In an interview published in the Guardian newspaper, Douglas appeared to blame his own battle with throat cancer on oral sex although that interpretation was later disputed by one of his representatives.

The Guardian quoted Douglas as attributing his illness to the HPV virus spread through oral sex. When asked about his cancer, Douglas said, "without wanting to get too specific, this particular cancer is caused by HPV (human papillomavirus), which actually comes from cunnilingus."

In response, spokesman Allen Burry said Douglas never said oral sex was the cause of his own cancer, just one of the many causes.

"In a discussion with the newspaper, they talked about the causes of oral cancer, one of which was oral sex, which is noted and has been known for a while now," Burry said.

Health officials say smoking and drinking alcohol are the main causes of oral cancer, although the human papillomavirus has been linked to one kind of throat cancer. The human papillomavirus is mostly known for causing cervical cancer.

Douglas also told the Guardian he didn't regret his years of smoking and drinking.

A spokesman for the Guardian said in an email that the paper hadn't received any complaints about its interview either from Douglas or his representatives.

Douglas has starred in many movies including "Basic Instinct," ''Fatal Attraction" and "Wall Street" and is married to the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones. He is currently appearing in a biopic about Liberace titled "Behind the Candelabra."

___

AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle in New York contributed to this report.

HARRISBURG, Penn. (Reuters) - The family of late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno would be among a group of plaintiffs filing a lawsuit against the U.S. college sports association on Thursday over its reaction to the Jerry Sandusky scandal, the Paterno's lawyer said.

Speaking on "Costas Tonight" on NBC Sports Network, Wick Sollers said the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) used "coercion and behind-the-scenes threats" to force Penn to pay severe penalties for its handling of the sex abuse scandal.

The NCAA threatened the school with the so-called "Death Penalty", the complete elimination of the football program for one season, to force school officials into accepting the penalties, Sollers said on the sports channel on Wednesday.

The penalties imposed in July 2012 included a $60 million fine and a four-year loss of post-season eligibility, based on an independent investigation by former FBI Director Louis Freeh into how Penn handled reports of abuse by Sandusky, an assistant football coach.

Freeh found Paterno, who died in January 2012, along with other university officials, covered up Sandusky's sexual abuse for years and showed a callous disregard for the victims to protect a multimillion-dollar football program.

Sue Paterno, the coach's widow, has said her husband had never hindered investigators looking into Sandusky's behavior.

Sandusky is in prison serving a sentence of 30 years to 60 years for the sexual abuse of 10 boys in a 15-year period. Some of the abuse occurred in the Penn State locker room.

Until Sandusky's arrest in 2011, Paterno was one of the most revered figures in American sports due in large part to his ranking as the winningest coach in major college football.

The suit is expected to be filed in Centre County, Pennsylvania. Former Penn State football stars Michael Robinson, Patrick Mauti and Justin Kurpeikis are expected to be among the plaintiffs, Paterno family representatives said in a statement late on Wednesday.

Donald Remy, the NCAA's chief legal officer, declined to comment on the pending lawsuit.

Penn State officials said the school is not directly involved in any lawsuit against the NCAA that the Paterno family may join.

(Editing by Louise Ireland and Alex Dobuzinskis)

Yes, gridlock still prevails and drivers' blood pressure still spikes as LA's traffic arteries seize up during every morning and afternoon rush hour.

Yet, with the flip of a switch earlier this year, Los Angeles became a worldwide leader by synchronizing all of its nearly 4,400 stoplights, making it the world's first major city to do so.

The result? Well, it can still be hell to cross the City of the Angels by car. Synchronization has allowed LA to boast of real improvements on paper, however, the average driver won't always be able to discern the difference of a project that took nearly 30 years to complete.

"To be honest with you, I haven't felt it, yet," said Jack Abramyam, who has been driving a cab across LA's mean streets for 20 years.

"Late at night, maybe, yes," Abramyam said as he sat outside his cab on a street in Chinatown recently, waiting for a fare. "But it was never really bad then anyway. During the day it was bad. And it's still bad."

The way synchronization works is simple enough: With all the signals synchronized, if you drive down a street at the posted speed limit you should be able to make every green light from one end of this sprawling city of 469 square miles to the other.

Of course there are any number of obstacles that can prevent that.

On a recent mid-afternoon test drive down eight miles of Wilshire Boulevard, for example, I was cut off by a bus, stuck behind more than one right-turner waiting for pedestrians to cross the intersecting street and at one point had my lane blocked by a delivery truck.

Approaching the world famous La Brea Tar Pits where prehistoric dinosaurs once got stuck in muck, not traffic so many people were waiting to turn left into a parking lot that the street became gridlocked for more than two blocks. The numerous synchronized green lights didn't wait for me. But why would they? With the posted speed limit 35 mph, I was only averaging 15.

Still, once the LA County Museum of Art, the high-rise apartments, the headquarters of porn publisher Larry Flynt and the various other Wilshire Boulevard landmarks were in the rear-view mirror, the pace did pick up. So much so that 11 green lights in a row suddenly materialized. That string ended on the edge of downtown, however, when Wilshire simply became clogged with too many cars. It was a non-rush hour jam that demonstrated that, good as synchronization may be, it isn't a magic, traffic-breaking bullet.

Los Angeles Department of Transportation officials agree.

As they stated in a recent report praising the benefits of synchronized signals, "No traffic signal system is capable of 'fixing traffic.'"

If more motor vehicles show up in the years ahead (and there are already more than 7.1 million of them registered in Los Angeles County, a number greater than that of most states), then officials say LA traffic jams will probably get worse.

That's why, said Clinton Quan, an engineering associate with the Department of Transportation, planners are continuing to push people to ride bicycles, take commuter rail lines and other public transportation and move close enough to work that they can walk there.

The city has added three light rail lines in the last seven years and has more planned. Officials also recently approved plans to allow high-rise apartment and condominium buildings along a corridor in Hollywood where a subway connecting the city's West Side to downtown is supposed to go.

In the meantime, Quan says, the synchronized signal program is putting up some pretty impressive numbers, even if the average driver isn't noticing them. It has reduced the drive time on several major LA corridors, for example, by about 12 percent.

In driver-speak, that means the trip across town that used to take you an hour has been reduced to about 53 minutes.

And that's nothing to shrug at, says Robert Puentes, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution's metropolitan policy program, which studies among other things the impact of traffic on the quality of life in metropolitan areas.

Several other traffic-clogged cities are looking into instituting similar programs and New York already synchronizes some of its stoplights, said Puentes, who works in Washington, D.C., the ninth-worst traffic-clogged city in the country.

"If you can get a 12 percent reduction on, say, the Washington Beltway, that would be phenomenal," he said.

PORT LOUIS, Mauritius (Reuters) - Workers' rights demonstrators protesting against the 2022 World Cup finals being held in Qatar were arrested and detained for seven hours by police while the FIFA Congress was being held on Friday.

The demonstration was taking place in the Mauritian capital of Port Louis about 24 km (15 miles) from the Swami Vivekananda Convention Centre where the Congress of FIFA's 209 member nations, including Qatar, was taking place.

The demonstration involved around eight people holding protest banners demanding a revote of the 2010 decision to award Qatar hosting rights for the World Cup.

The demonstration was organised by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and their banners read: "Re-run the vote. No World Cup without workers' rights."

The ITUC has become increasingly active and also held a protest outside last week's UEFA Congress in London.

South African Gemma Swart, the ITUC's campaign and communications specialist, told the media by telephone: "We were arrested and held in a Port Louis police station for seven hours without charge.

"Our lawyers told us that under local laws we could hold a peaceful demonstration with up to 11 people and we were below that.

"We staged a similar protest in London last week outside the UEFA Congress without any problems."

FIFA has yet to comment.

This marks the first companion diagnostic that detects epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene mutations to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the agency said. The diagnostic is called the Cobas EGFR Mutation Test.

"Companion diagnostics play an important role in determining which therapies are the safest and most effective for a particular patient," Alberto Gutierrez, of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a statement.

The approval will also move Tarceva up the treatment chain for those patients who test positive for the EGFR mutation. The drug was originally approved in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer only after they were not helped by at least one previous chemotherapy regimen.

"People with this type of lung cancer now have the option to use a personalized medicine as their initial treatment to help them live longer without their disease worsening," Hal Barron, chief medical officer of Roche Holding Ag's Genentech unit, said in a statement.

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot; Editing by Carol Bishopric)

(Reuters) - Consumer review aggregator Yelp Inc, which analysts say could face intense competition from Facebook Inc's "graph search", is open to partnering with the social networking website's latest offering, Yelp's Chief Financial Officer Rob Krolik told Reuters.

Facebook, in January, unveiled its graph search feature, available in a beta version, letting users trawl their network of friends to find everything from restaurants to movie recommendations, bringing it into direct competition with Yelp.

Analysts have viewed this as a big negative for Yelp as companies such as Facebook have a lot of opportunity to imitate smaller companies, and over a larger audience.

"We are actually happy to partner with Facebook (for graph search) if that's something that they're interested in," Krolik said.

Facebook declined to comment on any possible partnership.

Yelp's mobile app makes it easier for people to discover local businesses. It combines Yelp's reviews and other relevant information with knowledge of the consumer's location. It also allows consumers to "check-in" at local businesses.

Google Inc, through its Google Plus Local product, also recommends businesses to its users based on circles, past reviews, location and allows them to publish reviews and photos of favorite places.

"Facebook and Google and some other players really are attacking the local space via technology," Krolik said.

Krolik said Yelp, which is integrated into Apple Inc's Maps product and their Siri product, would definitely monitor Facebook's graph search and see what it's all about.

"I just don't think people go to Facebook to find a great local business. I think they connect with their friends, see a lot of photos."

Macquarie Research analyst Tom White said it was not particularly likely that the partnership would happen, because Facebook thinks they have enough data to do it themselves.

He, however said, if it was to happen, it would benefit Yelp, and would cut down competition from Facebook.

"It would mean broader distribution for their reviews, and more people reading their reviews," White said.

"It's not directly a revenue generator, but in theory it would increase the value of advertising on Yelp, just because you're getting it out to more people."

The success of graph search, which will rely heavily on local information, depends on Facebook launching a mobile app. In addition, graph search lacks the depth of review content offered by Yelp.

If Yelp were to partner with Facebook for graph search, the consumer review aggregator would be in a better position to compete with Google, Jefferies analyst Brian Fitzgerald told Reuters.

Yelp already has a tie-up with Facebook Connect, which allows users to login with their Facebook credentials without having to create separate accounts for different websites.

A Yelp user can see if a Facebook friend has reviewed a business. (http://r.reuters.com/fyp58t)

Jefferies' Fitzgerald said Yelp could also make a good acquisition target for Apple, Google or Facebook.

"Any one of those guys could acquire Yelp and they would be able to use it pretty productively," he said.

Yelp was founded by former PayPal engineers Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons as a start-up idea in a business incubator in 2004. It has never been profitable since its inception.

Analysts expect the company to post its first profit of 1 cent per share for the first quarter of 2014, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

The company's earnings quality score on Thomson Reuters StarMine rose to 7 out of 100, from 5, after it reported its earnings for the January-March quarter. This compares with a sector median of 63.

The earnings quality model rates companies according to the sustainability of their earnings.

Yelp shares, which have risen about 80 percent in the last year, closed marginally down at $29.81 on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday. They had fallen 6 percent on January 15, when Facebook unveiled its graph search.

(Additional reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Bangalore and Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco)

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)

BRESCIA, Italy (Reuters) - Italian Vincenzo Nibali followed up his victory in the 2010 Tour of Spain by winning the Giro d'Italia in Brescia on Sunday to claim victory in cycling's second biggest Grand Tour.

The Team Astana rider's triumph came ahead of Colombian Rigoberto Uran with Australia's Cadel Evans third.

Following the withdrawal of Giro pre-race favorite and 2012 Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins due to illness, Nibali began to build toward victory. stretching his competitors to breaking point in the stage 18 time trial at Polsa.

On Saturday's final mountain top stage finish at Tre Cime di Lavaredo, Nibali launched one last attack to stamp his authority and claimed his second stage victory of the race.

"I came here with a team that wanted to win the Giro, that was united with me from beginning to end and which really supported me all the way through," Nibali said after hoisting his trophy.

"And I knew from stage eight that I could win the Giro this year. And I have.

"My only serious difficulty came in the stage seven finish at Pescara, when I crashed twice on the descent, and I didn't know if I was going to recover from that."

Uran's runners-up spot is the best position for a Colombian rider in the Giro's history.

"I couldn't be happier, I came here with one job, which was to work for (leader and team mate) Bradley Wiggins, but when he had to abandon the team regrouped around me and I've got on the podium," Uran told reporters.

"If I can, I'm going to come back here and win the Giro next year."

Evans, at 36 years three months, is the oldest rider to make it onto a Giro podium since 1928.

"I came to this Giro with few reference points from earlier in the season and little by little I've come through," Evans told reporters.

"But I'll be back at the Tour, which is my team's biggest target of the season."

The 21st and final stage of the race, from Riese Pio X to Brescia, went to Briton Mark Cavendish in a bunch sprint that handed him the red points leader's jersey.

After losing by a single point in last year's Giro, Cavendish becomes the fifth rider to claim the points jersey on all three Grand Tours.

"I lost it by so little last time and there was no way I was going home without it this year," a jubilant Cavendish told reporters.

(Editing by Mark Pangallo)

CANNES (Reuters) - An avenging Venus settling the psychological and sexual score is the star of acclaimed director Roman Polanski's "La Venus a la Fourrure" ("Venus in Fur"), one of the Cannes film festival's two final movies in main competition to premiere on Saturday.

The French-Polish director is one of 20 vying for the top Palme d'Or prize to be handed out at the festival on Sunday by a jury led by Steven Spielberg. Polanski won the prize in 2002 for "The Pianist", his semi-autobiographical drama about the Warsaw Ghetto, for which he also won an Oscar for best director.

"I think when you show a film here, you have to be in the competition, you have to be a sport," Polanski told journalists before the official screening. "And even if I don't get anything I can say, 'Well, I got it already.'"

Also screening on Saturday is "Only Lovers Left Alive," U.S. director Jim Jarmusch's languorous retro-cool vampire film.

Frontrunners for top prize at the end of the 12-day festival include French director Abdellatif Kechiche's love story "Blue is the Warmest Colour" - whose no-holds-barred lesbian sex had audiences buzzing - and "Inside Llewyn Davis", U.S. directors Ethan and Joel Coen's story of a struggling singer trying to make it as a folk singer in the 1960s.

Also on the short list is "The Great Beauty" from Italy's Paolo Sorrentino, a heady, magical ode to the decadence of Rome, and "The Past" a tension-filled psychological drama from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi.

The jury of Ang Lee, Vidya Balan, Daniel Auteuil, Lynn Ramsay, Christoph Waltz, Naomi Kawase, Nicole Kidman and Cristian Mungiu will hand out the top prize and a slate of other directing and acting awards on Sunday.

U.S. director Steven Soderbergh's "Behind the Candelabra" starring Michael Douglas as pianist Liberace was an opulent, rhinestone-encrusted spectacle while the most unabashedly political film this year was director Jia Zhangke's critical look at modern China, "A Touch of Sin".

Polanski, whose 1974 film "Chinatown" established him as one of the world's great directors, remains controversial after his 1977 flight from the United States after serving time for unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl.

ROLE REVERSAL

"Venus in Fur" stars Polanski's wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, as brash actress Vanda who crashes an audition to convince writer Thomas, played by Mathieu Amalric, to cast her as the lead in his new play.

Soon, the roles in the play are being acted out by Vanda and Thomas, and as the themes of domination and submission come into focus, roles become reversed and reality is blurred.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw called Polanski's first French-language film a "playful if occasionally heavy-handed jeu d'sprit on the subject of sexual role-play, the games we all play, illusion and reality, and directing as a sexual act."

Peppered with erudite literary references and infused with retro cool - blood is drunk from cordial glasses or frozen into popsicles - "Only Lovers Left Alive" is high on style but short on emotional depth as lovers Adam and Eve seek out type O negative blood and disparage humans as "zombies."

Starring Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, Variety's Leslie Felperin called it a "sweet but slight love story" that feels like "an in-joke intended only for select acolytes, who will probably love it with an undying passion."

(Editing by Patrick Graham)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A House committee taking Congress' latest look at the Internal Revenue Service's mistreatment of tea party groups will apparently have to do so without input from the star witness.

IRS official Lois Lerner will invoke her constitutional right to not answer questions on Wednesday at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, her lawyer told the panel in a letter.

Lerner triggered the recent IRS uproar at a legal conference nearly two weeks ago, when she revealed that the agency had subjected tea party and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status to extra scrutiny during parts of the 2010 and 2012 election seasons. She also apologized for the actions.

Lerner, 62, an attorney who joined the IRS in 2001, heads the unit that decides whether groups qualify for the status. She has come under fire from members of both parties, including Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, who said in an interview Tuesday that she should lose her job.

In Lerner's absence, Wednesday's spotlight will be on another witness: Neal Wolin, the Treasury Department's deputy secretary.

J. Russell George, a Treasury inspector general, has said he told Wolin in mid-2012 that he was investigating the IRS' targeting of conservative groups, a report that was released last week. That means Wolin was the highest-ranking Treasury official to have known about the probe during last year's elections, making him a focus of interest for lawmakers.

"What did you know and when? Who did you tell?" Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a senior member of the Oversight Committee, said Tuesday of what he hopes to learn from Wolin.

Lerner's attorney, William W. Taylor III, has requested that she be excused from Wednesday's hearing, writing in the letter that forcing her to appear "would have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her." But the committee has subpoenaed her and panel members say they expect her to attend.

"She better be there. We're planning on it," Chaffetz said.

In writing that Lerner would use her Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate herself, Taylor noted that the Justice Department has started an investigation into the IRS controversy. He also referred to a letter she received last week from Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., saying she "provided false or misleading information on four separate occasions last year" to committee queries.

Staff of the Oversight Committee questioned Lerner and other IRS officials last year after receiving complaints from Ohio tea party groups that they were being mistreated by the IRS, said Meghan Snyder, spokesman for Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a member of the committee.

In responses to the committee, Lerner didn't mention that tea party groups had ever been targeted, according to documents. Her responses included 45-page letters in May 2012 to Issa and Jordan.

Lerner also met twice in early 2012 with staff from the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee to discuss the issue, according to a timeline constructed by committee staff. The timeline said she didn't mention at either meeting that conservative groups had been targeted.

Lerner's revelation and apology at the May 10 legal conference came in response to a question that IRS officials later acknowledged they had planted with an audience member. Lerner's disclosure came days before George, the inspector general, released his report detailing the IRS' actions.

George's report found that in June 2011, Lerner discovered that her unit was searching for organizations with words like "tea party" or "patriots" in their applications and subjecting them to tougher questions. She ordered the initial tea party criteria to be scrapped, but it later evolved to include groups that promoted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the report said. Lawmakers are curious about why the practice didn't stop entirely.

A career civil servant who has run the division since late 2005, Lerner has not been disciplined for her role, IRS officials said. But with President Barack Obama demanding that IRS officials be held accountable for the problem, Acting Commissioner Steven Miller and another top agency official have announced their departures in recent days and many lawmakers believe more heads should roll.

"If Miller had to lose his job, I don't think he should just be the lone person to go," Cummings said.

George and Douglas Shulman, the former IRS commissioner who headed the agency while it was targeting conservative groups, are also scheduled to testify Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Shulman told the Senate Finance Committee that he learned in the spring of 2012 about his agency's targeting of conservatives and George's probe. He said he didn't tell lawmakers or officials at Treasury of which the IRS is part because he only had sketchy information about the situation, was told it was being handled and believed it proper to let George's office conduct its investigation.

"Sitting there then and sitting here today, I think I made the right decision, which is to let the inspector general get to the bottom of it, chase down all the facts and then make his findings public," Shulman said.