Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

The company's forecast implies a potential $3 billion upgrade to the consensus estimate from analysts and marks an attempt to call a bottom to a sales decline driven by the loss of exclusivity on several top-selling medicines. Britain's second-biggest drugmaker is already suffering from generic competition to its antipsychotic Seroquel, while its Nexium treatment for excess stomach acid loses U.S. patent cover this year. Top-selling Crestor, for high cholesterol, faces competition from cheap copycat drugs in 2016. The patent expiries leave AstraZeneca's sales on a near-term downward spiral at a time when most of its rivals have put their biggest patent losses behind them. Shares in the group rose 1.6 percent by 1215 GMT on the more upbeat outlook, against a 0.3 percent decline for the European healthcare sector. Chief Executive Pascal Soriot, who has been leading the company for a little more than a year, will set out the new revenue guidance in a presentation at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco later on Tuesday. The company will then give a more detailed update on its progress in full-year results on February 6. The consensus of analyst forecasts compiled by Thomson Reuters is for 2017 revenue of $22.5 billion, down from the $25.8 billion estimated for 2013. However, a number of the 2017 forecasts pre-date the diabetes drug deal struck last month that is already expected to add some $1 billion to $2 billion to annual revenue. Citigroup analyst Andrew Baum said the positive medium-term outlook reinforced his "more constructive thesis" for the stock, adding that he expects Soriot to strike more earnings-boosting deals this year. Panmure Gordon's Savvas Neophytou remains more wary, pointing out that Soriot's predecessor, David Brennan, had made a similar attempt to talk up AstraZeneca's longer-term prospects. "In our view, management is stepping onto thin ice with this same sort of guidance," Neophytou said, pointing out the previous management's failure to hit its forecasts. AstraZeneca has become more confident about its revenue outlook after the $4 billion deal last month to buy Bristol-Myers Squibb's share of a diabetes joint venture. The acquisition is expected to complete in the first quarter of 2014 and will boost sales immediately. Mark Clark of Deutsche Bank said this was set to lift analysts' revenue forecasts significantly, suggesting that a more realistic "adjusted consensus" for 2017 was around $24.3 billion rather than $22.5 billion. Soriot has been striking a number of bolt-on deals to refill the company's thin pipeline of new medicines and accelerating in-house research programs. The group now has 11 new-drug programs in late-stage Phase III testing, almost double the number a year ago, and 27 in Phase II. Hopes are particularly high for its cancer research, where it has started trials for immunotherapy combination treatments for which the first results are anticipated in 2014/15. AstraZeneca is behind the likes of Bristol-Myers, Roche and Merck & Co in the race to develop immunotherapies - a hot new area of cancer research - but it is betting on combination treatments to help it to catch up. Immunotherapy, which harnesses the body's immune system to fight cancer, has shown great promise in clinical trials and analysts believe that the treatments may extend patients' lives significantly and generate tens of billions of dollars in annual sales.
Drugmaker AstraZeneca forecasts faster return to growth.

The Council of State ruled that doctors had the right to end the medical support that has kept Vincent Lambert, brain-damaged and in vegetative state, artificially alive since a motorbike accident on the way to work plunged him into a coma in September 2008. The verdict follows a heart-rending battle between Lambert's wife Rachel, seeking to let the former psychiatric nurse die, and his parents, who took legal action last year to halt plans by his doctors to do that. Apart from places such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, few countries in the world explicitly permit euthanasia or assisted suicide - sometimes known as mercy killings. But France, where President Francois Hollande promised prior to his 2012 election to introduce new right-to-die legislation, has left grey areas regarding more passive forms of euthanasia in a 2005 law on patient rights and care for the terminally ill. The so-called Leonetti law does not legalize euthanasia but also states, according to government information services, that patient treatment should not involve "excessive obstination". Lambert's parents, devoutly religious Catholics, said even before the Council of State's Tuesday ruling that they had asked the European Court of Human Rights to issue an emergency ruling on the case should the French judges go against their will to keep their son, now in his late 30s, as he is. The international rights court, based in the eastern French city of Strasbourg, said in a statement it would respond "as soon as possible". While Hollande has yet to deliver on his promise of legislation by the end of the year on the rights of the incurably ill, the legal battles over Lambert's fate and other cases has thrust the euthanasia debate firmly back onto the radar screen. As many as 25,000 people die a year in France after removal of medical support, according to Remi Keller, a member of the Council of State. In a separate case, a hospital doctor in southwest France is on trial on charges that he used lethal injections to hasten the deaths of seven old-aged people in 2010-2011. His lawyers say they intend to turn that trial into a debate about the wider issue of the boundaries of euthanasia.
France reopens euthanasia debate with right-to-die ruling.

"Newly born babies rest inside a ward at a hospital on the occasion of ""World Population Day"" in the northern Indian city Lucknow in this file picture taken July 11, 2009. REUTERS/Pawan Kumar/Files To some demographers the milestone foreshadows turbulent times ahead: nations grappling with rapid urbanization, environmental degradation and skyrocketing demand for healthcare, education, resources and jobs. To others, a shrinking population, not overpopulation, could be the longer-term challenge as fertility rates drop and a shrinking workforce is pushed to support social safety for an aging populace. "There are parts of the world where the population is shrinking and in those parts of the world, they are worried about productivity, about being able to maintain a critical mass of people," Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund, told Reuters. "Then there are parts of the world where the population is growing rapidly. Many of these countries face challenges in terms of migration, poverty, food security, water management and climate change and we need to call attention to it." The United Nations says the world's seven billionth baby will be born on October 31. No-one knows what circumstances the baby will be born into, but India's Uttar Pradesh a sugarcane-producing state with a population that combines that of Britain, France and Germany, in a country expected to overtake China as the world's most populous by 2030 provides a snapshot of the challenges it could face. Pinky Pawar, 25, is due to give birth in Uttar Pradesh at the end of the month and is hoping her firstborn will not join the estimated 3 billion people living on less than $2 a day, with little hope of an education or a job. "I want my child to be successful in life, so I must do my best to make this possible," she said, her hands over her swollen belly as she sat outside her mud and brick home in Sunhaida village. In Sunhaida, poverty, illiteracy and social prejudice mark a life dominated by the struggle for survival that mirrors millions of others across the world. With the number of people on earth more than doubling over the last half-century, resources are under more strain than ever before. First among the short-term worries is how to provide basic necessities for the additional 2-3 billion people expected to be added in the next 50 years. Water usage is set to increase by 50 percent between 2007 and 2025 in developing nations and 18 percent in developed ones, with much of the increased use in the poorest countries as rising rural populations move to towns and cities. "The problem is that 97.5 percent of it (water) is salty and ... of the 2.5 percent that's fresh, two-thirds of that is frozen," says Rob Renner, executive director of the Colorado-based Water Research Foundation. "So there's not a lot of fresh water to deal with in the world." Nutritious food is in short supply in many parts of the globe. The World Bank says 925 million people are hungry today, partly due to rising food prices since 1995, a succession of economic crises and the lack of access to modern farming techniques and products for poor farmers. To feed the two billion more mouths predicted by 2050, food production will have to increase by 70 percent, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization says. But just as research, development and expansion of agricultural programs are critical, the public dollars pledged to this effort remain a pittance of what is needed, and are in fact in danger of sharp decline, experts say. "We have to raise productivity," Robert Thompson, who serves on the International Food & Agricultural Trade Policy Council and is former director of rural development for the World Bank. "I think we can do it all if we invest enough in research. But at the moment we aren't." Climate change could be the greatest impediment to meeting the food target as rising temperatures and droughts dry out farmlands which are then inundated by intense floods and storms. The way climate change has been handled offers a window on how tricky it is to tackle global, long-term problems, however. While it's clear what needs to be done, U.N. climate talks have largely stalled. "There is a reason why these negotiations are relatively slow," said Wendel Trio, director of Climate Action Network Europe, referring to the economic downturn and arguments between rich and poor nations over carbon cuts. "But if you compare it to the urgency and the fact that many governments clearly understand the urgency, it is a failure of governments that they can't move forward." Experts say demographic imbalances will also place serious strains on towns and cities across the world as mostly middle-class blue-collar migrants move from poorer rural areas to richer urban centers. China's capital Beijing with its almost 20 million inhabitants is now the world's 13th most populous city, its population almost doubling over the last decade, reflecting a trend mirrored worldwide, particularly in developing nations. Cities in Africa, Asia and South America are bursting at the seams from migrants seeking better jobs or as farmers flee droughts, floods and other environmental disasters. In 1950, about 730 million people lived in cities. By 2009, it was nearly 3.5 billion and in four decades it will be 6.3 billion, the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs said in a March 2010 report. That explosive growth stretches limited resources and infrastructure and places megacities on a collision course with a predicted increase in extreme flooding, storms and rising sea levels from climate change, U.N. Habitat says. Experts say the lack of coordinated planning is exacerbating the problem. "Any kind of plan for decentralizing the population requires a series of policies that work together," said Wang Jianguo, a senior project officer on urbanization at the Asian Development Bank's Beijing office. "If you only have a population policy without an employment policy, without an industry development policy, education, medical policy, it won't work." One important policy tool to manage a growing population is to give women access to family planning, experts say, adding that 215 million women worldwide want it but do not get it. Access to education is also important as it motivates women to reduce their fertility and improve their children's health. A lack of such education has meant that while the overall populations continue to rise in countries such as China and India, the number of women is falling because of a preference for boys leading to deliberate abortions of female babies. The world is also seeing a demographic anomaly: a declining population in some richer countries has led to an imbalance between the working population and retirees who need expensive social safety nets. The global fertility rate the number of children born per couple is around 2.5, but in richer countries this number has already nosedived. And while exact predictions vary, most suggest the global population will peak at around 9 billion around 2070 and then start to fall, perhaps very fast. "We thought that overpopulation was going to force humanity to expand outward to the stars," says Jack Goldstone, professor of social science and a leading demographics expert at Washington's George Mason University. "That doesn't look like the problem at all. And the policy framework isn't set up at all to handle these longer-term issues.""
Crowded, stretched world awaits 7 billionth baby.