Wall Street edges lower as Fed keeps stimulus in place

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks edged lower on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve left in place its bond-buying stimulus plan, saying economic growth had stalled but indicating the pullback was likely temporary.


Describing the U.S. job market as continuing its modest pace of improvement, the Fed repeated a pledge to keep purchasing securities until employment improves substantially.


The statement from the Fed follows data that showed the economy, as measured by gross domestic product, unexpectedly contracted in the fourth quarter. Economists stressed that the 0.1 percent contraction, caused partly by a plunge in government spending and lower business inventories, is not an indicator of recession.


"It is interesting that the Fed decided to focus on the GDP report, pointing to how activity slowed because of transitory factors. That sums up the GDP report. I am a bit puzzled why the Fed focused solely on one report. I would argue that this was a slightly dovish report," said Tom Porcelli, chief U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was down 13.32 points, or 0.10 percent, at 13,941.10. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was down 1.90 points, or 0.13 percent, at 1,505.94. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was down 2.11 points, or 0.07 percent, at 3,151.55.


The S&P 500 held above 1,500, seen by technical analysts as an inflection point that will determine the overall direction in the near term. The index is on track to post its best month since October 2011 and its best January since 1997.


"This is a very modest pullback after a steep run," said Paul Zemsky, head of asset allocation at ING Investment Management in New York.


"It is too soon for the Fed to start talking about the end of (their bond buying program); the economy needs stimulus to sustain this recovery."


Both Boeing Co and Amazon.com shares gained after earnings beat expectations, continuing a trend this quarter of high-profile names advancing after results.


Amazon rose 5.1 percent to $273.51 and Boeing rose 1.1 percent to $74.43.


Thomson Reuters data showed that of the 192 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings this season 68.8 percent have been above analyst expectations, which is a higher proportion than over the past four quarters and above the average since 1994.


Chesapeake Energy rose 8 percent to $20.48 a day after it said Aubrey McClendon would step down as chief executive. The last year has been marked by civil and criminal probes into the second-largest U.S. natural gas producer.


Research In Motion shares fell 6.3 percent to $14.67 after the company, which is changing its name to BlackBerry, unveiled a long-delayed line of smartphones in hopes of a comeback into a market it once dominated.


Giving the market extra support, private sector employment topped forecasts with the ADP National Employment report showing 192,000 jobs added in January, higher than the 165,000 expectation.


(Reporting by Angela Moon; Editing by Kenneth Barry)



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Somalia Moves to Prosecute Woman Who Accused Soldiers of Rape

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NAIROBI, Kenya — The Somali government, in a move that has outraged human rights groups, has charged a woman who said she was gang-raped by soldiers with making a false accusation and having “insulted and lowered the dignity of a National Institution,” crimes that could mean many years in prison.




The woman’s husband has also been jailed — essentially for backing up his wife’s allegations — and so has a Somali journalist who interviewed the woman, even though he never published any information.


The Somali government said that the woman was lying for financial gain and that she later admitted that her story was “bogus.”


But Somali advocacy groups criticized the government’s hard line on this case, which they said would prompt many rape victims to remain silent despite years of trying to empower them to come forward.


“Women are now asking me, ‘Who’s going to protect us?’ ” said Fartuun Adan, who runs a shelter for abused women in Somalia. “They’re saying, ‘What are we supposed to do?’ ”


There is no question that rape by armed men is a serious problem in Somalia. Though Somalia has become significantly more stable, there are still thousands of young women living in squalid displaced-persons camps and loose bands of soldiers and other gunmen roaming around with heavy weapons, essentially doing as they please.


This week, a United Nations official reported more than 1,100 cases of sexual violence last year in Somalia, a figure that the United Nations considers alarming but an underestimation.


When Somalia’s new president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, took office last year, he announced that his government was committed to cracking down on rapists and protecting vulnerable women.


But in the past few weeks, Somali government officials have aggressively pursued the woman who made the recent rape allegation, saying that her story was “simply baseless” and that a medical examiner confirmed she had not been raped.


Several people in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, who have met the woman said she was forced by the police to recant. The woman, whose identity has been released by the Somali government but is being withheld by The New York Times, is 27 years old and has been living in a displaced-persons camp in Mogadishu with several young children. She said she was raped last August by five members of the government’s security services who forced her at gunpoint into an abandoned high school and then took turns assaulting her. She was on her way to get food for the children at the time, she said.


Her prosecution appears to be linked to an article by Al Jazeera published on Jan. 6 that detailed rape allegations against government soldiers and apparently embarrassed the new government, which recently has been making the rounds with donor nations, asking for millions to help rebuild Somalia.


But Al Jazeera did not base its article on the woman’s allegations. After the article appeared, police officials found out that the woman had accused government soldiers of rape and then they arrested Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim, a freelance journalist who had interviewed her, even though he did not work with Al Jazeera or publish any of his information.


Mr. Ibrahim, 25, has been in jail for more than two weeks, along with the woman’s husband. The three appeared in court on Tuesday, along with two others connected to the case, and more hearings are expected next week.


In the recent past, the worst culprit for rape in Somalia was the Shabab militant group, which presented itself as a morally righteous rebel force and the defender of Islam, even though it had been seizing women and girls as spoils of war, gang-raping and abusing them as part of its reign of terror. Many victims and witnesses said that Shabab militants forced families to hand over girls for arranged marriages that often lasted no more than a few weeks and were essentially sexual slavery, a cheap way to bolster their ranks’ flagging morale. One teenage girl who refused to be locked into such a marriage was buried up to her neck in sand and then had her head bashed in, rock by rock.


But as the Shabab have been pushed out by African Union peacekeepers from most of the areas they used to control, government troops are now a bigger problem in terms of preying upon defenseless civilians, human rights advocates say.


Lisa Shannon, an American who co-founded Sister Somalia, an organization that helps rape victims in Somalia, recently visited Mogadishu, where she heard many allegations of government soldiers’ gang-raping women.


She said the attacks were “happening in camps, happening around town, it has not slowed down at all.”


She called the case against the woman who made the recent rape allegation a “huge red flag.”


“It’s taken a long time to get women in Somalia to speak openly about this,” Ms. Shannon said on Wednesday. “Now they are all terrified.”


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The Z10 is a good first step, but BlackBerry still has to fix its app problem

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BlackBerry, a.k.a., the Company Formerly Known as RIM, made good with its first two BlackBerry 10 smartphones on Wednesday. While the new devices are far from perfect, they will at the very least make long-suffering BlackBerry fans very happy and should provide a needed boost to a company in desperate need of growth. That said, BlackBerry still has a major problem that it will have to fix if it ever hopes to lure Android and iOS users away from their devices — it needs to improve the quality of apps that are available on its platform.


[More from BGR: BlackBerry Z10 review]






BlackBerry has done its best to spin its app situation as a positive, touting the roughly 70,000 apps that will be available for BlackBerry 10 at its launch. This number sounds impressive until you realize that the vast majority of these apps are ported from Android or from the BlackBerry Playbook. Even worse for the company, earlier reviews have indicated that many of these apps don’t at all function well, especially since a good portion of them were ported over from Android 2.3 Gingerbread or earlier.


[More from BGR: BlackBerry Q10 preview]


This is obviously not a sustainable situation for BlackBerry in the long term, and to the company’s credit it did announce some very important apps that are being developed directly for the BlackBerry 10 platform, including Skype, WhatsApp and the Angry Birds franchise. But there is a glaring absence that should give pause to anyone feeling optimistic about the platform’s ability to attract top developers in the future: Instagram.


Yes, Instagram is just one app, but it’s also one of the most popular in the world and it’s owned by Facebook (FB), the social networking giant that BlackBerry supposedly has a close partnership with. If BlackBerry can’t convince one of its close partners to develop an app that’s ready in time for its big platform launch, then it really calls into question how much clout the company will have with smaller developers that may not have the resources to build for more than two platforms.


And BlackBerry’s ability to attract the smaller developers is crucial to its future success because we’ve all seen mobile apps that come out of nowhere on iOS and Android and suddenly take the world by storm. If BlackBerry is constantly rushing around trying to get upstart app developers to make native BlackBerry 10 apps months after those developers have hit it big on other platforms, it will put the company at a perpetual disadvantage. This is a problem that BlackBerry desperately needs to fix by the time its next smartphones roll out.


This article was originally published on BGR.com


Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News




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Lindsay Lohan's Day in Court: We Put Her Style on Trial

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Style News Now





01/30/2013 at 02:00 PM ET











Lindsay Lohan Court OutfitSplash News Online (2)


By now, we’re sort of used to Lindsay Lohan‘s antics, but it seems that we’ll never get accustomed to her unusual outfit choices. Case in point: the two very different (but equally eyebrow-raising) styles she sported within 12 hours this week.


First up, Lohan traveled from N.Y.C. to L.A.Tuesday night in an ensemble that has never been worn before on a plane — and with good reason. From her billowy leather trousers to her fur-trimmed leather jacket, we can’t imagine a stiffer, sweatier travel ensemble. Add a floppy brown hat and you’ve got a look that’s very Indiana-Jones-meets-Kim-Kardashian.


Then she showed up (on time!) to her probation violation pretrial hearing in L.A. on Wednesday morning in an outfit that mixed a courtroom-ready dress with a nightclub-ready heel. A marked improvement from her leather look, but still completely inappropriate for the situation.


The star has six weeks to come up with a better outfit (her trial date is March 18), and we’d be happy to assist in any way we can. Lindsay: call us! Tell us: What would you do to fix Lohan’s style?


PHOTOS: TELL US WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT MORE QUESTIONABLE STAR STYLE!




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Soldier looks forward to driving with new arms

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BALTIMORE (AP) — A soldier who lost all four limbs in a roadside bombing in Iraq says he's looking forward to driving and swimming with new arms after undergoing a double-arm transplant.


"I just want to get the most out of these arms, and just as goals come up, knock them down and take it absolutely as far as I can," Brendan Marrocco said Tuesday.


The 26-year-old New Yorker spoke at a news conference at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was joined by surgeons who performed the operation.


After he was wounded, Marrocco said, he felt fine using prosthetic legs, but he hated not having arms.


"You talk with your hands, you do everything with your hands, basically, and when you don't have that, you're kind of lost for a while," he said.


Marrocco said his chief desire is to drive the black Dodge Charger that's been sitting in his garage for three years.


"I used to love to drive," he said. "I'm really looking forward to just getting back to that, and just becoming an athlete again."


Although he doesn't expect to excel at soccer, his favorite sport, Marrocco said he'd like to swim and compete in a marathon using a handcycle.


Marrocco joked that military service members sometimes regard themselves as poorly paid professional athletes. His good humor and optimism are among the qualities doctors cited as signs he will recover much of his arm and hand use in two to three years.


"He's a young man with a tremendous amount of hope, and he's stubborn — stubborn in a good way," said Dr. Jaimie Shores, the hospital's clinical director of hand transplantation. "I think the sky's the limit."


Shores said Marrocco has already been trying to use his hands, although he lacks feeling in the fingers, and he's eager to do more as the slow-growing nerves and muscles mend.


"I suspect that he will be using his hands for just about everything as we let him start trying to do more and more. Right now, we're the ones really kind of holding him back at this point," Shores said.


The procedure was only the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant ever done in the United States.


The infantryman was injured by a roadside bomb in 2009. He is the first soldier to survive losing all four limbs in the Iraq War.


Marrocco also received bone marrow from the same donor to minimize the medicine needed to prevent rejection. He said he didn't know much about the donor but "I'm humbled by their gift."


The 13-hour operation on Dec. 18 was led by Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, plastic surgery chief at Hopkins.


Marrocco was being released from the hospital Tuesday but will receive intensive therapy for two years at Hopkins and then at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda.


After a major surgery, human nerves regenerate at a rate of an inch per month, Lee said.


"The progress will be slow, but the outcome will be rewarding," he added.


___


Associated Press Writer David Dishneau contributed to this story from Hagerstown, Md.


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Defensive stocks extend rally as caution sets in

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose on Tuesday, led by defensive sectors, in a sign the cash piles recently moving into the market are being put to use by cautious investors to pick up more gains.


The S&P 500 is on track to post its best monthly performance since October 2011 and its best January since 1997 as investors poured $55 billion in new cash into stock mutual funds and exchange-traded funds in January, the biggest monthly inflow on record.


Among rising defensive shares, which are companies relatively immune to economic swings, were drugmaker Pfizer, up 1.2 percent to $27.16 after posting earnings and AT&T , 1.5 percent higher at $34.64.


"Cyclicals were moving very nicely, now you see balance with some of the defensives. Many managers use that as an internal hedge in equity portfolios," said Quincy Krosby, market strategist at Prudential Financial in Newark, New Jersey.


She said the market is cautious ahead of Wednesday's statement following the Federal Reserve's two-day meeting. In addition, defensive stocks would hold up better if Friday's payrolls report surprises on the downside.


The S&P hovered near 1,500, and market technicians say the benchmark is at an inflection point which will determine the overall direction in the near term.


"The public is pouring in now," said Carter Worth, chief market technician at Oppenheimer & Co in New York. "It reflects complacency and that typically leads to hubris, and hubris leads to trouble. Everyone's buying."


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> rose 70.27 points or 0.51 percent, to 13,952.2, the S&P 500 <.spx> gained 6.62 points or 0.44 percent, to 1,506.8 and the Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> dropped 3.52 points or 0.11 percent, to 3,150.77.


The top performing sectors on the S&P 500 were healthcare <.spxhc> and telecom services <.splrcl>, so-called defensives, both up more than 1 percent.


The energy sector also advanced, on the back of strong earnings from Valero Energy Corp and a hedge fund move to break up Hess Corp to boost investor returns.


Valero shares jumped 10.3 percent to $42.82 and Hess gained 8.5 percent to $67.80.


The equity gains have largely come on a strong start to earnings season, though results were mixed on Tuesday with Pfizer rising but Ford Motor Co down after its report.


Both companies reported profits that topped expectations, but Ford also forecast a wider loss in its European segment. Ford dropped 5.6 percent to $13.01 as one of the biggest percentage losers on the S&P 500.


Thomson Reuters data showed that of the 174 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings this season, 68.4 percent have been above analyst expectations, which is a higher proportion than over the past four quarters and above the average since 1994.


Disappointing outlooks from Seagate Technology and BMC Software pressured their shares. Seagate lost 9.6 percent to $33.82 and BMC fell 8.5 percent to $40.70.


Software maker VMware Inc lost 21 percent to $77.71 also after a cautious 2013 outlook.


Amazon was the biggest drag on the Nasdaq with a 2.1 percent drop to $270.17 before its results, expected after the closing bell.


U.S. home prices rose in November to rack up their best yearly gain since the housing crisis began, a further sign that the sector is on the mend, but consumer confidence fell to its lowest level in more than a year in the wake of higher taxes for many Americans.


(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Nick Zieminski)



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The Lede Blog: Under Attack, Cairo Hotel Sends Twitter SOS

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Video of unidentified men streaming into the lobby of Cairo’s Semiramis InterContinental hotel broadcast live on Egypt’s ONTV early Tuesday.

Last Updated, 2:56 p.m. As our colleagues Kareem Fahim, David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh report, the mayhem on Cairo’s streets briefly spilled into the lobby of one of the city’s luxury hotels, the Semiramis InterContinental, during intense clashes between riot police and protesters along the Nile Corniche overnight.

Images of a mob streaming into the hotel, broadcast live on Egyptian television and then posted online, raised fears of further damage to the country’s already battered tourist industry. Coming at the same time as violence in cities on the Suez Canal, this week’s unrest threatened two of the main pillars of the Egyptian economy.

Judging by a series of urgent pleas for help posted on the hotel’s Twitter feed, the raid came just after 2:30 a.m. local time.

Within an hour of sounding the alarm on the social network, the staff reported on Twitter that the security forces had arrived.

Guards at the hotel told Bel Trew of the Egyptian news site Ahram Online that phone calls to the police and the army initially went unheeded as about 40 men armed with shotguns, knives and a semiautomatic weapon broke into the shuttered lobby and started looting.

An Ahram Online journalist who witnessed the attack, Karim Hafez, said that protesters had stopped fighting with the police to help secure the hotel: “When they realized these groups were trying to loot the hotel, protesters shot fire crackers at them as they attacked the building and tried to push them away from the area but these groups were armed with birdshot bullets.”

This reported cooperation of the protesters with the police officers they have been battling for days on the street outside the hotel prompted bloggers like the British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr to comment on the black comedy of the situation.

Another Egyptian blogger, Mohammed Maree, reported on his @mar3e Twitter feed that a police captain on the scene confirmed to him that the protesters who were fighting with the security forces when the raid took place were not responsible for the storming of the hotel.

Mr. Maree also reported that witnesses to the raid said it began after four people drove up in a car with no license plates and fired shots to scare protesters away, before storming the hotel. He later posted a photograph of some of the hotel’s guests leaving under the protection of protesters.

Nabila Samak, a spokeswoman for the hotel who posted the calls for help on Twitter, told The Times that the staff had called Egyptian television stations for help earlier in the evening, well before the attack, after appeals to the security forces for protection went unanswered.

Ms. Samak told Ahram Online that the staff worked to secure the hotel’s guests but were not equipped to cope with the effective collapse of the police force, since, “no guards of hotels in Egypt are armed.” Later she thanked protesters for coming to the aid of the hotel’s staff and guests.

A Saudi women who identified herself as a guest at the hotel, Hilda Ismail, posted updates and photographs from a shelter the guests were taken to during the incident on her Arabic-language Twitter feed.

In one message, she wrote: “If there is no Egyptian security, and if Morsi is sleeping, where are this country’s men!! Come get these dogs, the Semiramis Hotel is being ransacked and we are there.”

Later, Ms. Ismail uploaded a brief video clip of a man attempting to reassure guests that they were safe after the arrival of special forces officers from the ministry of the interior led by a Captain Moataz.

In the clip, the man tells the guests that the police captain wants “to assure you that the hotel is secured and it is under the control of the ministry of the interior now. Within no time you will go back to your rooms and already are in safe hands.” The police, the man added, “will make sure that such thugs will not enter the hotel again. We are sorry.”

Ms. Ismail also posted an image of the ransacked lobby on Twitter.

Ms. Ismai’s claim to have been a guest at the hotel was supported by the fact that she had uploaded a brief video clip, apparently shot from a high floor of the hotel, showing the fighting on the Nile Corniche below.

The luxury hotel chain, which was created in 1946 by Pan American World Airways, did not immediately reply to a request for comment, but an executive in Cairo told Al-Masry Al-Youm, an Egyptian newspaper, that “more than 45 clients insisted on leaving despite the hotel’s offer to relocate them to higher floors, away from the clashes.”

Although the hotel then announced that it would be closed for security reasons, the staff posted another urgent plea for help on Twitter late Tuesday.

Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim in Cairo.

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Apple announces iPad with double storage capacity

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(Reuters) – Apple Inc said on Tuesday that it will sell a version of its iPad tablet computer with 128 gigabytes of storage, which is twice the capacity of its existing models.


Apple, which has sold more than 120 million iPads so far, said that the new iPad will go on sale February 5, in black or white, for a suggested retail price of $ 799 for the iPad with just Wi-Fi model, and $ 929 for the version that also has a cellular wireless connection.






(Reporting By Sinead Carew; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Two New Breeds to Compete at Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show

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01/29/2013 at 03:00 PM EST







Treeing Walker Coonhound and a Russell Terrier


Astrid Stawiarz/Getty


Looks like there will be some new furry faces at this year's Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

The American Kennel Club recently announced the inclusion of two new breeds for the 2013 competition, the Russell Terrier and the Treeing Walker Coonhound.

Per a description on Westminster's official site, new breeds are considered for addition when they've reached a significant number and distribution across the United States, as well as when a breed's parent club shows a growing interest.

Praised for being "athletic, intelligent, and fiercely loyal, the Russell Terrier is well-regarded for its hunting abilities, while the Treeing Walker Coonhound – bred to track and tree wild raccoons, hence its name – takes pride in its "clear, ringing bugle voice" and "intelligent, confident and sociable" nature.

Before these new breeds take their first bow at the show, to be held on Feb. 11 and 12 in New York City, tell us: Will you be watching?

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Soldier who lost 4 limbs has double-arm transplant

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The first soldier to survive after losing all four limbs in the Iraq war has received a double-arm transplant.


Brendan Marrocco had the operation on Dec. 18 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, his father said Monday. The 26-year-old Marrocco, who is from New York City, was injured by a roadside bomb in 2009.


He also received bone marrow from the same dead donor who supplied his new arms. That novel approach is aimed at helping his body accept the new limbs with minimal medication to prevent rejection.


The military is sponsoring operations like these to help wounded troops. About 300 have lost arms or hands in the wars.


"He was the first quad amputee to survive" from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there have been four others since then, said Brendan Marrocco's father, Alex Marrocco. "He was really excited to get new arms."


The Marroccos want to thank the donor's family for "making a selfless decision ... making a difference in Brendan's life," the father said.


Surgeons plan to discuss the transplant at a news conference with the patient on Tuesday.


The 13-hour operation was led by Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, plastic surgery chief at Johns Hopkins, and is the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant done in the United States. Lee led three of those earlier operations when he previously worked at the University of Pittsburgh, including the only above-elbow transplant that had been done at the time, in 2010.


Marrocco's "was the most complicated one" so far, Lee said in an interview Monday. It will take more than a year to know how fully Marrocco will be able to use the new arms, Lee said.


"The maximum speed is an inch a month for nerve regeneration," he explained. "We're easily looking at a couple years" until the full extent of recovery is known.


While at Pittsburgh, Lee pioneered the novel immune suppression approach used for Marrocco. The surgeon led hand transplant operations on five patients, giving them marrow from their donors in addition to the new limbs. All five recipients have done well and four have been able to take just one anti-rejection drug instead of combination treatments most transplant patients receive.


Minimizing anti-rejection drugs is important because they have side effects and raise the risk of cancer over the long term. Those risks have limited the willingness of surgeons and patients to do more hand, arm and even face transplants. Unlike a life-saving heart or liver transplant, limb transplants are aimed at improving quality of life, not extending it.


Quality of life is a key concern for people missing arms and hands — prosthetics for those limbs are not as advanced as those for feet and legs.


Lee has received funding for his work from AFIRM, the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a cooperative research network of top hospitals and universities around the country that the government formed about five years ago. With government money, he and several other plastic surgeons around the country are preparing to do more face transplants, possibly using the new minimal immune suppression approach.


Marrocco expects to spend three to four months at Hopkins, then return to a military hospital to continue physical therapy, his father said. Before the operation, he had been living with his older brother in a handicapped-accessible home on New York's Staten Island built with the help of several charities.


The home was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy last fall.


Despite being in a lot of pain for some time after the operation, Marrocco showed a sense of humor, his father said. He had a hoarse voice from a tube in his throat during the long surgery, decided that he sounded like Al Pacino, and started doing movie lines.


"He was making the nurses laugh," Alex Marrocco said.


___


AP writer Alex Dominguez contributed to this report.


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