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U.S. markets swing up Friday

NEW YORK, June 13 (UPI) -- U.S. stock indexes held to gains at the close Friday, enough to put a gain of 0.8 percent in the Dow Jones industrial average for the week.

Friday's upswing was attributed to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report that said core price inflation, which exclude food and energy, was limited to a 0.2 percent gain in May.

The Dow Jones industrial average gained 165.77 points Friday to 12,307.35, up 1.37 percent. The Standard and Poor's 500 index rose 20.16 points to 1,360.03, up 1.5 percent. The Nasdaq composite index rose 2.09 percent to 2,454.50, up 50.15 points.

On the New York Stock Exchange, 2,271 stocks advanced and 845 declined on a volume of 1.224 billion shares traded.

The 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell 11/32 to yield 4.261 percent.

The dollar gained. The euro traded at $1.5372 from Thursday's $1.5421, while the dollar traded at 108.20 yen from Thursday's 107.93 yen.

In Tokyo, the Nikkei index gained 85.13 points to 13,973.73, up 0.61 percent.

In London, the FTSE 100 index gained 13.80 to 5,804.30, up 0.24 percent.

Wheat sneaks back onto small farms

WASHINGTON, June 13 (UPI) -- High prices for wheat have caught the attention of New England farmers with relatively small plots of land, agricultural experts said.

In states where wheat has not been a major player in the agricultural scene for decades, farmers are looking for niche markets, such as organic bakeries, to supply buyers, The Christian Science Monitor reported Friday.

"It's nice to finally get a fair return for what you're doing," Jack Lazor, a Vermont dairy farmer said.

Lazor, who grows organic wheat, doubled his wheat planting to 30 acres this year.

Wheat prices hit a record $24 per bushel in February, prompting a boost of 11 percent in the country's wheat acreage to 63.8 million acres and the 6.6 million new acres planted helped drop prices down to earth.

Nevertheless, "there had been a shift away from wheat in the long term," Jim MacDonald, a U.S. Department of Agriculture productivity specialist told the paper. "But with the prices, I think a lot more people have turned that around in the last couple of years."

Video console sales unaffected by big game

NEW YORK, June 13 (UPI) -- Grand Theft Auto IV sales, at 4.2 million copies since its April release, have yet to boost sales of the video game platforms that support it, analysts said.

"The continued success of GTA IV is not translating into big hardware sales for the PS3 or the 360," NPD Group analyst Anita Frazier told The New York Times.

Combined sales of the two platforms that run versions of Grand Theft Auto IV, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, were 396,000, about half the sales of the Nintendo Wii, although that platform has yet to introduce a compatible version of the game, the newspaper said.

In May, sales of the Wii reached 675,000, while 209,000 PlayStation 3s and 187,000 Xbox 360s were sold.

Hardware, software and accessory sales for video games exceed $6.6 billion so far this year, on track to reach about $22 billion by years' end, industry analysts said.

Lower gas prices would take several steps

WASHINGTON, June 13 (UPI) -- Trimming the price of U.S. gasoline would take a series of steps, some making only minor contributions to lowering the price, various energy experts said.

Pumping more oil would help on the supply side, but have limited impact on prices and come at an environmental price, USA Today reported Friday.

For example, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would cut prices by 1 cent to 3.5 cents per gallon and the savings wouldn't be realized until 2027, the newspaper reported.

On the demand side, slowing to increase mileage is one solution. So is doubling ethanol mandates, which would lower gas consumption and double the 10-cents-per-gallon savings consumers realize through ethanol, experts said.

Building new refineries could help trim the 21-cents-per-gallon cost of processing oil, the USA Today said.

A popular solution is to attack the producer: Oil companies or exporting nations, the newspaper said. But this would have minimal impact on prices, USA Today reported.