DealBook: Obama’s Nominee for S.E.C. Tries to Allay Skepticism

Mary Jo White’s path to the Securities and Exchange Commission has reached a crucial juncture: the Congressional charm campaign.

Lawmakers are scrutinizing Ms. White ahead of her Senate confirmation hearing, raising questions about the former prosecutor’s lack of regulatory experience and the challenge of policing Wall Street firms she recently defended in private practice. But Ms. White is seeking to quell concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

She recently scheduled meetings with Senate Banking Committee members, who must clear her nomination, and answered a 20-page boilerplate questionnaire detailing her qualifications, according to a copy provided to The New York Times. The document sheds new light on her list of Wall Street clients, including little-known work performed for HSBC’s former chief executive. It also describes her ties to New York Democratic causes and laurels she earned both as a defense lawyer and federal prosecutor.

The questionnaire, created by the banking committee, focused significant attention on her movement through the revolving door between government service and private practice, a concern that has loomed since President Obama nominated Ms. White in January.

“As a government official, I believe I have an established track record and the reputation of being tough, but fair,” she said in the document.

Ms. White also offered a previously undisclosed concession, vowing “as far as can be foreseen,” never to return to Debevoise & Plimpton, where she had built a lucrative legal practice. To avert potential conflicts stemming from her work on behalf of Wall Street giants, Ms. White had already agreed to recuse herself for one year from most matters that involve former clients.

While Ms. White’s nomination is expected to sail through the committee before receiving full Senate approval, four Congressional officials who spoke anonymously warned that some Democrats have lingering reservations.

The Democrats note that her husband, John W. White, is co-chairman of the corporate governance practice at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where he represents many of the companies that the S.E.C. regulates. They also question whether Ms. White’s recusals, even if well-intentioned, could cripple her ability to run the agency.

In a meeting on Tuesday with Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, Ms. White did little to alleviate the fears.

“Senator Brown respects Ms. White’s credentials and experience, but is concerned with Washington’s long-held bias toward Wall Street,” his spokeswoman, Meghan Dubyak, said in a statement. “He pushed Ms. White,” to explain “whether her previous employment or her spouse’s current employment could cause her to recuse herself from key business facing the S.E.C.” The agency has already fallen behind in writing dozens of new rules for Wall Street.

Ms. White’s supporters counter that, before the White House announced the appointment, the Office of Government Ethics vetted her disclosures. The nonpartisan officials concluded that, even with her recusals, Ms. White could effectively run the agency.

Her supporters also trumpet her long tenure as a tenacious prosecutor. During stints as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn and as the first woman United States attorney in Manhattan, she helped oversee the prosecution of the crime figure John Gotti and directed the case against those responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The cases won her praise from several lawmakers.

Ms. White still has time to win over remaining skeptics. Her confirmation hearing is not expected until the week of March 11, Congressional officials briefed on the matter said.

Until then, Ms. White is blitzing through the halls of Congress, a routine practice for nominees. She began her charm offensive at the top of the banking committee’s roster, visiting this month with the Democratic chairman, Senator Tim Johnson, of South Dakota. A Congressional official briefed on the matter said Ms. White performed well at the gathering, and no major issues arose.

In the next round of meetings, she will face off with a more liberal arm of the committee known to scrutinize nominees. After meeting Mr. Brown, Ms. White is scheduled to see Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon. She also will meet Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who is an outspoken critic of Wall Street, Ms. Warren’s office confirmed on Tuesday.

Even if Ms. White fails to satisfy lawmakers’ concerns, the meetings are an important step in clearing the way for her appointment.

“Senators will have a chance to size Mary Jo up, and I believe will come away with a great sense of comfort that she’s a candidate of true quality,” said Harvey Pitt, who passed through the confirmation process in 2001 to lead the S.E.C.

He noted that additional disclosures could bolster her candidacy. “I do think she will need to provide a level of comfort to the committee that she is aware of the issue, has a definitive plan for navigating through the potential conflict issues, and will be completely open about when she has a potential recusal issue, and how she has handled it,” he said.

Ms. White, a political independent, assured lawmakers in her questionnaire that she was “completely independent of political or personal influences.” She did disclose, however, $13,000 in campaign donations to Democratic candidates. She also served on the campaign committee of a Democrat who had run for New York attorney general.

Her ties to Debevoise — and its clients — are more significant; she represented JPMorgan Chase, UBS and Michael Geoghegan, the former head of HSBC.

Ms. White, 65, said this month said that she would retire from Debevoise after taking over the S.E.C. and would forgo the firm’s typical retirement perks: office space and a free BlackBerry. She also will sever financial ties to the firm during her term at the S.E.C., taking an upfront lump-sum retirement payment rather than collecting a monthly installment of $42,500.

Her husband has also offered concessions. He agreed to convert his partnership at Cravath, Swaine & Moore from equity to nonequity status and promised not to “communicate directly” with the S.E.C. about rule-making. Ms. White will not participate in a matter with a direct effect on his compensation.

In line with a standard move for federal appointees, Ms. White further agreed to recuse herself for one year from voting on enforcement cases involving Debevoise clients. There are limitations to the policy, though, in case it is “in the public interest” and a “reasonable” person would not object.

Some lawmakers dismiss questions about her potential conflicts, but still question her mastery of regulatory minutiae. While Ms. White is a skilled litigator, she lacks experience in financial rule-writing, unlike a predecessor, Mary Schapiro, a lifelong regulator who ran the S.E.C. for nearly four years.

In her questionnaire, Ms. White highlighted her role as a director of the Nasdaq exchange and other experiences that she said gave her “a firm grounding” in securities laws.

She also, inadvertently, drew a connection to Ms. Schapiro. Like Ms. Schapiro, Ms. White is an animal lover, currently serving as a board member of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

She agreed to step down from the board once she is sworn in at the S.E.C.

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/27/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Nominee For S.E.C. Tries to Allay Skepticism.

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Scientist at Work Blog: Getting to the Bottom of It All

Michael Becker, a doctoral student at McGill University, was a scientific diver on an expedition to Lake Untersee in Antarctica.

If you’re going where there’s no air to breathe, you better be organized.

Any kind of underwater diving involves process for that very reason. There’s the early-morning wake-up, the weather check, the gear check (masks, fins, regulators … check). And then there’s the dive site approach – whether you’re walking in from the shore or taking a boat to some far forgotten reef.

Diving Lake Untersee is just like that – except in Antarctica we get to our dive site by snowmobile.  And Untersee ratchets up the workload because it’s remote, technical and cold.

To even get into the lake is a feat of accomplishment and a trick of clever engineering. Just the thought of trying to chip a dive hole through 10-foot thick lake ice could give you tendinitis long before you get your feet wet.

During the early days of Antarctic diving in the late-1970s, the expedition leader Dale Andersen and a few clever people working in the Dry Valley region of Antarctica came up with an ingenious way of getting through the ice. They modified an industrial-strength steam cleaner to circulate boiling hot liquid through a closed-circuit piece of copper tubing. All a would-be diver had to do was place the tubing inside a small hole drilled in the ice and wait for magic to happen as the hole slowly formed over two days.

But even when the hole is melted there’s still a lot to do before getting into the water.

Dive Days

We start with a hearty breakfast of dehydrated granola — a meal that I hope to never see again. After breakfast, the diver gets ready by sorting the gear and putting on the dry suit while the first tender drives out by snowmobile to chip out any refrozen ice from the dive hole.

The second snowmobile carries the other dive tender and the diver (already in their dry suit) to the hole. The diver sits on the ice platform and is dressed with weights, tank, gloves, and is tied in to the all-important safety line.

This line is the life tether. It is fed out and taken in as needed. That way the surface assistants have a sense of how far away the diver is, and the diver knows where to return. In the early days, sequences of line pulls would be used to communicate simple commands like an early Morse code for dive messages. Nowadays, the dive line connects a surface communication box to the diver’s facemask. Diver and tender are easily able to grumble back and forth to each other with all the benefits of modern technology.

Once the diver’s mask is on they slide in, do the dive, come back to the hole and are yanked out. If the diver still has a pulse there is applause all around and we go back to celebrate with a dinner of dehydrated food.

Safety is paramount here and there is no margin of error. The nearest recompression chamber for a dive injury is 2,000 miles away in Cape Town. There are no helicopters for rescue and any serious injury or accident could mean death.

We follow all this protocol and process in pursuit of one thing – studying microbial communities locked away from human history.

The Science Down There

Dale and I have done a number of dives to collect data and samples on the conical stromatolites found at the bottom of Lake Untersee.  Dale has surfaced several times with sediment cores of the lake’s bottom. These cores tell us about the history of the lake and its resident organisms. By looking at cross-sections of the cores, we can see that the microbial communities grow over the years in layers known as laminations. These laminae show us a chronosequence of events, alternating between mineral deposition and organic layer growth. These mineral deposits must come from somewhere as the lake surface is covered in ice. It’s thought that the occasional influx of silt from nearby glaciers provides the sediment that the cyanobacteria then recolonize.

But there’s more than just grabbing a sample and returning to the surface – the lake environment needs to be described in precise detail.

These cyanobacteria are photosynthetic and dependent on light to create their energy. One of my dives was spent swimming transects back and forth directly underneath the 10-foot ice ceiling holding a light meter. This gives us an idea of the amount of energy that is available for photosynthesis beneath the lake. The ice cover isn’t completely uniform; there are dark areas intermingled with sections of bright windows. Also, since light drops off with depth, not all life within the lake is receiving the same amount of energy.

It’s not just these cyanobacterial mats that thrive in Lake Untersee.

There is a diverse world of bacteria and viruses that inhabit their own unique sections of the water column all the way from the lake surface to over 500 feet below. These areas are far beyond our range capacity as scientific divers, and so we must rely on a different technique to sample these distant creatures.

Our two Russian scientists, Vladimir Akimov and Valery Galchenko from the Winogradsky Institute of Microbiology, are microbiologists that specialize in microbial life in extreme environments. Their work has taken them from remote regions of Yakutia, Russia, studying heat-loving extremophiles, to the even more remote Lake Untersee to study the isolated bacteria inhabiting this lake.

Different communities of bacteria thrive according to the changing abiotic conditions, as you get deeper in the lake’s water column.  These environments are mapped out by lowering sensors to measure conductivity, temperature, and depth, or CTD, from the lake’s surface down to around 330 feet – our maximum sample depth.

Vladimir and Valery then lower their sampler to different points within the water column and capture about a gallon of water. These samples are brought back to camp, and the two spend hour after waking hour filtering the water to concentrate samples of both bacteria and viruses. There’s no human health concern with these viruses – they are specific to the bacteria in the lake, and must exist in some sort of equilibrium with the lake life.

One of the areas that Vladimir and Valery are particularly interested is a section of the lake at 256 feet. At this depth, the lake chemistry changes quite a bit – it becomes anoxic, meaning without oxygen. The organisms that thrive in this section have no need for oxygen in their metabolic processes. They use sulfur instead.

From a practical perspective, that means the samples reek. Rich in hydrogen sulfide, they smell like sour, rotten eggs. But by studying this transition from the clear, oxygen-rich water above to the dark, oxygen-poor water below we can get a sense of the two different worlds experienced by bacteria within the same lake.

What we bring up from the depths of Lake Untersee is only the beginning of a long scientific process. All these samples must be carried back to the civilized world, processed and analyzed over the next several months. Only then we will be able to more fully understand the ecosystem of Lake Untersee, and only then will we fully understand the significance of what we’re seeing.

And that’s what makes all this time, effort, and risk worth it. Diving Untersee has been an incredible experience, but without the questions driving us forward, it would be a lot to gamble for a good view.

Follow Michael on Twitter: @Michael__Becker or on his blog, “The Dry Valleys.”

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Dorothy Hamill and Andy Dick among 'Dancing' stars

NEW YORK (AP) — A gold-medal figure skater, a country music legend and a kooky comedian are stepping their way onto "Dancing With the Stars."

ABC says Dorothy Hamill, Wynona Judd and Andy Dick are among 11 contenders for the mirrored ball on the new season of the celebrity dance competition.

Other famous faces in the show's 16th edition include standup comic and actor D.L. Hughley, Baltimore Ravens football player Jacoby Jones and former "American Idol" contestant Kellie Pickler.

Also on hand will be former welterweight boxing champ Victor Ortiz, "General Hospital" star Ingo Rademacher, actress-singer Zendaya Coleman and Lisa Vanderpump from "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," as well as Olympic gold-medal gymnast Aly Raisman.

The new "Dancing With the Stars" season kicks off on ABC with a two-hour premiere on March 18.

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Recipes for Health: Roasted Carrots and Scallions — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

I bought incredibly sweet, thick red scallions and multicolored bunches of carrots from a farmer at my market and roasted them with fresh thyme. Then I sprinkled on some crushed toasted hazelnuts, which contributed a nice crunchy texture and nutty finish to the dish. If you have a bottle of hazelnut oil or walnut oil on hand, a small drizzle just before serving is a welcome touch.

1 ounce hazelnuts (about 1/4 cup)

1 pound carrots, preferably young small carrots, any color (but a mix is nice)

1 bunch white or purple spring onions or scallions

Salt and freshly ground pepper

2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Optional: a drizzle of hazelnut oil or walnut oil for serving

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Place the hazelnuts on a baking sheet and roast for 8 to 10 minutes, until they smell toasty and they are golden all the way through (cut one in half to check). Remove from the oven and turn up the heat to 425 degrees.

2. Immediately wrap the hazelnuts in a clean, dry dish towel. Rub them in the towel to remove the skins. Then place the skinned hazelnuts in a plastic bag or, if you have one, a disposable pastry bag and set on your work table in one layer. Use a rolling pin to crush the nuts by rolling over them with the pin. Set aside.

3. Line a sheet pan with parchment or oil a baking dish large enough to fit all of the vegetables in a single layer. If the carrots are small, just peel and trim the tops and bottoms. If they are medium-sized, peel, cut in half and cut into 4-inch lengths. Quarter large carrots and cut into 4-inch lengths. Trim the root ends and greens from the spring onions or scallions. If they are bulbous, cut them in half. Season with salt and pepper, add the thyme and olive oil and toss well, either directly on the pan or in the dish or in a bowl. Spread in an even layer in the baking dish or on the baking sheet.

4. Roast in the oven for 20 to 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes. The onions may be done after 10 minutes – they should be soft and lightly browned. Remove them from the pan if they are and hold on a plate. When the carrots and onions are tender and browned in places, remove from the oven. Add the onions back into the mix if you removed them and toss together. Sprinkle on the toasted ground hazelnuts, drizzle on the optional nut oil, and serve.

Yield: Serves 4

Advance preparation: The vegetables can hold for a few hours once roasted; cover and reheat in a medium oven.

Nutritional information per serving: 171 calories; 11 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 8 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 16 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams dietary fiber; 89 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 2 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Wall Street Sheds Morning Gains

After beginning the day with a partial rebound from Monday’s steep drop, stocks on Wall Street gave up some of their gains Tuesday in the course of Congressional testimony by Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman.

In afternoon trading, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was up 0.1 percent, while the Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.6 percent. The Nasdaq composite index was down 0.2 percent.

In his prepared testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, Mr. Bernanke defended the Fed’s bond-buying program and said the economy was growing at a “moderate if somewhat uneven pace.” Senators were questioning him on the prospects for a global currency war and the potential economic effects of the latest budget impasse in Congress.

The major indexes fell more than 1 percent on Monday, with the S.&P. 500 recording its biggest daily drop since November. The falloff came as investors fretted that if Italy does not undertake reforms, the euro zone could once again be destabilized. The Euro Stoxx 50 index was off more than 3 percent in late trading Tuesday.

Groups in Italy opposed to economic reforms posted a strong showing in the recent election, resulting in a political deadlock with a comedian’s protest party leading the poll and no group securing a clear majority in Parliament.

“We’ve gone to an environment of political stability to instability, and until we get some type of clarity over who is in charge, which could take days, the market will have renewed concerns,” said Art Hogan, managing director of Lazard Capital Markets in New York.

Still, market participants speculated that a coalition government would eventually emerge in Italy and ease worries about a new euro zone crisis.

The early market gains suggested the recent trend of investors buying on dips would continue. Last week, concerns that the Federal Reserve might roll back its stimulus efforts earlier than expected prompted a sharp two-day decline, though equities recovered most of the lost ground by the end of the week.

“Investors are taking advantage of the drop, and once some kind of coalition government is formed, most of our concerns will be put to rest,” Mr. Hogan said.

Home Depot reported adjusted earnings and sales that beat expectations, sending shares up more than 5 percent.

Macy’s rose 3.1 percent after stating it expected full-year earnings to be above analysts’ forecasts because of strong sales in the holiday period.

For the benchmark S.&P. 500, 1,500 points will be watched as a key benchmark after the index closed below it on Monday for the first time since Feb. 4, with selling accelerating after falling below it. An inability to break back above it could portend further losses.

Financial shares may be among the most volatile, as that sector is closely tied to the pace of global economic growth. Morgan Stanley was one of the top percentage losers on the S.&P. on Monday, dropping more than 6 percent on concerns about the company’s exposure to European debt. It was up 0.4 percent.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 26, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the Senate panel before which Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, was testifying Tuesday. It was the Banking Committee, not the Finance Committee.

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Syria Willing to Talk With Armed Opponents, Foreign Minister Says

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria’s government is willing to hold talks with members of the armed opposition on ending the country’s nearly two-year-old civil war, the Syrian foreign minister said on Monday.

It was the first time that a high-ranking Syrian official signaled that the government was open to talking with Syrian rebels who have taken up weapons against the armed forces. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, called in January for talks to resolve the conflict, but appeared to rule out dialogue with Syrians who were armed.

The new statement came as two opposition figures said that the main Syrian opposition leader, Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, had already met quietly on at least one recent occasion with a prominent Syrian businessman with close ties to Mr. Assad, apparently in an effort to explore channels for discussion.

Both sides are under pressure from their international backers to explore ways to end the fighting that threatens to destroy Syria and spread conflict beyond its borders.

But Syrian opposition leaders gave conflicting signals on Monday on the future of any talks with members of Mr. Assad’s government.

The rebels’ top military leader, Gen. Selim Idriss, seemed to harden the opposition’s position, ruling out any negotiations until after Mr. Assad steps down — a precondition the Syrian government and its main international backer, Russia, reject. But Sheik Khatib said his offer to talk with members of the government without “blood on their hands” remained on the table, although he criticized what he called the Syrian government’s slowness to respond.

Russia declared last week that it would work with the Arab League to bring about direct talks between the government and the rebels, and Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, was meeting in Moscow on Monday with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov.

“We are ready for a dialogue with anyone who’s willing,” Mr. Moallem said ahead of the meetings, Russian news agencies reported. “Even with those who carry arms.”

It was unclear whether the Syrian government would ask rebels to lay down arms before such talks. The rebels have said before that they will reject such a precondition.

General Idriss, the leader of the Free Syrian Army, the main rebel fighter group, said that to the contrary, a cessation of violence by the government was “the bottom line” for rebels ahead of any talks. In remarks to Al-Arabyia, a Saudi-backed news Web site, General Idriss also said, “There needs to be a clear decision on the resignation of the head of the criminal gang Bashar Assad, and for those who participated in the killing of the Syrian people to be put on trial.”

The main opposition group, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, led by Sheik Khatib, had long insisted on Mr. Assad’s departure as a precondition for talks, but on Jan. 30, Sheik Khatib floated the idea of negotiations with members of the government not directly involved in the bloody crackdown.

On Friday after meetings in Cairo, the coalition adopted a written framework for talks that stopped short of calling for Mr. Assad to step down. It called for Mr. Assad and others involved in the killing to be “held accountable for their crimes” and declaring that they “will not be a part of this political solution.”

But many in the coalition remain skeptical of talks with the government and see them as a way for Mr. Assad to buy time, and are frustrated that the rebels are under pressure to compromise amid what they see as insufficient international support.

On Monday, Samir Nachar, a member of the coalition, said that Sheik Khatib had met in the past week with Muhammad Hamsho, a prominent Syrian businessman who is close to Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother who leads the army’s feared Fourth Division, and a frontman for many Assad family enterprises.

News of the meeting, which surfaced in the London-based pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, prompted a new round of criticism in some opposition quarters of Sheik Khatib. The newspaper quoted Faiek al-Meer, a member of the banned opposition Democratic People’s Party, as saying that Sheik Khatib had met with Mr. Hamsho without telling other coalition members.

Mr. Nachar said that Sheik Khatib had briefed him and other coalition members on the recent meeting, which he said had been initiated by Mr. Hamsho.

“Hamsho asked to meet Moaz al-Khatib and the latter agreed,” Mr. Nachar said in an interview. “The meeting did take place, yes. Al-Khatib was straightforward about it place but he refrained from going into details.”

Mr. Hamsho is one of several Syrian figures on whom the United States Treasury Department has imposed sanctions since Mr. Assad’s harsh crackdown on a peaceful protest movement that began in March 2011 and has since evolved into a civil war.

“Muhammad Hamsho earned his fortune through his connections to regime insiders, and during the current unrest, he has cast his lot with Bashar al-Asad, Mahir al-Asad and others responsible for the Syrian government’s violence and intimidation against the Syrian people,” David S. Cohen, under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement in August 2011.

Sheik Khatib did not directly address the issue, but posted a message on his personal Facebook page cautioning against rumors.

Sheik Khatib told reporters in Cairo that he had not had any contacts with the Syrian government about potential meetings, and did not immediately respond to the offer from the Syrian foreign minister. He said that he would postpone a planned visit to Moscow “until we see how things develop,” The Associated Press reported.

He added, “We are always open to initiatives that stop the killing and destruction but the regime rejected the simplest of humanitarian conditions. We have asked that the regime start by releasing women prisoners and there was no response,” he said. “This regime must understand that the Syrian people do not want it anymore.”

Hania Mourtada contributed reporting.

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The Onion apologizes for offensive actress tweet

NEW YORK (AP) — The Onion is apologizing for calling the 9-year-old star of "Beasts of the Southern Wild" a vulgar and offensive name on Twitter, an attack that led to a firestorm online.

The satirical newspaper on Sunday referred to Quvenzhane Wallis with an expletive intended to denigrate women. The Onion was lambasted overnight and asked for forgiveness Monday.

"It was crude and offensive — not to mention inconsistent with The Onion's commitment to parody and satire, however biting," The Onion CEO Steve Hannah wrote on Facebook. "No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire."

Hannah said the offensive tweet was taken down within an hour and the newspaper has "instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures" to ensure it will never happen again. Those responsible would be disciplined, he added.

"Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry."

A message sent to Quvenzhane's representative seeking comment wasn't immediately returned Monday.

The Onion's original tweet brought some calls for the fake new organization to publicly identify the writer of the tweet, vows to refuse to retweet its material, and requests from outraged consumers to email The Onion to complain.

Oscar host Seth MacFarlane also joked about the young star during the ceremony. Some found the quip offensive, albeit not to the degree of the outrage over The Onion's tweet. MacFarlane joked that "it'll be 16 years before she's too old for" George Clooney.

It wasn't the first time The Onion has gotten into hot water for trying to push its humor. Last year, the site attracting public ire for an image that showed an airliner about to crash into Chicago's Willis Tower, the tallest building in the country.

And the year before, Washington Capitol Police released a statement refuting tweets and an article claiming members of Congress had taken a group of schoolchildren hostage. It included a doctored picture of Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner holding a gun to a child's head.

The Chicago-based publication was founded in 1988 by two students in Madison from the University of Wisconsin. Starting as a local college newspaper, it became a national comedy institution and went online in 1996, and has since developed a television news parody.

The publication is distributed weekly in cities, but it has also embraced Twitter and has an app for the iPad and other tablets. It says it averages 40 million page views and roughly 7.5 million unique visitors per month.

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Well: Ask Well: The Nutrients in Fruits and Veggies

The colorful skin of an apple, grape or tomato is certainly chockfull of nutrients. But by no means are the outer layers of most fruits and vegetables the prime source of their nutrition.

Part of what makes some fruits and vegetables so rich with color – wax and pesticides notwithstanding – are pigments in the skin that have healthful antioxidant properties. Resveratrol, for example, is found in the skin of red grapes and other fruits. But lycopene, one of the pigments that gives tomatoes and bell peppers their deep red color, is distributed throughout.

Indeed, many vitamins and nutrients are found in the skin as well as the flesh. Take apples. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, a large red apple with its skin intact contains about 5 grams of fiber, 13 milligrams of calcium, 239 milligrams of potassium, and 10 milligrams of vitamin C. But remove the skin, and it still contains about 3 grams of fiber, 11 milligrams of calcium, 194 milligrams of potassium, and plenty of its vitamin C and other nutrients.

Another example is the sweet potato. The U.S.D.A. says that a 100-gram serving of sweet potato cooked with its skin contains 2 grams of protein, 3 grams of fiber, and 20 milligrams of vitamin C. But the same sized serving of sweet potato without skin that has been boiled — a process that further leaches away some of its nutrients — still boasts 1.4 grams of protein, 2.5 grams of fiber, and 13 milligrams of vitamin C.

You can lose the skin, in other words, without losing all the benefits.

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DealBook: Japan to Sell $10 Billion Stake in Cigarette Firm

TOKYO – The Japanese government is set to loosen its grip on Japan Tobacco, the world’s third-largest tobacco company, by selling a third of its stake in a sale that will net the country about $10 billion.

The Finance Ministry, which owns just over 50 percent of the former state monopoly, will sell 333 million of its shares in the cigarette manufacturer, according to a company statement issued on Monday.

The deal will be priced next month, from March 11 to 13, the statement said. In the run-up to the sale, Japan Tobacco will buy back up to 250 billion yen ($2.7 billion) of its shares.

Under laws passed in 2011 after a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, proceeds of the sale of Japan Tobacco shares will go toward rebuilding the country’s battered northeast coast. The reconstruction costs have threatened to weigh on Japan’s public finances at a time when public debt is twice the size of its economy.

It is an opportune time for the Japanese government to sell. Japan’s stock market has rallied since mid-November, and Japan Tobacco’s shares have tracked the market’s ascent, climbing 20 percent in the last three months.

Shares in Japan Tobacco closed 1.43 percent higher on Monday, at 2,901 yen, before the planned sale was announced. At that price, the government’s share sale would be valued at roughly 967 billion yen.

Japan has already been reducing its stake and involvement in the cigarette maker, which traces its origins to a Finance Ministry bureau set up in 1898 to create a national tobacco monopoly that lasted until 1985.

Even after the company went public, the Finance Ministry held two-thirds of its shares until 2004, when it reduced its stake to 50.1 percent, or roughly one billion shares. Other investors in Japan Tobacco include Mizuho Trust & Banking, Goldman Sachs and the Children’s Investment Fund Management.

The position in Japan Tobacco has put the government in a controversial position.

The government has squeezed more funds from its smokers, raising the price of a pack of cigarettes about 40 percent in 2010, its single largest increase in tobacco taxes. Still, cigarettes remain relatively cheap in Japan, at about $4.30 a pack.

But antismoking advocates have blamed the Japanese government’s continued ownership of Japan Tobacco – whose brands include Camel, Winston and Mild Seven – for the country’s delay in passing laws to protect nonsmokers from cigarette smoke, for example, and more stringently regulating of tobacco-related marketing.

In a 2012 report, the Washington-based Global Business Group on Health said Japan’s ownership of Japan Tobacco shares “leads to a national conflict of interest, in which the government treats smoking as a behavioral issue rather than a health concern.”

Though smoking rates have started to decline in recent years, the Japanese remain heavy smokers, consuming about 1,841 cigarettes a person, according to data compiled last year by the World Lung Foundation and American Cancer Society. That compared with about 1,000 cigarettes a person in the United States.

To make up for declining cigarette consumption at home, Japan Tobacco has aggressively expanded overseas, acquiring Britain’s Gallaher Group in 2007 for $15 billion, and adding the Silk Cut and Benson & Hedges brands to its portfolio. The company has also made a push into packaged foods and soft drinks, as well as pharmaceuticals.

The government’s sale of Japan Tobacco shares is part of a wider effort to raise money to finance reconstruction from the country’s natural and nuclear disasters in 2011. The government also plans to sell shares of Japan Post Holdings, which runs the country’s postal system and also acts as its biggest bank.

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African Nations and U.N. Offer Plan to Stabilize Congo

NAIROBI, Kenya — Leaders of several African countries and United Nations officials on Sunday announced a new “framework” to tackle instability in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a war-torn country that has become synonymous with suffering and has eluded countless attempts to build a lasting peace over the years.

The new effort calls for greater cooperation between Congo’s neighbors — several of which are suspected of sponsoring violence inside Congo — and political changes by the Congolese government. United Nations and African officials are also proposing a new beefed-up “peace enforcement” brigade of about 2,000 soldiers to go after rebel groups in Congo.

“We can only put an end to recurring cycles of violence through an innovative approach,” said Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, who witnessed the signing of the peace framework in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Sunday.

But many Congo analysts doubt that this agreement, by itself, is going to make much of a difference in a place where myriad rebel groups haunt the hills, massacring civilians and raping women with impunity.

“If not accompanied by the swift appointment of a U.N. envoy and the initiation of a focused peace process between Congo, Rwanda and Uganda led by that U.N. envoy, this framework agreement will end up having no impact on ending the violence in eastern Congo,” said John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, a nonprofit anti-genocide group.

Parts of Congo, especially in the east, along the borders with Uganda and Rwanda, have been mired in various degrees of rebellion and mayhem since the mid-1990s, when rebel groups overthrew Mobutu Sese Seko, a Western-backed dictator who set new standards for wanton corruption. Congo is home to vast mineral riches, and many rebel groups who now control territory sustain their brutality by seizing minerals or taxing the mineral trade.

This fall, a relatively new rebel outfit, called the March 23 Movement, or M23, captured the provincial capital of Goma, though under intense international pressure it soon pulled out. United Nations investigators have accused Rwanda and Uganda of providing covert support to the M23.

The United Nations has more than 17,000 military personnel in Congo, but the peacekeepers have been roundly criticized for being too passive. Several African countries, including Tanzania and Mozambique, have discussed contributing troops to a new intervention brigade to confront and disarm rebel groups in Congo. The plan is for the new brigade to work with the other peacekeepers but engage in combat more often.

But analysts warn that this new brigade, which still needs to be approved by the United Nations Security Council, will be effective only if it is willing to go toe-to-toe with rebel fighters and take heavy casualties — as peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi have been doing in Somalia, with some success. Many observers say the United Nations has so far been unwilling to do this in Congo.

Jason Stearns, the author of a recent, well-regarded book on Congo and a blog that is considered required reading by Congophiles, said there had not been a genuine peace process in Congo since 2006.

“So are we back in a peace process?” Mr. Stearns asks on his blog. “Not really. Or more precisely: We don’t know yet. The agreement is more a statement of principles than a concrete action plan.”

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