U.S. plane stuck in Iran for repairs after emergency landing

DUBAI | Sun Dec 30, 2012 3:46am EST

DUBAI (Reuters) - A small U.S. commercial plane has been stuck in Iran for nearly three weeks after making an emergency landing near the city of Ahvaz, the country's airports director said on Sunday.

The plane was forced to land because of technical problems, Mahmoud Rasoulinejad said, quoted by the Mehr news agency.

"After landing, the crew traveled on to countries around the Persian Gulf and the plane is currently being repaired," he said.

Rasoulinejad did not specify who owned the aircraft, where it was headed or the nationality of the crew members. It would soon be ready to return to the skies, he said.

Ahvaz lies near Iran's border with Iraq in the southwest of Iran, an important area for the country's oil industry.

Earlier this month Iran trumpeted the capture of a compact U.S. intelligence ScanEagle drone in its airspace, which U.S. officials have denied.

In December 2011 Iranian forces announced they had captured a U.S. RQ-170 reconnaissance drone in eastern Iran which had been reported lost by U.S. forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

(Reporting By Marcus George; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

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Stock futures drop after Boehner "cliff" vote falls short

1 of 2. Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange at the opening of the trading session in New York October 5, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/Mike Segar

By David Gaffen and Jennifer Ablan

NEW YORK/TOKYO | Fri Dec 21, 2012 12:23am EST

NEW YORK/TOKYO (Reuters) - U.S. stock index futures fell sharply after a Republican proposal for averting the "fiscal cliff" failed to muster enough support on Thursday, raising concerns lawmakers won't be able to come to a deal, putting the world's largest economy at risk of recession.

S&P 500 E-Mini stock futures plunged on the news in a matter of seconds - falling as much as 3.6 percent in a mini "flash crash" that even caused a halt in trading of one March E-Mini futures contract because of the sharp move.

The market rebounded from there, but futures were still down 1.5 percent by 0400 GMT Friday. Dow Jones stock futures dropped 1.6 percent and Nasdaq futures were down 1.5 percent.

"This is happening on the evening before the last day of the week -- ahead of the weekend. There is a lot of complacency in the market -- as many, attracted to the favorable 'action' became too comfortable over the last few weeks," said Doug Kass, founder of hedge fund Seabreeze Partners Management Inc. in Palm Beach, Florida.

The S&P 500 .SPX closed Thursday at 1,443.69, just a few points off a two-month high, driven largely by optimism that Washington lawmakers would find a way to avoid a series of $600 billion in spending cuts and tax hikes set to begin in 2013.

Late Thursday, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner conceded that his tax bill proposal to help avert the "fiscal cliff" lacked the votes to pass, leaving only 11 days for politicians to come to a deal.

Trading in S&P E-Mini futures, the most popularly traded futures contract on CME, spiked as the news broke and as orders flooded into the market.

The move lower included a drop of 15 points in the March E-Mini futures from 1,407 to 1,392 in less than one second, according to Thomson Reuters time-and-sales data. That caused a halt in trading of 10 seconds before trading resumed.

Futures trading resumed shortly after as orders came back into the system. A CME representative was not available for comment.

"It basically stops trading if an order comes in that will clear out the orders resting in the book," said Eric Hunsader, founder of trading software and technology firm Nanex, who maintains a blog where he posts frequently on sudden, computer-driven moves in markets.

GROWTH IMPERILED

The cuts were designed to hit in a matter of months, rather than over years, and it is estimated that this compressed set of actions will hit U.S. growth hard.

"It's a confidence denter as this is happening at the important end of Christmas sales period -- it's not a positive for Christmas sales activity. Investors should look for downgrades to first-quarter GDP forecasts. Another risk short-term is that this event could accelerate tax selling," Kass said.

The bill, had it passed, would have put Republicans on record as supporting a tax increase on those who earn more than $1 million per year, breaking with decades of orthodoxy. It won the blessing of influential anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, but other conservative groups fiercely opposed it and many rank-and-file members said they would not support it.

The Boehner proposal was not expected to pass the Democratic-held Senate and did not have White House support, but the fact that the proposal could not even win passage among Republicans suggests it will be difficult to agree on a bill that comes closer to President Barack Obama's demands.

President Obama wants to raise taxes on families earning more than $400,000, a much lower threshold.

"The effect on markets will entirely be determined by the length of time this persists," said Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at BTIG LLC in New York.

"Markets in particular, and the economy in general, probably won't care all that much if this is just posturing and a deal is eventually reached. But if we stretch into mid-January, it's hard to image there won't be effects."

(Reporting by David Gaffen and Jennifer Ablan in New York and Dominic Lau in Tokyo; Editing by Richard Borsuk and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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Videogames under fire, Hollywood lays low after school shooting

By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES | Wed Dec 19, 2012 6:57pm EST

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The multi-billion-dollar videogame industry came under scrutiny on Wednesday after Hollywood canceled, postponed or played down a slew of movies and TV shows with violent content in the wake of last week's shooting at a Connecticut elementary school.

In Washington, Senator John Rockefeller called for a national study of the impact of violent videogames on children and a review of the rating system.

Although investigators in Newtown, Connecticut, have given no motive for Friday's shooting rampage, some U.S. media have reported that the 20-year-old gunman played popular videogame "Call of Duty" - in which players conduct simulated warfare missions - in the basement of his home.

The gunman, Adam Lanza, killed himself at the scene after gunning down 20 young children, six school employees and his mother.

Rockefeller said he had long been concerned about the impact of violent games and videos on children.

"Major corporations, including the video game industry, make billions on marketing and selling violent content to children. They have a responsibility to protect our children," Rockefeller said in a statement.

The Entertainment Software Association, which represents the $78 billion U.S. videogame industry, on Wednesday offered its "heartfelt prayers and condolences" to the Newtown families.

But it said in a statement that "the search for meaningful solutions must consider the broad range of actual factors that may have contributed to this tragedy.

"Any such study needs to include the years of extensive research that has shown no connection between entertainment and real-life violence," the association said.

NEW 'CALL OF DUTY,' 'HALO' GAMES RAKE IN BILLIONS

Activision Blizzard's latest title in its "Call of Duty" franchise - "Call of Duty: Black Ops II" - hit $1 billion in sales two weeks after its launch last month.

Other popular videogames include Microsoft's "Halo 4," in which players kill evil aliens. The game racked up $220 million in global sales on its launch day in November.

Mike Hickey, an analyst at National Alliance Capital Markets, said backlashes against videogames were not rare, but he was unaware of an instance of games being pulled off store shelves in the past.

When the Columbine school shooting happened in 1999, there was a similar outcry because the two perpetrators were students who played the shooter game "Doom," Hickey told Reuters.

Executives at Hollywood movie studios and TV networks have mostly laid low this week as Americans seek answers to the Newtown slaughter, and discuss how to prevent similar gun violence.

However, content seen as sensitive has been pulled from the airwaves, including an episode of the SyFy TV series "Haven" that contained violent scenes in a high school setting, and the premiere next week of a TLC show called "Best Funeral Ever."

Discovery Channel canceled a third season of its reality series "American Guns" about a family of gun makers. Some radio stations stopped playing pop star Ke$ha's bubbly new single "Die Young" to avoid any potential offense.

Glitzy red carpet premieres for violent upcoming new movies "Jack Reacher," starring Tom Cruise, and "Django Unchained" starring Jamie Foxx, were canceled out of respect for the Newtown victims, but both movies will open in theaters as planned in the next seven days.

INSENSITIVE TODAY, OK TOMORROW?

The Parents TV Council praised the response of the entertainment industry this week, but said it shouldn't be confined to the immediate aftermath of such tragedies.

"If a television network changes its programming because of content that could be insensitive today, why would that same content be appropriate at a later time?," council president Tim Winter said in a statement.

"If producers and performers rightly question whether their industry is complicit in creating a violent media culture that feeds real-life tragedies, why would there be a later time to produce and distribute more of it?," Winter added.

Most major Hollywood stars have remained silent about the potential influence of violent movies on U.S. society. But "Django Unchained" star Foxx was quoted as saying the movie industry should not shirk its responsibility.

"We cannot turn our back and say that violence in films or anything that we do doesn't have a sort of influence," Foxx was quoted as saying while promoting the film in New York.

Director Quentin Tarantino called the Newtown shootings "a horrible tragedy," but in an interview with CNN on Monday he declined to link screen violence with real life events.

"This has gone back all the way down to Shakespeare's days ... when there's violence in the street, the cry becomes 'blame the playmaker.' And you know, I actually think that's a very facile argument to pin on something that's a real life tragedy," Tarantino said.

(Additional reporting by Malathi Nayak in San Francisco, editing by Stacey Joyce)

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