S&P rises for seventh day but 1,500 too steep a climb

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The smallest of gains gave the Standard & Poor's 500 its seventh straight winning day on Thursday, but the index failed to hold above the 1,500 line, restrained by Apple's worst day in more than four years.

Apple Inc slid 12.4 percent to $450.50 a day after it posted revenue that missed Wall Street's forecast as iPhone sales were poorer than expected.

The sharp drop wiped out nearly $60 billion in Apple's market capitalization to less than $423 billion, leaving the company vulnerable to losing its status as the most valuable U.S. company to second-place ExxonMobil , at $416.5 billion.

The S&P 500, however, managed to hit its longest winning streak since October 2006.

"The market has sent the message it is no longer driven by the whims of Apple," said Ken Polcari, director of the NYSE floor division at O'Neil Securities in New York.

The S&P 500 briefly traded above 1,500 for the first time since December 12, 2007, but failed to hold above it, indicating that momentum is waning and a pullback is in the charts.

"If the market had a little bit more excitement to it, momentum players would have jumped after it broke through 1,500. Investors know the market is a little bit ahead of itself," Polcari said.

Economic data helped buoy equities as U.S. factory activity grew the most in nearly two years in January and new claims for jobless benefits dropped to a five-year low last week, giving surprisingly strong signals on the economy's pulse.

At the same time, Chinese manufacturing grew this month at the fastest pace in about two years, while data suggesting German growth picked up boosted hopes for a euro-zone recovery.

"PMI in Asia, Europe, and obviously, here in the United States, is moving in the right direction, and that's stuff people should be excited about," Polcari said.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> rose 46 points or 0.33 percent, to 13,825.33 at the close. The S&P 500 <.spx> inched up just 0.01 of a point, or 0 percent, to finish at 1,494.82. The Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> dropped 23.29 points or 0.74 percent, to end at 3,130.38, with most of that loss on Apple's slide.

The broader Russell 2000 index <.rut> also hit a milestone as it closed above 900 points for the first time.

Video streaming service Netflix Inc surprised Wall Street with a quarterly profit after it added nearly 4 million customers in the United States and abroad. Netflix shares surged 42.2 percent to $146.86, its biggest percentage jump ever.

Earnings have helped drive the stock market's recent rally. Thomson Reuters data through early Thursday showed that of the 133 S&P 500 companies that have reported earnings so far, 66.9 percent have exceeded expectations - above the 65 percent average over the past four quarters.

About 6.8 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, below the daily average during January 2012 of about 6.93 billion shares.

Roughly five issues rose for every four that fell on both the NYSE and Nasdaq.

(Editing by Jan Paschal)

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Formally Lifting a Combat Ban, Military Chiefs Stress Equal Opportunity

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday formally lifted the military’s ban on women in combat, saying that not every woman would become a combat soldier but that every woman deserved the chance to try.

They said that the new policy was in many ways an affirmation of what was already occurring on the battlefield, where women have found themselves in combat over the past decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that it was essential that the military offer fully equal opportunities to both women and men.

“They’re fighting and dying together, and the time has come for our policies to reflect that reality,” Mr. Panetta said at a packed Pentagon news conference.

General Dempsey, like Mr. Panetta, said that his views had evolved as he came into contact with women in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he first got to Baghdad in 2003 as a division commander, he said, he got into a Humvee for his first trip out of his base.

“I asked the driver, you know, who he was and where he was from, and I slapped the turret gunner on the leg, and I said, ‘Who are you?'” General Dempsey recalled. “And she leaned down and said, ‘I’m Amanda.’ And I said, ‘Oh, O.K. So a female turret gunner is protecting a division commander.'”

Mr. Panetta and General Dempsey said they had worked together on lifting the ban for more than a year and had regularly briefed President Obama on developments. They described him as highly supportive of the decision but not intimately involved in the process.

In December, Pentagon officials said, Mr. Panetta and the Joint Chiefs reached a tentative agreement that women should be permitted in combat. Mr. Panetta thought about it over the holidays and returned early this month to receive a letter dated Jan. 9 from General Dempsey strongly recommending the change.

In the most vocal official opposition to the changes, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is set to become the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, warned that some in Congress may seek legislation to limit the combat jobs open to women.

“I want everyone to know that the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which I am the ranking member, will have a period to provide oversight and review,” Mr. Inhofe said in a statement. “During that time, if necessary, we will be able to introduce legislation to stop any changes we believe to be detrimental to our fighting forces and their capabilities. I suspect there will be cases where legislation becomes necessary.”

Pentagon officials said that the different services would have until May 15 to submit their plans for carrying out the new policy, but that the military wanted to move as quickly as possible to open up combat positions to women. Military officials said that there were more than 200,000 jobs now potentially open to women in specialties like infantry, armor, artillery and elite Special Operations commando units like the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers.

If a service determines that a specialty should not be open to women, Pentagon officials said that representatives of the service would have to make the case to the defense secretary by January 2016.

Officials said repeatedly that they would not lower the physical standards for women in rigorous combat jobs like the infantry, but they said they would review standards for all the military specialties in coming months and potentially change them to keep up with, for example, advances in equipment and weaponry. Marine officials also said they might change the initial physical standards that recruits have to meet before they are sent off to boot camp.

At a Pentagon briefing about the changes, reporters asked several times about two women who entered the Marines’ brutal Infantry Officer Course in Quantico, Va., last year as an experiment, since neither at the time would have been allowed to serve in the infantry. One woman dropped out on the first day, and the other withdrew later because of physical ailments, including stress fractures. Many men fail the course as well. Marine officials said they were determined to open up jobs to women as long as they qualified for them.

Pentagon officials and military officers said it remained unclear how many women would apply to join the elite commando and counterterrorism forces, and some of those combat jobs might be among any that are proposed for exclusion. A high percentage of men fail to make the cut for those units, which include the Army Rangers and the Green Berets, and Navy SEAL teams.

Army leaders said an important initiative would be to create a cohort of female officers and noncommissioned officers who could provide leadership in combat units that would be accepting female soldiers for the first time. Policies may have to change to allow those officers to move from one military specialty to another.

The Army has also conducted studies on the psychological, cultural and social aspects of integrating women into units that have long been a male-only domain. Those studies are expected to guide how the ground forces alter their base housing, training and deployment infrastructure.

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Racy Victorian divorces online at genealogy website

LONDON (Reuters) – The original Mrs Robinson’s diary and scandalous suggestions about a former heir to the British throne are all part of the latest ancestral revelations to go online.

British genealogical website Ancestry.co.uk said on Tuesday it has put the transcripts of thousands of Victorian divorce proceedings online, which reveal the racy details of an era that most modern Britons consider to have been dominated by imperial duty, a stiff upper lip and formal familial relations.

The UK Civil Divorce Records, 1858-1911 date from the year when the Matrimonial Causes Act removed the jurisdiction of divorce from the church and made it a civil matter.

Before this, a full divorce required intervention by Parliament, which had only granted around 300 since 1668. The records also include civil court records on separation, custody battles, legitimacy claims and nullification of marriages, according to the website.

Primarily due to their high cost, divorces were relatively rare in the 19th century, with around 1,200 applications made a year, compared to approximately 120,000 each year today, and not all requests were successful due to the strength of evidence required.

The rarity of such cases, combined with the fact that it was wealthy, often well-known nobility involved, made the divorce proceedings huge public scandals, played out in the press as real life soap operas.

Famously high-profile divorces included that of Henry and Isabella Robinson, the inspiration for the novel “Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace”, by Kate Summerscale.

Henry Robinson sued for divorce after reading his wife Isabella’s diary, which included in-depth details of her affair with a younger married man.

The diary was used as court evidence and when reported by the media became a huge scandal, partly because of the language used within the journal. Isabella, however, claimed the diary was a work of fiction, which led to her victory in court.

Conservative MP and baronet, Charles Mordaunt, filed for divorce in 1869 from his wife Harriet who stood accused of adultery with multiple men.

The case became national news when the Prince of Wales was rumored to be among the men who had had an affair with her. This rumor was never proven and Lady Mordaunt was eventually declared mad and spent the rest of her life in an asylum.

“At the time, such tales often developed into national news stories, but now they’re more likely to tell us something about the double standards of the Victorian divorce system or help us learn more about the lives of our sometimes naughty ancestors,” Ancestry.co.uk UK Content Manager Miriam Silverman said in a statement on Tuesday.

When the divorce laws first came into effect, men could divorce for adultery alone, while women had to supplement evidence of cheating with solid proof of mistreatment, such as battery or desertion.

Despite this double standard, roughly half of the records are accounts of proceedings initiated by the wife. Many of the nullifications of marriages fall into this category, with failure to consummate the nuptials a common reason.

One such example in the records shows a Frances Smith filing for divorce in 1893 under such grounds.

In the court ledgers it is noted that the marriage was never consummated, with the husband incapable “by reason of the frigidity and impotency or other defect of the parts of generation” and “such incapacity is incurable by art or skill” following inspection.

(Reporting by Paul Casciato; editing by Patricia Reaney)

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Whitney Houston's Mom Cissy: 'I'm Angry She Died Alone'

People Exclusive

By Liz McNeil

01/23/2013 at 05:00 PM EST

Cissy Houston and Whitney Houston in 1985

Jack Vartoogian/Getty

Nearly one year after Whitney Houston's shocking death, her mom Cissy Houston often asks herself: "Could I have saved her somehow?"

In a revealing new memoir, Remembering Whitney (Harper Collins), Cissy, 79, writes candidly about her daughter's severe drug problems and the downward spiral that led to her death by drowning in a hotel bathtub with traces of cocaine still in her system.

"She started partying and she didn't really know how to stop," says Cissy. "I used to wonder what she was doing at night, where she was."

But when she tried to contact her, Whitney often didn't return her call.

"Whitney hid from me," says Cissy. And when she did see her, she was often afraid to confront her daughter. Shocked at her skeletal appearance at the Michael Jackson tribute concert in 2001, she never expressed concern.

"What was the point?" she asks. "I didn't want her to run completely away from me."

She doesn't believe former husband Bobby Brown was the cause.

"I blame him for the way he treated her," she says, "but I don't blame him for her drug problems." Still, she adds: "He was no help to her at all."

Cissy also writes for the first time about her daughter's relationship with former assistant Robyn Crawford, who became her creative director.

"I just didn’t want her with my daughter," she says. "I know nothing about a romantic relationship. That's what everybody said but they didn't know either."

She admits, Crawford "cared for her" and reveals for the first time that she was the first one to come tell her Whitney had a drug problem.

Cissy is still tormented by her daughter's sudden death. "I'm angry she died alone, in those conditions," she says. "I'm still mad about that."

Still, she hopes her book will remind people "what a good person she was. I want people to know the truth about her, how she really was."

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Scientists to resume work with lab-bred bird flu

WASHINGTON (AP) — International scientists who last year halted controversial research with the deadly bird flu say they are resuming their work as countries adopt new rules to ensure safety.

The outcry erupted when two labs — in the Netherlands and the U.S. — reported they had created easier-to-spread versions of bird flu. Amid fierce debate about the oversight of such research and whether it might aid terrorists, those scientists voluntarily halted further work last January — and more than three dozen of the world's leading flu researchers signed on as well.

On Wednesday, those scientists announced they were ending their moratorium because their pause in study worked: It gave the U.S. government and other world health authorities time to determine how they would oversee high-stakes research involving dangerous germs.

A number of countries already have issued new rules. The U.S. is finalizing its own research guidelines, a process that Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said should be completed within several weeks.

In letters published in the journals Science and Nature this week, scientists wrote that those who meet their country's requirements have a responsibility to resume studying how the deadly bird flu might mutate to become a bigger threat to people — maybe even the next pandemic. So far, the so-called H5N1 virus mostly spreads among poultry and other birds and rarely infects people.

"The risk exists in nature already. Not doing the research is really putting us in danger," said Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus University in the Netherlands separately created the new virus strains that could spread through the air.

The controversy flared just over a year ago, when U.S. officials, prompted by the concerns of a biosecurity advisory panel, asked the two labs not to publish the results. They worried that terrorists might use the information to create a bioweapon. More broadly, scientists debated whether creating new strains of disease is a good idea, and if so, how to safeguard against laboratory accidents.

Ultimately, the flu researchers prevailed: The government decided the data didn't pose any immediate terrorism threat after all, and the two labs' work was published last summer.

Fouchier said that within weeks, he will begin new research in the Netherlands, with European funding, to explore exactly which mutations are the biggest threat. He said the work could enable scientists today to be on the lookout as bird flu continually evolves in the wild.

U.S.-funded scientists cannot resume their studies until the government's policy is finalized.

But the NIH had paid for the original research — and it would have been approved under the soon-to-come expanded policy as well, Fauci told The Associated Press. That policy will add an extra layer of review to higher-risk research, to ensure that it is scientifically worth doing and that safety and bioterrorism concerns are fully addressed up-front, he said.

Had that policy been in place over a year ago, it could have averted the bird flu debate, Fauci said: "Our answer simply would have been, yes, we vetted it very carefully and the benefit is worth any risk. Period, case closed."

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S&P 500 futures fall after Apple results

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The S&P 500 rose for a sixth day on Wednesday after stronger-than-expected profits from IBM and Google but the rally could be halted as Apple's after-hours miss send its shares lower.

The S&P was just 4.7 percent from its all-time closing high as IBM's and Google's earnings, released after Tuesday's close, followed on the heels of stronger U.S. economic data.

"People were kind of nervous about earnings coming into this quarter but numbers have shown so far strength in earnings," said King Lip, chief investment officer at Baker Avenue Asset Management in San Francisco.

But Apple , still the largest U.S. publicly traded company, fell more than 4 percent in extended trading after sales of its flagship iPhone came in below analyst targets and quarterly revenue slightly missed Wall Street expectations.

Declining issues beat advancers in both the NYSE and Nasdaq during regular market hours, in a sign the market's rally may be overstretched. The broad Russell 2000 index <.rut> closed the day down 0.3 percent after earlier hitting and intraday historic high just below 900 points.

Shares in IBM Corp , the world's largest technology services company, climbed 4.4 percent during regular market hours to $204.72, providing just about all of the Dow's 67-point gain.

Also helping the tech sector was a 5.5 percent jump in Google Inc to $741.50. The Internet search company reported its core business outpaced expectations and revenue was higher than expected.

The S&P technology sector <.splrct> rose 1.2 percent.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> rose 66.96 points or 0.49 percent, to 13,779.17, the S&P 500 <.spx> gained 2.22 points or 0.15 percent, to 1,494.78, and the Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> added 10.49 points or 0.33 percent, to 3,153.67.

The benchmark S&P 500 is a mere 0.35 percent away from hitting 1,500, a level not seen since December 12, 2007.

Netflix shares soared 32 percent, above $136, after the video subscription service said it added subscribers in the United States and abroad and posted a quarterly profit.

LED maker Cree Inc jumped 22 percent to $40.85 after it forecast a higher-than-expected third-quarter profit, and reported results above analysts' estimates.

Upscale leather goods maker Coach Inc plunged 16.4 percent to $50.75 after reporting sales that missed expectations.

Clearing a market hurdle, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a Republican-led plan to extend the country's borrowing authority until mid May. This delays a confrontation in Congress similar to one in 2011, which generated a stalemate that triggered the first-ever U.S. debt rating downgrade.

Thomson Reuters data through Wednesday showed that of the 99 S&P 500 companies that have reported earnings so far, 67.7 percent have topped expectations, above the 65 percent average beat over the past four quarters.

Overall, S&P 500 fourth-quarter earnings rose 2.8 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data. That estimate is above the 1.9 percent forecast at the start of earnings season.

Top U.S. manufacturers sounded a confident note about their expectations for 2013 on Wednesday as fears of the year-end "fiscal cliff" faded into memory.

In the regular session, about 6.1 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, below the 2012 daily average of about 6.45 billion.

On the NYSE, roughly 15 issues fell for every 14 that rose and on Nasdaq seven declined for every five gainers.

(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Nick Zieminski)

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The Lede Blog: Video Suggests Missile Hit Syrian University

Video posted online by Syrian opposition activists appears to have been recorded during the second of two explosions at Syria’s Aleppo University last week.

At least one of the two explosions that killed more than 80 people at Syria’s Aleppo University last week was caused by a missile, according to two analysts who examined new video of the attack posted online by Syrian opposition activists.

Traces of what appears to be a missile descending moments before the huge blast can be seen in three still frames taken from the brief video clip, which seems to have been recorded on the university campus as the second rocket shattered a dormitory.

As my colleague C.J. Chivers noted on his blog, if the new video of the second blast is authentic, those frames and the loud whirr of the missile just before the explosion, appear to rule out initial claims from the government that the explosions were caused by car bombs.

another thing u should consider about Aleppo Uni bombings. first claim by regime was mortars, then a car bomb, then to rebel rockets #Syria

— edward dark (@edwardedark) 16 Jan 13

Like another clip of the second explosion posted online last week, the new video does not resolve the question of whether the rockets were fired by Syrian Air Force jets, as some activists claimed, or were ballistic missiles. Late on the day of the attack, Syrian officials cited by the state-run news media claimed that the rebels had fired two rockets at the school, although the insurgents are not known to possess ballistic missiles.

While no image of a jet has yet appeared, some opposition activists insisted that they did see a plane before the explosions. An Aleppo blogger who has been critical of the armed rebellion on his @edwardedark Twitter feed wrote last week that he heard what he took to be a jet just before the blast.

I myself was driving up the road, just a few miles away from the jet strike. I clearly heard a jet fighter swooping, then a blast #Syria

— edward dark (@edwardedark) 16 Jan 13

As my colleagues Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt reported in December, Obama administration officials said that President Bashar al-Assad’s military had fired at least six Soviet-designed Scud missiles — not known for their precision — at rebel fighters north of Aleppo last month from a base outside Damascus.

An undated YouTube clip, apparently recorded from Syrian state television by an Israeli defense news magazine, appears to show that Syria’s military has openly test-fired Scuds and other missiles.

Video of Syria’s military testing missiles apparently recorded from Syrian state television by an Israeli defense news magazine.

According to Joseph Holliday, a former Army intelligence officer and a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War who studied the clip for The Lede, the video strongly suggests that a missile struck the university. “There’s no jet noise before or after the strike and only missiles would be supersonic – the ripping noise at the end is just the missile ripping through the air,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Add to all that the size of the blast definitely seems more like a ballistic missile than a bomb.”

Mr. Holliday added:

This also solves the mystery of who would target the university and why, and I think the answer is that the regime didn’t mean to target the university, but their Scuds just aren’t accurate enough and they screwed up – big time. I say Scuds here, but I can’t confirm whether or not it’s a different type of ballistic missile, it’s just that they have more Scuds in inventory than anything else.

Mr. Holliday showed the video to another analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, Christopher Harmer, a former Naval officer, who observed: “I am 90 percent confident that is either a Scud or a large surface to surface rocket – that is much bigger than a Qassam or Katyusha. Might be a Fajr-5 rocket.” He arrived at that conclusion, he wrote, by the following process of elimination:

R.P.G.? No — explosion is too big. Mortar? No — explosion is too big for the size of mortars in theater. Artillery? No — explosion is too big for any of the artillery pieces in theater. Also, if it were fired by artillery, they would have heard firing. Air-dropped bomb? Possible, but unlikely. No visual indication of jets in the area.

Based on size of explosion, sound of inbound projectile, assess this is either a large rocket (Fajr-5) series or a Scud ballistic missile.

On the possibility that the bomb might have been dropped by a jet, Mr. Harmer wrote:

I don’t buy it. You can hear something like an aircraft engine at 0:40, but it sounds more like wind to me than jet engine. Also, if this were an air attack, I think there are enough photographers up there that somebody would have caught it on video. The day is clear – no clouds or fog. The aircraft would have been visible.

Separate technical issue – Syrian Air Force has old jets. They make a lot of noise. At the altitudes they have been flying at, we almost certainly would have heard the jet engine noise. It is possible it was an air attack, but if so, it would have been a fairly high altitude attack, high enough that the jet was not visible to any of the amateur photographers on the ground, and high enough that we did not clearly hear the jet engine.

In a note to The Lede, Mr. Chivers, a former marine who has reported from Syria and written extensively about the insurgent arsenal for The Times and his personal blog, observed: “this now appears to have been a military strike, with ordnance that the Free Syrian Army does not have.”

He added:

The thing about these kind of attacks is they seem to be inherently inaccurate. I’ve been going to craters in Syria in recent days trying to figure out exactly what types of missiles are involved. So far, still stumped, though I have some scraps of their remains and have circulated pictures to some friends. But they simply do not seem to come near their targets in many cases — they miss by a kilometer or more. And that may be what happened here.

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BlackBerry Z10 Looks Like iPhone 5, Takes on Siri

RIM is set to announce the first devices running its new BlackBerry 10 operating system at an event on January 30. A lucky few, however, have already gotten their hands on what looks to be the new hardware, including German site TelekomPresse.

[More from Mashable: Watch These iPhone Knockoffs Get Bulldozed]

The site has the BlackBerry Z10, a touchscreen device with a similar look to some of the other popular smartphones out there — especially the iPhone 5.

Curious to see how the two compared, they put them side-by-side in the video above, running through both the physical design of both devices as well as some of their features.

[More from Mashable: RIM May License BlackBerry 10 to Other Manufacturers]

Notably, the video shows a Siri-like voice control functionality in BlackBerry 10, that we haven’t seen previously. As you can see in the test above, it beats Siri for speed.

SEE ALSO: RIM Adds 15,000 BlackBerry 10 Apps in a Weekend

While similar at first glance, design-wise the two phones do have some differences. The Z10 has a 4.2-inch screen, slightly larger than the iPhone 5’s 4-inch display. Both phones have a power button on top, however, the button on the BlackBerry is in the center of the top of the phone, while the iPhone’s is on the right on the device.

The volume controls are on the right side of the Z10, and left side of the iPhone 5. When it comes to power, the connection for the iPhone 5 is on the bottom of the device with the headphone jack, while the HDMI and USB connections on the Z10 are located on the left.

Check out the video above for a look at the full comparison of the two devices. Are you looking forward to BlackBerry 10? Can the new OS save RIM? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

BlackBerry 10 Lock Screen

You unlock a BlackBerry 10 device by swiping up from the bottom of the screen.

Click here to view this gallery.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Denise Richards's Dog Dies at 13

People Pets

By Amy Jamieson

UPDATED
01/22/2013 at 04:45 PM EST

• Originally published 01/22/2013 at 03:45 PM EST

Denise Richards's dog Hank

Courtesy Denise Richards; Inset: Cindy Ord/Getty

Denise Richards is mourning an old friend.

The actress's beloved French bulldog died on Sunday and she took to Twitter to memorialize him.

"Last night we lost our beloved Hank … I will miss him dearly, 13 yrs old … been there for me thru it all Best dog ever & part of our family," she wrote, with a picture of the black pup.

The mother of three girls, and ex-wife of actor Charlie Sheen, has a large pack of cats and dogs that will comfort her during this difficult time.

Most recently, she adopted Lily, a rescue puppy displaced by Hurricane Sandy in November.

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S&P 500 ends at five-year high on banks, materials

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bank and commodity shares led the Standard & Poor's 500 to a fresh five-year closing high on Tuesday on hopes that the global economy continues to mend.

The Dow Jones industrial average also ended at a five-year high, buoyed by an advance in Travelers' shares after the insurer's earnings.

The market also gained on signals that Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives aim on Wednesday to pass a nearly four-month extension of the U.S. debt limit. The White House welcomed the move, saying it defuses fears of a U.S. default on its debt.

Investors, however, were cautious ahead of an increase in earnings reports and as the S&P 500 rose for a fifth straight day.

Jack de Gan, chief investment officer of Harbor Advisory Corp, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, said better economic numbers in the United States and China, as well as more stabilization in Europe, were driving buyers into sectors associated with economic growth.

"Any (bearish) news could turn us down for a day or so," he said, referring to the recent string of gains.

Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold led gains in the materials sector after it reported a 16 percent rise in fourth-quarter profit on higher production. Shares gained 4.6 percent to $35.19.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> rose 62.51 points, or 0.46 percent, to 13,712.21 at the close. The S&P 500 <.spx> gained 6.58 points, or 0.44 percent, to 1,492.56. The Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> added 8.47 points or 0.27 percent, to 3,143.18.

Signs of improved sentiment toward world growth were seen in European bond markets. The yield on Portugal's benchmark 10-year note fell below 6 percent for the first time since late 2010 on news that the country was set to tap the bond market this week for the first time since it was bailed out in 2011.

Technology shares underperformed as concerns about Apple's ability to continue to grow at hyper speed and a weak outlook from Intel Corp diminished optimism about the sector's prospects. The S&P technology index <.splrct> added 0.16 percent, compared with 0.9 percent gains in energy <.spny>, financials <.spsy> and basic materials <.splrcm>.

In extended-hours trading, Google shares rose 4.5 percent to above $734 after the world's No. 1 search engine reported a jump in fourth-quarter revenue, while IBM added more than 3 percent to trade above $200 after the world's largest technology services company reported earnings and revenue that beat estimates.

During the regular session, shares of blue chips Travelers , DuPont , and Verizon Communications rose following earnings

Travelers rose 2.2 percent to $77.95, a closing high. DuPont's shares gained 1.8 percent to $47.82 and Verizon's stock rose 0.9 percent to $42.94.

Thomson Reuters data through Tuesday morning showed that of the 74 S&P 500 companies that have reported earnings so far, 62.2 percent have topped expectations, roughly even with the 62 percent average since 1994, but below the 65 percent average over the past four quarters.

Overall, S&P 500 fourth-quarter earnings are forecast to have risen 2.6 percent. That estimate is above the 1.9 percent forecast from the start of earnings season, but well below the 9.9 percent fourth-quarter earnings forecast from October 1, the data showed.

U.S.-listed shares of Research in Motion rallied 13 percent to $17.90 a day after its chief executive said the Canadian company may consider strategic alliances with other companies after the launch of devices powered by RIM's new BlackBerry 10 operating system.

About 6.2 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, below last year's daily average of about 6.45 billion shares.

On the NYSE, advancers outnumbered decliners by a ratio of roughly 7 to 3. On the Nasdaq, five stocks rose for every three that fell.

(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Jan Paschal)

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