LONDON (Reuters) - Speculation about baby names, hair colour and hypnosis swirled around the Duchess of Cambridge on Thursday during her last solo public appearance before she gives birth to a royal heir.

British glossy magazine Grazia reported the duchess has considered using hypno-birth for a delivery expected next month in which women use a form of self-hypnosis to control pain by learning techniques to boost production of pain-relieving hormones.

Bookmakers said bets favoured the duchess joining the growing band of women dubbed "too posh to push" by opting for a caesarean rather than a natural birth.

The royal family has declined to give any details on plans for the first child of Prince William and Kate Middleton, 31, who have been officially known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge since their marriage in April 2011.

A royal spokeswoman said she was aware of rising speculation about the birth but declined to confirm or deny any details for the baby who will be the third in line to the British throne after Prince Charles and his oldest son William.

"This is a happy occasion and there is lot of speculation about what the duchess might and might not do but this really is a private matter," the spokeswoman said.

Royal watchers expect the baby to be born at St Mary's Hospital in central London where Princess Diana gave birth to William, who turns 31 next week, and his brother Prince Harry.

The duchess was under scrutiny for any hints about the baby during her last solo public engagement on Thursday when she launched Princess Cruises' new 3,600-passenger vessel Royal Princess in Southampton on England's south coast.

BABY TALK

Wearing a black hat and Dalmatian print coat, the duchess was careful to give nothing away after a slip in March when she accepted a teddy saying: "Thank you, I'll take this for my d.."

Rupert Adams from bookmaker William Hill said this dropped "d" led to such wide speculation that the baby was a girl that it suspended all bets on gender just weeks later while rival bookmaker Paddy Power paid out on bets that it was girl.

Bets on names have continued to roll in with Alexandra the clear favourite followed by Diana, after Prince William's mother who died in a car crash in 1997, and then Elizabeth.

Alexandra has a history in the royal family with Princess Alexandra, 76, a cousin of the Queen and Queen Victoria's son Edward VII married to Alexandra of Denmark in 1863.

The favourite boy's name is George and the favoured date for the birth is July 17.

"We are seeing lots of small bets from over 100 countries. The Aussies and Canadians particularly love this," said Adams.

Rory Scott from Paddy Power said people were also putting money on more obscure bets, such as the baby's future career, university, and hair colour with brown favoured over ginger.

"You combine the royal family with betting and you have two of the favourite pastimes in Britain," Scott said.

Both bookmakers found gamblers expected the duchess to opt for a caesarean instead of natural birth with one in four babies now delivered this way in the UK, up from 12 percent in 1990.

The focus on how the duchess gives birth has drawn her, unwittingly, into the complex web of childbirth politics where campaigners of different birthing methods battle for supremacy.

The Blissful Birth website which deals with hypno-birthing said a number of hypno-birthing practitioners have "spun" speculation about the duchess using hypno-birthing into suggestions that she was considering their particular approach.

But the website's founder Heidi Woodgate, urged these practitioners to stop the race for recognition.

"Quite frankly, whether my customers are royalty, celebrities or normal everyday women, the focus should be on their birth story, not the particular hypno-birthing programme they used," Woodgate wrote in a blog on the website.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

MADRID (Reuters) - Barcelona's Argentina forward Lionel Messi and his father denied wrongdoing on Wednesday after the Spanish tax authorities accused them of defrauding the state of more than four million euros ($5.3 million).

The World Player of the Year and his father Jorge allegedly filed fraudulent tax returns for the years 2006 to 2009, according to Jose Miguel Company, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office for tax crimes in Catalonia.

"We learned about the action begun by the Spanish prosecutor through the media," Rosario-born Messi, who has been resident in Barcelona since 2000 and gained Spanish citizenship in 2005, wrote in a statement on his official Facebook page.

"It is something that surprises us because we have never committed any offence," the statement added.

"We have always fulfilled all our tax obligations following the advice of our tax consultants, who will take care of clarifying this situation."

Via a complex web of shell companies in Uruguay, Belize, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, income from the sale of Messi's image rights was effectively hidden from the Spanish authorities, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

The pair could face up to four years in jail if found guilty, according to Spanish law.

Messi, who will be 26 this month, is one of the world's highest-paid athletes with a salary of just over $20 million a season, according to Forbes magazine.

On top of his Barca wages, he pulls in about $21 million in endorsements from sponsors including Adidas, PepsiCo and P&G and is 10th on Forbes' latest list of top-earning athletes.

As well as income he received from the three companies mentioned above, Messi also avoided paying tax on earnings from selling his image rights to the Aspire Academy in Qatar and from a trip he made with Barca team mates to Uzbekistan in 2008, the prosecutor's office said.

Messi came on for the final half-hour of Argentina's World Cup 2014 qualifier against Ecuador in Quito on Tuesday, which ended in a 1-1 draw.

The forward and his Argentina team mates are due to play a friendly against Guatemala in Guatemala City on Friday.

(Writing by Iain Rogers, editing by Clare Fallon and Sonia Oxley)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study has confirmed that removing the tonsils and adenoids of children with obstructive sleep apnea can reduce sleepiness and improve the quality of life, but putting off the surgery might not hurt either.

The study is the first controlled test to compare the operation with so-called watchful waiting as a strategy for stopping childhood obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, where the structures in the back of the mouth can temporarily block breathing during sleep.

The findings, released May 21 at an American Thoracic Society International Conference in Philadelphia, and appearing online in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that after seven months, surgery improved many gauges of everyday living.

"Improvements in emotional regulation, attention, organizational skills, reduced sleepiness, improved quality of life including socialization and physical and emotional wellbeing were quite large, larger than we anticipated," coauthor Dr. Susan Redline of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston told Reuters Health.

Yet when the children were formally tested, youngsters in both groups performed equally well, an indication that the sleep disturbance wasn't causing any measurable cognitive problems.

"Where you objectively measure these cognitive tasks, children can do fairly well in that motivated and structured environment" whether or not they have surgery, she said. "It shows that over a 7-month period of watchful waiting, cognition does not decline."

Nearly half the children who did not have the operation improved on their own, Redline said.

About 500,000 such operations are done in the U.S. each year, mostly to help children with apnea. It's the second most common pediatric surgical procedure after tubes in the ears, and costs about $2,850, according to the Healthcare Blue Book.

Redline and her colleagues took 464 children age 5 to 9 and randomly assigned them to surgery or observation at seven academic sleep centers. Nearly half were overweight or obese. The children with the most severe apnea were excluded.

Children with the surgery showed a large improvement on ratings of things such as impulsiveness, emotional control and quality of sleep that were assessed by parents and teachers.

"It really was across-the-board improvement in everyday life" for surgery patients, Redline said.

On the other hand, "almost half the children improved spontaneously over the 7-month period without surgery," she said.

Growth of the airway, a regression of the tissue blocking the airway at night, or routine medical care may have been some of the reasons, the researchers said.

Nonetheless, six of the 203 children in the watchful waiting group had an exacerbation of their symptoms. There was no worsening among the children who got surgery.

Three percent of the children who had surgery had some type of complication related to the surgery, but none was associated with death or disability.

The results also varied by weight, and the surgery was less effective among black children. The reason is unclear, the authors write.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/165LeNT New England Journal of Medicine, online May 21, 2013.

The study may help explain why black women have higher rates of breast cancer at young ages and a worse chance of survival.

Doctors say these patients should be offered genetic counseling and may want to consider more frequent screening and prevention options, which can range from hormone-blocking pills to breast removal, as Jolie chose to do.

"We were surprised at our results," said the study leader, Dr. Jane Churpek, a cancer specialist at the University of Chicago. Too few black women have been included in genetic studies in the past and most have not looked for mutations to the degree this one did, "so we just don't have a good sense" of how much risk there is, she said.

Churpek gave results of the study Monday at an American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago. The researchers include Mary-Claire King, the University of Washington scientist who discovered the first breast cancer predisposition gene, BRCA1.

Jolie revealed a few weeks ago that she carries a defective BRCA1 gene, giving her up to an 87 percent risk of developing breast cancer and up to a 54 percent risk for ovarian cancer. The actress's mother had breast cancer and died of ovarian cancer, and her maternal grandmother also had ovarian cancer. An aunt recently died of breast cancer.

Children of someone with a BRCA mutation have a 50 percent chance of inheriting it.

In the U.S., about 5 to 10 percent of breast cancers are thought to be due to bad BRCA genes. Among breast cancer patients, BRCA mutations are carried by 5 percent of whites and 12 percent of Eastern European (Ashkenazi) Jews. The rates in other groups are not as well known.

The study involved 249 black breast cancer patients from Chicago area hospitals. Many had breast cancer at a young age, and half had a family history of the disease.

They were given complete gene sequencing for all 18 known breast cancer risk genes rather than the usual tests that just look for a few specific mutations in BRCA genes.

Gene flaws were found in 56, or 22 percent, of study participants; 46 of them involved BRCA1 or BRCA2 and the rest were less commonly mutated genes.

Harmful mutations were found in 30 percent of black women with "triple-negative breast cancer" tumors whose growth is not fueled by estrogen, progesterone or the gene that the drug Herceptin targets. Doctors have long known that these harder-to-treat cases are more common in black women.

The National Cancer Institute, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and Komen for the Cure paid for the study.

It included many younger women and those with a family history of cancer, and they are known to have higher rates of gene mutations that raise risk, said Rebecca Nagy, a genetics counselor at Ohio State University and president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors.

Still, "it has always stumped us" to see black families with lots of breast cancer but no mutations that can be found in ordinary testing for BRCA genes, she said.

That was the situation for Alicia Cook, 44, a Chicago woman whose grandmother died of breast cancer, mother died of ovarian cancer and two sisters have had breast cancer. When she was first diagnosed with breast cancer nearly 10 years ago, a test for BRCA mutations was negative.

Doctors said, "I'm sure there's something going on genetically" but they didn't have the tools to find it, Cook said.

Last year, she had a recurrence and a sister who was diagnosed with the disease learned she carried a BRCA1 mutation. Cook was retested for the same mutation and found to have it. Now she is telling her relatives in hopes that more of them will seek genetic counseling and be aware of their risk.

"You don't want to put people in fear, but knowledge is power," she said.

___

Online:

Breast cancer: http://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/breast-cancer

and http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/risk/brca

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

The two men were part of a group of 22 skydivers who jumped from a plane in Zephyrhills, about 30 miles northeast of Tampa, according to the Tampa Tribune newspaper.

When only 20 of those who jumped returned, authorities launched a search and found the bodies of the two men a few hours later, Florida media said.

The two men were from Iceland, according to Skydive City, which planned the jump, the Tribune reported.

Their identities were not released.

A spokesman for the Pasco County, Florida Sheriff's Office could not be reached for comment.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst; Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Todd Eastham)

Now they'll go head to head.

Both advanced to Friday's semifinals with victories in straight sets, finishing less than 10 minutes apart. Nadal drubbed Stanislas Wawrinka 6-2, 6-3, 6-1, and shortly thereafter Djokovic eliminated 35-year-old Tommy Haas 6-3, 7-6 (5), 7-5.

So much for the preliminaries to set up a much-anticipated rematch of last year's final, which Nadal won for a record seventh French Open title. He's bidding to become the first man to win eight titles at the same Grand Slam event.

Djokovic, ranked No. 1 and the owner of six Grand Slam titles, seeks the only major championship he has yet to win. With two more victories he would become the eighth man to complete a career Grand Slam.

The other semifinal pits Spaniard David Ferrer against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, who's trying to become the first Frenchman in 30 years to win Roland Garros.

Advancing on the women's side were defending champion Maria Sharapova and two-time Australian Open winner Victoria Azarenka, and they'll meet Thursday. The other semifinal will match No. 1 Serena Williams against 2012 runner-up Sara Errani.

Nadal leads Djokovic 19-15 but lost their most recent meeting in the Monte Carlo final on clay in April. Nadal leads 6-3 in Grand Slam meetings.

Because Nadal's ranking slipped during a seven-month layoff because of a knee injury, he and Djokovic wound up in the same half of the draw. As a result, they'll meet before the final at a major event for the first time since 2008.

Both were near top form in the quarterfinals.

Djokovic wore down Haas, winning 40 of his first 43 service points. Haas found himself on the verge of pulling even at 5-all in the tiebreaker, but Djokovic smacked a backhand winner to end a 24-stroke rally longest of the match and won the next point as well for a two-set lead.

Djokovic reached his 12th consecutive Grand Slam semifinal. He improved to 33-4 this year.

Nadal, seeded No. 3, turned in his finest performance of the tournament yet. After dropping the first set in each of the first two rounds, he has won 12 sets in a row, looking better and better at Roland Garros, where he now is 57-1.

Nadal improved to 10-0 against Wawrinka and has won all 22 sets they've played.

Sharapova needed a comeback unlike any other in her career to reach the semifinals, rallying past Jelena Jankovic, 0-6, 6-4, 6-3. It was Sharapova's first win after losing an opening set 6-0.

The No. 2-seeded Sharapova earned her first French Open title a year ago to complete a career Grand Slam. She has won 12 matches in a row at Roland Garros, where her 42-9 record is the best among active women.

"Obviously it only gets tougher from here," Sharapova said, "but I'm really happy I'm at this stage again."

She's 5-7 against No. 3 Azarenka, who reached her first Roland Garros semifinal by beating Maria Kirilenko 7-6 (3), 6-2.

The warmest weather of the tournament greeted the last of the quarterfinalists, and Jankovic quickly had Sharapova sweating. In the first set the Russian repeatedly missed the lines by narrow margins or clipped the net cord, and the match was 35 minutes old before she won a game and only then because Jankovic double-faulted on break point.

Jankovic won 27 points in the first set, 20 on unforced errors by her opponent.

"I still felt like I was in the match," Sharapova said. "And I was."

She then began to find her range while hitting even harder than before, while Jankovic did her best to withstand the barrage. In contrast to Sharapova's metronomic shrieking, Jankovic went about her business in silence until she started muttering to herself as her lead disappeared.

"It was a big fight," Jankovic said. "It was great tennis out there. We battled."

Sharapova earned the first break of the final set to take her first lead at 4-3. Toward the end the rallies became longer, and she won the majority, often by hitting shots at improbable angles.

Twice Sharapova yanked lunging backhand returns cross-court for winners. She finished off another point with a forehand struck so violently her necklace flew into her face.

"It was certainly nice to change things around," Sharapova said, "because I wasn't doing much in the first six games."

When Jankovic's final shot sailed wide, Sharapova responded with a slack-jawed smile, as though she couldn't quite believe her comeback. She had dropped a first set 6-0 five other times in her career and went on to lose each match.

The English-language station, beamed to 630 million viewers worldwide, said it would launch "Politics with Larry King" in June.

The show will be produced by Ora TV, an online broadcaster founded by King and Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim last year, and recorded in RT America's Washington, DC, studio and Ora TV's Los Angeles studio.

RT said it also signed a deal to air the online talk show "Larry King Now", which has been hosted by web broadcasters Hulu.com and Ora.tv since last July. The U.S. branch will be the exclusive broadcaster for both programmes, it said.

"Whether a president or an activist or a rock star was sitting across from him, Larry King never shied away from asking the tough questions, which makes him a terrific fit for our network," said RT's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.

RT and Ora TV declined to comment on King's salary in the deal.

Russia Today - considered a Kremlin exercise in image enhancement by critics - received 11 billion roubles ($349 million) from the state this year. It signed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange last year to host his own talk show.

King, 79, ended a 25-year run as the host of "Larry King Live" on CNN in 2010. He had interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin several times over his 13-year rule.

RT also made headlines in 2011 when U.S. airports refused to put up one of its controversial advertisements.

The billboards comparing U.S. President Barack Obama and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a tagline asking, "Who poses the greater nuclear threat?" did appear at airports across Europe.

(Reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel; editing by Mike Collett-White)

Anti-drug Institute Deputy Director Bernardita Marin says bank officials reported suspicious activities in 2009 and in 2010 to the government's Financial Intelligence Unit, which began investigating.

The investigation was turned over to prosecutors in 2011, the same year the United States informed Costa Rica about Liberty Reserve's criminal activities.

Marin says that Liberty Reserve moved about $100 million through Costa Rican banks.

Liberty Reserve's founder Arthur Budovsky was arrested Friday at a Madrid airport while trying to return home to Costa Rica.

U.S. federal prosecutors charged seven people Tuesday, including Budvosky, with running an underworld bank that handled $6 billion around the world.

The new Common Core standards replace a hodgepodge of educational goals that had varied greatly from state to state. The federal government was not involved in the state-led effort to develop them but has encouraged the project.

While proponents say the new standards will better prepare students, critics worry they'll set a national curriculum for public schools rather than letting states decide what is best for their students.

There was little dissent when the standards were widely adopted in 2010, but that begun changing last year and debate picked up steam this year. The standards have divided Republicans, with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush championing them and conservatives such as Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, opposing them.

Lawmakers and governors are reviewing the standards in Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Indiana, Alabama, South Carolina and Utah. Grassley, meanwhile, persuaded eight other senators to sign onto a letter in April asking the Senate Appropriations Committee to stop the Education Department from linking adoption of the standards to eligibility for other federal dollars. That same month, the Republican National Committee passed a resolution calling the standards an "inappropriate overreach."

Kristy Campbell, a spokeswoman for the Bush-backed Foundation for Excellence in Education, said conservatives historically have supported higher standards and greater accountability.

"The fact that they are opposed to Common Core now is a little surprising and disappointing given the fact that states came together to solve a need," Campbell said, adding that the new standards will allow for state-by-state comparisons that haven't been possible before. "We are going to have more rigorous assessments that are going to test kids against those higher standards and hopefully achieve what we all want, which is a dramatically greater quality of education in America."

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative, Washington-based think tank that espouses conservative policies in state legislatures, debated in November whether to oppose the Common Core standards. The group ultimately decided to remain neutral, but its discussion, along with concerns raised by conservative groups such as the Goldwater and Pioneer institutes, caught the attention of lawmakers.

States that adopt the standards are supposed to use them as a base on which to build their curricula and testing, but they can make their benchmarks tougher than Common Core. While the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, found the new standards to be more rigorous than those that had been used by three-quarters of all states, critics question what will happen in states whose previous standards were tougher.

"So in that regard we really viewed Common Core as the race to the middle, not to the top," said Jamie Gass, director of the Center for School Reform at the Pioneer Institute.

Questions about testing also have arisen. In New York, among the first states to test students based on the standards, some students complained this spring that the Common Core-aligned English exams were too difficult to complete in the allotted time, and there were reports of students crying from stress.

Jonathan Butcher, education director for the Goldwater Institute, based in Phoenix, said opposition also is gaining traction because states and districts are at the point where money has to be appropriated to pay for the standards.

"As soon as states had to start spending money on the Common Core, as soon as it became a line item in the budget, people sit up and take notice," Butcher said. "And that wasn't going to happen until now, until states started to implement it. So it's unfortunate that there is so much attention to it so late in the game but that's kind of where we are. As soon as it starts to become a money issue people will pay attention."

Calculations on the cost of implementing the standards vary, with the Pioneer Institute and two other anti-Common Core conservative think tanks estimating it will cost $16 billion over seven years. Meanwhile, the Fordham Institute, which is pro-Common Core, said the cost over a one-to-three-year transition period could range from $8.3 billion to breaking even or even saving money, depending on things like whether the states purchase hard-copy textbooks or use open-source learning material written by experts, vetted by their peers and posted for free downloading.

One issue is that new tests tied to the standards will be computerized, requiring some states and districts to make technology upgrades. The Pioneer analysis included those technology costs; the Fordham one didn't.

In backing ultimately unsuccessful anti-Common Core legislation in Missouri, Rep. Kurt Bahr, a Republican from the St. Louis suburb of O'Fallon, said he was concerned that many communities lacked the bandwidth and hardware to administer the tests.

"We don't have that connectivity," Bahr said. "It's about to become a massive pocketbook issue."

The standards are the result of an initiative sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Carrie Heath Phillips, who oversees implementation of the standards for the council, played down the concerns about cost, noting that states periodically update their standards and that spending money to implement new ones is nothing new. She also acknowledged that technology upgrades can be a real issue for states that haven't invested in it, but asked, "If you're not moving into the 21st century now in 2013, when are you going to?"

The standards have a long list of supporters, including the National Parent Teacher Association, several education associations and businesses such as the Boeing Co. and Microsoft Corp.

Literacy teacher Jessica Cuthbertson said she attempted to fully implement the new standards in her sixth-grade Aurora, Colo., classroom for the first time this year and found her students' writing was "substantially better."

"I feel that often the debate isn't about the learning," said Cuthbertson, who also trains teachers to use the new standards as part of her job with a virtual teacher leadership initiative called the Center for Teaching Quality. "We're not talking about what the kids are producing and doing with these cool standards. We're talking about the big brother federal government controlling curriculum. I don't think it's really grounded in student learning, and yet in the hands of teachers focused on student learning, I just think there is nothing but hope."

While the federal government wasn't involved in developing the standards, it has provided $350 million to two consortiums developing Common Core tests. The federal Education Department also encouraged states to adopt the standards to compete for "Race to the Top" grants and seek waivers around some of the unpopular proficiency requirements of the No Child Left Behind federal education act.

"They have done some things that have kind of muddied the waters at the very least," said Butcher of the Goldwater Institute. "It's hard for me to say, 'Well, clearly the federal government has no interest in this.'"

But in Michigan, where the Republican-led Legislature is taking steps aimed at halting the standards, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder is defending them as a "really important opportunity" for the state.

"Unfortunately, it's been too much about politics," he said. "It's being viewed as the federal government putting another federal mandate on us. ... It was the governors of the states getting together ... to say we want a partner at the national level and all levels to say, 'Let's raise the bar.'"

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Associated Press writers Chris Blank in Jefferson City, Mo., John Milburn in Topeka, Kan., Alanna Durkin in Lansing, Mich., Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta, Tom LoBianco in Indianapolis, Phillip Rawls in Montgomery, Ala., Seanna Adcox in Columbia, S.C., Michelle Price in Salt Lake City, Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pa., and Karen Matthews in New York contributed to this report.

The 36-year-old welterweight - considered the best defensive boxer of his generation - topped the magazine's Fortunate 50 list, issued on Wednesday. Mayweather also took the top spot last year, earning an estimated $85 million, again from just two fights, the magazine reported.

Miami Heat basketball star LeBron James, 28, a four-time National Basketball Association Most Valuable Player, came in this year in the number two slot, earning a total of $56.5 million.

The list is calculated by combining estimated salary, winnings and endorsements. Mayweather's total earnings are even more impressive considering he received no endorsement money either this year or last.

James' $56.5 million income combines a $17.5 million salary with an additional $39 million in endorsements.

Golfer Tiger Woods, the highest paid U.S. athlete from 2004, when the list was first published, through 2011, dropped to the No. 5 slot on this year's list, earning $40.8 million.

Chicago Cubs outfielder Alfonso Soriano came in as the 50th highest-paid U.S. athlete with an estimated $18.2 million.

Candidates for the list must be U.S. citizens and compete in a U.S.-based league.

Internationally, soccer great David Beckham is estimated to earn more than $48 million, landing him the top spot on the magazine's annual list of highest-paid athletes worldwide, The International 20.

(Reporting by Chris Francescani; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Tim Dobbyn)