We are pleased that the court has affirmed our ability to provide high-quality data at reasonable rates to vendors who profit from reselling the data to their customers," a spokesman for the Nasdaq said. The NYSE declined to comment.

The NYSE and Nasdaq presented academic studies to bolster their position that competition exists for market data, and they have strongly resisted any cost analysis of their data.

The Nasdaq's chief financial officer has been telling analysts that market data is an "extremely high-margin" business. Revenue from the U.S. sale of proprietary data at the Nasdaq has expanded at a compound annual growth rate of about 10.8 percent since 2007, a period in which data usage has exploded.

The emphasis on market data as a profit center is misplaced, according to former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt. The exchanges are trying to staunch their hemorrhaging and charging for data is purely a short-term solution to a long-term problem, he said.

A good portion of market data is public and should not be proprietary as the exchanges see it, Pitt said in an interview before the court's ruling this week. Allowing data to be available only for those who can afford it will create hard-to-justify market dislocations, he warned.

"The question is when you've allowed people to treat market data as proprietary for so long, how do you justify making a shift and what accommodations do you make?" Pitt said.

The case is NetCoalition and Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association v Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit; No. 10-1421.

(Reporting by Herbert Lash; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Online reports have surfaced that Zhang, who dazzled the world in 2008 with his Beijing Olympic ceremonies, "has at least seven children and will face a 160 million yuan fine," said the website of the People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece.

An unnamed official at the Wuxi Municipal Population and Family Planning Commission said "based on the current policies and regulations, an investigation is currently being carried out", according to the report.

It is unclear where Zhang's children were born, the report said, citing a worker at the Jiangsu Province Population and Family Planning Commission.

Both the Wuxi and Jiangsu Population and Family Planning Commission could not be reached for comment.

Zhang, 61, once the bad-boy of Chinese cinema whose movies were sometimes banned at home while popular overseas, has since become a darling of the Communist Party, despite long being a subject of tabloid gossip for alleged trysts with his actresses.

Zhang's newest project, a film to depict wartime Nanjing under Japanese occupation starred Hollywood actor Christian Bale in a leading role.

There are signs that China may loosen the one-child policy, introduced in the late 1970s to prevent population growth spiraling out of control. The policy has long been opposed by human rights and religious groups but is also now regarded by many experts as outdated and harmful to the economy.

Last December, authorities in southern Guangdong said they were investigating a family for having given birth to octuplets through in-vitro fertilization, a case that sparked intense public debate about China's one-child policy and how wealthy families were able to circumvent the rules.

The one-child policy was meant to last only 30 years and there are now numerous exceptions to it. But it still applies to about 63 percent of the population. ($1 = 6.1410 Chinese yuan)

(Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee, Additional reporting by Sally Huang; Editing by Michael Perry)

But new research finds the financial world doesn't just respond to the Internet; the Internet can also predict what the stock market will do. The research isn't the first to find such online clairvoyance. For example, Google may even be able tobefore doctors can, thanks to people's tendencies to self-diagnose using the search engine. Google searches can also forecast the .

The new study, however, takes the extra step of testing out how well stock-buying would go, using Google search trends as guidance. The result: a pretty nice return.

Googling the markets

University of Warwick Business School researcher Tobias Preis and colleagues had previously found a correlation between the number of Google searches for a company's name and the number of times that company's stock was bought and sold. However, that method couldn't predict a stock's price. []

Now, Preis and his colleagues have turned to broader search trends to try to predict the whole stock market's movements. Using publicly available data on search terms from Google Trends, the researchers tracked 98 terms, many of them finance- or economics-related, such as "debt," "crisis" and "derivatives" from 2004 to 2011. They then compared the searches to the closing prices of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a major stock-market index.

To test whether the terms searched in the week prior to any given closing day could predict the Dow Jones, the researchers invented a pretend investing game. If searches for financial terms went down, they opted to buy stocks and take a "long" position, holding on to the stocks and waiting for their value to go up.

If searches for financial terms went up, the researchers instead chose to "short" the market a strategy that allows buyers to sell stocks they don't own, with the understanding that they will buy the stocks later at a lower price in essence, gambling that thein value.

Worried searchers

The reasoning behind the game was simple. If people get anxious about the stock market, they will likely seek out information on financial issues before trying to dump their stock. Thus, finance-related Google searches should go up before a stock market decline.

That's exactly what the researchers found: An uptick inon finance terms reliably predicted a fall in stock prices.

"Debt" was the most reliable term for predicting market ups and downs, the researchers found. By going long when "debt" searches dropped and shorting the market when "debt" searches rose, the researchers were able to increase their hypothetical portfolio by 326 percent. (In comparison, a constant buy-and-hold strategy yielded just a 16 percent return.)

"Trends to sell on the financial market at lower prices may be preceded by ," the researchers write today (April 25) in the journal Scientific Reports. "During such periods of concern, people may tend to gather more information about the state of the market. It is conceivable that such behavior may have historically been reflected by increased Google Trends search volumes for terms of higher financial relevance."

Nevertheless, the average day-trader might find the strategy tough to implement, Preis said.

"This is something I wouldn't recommend to do without testing this very carefully," Preis told LiveScience. For one thing, markets have a tendency to adapt. If everyone starts using Google search terms to try to game the system, the strategy will become less effective.

For another, the financial terms used by the researchers may no longer be the best predictors of how buyers and sellers are feeling.

"You would need to find a way to identify, on the fly and in real time, what are the emerging topics that are relevant to markets?" Preis said.

The findings are scientifically "truly exciting," Preis said, because they have implications far beyond the stock market. Online chatter could help predict disease spread, civil unrest and political elections, he said. And Google is only the beginning, he added. Wikipedia, for example, provides open-source information on how many people view specific articles hour-by-hour, making the online encyclopedia another potential predictor of stock markets and other real-life behavior.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on and . Follow us , & . Original article on LiveScience.com.

Aug. 1 marks the six-year anniversary of when the bridge buckled and fell into the Mississippi River during evening rush hour in downtown Minneapolis, killing 13 people and injuring 145 others. The Minnesota Department of Transportation had to store the bridge's steel beams and plates until all the legal claims could be resolved, spokesman Kevin Gutknecht said. The final lawsuit was settled last November.

"There are some folks who were directly involved with the collapse who are interested in having a piece as a memento," Gutknecht said.

The Minnesota House on Monday unanimously passed a bill to give MnDOT six months to parcel out free pieces to victims' families, collapse survivors, the Minnesota Historical Society and certain other people or institutions with a connection to the bridge or transportation safety. The bill still awaits Senate action.

State officials expect to give away 121 tons of the 3,380 tons of steel. The remainder would be sold to metal recyclers, generating about $645,000 for the state, which would cover a tiny fraction of the millions paid out to survivors in compensation.

Helen Hausman, whose husband, Peter Hausman, died in the collapse, said it's only right that victims' families should get the chance to claim some steel.

"It's like a weapon that killed their loved ones," Hausman said, adding that she intends to give her piece to her church, which plans to use it to create a small memorial.

Survivor Garrett Ebling already has a piece of the bridge a chunk of concrete the size of a fist that was found in his car after it was fished out of the river. He uses it as a paperweight and teaching aid when he speaks to groups about the collapse and his long road to recovery.

Ebling suffered severe internal injuries, broken bones and post-traumatic stress disorder, and still deals daily with physical pain. He's getting counseling and said publishing a memoir on his experiences last year has helped him move forward.

Now, he wants a small piece of the steel, too.

"I hope I'm not going to end up with a giant beam I could put in my yard," Ebling cracked.

Gutknecht acknowledged that most of the metal pieces, which have been sitting in a MnDOT yard in suburban Afton since 2010, are big and heavy.

"We can certainly cut some down to hand-carryable size," he said.

Still to be determined is the fate of the most crucial pieces the gusset plates that the National Transportation Safety Board said caused the collapse, breaking because they were too thin. Gutknecht said all the key pieces studied by the NTSB are in storage at a separate MnDOT facility in Oakdale.

First dibs on everything goes to the Minnesota Historical Society, according to the state legislation.

Senior Curator Adam Sher said it's possible the society will ask for those plates.

"We have other artifacts that were related to the bridge collapse. I think it would be appropriate for us to consider a piece of the actual bridge, but we would need to consider the condition and size, and what might be useful for the interpretation of the event," Sher said.

The society is currently displaying the back door from a school bus that was on the bridge and fell at least 30 feet, autographed by all the more than 50 students aboard.

"It's a very tangible reminder of an event that impacted people in a very direct and tragic way," Sher said. "And so it's important to preserve those kinds of artifacts and tell their story. But is difficult sometimes to deal with issues that are tragic, but it also is something we can't forget."

The University of St. Thomas hopes for a small piece, perhaps a beam, to remind engineering students of the responsibilities they face.

It would be used to display the steel rings given to students as they're inducted into the Order of the Engineer. Students across the country accept those rings as they pledge to uphold the standards of their profession.

Don Weinkauf, dean of the School of Engineering at St. Thomas, said using the bridge steel in those ceremonies "will be a powerful connection to that ideal. ... We convey to them in a very real sense that the things they create and design and build will touch people's lives."

___

Associated Press writer Brian Bakst contributed to this story from St. Paul, Minn.

The Kauai Humane Society since December has been reaching out to tourists and other travelers willing to bring a dog with them as extra luggage when they fly to California and Oregon.

The shelter gets a lot of stray and abandoned dogs derived from hunting breeds that are used for hunting feral pigs on Kauai. So far, 24 dogs have been adopted through the program, which also is working with the Oregon Humane Society in Portland.

Shelter officials say the Hawaii dogs get snatched up quickly after languishing in Kauai's shelter for months because they are different from what is normally offered for adoption.

Tommy Haas won ugly, becoming the oldest man to beat a No. 1-ranked player in 30 years.

Eight days shy of his 35th birthday, tour veteran Haas defeated three-time champion Novak Djokovic in the fourth round of the Sony Open, 6-2, 6-4. The upset Tuesday night snapped Djokovic's 14-match winning streak at Key Biscayne, where he won the tournament the past two years.

"This is crazy," Haas said. "Playing against someone like Novak and coming out on top at this time of my career, it's unbelievable."

As for Haas' outfit: "Yeah, I'm pretty pathetic I think when it comes to color matching," he said. "Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror before I go out and I'm like, 'Geez, what was I thinking?' I guess if I maybe had a clothing contract it would be different."

The top-ranked Djokovic has lost two of his past four matches after winning 22 in a row, including the Australian Open for his sixth Grand Slam title.

"All the credit to Tommy," Djokovic said. "He played a great match and he was the better player, no question about it."

Haas improved to 2-14 against No. 1-ranked players. His only other win came against Andre Agassi in 1999.

The oldest player in the top 50, Haas is making his 13th appearance at Key Biscayne and advanced the tournament's quarterfinals for the first time. His opponent Wednesday will be No. 11 Gilles Simon, who rallied past No. 7 Janko Tipsarevic, 5-7, 6-2, 6-2.

Sam Querrey lasted only 50 minutes in the fourth round and lost to Tomas Berdych, 6-1, 6-1. Querrey was playing his first tournament as the No. 1 American on the ATP Tour, and his elimination means that for the first time, the 28-year-old tournament will have no U.S. men in the quarterfinals.

The shutout is the latest sign of declining fortunes for American tennis.

"I guess you could say it's been somewhat of the norm the last couple of years," Querrey said. "It's not like we had guys in the quarters week in, week out."

American results on the women's side have been better lately, thanks mostly to No. 1-ranked Serena Williams. The five-time Key Biscayne champion advanced to Thursday's semifinals and tied the women's record for career victories in the tournament by beating No. 5-seeded Li Na 6-3, 7-6 (5).

Williams' opponent in the semifinals Thursday will be defending champion Agnieszka Radwanska, who hit a desperation shot behind her back for a winner en route to a win over No. 30 Kirsten Flipkens, 4-6, 6-4, 6-2.

With temperatures in the 50s for the final match of the night, Djokovic appeared out of sorts from the start. During his second service game he became annoyed at fans shouting as he was about to serve.

"It's definitely the worst match I have played in a long time," Djokovic said. "I just didn't feel good on the court. Conditions were really much, much different from what I have played in previous matches. Balls didn't bounce at all. He has a quite flat shots. He used the variety really well. It was very cold, and I just didn't find a better solution to come back."

Djokovic hit consecutive forehand errors to lose serve and fall behind 3-2, the start of a stretch where Haas won six consecutive games. The German hit three spectacular winners to break again for a 5-2 lead, and Djokovic double-faulted to lose serve once more in the opening game of the second set.

Djokovic broke for the only time to reach 3-all, but lost his serve again. Haas closed out the victory with a forehand winner, then shared a warm exchange at the net with a gracious Djokovic, who gave the crowd a wave as he left the court.

Haas didn't look his age from the start, and not just because he played with his cap on backward. He played patiently from the baseline, mixing the pace of his shots to win a succession of long rallies, and he repeatedly whacked winners when Djokovic tried to force the issue by coming forward.

"I'm just really happy and proud that tonight, against such a great player who has been dominating the sport the past couple of years, I really took advantage of the opportunities I got," Haas said. "I think I played extremely well."

While Williams continues to dominate the WTA Tour, no American man has reached the past five Grand Slam quarterfinals. The outlook wasn't helped by the retirement of Andy Roddick, whose 2003 U.S. Open championship is the most recent major title by a U.S. male.

Querrey was playing his first tournament as the top American, and he managed his best showing in eight appearances at Key Biscayne, aided by a walkover in the third round.

His serve and forehand let him down against Berdych, however. The 6-foot-6 Querrey came into tournament second on the tour in aces this year, but he had only four against Berdych, and made only 39 percent of his first serves.

"Just one of those awful days," Querrey said. "The more you miss, the harder it gets to get the ball in. It just kept getting worse."

No. 2 Andy Murray, the champion in 2009 and runner-up last year, beat No. 16 Andreas Seppi 6-2, 6-4. His opponent Wednesday will be No. 9 Marin Cilic, who defeated No. 6 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga 7-5, 7-6 (4).

No. 8 Richard Gasquet hit 17 aces, including three in the final tiebreaker, defeated No. 10 Nicolas Almagro 6-7 (3), 7-5, 7-6 (3). Gasquet will next face No. 4 Berdych.

No. 3 David Ferrer beat No. 13 Kei Nishikori 6-4, 6-2. Ferrer's opponent Wednesday will be unseeded Jurgen Melzer, who rallied past Albert Ramos, 2-6, 6-3, 6-3.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - San Francisco's city attorney said on Monday he has opened an investigation into recent newspaper reports that a Nevada mental hospital was illegally busing hundreds of newly discharged psychiatric patients to California and other states.

In a letter to the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services, City Attorney Dennis Herrera cited a Sacramento Bee investigative series documenting what it described as rampant "patient dumping" by the Rawson Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas.

The Bee reported that the state-run facility has, since 2008, discharged some 1,500 patients - some of them still mentally ill and indigent - with one-way Greyhound bus tickets to out-of-state destinations without adequate provisions for food, medication, housing or medical treatment.

The report found that one third of those patients were sent to neighboring California, the bulk of them arriving in Los Angeles, while 36 ended up in San Francisco.

"Assuming the reports are true, Nevada's practice of psychiatric 'patient dumping' is shockingly inhumane and illegal," Herrera said in a statement.

Herrera wrote to Nevada's director of health and human services, Mike Willden, seeking copies of public records of the circumstances under which Rawson Neal discharged the 1,500 patients in question.

"Under common law in Nevada and California, the hospitals have a duty to exercise reasonable care to avoid foreseeable harm to patients with respect to the manner in which they are discharged," said Matt Dorsey, a spokesman for Herrera.

By placing mentally ill individuals on a bus without a plan for them "to be received by family, medical facility, or other responsible person at the place of destination, and without adequate food or medication, the Nevada hospital placed the patients at risk," he said.

Herrera also sent copies of his letter to Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval and Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto.

NEVADA REVIEWING THE DISCHARGES

Willden, in an email, said his department was "reviewing the approximate 1,500 discharges that included out-of-state transportation over the past five years."

He blamed what he called a "documentation error" for the hospital staff's failure to "properly discharge the reasons that support interstate placement."

He also said the hospital would review all future patient discharges "to ensure quality of discharge planning and after-care plans."

A Los Angeles city attorney spokesman, Sandy Cooney, said that office was also reviewing the newspaper's report and gathering information "in the community" to decide whether to open its own formal inquiry.

Built at a cost of $35.5 million, Rawson Neal opened in 2006 with 190 beds. A hospital official declined to comment, referring the request to Willden.

Dorsey said the hospital could lose its Medicare funding if found to be in violation of federal laws that require hospitals participating in the program to treat patients until their condition is resolved or stabilized and to plan for after-care following discharge.

In one case cited in its investigation, the Bee reported that the Las Vegas hospital discharged James Flavy Coy Brown, 48, in a taxi to a Greyhound Bus station with a one-way ticket for a 15-hour ride to Sacramento, and a three-day supply of medication to treat his schizophrenia, depression and anxiety.

Brown told the newspaper a doctor recommended the trip to "sunny California," where he knew no one, because the state offers superior health care and more benefits than Nevada, Herrera said.

(Editing by Steve Gorman, Cynthia Johnston and Vicki Allen)