Stocks soar on Europe hopes, strong housing starts

Traders James Lodewick, left, and James Riley, center, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2011. Stocks are surging after the opening bell following encouraging signs out of Europe and a jump in apartment building in the U.S. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Traders James Lodewick, left, and James Riley, center, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2011. Stocks are surging after the opening bell following encouraging signs out of Europe and a jump in apartment building in the U.S. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Traders Gerard Farco, left, and Richard Cohen, right. work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2011. Stocks are surging after the opening bell following encouraging signs out of Europe and a jump in apartment building in the U.S. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Trader Gregory Rowe works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2011. Stocks are surging after the opening bell following encouraging signs out of Europe and a jump in apartment building in the U.S. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Traders John Panin, center, and Robert Charmay, right, work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2011. Stocks are surging after the opening bell following encouraging signs out of Europe and a jump in apartment building in the U.S. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

NEW YORK (AP) ? Encouraging signs out of Europe and a surprisingly strong report on the U.S. housing market drove the Dow Jones industrial average up more than 300 points Tuesday. It was the best day for stocks this month.

The Spanish government pulled off a successful debt auction and gauges of business and consumer confidence in Germany rose unexpectedly. Both helped ease worries about Europe's debt crisis. The dollar fell against the euro and U.S. government bond prices dropped as traders shifted money out of the safest assets.

Borrowing costs for the Spanish government plunged at an auction of short-term debt, a sign that bond buyers are more confident in the country's ability to pay them back.

"Spain has plenty of problems, large debts and budget deficits," said Sam Stovall, chief equity strategist at S&P Capital IQ. "So when we see debt auctions go much better than expected it's very encouraging."

Spain's government raised ?5.6 billion ($7.3 billion), much more than its goal of ?4.5 billion. Investors demanded an interest rate of only 1.74 percent to lend to Spain for three months, a steep fall from the 5.1 percent at an auction in November.

The Dow gained 337.32 points, or 2.9 percent to close at 12,103.58. It lost 100 points the day before.

Europe's major stock markets also climbed. Germany's DAX soared 3.1 percent. France's CAC-40 jumped 2.7 percent.

The gains held on Tuesday afternoon even after the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a plan to extend a cut in Social Security taxes. Unemployment benefits for 2 million people are also at risk.

A Federal Reserve proposal for stricter rules on larger banks didn't knock down JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and other big bank stocks. JPMorgan Chase & Co. gained 4.9 percent. Citigroup added 4.6 percent.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index gained 35.95 points, or 3 percent, to 1,241.30. Only six stocks in the index fell. The Nasdaq composite index rose 80.59, or 3.2 percent, to 2,603.73.

Analysts cautioned that recent big rallies in the stock market have been quick to fade as traders seize the chance to sell stocks and lock in gains. "If you're selling into rallies, it means people want out," said Quincy Krosby, Prudential Financial's market strategist. "They don't believe it's sustainable."

Take the Dow's 490-point jump Nov. 30 after major central banks made a coordinated move to prop up European lenders by freeing up cash. The one-day rally brought the Dow to 12,045, but that gain had evaporated by last week.

The Commerce Department said Tuesday that builders broke ground on 685,000 new homes last month, a 9.3 percent jump from October. That's the highest level since April 2010. Building permits, a gauge of future construction, increased 5.7 percent, spurred by a jump in apartment permits. Stovall said the surge in housing construction was another piece of evidence that the U.S. will avoid slipping into another recession soon. "It's great news," he said.

The report drove housing stocks higher. PulteGroup Inc. jumped 10 percent. D.R. Horton Inc. rose 5.7 percent.

In other corporate news,

? General Mills Inc. dropped 1 percent after reporting that its quarterly profit sank 28 percent. The maker of Cheerios and Yoplait yogurt blamed higher costs for ingredients and packaging for pinching profit margins.

? AT&T Inc. rose 1.3 percent after the company abandoned its bid late Monday to acquire the wireless provider T-Mobile USA. Sprint Nextel Corp. gained 5 percent. Sprint, the No. 3 wireless carrier, had opposed the deal.

? Red Hat Inc. plunged 8.9 percent after the software company forecast revenue that was short of what analysts were expecting. Red Hat provides support to business users for the freely distributed Linux operating system.

? Oracle Corp. dropped 8 percent in extended trading after the business software giant's quarterly earnings and sales missed analysts' estimates.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2011-12-20-Wall%20Street/id-1413dea6ad41456fae51cbe5afd24c5c

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With morgues full, Philippine flood victims buried (AP)

ILIGAN, Philippines ? With funeral parlors overwhelmed, authorities in a flood-stricken southern Philippine city on Monday organized the first mass burial of some of nearly 700 people who were swept to their deaths in one of worst calamities to strike the region in decades.

For the first time in a day, the staggering death toll from Friday night's disaster, spawned by a tropical storm, remained little changed but the number of missing varied widely. Official figures put the missing at 82, while the Philippine Red Cross estimated 800.

The disparity underscores the difficulty in accounting for people who could be buried in the mud and debris littering much of the area or could be alive but lost in crowded evacuation centers or elsewhere.

"We lost count of how many are missing," said Benito Ramos, head of the government's Office of Civil Defense.

In Iligan, a coastal industrial hub of 330,000 people, Mayor Lawrence Cruz said the city's half a dozen parlors were full to capacity and no longer accepting bodies. The first burial of 50 or so unclaimed bodies was to take place later Monday in individual tombs at the city cemetery, he said.

"For public health purposes, we're doing this. The bodies are decomposing and there is no place where we can place them, not in an enclosed building, not in a gymnasium," Cruz told The Associated Press.

He said many of the Iligan dead ? 279 by official count ? "are just piled and laid outside the morgues," which ran out of formaldehyde for embalming and coffins.

"We're using plastic bags, whatever is available," Cruz said.

In nearby Cagayan de Oro city, the situation was more chaotic and people were resisting mass burials, instead demanding that bodies be interned until relatives can claim them.

About 340 died in Cagayan de Oro, most of them women and children and many of whom lived along river banks. Flood waters came gushing after 12 hours of pounding rain, catching most of them in their sleep.

Residents told local officials that plans for a mass burial was "un-Christian," said Cagayan de Oro city administrator Griscelda Joson.

Mayor Vicente Emano called a meeting later Monday to discuss the problem. Funeral parlors have asked authorities to do something about the unclaimed bodies because of the stench and complaints from neighbors, she said.

More bodies continue to be found. While city officials were meeting Sunday, more than 40 bodies were seen floating off an island but the coast guard could not recover them, Joson said.

In a grim sign of desperation, a funeral parlor dumped about 30 badly decomposed bodies in a city garbage dump over the weekend, sparking protests from distraught villagers who were looking for the missing loved ones.

Ramos, the head of the agency that is spearheading the recovery and relief operations, attributed the high casualties "partly to the complacency of people because they are not in the usual path of storms" despite warnings by officials that one was approaching.

"We've had flooding before but nothing like this," Cruz, the Iligan mayor said, recalling floods in the early 1950s. "We have a good drainage system but it as simply overwhelmed. The rainfall fell heavily on the mountains and this flowed down to two of our river systems and they overflowed and swept away houses and covered the highway and residential areas."

About 143,000 people were affected in 13 southern and central provinces, including 45,000 who fled to evacuation centers. About 7,000 houses were swept away, destroyed or damaged, the Office of Civil Defense said.

An estimated 35 percent of evacuees are children, said Trevor Clark, head of UNICEF in the southern Mindanao region. Running water and hygiene were major concerns, followed by a lack of clothing, blankets and even shoes for young children, he said.

Although he said government agencies were responding in a quick and efficient manner, they were overwhelmed and the United Nations was preparing an appeal for urgent assistance from donors and foreign governments.

___

Associated Press writers Jim Gomez and Hrvoje Hranjski in Manila contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111219/ap_on_re_as/as_philippines_storm

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16 Days Out: Good Morning Iowa (ABC News)

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UN: Syria now in a civil war

BEIRUT?? Syria has entered a state of civil war with more than 4,000 people dead and an increasing number of soldiers defecting from the army to fight President Bashar Assad's regime, the U.N.'s top human rights official said Thursday.

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Civil war has been the worst-case scenario in Syria since the revolt against Assad began eight months ago. Damascus has a web of allegiances that extends to Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah movement and Iran's Shiite theocracy, raising fears of a regional conflagration.

The assessment that the bloodshed in Syria has crossed into civil war came from the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay.

The conflict has shown little sign of letting up. Activists reported up to 22 people killed Thursday, adding to what has become a daily grind of violence.

"We are placing the (death toll) figure at 4,000 but really the reliable information coming to us is that it's much more than that," Pillay said in Geneva.

"As soon as there were more and more defectors threatening to take up arms, I said this in August before the Security Council, that there's going to be a civil war," she added. "And at the moment, that's how I am characterizing this."

U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner declined to call it a civil war.

"The overwhelming use of force has been taken by Assad and his regime," Toner told reporters. "So there's no kind of equanimity here."

Toner said Assad's government has taken Syria down a dangerous path, and that "the regime's bloody repression of the protests has not surprisingly led to this kind of reaction that we've seen with the Free Syrian Army."

The Free Syrian Army, a group of defectors from the military, has emerged as the most visible armed challenge to Assad. The group holds no territory, appears largely disorganized and is up against a fiercely loyal and cohesive military.

International intervention, such as the NATO action in Libya that helped topple longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, is all but out of the question in Syria. But there is real concern that the conflict in Syria could spread chaos across the Middle East.

Syria borders five countries with whom it shares religious and ethnic minorities and, in Israel's case, a fragile truce.

Recent economic sanctions imposed by the European Union, the Arab League and Turkey were aimed at persuading Assad to end his crackdown. On Thursday, the EU announced a new round of sanctions against Syrian individuals and businesses linked to the unrest.

The new sanctions target 12 people and 11 companies, and add to a long list of those previously sanctioned by the EU. The full list of names of those targeted will not be known until they are published Friday in the EU's official journal.

The 27-member bloc also imposed some sanctions on Syria's ally Iran in the wake of an attack this week by a mob on the British Embassy in Tehran, the Iranian capital.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague accused Iran of supporting Assad's crackdown, saying "there is a link between what is happening in Iran and what is happening in Syria."

The sanctions are punishing Syria's ailing economy ? a dangerous development for Damascus because the prosperous merchant classes are key to propping up the regime.

Syrian business leaders have long traded political freedoms for economic privileges. The sanctions, along with increasing calls by the opposition for general nationwide strikes, could sap their resolve.

A resident of the flashpoint city of Homs said businessmen are growing impatient.

"The sanctions against the regime are harming them," he told The Associated Press by telephone, asking that his name not be used for fear of reprisals. "Merchants only care about their interests. Many merchants are complaining that their business is dropping."

Activists also are trying to peel the business elite away from their allegiance to Assad. On Thursday, opposition groups called for a general strike, but it was difficult to gauge how widely Syrians were abiding by the strike. The regime has sealed the country off from foreign journalists and prevented independent reporting.

Residents in Syria's two economic powerhouses ? the capital of Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo ? reported business as usual Thursday.

But a video posted online by activists showed mostly closed shops in the Damascus suburb of Zabadani, which also has seen large anti-government protests. And a resident in Homs said most of the shops were closed, except for those selling food. Homs has been one of Syria's most volatile cities, with increasing clashes between troops and army defectors.

Syria has been the site of the deadliest crackdown against the Arab Spring's protests.

Deaths in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen have numbered in the hundreds. Libya's toll is unknown and likely higher than Syria's, but the conflict there differed because it descended early on into an outright civil war between two armed sides.

Since the revolt began in Syria, the regime has blamed the bloodshed on terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy to divide and undermine the country. It has laid bare Syria's simmering sectarian tensions, with disturbing reports of killings like those seen in Iraq.

Syria is an overwhelmingly Sunni country of 22 million, but Assad and the ruling elite belong to the minority Alawite sect. Assad, and his father before him, stacked key military posts with Alawites to meld the fate of the army and the regime ? a tactic aimed at compelling troops to fight to the death to protect the Assad family dynasty.

The leader of the Free Syrian Army, breakaway air force Col. Riad al-Asaad, acknowledges nearly all the defectors under his command ? some 15,000 ? are low-level Sunni conscripts. The men are armed with rocket-propelled grenades, rifles and guns they took with them when they deserted, as well as light weapons they acquired on the black market, he says.

Until recently, most of the bloodshed was caused by security forces firing on mainly peaceful protesters. There have been growing reports of army defectors and armed civilians fighting Assad's forces ? a development that some say plays into the regime's hands by giving government troops a pretext to crack down with overwhelming force.

As the violence continues, the 22-member Arab League in Cairo unveiled this week a list of top officials it wants to prevent from traveling to Arab countries ? a humiliating affront to a country that prides itself on Arab nationalism.

The 17 officials who face the ban include the defense and interior ministers, and close members of Assad's inner circle. Assad's millionaire cousin, Rami Makhlouf, who has controlled the mobile phone network and other lucrative enterprises in Syria, and the president's younger brother, Maher, are on the list.

Assad himself was not named.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45514855/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/

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