Wall Street ends lower on renewed euro zone fears

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks declined on Thursday, taking a step back from their recent advance, prompted by comments by the ECB president on the euro and Europe's outlook.

The euro currency dropped against the safe-haven dollar and yen, spurring a retreat from risky assets such as stocks, after European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said the exchange rate was important to growth and price stability. Investors took that as a sign the bank is concerned about the euro's advance and its effect on the region's economy.

Growth sectors were among the weakest performers on the S&P 500: the S&P 500 materials index <.splrcma> was down 0.6 percent while the S&P energy index <.spny> was down 0.5 percent. Housing stocks also declined, with a housing sector index <.hgx> off 1.4 percent.

Despite the day's decline and weakness earlier this week, the stock market has been in an almost uninterrupted up trend for most of the year, with the S&P 500 up 5.8 percent so far for 2013.

Many analysts say some weakness at this point is no surprise.

"Given the amount the market moved in January, having a little bit of a pullback and some consolidation where the market goes sideways for a little while, we think would be a healthy sign," said Eric Marshall, director of research at Hodges Capital Management in Dallas.

Top U.S. retailers reported strong January sales after offering compelling merchandise that drew in shoppers facing a hit to their take-home pay from higher payroll taxes.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was down 42.47 points, or 0.30 percent, at 13,944.05. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was down 2.73 points, or 0.18 percent, at 1,509.39. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was down 3.34 points, or 0.11 percent, at 3,165.13.

Shares of Apple helped to limit losses on the Nasdaq, the stock ending up 3 percent at $468.22. Fund manager David Einhorn's Greenlight Capital said it has sued Apple Inc and said the company needs to do more to unlock value for shareholders.

Though the earnings season is winding down, results continue to boost growth estimates for the fourth quarter. According to Thomson Reuters data through Thursday morning, of 317 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings, 69 percent have exceeded analysts' expectations, above a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters.

Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies rose 5 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.

Akamai Technologies Inc lost 15.2 percent to $35.26 as the worst percentage performer on the S&P 500 after the Internet content delivery company forecast current-quarter revenue below analysts' expectations.

Among retailers, Macy's Inc rose 2 percent to $40.27 after reporting January same store sales rose 11.7 percent.

But Ann Inc dropped 8 percent to $30.20 after forecasting fourth-quarter sales below analysts' expectations.

Economic data was mixed. Initial jobless claims dipped last week, with the four-week moving average falling to its lowest level since March 2008, signaling the economy continues to recover slowly.

A separate report said fourth-quarter productivity registered its biggest drop in nearly two years, while unit labor costs jumped 4.5 percent, more than economists expected.

Roughly 6.6 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the NYSE MKT, compared with the 2012 average daily closing volume of about 6.45 billion.

Decliners outpaced advancers on the NYSE by nearly 4 to 3 and on the Nasdaq by about 5 to 3.

(Additional reporting by Angela Moon; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)

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Senators Press Brennan About C.I.A.’s Drone Strikes

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Protesters briefly disrupted the confirmation hearing for John O. Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to be C.I.A. director, on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

WASHINGTON — Engaging a high-ranking Obama administration official for the first time in an extensive public discussion of the use of drones for targeted killing, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday pressed John O. Brennan, President Obama’s nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, about the secrecy of the strikes, their legal basis and the reported backlash they have produced in Pakistan and Yemen.

Adding a new element to the roiling debate, the committee’s chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said she would review proposals to create a court to oversee targeted killings. She gave no details but said such a court would be analogous to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees eavesdropping on American soil.

Mr. Brennan was noncommittal, noting that lethal operations are generally the sole responsibility of the executive branch. But he said the administration had “wrestled with” the concept of such a court and called the idea “certainly worthy of discussion.”

On the same day two other administration officials, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that a plan they had supported to arm Syrian rebels had been rejected by the White House, the notably aggressive questioning Mr. Brennan received seemed to underscore the increased scrutiny Mr. Obama’s national security policies are facing as he begins his second term.

Mr. Brennan, 57, a 25-year C.I.A. veteran who has spent the last four years as the administration’s senior counterterrorism official, also faced intense questioning about whether he was responsible for leaks of classified information, and whether he had been candid about his involvement in the agency’s interrogation program under President George W. Bush.

But the senators repeatedly returned to the targeted killings Mr. Brennan has helped direct over the last four years.

The hearing came three days after the leak of a Justice Department document explaining the legal rationale for the killing of American citizens who join Al Qaeda. On the eve of Mr. Brennan’s hearing, the White House gave in to pressure from lawmakers and said the Senate and House Intelligence Committees could see the full classified legal memorandum justifying the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who joined Al Qaeda in Yemen and was killed in Yemen in a C.I.A. drone strike in September 2011.

Ms. Feinstein expressed frustration at the committee’s difficulty in getting information about the targeted killing program. She said that while senators were allowed to view two legal memos, they were still seeking eight others, and committee staff members were still prohibited from reading the classified documents.

In his opening statement, Mr. Brennan acknowledged “widespread debate” about the administration’s counterterrorism operations but strongly defended them, saying the United States remained “at war with Al Qaeda.”

He said later that when C.I.A. drone strikes accidentally kill civilians, those mistakes should be admitted. “We need to acknowledge it publicly,” he said. “In the interests of transparency, I believe the United States government should acknowledge it.”

But senators repeatedly complained that there was too little transparency about the targeted killing program, sometimes producing misleading information in the news media.

“I think that this has gone about as far as it can go as a covert activity,” Ms. Feinstein told reporters after the hearing.

But she defended the agency’s record on the strikes, saying the number of civilians killed each year has been “in the single digits.” A reporter pointed out that she has accused the agency of lying for years about its interrogation program and asked how she could have such confidence in its claims on casualties in the drone program. “I am confident of those figures until I am not confident of them,” she said.

The hearing made clear that even members of the Intelligence Committee, created in the 1970s to be the public’s eyes on secret government programs, are in the dark about many of their details.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, told Mr. Brennan that the committee had never been given the full list of countries in which the C.I.A. has carried out lethal operations. Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, urged Mr. Brennan — if he is confirmed, as appeared likely Thursday night — to be more candid with the panel than his predecessors. “There’s no one else watching,” he said.

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

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Sean Eldridge, Husband of Facebook Co-Founder, Running for Congress

Sean Eldridge, an investor and the husband of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, has filed paperwork establishing a campaign for New York’s 19th Congressional District seat in 2014.

Eldridge, who is a frequent donor to Democratic candidates and committees, has publicly backed President Barack Obama and hopes to unseat two-term Republican Chris Gibson. This November, Gibson won reelection by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent. However, the district also favored Obama.

Eldridge is a politically active Democrat and the CEO and founder of Hudson River Ventures LLC, a small business investment fund located in New York’s Hudson Valley. He also serves as an adviser to Freedom to Marry, a campaign to win marriage equality nationwide.

The 26-year-old is married to entrepreneur Chris Hughes, who is both a co-founder of Facebook and the publisher of The New Republic magazine.

Bloomberg.com reported that Eldridge’s statement of organization, which created “Sean Eldridge for Congress,” accompanied by a statement of candidacy, was processed by the Federal Election Commission last week.

Born in 1986, if Eldridge wins the congressional seat, he’ll be just 27, making him one of the youngest members of Congress in 2014.

Rep. Aaron Shock, a Republican from Illinois, was elected to his congressional seat when he was 27. He is now the youngest representative, at age 31.

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Leeza Gibbons: I Count My Blessings - Not My Stretch Marks

By Mike Fleeman

02/06/2013 at 07:30 PM EST

When TV personality Leeza Gibbons married Steven Fenton in 2011, she joked that she was finally embracing "my inner cougar" – on their first date he was 38 and she was 51.

Now approaching their two-year anniversary in April, Gibbons has given a little more thought to the dynamics of their relationship and concludes that "the term cougar has so much energy around it that doesn't really fit."

"We laugh about it all the time," Gibbons, now 55, tells PEOPLE. (Fenton is a longtime talent manager and former president of the Board of Education in Beverly Hills.) "I always joke that emotionally and with regard to maturity, he's much older than I am."

The theme of starting over – "rebooting your life," as Gibbons calls it – runs through her new book, Take 2: Your Guide to Creating Happy Endings and New Beginnings.

She's had much to draw on from her own life: She's been divorced (this is her fourth marriage), had high-profile jobs at Entertainment Tonight, Extra and Leeza, and seen her kids grow older. She became an activist for family caregivers as her mother and grandmother both had Alzheimer's.

She writes about navigating change, basking in one's past, handling disappointments, "test-driving our dreams," learning how to say no and embracing the "Goddess Quotient" – how to be "a good girlfriend to yourself."

As for her own big new beginning, Gibbons remembers how just a couple of years ago she privately worried about the age difference.

"I did play out all those fears," she says. "I went through the list: I've got kids, there's a lot in my life that is big and complicated, he should be starting a young family. I went through all of it. I decided that I needed to count my blessings and not my stretch marks. I recognized that my work in the relationship was not to decide what he felt about it."

In the end, she says, "It was up to Steven to decide how to receive. He didn't need me to protect him from our age difference. Now two years later, there's so much respect and so much fun and so much faith in each other. We truly are our biggest supporters. That's really love"

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New whooping cough strain in US raises questions

NEW YORK (AP) — Researchers have discovered the first U.S. cases of whooping cough caused by a germ that may be resistant to the vaccine.

Health officials are looking into whether cases like the dozen found in Philadelphia might be one reason the nation just had its worst year for whooping cough in six decades. The new bug was previously reported in Japan, France and Finland.

"It's quite intriguing. It's the first time we've seen this here," said Dr. Tom Clark of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The U.S. cases are detailed in a brief report from the CDC and other researchers in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Whooping cough is a highly contagious disease that can strike people of any age but is most dangerous to children. It was once common, but cases in the U.S. dropped after a vaccine was introduced in the 1940s.

An increase in illnesses in recent years has been partially blamed on a version of the vaccine used since the 1990s, which doesn't last as long. Last year, the CDC received reports of 41,880 cases, according to a preliminary count. That included 18 deaths.

The new study suggests that the new whooping cough strain may be why more people have been getting sick. Experts don't think it's more deadly, but the shots may not work as well against it.

In a small, soon-to-be published study, French researchers found the vaccine seemed to lower the risk of severe disease from the new strain in infants. But it didn't prevent illness completely, said Nicole Guiso of the Pasteur Institute, one of the researchers.

The new germ was first identified in France, where more extensive testing is routinely done for whooping cough. The strain now accounts for 14 percent of cases there, Guiso said.

In the United States, doctors usually rely on a rapid test to help make a diagnosis. The extra lab work isn't done often enough to give health officials a good idea how common the new type is here, experts said.

"We definitely need some more information about this before we can draw any conclusions," the CDC's Clark said.

The U.S. cases were found in the past two years in patients at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in Philadelphia. One of the study's researchers works for a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, which makes a version of the old whooping cough vaccine that is sold in other countries.

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JournaL: http://www.nejm.org

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Wall Street ends flat as investors pull back

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks ended mostly flat on Wednesday, taking another pause in the recent rally that has driven the S&P 500 to five-year highs, as transportation and technology shares lost ground.

Transportation stocks were among the worst performers. Shares of CH Robinson Worldwide fell 9.7 percent to $60.50 and the stock was the biggest percentage loser on the Nasdaq 100 after the freight transport company posted a lower-than-expected adjusted quarterly profit.

Without a strong catalyst, the market could struggle to continue its rally, analysts said. The benchmark S&P 500 index has advanced 6 percent this year, reaching its highest since December 2007, while the Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> has risen above 14,000 recently.

Bank of America-Merrill Lynch analysts see a near-term pullback likely, based on strong equity inflows at the start of the year, said Dan Suzuki, the bank's equity strategist in New York.

"The fact that we've gone since November without seeing one, from a timing perspective, it wouldn't be a surprise to see one now."

With fourth-quarter earnings nearing an end, the market will be losing one of its big supports, said Frank Lesh, a futures analyst and broker at FuturePath Trading LLC in Chicago. "That's one thing that's been holding the market up," he said.

Shares of Time Warner Inc jumped 4.1 percent to $52.01 after reporting higher fourth-quarter profit that beat Wall Street estimates, as growth in its cable networks offset declines in film, TV entertainment and publishing units.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 7.22 points, or 0.05 percent, at 13,986.52. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 0.83 points, or 0.05 percent, at 1,512.12. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was down 3.10 points, or 0.10 percent, at 3,168.48.

Amazon.com shares, down 1.7 percent at $262.22, led the decline on the Nasdaq.

Also causing some strain on the market, investors have been speculating about leadership changes in Spain and Italy and watching for comments from European leaders, analysts said. European Central Bank policymakers are due to meet Thursday.

The Dow Jones Transportation average <.djt> was down 0.2 percent after hitting another record high on Tuesday. The average is up 10.7 percent for the year so far and has made a series of new highs since mid-January.

According to Thomson Reuters data, of 301 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings, 68.1 percent have exceeded analysts' expectations, above a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters. In terms of revenue, 65.8 percent of companies have topped forecasts.

Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies are estimated to have risen 4.7 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.

Walt Disney Co's stock was up 0.4 percent at $54.52, after the company beat estimates for quarterly adjusted earnings and gave an optimistic outlook for the next few quarters.

Volume was roughly 6.5 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the NYSE MKT, compared with the 2012 average daily closing volume of about 6.45 billion.

Advancers outpaced decliners on the NYSE by roughly 17 to 12 and on the Nasdaq by about 13 to 11.

(Editing by Bernadette Baum, Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)

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Europe’s Galileo GPS Plan Limps to Crossroads

Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times

The few satellites launched so far for the European Union's Galileo navigation system, which faces a budget test this week, are tracked in Fucino, Italy.

FUCINO, Italy — With lofty dreams of European unity increasingly grounded by economic woe and the weight of narrow national interests, an array of computer screens here in central Italy blinks with faint signs that — far away in space, at least — Europe’s often quarreling nations can still sometimes find common cause.

Ringed by snow-covered mountains on a plateau east of Rome, the Fucino Space Center stands guard over the European Union’s flagship joint project: a satellite navigation system that is years behind schedule, many times over its original budget and unlikely to start operating for at least another year.

Europe’s future commitment to the project, known as Galileo and designed to create a new, improved and European-controlled version of America’s Global Positioning System, is to be decided in Brussels on Thursday and Friday, when European leaders will try for a second time, after talks failed in November, to hash out a long-term budget for the 27-nation bloc.

With recession and austerity clouding much of the Continent, they will argue over where the ax should fall on a European Union budget for 2014 to 2020, which would total nearly $1.35 trillion as drafted. An over-budget satellite navigation system that is years from full completion, largely a duplicate of an American system already widely used in Europe and unlikely ever to generate much revenue would seem to be in the budget cutters’ cross hairs.

But Galileo’s backers are confident, so much so that they are asking for $8 billion beyond the more than $4 billion already spent. For Galileo promises perhaps the one thing that still seems able to overcome European leaders’ devotion to austerity: economic and technological independence from the United States.

“It is like a car going on a highway — it is very difficult to stop,” said Lucio Magliozzi, chief operating officer of Telespazio. The Italian-French company manages the Fucino control center, which is tracking the handful of Galileo navigation satellites launched by Europe so far.

Galileo, also known as the European Global Navigation Satellite System, has already burned through more than three times the original budget target and has only 4 of the 30 planned satellites in orbit. Even so, the troubled program highlights how, through sheer force of will and a judicious sharing of economic spoils, the European Union can at times push ahead with objectives it defines as “strategic.”

Space “has a strategic importance for the independence of Europe, for employment and for competitiveness,” Antonio Tajani, vice president of the European Commission, the union’s policy-making arm, said in a recent speech. Mr. Tajani, who is also the commission’s senior official responsible for space projects, added, “This is why we need a European space policy that is even more ambitious.”

The budget talks are expected to be dominated by the competing demands of countries, like France, that want to maintain heavy spending on farm subsidies and those in poorer regions that want to avoid cuts to so-called cohesion funds designed to narrow economic gaps on the Continent.

This leaves items like research vulnerable to deep cuts. Research is heavily favored by Britain and some other countries as a lever for Europe to be competitive in the future but is less immediately tied to the economic fortunes of individual states.

One project that could get hit is a satellite observation system known as Copernicus, or Global Monitoring for Environment and Security. Europe’s efforts to monitor earth from space suffered a big blow last year when its biggest satellite, an eight-ton device called Envisat, suddenly stopped working. The Copernicus program has its own satellites and is now mostly operational but has struggled to get a clear funding commitment in the next long-term union budget.

Europe “is like someone who buys a car but has no money for petrol,” Diego Canga Fano, a senior European Commission official in the department responsible for industry, said at a space conference in Brussels last week, referring to uncertainty over money for the Copernicus project. “The car is useless. We are a bit in this situation.”

Galileo has fared better, gathering a powerful group of backers in Brussels and among industrial and political interests in key member states. They include France, Germany and even Britain, which is usually a leading voice for deep cuts and was once a strong critic of the navigation program.

James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels.

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Zynga profit tops views, but it forecasts lower revenue

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Zynga Inc, the one-time Silicon Valley darling that has been wrestling with a months-long exodus of online gamers, reported an unexpected fourth-quarter profit on Tuesday after embracing steep cuts and shifting forward deferred revenue.

The results assuaged investors who had feared the company might be in free fall and boosted Zynga shares by 7 percent to $ 2.93 in after-hours trade.

Still, the company reported fourth-quarter revenues of $ 311 million, virtually unchanged from a year ago and down from the prior quarter. And Zynga’s underlying business appeared to be continuing its downward slide, as the maker of “CityVille 2″ and other games projected revenue could shrink for a third sequential quarter.

Zynga forecast revenue for the first quarter of 2013 of between $ 255 million and $ 265 million, a roughly 20 percent drop from the same quarter in 2012.

The company attributed the weak sales forecast to a “light slate” of new games planned for quarter.

“The highlight was it was a good quarter and good free cash flow but outlook and guidance is somewhat cloudy,” said Arvind Bhatia, a Sterne Agee analyst.

Once hailed as one of Silicon Valley’s fastest growing companies, Zynga suffered a dramatic reversal in 2012, when users began to abandon its red-hot games like “CityVille.” The company was also caught off-guard by a sweeping, permanent change in consumer behavior, as people spent more time on their mobile phones instead of desktop computers – the platform for Zynga’s most lucrative, Facebook-based games.

The company went public in late 2011 at $ 10 a share. By November, its stock had dipped as low as $ 2.10, a price that valued the company only narrowly above the value of its securities, cash and assets.

But Zynga on Tuesday reported a quarterly profit of 1 cent per share on an adjusted basis, beating expectations for a loss of 3 cents per share, according to analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

COST CUTTING

In October, Zynga’a chief executive, Mark Pincus, laid off staff and announced $ 200 million in stock buybacks after the company forecast a loss for the December quarter.

To begin the company’s turnaround, he also vowed to make smartphone-based games a centerpiece of Zynga’s line-up, and to crack down on internal delays that affected game launches.

Excluding certain items such as one-time stock compensation costs, Zynga achieved profitability by sharply paring costs on research and development and administration, as well as by shifting forward $ 50 million in future guaranteed revenue to be counted in the current quarter.

New bookings fell to $ 261.2 million, a decline of 15 percent from a year ago.

Executives told analysts on Tuesday’s conference call that the company would adopt a more conservative game development strategy and discard titles that fail to become hits – a departure from earlier days when the high-flying startup spent lavishly on developing a wide array of game offerings.

For instance, CityVille 2, the sequel to Zynga’s most successful game to date, would be shuttered because it was underperforming, executives said.

“Not every launch was a success,” said Chief Operating Officer David Ko. “We’re taking a more disciplined approach to managing our game portfolio.”

FACEBOOK TIES UNRAVELED

Zynga’s management also played up the strength of its own gamer network, weeks after Zynga and Facebook dissolved a longstanding partnership that gave Zynga beneficial privileges on the Facebook platform.

For years, Zynga and Facebook enjoyed a closely symbiotic relationship: The world’s No. 1 social network fed new gamers to Zynga games by tweaking its recommendations algorithms and exposing Zynga games to Facebook users, while Zynga funneled millions in fees back to Facebook.

But Facebook has recently courted other developers to make games on its platform to diversify its revenue streams, while Pincus pushed Zynga to make itself less dependent on Facebook and more focused on mobile games.

Pincus told analysts Tuesday that the company’s own gamer network and websites, rather than Facebook, now represents Zynga’s “most important distribution channel.”

In an interview, Barry Cottle, Zynga’s chief revenue officer, said more than two-thirds of new game downloads were spurred by social communication tools Zynga developed for its own players, and that Zynga could harness social gaming without Facebook.

“We have a strong audience base through our own channels,” Cottle said. “And we’ve got a lot of experience here at Zynga that was built on understanding how players like to interact in games.”

(Reporting By Gerry Shih; Editing by Leslie Adler and M.D. Golan)

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Kim Kardashian's Pregnancy Is No Reason to Speed Divorce, says Kris Humphries

By Mike Fleeman

02/05/2013 at 09:20 PM EST

Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian

Seth Browarnik/StarTraks

Kim Kardashian's baby is not even born yet and already is being drawn into mama's divorce.

Kardashian, carrying boyfriend Kanye West's child, has bristled at what she sees as stall tactics by estranged husband Kris Humphries to close the legal books on their 72-day marriage.

But Humphries's lawyer Marshall W. Waller writes that "what is really going on here is that an 'urgency' in the form of an apparently unplanned pregnancy" is being used by Kardashian as "an opportunity to gain a litigation advantage (to) prematurely set this matter for trial."

He adds parenthetically that the pregnancy is "something (Humphries) had nothing to do with."

Waller explains his reasoning for calling the pregnancy as unplanned: "Indeed, why would (she) plan to get pregnant in the midst of divorce proceedings?"

Kardashian, herself, recently addressed the timing.

"God brings you things at a time when you least expect it," she said last month. "I'm such a planner and this was just meant to be. What am I going to? Wait years to get a divorce? I'd love one. It's a process."

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Critics seek to delay NYC sugary drinks size limit

NEW YORK (AP) — Opponents are pressing to delay enforcement of the city's novel plan to crack down on supersized, sugary drinks, saying businesses shouldn't have to spend millions of dollars to comply until a court rules on whether the measure is legal.

With the rule set to take effect March 12, beverage industry, restaurant and other business groups have asked a judge to put it on hold at least until there's a ruling on their lawsuit seeking to block it altogether. The measure would bar many eateries from selling high-sugar drinks in cups or containers bigger than 16 ounces.

"It would be a tremendous waste of expense, time, and effort for our members to incur all of the harm and costs associated with the ban if this court decides that the ban is illegal," Chong Sik Le, president of the New York Korean-American Grocers Association, said in court papers filed Friday.

City lawyers are fighting the lawsuit and oppose postponing the restriction, which the city Board of Health approved in September. They said Tuesday they expect to prevail.

"The obesity epidemic kills nearly 6,000 New Yorkers each year. We see no reason to delay the Board of Health's reasonable and legal actions to combat this major, growing problem," Mark Muschenheim, a city attorney, said in a statement.

Another city lawyer, Thomas Merrill, has said officials believe businesses have had enough time to get ready for the new rule. He has noted that the city doesn't plan to seek fines until June.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other city officials see the first-of-its-kind limit as a coup for public health. The city's obesity rate is rising, and studies have linked sugary drinks to weight gain, they note.

"This is the biggest step a city has taken to curb obesity," Bloomberg said when the measure passed.

Soda makers and other critics view the rule as an unwarranted intrusion into people's dietary choices and an unfair, uneven burden on business. The restriction won't apply at supermarkets and many convenience stores because the city doesn't regulate them.

While the dispute plays out in court, "the impacted businesses would like some more certainty on when and how they might need to adjust operations," American Beverage Industry spokesman Christopher Gindlesperger said Tuesday.

Those adjustments are expected to cost the association's members about $600,000 in labeling and other expenses for bottles, Vice President Mike Redman said in court papers. Reconfiguring "16-ounce" cups that are actually made slightly bigger, to leave room at the top, is expected to take cup manufacturers three months to a year and cost them anywhere from more than $100,000 to several millions of dollars, Foodservice Packaging Institute President Lynn Dyer said in court documents.

Movie theaters, meanwhile, are concerned because beverages account for more than 20 percent of their overall profits and about 98 percent of soda sales are in containers greater than 16 ounces, according to Robert Sunshine, executive director of the National Association of Theatre Owners of New York State.

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