Singapore Stocks-Flat at midday on Wall St;seen near fair value - Casino

* Index flat; near-term support seen at 3,043 pts
* Genting Singapore and Genting HK fall on profit-taking
By Eveline Danubrata
SINGAPORE, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Singapore shares were flat
at midday after Wall Street slipped overnight, prompting local
investors to take a break from a four-week rally, and are seen
range-bound in the afternoon, traders said.
By the lunch break, the Straits Times Index (STI) .FTSTI
inched 0.01 percent or 0.25 points higher to 3,113.71.
"I think we are taking the cue from Wall Street. We are
also already quite close to 3,200 and a lot of us see it as a
fundamental fair value for the STI," said Carey Wong, an
analyst at OCBC Investment Research.
"We do see more profit-taking pressures, especially if
Europe opens on the soft side," Wong said, adding that if the
STI falls below the 3,100 level, support may come in at 3,043.
Shares of casino operators Genting Singapore (GENS.SI) and
Genting Hong Kong (GENH.SI) were down on profit-taking and
after a brokerage said the current valuation for Genting Hong
Kong looks expensive.
At midday, shares of Genting Singapore were down 3 percent
at S$1.96. Nearly 76 million shares had changed hands.
Genting Hong Kong shares lost 5.3 percent to trade at
S$0.45 on a volume of 66 million shares.
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Will your new film be a hit? Ask the web - Movies

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tracking web searches for new songs, video games and movies can predict which ones will be big hits, but often not much better than traditional methods, researchers at Yahoo Inc reported on Monday.
And they confirmed earlier findings that showed searches associated with diseases, such as Google's Google Flu Trends, were not any more effective than traditional methods for predicting the spread of infections.
Tracking web searches worked the best in predicting how a new video game would sell, Yahoo's Sharad Goel and Jake Hofman said.
"Here we show that what consumers are searching for online can also predict their collective future behavior days or even weeks in advance," they wrote in a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Specifically we use search query volume to forecast the opening weekend box-office revenue for feature films, first-month sales of video games, and the rank of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, finding in all cases that search counts are highly predictive of future outcomes," they added.
"We considered four different classes of web activity. At least three of them we do a pretty good job of predicting outcomes," Goel said in a telephone interview.
Counting the number of searches related to new songs was the least effective, they found.
But Goel said using Billboard Top 100 listings to predict whether a song would stay at the top of the charts worked as well as or better than counting web searches.

� Continued...
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Egypt's Mubarak to Berlin, Rome to discuss Mideast - Arts

Mubarak will meet Chancellor Angela Merkel during a visit to Berlin that will last only a few hours, then head to Rome to have talks with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and open a newly renovated Egyptian arts academy on Thursday.
Mubarak, 82, was also in Germany in March for gallbladder surgery in Heidelberg Hospital. In 2004, he had surgery for a slipped disc at a Munich hospital.
Both events sparked rumours about the state of his health, unnerving Egypt's financial markets because he has no designated successor. Mubarak has not appointed a vice president, the post he held before taking office in 1981.
"The discussions in Berlin and Rome will centre around the peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis" as well as regional issues and bilateral relations, MENA said.
The peace talks are stuck over the issue of Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, with the Palestinians threatening to quit the negotiations unless Israel extends a partial construction moratorium in the enclaves.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and presidential chief of staff Zakaria Azmi will accompany Mubarak, it added.
He will return to Egypt later on Thursday.
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