Warnings from companies such as chemical maker DuPont (DD.N) and chip maker Texas Instruments (TXN.N) suggest the crisis may already be taking its toll on corporate America.

While holiday shopping has started on an upbeat note, the corporate warnings could sour the cheer for some investors.

“We are now beginning to see the collateral damage of the events in Europe with the earnings guidance cuts,” wrote Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at Miller Tabak Co. in New York.

Fourth – and first-quarter earnings growth estimates for Standard Poor’s 500 companies have come down sharply since July, underscoring worries about the outlook for companies.

Earnings are now expected to increase 10.1 percent for the fourth quarter, down from a growth estimate of 15 percent at the start of October and from an estimate of 17.6 percent in July, according to Thomson Reuters data.

The data also showed that negative preannouncements by companies are outpacing positive ones by the biggest ratio since the second quarter of 2001.

Late Thursday, Texas Instruments cut its revenue outlook for the current quarter, citing lower demand, while DuPont on Friday lowered its full-year profit forecast.

Overseas, German specialty chemicals group Wacker Chemie (WCHG.DE) also cut its outlook, with the industry worried about slower global growth.

Among others in technology, Lattice Semiconductor Corp (LSCC.O) cut its fourth-quarter revenue outlook on Friday.

Stocks mostly brushed off the bearish news on earnings, focusing instead on Europe after nearly all European Union leaders agreed to build a closer fiscal union to battle the sovereign debt crisis.

But the market for months has struggled with the news from Europe, which featured the lack of resolution to the debt crisis, causing high uncertainty for investors.

“Today was a positive move forward. Unfortunately European austerity will impact global corporate earnings going into the next year,” said Chad Morganlander, portfolio manager at Stifel, Nicolaus Co in Florham Park, New Jersey.

“European policymakers’ inability to placate investor fears has business decision-makers hesitant to give positive light to the coming months,” he said.

Stocks ended with gains for a second straight week, and the profit warnings came on the heels of what has been considered a fairly robust third-quarter reporting period.

For the week, the Dow rose 1.4 percent, the SP gained 0.9 percent and the Nasdaq was up 0.8 percent.

Earnings increased 17.9 percent for the third quarter, according to Thomson Reuters data, up from a forecast for 13.1 percent growth in early October.

Prospects for profit and revenue growth have been among the chief reasons why a good number of analysts remain optimistic about stocks heading into 2012.

Kenneth Fisher, a billionaire investor and author whose money management firm oversees $40 billion in assets, said 2012 “will be a very nice year” for the United States.

“Revenue growth, as a function of the economy, is pretty damn gangbusters,” he said at the Reuters 2012 Investment Outlook Summit this week.

FORECASTS HIT

Still, the aggregate change in consensus earnings estimates has been coming down even over the past month, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine data. All but two SP 500 sectors — healthcare and consumer staples — show negative earnings revisions to estimates over the past 30 days, the data showed.

Materials and financials are among sectors showing the biggest drops in estimates.

For the fourth quarter, earnings for the materials sector are now expected to have decreased 1.4 percent from a year ago, while in October earnings were expected to have risen 25.6 percent.

Financials, seen as the sector most sensitive to euro zone problems, also have taken a hit. Sector earnings are expected to have increased 18.3 percent for the fourth quarter, down from an October 3 forecast for growth of 26.6 percent.

SP 500 revenue is expected to have increased 6.6 percent in the fourth quarter compared with revenue growth of 11.1 percent in the third quarter, Thomson Reuters data showed.

“A lot of companies are talking about Europe,” and its effect going forward, said Greg Harrison, Thomson Reuters earnings research analyst. Also, lackluster trading volumes are going to affect financials here in the United States, he said.

Companies seemed more optimistic heading into 2011. Consumer confidence was higher, and the crisis in Europe seemed more contained.

Among companies with disappointing outlooks a year ago were Xilinx (XLNX.O) and Jo-Ann Stores, which forecast a weak 2011 profit on Dec 1, 2010 but was bought by a private equity firm in January.

(Reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Additional reporting by Ernest Scheyder and Nicola Leske; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

Rallies were expected in dozens of cities, from Vladivostok on the Pacific coast to Kaliningrad nearly 7,400 km (4,600 miles) away in the west, mounting the biggest opposition protests since Putin came to power in 2000.

In Vladivostok, a large port city where Putin’s United Russia party was defeated by communists in last Sunday’s parliamentary election, protesters held banners saying: “We are against mass falsifications!” and “The rats should go!”

Organizers said about 1,000 people defied wintry weather to protest, but police put the number much lower. About 20 were detained in Khabarovsk, a city of almost 580,000 people about 30 km (19 miles) from the border with China, RIA news agency said.

At least 15,000 people protested at Bolotnya Square, a large

open space across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, and up to 1,500 gathered near a statue to Communist ideologist Karl Marx at Revolution Square, a few steps from the red walls of Russia‘s centre of power, witness said.

Protesters in Moscow waved pictures of Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev declaring: “Guys, it’s time to go.”

The rallies are a test of the opposition’s ability to turn outrage over the December 4 election, which it says was slanted in United Russia‘s favor, into a national protest movement that can undermine Putin’s plan to return to the presidency in 2012.

“This is history in the making for Russia. The people are coming out to demand justice for the first time in two decades, justice in the elections,” a 41-year-old employee in the financial services sector, who gave his name only as Anton, said at Revolution Square.

Like other protesters, he wore a white ribbon which he said symbolized the dissent of the people. At Bolotnaya Square people of all ages gathered, many carrying white carnations which they said was the symbol of their protest.

CALLS FOR NEW ELECTIONS

“I want new elections, not a revolution,” said Ernst Kryavitsky, 75, a retired electrician dressed in a long brown coat and hat against the falling snow who was protesting even though he did not expect Putin to be ousted.

“Putin will not leave power, and there won’t be any major changes in the country but the authorities need to know how angry we are,” he said.

Around Bolotnaya Square policeman stood every 50 meters (yards) with dogs. Banners declared: “Putin Kaput” and “Big brother is watching you” with a picture of Putin.

About 50 trucks of riot police were parked near Revolution Square and police were out in force in the capital. There were no immediate reports of clashes or detentions.

There were also reports of protests in other big cities including Arkhangelsk in the Arctic north and in the Siberian cities of Barnaul, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk.

ANGER OVER ELECTION

The protesters were angered by the parliamentary election in which Putin’s United Russia party won only a slim majority in the State Duma lower house, widely seen as a growing sign of discontent with the former KGB spy’s rule.

Protesters, who this week staged the biggest opposition rally in Moscow for years, say only widespread falsifications prevented the result for United Russia being much worse.

The ruling party’s leaders have denied cheating and Putin, who is now prime minister after serving eight years as president until 2008, has accused the United States of encouraging and financing the protesters.

Putin and Medvedev have both said that Russians have a right to protest but only within the bounds of permission granted by local authorities who normally allow demonstrations only at specific locations and limit turnout.

Putin, 59, remains Russia‘s most popular leader in opinion polls, but his ratings have been falling.

Many Russians felt disenfranchised when he and Medvedev announced plans to swap jobs after next year’s presidential election and said they had taken the decision years ago.

The protests have also shown the power of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, through which most of the protests have been organized.

Putin may hope to show his government will tolerate peaceful protests within the limits it sets — by allowing certain rallied to take place but preventing others — but will crack down on anyone who ventures outside those boundaries.

(Writing by Gleb Bryanski, editing by Timothy Heritage)

BLACKSBURG, Va. – A dean’s list student who killed a Virginia Tech police officer had no ties to the university and did not know the patrolman, authorities said Friday without offering a motive for a crime spree that spanned two days and ended in suicide.

Ross Truett Ashley, 22, first drew authorities’ attention when he robbed his landlord’s office at gunpoint Wednesday. He took the keys to a Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle later found in Blacksburg, home to Virginia Tech, about 10 miles away.

Ashley, a part-time business student at Radford University, was described by those who knew him as a typical college student, though he could be quiet and standoffish. He liked to run down the hallways and recently shaved his head, a neighbor said.

Police said he walked up to officer Deriek W. Crouse on Thursday and shot him to death as the patrolman sat in his unmarked cruiser in the midst of a traffic stop. Ashley was not involved in the stop and did not know the driver, police said.

Ashley then took off for the campus greenhouses, ditching his pullover, wool cap and backpack as police sent out a campus-wide alert that a gunman was on the loose, terrorizing students on a campus still coping with the nation’s worst mass slaying in recent memory.

A deputy sheriff on patrol noticed a man acting suspicious in a parking lot about a half-mile from the shooting. The deputy drove up and down the rows of the sprawling Cage parking lot and lost sight of the man for a moment, then found Ashley shot to death on the pavement.

Ashley lived in an apartment on top floor of a gray, three-story brick building that looked a little beaten up on the outside.

On Friday night, students popped in and out of the building visiting friends. Mandy Adams, a Radford grad student, said Ashley had recently shaved his head. Other than running down the hallways, he was quiet, she said.

“He would just run down the hallway, never walk, always run,” said Adams, who was out on a rear fire escape with a glass of white wine and a cigarette to calm her nerves. “It’s going to be really creepy when they come to take his stuff out of here.”

Ashley’s apartment was above a yogurt shop, consignment store, barber shop and a tattoo parlor. It overlooked the business section of Radford’s main drag.

Va. Tech shooting stirs bad memories; Vigil held
Va. Tech gunman kills officer, later found dead
Series of scares for Va. Tech since ’07 massacre

Neighbor Nan Forbes, a Radford senior, said he was rarely seen or heard from. She said she knew he was in trouble when she saw two police officers guarding the door to Ashley’s apartment

“It does freak us out because we live in this building, but there was not one peep of trouble, nothing unusual,” she said.

Ashley made the dean’s list in 2008 at the University of Virginia-Wise, which is located in southwest Virginia. Officials at Radford or UVA-Wise were not immediately able to talk in detail about Ashley.

Crouse, 39, the slain officer, was a trained firearms and defense instructor with a specialty in crisis intervention. He had been on the force for four years, joining about six months after 33 people were killed in a classroom building and dorm April 16, 2007.

Ironically, Crouse was killed across the street from the dormitory where the 2007 massacre began, reports CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano. He was to be buried at a memorial service Monday.

At the Virginia Tech campus, thousands of people silently filled the Drillfield for a candlelight vigil Friday night to remember Crouse.

Vigil held for slain Va. Tech police officer

The vigil included a moment of silence and later closed with two trumpeters stationed across the field from each other playing “Echo Taps” as students raised their candles.

“Let’s go!” one student then shouted. “Hokies!” everyone else responded.

Kathleen O’Dwyer, a fifth-year engineering majors, said it was important to come for Crouse’s family.

“Also it’s for the community, to see the violence that happens isn’t what we’re about,” said O’Dwyer, who will be graduating next week.

Her plans when she leaves school?

“First, go home and hug my mom,” O’Dwyer said.

Nobody answered the door at Ashley’s parents’ home in Spotsylvania County in the northern part of the state. The house was dark and no vehicles were in the driveway. The two-story, log cabin-style home in a semi-rural area sits about 200 yards off the road up a narrow gravel drive.

Billie Jo Phillippe, who lives three houses down, said she didn’t really associate with the family.

“They stay off to themselves a lot,” she said. “He was a clean-cut young guy but standoffish.”

“It’s fair to say that life is very different at college campuses today. The telecommunications technology and protocols that we have available to us, that we now have in place, didn’t exist years ago,” he said. “We believe the system worked very well.”

BLACKSBURG, Va. –  A part-time college student at a small school near Virginia Tech was identified Friday as the gunman who shot a police officer to death and then killed himself, triggering a lockdown on a campus still coping with the nation’s worst mass slaying in recent memory.

The day before the shootings, police said Ross Truett Ashley, 22, stole a sport utility vehicle at gunpoint from a real estate office in Radford. He dumped the car on the Virginia Tech campus and it was found Thursday.

Authorities have not been able to say what led Ashley to kill a police officer he did not know at a school he had never attended.

“That’s very much the fundamental part of the investigation right now,” state police spokeswoman Corrine Geller said Friday at a news conference.

Police said Ashley walked up to patrolman Deriek W. Crouse and fired, then took off for the campus greenhouses, ditching his pullover, wool cap and backpack. He made his way to a nearby parking lot and when a deputy spotted him, he took his own life.

Ashley was a business management major at Radford, the school said on its website. He was from Partlow, Va., about 160 miles northeast of Virginia Tech. He also had a local listing in Radford.

Crouse was a trained firearms and defense instructor with a specialty in crisis intervention. He had been on the force for four years, joining about six months after 33 people were killed in a classroom building and dorm April 16, 2007.

At 12:15 p.m. Thursday, Crouse pulled over a student and was shot while sitting in his unmarked cruiser. The student didn’t have any link to the gunman, Geller said.

Shortly before 12:30 p.m., police received a call from a witness who said an officer had been shot. About six minutes later, the first campus-wide alert was sent by email, text message and electronic signs in university buildings. Many students on campus were preparing for exams, and some described a frantic scene after the initial alert. Soon, heavily armed officers were walking around campus, caravans of SWAT vehicles were driving around and other police cars with emergency lights flashing patrolled nearby.

Students outdoors went inside buildings. Those already there stayed put. Everybody waited.
Police aren’t sure what the gunman was doing at this point. After the shooting, he fled on foot to the greenhouses, where he left some of his clothes and his ID.

Fifteen minutes after the witness called police, a deputy sheriff on patrol noticed a man at the back of another parking lot about a half-mile from the shooting. The man was by himself, looking around furtively and acting “a little suspicious,” according to Geller.

The deputy drove up and down the rows of the sprawling Cage parking lot and lost sight of the man for a moment. The deputy then found the man lying on the pavement, shot to death. The handgun was nearby.

Police said nobody witnessed the suicide, the parking lot apparently vacant because of warnings. For three more hours, students checked their phones, computers and TVs. Finally, the school gave the all clear.

The events unfolded on the same day Virginia Tech officials were in Washington, fighting a federal government fine over their handling of the 2007 massacre, and the shooting brought back painful memories. About 150 students gathered silently Thursday night for a candlelight vigil on a field facing the stone plaza memorial for the 2007 victims.

“Why Tech, why again?” said Philip Sturgill, a jewelry store owner. “It’s so senseless. This is a lovely, lovely place.”
An official vigil is planned Friday night.

School spokesman Larry Hincker said the alert system worked exactly as expected.
“It’s fair to say that life is very different at college campuses today. The telecommunications technology and protocols that we have available to us, that we now have in place, didn’t exist years ago,” he said. “We believe the system worked very well.”

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Blackburg, Virginia (CNN) — Ballistics evidence testing has officially linked the two fatal shootings on the Virginia Tech campus, Virginia State Police said Friday.

Both Virginia Tech Police Officer Deriek W. Crouse and another man were shot with the same gun.

The ballistics test is part of the ongoing investigation into Thursday’s double shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech that left many thinking back to the 2007 mass slaying at the university that left 33 dead.

Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger released a statement about the shooting Thursday night.

“Once again, the campus and the community that we love so well have been visited by senseless violence and tragic loss,” the statement said. “Tragedy again struck Virginia Tech in a wanton act of violence where our police officer, Deriek Crouse, was murdered during a routine traffic stop.”

The next time Blagojevich gets to spend Christmas or his birthday with his children — 15-year-old Amy and 8-year-old Annie — they will likely be young adults. Blagojevich, whose 55th birthday is Saturday, won’t be eligible for early release for about 12 years, when he will be around 67 years old.

“I’ve had a lot of clients who’ve had to start making preparations the day after they were sentenced,” said Gal Pissetzky, a federal defense attorney based in Chicago. “But not a single one of them has been able to prepare for saying goodbye to their children.”

Judge James Zagel sentenced Blagojevich on Wednesday on 18 counts of corruption, including his June convictions on charges that he tried to sell or trade an appointment to President Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat for campaign cash or a top job. The impeached governor must report to prison on Feb. 16.

The Blagojeviches, who say his legal troubles also devastated them financially, put their home up for sale after he was convicted in June, and he would likely want to find a buyer before he heads off to prison. They initially listed it for $1.07 million but reportedly lowered the price recently by several thousand dollars.

To make sure his wife can make those and other financial transactions on her own, Blagojevich will also want to make sure he signs necessary papers to give her power of attorney, Pissetzky said.

There’s also the issue of an appeal, something Blagojevich and his attorneys can finally focus on now that the judge has pronounced the sentence.

Federal authorities must still make a final decision about where Blagojevich will serve his time. Wherever it is, Blagojevich will be largely cut off from the outside world. He will have to share a cell with other inmates and work a menial job, possibly scrubbing toilets or mopping floors, at just 12 cents an hour.

On Wednesday, the Rod Blagojevich who once challenged a prosecutor to face him like a man, the glad-handing politician who took to celebrity TV shows to profess his innocence, was nowhere to be found. Frowning and pulling nervously at his tie, the disgraced former governor did his best to display humility in hopes of convincing Judge Zagel to hand him a lesser sentence.

He licked his lips nervously as he stepped up to address the judge — mouthing the words, “I love you,” to his wife. Leaning into a hefty oak podium, gripping its sides, the normally fast-talking Blagojevich spoke slowly, sometimes pausing to search for the right word.

“My life is ruined,” he told Zagel. Accentuating each word, he added, “I have nobody to blame but myself. … I am just so incredibly sorry.”

The two-term Democrat offered more than half a dozen apologies, including to his former constituents across Illinois. But he stopped, seemingly to gather his composure, when he said he also owed an apology to his family.

“I have ruined their innocence,” he said quietly.

It was not enough for Zagel, who proceeded to give Blagojevich close to the 15 to 20 years prosecutors had sought.

“When it is the governor who goes bad,” Zagel said, “the fabric of Illinois is torn and disfigured and not easily repaired.”

Blagojevich slumped forward in his chair, momentarily frozen as the judge pronounced the sentence. Moments later, his wife, Patti, fell into his arms; when he pulled back from their embrace, he brushed tears from her cheek.

It took two trials for prosecutors to snare Blagojevich. His first ended deadlocked with jurors agreeing on just one of 24 counts — that Blagojevich lied to the FBI. Jurors at his retrial convicted him on 17 of 20 counts, including bribery and attempted extortion.

Blagojevich responded to his Dec. 9, 2008, arrest with defiance, proclaiming his innocence with a media blitz. He pursued the spotlight after he was removed from office, appearing in reality TV shows such as “Celebrity Apprentice.”

But Blagojevich clearly dreaded the idea of prison time. Asked in an interview before his retrial about whether he dwelled on that prospect, he answered: “No. I don’t let myself go there.”

___

Associated Press writer Deanna Bellandi contributed to this report.

___

Michael Tarm can be reached at www.twitter.com/mtarm. Don Babwin can be reached at http://twitter.com/dbabwin

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The blast came a day after rare sectarian attacks in three Afghan cities killed 59 people, and refocused attention on the fragile Afghan security situation.

After Tuesday’s attacks, the largest of which targeted a Shi’ite Muslim shrine in the capital Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai cancelled a planned visit to Britain to return straight home, wiping out any residual optimism from an international conference about the future of Afghanistan, held on Monday in Germany.

Afghans have previously been spared the large-scale sectarian attacks that regularly trouble Iraq and neighboring Pakistan, but now face the grim prospect of a new type of bloodshed being added to the dangers of daily life.

“The reason for President Karzai’s trip cancellation to Britain is the terrorist attacks on Ashura in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar which killed and wounded many participants,” Karzai’s office said in a statement.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), responsible for security across much of the country, says it is winning the war against the Taliban.

But if Tuesday’s bombing sets a precedent for violence between the Sunni Muslim majority and the Shi’ite minority, it would severely stretch army and police resources.

At a funeral ceremony on Wednesday for victims of the attack, hundreds of Shi’ite Muslims bore aloft the bodies of the dead, chanting that because they had been killed at a Muslim ceremony, they had died in the name of the Prophet Mohammad.

“We were sacrificed for you,” they shouted.

“Where is the government, where are the members of parliament? Why they don’t join our mourning? It creates a gap between people and the government,” said Mohammad, 40 years old, who said one his relatives died in the Kabul blast.

SECURITY FEARS

The interior ministry has blamed “the Taliban and terrorists”, without giving further details, while the Taliban strongly condemned the bombings.

“We want the Afghan government, international community and those who are involved in Afghanistan‘s affairs to reveal those who were behind the attack,” said Yazdan Parast, another Shi’ite Muslim attending the ceremony.

Some Shi’ite Muslims said immediately after the Kabul blast that police had not done enough to protect them. Hundreds of worshippers had gathered to mark the festival of Ashura at a shrine in central Kabul when a suicide bomber struck.

Among those killed in Tuesday’s attacks was a U.S. citizen the American embassy in Kabul said in a statement. It gave no further details.

At the German conference, the Afghan government’s Western backers, who have spent billions of dollars on the country since the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban government in 2001, pledged to support the country beyond the end-2014 deadline for the withdrawal of foreign combat troops.

Afghanistan has said that it will not be able to afford the army and police force it needs after 2014 without international help, and Tuesday’s attack is likely to reinforce fears about the ability of Afghan forces to cope with violence after ISAF has fully handed over security.

(Additional reporting and writing by Daniel Magnowski; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)