LOS ANGELES | Thu Sep 27, 2012 10:29pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Police recovered a multimillion-dollar collection of paintings stolen from the Southern California home of superstar bond fund manager Jeffrey Gundlach, and two men are in jail on suspicion of possessing the stolen property, authorities said on Thursday.

The 13 paintings, which included works by Jasper Johns and Piet Mondrian, were taken from Gundlach's home in the coastal city of Santa Monica between September 12 and September 14, officials with the city's police department said.

Gundlach, who was in New York at the time, put forward a $1.7 million reward earlier this week for the recovery of all his stolen art, increasing his previous offer of $200,000.

Officers arrested Jeffrey Nieto, 45, at Al & Ed's Autosound in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena on Wednesday in connection with the theft, and recovered most of the paintings at that business, where Nieto is the manager, police said.

They took the second man, Wilmer Cadiz, 40, into custody at his home in nearby San Gabriel and found another four paintings there, police said. The last painting was recovered at a home in the Los Angeles bedroom community of Glendale. The person who had that painting has been interviewed and is cooperating with investigators, police said.

Police are still investigating the case, including whether Nieto and Cadiz committed the actual burglary at Gundlach's home, Santa Monica police spokesman Sergeant Richard Lewis said.

It was not immediately clear if Nieto or Cadiz have attorneys to represent them.

Gundlach, who is chief executive officer and chief investment officer of DoubleLine Capital, in a statement thanked the Santa Monica Police Department for "apprehending the criminals" and recovering "all of the artwork stolen."

"This is a great day for the art world and all those who seek order and justice in our society," Gundlach said. A representative for Gundlach did not immediately respond to an email about payment of the reward in the case.

The stolen art pieces included works by Frank Stella, Guy Rose, Hanson Duvall Puthuff and other artists.

The painting by Jasper Johns, who last year received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, is his 1956 "Green Target." The piece by the late Dutch artist Piet Mondrian is his 1936 "Composition (A) En Rouge Et Blanc."

The Mondrian piece alone is worth between $10 million and $15 million, Lewis said. The total value of the stolen paintings could be up to $39 million, but police initially valued all the items stolen from Gundlach's home at $10 million to be conservative about the price tag, Lewis said.

Police have not recovered a Porsche Carrera 4S sports car taken from Gundlach's home, nor have they found several luxury watches, a handgun and some wine that was also stolen, Lewis said. The car originally sold for $120,000 and the wine was worth $100,000, he said.

Nieto was being held in jail on bail of $500,000 and Cadiz was being held on $20,000, according to Los Angeles County inmate records.

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Eric Walsh)

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1 of 2. Research in Motion (RIM) BlackBerry smartphone handsets are pictured in this illustration picture taken in Lavigny, Switzerland in this July 21, 2012 file photo.

TORONTO | Thu Sep 27, 2012 9:17pm EDT

TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion Ltd reported a narrower-than-expected loss on Thursday and the struggling BlackBerry maker bolstered its cash reserves, sparking optimism ahead of the launch of its make-or-break line of next-generation smartphones.

Shares of RIM surged 20 percent in after-hours trade on indications the company will have plenty of cash to ramp up production of its new BlackBerry 10 devices and mount a robust marketing campaign for the revamped line, due in early 2013.

It was the biggest jump for the stock since a 50 percent surge in December 2003, underlining the importance of the BB10 launch. The company, which has fallen far behind its rivals in a smartphone market it once dominated, has staked its future on the BB10 and its completely redesigned operating system.

RIM's second fiscal quarter brought shareholders additional glimmers of hope, a break from a succession of dreadful quarterly reports. The company not only generated more revenue than Wall Street had forecast but it topped expectations on the number of devices shipped in the period, which ended on September 1.

"It's very impressive," said Jefferies & Co analyst Peter Misek. "I didn't expect they could execute on the business given the models they have in the market, but they obviously did really well in emerging markets."

RIM was also able to bolster its cash pile by collecting on cash owed to the company, drawing down inventories and cutting costs.

ONE-TIME PIONEER

A one-time smartphone pioneer, RIM has failed to keep pace with rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co, and its stock price has tumbled about 70 percent over the past year while its market share shriveled.

But the latest quarter showed that RIM is still able to lure buyers for its lower-end smartphones in the more price-conscious emerging markets. And that has helped make up for ground the BlackBerry has lost to cutting-edge devices such as Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy S III in North America and Europe.

"RIM and its products, however obsolescent, are still relevant in the parts of the planet where most people live," said CCS Insight analyst John Jackson. "The bad news is that these results have little or no bearing on what remains true, and that is, RIM still needs to execute on BB10."

In an attempt to create a buzz, Chief Executive Thorsten Heins gave a preview of the new smartphone and its features to app developers at an event on Tuesday in San Jose, California.

Analysts said RIM struck the right chords at the event but cautioned that it is hard to evaluate how well the BB10 devices will work in real world conditions until they are on the market.

"We are now just a few months away from our launch and our teams are working night and day to meet the expectations we have of ourselves," said Heins on a conference call after the results were released on Thursday.

Heins said RIM executives have met with dozens of carriers in more than 16 countries in the last few weeks and the feedback on the new devices so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

QUARTERLY RESULTS

Shipments of BlackBerry smartphones were 7.4 million in the quarter, easily outpacing Wall Street's expectation of about 6.9 million.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company reported a net loss of $235 million, or 45 cents a share, in its fiscal second quarter. That compared with a profit of $329 million, or 63 cents, in the same period a year earlier.

Excluding one-time restructuring-related items, the loss came in at $142 million, or 27 cents a share, in the quarter just ended.

Revenue rose to $2.9 billion, a gain of 2 percent from the fiscal first quarter, but the latest result was down about 30 percent from the same period a year earlier.

Analysts, on average, had expected RIM to report a loss of 46 cents a share, on revenues of $2.5 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

"You still have revenue declining 31 percent on a year-over-year basis but it's certainly not the train wreck that a lot of people feared," said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis. "They live to fight another day."

CASH PILE

RIM also increased its cash to about $2.3 billion from $2.2 billion in the fiscal first quarter.

"In the last two quarters RIM has done a really good job on collecting on receivables," said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu, but he cautioned that this was not sustainable over the long run and RIM would have to return to a profitable business model for it to thrive once again.

While RIM has warned that it faces another operating loss in its fiscal third quarter, it expects its cash position to remain stable unless it is hit by restructuring charges.

Wu believes that the company can achieve this by continuing to draw down on its receivables, which stood just shy of $2.2 billion as of Sept 1.

RIM's chief financial officer said the company had entered into a new secured credit facility of $500 million which expires in September 2013, and in the first half RIM realized some $350 million of the up to $1 billion in cost savings it hopes to achieve in fiscal 2013, which ends on March 2 of next year.

The company, which earlier this year said it would cut about 5,000 jobs to save money, said it has already laid off roughly 2,500 workers.

"It's still bad, but it's a much smaller disaster than expected," said Wu. "These stocks all trade on expectations. Expectations were really low, and they were able to beat that."

RIM's U.S.-listed shares surged 20 percent to $8.55 in trade after the closing bell on Thursday.

(Additional reporting by Alastair Sharp, Allison Martell and Cameron French; Editing by Frank McGurty and Edmund Klamann)

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KUALA LUMPUR | Thu Sep 27, 2012 6:05am EDT

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia's Tune Group, a financial services-to-discount hotel conglomerate owned by AirAsia Bhd's founders, said it plans to list its insurance arm in a move to fund the company's expansion overseas.

Tony Fernandes and Kamarudin Meranun, who in 1993 founded Asia's biggest budget carrier, plan to list Tune Insurance Malaysia in a move that comes hot on the heels of other planned initial public offerings by AirAsia.

These include listings by AirAsia's long haul arm AirAsia X and its Indonesian unit.

"Tune Insurance is definitely going to be the first candidate to go public under the Tune brand. As to when, we are looking at it but no news as of yet," Fernandes told reporters on Thursday in the Malaysian capital.

"It has a good business, it is in a fantastic part of the world, which is under insured. We are looking at acquisitions in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines," he said in reference to Southeast Asia.

It was not immediately clear how much the IPO intended to raise and where the company would list.

Tune Group has been expanding its insurance business in preparation for the listing.

In April, Tune Group bought a 77.9 percent stake for 153.13 million ringgit ($49.69 million) in Oriental Capital Assurance Bhd, in a move to beef up its financial services division and allow it to underwrite its insurance businesses.

Tune Group now owns some 83 percent in Tune Insurance, according to its chief executive officer Peter Miller. It could not be immediately ascertained who owned the remaining stake. ($1 = 3.0820 Malaysian ringgits)

(Reporting by Yantoultra Ngui and Anuradha Raghu; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress in the ''Innocence of Muslims'', an anti-Islam movie that has spawned violent protests across the Muslim world, attends a news conference outside her attorney's office after a court hearing in Los Angeles, California September 20, 2012.

LOS ANGELES | Thu Sep 27, 2012 3:58pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An actress who said she was duped into appearing in an anti-Islam film that stoked violent protests across the Muslim world took her legal bid to federal court on Wednesday in a renewed effort to force it off YouTube.

The lawsuit filed by Cindy Lee Garcia names the popular online video site YouTube and its parent company Google Inc. as defendants, along with the Egyptian-American Coptic Christian from California believed to be behind the making of the film.

Last week, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge denied Garcia's request for a temporary restraining order that would have required YouTube to stop posting the crudely made 13-minute video, finding the actress was unlikely to prevail on the merits of her case in state court.

As in her previous lawsuit, Garcia accused the purported filmmaker of fraud, libel and unfair business practices. But her federal lawsuit also asserts a copyright claim to her performance in the video, titled "The Innocence of Muslims."

Garcia's case was the first known civil litigation stemming from the video, billed as a film trailer, which depicts the Prophet Mohammad as a fool and a sexual deviant. The clip sparked a torrent of anti-American unrest in Egypt, Libya and dozens of other Muslim countries over the past two weeks.

The outbreak of violence coincided with an attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

U.S. and other foreign embassies were also stormed in various cities across the Middle East, Asia and Africa. For many Muslims, any depiction of the prophet is considered blasphemous.

Google has refused to remove the film from YouTube, despite pressure from the White House and others to take it down, though the company has blocked the trailer in Egypt, Libya and other Muslim countries.

COPYRIGHT ISSUE

Garcia's lawyer argued in court last week that her client, who is from Bakersfield, California, has suffered harm similar to a person whose privacy is violated by the unauthorized release of a sex tape.

But Google's attorneys said that the rights of an actor do not protect that person from how a film is perceived.

In her latest lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Santa Clara, California, Garcia says that Google is infringing on the copyright she holds to her performance in the film by distributing the video without her approval via YouTube.

Garcia's lawsuit identifies Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, a Los Angeles-area Coptic man who has served time in federal prison for bank fraud, as the film's producer.

On Saturday, a Pakistani cleric offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who killed the film's maker. Garcia said in her lawsuit that an Egyptian cleric had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against anyone who served as a director, producer or actor in the video.

According to Garcia, Nakoula operated under the assumed name of Sam Bacile, misleading her and other actors into appearing in a film they believed was an adventure drama called "Desert Warrior."

After the fact, however, she learned that some of her lines spoken in the production had been dubbed over.

The alteration made it look like Garcia "voluntarily performed in a hateful, anti-Islamic production," the lawsuit says, adding that she has "been subjected to credible death threats and is in fear for her life and the life and safety of anyone associated with her."

Nakoula has been in hiding for much of the past two weeks after being questioned by federal authorities looking into whether he may have violated terms of his probation in the making or promotion of the video.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman)

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Author J.K Rowling poses for photos with her certificate after being presented with the Freedom of the City of London, at Mansion House, central London May 8, 2012.

NEW YORK/LONDON | Wed Sep 26, 2012 4:09pm EDT

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - Harry's still finished, but don't rule out any return to the Potter world.

Although J.K. Rowling's first novel tailored for adults is being released this week, she says her next book will likely be a children's book, and in the future she may pen a story related to the Harry Potter universe.

"I think it very likely that the next thing I publish will be for kids. I have a children's book that I really like, it's for slightly younger children than the Potter books," Rowling told the BBC in a television interview broadcast on Wednesday.

In one of a handful of appearances to promote "The Casual Vacancy," which hits bookstores worldwide on Thursday, Rowling told the BBC: "Truly, where Harry's story is concerned, I'm done.

Yet the 47-year-old best-selling British author did not rule out a Potter spin-off, while she was adamant it would never be for commercial reasons. The seven "Harry Potter" books have sold more than 450 million books worldwide.

"I have always left the door ajar because I'm not that cruel. If I had a fabulous idea that came out of that world, because I loved writing it, I would do it," she told the BBC.

"But I've got to have a great idea, I don't want to go mechanically into that world and pick up odds and ends and glue them together and say 'Here we go, we can sell this'. It would make a mockery of what those books were to me."

Were that great idea to come, she said: "I probably would do it. I'm very averse to the prequel/sequel idea. I've never seen it work well in either literature or film. That's a personal preference."

Rowling, who started her writing career as a financially struggling, single mother, said while there was clearly "an appetite for eight, nine, ten," Potter novels, she knew she only had enough plot for seven books about Harry's magical adventures.

"To go further would have been money for old rope. Couldn't do it. And that's largely why I slapped on that epilogue (in the final "Harry Potter" novel). (It) says he's leading a quiet life, and he's earned it. He's done," she said of the boy wizard.

POTTER DIRECTOR'S CUT, TEEN OCD

Rowling said she would have liked more time to work on some of the books.

"I had to write on the run and there were times when it was really tough. And I read them, and I think 'Oh God, maybe I'll go back and do a director's cut". I don't know," she said in BBC interview.

"But you know what?" she added. "I'm proud I was writing under the conditions under which I was writing. No one will ever know how tough it was at times."

In a separate interview with ABC's "Nightline", Rowling revealed that she had signs of obsessive-compulsive behavior when she was a teenager, and that one of the characters in "The Casual Vacancy" was drawn from her own experiences.

"These are things I know from the inside," she said in the interview, some of which was aired on "Good Morning America" on Wednesday. "When I was in my teens, I had issues with OCD ... checking things, it's very common, double checking, triple checking, it's an anxiety disorder."

Rowling has spoken openly in the past about dealing with depression, which she estimated she had not had to deal with for more than a decade.

She credited Harry Potter with helping. "Forget the money," she said; it gave her self-respect. "Harry gave me a job that I loved to do more than anything else," she told ABC.

(Additional reporting by Mike Collett-White in London, editing by Jill Serjeant and Gunna Dickson)

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