S&P 500 posts biggest monthly gain since October 2011

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Stocks edged lower on Thursday on caution ahead of Friday’s all-important jobs report, but the S&P 500 still posted its best monthly gain since October 2011.

The benchmark S&P 500 advanced 5.1 percent in January as investors cheered a compromise that temporarily postponed the impact of the “fiscal cliff” and fourth-quarter earnings were better than expected.

The S&P 500 registered its largest monthly advance since a rise of more than 6 percent in October 2011 and the best January showing since a 6.1 percent jump in 1997. For the month, the Dow gained 5.8 percent and the Nasdaq rose 4.1 percent.

Investors expect a pullback in equities after the recent gains, though they have bought on dips over the past four weeks. The largest daily decline on the S&P 500 so far in 2013 was Wednesday’s 0.39 percent drop after data showed the economy contracted in the fourth quarter of 2012.

On Friday, the government is due to release January’s employment figures at 8:30 a.m. (1330 GMT). Economists polled by Reuters expect non-farm payrolls to show employers added 160,000 jobs compared with a rise of 155,000 in December. The unemployment rate is likely to hold steady at 7.8 percent.

A survey by payroll processing company ADP on Wednesday showed private sector employment rose higher than expected last month, but the government’s measure of jobless benefits claims increased last week.

“It’s the calm before the potential storm. The uncertainty about tomorrow’s numbers comes from that fact that we had a decent ADP report but the weekly claims were not so great,” said Randy Frederick, managing director of active trading and derivatives for Charles Schwab in Austin, Texas.

In a separate report, the Commerce Department said American incomes rose 2.6 percent last month, the biggest increase since December 2004.

“We could see an overly sensitive market to a bad number tomorrow, given that we’ve been up without a major correction, and that makes the market sensitive to the downside.”

Friday will also bring reports on consumer confidence, U.S. manufacturing, construction spending and car sales.

Limiting losses on the Nasdaq composite index, Qualcomm gained 3.9 percent to $ 66.02 after the world’s leading supplier of chips for cellphones beat analysts’ expectations for quarterly profit and revenue and raised its targets for the year.

Facebook shares fell 0.8 percent to $ 30.98 after falling as low as $ 28.74 a day after the social network company said it doubled its mobile advertising revenue in the fourth quarter. However, growth trailed some of Wall Street‘s most aggressive estimates.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was down 49.84 points, or 0.36 percent, at 13,860.58. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index <.spx> was down 3.85 points, or 0.26 percent, at 1,498.11. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was down 0.18 points, or 0.01 percent, at 3,142.13.</.ixic></.spx></.dji>

UPS shares lost 2.4 percent to $ 79.29 after reporting fourth-quarter earnings that were below analysts’ estimates on Thursday and forecasting weaker-than-expected profit for 2013.

Constellation Brands shares tumbled 17.4 percent to $ 32.36 after the U.S. Justice Department moved to stop Anheuser-Busch InBev from buying the half of Mexican brewer Grupo Modelo that it does not already own. Constellation would have distributed Corona beer in the United States if the transaction had been approved.

Thomson Reuters data through Thursday morning shows that of the 231 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings this season, 69.3 percent have exceeded expectations, a higher proportion than over the past four quarters and above the average since 1994.

Overall, S&P 500 fourth-quarter earnings rose 3.7 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data. That’s above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season but well below a 9.9 percent profit growth forecast on October 1.

(Reporting By Angela Moon; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Kenneth Barry)

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Canada says no date set to sign EU free trade deal

ABUJA (Reuters) – Free trade talks between Canada and the European Union are progressing but there is no end date for an deal that was supposed to have been finished by the end of 2012, Canada‘s Trade Minister Ed Fast said on Monday.

Canada, keen to diversify its exports away from the United States, says a deal with the European Union would increase two-way trade by 20 percent. The talks started in 2009.

Officials and industry sources say several sensitive matters remain to be settled, including access for agricultural goods, opening up procurement markets and the extension of pharmaceutical patents.

“I have not committed to a firm time line. We’re not going to be rushed into a deal that doesn’t serve Canadians,” Fast said during a visit to Nigeria, where he was building bilateral trade ties with Africa’s biggest oil producer.

“We continue to make significant progress in addressing the handful of remaining issues, which are the most serious and difficult ones to overcome,” he said.

Fast said he would at some point meet with EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, likely in Ottawa, but no date had been set for that meeting. European officials say such a meeting is likely to take place on February 6-7.

Negotiators have struggled over investment protection, agriculture, public procurement and intellectual property, particularly regarding pharmaceuticals, trade experts say.

De Gucht told Reuters last week that the EU was ready to start talking about a free trade deal with the United States. European diplomats say this could give Canada further impetus to wrap up its own deal with the EU quickly before the bloc turns its attention to what would be a much richer agreement.

A free trade agreement with Canada, the EU’s 12th-largest trading partner, would be the bloc’s first with a country from the G7 group of major developed economies.

For Canada, it would be the most significant since the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Mexico in 1994 and an opportunity to diversify exports away from the United States. The EU is its second-largest trading partner.

(Reporting by Joe Brock; editing by Ron Askew)

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Rape trial of teenaged football players to be open to public: Ohio judge

(Reuters) – The controversial trial of two high school football players accused of raping a classmate will remain open to the public and will not be relocated to another town, an Ohio judge ruled on Wednesday.

Prosecutors and an attorney representing the accuser had sought a closed trial, arguing that public access to the juvenile trial would subject the accuser to unwanted publicity and make potential witnesses reluctant to testify.

Visiting Hamilton County Judge Tom Lipps said the presence of the media would prevent inaccurate reporting and enhance public confidence in the juvenile justice system, according to his written ruling, a copy of which was seen by Reuters.

“An open hearing is especially valuable where rumors, mischaracterizations and opinions unsupported by facts have reportedly been repeated in social media postings and other published outlets,” Lipps wrote. “An open hearing will diminish the influence of such postings and publications.”

Prosecutors have accused Ma’Lik Richmond and Trent Mays, both 16, of raping a classmate at a party attended by many teammates last August in Steubenville, a close-knit city of 19,000 near the Pennsylvania border.

The case attracted national attention after the hacker activist group Anonymous publicized a picture of two young men carrying a girl by her wrists and ankles and released a video showing other young men joking about the alleged assault.

Richmond’s lawyer, Walter Madison, said previously on CNN that his client was one of the young men in the photograph – which he said was taken out of context – but does not appear in the video. A lawyer for Mays has not publicly commented on the postings.

Community leaders have accused authorities of protecting the school’s popular football program by not charging more players who could have prevented the alleged attack.

Lipps also ruled on Wednesday that the trial will remain in Steubenville. He set a trial date for March 13.

Reuters generally does not identify people who say they have been victims of sex crimes.

(Editing by Paul Thomasch, Bernard Orr)

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Study sees prostate cancer treatment side effects

A new study shows how important it is for men to carefully consider treatments for early-stage prostate cancer. Fifteen years after surgery or radiation treatment, nearly all of the older men in the study had some problems having sex.

About one-fifth had bladder or bowel trouble, researchers found.

The study doesn’t compare these men — who were 70 to 89 at the end of the study — to others who did not treat their cancers or to older men without the disease. At least one study suggests that half that age group has sexual problems even when healthy.

The study isn’t a rigorous test of surgery and radiation, but it is the longest follow-up of some men who chose those treatments.

Since early prostate cancers usually don’t prove fatal but there are no good ways to tell which ones really need treatment, men must be realistic about side effects they might suffer, said one study leader, Dr. David Penson of Vanderbilt University.

“They need to look at these findings and say, ‘Oh my gosh, no matter what I choose, I’m going to have some quality-of-life effect and it’s probably greater than my doctor is telling me,’” he said.

The study appears in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in American men. In the United States alone, there were about 240,000 new cases and 28,000 deaths from the disease last year. Radiation or surgery to remove the prostate are common treatments when the disease is confined to the gland.

Men usually live a long time after treatment — 14 years on average — so it’s important to see how they fare, said another study leader, Vanderbilt’s Dr. Matthew Resnick.

The study involved 1,655 men diagnosed in 1994 or 1995, when they were ages 55 to 74. About two-thirds of them had surgery and the rest, radiation. They were surveyed two, five and 15 years later. By that time, 569 had died.

Men who had surgery had more problems in the first few years after their treatments than those given radiation, but by the end of the study, there was no big difference.

After 15 years, 18 percent of the surgery group and 9 percent of the radiation group reported urinary incontinence, and 5 percent of the surgery group and 16 percent of the radiation group said they were bothered by bowel problems. But the differences between the two groups could have occurred by chance alone once researchers took other factors such as age and the size of the men’s tumors into account.

Impotence was “near universal” at 15 years, the authors write — 94 percent of the radiation group and 87 percent of the surgery group. But the difference between the groups also was considered possibly due to chance. Also, less than half of men said they were bothered by their sexual problems.

“These men do get some help from pills like Viagra, Cialis, Levitra,” but it may not be as much as they would like and most men would rather not need those pills, Penson said.

The National Cancer Institute paid for the study. Two authors have consulted for several makers of prostate cancer treatment drugs.

No study is perfect and this one has many limitations, said Dr. Timothy Wilson, urology chief at City of Hope, a cancer center in Duarte, Calif. Men who are having problems are more likely to complete follow-up surveys because they’re angry, so that could skew results, he noted.

Still, “it’s a high percentage” with side effects, said Wilson, who has been a paid speaker for two makers of surgery equipment.

“There’s no question we overtreat” many cases of early prostate cancer, yet the disease is still the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in men. “We need to better sort out who really needs treatment,” he said.

___

Online:

New England Journal: http://www.nejm.org

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Army warns unrest pushing Egypt to the brink

CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) – Egypt’s army chief said political unrest was pushing the state to the brink of collapse – a stark warning from the institution that ran the country until last year as Cairo‘s first freely elected leader struggles to curb bloody street violence.

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a U.S.-trained general appointed by President Mohamed Mursi last year to head the armed forces, added in a statement on Tuesday that one of the primary goals of deploying troops in cities on the Suez Canal was to protect the waterway that is vital for Egypt’s economy and world trade.

Sisi’s comments, published on an official army Facebook page, followed 52 deaths in the past week of disorder and highlighted the mounting sense of crisis facing Egypt and its Islamist head of state who is striving to fix a teetering economy and needs to prepare Egypt for a parliamentary election in a few months that is meant to cement the new democracy.

Violence largely subsided on Tuesday, although some youths again hurled rocks at police lines in Cairo near Tahrir Square.

It seemed unlikely that Sisi was signaling the army wants to take back the power it held for six decades since the end of the colonial era and through an interim period after the overthrow of former air force chief Hosni Mubarak two years ago.

But it did send a powerful message that Egypt’s biggest institution, with a huge economic as well as security role and a recipient of massive direct U.S. subsidies, is worried about the fate of the nation, after five days of turmoil in major cities.

“The continuation of the struggle of the different political forces … over the management of state affairs could lead to the collapse of the state,” said General Sisi, who is also defense minister in the government Mursi appointed.

He said the economic, political and social challenges facing the country represented “a real threat to the security of Egypt and the cohesiveness of the Egyptian state” and the army would remain “the solid and cohesive block” on which the state rests.

Sisi was picked by Mursi after the army handed over power to the new president in June once Mursi had sacked Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, in charge of Egypt during the transition and who had also been Mubarak’s defense minister for 20 years.

The instability has provoked unease in Western capitals, where officials worry about the direction of a powerful regional player that has a peace deal with Israel. The United States condemned the bloodshed and called on Egyptian leaders to make clear violence was not acceptable.

DEEPLY POLARISED

The 58-year-old previously headed military intelligence and studied at the U.S. Army War College. Diplomats say he is well known to the United States, which donates $ 1.3 billion in military aid each year, helping reassure Washington that the last year’s changes in the top brass would not upset ties.

One of Sisi’s closest and longest serving associates, General Mohamed el-Assar, an assistant defense minister, is now in charge of the military’s relations with the United States.

Almost seven months after Mursi took office, Egyptian politics have become even more deeply polarized.

Opponents spurned a call by Mursi for talks on Monday to try to end the violence. Instead, protesters have rallied in Cairo and Alexandria, and in the three Suez Canal cities – Port Said, Ismailia and Suez – where Mursi imposed emergency rule.

On Tuesday, thousands were again on the streets of Port Said to mourn the deaths of two people in the latest clashes there, taking the total toll in Mediterranean port alone to 42 people. Most were killed by gunshots in a city where weapons are rife.

Mohamed Ezz, a Port Said resident speaking by telephone, heard heavy gunfire through the night. “Gunshots damaged the balcony of my flat, so I went to stay with my brother,” he said.

Residents in the three canal cities had taken to the streets in protest at a nightly curfew now in place there. The president’s spokesman said on Tuesday that the 30-day state of emergency could be shortened, depending on circumstances.

In Cairo on Tuesday afternoon, police again fired teargas at stone-throwing youths in a street near Tahrir Square, the center of the 2011 uprising. But the clashes were less intense than previous days and traffic was able to cross the area. Street cleaners swept up the remains of burnt tires and other debris.

The police have been facing “unprecedented attacks accompanied by the appearance of groups that pursue violence and whose members possess different types of weapons”, the state news agency reported, quoting the Interior Ministry spokesman.

Street flare-ups are a common occurrence in divided Egypt, frustrating many people desperate for order and economic growth.

WARY MILITARY

Although the general’s comments were notably blunt, Egypt’s military has voiced similar concerns in the past, pledging to protect the nation. But it has refused to be drawn back into a direct political role after its reputation as a neutral party took a pounding during the 17 months after Mubarak fell.

“Egyptians are really alarmed by what is going on,” said Cairo-based analyst Elijah Zarwan, adding that the army was reflecting that broader concern among the wider public.

“But I don’t think it should be taken as a sign that the military is on the verge of stepping in and taking back the reins of government,” he said.

In December, Sisi offered to host a national dialogue when Mursi and the rivals were again at loggerheads and the streets were aflame. But the invitation was swiftly withdrawn before the meeting went ahead, apparently because the army was wary of becoming embroiled again in Egypt’s polarized politics.

Protests initially flared during the second anniversary of the uprising which erupted on January 25, 2011 and toppled Mubarak 18 days later. They were exacerbated in Port Said when residents were angered after a court sentenced to death several people from the city over deadly soccer violence.

Since the 2011 revolt, Islamists who Mubarak spent his 30-year rule suppressing have won two referendums, two parliamentary elections and a presidential vote.

But that legitimacy has been challenged by an opposition that accuses Mursi of imposing a new form of authoritarianism. Mursi’s supporters says protesters want to overthrow Egypt’s first democratically elected leader by undemocratic means.

The army has already been deployed in Port Said and Suez and the government agreed a measure to let soldiers arrest civilians as part of the state of emergency. Sisi reiterated that the army’s role would be to support the police in restoring order.

Mursi’s invitation to rivals to a national dialogue with Islamists on Monday was spurned by the main opposition National Salvation Front coalition, which described it as “cosmetic”.

The presidency said a committee would be formed to look at changes to the constitution, but it ruled out changing the government before the parliamentary election.

Mursi’s pushing through last month of a new constitution which critics see as too Islamic remains a bone of contention.

(Additional reporting by Yasmine Saleh and Omar Fahmy in Cairo, Yusri Mohamed in Ismailia and Abdelrahman Youssef in Alexandria; Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Peter Millership)

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BlackBerry 10 said to be inadequate for helping RIM overcome its ‘demons’

After hitting a seven-year low of $ 6.22 this past summer, shares of Research in Motion (RIMM) have rebounded and climbed more than 100% in the past six months. The company that was previously written off by Wall Street investors has seen a significant boost in recent months as anticipation grows for its BlackBerry 10 operating system. But while a number of analysts have voiced their support for RIM, not everyone is convinced.

[More from BGR: Apple’s 128GB iPad shows the world exactly what Apple does best]

Jan Dawson of Ovum explained, per Benzinga, that RIM continues to “face the twin demons of consumer-driven buying power and a chronic inability to appeal to mature market consumers,” and he believes BlackBerry 10 won’t change this. The analyst said that due to a strong user base of 79 million subscribers and profitability still in the black, the company will remain for years to come. He was quick to note, however, that its glory days are in the past and “it is only a matter of time before it reaches a natural end.”

[More from BGR: Apple unveils new 128GB iPad]

Dawson previously wrote that RIM’s strategy seems to be focused on building the best devices for current BlackBerry users “rather than something that will necessarily win converts from other platforms.”

“The points of differentiation RIM has focused on in teasers for the new platform confirm this – better multitasking, productivity, email, contacts and calendar applications and so on, rather than a better gaming, content consumption or social networking experience,” he said.

Shares of RIM are down more than 6% on Monday, a day before the company is set to unveil its BlackBerry 10 operating system.

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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Justin Timberlake’s new album ’20/20′ is due out in March

(Reuters) – Singer-turned-actor Justin Timberlake has set a March date for his comeback album – his first in more than six years.

RCA Records said on Tuesday “The 20/20 Experience,” the former N’Sync boy band member’s follow-up to 2006′s “FutureSex/LoveSounds” and only his third album ever, would be released on March 19.

In recent years, Timberlake, 31, has focused more on films and business ventures ranging from restaurants to a clothing line, and reviving social networking site Myspace, of which he is part owner. He remarked in a recent video that creating music involved “physical torture” for him.

“Suit & Tie,” the first single off his forthcoming album, fell short of sales expectations for its first week. The song, featuring rapper Jay-Z, sold 314,000 downloads last week. Industry experts had expected about 350,000 downloads.

Top menswear designer Tom Ford collaborated with Timberlake, designing suits worn in the “Suit & Tie” video as well as styling the production and the release’s artwork.

Timberlake will perform his first concert in five years during a private Super Bowl-weekend event in New Orleans on February 2 at an invitation-only concert.

Timberlake posted on Twitter about the forthcoming game, saying among other things: “This is gonna be a GREAT Super Bowl!” and “Oh wait … I don’t have tickets. Dammit! Anybody know anybody?? LOL!”

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Philip Barbara)

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Actor Burt Reynolds released from hospital after flu bout

(Reuters) – American actor Burt Reynolds has left a Florida hospital after a battle with the flu, a representative for the “Smokey and the Bandit” star said on Tuesday.

“Burt has been released from the hospital,” said Reynolds’ manager, Erik Kritzer.

Reynolds, 76, was admitted to an unidentified hospital last week with dehydration and was later placed in intensive care.

Reynolds is best known for his roles in 1970s films such as “Deliverance” and “The Longest Yard.”

He won a Golden Globe award and scored an Oscar nomination for his role as a porn king in the 1997 film “Boogie Nights.”

Reynolds underwent heart bypass surgery in 2010.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Doina Chiacu)

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Microsoft’s Ballmer Does Not Fear Dropbox or an Office-less IPad

When Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer does his bounding these days, it’s often in front of an 82-inch interactive display mounted on the wall of his office. Ballmer gets to poke at the screen—a Perceptive Pixel LCD—like a more energetic version of Wolf Blitzer. The display points to Microsoft’s vision for an interactive future in which documents, spreadsheets, and presentations get animated and people work on projects with more gesticular gusto. (This is a future that plays to Ballmer’s strengths.)

Microsoft (MSFT) took a decently big step toward this future today with the release of Office 2013. As Dina Bass and I pointed out, this is Office for the Cloud, in that you can now save files straight to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s online storage system. Users can also pay for the software on an annual subscription basis and receive updates every three months instead of every three years. In an interview on Jan. 29, Ballmer talked about the release of Office 2013 and where Microsoft is heading when it comes to making people more productive.

What’s the big pitch here?
No. 1, this new Office is really consistent with what I would call a whole new generation of hardware and software. It has a fast, fluid user interface. It works well with touch and supports modern UIs and modern hardware. It is the first version built from the get-go to think about the cloud as its delivery point. It supports multiple devices, and it embraces the notion of social, so you can stay connected and share information with the people you care about. It will be extremely valuable to anybody who cares at all about being productive.

You guys face the huge challenge of trying to advance a product on which about 1 billion people rely. You want to modernize it, but you don’t want to break anything that people need. Partly as a result of this, Microsoft is coming to the cloud late and now going up against a company like Dropbox that already has 100 million users.
Well, you’ve got to remember, 100 million sounds like a pretty small number to me, actually. We’ve got a lot more Office users. And actually if you even want to go to the cloud, we have a lot of Hotmail and SkyDrive users. I’m not beating on Dropbox. They’re a fine little startup and that’s great.

We first did our HTML versions of Office, the so-called Web Apps, two releases ago. I think probably six years. We enhanced them three years ago. And this is just another logical step down the path that we had embraced.

You have 1 billion Office users today. It seems like that number can’t get that much bigger.
That number is going to grow. That’s sort of the miracle of economic development, isn’t it? More and more people enter the class of information workers and knowledge workers. More and more students getting more and more education, taking on more and more jobs where they work with information every day.

You knocked Dropbox as a small startup, but you guys paid $ 1.2 billion last year for Yammer, and it has just 6 million-plus users to Dropbox’s 100 million.
Well, remember, there are two different things here. Yammer is about sort of mid-size companies and above. And what we’re trying to do with [Microsoft's cloud-based service] Office 365, it has an enterprise side and a consumer side. If you want to get numbers like 100 million, it helps to start with consumers as opposed to businesses so you’re doing an apples-to-apples comparison.

In general, I would say a much higher percentage of our unit engagement with our customers comes from the consumer. And a much higher percentage of our revenue participation comes from our business customers. And the Yammer model is really about how do you let people who work in businesses get excited, and then if they do and their businesses think it’s important and valuable, how do they pay for that?

But, on the whole, you’re still satisfied with this deal? Only 20 percent of Yammer’s customers actually pay for the service.
I’m delighted. We have a lot of work to do. When we bought it, we knew we had a lot of work to do. It’s a great team of people, but really getting it bootstrapped, it’s a product that it’s easy to build a natural and viral following, which is fantastic. We’re kind of on track, but on track on what I would call a big, bold voyage.

What do you think about this concept of every document having its own URL? We’re obviously heading in that direction, so give me your vision of the next couple of years and what documents look like.
Yes, I think a lot about—you could say a lot of what’s happened heretofore gets a chance to get remade. When we first built Word, Word was primarily about authoring documents that were going to get printed. Yet the number of documents that get printed as a percentage is much lower than it used to be. And most presentations were essentially about things that you were going to do face to face, and yet many more presentations get done digitally, and get done virtually than ever got done before.

And we’ve done a lot of innovation in core Office that sort of speaks to that trend, and yet I think there’s a lot more coming as you think about, kind of, is every website an Office document? It’s possible. Is every Office document a website? It’s possible. It’s a way to think about it.

How’s that Office for the iPad coming along?
I have nothing to say on that topic. We’re very glad with the product, very happy with the product that we’re putting in market. It makes sense on the devices like the Mac and the PC. We have a product that we think makes a lot of sense. We do have a way for people always to get to Office through the browser, which is very important. And we’ll see what we see in the future.

(This interview was edited for content and clarity.)

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Neglect, errors to blame in Brazil nightclub fire

SANTA MARIA, Brazil (AP) — There was no fire alarm. There were no sprinklers or fire escapes. And when a band member tried to put out a fire that had been started by pyrotechnics, the extinguisher didn’t work.

All the elements were in place for the tragedy at the Kiss nightclub early Sunday. The result was the world’s worst fire of its kind in more than a decade, with 231 people dead and this southern Brazilian city in shock and mourning.

Funerals began on Monday, as reports continued to emerge about the accumulation of neglect and errors at the packed night spot.

Brazilian police said they detained three people in connection with the blaze, while the newspaper O Globo said on its website that a fourth person had surrendered to police. Police Inspector Ranolfo Vieira Junior said the detentions were part of the ongoing police probe and those detained can be held for up to five days.

Vieira declined to identify those detained, but the Brazilian newspaper Zero Hora quotes lawyer Jader Marques saying his client Elissandro Spohr, a co-owner of the club, had been held.

The paper said police also detained two members of the band that was performing when the blaze broke out in this university town of about 260,000 people. The band’s guitarist told Brazilian media he saw flames lick the ceiling after the group’s spark machine was deployed.

More than 100 people remained hospitalized for smoke, local officials said. Paulo Afonso Beltrame, a doctor helping coordinate the emergency response, said he was optimistic that those injured would pull through.

“It’s impossible to predict what will happen, because they are all in a very delicate state, but there’s hope for all of them,” said Beltrame, adding that more than 40 survivors had been sent to neighboring cities for treatment of burns and smoke inhalation. “One of the problems we’re having here is that all these people need to be on respirators and we don’t have enough respirators in the city.”

Funeral services were held for several of the 231 victims, most of them college students 18 to 21 years old. Some of the victims were minors. Most died from smoke inhalation rather than burns.

Initial reports suggested the tragedy was the result of a series of failures. Police have said they think the pyrotechnics ignited flammable sound insulation on the ceiling.

Other witnesses said security guards who didn’t know about the blaze initially blocked people from leaving without paying their bills. Brazilian bars routinely make patrons pay their entire tab at the end of the night before they’re allowed to leave. Many of the dead were found in the club’s two bathrooms, where the blinding smoke caused them to believe the doors were exits.

Rodrigo Martins, a guitarist for the group Gurizada Fandangueira, told Globo TV network in an interview Monday that the flames broke out minutes after the deployment of a pyrotechnic machine that fans out colored sparks, at around 2:30 a.m. local time.

“I felt that something was falling from the roof and I looked up and I saw the fire was spreading, and I shouted ‘Look, it’s catching on fire, man, it’s catching fire,’” Martins said. “Then the drummer tried to throw water on it, and it looked like the fire spread more then. Then the security guards came with an extinguisher, tried to use it, but it didn’t work.”

He added that the club was packed and estimated the crowd at about 1,200-1,300 people.

“I thought I was going to die there. There was nothing I could do, with the fire spreading and people screaming in front.”

Martins confirmed that the group’s accordion player Danilo Jacques, 28, died, while the five other band members made it out safely. Martins said he thought Jacques made it out of the building and later returned to save his accordion.

Martins said the group nearly always used the so-called Sputnik pyrotechnics machine and that it had never before caused any problem, even in smaller venues. An electrical short circuit could also possibly have been to blame for the fire, he suggested.

Still, police were leaning toward the pyrotechnics as the likely cause of the tragedy. Police inspector Antonio Firmino, who’s part of the team investigating Sunday’s blaze, said it appeared the club’s ceiling was covered with an insulating foam made from a combustible material that ignited with the pyrotechnics. He said the number and state of the exits is under investigation but that it appeared that a second door was “inadequate,” as it was small and protected by bars that wouldn’t open.

Television images from Santa Maria showed black smoke billowing out of the Kiss nightclub as shirtless young men who attended the university party joined firefighters using axes and sledgehammers to pound at the hot-pink exterior walls, trying to reach those trapped inside. Teenagers sprinted from the scene after the fire began, desperately seeking help. Others carried injured and burned friends away in their arms. About half of those killed were men, and another half women.

The party was organized by students from several academic departments at the Federal University of Santa Maria. Such organized university parties are common throughout Brazil.

Beltrame said he was told the club had been filled far beyond its capacity, and the crowds and thickness of the smoke made it hard for people to find their way out.

“Large amounts of toxic smoke quickly filled the room, and I would say that at least 90 percent of the victims died of asphyxiation,” Beltrame said. “The toxic smoke made people lose their sense of direction so they were unable to find their way to the exit. At least 50 bodies were found inside a bathroom.”

Beltrame said people who were inside the club and thought they made it out safely have started to turn up at area hospitals with symptoms of smoke inhalation, which he said can take hours or even days to appear. He estimated that around 15 people have sought out help in the past few hours and said some have had to be intubated.

Santa Maria Mayor Cezar Schirmer declared a 30-day mourning period, and Tarso Genro, the governor of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, said officials were investigating the cause of the disaster.

The blaze was the deadliest in Brazil since at least 1961, when a fire that swept through a circus killed 503 people in Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro.

Sunday’s fire also appeared to be the worst at a nightclub since December 2000, when a welding accident reportedly set off a fire at a club in Luoyang, China, killing 309 people.

___

Associated Press writers Marco Sibaja contributed to this report from Brasilia, Brazil, Stan Lehman and Bradley Brooks contributed from Sao Paulo and Jenny Barchfield contributed from Rio de Janeiro.

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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