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Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial Network, said the combination of strong consumer spending, rising business investment, and good economic data is likely to lead to another quarter of strong earnings growth.
The S&P 500 index rose 0.2 percent, to 2,815.62. The Dow Jones industrial average added 0.3 percent, to 25,199.29. The Nasdaq Composite declined less than one point to 7,854.44. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks gained 0.3 percent, to 1,691.87.
Stocks have been rising this month, even as trade tensions with China continue to mount, as investors anticipate solid second-quarter earnings reports from US companies. The S&P 500 is up 3.6 percent so far in July.
United Continental surpassed Wall Street projections and said strong demand is resulting in higher prices this summer travel season. Its stock surged 8.8 percent.
CSX said its profit climbed 72 percent in its latest quarter as it kept cutting costs and improving operations. The results were stronger than analysts expected; the stock added 7.1 percent.
Maintenance supply company W.W. Grainger made the biggest gain on the S&P 500 after it blew past analysts’ estimates in the latest quarter. It posted strong growth in the United States, with more business with both large and medium-size customers. And it raised its forecasts for the year. The stock jumped 11.2 percent.
Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate that owns Geico and other insurance companies, jumped as investors hoped it would give some of that money back to shareholders by buying back its own stock. The company had $108 billion in cash and short-term investments as of March.
Berkshire’s Class B shares jumped 5.3 percent in heavy trading. Other financial companies including Morgan Stanley, M&T Bank, and Northern Trust climbed after their quarterly reports.
Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell wrapped up his testimony to Congress about economic and monetary policy. He said the trade war with China might make inflation speed up, but continued to express a very positive view of the state of the economy overall.
McMillan, of Commonwealth, said Powell’s comments were so upbeat that he wonders if the Fed is really reckoning with the risks posed by tariffs and higher interest rates. ‘‘I’ve never seen a central bank look quite that confident, and frankly it makes me nervous,’’ he said.
While investors are focusing more on company earnings than trade policy at the moment, US uranium mining companies rose after the Commerce Department started an investigation into the impact of uranium imports on US national security. That could result in tariffs, similar to the investigation into steel and aluminum imports that resulted in big taxes on steel from the European Union, Canada, Mexico, and Japan.
Energy Fuels, one of the companies that requested the investigation, rose 3.9 percent. Uranium Energy added 1.3 percent.
The European Union fined Google a record $5 billion Wednesday for using the market dominance of its Android mobile operating system to force handset makers to install Google apps, reducing choice for consumers. The company said it plans to appeal. Shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, took a small loss.
Bond prices slipped. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 2.88 percent from 2.86 percent. That sent big-dividend stocks like household goods companies and utilities lower.
Benchmark US crude recovered from an early loss and rose 1 percent to $68.76 a barrel in New York. Brent crude, used to price international oils, added 1 percent to $72.90 in London. US crude has tumbled 8 percent in July but is still up 42 percent over the last 12 months.
The legal community, including lawyers and judges who visited and called him in recent weeks, shared her sentiment.
“He was the Abraham Lincoln of the federal bench,” said criminal defense attorney Howard Srebnick, who as a law clerk for another U.S. district judge in 1990 would take advantage of Hoeveler’s “open-door” policy to visit with him.
Long before he put down stakes and built a 60-year legal career in Miami, “Bill” Hoeveler seemed destined to make a mark.
Hoeveler was born in Paris to a father who served with the Marines in World War I and a mother who sang French operas. Raised outside of Philadelphia, he won a basketball scholarship to Temple University, then joined the Marines himself during World War II, before returning to finish college at Bucknell University.
At Harvard Law School, Hoeveler was elected co-president of the class of 1950, which included a future U.S. attorney general, Richard G. Kleindienst, two U.S. senators, John Chafee of Rhode Island and Ted Stevens of Alaska, and the chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, Samuel Dash.
After Harvard, he moved with his new wife, Mary Griffin Smith, to Miami, where her father was a partner in a law firm that Hoeveler would join. His specialty became defending professionals — attorneys, accountants and architects — accused of malpractice. He won over witnesses and juries alike, the late trial attorney J.B. Spence once said.
Hoeveler even drew praise from the most infamous defendant ever to appear in his courtroom, the deposed Panamanian General Manuel Noriega, who was captured by U.S. forces that invaded Panama in late 1989, leading to a nationally covered Miami trial that was “the mother of all battles in the war on drugs,” as one prosecutor later described it.
After sentencing him to 40 years — punishment that would later be reduced to 30 years — Hoeveler declared Noriega a prisoner of war under the Geneva Conventions who should be accorded special privileges. Among them: an apartment-like cell with phone, color TV and exercise bike at the low-security Southwest Miami-Dade federal prison.
Hoeveler even wrote a 2004 letter to the U.S. Parole Commission recommending his release. He cited Noriega’s “advancing age” and his “tempered” view toward the ex-strongman. That contrasted sharply with the Bush administration’s stand to keep him behind bars, which delayed his parole for three more years.
When he completed his federal sentence, France sought Noriega’s extradition on money laundering charges stemming from his Miami case. But Noriega and his lawyers argued he should be returned to Panama, where he was wanted on murder charges, because he was a prisoner of war. His legal team said the U.S. was violating the Geneva Conventions by not sending him back to Panama. But Hoeveler and other federal judges rejected the claim, with the U.S. Supreme Court refusing to hear his final appeal in 2010.
Noriega was tried and convicted in France but eventually extradited to Panama, where he died at age 83 in May.
The fact that Hoeveler played such a prominent role in deciding Noriega’s fate seemed miraculous, for the judge had to undergo coronary bypass surgery midway through the Panamanian general’s trial in late 1991. Rather than declare a mistrial or turn the case over to another judge, Hoeveler had the operation and resumed the trial six weeks later.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michel “Pat” Sullivan, one of three prosecutors in the Noriega case, said he marveled over Hoeveler’s endurance under such extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
“Most judges would have declared a mistrial and it would have been entirely justified under the circumstances,” said Sullivan, who has worked in the U.S. attorney’s office for 46 years. “But Judge Hoeveler was dedicated to administering the law. He wanted to get the job done.
In early 2000, however, Hoeveler suffered such a severe stroke during another colossal legal dispute — the immigration case of Cuban boy Elián Gonzáez — that he could not continue as the presiding judge. The six-year-old Cuban boy lost his mother on a tragic boat trip from Cuba to Florida, but was rescued off shore and united with his Miami relatives. The relatives sued the U.S. government after immigration authorities said they didn’t have the right to seek asylum on the boy’s behalf, concluding that power belonged to his father, who wanted him returned to Cuba.
Despite his health problems, Hoeveler returned to the bench, handling not only Noriega’s extradition case to France but many others.
“I have seen him journey back from a stroke because he believed in what he did in serving the public,” Tinsman wrote in 2011, when Hoeveler won the Federal Bar Association’s Judicial Excellence award, named after the late U.S. District Judge Edward B. “Ned” Davis. “He did not just sit down and not come back. I have seen him journey back from the loss of his wife [Griff] only a couple of months after suffering his stroke.
After the death of his first wife, Hoeveler married a second time, to Chrstine Davies, who cared for him after his stroke.
Hoeveler even rebounded after a professional setback in the federal government’s environmental case against the state, which resulted in a consent order forcing Florida to clean up the Everglades at cost of billions of dollars.
After presiding over the case for 15 years, the judge was removed because he publicly criticized the Florida Legislature and Gov. Jeb Bush in 2003 for backing a bill pushed by Florida’s powerful sugar industry that extended the deadline for restoring the ravaged River of Grass.
He also ordered hearings to determine whether the new legislation changed the terms of the 1992 Everglades cleanup settlement between the state and federal governments. He called for the appointment of a special master to help scrutinize progress on the daunting restoration project.
After he issued the order, Hoeveler explained his position in separate interviews with The Herald, The Sun-Sentinel and The St. Petersburg Times.
But by putting the Legislature, the governor and Florida’s sugar industry on notice that he was disturbed by the new proposal, Hoeveler got himself into an ethical bind.
U.S. Sugar Corp. claimed he was partial and sought to have him removed from the Everglades case after the judge labeled the legislation “clearly defective” in his court order, writing that he was “dismayed by the process that led to its passage.” He noted 40 sugar industry lobbyists pushed it through the Legislature.
In September 2003, Chief U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch removed Hoeveler for speaking so critically in court and to newspaper reporters about amendments to the Everglades Forever Act. To Zloch, those comments appeared to cross an ethical line about remaining impartial.
Hoeveler said he found solace in his decision to speak out in the movie “Philadelphia.” Actor Tom Hanks, playing an attorney dying of AIDS who sues his law firm for firing him, testifies he became a lawyer to do some justice. Hoeveler said he, too, could identify with that principle.
In the Herald interview, Hoeveler said he still believed the Legislature and governor infringed on a binding legal blueprint to clean up the Everglades by 2006 by extending the deadline a decade and lowering phosphorous-pollution standards from farms around Lake Okeechobee.
The removal of Hoeveler from the Everglades cleanup case for appearing biased seemed like the greatest irony, for he had long been viewed in legal circles as one of Florida’s fairest federal judges. The jurist was always top rated as “exceptionally qualified” by the vast majority of lawyers surveyed in the annual Dade County Bar Association’s polls of lawyers.
In 2002, the University of Miami School of Law’s Center for Ethics and Public Service established an annual award in Hoeveler’s name for his dedication to both of those areas. He was the first recipient.
The center’s director, UM law professor Anthony Alfieri, said Hoeveler inspired and helped launch the center’s Historic Black Church Program, an anti-poverty and civil rights consortium of 60 inner-city churches in South Florida. “Judge Hoeveler’s commitment to law, ecumenical faith and equal access to justice carved the path for the center’s decade-long program,” Alfieri said.
Veteran South Florida attorney Jon May, who served on Noriega’s defense team, said he appeared before Hoeveler many times in drug-trafficking cases and never questioned his impartiality.
“Judge Hoeveler may not rule in your favor, but you always knew he was listening to what you had to say,” May said. “You also knew he would treat everyone with respect and not try to embarrass anyone. He would let you try your case so you always knew you were not likely to have any issues on appeal.
U.S. District Judge William M. Hoeveler is survived by his four children, William H. Hoeveler (Hank), Elizabeth H. Davis (Betsy), Margaret Y. Hoeveler and Mary G. Hoeveler; sister, Yvonne H. Rayher; grandson, Milo Hoeveler-Castano; current wife, Christine Davies Hoeveler; and stepchildren, Stephen C. Davies and Susan C. Davies. The judge is also survived by Hank Hoeveler’s husband, Isak Tykesson.
Memorial services will be announced at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family suggested that donations be made to the Nature Conservancy or the Humane Society of Miami. Judge Hoeveler always had a fondness for dogs.
Voting is now open for the 2011 CNET Tech Car of the Year. Choose among the 2012 Audi A7, 2011 BMW X3, 2011 Chevy Volt, 2012 Infiniti M Hybrid, and 2012 Mercedes-Benz CLS550.
As 2011 rolls to a close, we look back at the cars we've reviewed over the last year to see which one should earn our Tech Car of the Year Award.
This year's nominees come largely from the luxury market, where automakers are pushing their best cabin tech and most-advanced driver assistance features. Connected features are also starting to appear, with online search available in navigation systems. All of these vehicles use advanced engines, but the Volt pushes the boundaries the furthest.
Please vote for the car you think should be the 2011 Tech Car of the Year, and discuss it in the comments. The Car Tech staff jury will place its own votes, voting closes on December 19, and we will announce the winner on December 21.
Audi has been unstoppable lately, pushing the tech envelope in the cabin and under the hood. The A7 is the first car we've seen with a dedicated Internet connection, powering such features as Google Earth navigation. Audi also brings in a first-rate audio system and a very innovative cabin tech interface.
Embracing fuel efficiency, Audi puts a direct-injection 3-liter V-6 under the hood, using a supercharger to pump up the power. The latest version of all-wheel drive, with torque vectoring, ensures superior handling. The A7 is a near-perfect tech car.
At long last, BMW updates its X3 SUV, and it benefits from all of the company's latest technology. Like the Audi A7, the BMW X3 gets connected features, such as Google search integrated with the navigation system. BMW gives the X3 a wide, 8.8-inch LCD, making it easy to display a lot of information.
The X3's direct-injection engine uses BMW's innovative Double-VANOS fuel delivery system and an eight-speed automatic transmission to help fuel economy. A twin-scroll turbocharger ups the power without causing turbo lag. The X3 is an excellent showcase for efficiency and connected features.
The Chevy Volt came in too late to be included in last year's Tech Car of the Year contest, but it comes on strong this year with the most innovative power train of our 2011 nominees. Driving the front wheels with an electric motor, the Volt relies on a battery pack with stored electricity and a gas engine acting as an electricity generator.
But the Volt's innovations don't stop at the drivetrain. Chevy fitted the cabin with plenty of technology as well. Through an OnStar app, owners can set charging times remotely. The center stack uses touch buttons, which seems like something from a concept car. The Volt may have faced a year of criticism, but most owners seem quite happy.
For a long time, Nissan promised to launch its own hybrid system instead of merely licensing Toyota's. It is finally here, deployed in the Infiniti M, turning this big sedan into a powerful and economical driver. This next-generation hybrid system uses a lithium ion battery pack to turn waste energy into electricity.
Infiniti has also been very strong on driver assistance features, such as crash prevention technology that automatically hits the brakes in the M and keeps it from drifting across lane lines. With all this tech, the Infiniti M Hybrid should remain dent-free.
Mercedes-Benz hit a solid balance between an efficient power train, cabin tech, and driver assistance features in the sleek CLS550. The navigation system shows beautifully rendered 3D maps, while the Harman Kardon system delivers excellent fidelity. The Mbrace smartphone app gives drivers remote-control features and concierge service.
A new engine lowers displacement from the older V-8, using direct injection and twin turbochargers to be more efficient and make up for any lost power. Driver assistance features include adaptive cruise control, which can bring the car to a dead stop, and blind-spot detection.
Beyoncé tickets are valued roughly the same as a bar of gold, right? Right.
So on June 5, when Lowkeyshia Cole and her brother, Shannon gifted their mother surprise tickets to a Beyoncé concert for her birthday, you can imagine how excited she was.
Actually, you don't have to imagine it, because her kids recorded her genuine excitement/disbelief/thankfulness for us to see.
Cole's mother — who originally thought the family was en route to a party — learned she was actually going to Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to get her Formation World Tour on.
In case that wasn't amazing enough, Cole and her brother also managed to chronicle the night via social media and record their mom's initial reaction to the surprise.
Lowkeyshia also posted a video of Bey welcoming the audience to the concert, and from the looks of it it seems like their seats were very close to the stage. WAY better than a party.
Joba Chamberlain's general manager has already stated in an extremely succinct manner that Chamberlain is not so fit and that he is no lock to make the roster. It's a bad case of timing for the big righty. Although the Yankees once had Chamberlain targeted for a more prominent role than a seventh- or eighth-inning guy, he seemed to rediscover his groove in the job last year.
To be fair, Chamberlain has been moved from role to role more than he would like. Quietly, he got past it to become a more steady option out of the bullpen for manager Joe Girardi in 2010. He was 2-0 with a 2.88 ERA and a 1.078 WHIP in the second half of the season, striking out 37 and walking only eight in 34 1/3 innings.
With the acquisition of Rafael Soriano and the seeming stability of Chamberlain, the Yankees figured to have a fantastic back end to their bullpen. If the Kevin Youkilis' favorite pitcher is indeed out of shape, that could be an issue.
Media captionKate McGeown meets some of the people proposing to set up "Dwarf City"
People of small stature in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, have ambitions to build a new community - of small houses - on a greenfield site. It's an unusual idea, but they are completely serious and determined to succeed.
Inspired by the books of JRR Tolkien, the Hobbit House is one of Manila's best-known bars. There are illustrations from the Lord of the Rings on the wall, and you enter through a round wooden door, just as if you were arriving at Bilbo Baggins' house.
But the illusion doesn't stop there - the waiters are all under 4ft (1.2m) tall.
"Hobbit House is very unique - we only recruit little people," says the proud manager, Pidoy Fetalino, 3ft 6in tall, who has been working at the bar for more than 30 years.
While some might question how politically correct it is, the reality is that a job at the Hobbit House is undoubtedly one of the best the staff can get.
The Philippines doesn't provide much, if any, state support, and many jobs have height restrictions, making a market which is already competitive due to high unemployment even tougher.
The waiters say that most of their friends, if they have jobs at all, work in the entertainment industry - as boxers, bit-part actors or even as human cannonballs.
One said his friend was paid half what other employees were paid just because he was short.
Unsurprisingly, the little people of Manila want more than this - and they are busy making plans.
They have formed a group called the Little People's Association of the Philippines, which meets most Saturday mornings in a ramshackle workshop at the back of a flat owned by the president, Perry Berry.
The most important item on their agenda is a radical proposal - for the entire group to move out of Manila and set up their own community.
A wealthy benefactor has donated a 6,000-square-metre (1.5-acre) piece of uncultivated land near the town of Montalban, and there they want to create a place called "Dwarf City".
Mr Berry has a clear vision of what he wants this community to look like.
"Wow, if you can imagine it," he says. "We're creating a housing project designed for small people and we have to create something unique. We're going to build houses like big mushrooms and big shoes."
Their idea is to construct buildings tailored to their size, to represent certain themes, and they hope they will be able to earn at least part of their income through tourism.
The day after the association meeting, armed with a rudimentary drawing of what this new community might look like, Mr Berry and other association members take me to visit the site.
They try to go at least twice a month - piling into a hired van and taking a picnic along too.
At the moment, their potential new home is just grass and trees but Mr Berry says it is important for them to get used to the idea of living there, and get to know the locals.
As we climb up to the site, Mr Berry becomes increasingly animated about the future.
"We want a flea market here, and a big chapel over there," he says, pointing his hand into the distance. "We will each design our own home… it's a very fantastic and wonderful place."
His friends are equally enthusiastic. Dheng Bermudez, who is proudly wearing her Small is Beautiful T-shirt, says she wants the community to show that "we're more than people to make fun of".
They talk of living without discrimination, and being able to let their children run around in the fresh air.
"As small people, sometimes other people tease us or make fun of us. Sometimes it hurts, you know," Mr Berry adds.
"It's much better if we're together, because it's just like a family."
The little people of Manila don't want to confine this new "Dwarf City" just to the 47 families who are current members of the association - they envisage a much bigger settlement.
"I believe that a lot of small people in other provinces have an inferiority complex, and don't want to come out," says Mr Berry.
"But if the existence of this community is well-known, I'm pretty sure they will come and join us. So this community will become bigger and bigger."

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