The Kolkata Patent Office said earlier this month that it had dismissed certain patent applications filed by Roche, because the company had failed to submit the applications for Herceptin correctly.

"Roche has come to the conclusion not to pursue Indian Patent No. 205534 (the secondary patent) and the related divisional applications," a Roche spokesman said in an emailed statement. "This decision takes into account the strength of the particular rights and the IP (intellectual property) environment in India in general."

Western pharmaceutical companies are keen to tap into India's $13 billion drug market, but there are concerns about the level of protection for intellectual property in the country, where generic medicines account for more than 90 percent of drug sales.

Herceptin, a treatment for a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer, is Roche's third-biggest seller and notched up global revenues of 3.08 billion Swiss francs ($3.30 billion) in the first half of the year.

India's government has considered issuing a compulsory license on Herceptin, which would allow local drugmakers to sell far cheaper, generic copies. The government has so far held off from a decision.

In 2012, India issued the first ever compulsory license to domestic drugmaker Natco Pharma on a kidney and liver cancer drug, Nexavar, patented by Germany's Bayer.

Roche's decision not to pursue a patent for Herceptin could pave the way for generic drugmakers to produce cheaper copies, known as biosimilars, because they are not identical replicas of the original drug.

However, Roche said there are no approved versions in India of a biosimilar version of Herceptin, also known as Trastuzumab.

Roche said it would continue to enforce other patents covering its drugs in India.

($1 = 0.9346 Swiss francs)

(Reporting by Caroline Copley; editing by Tom Pfeiffer)

1. Mika Kallio (Finland) Kalex 41:11.785

2. Takaaki Nakagami (Japan) Kalex 41:12.375

3. Thomas Luethi (Switzerland) Suter 41:12.584

4. Pol Espargaro (Spain) Kalex 41:12.750

5. Johann Zarco (France) Suter 41:12.885

6. Nicolas Terol (Spain) Suter 41:13.324

7. Esteve Rabat (Spain) Kalex 41:14.281

8. Scott Redding (Britain) Kalex 41:16.275

9. Simone Corsi (Italy) Speed up 41:17.562

10. Jordi Torres (Spain) Suter 41:17.581

11. Xavier Simeon (Belgium) Kalex 41:20.426

12. Danny Kent (Britain) Tech 3 41:24.210

13. Dominique Aegerter (Switzerland) Suter 41:24.275

14. Mattia Pasini (Italy) Speed up 41:30.382

15. Toni Elias (Spain) Kalex 41:36.212

"It's a bit hard for me to decide who to support," Francis, an Argentine whose parents hailed from northern Italy, said in an audience with players and officials at the Vatican ahead of the fixture, which has been organized in his honor.

"It's a good thing it's a friendly, and make sure that it really is," the pontiff told the two sides who will play at Rome's Olympic Stadium in their first meeting in 12 years.

"You might not realize it but for so many people who look at you with admiration you are a model, for better or for worse, so be aware of this and give an example of fair play, respect and altruism" said the former Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who is an avid football fan.

"Here in the Vatican they tell me off for being undisciplined," joked Francis, who is known for breaking with stiff Vatican protocol.

His audience included Italian striker Mario Balotelli, whose volatile character has got him into trouble in the past, but who will miss Wednesday's match because of a knee injury.

There had been speculation that the Pope would attend the match, which is the pick of a crop of international friendlies on Wednesday, but Italian coach Cesare Prandelli said Francis had been advised against it by his staff.

Argentine captain Lionel Messi, who will also miss Wednesday's game with a muscle strain, said it had been "a very special day, unforgettable." He was due to fly back to his Barcelona club after the audience.

Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon said he hoped the two sides, who have won six World Cups between them, would meet again in the final of next year's tournament in Brazil.

"Two teams with the history of Argentina and Italy have the right to dream (of World Cup victory)," he said at a joint news conference with Messi. "A team with the good luck to have a player like Messi has every chance to win the World Cup."

(Reporting by Gavin Jones; editing by Barry Moody and Tony Goodson)

City Attorney Jan Goldsmith announced an agreement had been struck at the end of three days of talks. He said the proposed resolution will be presented to the City Council during closed session Friday, and if approved the members could go into open session.

"I'm sorry I cannot give more information," Goldsmith told The Associated Press.

The resolution came after three days of mediation talks over the lawsuit filed by Filner's former communications director Irene McCormack Jackson.

Filner's attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.

The talks ended hours after a San Diego businesswoman became the latest woman to go public in accusing Filner of making unwanted sexual advances.

The 70-year-old former congressman has been besieged by similar allegations from at least 17 women, and whether he'll be able to hang onto his job is in limbo.

A petition drive to recall Filner is in full swing, and calls from his own party urging him to step down were mounting with the Democratic National Committee planning to vote on a resolution Friday.

Dianne York, the latest accuser, said Filner placed his hand on her buttocks while she posed for a photo with him about three months ago.

York told reporters at a news conference in National City that the incident took place after a meeting at his office. She said she reported the incident to the San Diego County Sheriff's Department.

Those at the negotiating table involving the lawsuit said they were instructed not to comment. Filner attended the talks, along with Goldsmith, City Council President Todd Gloria and Councilman Kevin Faulconer.

The office of McCormack's attorney Gloria Allred said she would give her reaction to the proposed deal at a news conference Thursday at her office in Los Angeles. The announcement said Filner's former fiance, Bronwyn Ingram, would also be present and that Ingram and Allred in the past have called for the mayor's resignation.

Analysts have speculated Filner might have negotiated a deal that would shed his financial liability in the lawsuit in exchange for his resignation.

Gloria would serve as acting mayor if Filner resigns.

Filner's former communications director, McCormack, as she is known professionally, was the first to go public with allegations against him. Other accusers include a university dean and a retired Navy rear admiral. Some contend he cornered, groped and forcibly kissed them.

Filner announced three weeks ago that he would undergo therapy after acknowledging he has disrespected and intimidated women. He has denied committing sexual harassment.

I am endorsing Bill de Blasio for Mayor because I believe he has the talent, vision and ability to lead New York City, said Soros in a statement issued by de Blasios press team.

In particular, Soros cited the public advocate's support for universal prekindergarten and opposition to New York Citys controversial stop-and-frisk police policy, which critics say unfairly targets black men.  Bill de Blasio has cut through the rhetoric on stop-and-frisk, and alone advanced concrete policy changes that can mean far fewer innocent New Yorkers are subject to this demeaning practice while reductions in crime are maintained, Soros said.

In recent years, Soros has shifted his focus from politics to charity. While the Hungarian-born hedge fund manager spent $25.5 million to remove then-President George W. Bush in 2004, he remained relatively quiet during the 2012 election,noted. His support for de Blasio marks a return to politics that could animate the citys left-leaning Democrats.

Soros, who is estimated to have a net worth of nearly $20 billion, isnt the only big-name liberal to come out in favor of de Blasio. At a raucous fundraising event in July, former Vermont Gov. Howard Deanand called de Blasio the only true progressive in a crowded mayoral race.

Recent polling suggests de Blasio may be benefiting from the recent derailment of Anthony Weiner's campaign. Alast Wednesday shows de Blasio now running second among Democratic voters, to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, with 21 percent of the vote. Quinn takes the lead with 27 percent, while Weiner, embroiled anew in a sexting controversy, has dropped to just 16 percent from the 26 percent he held just one week earlier.

The Democratic candidates for mayor will face off in a primary scheduled for Sept. 10. They are vying to replace Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is stepping down after three terms.

That was the highest toll in an attack since Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war, and brought condemnation from Western powers, the United Nations and Syria.

Coming a week after a bombing in the Beirut bastion of Shiite party Hezbollah, a close ally of Bashar al-Assad, the bombings in the northern port of Tripoli risk further stoking tensions between supporters and foes of the Syrian president.

"The death toll has risen to 42," a security source told AFP, a few hours after the early-afternoon attacks.

Earlier, the Lebanese Red Cross earlier said there were also at least 500 wounded, with director Georges Kettaneh adding that many of them had serious burns and head wounds.

The blasts hit during weekly Muslim prayers, in a city where Sunni supporters of Syria's rebels engage in frequent, often deadly, clashes with Alawites, who back the Assad regime.

The first bomb struck in the city centre at the Al-Salam mosque as worshippers were still inside.

Local television showed images from a CCTV camera of people sitting on the floor listening to a talk, when the explosion hit and they scattered in panic.

The second explosion struck just minutes later outside Al-Taqwa mosque, about two kilometres (a little more than a mile) away, near the port.

An AFP reporter saw a number of charred bodies near Al-Taqwa and the bodies of five children brought out of it.

As huge clouds of black smoke billowed into the air, television channels aired footage of the dead, of buildings with their fronts blown in and vehicles ablaze.

Hundreds of furious people gathered outside the Al-Taqwa mosque shouting curses at Hezbollah and the Syrian regime.

The powerful Shiite movement, whose militia have been fighting for months alongside Assad's troops, linked the Tripoli attacks to the one in Beirut on August 15, which killed 22 people and injured more than 300.

It said they were part of a plan to "plunge Lebanon into chaos and destruction".

Former premier Saad Hariri, a Sunni and Hezbollah opponent, said the "authors of dissension do not want Lebanon to live in peace for one minute; they want the killing machine to mow down the lives of innocents across Lebanon".

Hariri's father and former billionaire prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, was assassinated in a 2005 car bombing in Beirut that also killed another 22 people which was, until Friday, the worst attack since the civil war.

Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zohbi condemned this "cowardly terrorist attack on our brothers in Tripoli."

In London, Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt condemned what he called the "abhorrent attacks" while French President Francois Hollande spoke of what he called "odious, cowardly attacks."

For his part, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on Lebanese to "exercise restraint, to remain united," while expressing hope that "those responsible for such cowardly acts of violence will be brought to justice as soon as possible."

Washington also condemned the attacks and, in Beirut, its embassy warned Americans to "exercise security restraint" in Lebanon and reminded others to avoid travelling there.

On Wednesday, army chief General Jean Kahwaji had said his forces were fighting a "total war" against terrorism whose aim is "to provoke sectarian strife" in the country.

The army had been pursuing a "terrorist cell that prepares car bombs and sends them to residential neighbourhoods," he said, adding that this action aimed at provoking sectarian strife.

A Lebanese and two Palestinians suspected of preparing a car bomb attack were arrested days after the latest blast in Beirut, the General Security agency said.

Tripoli has seen frequent Syria-related violence over the past two years, including waves of deadly clashes.

Lebanon is officially neutral in Syria's conflict, but the country is deeply divided.

Hilal Khashan, chairman of the political science department at the American University of Beirut, said: "It is clear that there is a desire to trigger a confessional war in Lebanon to divert attention from what is happening in Syria."

Friday's car bombings were reminiscent of attacks that shook the country during the civil war, but Khashan said he did not think a confessional war would break out "because it will not benefit anyone."

The materials, released on Wednesday afternoon, consist of 140,000 pages of documents and 340 hours of old recordings covering topics such as Watergate, Vietnam and the historic 1972 summit between Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

It also includes a recording from May 11 1973 of a telephone conversation between Nixon and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau where the latter is consoling the former about his political scandal.

Here's the recording:

Watergate, of course, was ultimately the downfall of Nixon. In August of 1974, the President was forced to resign for his administration's attempted cover-up of its involvement in the 1972 break-in at the Democratic headquarters in Washington, DC.

[ Related:]

You can't tell from the recording, but it's always been believed that Trudeau and Nixon had a difficult relationship.

Nixon has beencalling Trudeau "an asshole" and a "pompous egghead."

of the two, released in 2008, had the two leaders embroiled in a sometimes testy discussion about trade issues.

[ More Canadian Politics:]

Another interesting recording, released on Wednesday, was a conversation between Nixon and then-California Governor Ronald Reagan on April 30, 1973 following the President's address to the nation about the Watergate controversy.

According to , the recording has some speculating about whether Nixon had been drinking during the call.

(Photo courtesy of the Canadian Press)

Police found the snakes, ranging from 1 foot to 4-1/2 feet in length, in a motel in Brantford, a city about 100 km (62 miles) southwest of Toronto.

"The snakes were not being suitably cared for and were in distress. The anxious officers called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals who attended and took 40 pythons into their care," local police said in a statement.

The snakes are expected to be fine, they said. No one at the Brantford police or at the SPCA were available for comment.

A manager at the motel said the snakes belonged to a couple who had checked into a room for one night, and who were out when police arrived on Thursday evening.

Pythons are not legal for home ownership in Brantford, according to the city's animal control bylaws.

Last week, two young boys in Eastern Canada died after a 13-foot (3.96-metre), 100-lb (45-kg) python apparently attacked them in their sleep. An autopsy confirmed the two died of asphyxiation.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Eric Beech)

Tomorrow's full moon qualifies as a Blue Moon because it's the third full moon in a season with four (most seasons have only three). Historically, there have been two different .

Technically, a Blue Moon is the third full moon in a four-full-moon season. However, a 1946 article in "Sky & Telescope" magazine mistakenly defined it as the second full moon in a single month (since most months have only one full moon), and the definition stuck. Because August will have just this one full moon, it wouldn't meet the mistaken, though commonly used, definition, though it does qualify as a . []

The moon's extra names come fromof a given month. A few hundred years ago, Native American tribes in what's now the northeastern United States kept track of seasons by ascribing particular names to each full moon. Later, European settlers added their own names for the full moons to the lexicon.

The annual August full moon has come to be known as the Full Sturgeon Moon, because the large fish called sturgeon can most easily be caught at this time of year. The name came from tribes who caught this fish in bodies of water such as the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain.

Another name for this month's full moon is the Full Red Moon, because the weather and atmospheric conditions during this season can often make the moon look reddish when it rises through a haze.

And finally, because crops grow tall at this time of year, this month's moon is sometimes called the Green Corn Moon or the Grain Moon.

Full moons occur every 29.5 days on average, when the moon is directly opposite the sun from the perspective of Earth. This causes its whole disk to be fully illuminated as a large, bright circle. Usually, when the moon is full, it passes either above or below Earth's shadow, but sometimes, when it is perfectly aligned, it travels right through the shadow, causing a lunar eclipse, when its disk is dark.

Blue Moons don't happen too often, which is why the phrase "once in a Blue Moon," has sprung up to mean only very rarely. After Tuesday's event, the next Blue Moon isn't set to occur until 2015.

Follow Clara Moskowitz onand. Follow us,and. Original article on.

LONDON (Reuters) - A corner of west London will see culinary and scientific history made on Monday when scientists cook and serve up the world's first lab-grown beef burger.

The in-vitro burger, cultured from cattle stem cells, the first example of what its creator says could provide an answer to global food shortages and help combat climate change, will be fried in a pan and tasted by two volunteers.

The burger is the result of years of research by Dutch scientist Mark Post, a vascular biologist at the University of Maastricht, who is working to show how meat grown in petri dishes might one day be a true alternative to meat from livestock.

The meat in the burger has been made by knitting together around 20,000 strands of protein that has been cultured from cattle stem cells in Post's lab.

The tissue is grown by placing the cells in a ring, like a donut, around a hub of nutrient gel, Post explained.

To prepare the burger, scientists combined the cultured beef with other ingredients normally used in burgers, such as salt, breadcrumbs and egg powder. Red beet juice and saffron have been added to bring out its natural colors.

"Our burger is made from muscle cells taken from a cow. We haven't altered them in any way," Post said in a statement on Friday. "For it to succeed it has to look, feel and hopefully taste like the real thing."

VIABLE ALTERNATIVE?

Success, in Post's view, would mean not just a tasty burger, but also the prospect of finding a sustainable, ethical and environmentally friendly alternative to meat production.

According to a 2006 report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), industrialized agriculture contributes on a "massive scale" to climate change, air pollution, land degradation, energy use, deforestation and biodiversity decline.

The report, entitled Livestock's Long Shadow, said the meat industry contributes about 18 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions and this proportion is expected to grow as consumers in fast-developing countries such as China and India eat more meat.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), annual meat production is projected to rise to 376 million metric tons by 2030 from 218 million metric tons in 1997-1999, and demand from a growing world population is expected to rise beyond that.

Post cites FAO figures suggesting demand for meat is expected to increase by more than two-thirds by 2050.

Animal welfare campaigners applauded the arrival of cultured meat and predicted a great future for it.

"In vitro technology will spell the end of lorries full of cows and chickens, abattoirs and factory farming," the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) campaign group said in a statement. "It will reduce carbon emissions, conserve water and make the food supply safer."

A study published in 2011 comparing the relative environmental impacts of various types of meat, including lamb, pork, beef and cultured meat, said the lab-grown product has by far the least impact on the environment.

Hanna Tuomisto, who conducted the study at Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, found that growing meats in-vitro would use 35 percent to 60 percent less energy, emit 80 percent to 95 percent less greenhouse gas and use around 98 percent less land than conventionally produced animal meat.

While Monday's fry-up will be a world first and only an initial proof-of concept, the Dutch scientist reckons commercial production of cultured beef could begin within the next 20 years.

"What we are going to attempt is important because I hope it will show cultured beef has the answers to major problems that the world faces," he added.

(Editing by Andre Grenon)