(02-19) 07:02 PST New York (AP) —

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. is bringing in a new celebrity: popular TV chef Emeril Lagasse.

The New York-based media and merchandising company founded by domesticity maven Martha Stewart announced Tuesday that it bought the rights to the Emeril Lagasse franchise of cookbooks, television shows and kitchen products for $45 million in cash and $5 million in stock at closing.

The final price could rise to up to $70 million if certain benchmarks are achieved.

The company did not acquire Emeril’s Homebase, which includes Lagasse’s 11 restaurants and corporate office.

Martha Stewart Living said the deal will “contribute immediately to our performance,” adding $8 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The acquired assets generated $14 million in revenue in 2007.

Martha Stewart Living expects the deal to close in the second quarter.

Lagasse joined the Food Network in 1993 and has hosted over 1,600 shows. His programs “The Essence of Emeril” and “Emeril Live” reach more than 85 million homes daily.

(02-19) 04:00 PST New York —

February’s stock market so far has displayed more stability than January’s, but Wall Street wants to see a stronger economy on the horizon before it trades confidently again.

Investors are not counting on readings this week on housing, inflation and manufacturing to give them that assurance. As a result, they are bracing for more volatility.

The market has been swinging higher and lower as traders sell off when disappointing economic data rolls in and then drive the market up when they snap up stocks that look like bargains. The pattern is indicative of a market that has underlying demand holding it up, but one that could have a bit further to fall if more bad news comes along.

After rallying early last week and then losing steam toward the end, the Dow rose 1.36 percent for the week, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index gained 1.4 percent, and the Nasdaq composite index advanced 0.74 percent. All three indexes remain down sharply for the year, particularly the Nasdaq, which is 12.5 percent lower than it was at the end of 2007.

“We may not have hit the bottom, but people seem to be looking for things to buy rather than things to dump,” said Alexander Paris, economist and market analyst for Barrington Research in Chicago. “Things might get worse before they get better, but you’ve got to buy stock when things look worst.”

The question is whether there’s any data coming in the near future that will have the power to reinvigorate the stock market - or whether the market is doomed to a holding pattern until the economy starts to recover.

One overriding concern is the weak housing market. Although investors have come to terms with falling prices, there’s uncertainty over how long the downturn will last and how much it will affect homeowners’ spending patterns. And there are worries about the financial well-being of companies with investments in mortgage-backed assets.

All U.S. financial markets were closed Monday for the Presidents Day holiday.

Today, the National Association of Home Builders releases its housing industry index, which economists surveyed by Thomson Financial/IFR expect to show a decline for February. Then Wednesday, the Commerce Department reports on housing starts and building permits - both are expected to be weak.

Because of the housing market’s deterioration, many businesses are suffering. The Institute for Supply Management’s January manufacturing report showed modest growth, but economists predict that the Philadelphia Fed’s regional manufacturing index will register another contraction. The decline is not expected to be as dismal as the December report, which caused the Dow to tumble more than 300 points a month ago, but if it is, it could send stocks reeling again.

Another worry is the inflation that is occurring alongside the economic slowdown. The dollar’s recent tumble appears to have plateaued, but it is still weak, while food and energy costs are staying high. Consumers are finding themselves unable to spend money on discretionary items because the bulk of their wages is going toward necessities like meals, transportation and health care.

The Labor Department reports Wednesday on consumer prices, which economists predict rose 0.3 percent in January, the same rate as in December. Core consumer prices, which exclude food and energy costs, are anticipated to have risen by 0.2 percent.

Also Wednesday, the Federal Reserve releases the minutes from its Jan. 29-30 meeting. At that meeting, the central bank lowered the key interest rate by a half point to 3.00 percent and stated that the financial markets are still under considerable stress. The Fed also said credit is tightening for businesses and households alike, the housing contraction appears to be deepening, and the job market seems to be weakening.

“It seems to be, as the data unfolds, they’ll have no choice but to cut further,” said Joseph Battipaglia, chief investment officer at Ryan Beck & Co. He added, though, that given how much policy makers have already slashed rates and their persistent worries about inflation, “they don’t have much more to go.”

The Jan. 30 move followed an emergency three-quarter-point reduction a week earlier, and three cuts in the latter part of 2007. Rate changes tend to take at least six months to affect the economy. The Fed meets next on March 18.

Errol Morris’s mother calls him “a good nag”. It’s true that the 60-year-old American documentary-maker has a knack for badgering and cajoling even the most reluctant witnesses. The evidence he assembled for his 1988 film The Thin Blue Line helped save a man wrongly convicted of murder from death row. In his Oscar-winning 2003 documentary The Fog of War, he managed to persuade Robert McNamara, former US Secretary of Defence, to acknowledge on camera that “in order to do good, you may have to engage in evil”.

Now Morris has tackled the Abu Ghraib scandal and those shocking photographs of Iraqis abused in the jail. Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), which Morris calls “a non-fiction horror movie”, investigates just how the Abu Ghraib photographs came to be taken, what they revealed and how they were interpreted by the media. The movie, which has just won the Silver Bear Jury Grand Prize at the Berlin film festival, is complex and ambivalent. On one level, this is the polemical documentary about the tragedy of the Iraq war that many people will be expecting. On another, it is a thoughtful and self-reflexive film essay, exploring what Morris calls “the irony of images” and the way photography both conveys and distorts truth. “These images seem to show you Abu Ghraib, but they don’t really,” he says. “They show you a glimpse, but certainly not the entire place.”

This, he argues, is the paradox at the heart of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Yes, they are an exposй - without them, we wouldn’t know about the horrors of the prison. After all, the US authorities went to considerable lengths to cover up what was happening. But the photographs are also about concealment. “I am now really interested in how the photographs encouraged us not to investigate Abu Ghraib,” says Morris. “They create a barrier you don’t want to walk beyond.”

SOP is not one of those grainy, shakily shot documentaries. Filmed in widescreen, it is a disconcertingly glossy affair. The re-creations - of snarling dogs terrifying prisoners, or of US soldiers overpowering an inmate who has somehow got hold of a gun - wouldn’t look out of place in a Hollywood action movie. Meanwhile, there are hi-tech animations and graphics; and Danny Elfman’s music isn’t so different from his score for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When Janis Karpinski, head of the prison service in Iraq, or former Private First Class Lynndie England appear on screen in interviews, we see their faces in huge, high-definition close-up.

“I don’t believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation,” explains Morris. “I don’t think that if it was grainy and full of handheld material, it would be any more truthful. Oddly enough, people don’t want truth. They want to avoid having to think. If anybody really thinks that truth and style are one and the same - that if you obey a set of documentary conventions truth magically pops out - well, that’s not the way it works.”

Morris, speaking in a Berlin hotel, is used to asking questions, not answering them, but he is gracious and humorous. He was told many times during the making of SOP that he was “much too late”, and that Abu Ghraib was no longer a news story. He disagrees, and takes issue with the idea that the disgraced guards - the so-called “bad apples” he interviews in the documentary - should show more obvious evidence of remorse. His own attitude toward Lynndie England and others is far from hostile, and his film at times comes across as strangely sympathetic. “I have a lot of trouble interviewing people I don’t like,” he says. “Maybe I have to like them [the guards] - but I do like them. I am certainly engaged by them. I am not interviewing them because I want to pass judgment. There are all these odd ideas that you do an interview to get someone to confess or apologise. It is almost a Christian idea of the interview. Because I don’t do that, I think I make people angry.”

Some of that anger was evident during the press conference for SOP, when Morris was accused of humiliating the victims shown in the photographs all over again. The film-maker tried to track down these detainees but says it was “difficult to impossible”. Instead, we have the guards, or at least the ones Morris was allowed to speak to. They are more articulate and forceful than their caricatured images in the media might suggest. Morris also argues that, had circumstances been different, Sabrina Harman - who caused horror and outrage after being photographed beside the corpse of an Iraqi prisoner with her thumbs up and smiling - could just as easily have won a Pulitzer prize for being among the team who actually took these shots and, in turn, let the world know what was going on. Intriguingly, although no one could ever excuse Harman’s facial expression in the photograph, that inane grin never seems to leave her face throughout the movie; it almost starts to look like a nervous tic.

‘One thing is absolutely clear to me,” says Morris. “Without the photograph, we would have no knowledge of this murder. She stumbled on this. She was not involved in the crime. It is one of the strange things about this story. If you ask me, are these pictures of torture, I would say yes. Yet, they are defined by the US military as ’standard operating procedure’. You’re talking about a world that has gone mad.”

Morris has been asked why he didn’t interview senior officers other than Janis Karpinski. He responds that he spoke to whoever he could get, and “who could inform the story around the pictures”. Like his subjects in SOP, Morris is a complex and contradictory figure. One moment, he talks of his film as if it were a Susan Sontag-like exploration of “the attraction of atrocity photography” and morbid voyeurism; the next, as if it were a campaign tool for Barack Obama (whom he supports), and a way of expressing his dismay at US foreign policy. Abu Ghraib “represents America in its policies”, he says. “The country, in its foreign policy, has gone stark raving mad.” He talks about the cloud of depression Bush’s re-election cast over him: “We’ve gone through seven years of what seems to be an unending horror show.”

One principle stays sacred to Morris. When he shows the photographs, they are always displayed as they were taken - never cropped to maximise the horror and conceal any context, as he says the media often did. Even so, Morris argues it is a mistake to believe the images can be fully trusted. He quotes the writer Philip Gourevitch, with whom he is collaborating on a book version of SOP. “Philip is very fond of talking about the line from Othello when Othello demands of Iago, ‘Bring me the ocular proof’. Well, he gets his ocular proof, but it doesn’t serve him well. It is no proof at all!”

Standard Operating Procedure will be released in the UK later this year.