NEW YORK: The S&P 500 punched to a new five-year high on Friday and the Nasdaq to its best since 2000, as stocks regained footing helped by a sharply narrowed US trade deficit.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average also reached a post-crisis high above 14,022 during trade, but slipped back to end up 48.92 points (0.35 percent) at 13,992.97.
The S&P 500 index rose 8.54 points (0.57 percent) to 1,517.93, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index jumped 28.74 points (0.91 percent) to 3,193.87.
The indices were still shy of their all-time closing records struck on October 9, 2007, of 1,564.15 for the S&P and 14,164.53 for the Dow. The Nasdaq last saw Friday's level in 2000 as markets plunged in the dot-com crash.
Friday's trade was buoyed by December US trade figures showing a sharp narrowing of the country's trade deficit, helped by a surge in oil exports and a parallel fall in the oil import bill.
The smaller trade deficit "implies positive GDP growth for the fourth quarter," after the initial estimate of an 0.1 percent contraction, said economist Harm Bandholz of UniCredit.
Bullishness also came from China's report that its trade surplus rose and inflation eased in January, adding to recent evidence the world's number-two economy is emerging from a drawn-out downtrend.
The Dow was led higher by Hewlett-Packard, which put on 2.6 percent amid speculation that the company could be broken up in the wake of PC industry rival Dell's going private.
Debt rater Moody's sank 7.7 percent, bringing its week loss to 21.6 percent, as speculation mounted that it could be in federal and state authority sights over its rating of mortgage securities, after Standard & Poor's was sued for allegedly exaggerating such ratings before the financial crisis.
S&P parent McGraw-Hill lost 2.6 percent, taking its fall for the week to 26.9 percent.
Online professional network LinkedIn jumped 21.3 percent after it smashed fourth-quarter earnings estimates and issued bullish predictions for 2013.
Apple put on another 1.4 percent as it fielded pressure from shareholders to share out its US$137 billion cash hoard. -- AFP
A blizzard blew into the northeastern United States on Friday, bringing whiteout conditions to some parts of New England and threatening to drop record amounts of snow around Boston.
Authorities scrambled to prepare for the storm, which had already touched off a massive traffic pile-up in southern Maine and prompted organizers of the nation's sledding championship in Maine to postpone a race scheduled for Saturday, fearing too much snow for the competition.
From New York to Maine, the storm began gently, dropping a light dusting of snow, but officials urged residents to stay home, rather than risk getting stuck in deep drifts when the storm kicks up later Friday afternoon.
Even in its early stages, the storm created some panic. Drivers lined up at gas stations to top off their tanks, grocery stores were swamped as shoppers stocked up on bread and milk, and travelers were forced to confront flight delays and cancellations.
The early edge of the storm led to a 19-vehicle pile-up in southern Maine, snarling traffic on a major interstate highway north of Portland. No major injuries were reported.
"It was close to whiteout conditions, it's sort of a precursor of what's coming later," said Stephen McCausland, a spokesman for the Maine State Police.
Officials across the region closed schools and more than 3,000 flights were canceled. Several thousand customers lost power in New Jersey and points south, though officials warned the number was likely to rise as the snowfall got heavier and winds picked up.
Governors and mayors ordered nonessential government workers to stay home, urged private employers to do the same, told people to prepare for power outages and encouraged them to check on elderly or disabled neighbors.
The light snow falling across much of New England on Friday morning was a taste of the weather to come, said Jerry Paul, senior meteorologist with Weather Insight, a unit of Thomson Reuters. <TRI.TO
"That's going to be gradually building today as time goes on," Paul said.
A wide swath of New England, including northeastern Connecticut, Providence, Rhode Island, and the Boston area, will likely see 24 inches to 30 inches (60 centimeters to 76 centimeters) of snow, with some areas seeing more than three feet (one meter) by the time the storm ends on Saturday morning, Paul added.
At the storm's peak, winds could gust up to 65 miles per hour (105 kilometers per hour), he said.
Boston's record snowfall, 27.6 inches (70.1 cm), came in 2003.
CHEERING ON STORM
Organizers of the country's championship sledding race, that had been scheduled to get underway in Camden, Maine, on Saturday, postponed the event by one day.
"As soon as the weather clears on Saturday and it is safe, the toboggan committee will be out at Tobagganville cleaning up the chute as quickly as they can," said Holly Edwards, chairman of the U.S. National Toboggan Championships. "It needs to be shoveled out by hand."
Some 400 teams were registered for the race, which features costumed sledders on a 400-foot (121 meter) chute.
After two years of very little snow across the region, people whose livelihoods depend on skiers and snowmobilers cheered on the storm.
"It affects restaurants, lodgings, everything if those people aren't up here to play," said Scott Senecal, manager of the VIP Discount Auto Center in Littleton, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains. "All those people that come up here they're going to have flat tires, batteries that die … Cold weather causes people to have to spend money whether they wanted to or not."
FUEL WORRIES
In New York City, still not fully recovered from the effects of October's devastating Hurricane Sandy, officials said they had 1,800 Sanitation Department trucks equipped with snow plows ready to be deployed.
Motorists, mindful of the severe fuel disruptions after Sandy, rushed to buy gasoline, leading to shortages in New York City. A Reuters photographer reported at least three service stations had run out of gas in the borough of Queens on Friday morning, with long lines formed at others.
Sandy knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes, taking gasoline stations out of service, and damaged port facilities, exacerbating the shortages by preventing operable stations from refueling.
"We've seen some lines at stations in the southern part of the state, ahead of the storm, which may actually help prevent problems after the storm," said Ralph Bombardiere, executive director of the New York State Association of Service Stations and Repair Shops. "I'm not expecting anything like the vast power outages and problems we had with Sandy."
Life was not any easier for those who planned to fly. More than 3,000 flights were canceled on Friday, with close to 1,000 planned cancellations for Saturday, according to the website FlightAware.com. The hardest-hit airports were in the New York City area, Boston and Toronto.
BIG BEAR LAKE, Calif. Police spent all night searching the snowy mountains of Southern California but were unable to find the former Los Angeles police officer accused of carrying out a killing spree because he felt he was unfairly fired from his job.
About 80 miles east of LA at Big Bear Lake, where Christopher Dorner's torched pickup was found, authorities said Friday morning that no new evidence had been found.
San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon said the hunt will go on until Dorner is found or there's evidence that he's left the mountain. Searchers Friday are dealing with falling snow and freezing temperatures in the Big Bear Lake region of the San Bernardino Mountains. More than 100 officers were assisting in the manhunt.
CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy reports from Big Bear that authorities admit that the truck could be an elaborate diversion or even a trap.
Local ski areas were open, but Bear Valley schoolchildren had the day off because of the manhunt.
About 150 miles to the south, up to 16 San Diego County sheriff's deputies spent the night surrounding and searching a rural home after a hoaxer reported Dorner was there. There were people at home but Dorner wasn't one of them, said Lt. Jason Rothlein. Investigators have a pretty good idea who made the call and will be seek criminal charges, he said.
Though the focus is on the resort area, the search for Dorner, 33, stretches across California, Nevada, Arizona and northern Mexico. LAPD officers are especially on edge because Dorner, who was fired from the force in 2008 after three years on the job, promised in rambling writings to bring "warfare" to police and their families.
"We don't know what he's going to do," said Cindy Bachman, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, one of many law enforcement agencies whose primary purpose has become finding Dorner. "We know what he's capable of doing. And we need to find him."
CBS News senior correspondent John Miller, a former top LAPD official, reports that Dorner cut off all his cell phones and other connections Jan. 31, indicating that he had spent time planning his alleged rampage.
On Thursday, law enforcement officials were inspecting a package CNN's Anderson Cooper received from Dorner. CNN spokeswoman Shimrit Sheetrit said that a parcel containing a note, a DVD and a bullet hole-riddled memento was addressed to Cooper's office.
The memento was a coin bearing the name of former Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton, who appeared with Dorner in a picture taken years ago. On "CBS This Morning" Friday, Bratton described Dorner as "an incredibly dangerous individual" and reacted to the damaged coin.
"When you see that that coin that was given in friendship and respect has three bullet holes, it's certainly very chilling," Bratton said.
Tracks that surrounded the truck and hours of door-to-door searching around Bear Mountain Ski Resort turned up nothing, and authorities conceded that the whereabouts of Dorner, also a former Naval reservist and onetime college running back, remained a mystery.
"He could be anywhere at this point," said San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon, who had 125 deputies and police officers and two helicopters searching the community of Big Bear Lake, where light snow fell early Friday morning.
The saga began Sunday night, when Monica Quan and fiance Keith Lawrence were found shot in their car at a parking structure at their condominium in Irvine. Quan was an assistant women's basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton.
The following morning in National City, near San Diego, some of Dorner's belongings, including police equipment and paperwork with names related to the LAPD, were found in a trash bin.
The LAPD was notified of the find, and two days later informed Irvine police of an angry manifesto written by a former officer and posted on Facebook. Among those named as targets was Randal Quan, a former LAPD captain turned attorney who represented Dorner in his unsuccessful attempts to keep the police job he lost in 2008 for making false statements.
Randal Quan was also Monica Quan's father.
"Bing bing bing, the dots were connecting," Irvine police Lt. Julia Engen said. "These names are somehow associated to Mr. Quan, who just lost his daughter the prior day. The dots connected. OK, now we've got a name of somebody to look at. That's when the discovery was connected."
On Wednesday night, Irvine and Los Angeles police announced they were searching for Dorner, declaring him armed and "extremely dangerous." Hours later, they learned they were all too correct.
Two LAPD officers en route to provide security to one of Dorner's possible targets were flagged down by a resident who reported seeing the suspect early Thursday at a gas station in Corona. The officers then followed a pickup truck until it stopped. The driver, believed to be Dorner, got out and fired a rifle, police said. A bullet grazed an officer's head.
Later, two officers on routine patrol in neighboring Riverside were ambushed at a stoplight by a motorist who drove up next to them and opened fire with a rifle. One died and the other was seriously wounded but was expected to survive, said Riverside police Chief Sergio Diaz.
Thousands of heavily armed officers patrolled highways throughout Southern California, while some stood guard outside the homes of people police said Dorner vowed to attack. Electronic billboards, which usually alert motorists about the commute, urged them to call 911 if they saw him.
At a news conference held amid heightened security in an underground room at police headquarters, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck urged Dorner to surrender.
"Of course he knows what he's doing; we trained him. He was also a member of the Armed Forces," he said. "It is extremely worrisome and scary."
While in the Naval Reserves, Dorner earned a rifle marksman ribbon and pistol expert medal. He was assigned to a naval undersea warfare unit and various aviation training units, according to military records, taking a leave from the LAPD to be deployed to Bahrain in 2006 and 2007.
He wrote that he would "utilize every bit of small arms training, demolition, ordinance and survival training I've been given," the manifesto read.
The hunt led to two errant shootings in the pre-dawn darkness Thursday.
LAPD officers guarding a target named in the manifesto shot and wounded two women in suburban Torrance who were in a pickup truck delivering newspapers. Investigators said Maggie Carranza, 47, and her mother, Emma Hernandez, 71, were in a Toyota Tundra, similar to Dorner's Nissan Titan. Carranza had minor hand injuries. Hernandez was hospitalized with a gunshot wound in the back. A lawyer said they had no warning.
Minutes later, Torrance officers responding to a report of gunshots encountered a dark pickup matching the description of Dorner's, police said. A collision occurred and the officers fired on the pickup. The unidentified driver was not hit and it turned out not to be the suspect vehicle, they said.
In San Diego, where police said Dorner tied up an elderly man and unsuccessfully tried to steal his boat Wednesday night, Naval Base Point Loma was locked down Thursday after a Navy worker reported seeing someone who resembled Dorner.
Navy Cmdr. Brad Fagan said officials believe Dorner had checked into a base hotel on Tuesday and left the next day without checking out. Numerous agencies guarded the base on Thursday. Fagan said Dorner was honorably discharged and that his last day in the Navy was last Friday.
Nevada authorities also joined the search, because Dorner owns a house nine miles from the Las Vegas Strip.
In Big Bear, Dorner's pickup was taken to be processed at a crime lab Thursday evening and examined by investigators from multiple agencies.
The manhunt was affecting some local businesses. A couple of fast food restaurants shut their doors and only took drive-in customers, and the main shopping avenue had light foot traffic.
Dorner's writings suggested he did not expect to live through the ordeal.
"Unfortunately, I will not be alive to see my name cleared," he wrote at one point in his manifesto, later saying, "Self-preservation is no longer important to me. I do not fear death as I died long ago."
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