Attorney General Dustin McDaniel called on the justices to reject the companies' appeal of a Pulaski County jury's ruling last year in which it found that the drug makers downplayed and hid risks associated with taking Risperdal. The companies have asked the Arkansas Supreme Court to overturn that ruling.

In his brief, McDaniel said the companies were going too far with their argument that the ruling against them violated the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment and the free speech provision of Arkansas' state constitution.

"Appellants' argument that they had a constitutional free-speech right to make false and misleading statements about the safety of their drugs has no merit," he wrote in the brief. "If accepted, it would effectively immunize false advertising and false labeling of drug products from regulation."

McDaniel also disputed the companies' argument that the fine levied was excessive.

If it's upheld, Arkansas law requires the fine to go toward the state's Medicaid Trust Fund.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox last year ordered Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, which are both based in New Jersey, to pay $5,000 for each of 240,000 Risperdal prescriptions the state Medicaid program paid for during a 3-year period, accounting for the bulk of the penalty. He also fined the companies $2,500 for more than 4,500 letters Jannsen sent to Arkansas doctors that the state said downplayed Risperdal's side effects, which came to about $11 million.

A group of 65 Arkansas legislators and 35 attorneys general also defended the court's ruling in a pair of friend of the court briefs filed Tuesday, arguing that the fine was consistent with state law.

"To the extent that appellants believe those statutory penalties are too harsh, their appropriate remedy lies in the political process, not the courts," the lawmakers said in the brief.

The AARP, the group Public Citizen and former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Donald Kennedy also filed briefs with the court defending the ruling.

Janssen said that it believed its appeal had strong merits.

"Janssen presented abundant evidence showing the company acted responsibly and fully complied with all laws and regulations regarding its antipsychotic prescription medication Risperdal," the company said in a statement.

Groups that have filed briefs on behalf of the drug makers challenging the ruling include the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce and the Washington Legal Foundation.

___

Follow Andrew DeMillo on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ademillo

Dubbed "Sony Smash Bros." by fans, after Nintendo's crossover brawler, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale features characters from Sony PlayStation games fighting each other in stages which mix their own titles. The characters featured include everyone from first-party favorites Nathan Drake (from Uncharted) and Sackboy (from Little Big Planet) to the armored Big Daddy from 2K Games' Bioshock.

None of the game's very few female characters have had their games featured.

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale

BioShock and BioShock 2

Sly Cooper

LittleBigPlanet

The PS Vita and PSP versions of LittleBigPlanet are also on sale, and neither are included with the PS3 games. The PSP version echoes the original platformer, while the PS Vita version is flexible enough to allow for more creative player-made games with touchscreen support. The less-well-received PS3 spinoff, LittleBigPlanet Karting, is the most expensive LBP title at $28 ($19.59 with PlayStation Plus).

Most of the God of War series (not the newest game), the entire inFAMOUS series, the Metal Gear Solid series minus Metal Gear Solid 4, the HD remakes of the PS2 Devil May Cry series, and several Twisted Metal games are all on sale as well.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

"We are...looking at the issue of price manipulation more broadly and the role of price reporting agencies in respect of the gas and electricity markets," Ofgem said.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) and Ofgem began investigating allegations made by a whistleblower in September 2012 that traders manipulated wholesale prices in Britain, Europe's biggest gas market.

The probe focused on a set of gas prices on September 28 as reported by ICIS Heren, which sets influential gas benchmarks used to underpin long-term gas supply deals.

ICIS Heren also independently raised concerns about irregular trading on that day to Ofgem.

Ofgem said it is now also looking at price formation in British gas and electricity markets and, as a first step, has asked market participants to share views on how PRAs set benchmarks.

The watchdog, without giving further details, made the announcement as it outlined broader enforcement powers for itself to tackle abuse in wholesale energy markets which are due to take effect later this month.

NEW POWERS

Ofgem's investigation comes on the same day that EU regulators published guidelines to stop banks rigging Libor and other market benchmarks in an interim measure before a more far-reaching EU law comes in.

In an annex to the draft law, the EU said it will set out a tougher regime for commodities benchmarks.

Last month EU investigators launched a probe into benchmarks used for crude oil and refined products and ethanol after raiding the London office of price reporting agency Platts and oil companies Statoil, Royal Dutch Shell and BP.

Ofgem said it "will consider all the circumstances" to ensure that any "financial penalties imposed are effective, dissuasive and proportionate".

The watchdog added that it would "ensure that no profits can be drawn from market abuse", and that prompt repayments of money made from wrongdoing would result in lower fines.

Ofgem said it will examine a range of factors when deciding whether to fine or admonish market participants, including the extent to which prohibitions on insider trading had been breached and whether it had been involved in actual or attempted market manipulation.

The new body would also weigh up the extent to which transgressions had damaged market confidence and had benefitted traders financially.

The heaviest fines would be levied for repeated violations, breaches that involve senior management, deliberate and reckless infringements of Regulations on Wholesale Energy Market Integrity and Transparency (REMIT) and where traders had tried to hide the proceeds.

Ofgem will also decide whether to fine individuals where there is evidence of personal culpability, and financial penalties would be widened to firms as a whole if they failed to establish appropriate monitoring and compliance measures.

TRADER REACTION

Participants in Britain's gas and power market said fines would need to be sufficiently large to deter infringements.

"Penalties would need to be around half of the profit made from breaches of REMIT to act as a strong disincentive - in addition to paying back the sum made by traders through any wrongdoing," said one trader.

Market participants said Ofgem would have to consider whether it would be appropriate to take the lead from U.S. regulators in levying fines.

British bank Barclays might have to pay a $470 million (300.7 million pounds) pound penalty following accusations it used loss-leading trades to rig California's electricity prices.

But despite recent job cuts in commodities trading desks at major banks including Barclays and Deutsche Bank, stiffer penalties would be unlikely to squeeze volumes in the market and deter trading, the trader added.

"REMIT will make transactions more transparent and the gas market is forecast to grow strongly, driven in major part by the global trade in liquefied natural gas," he said, referring to natural-gas chilled to liquid form and shipped on tankers.

(Reporting by Oleg Vukmanovic and John McGarrity; editing by Jason Neely and Anthony Barker)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - The breakout box-office success of the Matthew McConaughey movie "Mud" has surprised everyone - except independent film company Roadside Attraction, which has been nothing if not systematic in its marketing and release.

The Mississippi River-set coming-of-age drama has made nearly $17 million since opening back on April 26 and is easily the highest-grossing movie in the seven-year history of the company. All the more impressively, it's never played in more than 960 theaters.

"It's been an amazing ride," said Howard Cohen, co-president of with Eric D'Arbeloff at Roadside, which with Lionsgate Entertainment acquired and is distributing "Mud."

That ride isn't over yet. "Mud" broke into the top 10 in its second week and remains there , five weeks later. And Roadside's box-office grosses for 2013 are already up to $19.8 million -- better than 2012's total of $19.4 million.

What's more, with four movies still to come this summer, starting Friday with Joss Whedon's modern-day Shakespeare adaptation "Much Ado About Nothing," and three more due in the fall, Roadside looks like a lock to top its best year ever. That was 2011 when "Conspirator," "Margin Call," "Biutiful" and Oscar Best Picture nominee "Winter's Bone" helped them take in roughly $28 million.

"Mud" was written and directed by Jeff Nichols ("Take Shelter"), and co-stars Reese Witherspoon, Sam Shepherd and Nichols regular Michael Shannon. It was financed by Everest Entertainment and produced by Everest and FilmNation Entertainment for about $12 million, and competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, which is where Roadside picked it up.

It follows two teenage boys (Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland) who encounter a fugitive (McConaughey) and form a pact to help him evade a bounty hunter and reunite with his true love (Witherspoon).

"Mud" quickly caught the eye of Roadside and Lionsgate executives at Cannes.

"We've focused primarily on intelligent, upscale movies with significant casts that have commercial elements, not pure art films, and Mud' certainly fit that profile," said Howard Cohen, co-president with Eric D'Arbeloff at Roadside.

Once the deal closed in July, the next questions were the timing of the U.S. release and how to market the film.

"At the time, there was a lot of Matthew out there," Cohen said. A revived McConaughey was on screen throughout 2012 in "Bernie," "Killer Joe" and Magic Mike." So the decision was made to go with a spring 2013 release, which allowed Roadside and Lionsgate to take the film to the Sundance and South by Southwest film festivals.

"It was very well received and reviewed at both,' Cohen said, "and that gave us a lot of buzz ahead of the opening." "Mud" rolled out on 363 screens in late April -- more than a month after Focus Features debuted "Place Beyond the Pines," an arthouse-thriller which targeted a similar audience but failed to gain much traction, despite having Ryan Gosling in the title role.

When it came to the marketing, Cohen said that they pursued a more commercial, rather than arthouse, strategy. "The trailer pushes the genre elements - the thriller aspect, the gunplay - while at the same time emphasizing the reviews, and mentioning Cannes. It presents the film not as a standard thriller and not as pure arthouse either, and that was because we wanted to go to a wider demographic," Cohen said. "That's how we went with the TV spots, too."

"Mud" has played to a primarily - 60 percent - female audience, despite its gritty story line, and very well in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

But set on the Mississippi River, it also has played very strongly in the South - particularly so in Austin, where McConaughey and Nichols live, and throughout Texas. In terms of box office, the No. 2-grossing theater for the film (behind the Arclight Hollywood) is in Little Rock, Ark., where it was shot.

"It's a Heartland story," Cohen said, "and Matthew McConaughey is very popular in those regions, but mainly the film speaks for itself."

Roadside doesn't develop or produce movies; it buys the rights, does the marketing and puts them in theaters. It's a lean operation, with just 18 full-time employees, well below the numbers employed by other specialty labels.

It's a formula that is working better than it ever has before, in part because it's found a groove with partner Lionsgate, which bought a 43 percent stake in 2007. The two companies have developed a reputation for being aggressive on the festival circuit, where Cohen and d'Arbeloff, along with Lionsgate's Jason Constantine, are familiar faces.

Last year, they left the Toronto International Film Festival with the rights to Stuart Blumberg's "Thanks for Sharing," Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's "Imogene," Whedon's "Much Ado About Nothing" and Sarah Polley's family documentary, "Stories We Tell."

The company doesn't list its releases on Box Office Mojo or Exhibitor Relations' slate of upcoming film, so you have to be paying particularly close attention - or check in on their clever and occasionally sardonic Twitter account - to know what's coming.

First up is "Much Ado About Nothing" in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. No one is expecting superhero-sized grosses from this one, but anything "The Avengers" director is involved in is bound to draw attention, and a nationwide rollout is planned for June 21.

"Redemption," a thriller starring Jason Statham, is set for June 28. Steven Knight ("Dirty Pretty Things") wrote and directed the tale of a man on the run from a military court martial, who descends into London's underworld, assumes another's identity and becomes an avenging angel.

On July 19, the company will roll out the Kristin Wiig comedy "Girl Most Likely" on roughly 300 screens. Annette Bening, Matt Dillon and Darren Criss co-star in the film, which follows a failed New York playwright transitioning from Next Big Thing to Last Year's News. That one's probably the one with the most commercial appeal.

"In a World ...," in which Lake Bell makes her writing and directing debut, will close out Roadside's summer on August 9. In the comedy, Bell plays a voice coach who ventures into the competitive all-male race to land the voiceover gig for the trailer of a massive blockbuster trilogy. Rob Corddry and Nick Offerman co-star.

It's a diverse slate, which will get even broader in the fall.

First there is the Gwyneth Paltrow-Mark Ruffalo sex-addiction comedy "Thanks for Sharing," on September 20. That's followed by the Lionsgate production "Grace Unplugged," starring Disney TV star AJ Michalka as a young Christian singer whose faith is put to the test when she gets her big break.

That one will debut on about 500 screens - about as big as Roadside ever goes with openings - on October 4. And two weeks later, Roadside will debut its recent Cannes pickup, the Robert Redford shipwreck saga "All Is Lost," which looks sure to draw awards attention.

All that adds up to a year that will be the company's best and could actually change the way Roadside does business.

"We may have to add a couple of people," Cohen said.

That's why the agency dismantled thethat private contractors had set up in a large EPA storage warehouse in suburban Landover, Md., northeast of Washington, D.C.

The contractor, Apex Logistics, was hired by the EPA in 2007 to manage the agency's 70,000-square-foot (6,503 square meters) warehouse.

But Apex is now barred from the site, because their employees had set up couches, big-screen TVs, refrigerators, gym equipment and other furnishings inside the storage facility, according to the government's business news daily .

The contractors cleverly arranged partitions and stacked boxes to hide their secret man caves from security cameras, then decorated the walls with pinup calendars and photos.

Despite the cozy dcor, "deplorable conditions existed at the warehouse; corrosion, vermin feces, mold and other problems were pervasive," according to the EPA report.

Scattered among the videos, magazines and radios were important documents containing sensitive personal information such as passports.

Since awarding Apex Logistics the warehouse maintenance contract six years ago, the EPA has paid the company about $5.3 million, primarily for labor costs, Government Executive reports.

It's a guy thing

Apparently, the primal urge to set up a man cave is irrepressible among some guys: In 2007, police arrested Michael Townsend, the leader of an artist's cooperative in Rhode Island, for surreptitiously constructing a man cave at Providence Place Mall.

Townsend was inspired to build the 750-square-foot (70 square m) space after hearing a radio ad featuring a woman exclaiming how great it would be to live at the mall,reports.

The man-cave phenomenon began in earnest in the 1990s after the publication of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" (HarperCollins, 1992), in which author John Gray describes the need some men feel for a private retreat, thereports.

"Women come up to me and say: 'Thank you for explaining his cave. I always used to take it personally, and now I understand he just needs time in the cave and then he comes out,'" Gray told the Times.

Follow Marc Lallanilla onand . Follow us ,& . Original article on .

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Despite having just fired so much of his staff, Pincus manages to remain optimistic about the future of not just his company but the people he's sending toward unemployment. "We're offering generous severance packages that reflect our appreciation for all of their work and we hope this will provide a foundation as they pursue their next professional steps," Pincus writes, before getting to the part where the move will help continue the company's "mission of connecting the world through games." He continues: "Although these are hard decisions, I'm confident that our strategy of building leading franchises and supporting them with the largest network is the right one for the long term. I'm encouraged by our recent progress."

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While the very sadis trading slightly up — about one cent — on the news, Swisher's sources say Zynga had to lay so many people off because its web business has done worse than anticipated, while mobile games haven't exactly come to save the day. So far the "mobile first" strategy hasn't provided a lift, with the Farmville-style social games that made Zynga such a major player in that space failing to translate to phone-only. Hoping to get more people hooked, however, Zynga will invest in so-called "midcore" games, which take more concentration from players than tilling a virtual farm. In a recent earnings call, Pincus claimed midcore titles had "monetization that's running at roughly 15 times what we've seen across our With Friends titles on a per-player basis."

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That's got to be (slightly) encouraging for Pincus and his shareholders, but probably not so much to the 520 people who just lost their jobs. But, hey, at least they get a "generous severance" as they head out looking for jobs in that , right?

San Francisco's leading wide receiver underwent surgery Wednesday, though the team is optimistic he will return at some point in 2013. Crabtree was operated on at Stanford by Dr. Tim McAdams one day after suffering the injury during 7-on-7 drills in an organized team activity.

"Michael Crabtree underwent surgery to repair his Achilles tendon that he tore yesterday," coach Jim Harbaugh said. "Surgery was successful and we do not anticipate it will be season-ending for Michael. It was completely torn, and completely repaired."

Harbaugh would not speculate when Crabtree might return to play.

The 25-year-old Crabtree, the team's 10th overall pick in the 2009 draft out of Texas Tech, had career highs last season with 85 receptions for 1,105 yards and nine touchdowns for the NFC champion Niners, who lost 34-31 to the Baltimore Ravens in the Super Bowl.

USA Today first reported that Crabtree was hurt during Tuesday's OTA, citing an unidentified source.

Harbaugh said Crabtree went in motion, planted to begin a route and "felt like somebody kicked him in the Achilles, which sometimes people say that feels like." Having the operation right away was considered the best option so Crabtree has the chance to return this year unlike with running back Kendall Hunter last season, who had the same injury but the decision was made to wait some time before surgery.

"Good news is he woke up from the surgery and the first thing, asked the doctor how it went," Harbaugh said. "(The doctor) talked about the success of the surgery and he didn't anticipate he'd be out for the year. His comment to that was, 'Got no choice but to be back.' Every day now is a healing day, and that starts today."

This is a tough blow for the two-time defending NFC West champions after Crabtree's breakout 2012 season. He was one of the big reasons the franchise returned to the Super Bowl for the first time in 18 years, clicking with quarterback Colin Kaepernick after his promotion to starter in November over departed 2005 No. 1 overall draft pick Alex Smith.

"It's a setback, but Michael's young, he's strong. Everything will be a positive approach to healing and we'll anticipate great things," Harbaugh said. "Another thing right now is if you look at the young receivers on our team that will emerge because they have to emerge. I'm excited to watch them compete for that spot."

Harbaugh wouldn't say whether the 49ers would look outside the organization for a replacement with Crabtree out, or even if the team would consider bringing back Randy Moss.

"We're excited for the young receivers that we have, and feel that somebody's going to emerge there," he said. "Competition will create that, and we'll look forward to watching that."

Anquan Boldin, acquired in a trade with the Ravens this spring, will be counted upon to carry a bulk of the load. Boldin missed Wednesday's practice for what Harbaugh called "some prior commitments for this week."

Boldin had 65 catches for 921 yards and four touchdowns for the Ravens last season.

Kaepernick and Crabtree were eager to get back on the field together after falling just short in New Orleans back in February.

"It's an injury. Nobody wants it to happen no matter who it is," Kaepernick said.

Kaepernick's fourth-down throw into the end zone in the closing moments sailed over Crabtree. Harbaugh and the 49ers argued that Crabtree got held, bumped by cornerback Jimmy Smith with safety Ed Reed trailing the play.

Crabtree also had five TDs and 30 catches on third-down plays last season both stats among the top five in the NFL.

Kaepernick offered an easy explanation as to why they clicked so well: "He got open."

He has bounced back the past two seasons from several injuries.

After a 71-day contract stalemate as a rookie, Crabtree was sidelined during the 2010 preseason with a neck injury. Again a year later he was out with a broken foot sustained while working out in Alex Smith-organized practices during the NFL lockout.

In 2011, Crabtree led the team in catches (72) and yards receiving (874), but San Francisco came up short of a Super Bowl.

While he had four catches for 25 yards and a 4-yard touchdown reception in a 36-32 victory against Drew Brees and the favored Saints in the NFC divisional playoffs, it was the NFC championship game Crabtree remembers as a most disappointing day.

San Francisco's receivers had just one catch for 3 yards yes, it was by him and Crabtree was targeted four times in a 20-17 overtime loss to the eventual Super Bowl champion New York Giants.

Crabtree said that performance helped fuel him last year.

"Obviously he's a great player, he's done a lot for this team," Kaepernick said. "We just have to have someone step up. He's not happy about it, he's just trying to get healthy now. Crab's going to work, he's going to be back."

Notes: The 49ers signed fourth-round draft pick WR Quinton Patton to a four-year contract. ... The team also claimed tight end/long snapper Kyle Nelson off of waivers from the San Diego Chargers and waived P Anthony Santella. ... Also gone Wednesday were S Darcel McBath, who Harbaugh said was ill; LT Joe Staley, C Jonathan Goodwin, CB Tarell Brown and LB NaVorro Bowman.

___

Online: http://pro32.ap.org and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

[More from BGR: ]

However, there is something oddly familiar between the Pacific Crest claim. It sounds very much likefrom the same brokerage. In that note, Faucette projected BlackBerry would ship between 275,000 and 325,000 Z10s during the February quarter. The company ended up shipping 1 million units, over 200% more than Faucette projected. Of course, that is a sell-in number and does not reveal how many units were bought by consumers. But Pacific Crest anchors much of its research on component order checks and those are supposed toreflectsell-in levels.

[More from BGR: ]

That is far from the only weird drama surrounding BlackBerry shipment estimates in recent months. Back in February, Canaccordexecuted , slashing the number from 1.75 million to 300,000. This also happened just before the company announced it shipped 1 million phones.

What is going on?

One major factormotivating hysterical research notes and wild estimate swings is simply a raw need for attention. There are too many small and mid-sized brokerages out there. Most clients have slashed the funds they use to pay for research over the past decade, and many hedge funds have the habit of calling analysts withthe highest and lowest estimates on the Street and ignoring the middle.

This combination of shrinking research payment pools and attention garnered by outliers has created a perverse incentive. Some smaller brokerages can only get client attention bymoving way, way out of the consensus range with sales and earnings estimates. Many analysts no longer even seek accuracy the only goal is apparently to make a splash that is big enough to get some client calls returned.

As a result, the fringes of Wall Street sell-side research are starting to resemble a carnival sideshow; bearded ladies and lizard-tongued boys scrambling for dimes. The situation is likely to grow only moregarishif buy-side compensation for brokerage research continues its grinding slide.

This article was

PARIS (Reuters) - The last time Maria Sharapova dropped the opening set of a match 6-0, an Olympic dream was trampled. On Wednesday a similar drubbing provoked a champion's response as the Russian kept alive her hopes of a second successive French Open title alive.

Thoughts of her humiliating defeat at Wimbledon by Serena Williams last year returned as the misfiring Sharapova surrendered the first set of her quarter-final against Jelena Jankovic in 28 minutes before recovering to win 0-6 6-4 6-3.

As expected Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic set up a siesmic semi-final clash after comfortable wins against Stanislas Wawrinka and German veteran Tommy Haas respectively.

Seven-times champion Nadal, roaring back into top form after a poor opening week, crushed weary-looking Swiss Wawrinka 6-2 6-3 6-1 while world number one Djokovic was made to work harder by Haas before polishing off the 35-year-old 6-3 7-6(5) 7-5.

With Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Spaniard David Ferrer enjoying comprehensive wins on Tuesday all four men's quarter-finals at Roland Garros were won in straight sets for the first time since 1948.

In contrast all the women's last-eight ties have been tightly contested, even Victoria Azarenka's 7-6 6-2 defeat of Maria Kirilenko which featured a 76-minute opening set.

That Sharapova pulled round a match in which she managed just 14 points in a first set to move through to a juicy-looking semi-final against Azarenka spoke volumes for the fighting spirit of the four-times grand slam champion.

SIZZLING WINNERS

"I wanted to put that chapter behind me," Sharapova said.

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

World number two Sharapova will be wary of making such a slow start against Azarenka on Thursday.

The Belarussian enjoys a 7-5 career record against Sharapova and says she is beginning to fall in love with clay after reaching her first semi-final at Roland Garros.

"I still don't have any ring on my finger," she said when quizzed about her relationship with the Parisian clay courts.

"But I feel like we made a step forward."

Sharapova made 45 unforced errors against the feisty Jankovic but having worked her way back into the match she showed her class with some sizzling winners when it mattered.

At 3-3 in the third set she stretched her long limbs to hook an impossible-looking backhand winner and then broke serve with a piercing forehand down the line, holding her celebratory fist-clenched salute as courtside cameras clicked their appreciation.

She then fought off a break point in the next game with a nerveless swinging volley off a Jankovic moon ball, breaking the Serbian's spirit in the process as she moved on to reach the semi-finals here for the fourth time in 11 attempts.

"Sometimes you just have to get the job done, and I did today," Sharapova said.

REPEAT ON CARDS

A repeat of last year's women's final between Sharapova and Italian Sara Errani is still on the cards, although Azarenka and world number one Serena Williams, who faces Errani, will have plenty to say about that.

Nadal had never lost a set against Wawrinka, who was bidding to become the first Swiss to last longer at a grand slam than Roger Federer since 2002, in their nine previous matches and was never in danger of doing so on Wednesday.

Wawrinka broke French hearts when he came back from two sets down to defeat Richard Gasquet in the previous round, but the ninth seed looked leg weary as Nadal unleashed the kind of tennis that has made him virtually unbeatable at Roland Garros since winning the first of his seven titles here in 2005.

"It's always been the case. The deeper I go the better I play usually. It's always been the case. It's the same this year. It's the same old story," Nadal, who labored through his opening rounds here, told a news conference.

The form that has led to five claycourt titles already this year has returned just in time for an earlier-than-normal clash with Serbian Djokovic, who he beat in the final here last year.

Despite virtually owning Roland Garros where his only defeat in 58 matches came against Robin Soderling in 2009, current world number four Nadal came in seeded three and the draw has thrown up a clash which has the feel of a title-decider.

"It's the semi-finals and doesn't matter if it's against Novak or against another player, because the player who wins is not going to be the champion of Roland Garros. It's just a semi-final," Nadal told reporters.

Djokovic played down the implications of meeting Nadal in the semis after ending Haas's bid to become the oldest man to reach the last four at Roland Garros since 1968.

"I can't affect it. It's the draw. It is what it is," he said before elaborating on what will be required to end Nadal's bid to become the first man to win the same grand slam tournament eight times.

"We are in good form. This is it, you know. This is the biggest matchup of our Roland Garros 2013 campaign for both me and him," he said. "I need to be very disciplined and focused in order to get emotionally, physically, and mentally ready for that match."

Haas gave it his best shot against Djokovic, pushed him hard in the second set on a sun-bathed Suzanne Lenglen court and even broke the Serb when he served for the match but ultimately the exertions of the past week and a half caught up with him.

(Reporting by Martyn Herman; Editing by John Mehaffey)

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A simple screening program for cervical cancer using vinegar and visual exams helped reduce deaths caused by the cancer by 31 percent in a group of 150,000 poor women in India, researchers reported on Sunday.

If implemented broadly, the screening program could lead to the prevention of 22,000 deaths from cervical cancer in India, and 72,000 deaths in the developing world each year, the team reported at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.

"We had a 31 percent reduction in cervical cancer death. That was very significant," Dr Surendra Shastri of Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, India, who led the study and presented the findings at the meeting. The study also showed a 7 percent reduction in deaths from any cause, although that finding was not statistically significant.

Cervical cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths among women in India and in many parts of the developing world. "Low-cost screening programs such as described in India are desperately needed," said Dr Kathleen Schmeler of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Shastri said currently there are no cervical cancer screening programs in India, mainly because PAP smear screening, the conventional test done among women in developed countries, is not possible because of issues such as logistics, infrastructure and high costs.

"We hope our results will have a profound effect in reducing the burden of cervical cancer in India and around the world," Shastri said.

The study involved women selected from 20 slums in the city of Mumbai. To overcome some of the social barriers of screening, the team first met with religious, political and community leaders to gain support for the program. For the screening program, the team trained young women with at least a 10th grade education on how to apply the vinegar solution and evaluate the results.

As a result of these efforts, "the screening participation rates were 89 percent, huge for a country like India," Shastri told the briefing.

The study involved women aged 35 to 64 with no previous history of cancer. They were randomly assigned to either an education program to teach women how to recognize symptoms of cervical cancer or a screening program in which a vinegar solution is applied to the cervix, which can make pre-cancerous tissues turn white and visible to the naked eye after only a minute.

The screening group got four rounds of this vinegar treatment and visual inspection plus cancer education every two years. All of the women in the study were offered treatment for their cervical cancers.

Among women in the screening group, there was a 31 percent reduction in cervical cancer deaths compared with women in the education-only group.

Based on the study results, Shastri said the Indian government plans to take up the screening program on a population basis. In the state of Maharashtra, where the trial was done, health officials are preparing to train primary health care workers to provide the screening to all women in the state aged 35-64, including women who took part in the control arm of the study who did not receive screening.

Doctors at the meeting said the program could offer a good alternative to PAP testing.

"What we're talking about is the use of vinegar in a large screening program where PAP testing is not available. There have been studies that have demonstrated that the accuracy of these programs is comparable," said Electra Paskett, an ASCO spokeswoman and an expert in gynecologic cancers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Dr. Monique Spillman of the University of Colorado Cancer Center, said similar efforts have been tried in parts of Africa.

"This quick and cheap procedure could identify women who need to see a physician for treatment of cervical pre-cancer or cancer, while reassuring women who have normal results," she said.

Schmeler of MD Anderson is conducting similar studies in Brazil and El Salvador using the vinegar technique in combination with testing for human papillomavirus or HPV, the virus that causes cervical cancer, to try to improve on the accuracy of such screening programs, which can sometimes result in overtreatment.

"The work we're doing is to try to go to the next step to determine who are the false positives," Schmeler said.

(Editing by Doina Chiacu)