It was a steep fall for the now-86-year-old former strongman who ruled Guatemala from March 1982 to August 1983, during the height of a brutal civil war that killed 200,000 people, mainly Indians.

A tribunal on Friday ruled that Rios Montt knew about the slaughter of at least 1,771 Ixil Maya in Guatemala's western highlands and didn't stop it, handing down the first genocide conviction ever given to a Latin American strongman in his own country.

The former general was transferred to prison later that evening.

"He is not comfortable, but as a good soldier he is used to this," said Rios Montt's lawyer, Francisco Palomo, who is expected to seek to have the ex-general transferred to a hospital or to have his sentence be served under house arrest.

Matamoros prison, where Rios Montt is now behind bars, is located on a military base in Guatemala City where the former general spent time as a young cadet. It was built to house high-profile inmates who could be unsafe in normal prisons.

Authorities there say he has the right to spend two hours outside his cell each day, but guarded by officers. He has the right to three daily meals, though family members can also bring him food.

Most in Guatemala feel the sentence prison represents a triumph after a long struggle in a country still recovering from a 36-year-civil war that ended with peace accords in 1996.

"It's very valuable to us, totally refreshing. We deserved it," said human rights activist Helen Mack.

Genocidal massacres occurred before and after Rios Montt, "but the bulk of the killing took place under Rios Montt," said Victoria Sanford an anthropologist at Lehman College, City University of New York who has spent about 50 months in Guatemala and participated in excavations in at least eight massacre sites.

The long sentence was a message, activists said, that the previously untouchable and brutal military structures need to be held accountable. Guatemala's maximum sentence is 50 years making the 80 years symbolic.

The three-judge panel also ordered prosecutors to continue investigating to bring all those responsible for abuses to justice. Until now, only low or middle-level officials have been prosecuted for war atrocities.

On Monday, the same court will meet to discuss the compensation for the victims.

Indians and activists applauded and some wept after hearing Friday's ruling. But some are wondering if Rios Montt can successfully appeal.

Adding to their worries is the fact that Guatemala's current president, Otto Perez Molina, still refuses to acknowledge that genocide took place.

"It is painful to hear that some are in a state of denial, but admitting it is the first step for the country to heal," Mack said. "It is not over."

Perez Molina's name was brought up during the trial when a former soldier accused him of ordering executions while serving in the military in the Rios Montt regime.

He called the testimony "lies."

In a late Friday interview, Perez Molina told CNN's Spanish-language channel that there was no genocide, despite the ruling being seen as the country's first official acknowledgement that one took place.

"When I said that Guatemala has seen no genocide, I repeat it now after this ruling," Perez Molina said. "Today's ruling is not final ... the decision will not be final until the moment they run out of appeals."

Defense lawyer Francisco Palomo vowed to appeal the ruling, saying it was unjust.

Rios Montt has insisted he never knew of or ordered massacres while in power.

He began his career in the Guatemalan army in 1946 as a cadet. He seized power in March of 1982 through a military coup, and held it for 18 months until he was overthrown.

Ricardo Mendez Ruiz, a Guatemala businessman and son of a military officer, called the trial biased.

"We have found out the Ixiles' side of the story, not the whole truth," he said. "We want to rise up to show the world that this decision is not hailed by everyone in Guatemala."

In Rios Montt's trial, dozens of Ixil Mayas stood up and testified of atrocities, such as mass rapes and killing of children by the military.

Perez Molina said the army was not at fault.

"It was an armed conflict that was internal. The army did not cause this armed confrontation. The army did not declare war on the places where the Ixiles lived. The guerrilla did it," he said.

Military offensives were part of a brutal, decades-long counterinsurgency against a leftist uprising that brought massacres in the Mayan heartland where the guerrillas were based. A U.N. truth commission said both state forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93 percent of the killings and human rights violations that it documented.

Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu says Guatemala's moment strengthens the world's powerless. Ixil Mayas, she said, can teach other oppressed groups around the world to stand by their rights and not to rest until tyrants are punished by law.

"This could mean that everyone, all indigenous people all over the planet who have been treated with hatred, who have been branded as liars, could hopefully start living in harmony," Menchu said.

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Associated Press writer Olga R. Rodriguez and John Rice contributed to this report from Mexico City.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German prosecutors said on Friday they had arrested two Dutch citizens suspected of taking part in a $45 million global cyber heist unveiled the previous day by U.S. authorities.

A 35-year-old man and a 56-year-old woman were caught on February 19 withdrawing 170,000 euros ($220,500) in Dsseldorf using Bank of Muscat credit cards. In total, $2.4 million dollars was withdrawn in seven German cities, the prosecutors said.

On Thursday, U.S. prosecutors said an international criminal gang had stolen $45 million from two Middle Eastern banks by hacking into credit card processing firms and withdrawing money from cash machines in 27 countries.

The ringleaders of the global operation were believed to be outside the United States but U.S. prosecutors have declined to give details, citing the continuing investigation. Germany is the only other country so far to announce arrests.

A spokesman for the Dsseldorf prosecutor's office said the two Dutch people under arrest had come to Dsseldorf with the purpose of withdrawing money in Germany. The two suspects are accused of computer fraud and faking credit cards.

Germany's banking association, BdB, said it was not aware of any banks in Germany suffering losses as a result of the scheme.

In the complaint on Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department accused eight men of withdrawing $2.4 million from 3,000 bank cash machines in New York in the space of 10 hours in February. The Department said seven of the men have been arrested.

Dominican police on Friday confirmed that the eighth, Alberto Lajud-Pena, allegedly the leader of the New York cell, was killed in the Dominican Republic on April 27.

Lajud-Pena was shot dead in a robbery at a house in the town of San Francisco de Macoris, about 100 miles northeast of Santo Domingo, local police said. Investigators found $100,000 in cash in the house, as well as an M-16 assault rifle, two 9 mm pistols, a revolver, ammunition clips and a telescopic sight. It was not clear if the killing or the money were related to the cyber thefts.

According to the Justice Department, the hackers allegedly increased the available balance and withdrawal limits on prepaid MasterCard debit cards issued by Bank of Muscat of Oman, and National Bank of Ras Al Khaimah PSC (RAKBANK) of the United Arab Emirates.

They then distributed counterfeit debit cards to "cashers" around the world, enabling them to siphon millions of dollars from cash machines in a matter of hours, the complaint said.

National Bank of Ras Al Khaimah (RAKBANK) said on Friday the fraud against it took place at the end of last year and resulted in losses of around $4.7 million for the United Arab Emirates-based lender.

RAKBANK Chief Executive Graham Honeybill said he believed the fraud went wider than lenders in the Gulf region. "We are given to understand that the overall fraud encompassed a number of banks not only in the Middle East but in the USA and other countries," Honeybill said in a statement.

The amount of the potential loss for RAKBANK was 17.4 million UAE dirhams ($4.7 million) and this had been fully provided for before it closed its 2012 accounts, Honeybill said.

"The bank can confirm that none of its customers suffered any financial loss as a result of this fraud," he added.

The incident related to events in December 2012 and involved the bank's service provider in India, he said, without naming the provider or giving any further details. ($1 = 3.6730 UAE dirhams) ($1 = 0.7709 Euro)

(Reporting by Alexander Huebner in Frankfurt, Sabine Siebold in Berlin, Manuel Jiminez in Santo Domingo and Andrew Torchia in Dubai; Editing by Eddie Evans, Leslie Gevirtz and Claudia Parsons)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc on Monday agreed to buy Life Technologies Corp for $13.6 billion in a deal that would make it one of the top two companies in the hot field of genetic testing.

The pact values Life Tech at $76 per share, a 12 percent premium, and is one of the year's biggest corporate takeovers.

It would catapult Thermo, the world's largest maker of scientific and laboratory equipment, to the forefront of the fledgling field of personalized medicine, where research is uncovering the hereditary underpinnings of diseases to better tailor treatments to patients.

"Genetic sequencing is an area that will become increasingly important over the years in terms of specialty diagnostics, and Thermo needs to compete in that market because they have a number of products in that area that ultimately could get displaced by sequencing applications," said Macquarie Capital analyst Jonathan Groberg.

Thermo Chief Executive Marc Casper said advanced genetic testing was an important field going forward, and his company wanted to get into it as an industry leader. Life Tech is considered No. 2 behind Illumina Inc in the race to produce faster and less expensive gene sequencing technology.

"We didn't want to be a more distant participant, and this transaction facilitated us having a stronger position there," Casper said in a telephone interview.

Illumina last year rebuffed a $6.8 billion hostile takeover bid by Swiss drugmaker Roche Holding AG. Shares of Illumina, which will now have to compete with a far larger rival with much greater resources, were down nearly 3 percent.

Interest in buying Illumina could heat up again, given the company's unique position in advanced gene sequencing.

"They've only got one target they can think about," Mizuho Securities analyst Peter Lawson said of potential buyers. "There's a lot of experimental technologies out there, but if you need something that functional, you need either Illumina or Life Tech's Ion Torrent business."

Both companies have dramatically cut down the time and cost of sequencing human DNA, a major boon to researchers and drugmakers developing gene-based diagnostic tests and treatments. Life Tech's Ion Proton System can complete the sequencing process, which recently took several days, in a couple of hours for about $500. The technology has more than 1,000 times the sequencing capacity of Life Tech's original sequencing chip.

AN IMMEDIATE PROFIT BOOST

Thermo said the deal would add 90 cents to $1 to its per-share profit in the first full year, initially sending its shares higher. After jumping nearly 6 percent, the shares gave back those gains and were down almost 1 percent at $78.98 in late afternoon trade on the New York Stock Exchange. Life Tech shares were up 7.4 percent at $73.05, below the offer price.

Analysts estimate the combined company's 2013 revenue at about $17 billion. The acquisition will also enhance Thermo's offerings in the fast growing field of food safety, and its ability to grow in China and other emerging markets.

"The combined company has significant scale in emerging markets and scale makes a huge difference there," said Casper, adding that the deal "will put us in even better position to grow in the fastest growing regions in the world."

The acquisition is by far the biggest deal for Thermo since the company was created in the $12.8 billion merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific International in 2006. It is also far larger than the biggest previous deal on Casper's watch - the $3.5 billion acquisition of Phadia in 2011.

Thermo expects the transaction to close early in 2014, pending U.S. regulatory and shareholder approvals.

Thermo will assume Life Tech's net debt of about $2.2 billion. In the third year following the deal's closing, Thermo said it expects to achieve cost savings of $250 million by consolidating facilities and support functions.

Thermo's products range from basic scientific instruments to advanced mass spectrometry equipment used to determine the chemical structure of molecules. It also sells chemicals, agents and antibodies used in the manufacture and research of biotech medicine - a line that will be complemented by Life Tech's product lines - and in recent years has increased its portfolio of products for testing air and water quality and food safety.

LIFE TECH EXPLORED MANY OPTIONS

Life Tech explored a sale after previous attempts by Chief Executive Gregory Lucier to boost the value of the company's stock and capture more market share from Illumina.

Lucier said the company explored many options during a lengthy strategic review, with the ultimate sale of the company always one of them. "We are very satisfied both with the process and the outcome," he said in a telephone interview.

Lucier oversaw the merger of his former company Invitrogen and Applied Biosystems that created Life Tech.

Life Tech President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Stevenson is expected to play a significant role in the combined company, the companies said.

Thermo has obtained committed bridge financing from JPMorgan and Barclays, which also acted as the company's financial advisers.

Sources familiar with the deal told Reuters that Life Tech chose Thermo over Sigma-Aldrich Corp, a maker of chemicals for research laboratories, and a private equity consortium consisting of Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group, KKR & Co and Temasek Holdings.

Deutsche Bank Securities and Moelis & Co advised Life Tech.

Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz and WilmerHale are legal counsel to Thermo Fisher; Cravath, Swaine and Moore is legal counsel to Life Tech.

(Additional reporting by Esha Dey in Bangalore; Editing by Michele Gershberg)

DUBAI (Reuters) - Islamists charged with a coup plot in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have said they were abused in custody and, in a statement on social media, demanded an independent inquiry.

The trial of 94 Emiratis, which began in March, is seen as an attempt by the U.S.-allied Gulf Arab state to address what it says is a security threat from the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

The 94 were among dozens of people detained in a crackdown on Islamists over the past year amid heightened worries among officials about a spillover of unrest in other Arab countries.

In an open letter to the UAE president and vice-president published on a Twitter account belonging to the Islamist group al-Islah, the defendants said they had been insulted, threatened and in some cases subjected to physical abuse after arrest.

It was not clear how many of the 94, most of whom are in custody, had signed the letter or how it had been communicated outside prison.

Most of the detainees belong to al-Islah, which denies government charges that it is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Attorney-general Saleem Saeed Kubaish said in January that group members had sought to penetrate state institutions, including schools, universities and ministries, according to state news agency WAM.

"ILLEGAL ORGANISATION"

The defendants are accused of "belonging to an illegal, secret organization ... that aims to counter the foundations of this state in order to seize power and of contacting foreign entities and groups to implement this plan," WAM said.

Local media, which have attended the trial proceedings, have said the accused deny the charges. Foreign media have been barred from attending.

The group, which signed the letter dated May 7 as 'Prisoners from the Islah group', said they were "unjustly accused of planning to seize rule".

"We ... have been subjected to solitary confinement for many months in tight cells with no windows and with continuous light morning and night," the letter said.

The group complained of insults and threats and said some had been physically abused or had not been allowed to speak to their lawyers.

"(We call for) ... the formation of an independent committee to investigate these abuses," said the group.

Anwar Gargash, the UAE's state minister for foreign affairs, dismissed the letter as "nothing new".

"Actually it is a repetition of the campaign that the Brotherhood has chosen against the nation," Gargash, who is also state minister for Federal National Council Affairs, said on his Twitter page late on Thursday.

"The statement repeats this tale about torture, which it wants to attach to the nation ... and the statement disregards that the Emirates' measures took place within a constitutional and legal framework," he said.

(Editing by William Maclean and Alistair Lyon)

Thousands gathered Saturday at a Baptist church just north of Dallas to pay tribute to a broadcaster who called some of the most memorable games in NFL history, and also was known for his coverage of Grand Slam tennis tournaments, the Masters golf tournament and other sporting events.

The former NFL kicker died Tuesday at age 82 of cardiac arrest at a Dallas hospital.

With his deep, resonant voice, Summerall called 16 Super Bowls and was the primary television play-by-play voice of the NFL.

Former NFL analyst John Madden said Saturday that his broadcast partner's steady presence made Summerall the voice of the league. Madden, once a fiery NFL coach, was seen by many as the storm alongside Summerall's calm. The two teamed for 22 years covering games for CBS and then more briefly for Fox.

"I got up this morning and I thought, 'Pat, I need you,'" Madden told the mourners. "I couldn't get the tie straightened, a button buttoned. It was the same old thing."

Madden described his first year with Summerall in the broadcast booth in 1981 as riddled with confusion as the former coach struggled with the craft and fumbled with headsets and other equipment. But Summerall "didn't look down on me," he said.

"He didn't tell you he'd pull you through, he just damn did it," Madden said.

After talking at length, a despondent Madden looked upward.

"I know Pat's up there saying, 'brevity, brevity, brevity.' But just one more time I'm going to talk over you," Madden said, before reminding the audience of the deep faith Summerall developed in his later years.

One of Summerall's sons, Kyle, said his father had battled alcoholism for years but with the help of his faith had kicked it aside.

Summerall often shared his testimony with Christian groups and told his story when speaking before other organizations. In his 2006 book, "Summerall: On and Off The Air," he frankly discussed his personal struggles and professional successes.

Saturday's memorial service was powered by a group of church singers, a choir more than 300 strong, and NFL Hall of Fame players including former Cowboys quarterbacks Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman, ex-Dallas running back Emmitt Smith and former Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin. Fullback Daryl Johnston was among other past Dallas players who also attended, along with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and head coach Jason Garrett.

Summerall, who spent his final years in the Dallas area, living in Southlake, was a member of the North Texas Super Bowl host committee for the game played there in February 2011 in the $1.1 billion Cowboys Stadium that opened in 2009.

Another of Summerall's sons, Jay, said his father made time for as many people as he could, no matter their lot in life. The elder Summerall often spent time answering fan mail, sending along autographed photos, and serving as an ambassador for the Betty Ford Center.

Summerall in 2004 received the liver of a 13-year-old junior high football player from Arkansas who died unexpectedly from an aneurysm, and Summerall had remained in touch the teenager's family.

"There was no big shot in him," Jay Summerall said.

Added Madden: "If there ever was a book about good guys, he'd be the star of that book."

Overall, cancer drug prices are skyrocketing. Of the 12 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration for various cancer conditions in 2012, 11 were priced above $100,000 for a year of treatment. Writing in an op-ed in thein October 2012, three physicians at New York Citys Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center noted that the typical new cancer drug coming on the market a decade ago cost $4,500 per month (in 2012 dollars); since 2010 the median price has been around $10,000.

The work makes clearer who does and does not benefit from taking supplements of omega-3 fatty acids, the good oils found in fish such as salmon, tuna and sardines.

Previous studies have suggested that fish oil capsules could lower heart risks in people with heart failure or who have already suffered a heart attack. The American Heart Association recommends them only for people who have high levels of fats called triglycerides in their blood, says the group's president, Dr. Donna Arnett of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Fish oil capsules failed to prevent flare-ups of atrial fibrillation, a common heart rhythm problem, in a large study in 2010.

The new study was led by the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan. It tested 1 gram a day of fish oil versus dummy capsules in 12,513 people throughout Italy. They had not suffered a heart attack but were at high risk of having one because of diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking, obesity or other conditions. Most already were taking cholesterol-lowering statins, aspirin and other medicines to lower their chances of heart problems.

Researchers at first planned to compare the rate of death, heart attacks and strokes in the two groups, but these were less frequent than anticipated. So they started measuring how long it was before people in either group suffered one of these fates or was hospitalized for heart-related reasons. After five years, the rate was the same about 12 percent of each group had one of these problems.

"They're very high-risk people and so the level of other treatments was very high," Arnett said. "When you're being aggressively treated for all of your other risk factors, adding fish oil yielded no additional benefits."

Results are published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. Makers of fish oil supplements helped pay for the study.

Eating fish is known to help protect against heart disease, and the Heart Association recommends it at least twice a week.

"People who choose to eat more fish are more likely to eat heart healthier diets and engage in more physical activity," and studies testing the benefit of supplements may not be able to completely adjust for differences like these, said Alice Lichtenstein, director of the cardiovascular nutrition lab at Tufts University in Boston.

The results do show that people can't rely on a pill to make up for a bad diet, she said.

"It is sort of like breaking a fish oil capsule over a hot fudge sundae and expecting the effect of the calories and saturated fat to go away," she said.

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Online:

Fish oil:http://nccam.nih.gov/health/omega3/introduction.htm

Journal: http://www.nejm.org

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

WADA president John Fahey is an Australian with long political and sporting ties in the country.

An Australian Crime Commission report in February said dozens of players in the Australian Football League and NRL might have used illegal supplements.

Fahey says doping authorities cannot rely on that background for any potential action against the athletes.

But he says he's confident the battle will continue, pointing to the success of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency's lengthy investigations which led to Lance Armstrong's eventual confession that he had doped while winning the Tour de France.

Tsarnaev, the eldest of two sibling suspects in the April 15 attacks that killed three people and injured more than 200, died four days later in a shootout with police. His bullet-riddled body has yet to be claimed, and Dr. Michael Craig Miller claims his brain could hold important clues.

"There are political motives, social motives, cultural motives, but one that gets less attention is the biological basis for all this,"said Miller, a psychiatrist at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where Tsarnaev died and his younger brother, Dzhohkar Tsarnaev, was treated for bullet wounds.

In , Miller argued that neuroscientists should be given the chance to examine Tsarnaev's brain.

"This suspect's brain may teach us a small but important bit about the biology of violence," he wrote.

Miller, a former Watertown, Mass., resident who is also an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said Tsarnaev's boxing career could have triggered chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to concussions. Researchers at Boston University have found evidence of CTE in the brains of , including eight boxers.

"Our local experts should get the chance to study Tamerlan Tsarnaev's brain. And they should study it as closely as our forensic experts have studied a few blocks along Boylston Street," Miller wrote.

CTE is associated with impaired judgment, impulse control problems and aggression, according to. The condition, which shares symptoms with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Lou Gehrig's disease, is also marked by memory loss, confusion and depression.

It's the second time in four months that the brain of an alleged killer has become the topic of such interest and speculation. In January 2013, one month afterkilling 26 people, including 20 children, and then himself, a medical examiner said he found nothing unusual in the 20-year-old's brain.

"It's a fishing expedition," Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Wayne Carver IIof the Lanza brain study.

But Miller described the case of Charles Whitman, who in 1966 killed his mother, his wife, and 17 strangers at the University of Texas in Austin. The day before, he wrote a note requesting an autopsy of his brain an autopsy that revealed a tumor pressing on his amygdala, an almond-shaped brain structure that regulates emotion.

The pathologist ultimately decided that the tumor had no bearing on the case, and that Whitman was "a psychopath of the worst kind," according to Miller's op-ed.

"Even though there's a biological basis for our actions, we're still responsible for our actions," Miller said, adding that Tsarnaev might have "a perfectly a healthy brain" or evidence of disease that fails to fully explain his actions. "But it's in his brain that these ideas were formed. And so it would be interesting to look at that organ, where those ideas began."

NEW YORK (Reuters) - With signs of a slower economy mounting, the near-term outlook for U.S. stocks isn't rosy, but investors may find comfort next week from the world's major central banks.

The Federal Reserve will meet on Tuesday and Wednesday, with the report of weaker-than-expected, first-quarter growth could reinforce expectations the Fed will keep purchasing bonds at a pace of $85 billion a month.

Low interest rates and ample liquidity provided by the Fed and other central banks have buoyed global equity markets because low borrowing costs for businesses and consumers lead to richer corporate profits. Major U.S. stock indexes hit record highs earlier this month.

"As long as it looks like central banks are on your side and on investors' side as far as providing more liquidity, that's going to help improve sentiment," said Brian Jacobsen, chief portfolio strategist at Wells Fargo Funds Management in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.

"I don't think (Fed officials) have got enough data since the last meeting to really justify changing policy. I really don't think they're going to look at slowing the pace of purchases until probably September."

A strong commitment from the Fed to continue its stimulative policy, coupled with corporate earnings that have mostly exceeded lowered forecasts, could help Wall Street extend a rally despite signs that the U.S. economic recovery is losing momentum.

Even though the market ended flat on Friday, its performance for the week was positive. The Standard & Poor's 500 rose 1.7 percent, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 1.1 percent and Nasdaq Composite Index rose 2.3 percent

The economy expanded at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first quarter, the Commerce Department said on Friday, short of expectations of 3.0 percent and setting a cautious tone.

A heavy slate of key economic indicators will be released next week, including personal income and spending, the Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing and services activity indexes, pending home sales, the Chicago purchasing managers' index and consumer confidence from the Conference Board.

The highlight of the week will come on Friday when the Labor Department releases its employment report for April.

Economists polled by Reuters are looking for job growth of 150,000, up from 88,000 in March. The unemployment rate is likely to remain unchanged at 7.6 percent.

"Today's (GDP) data suggests maybe the momentum is much weaker that what was priced in," said John Praveen, chief investment strategist at Prudential International Investments Advisers in Newark, New Jersey.

"We have had a very strong rally, so people are looking for any trigger for profit-taking," he said. Praveen said the market could see a 5 percent pullback in the months ahead should upcoming data prove weaker than expected.

Stocks have had a wild run over the past week after hackers attacked the website of stock broker Charles Schwab Corpand a false report on the Associated Press's Twitter account about explosions at the White House sent the market into a brief tailspin.

On Thursday, a software glitch shut down the Chicago Board Options Exchange for half the day, preventing trading in options on two of the stock market's most closely watched indexes and delivering the latest blow to confidence in the way U.S. financial markets operate.

EUROPE, EARNINGS

The European Central Bank meets on Thursday and investors will watch to see if it delivers an interest-rate cut as the euro zone economy deteriorates further. Further monetary easing would encourage investors to buy riskier assets and boost stocks.

"The market has been rallying on the fact the ECB might actually start to do something; if the U.S. market reacts in the same way, that might get the market rallying," said John Canally, investment strategist and economist for LPL Financial in Boston.

With earnings reporting now half over, investors will look to see if companies can continue to exceed profit estimates despite lackluster revenue.

According to Thomson Reuters data, of the 271 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings for the first quarter, 69 percent have beaten analysts' expectations, above the 63 percent average since 1994.

However, only 43.9 percent have topped analysts' revenue forecasts, well below the 62 percent average since 2002 and the 52 percent rate for the last four quarters.

Analysts now see earnings growth of 3.8 percent this quarter, up from expectations of 1.5 percent on April 1.

Next week Dow components reporting results will be Pfizerand Merck . Other companies scheduled to report include Loews Corp , Aetna Inc , Chesapeake Energy , Visa Inc , Viacom Incand Kraft Foods Group Inc .

David Joy, chief market strategist at Ameriprise Financial, based in Boston where he helps oversee about $700 billion in assets, said the lackluster figures suggest the second quarter may not be as robust as hoped.

"Right now, markets are going through an adjustment process, trying to figure out just how robust the economy is here and overseas as well," Joy said. "You have investors sort of biding their time. They are invested, but not with complete conviction."

(Reporting By Wanfeng Zhou; Editing by Kenneth Barry)