DealBook: Capital One Hires Centerview Executive as Finance Chief

Capital One Financial said on Friday that it had hired Stephen S. Crawford, a top executive of the boutique investment bank Centerview Partners, as its chief financial officer.

He will join Capital One on Monday as chief financial officer designate, and on May 24 will formally replace Gary L. Perlin, who will retire. Upon joining the bank, Mr. Crawford will report to its chairman and chief executive, Richard D. Fairbank.

It is a return to the world of big banks for Mr. Crawford, a former chief financial officer and eventually co-president of Morgan Stanley. He made his mark as an adviser to financial institutions, helping orchestrate deals like Fleet Bank’s $49 billion sale to Bank of America.

At Centerview, he advised Capital One on its $9 billion purchase of the American online banking arm of ING.

“I have watched the transformation of Capital One over the last decade and have the greatest admiration for Rich and his strategic vision for the company,” Mr. Crawford said in a statement. “It is an honor to take on this important role and I look forward to continuing to help create a great company and bring value to our investors.”

Mr. Crawford isn’t the only deal-making investment banker to make the jump to the chief financial officer position of a client. In 2011, NBC Universal named Stuart J. Epstein, a top media banker at Morgan Stanley and a longtime adviser to corporate parent Comcast, as its chief financial officer.

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SciTimes Update: Recent Developments in Science and Health News

Michael Probst/Associated Press

Baby hedgehogs in Germany.

Friday in science, clues to owls’ backwardness, fresh dangers to the seas and the launch of a giant kite. Check out these and other headlines from around the Web.

Phil Marino for The New York Times

Physicists monitored data from heavy ion collisions in the control room at Brookhaven National Laboratory particle collider in 2007.

Felix Ordonez/Reuters

A snowy owl.

Hedgehog Bacteria: Sonic the Hedgehog may have a dark side. The Associated Press reports that in the last year, 20 people in the United States were infected, and 1 person died, from “a rare but dangerous” type of salmonella bacteria. All the cases, health officials said, were linked to hedgehogs that were kept as pets.

More Bad News for the Seas: National Geographic reports that buried beneath the waves are rich deposits of “gold, copper, zinc, and other valuable minerals,” and that is attracting the attention of the humans on the land above. Mining the minerals is not easy, but one company has already obtained an extraction contract for the waters off Papua, New Guinea, the magazine says.

Less Money for Science: Lean days are ahead for recipients of federal government contracts, and that knowledge is having an impact on physics research. Scientific American reports that a federal advisory panel has recommended closing a particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

Spinning Heads: Owls are able to do something that parents only dream about: swivel their heads completely around to see what is going on behind them. An illustrator and a physician at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine discovered that they can do so without severing their arteries or preventing blood from reaching their brains because of holes in their neck bones, which may hold air sacks that cushion the movement of the head, and because the vertebral artery is able to expand and hold reservoirs of blood for the brain, a LiveScience video explains.

Setting Sail in Space: A new solar sail, the largest yet, will be launched by NASA in 2014. Looking very much like a gigantic kite, it will eventually reach 2 million miles from Earth (that’s a lot of string!), Popular Science reports. And besides blazing the way for further research of this type, the mission has another purpose: “Sunjammer will be carrying the cremated remains of various individuals, including the creator of Star Trek,Gene Roddenberry, and his wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry. It is not exactly the Enterprise, but Sunjammer will be boldly going where no solar sailing spacecraft has gone before,” Popular Science says.

Video by NASAMarshallTV

Solar Sail Readies for Early Warning Mission

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SciTimes Update: Recent Developments in Science and Health News

Michael Probst/Associated Press

Baby hedgehogs in Germany.

Friday in science, clues to owls’ backwardness, fresh dangers to the seas and the launch of a giant kite. Check out these and other headlines from around the Web.

Phil Marino for The New York Times

Physicists monitored data from heavy ion collisions in the control room at Brookhaven National Laboratory particle collider in 2007.

Felix Ordonez/Reuters

A snowy owl.

Hedgehog Bacteria: Sonic the Hedgehog may have a dark side. The Associated Press reports that in the last year, 20 people in the United States were infected, and 1 person died, from “a rare but dangerous” type of salmonella bacteria. All the cases, health officials said, were linked to hedgehogs that were kept as pets.

More Bad News for the Seas: National Geographic reports that buried beneath the waves are rich deposits of “gold, copper, zinc, and other valuable minerals,” and that is attracting the attention of the humans on the land above. Mining the minerals is not easy, but one company has already obtained an extraction contract for the waters off Papua, New Guinea, the magazine says.

Less Money for Science: Lean days are ahead for recipients of federal government contracts, and that knowledge is having an impact on physics research. Scientific American reports that a federal advisory panel has recommended closing a particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

Spinning Heads: Owls are able to do something that parents only dream about: swivel their heads completely around to see what is going on behind them. An illustrator and a physician at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine discovered that they can do so without severing their arteries or preventing blood from reaching their brains because of holes in their neck bones, which may hold air sacks that cushion the movement of the head, and because the vertebral artery is able to expand and hold reservoirs of blood for the brain, a LiveScience video explains.

Setting Sail in Space: A new solar sail, the largest yet, will be launched by NASA in 2014. Looking very much like a gigantic kite, it will eventually reach 2 million miles from Earth (that’s a lot of string!), Popular Science reports. And besides blazing the way for further research of this type, the mission has another purpose: “Sunjammer will be carrying the cremated remains of various individuals, including the creator of Star Trek,Gene Roddenberry, and his wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry. It is not exactly the Enterprise, but Sunjammer will be boldly going where no solar sailing spacecraft has gone before,” Popular Science says.

Video by NASAMarshallTV

Solar Sail Readies for Early Warning Mission

Read More..

Making Web Sites Completely Addictive

Looking for a real estate agent who loves dogs? You’ll find 314 results for “dog lover” on Corcoran’s redesigned Web site.

Want to know how locals rate the suburb you’re considering moving to? What if during Sunday brunch you get the sudden urge to go apartment hunting? Warburgrealty.com now offers an app that offers up nearby listings based on your current location.

Recognizing that it’s no longer enough just to present real estate listings based on price, location and the number of bedrooms, many New York brokerage firms are redesigning their Web sites as glossy one-stop shops with new tools to help guide buyers and sellers through the deal.

Uncluttered pages with eye-catching full-screen photos that translate well to iPads and other mobile devices are now de rigueur. And on many sites, video walk-throughs of apartments are on the way out. They have made way for tours of neighborhoods and advice pieces on everything from timing the sale of a home to deciding whether it’s better to buy or rent.

Sites are also providing more comprehensive searches that make it easier for buyers to sort through new offerings and connect with agents through social media.

The idea is to give potential clients a reason to cleave to a particular site rather than shop the competition. After all, with apartment data made ubiquitous by sites like Trulia, Zillow, NYTimes.com and more, brokerage firms can no longer rely on listings alone. And while agents are still featured prominently on most sites, they have generally been recast as neighborhood specialists as opposed to the listing gatekeepers they once were.

Online consultants say that what is happening to online brokerage firms is not unlike what happened to brick-and-mortar travel agencies.

“Once all flights were made available on Expedia, Travelocity and Kayak, what’s the travel agent’s unique value proposition?” said Marc Davison, a founder of 1000Watt Design, a creative digital agency for real estate in Portland, Ore., that worked with Houlihan Lawrence on its recent redesign. “Real estate brokers are grappling with that same problem. What compels you to come to my site, what else can I offer?”

Corcoran.com is betting that less is more. In November it unveiled a new site with streamlined searches designed to uncover a smaller but more relevant number of listings based on what the consumer is looking for.

Visitors to the site still select a neighborhood, a price range and a number of bedrooms and baths. But there is less of the clicking back and forth and redoing of searches that the site previously required. It now offers all results on one page and has turned its agent search into something of a matchmaking service, allowing customers to look up agents not just by the properties they represent, but by the languages they speak, hobbies or other interests. Signing in with Facebook or LinkedIn will turn up a list of agents who may be known to your friends or contacts.

Consumers can also use keywords to search apartment listings and agents. Want a view of the Chrysler building? A recent search produced more than 300 listings. You could even search for the word “sexy,” just to make sure all your expectations were met. Such a search turned up 75 results, mostly listings in the Hamptons and links to related articles.

Corcoran also has a nifty feature that shows the number of listings meeting your criteria and ticks down as your search narrows. For example, the site offered a total of 1,262 available listings in New York early last week. A search for two-bedrooms in Brooklyn brought the count to 69 “matching homes.” That number dropped to just 24 when the search was limited to two-bedrooms with two baths.

Clicking on a listing produces full-screen photos and a neighborhood map showing restaurants, grocery stores, shopping and schools. Want more recommendations? Click a link to tips and data compiled from Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Foodspotting and Foursquare, the location-based social networking site.

Instead of “just putting forth hundreds of search results,” said Christina Lowris Panos, the chief marketing officer of the Corcoran Group, “we’re the curator of the information. We’re not just giving you volume.”

HoulihanLawrence.com, which revamped its Web site about the same time as Corcoran, has taken a similar approach. It also allows customers to search by keyword and offers more robust information on neighborhoods, including “community videos” of local historians, residents and small-business owners discussing favorite aspects of a given town.

A new “community conversations” section, powered by StreetAdvisor, invites residents to review their neighborhoods. For example, a snapshot of the stately Westchester town of Bedford, N.Y., ranks it 7.8 out of 10, noting who lives there (“country lovers, families with kids, professionals, retirees, gay & lesbian”), positive aspects (“peace & quiet,” “safe & sound,” schools) and what it is “not great for” (night life, public transport, cost of living, shopping and medical facilities).

You can pose a question to the forum, read answers to popular questions like “where is the closest mall?” or peruse reviews by residents.

“When looking for a home on a real estate Web site,” said Chris Meyers, the chief operating officer of Houlihan Lawrence, “very often people are shopping for a community more than an individual home. Where do I want to live that feels right for me? How do I understand that, in a market I haven’t been in before?”

Halstead Property, which is refreshing Halstead.com, already offers video tours of 23 neighborhoods in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The site also taps into New York Magazine’s best restaurants, shopping, night life and salons.

Other firms are not making the neighborhood a focus. Stribling & Associates, for example, has pared down its site to offer a cleaner presentation.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 1, 2013

An earlier version of this article gave the incorrect web address for a real estate brokerage. It is Warburgrealty.com, not Warburg.com.

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Scotland Yard Official Sentenced to 15 Months in Hacking Scandal

LONDON — A senior police officer in Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command, Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, was sentenced to a 15-month prison term on Friday for seeking cash payments from Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid in return for information about a Scotland Yard investigation into phone hacking at the paper.

A unanimous jury verdict after a four-day trial last month made Inspector Casburn, 53, the first person to be convicted of a criminal offense in the phone hacking scandal, which has enveloped Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper domain in Britain for 30 months. The judge told Inspector Casburn that she would have drawn a three-year term if she did not have a 3-year-old child who was still moving through the adoption process.

At the trial, the jury was told that evidence implicating Inspector Casburn was provided to Scotland Yard by an internal investigative unit, known as the management and standards committee, that was established by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation as part of his pledge to give the police any incriminating information that it came across as it examined millions of e-mails and other documents relating to the hacking scandal.

A spokesman for Scotland Yard said Inspector Casburn, who continued to draw her $102,000-a-year police salary during the trial, would now face an internal dismissal procedure. In a statement issued after her sentencing, Scotland Yard said Inspector Casburn had “betrayed the service and let down her colleagues.” It said her prison term “sends a strong message that the leaking of confidential information for personal gain is absolutely unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”

Inspector Casburn, who was impassive as the judge pronounced sentence, had told the court that she had telephoned The News of the World in September 2010 because she was angry that her superiors had decided to divert money and resources from counterterrorism operations to the phone hacking scandal, and thought that she was acting in the public interest.

At the time, Inspector Casburn was head of the counterterrorism unit’s financial investigative team, tracking the financing of terrorist operations. She told the court that as a woman working with a closely knit group of men, she often felt isolated and excluded, and that her feelings on that score had contributed to what her lawyer described as a “mad” and deeply regrettable action.

Crucially, she denied asking for any payment from the newspaper — a pivotal issue in the case after the jury was told that the reporter who took the call said in an e-mail to his editors immediately after the conversation that the officer had asked to be paid for confidential information about police plans to revive an investigation into phone hacking that had been halted three years earlier. The e-mail said Inspector Casburn had named several people who were a target of the police inquiry.

But the judge, Sir Adrian Fulford, said Friday that Inspector Casburn’s actions could not be described as “whistle-blowing.” He noted that the jury had rejected her claim that she had not sought payment, and described her actions as “a corrupt attempt to make money out of sensitive and potentially very damaging information.” He added: “Activity of this kind is deeply damaging to the administration of criminal justice in this country. We are entitled to expect the very highest standards of probity from our police officers, particularly those at a senior level.”

 More trials are expected to follow this year as prosecutors work their way through the cases of more than 90 editors, reporters, investigators and news executives who have been arrested and questioned in a wide-ranging investigation that has spread beyond phone hacking to computer hacking, bribery of public officials and tampering with evidence, among other forms of wrongdoing.

The scandal has shaken Mr. Murdoch’s global media empire, costing it hundreds of millions of dollars in legal settlements and other expenses. It also precipitated a breakup of Mr. Murdoch’s New York-based media conglomerate, News Corporation, into two companies that will separate the company’s newspaper holdings, some of them in a financially perilous state, and its far more lucrative television and film interests.

Revelations about the covert working practices of powerful British newspapers — mainly at two Murdoch-owned mass-circulation tabloids, the daily Sun and the Sunday News of the World, which was shuttered by Mr. Murdoch as the phone hacking scandal burgeoned in 2011 — have also had profound reverberations across Britain. A report last year from a public inquiry exposed, in addition to the widespread newsroom malpractice, a pattern of unhealthily cozy relationships among Britain’s newspapers, its senior politicians and the police.

With her sentencing on Friday, Inspector Casburn, one of the most senior female officers at Scotland Yard, became a totem for others facing prosecution and possible prison terms. Among them are Andy Coulson, a former News of the World editor who went on to become communications chief for Prime Minister David Cameron before quitting over the scandal; Rebekah Brooks, a former Sun and News of the World editor who became Mr. Murdoch’s handpicked chief executive at News International, the Murdoch newspaper subsidiary in Britain, before resigning with a multimillion-dollar buyout; and Charlie Brooks, Ms. Brooks’s husband, who is an Eton College contemporary and sometime riding companion of Mr. Cameron.

Before the sentencing of Inspector Casburn, the only convictions in the phone hacking scandal came in 2007, when an earlier police investigation resulted in jail terms of four months for Clive Goodman, The News of the World’s royal correspondent, and six months for Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator, for their role in hacking into the cellphone messages of royal family members and their aides.

Their trials brought a three-year hiatus in the Scotland Yard investigation after prosecutors accepted assurances from the Murdoch-owned papers that the activities of the two men constituted a “rogue” operation and that there was no wider pattern of criminal wrongdoing.

That changed in 2010, when Scotland Yard reopened its investigation, according to testimony at Inspector Casburn’s trial, on the basis of an article in The New York Times Magazine that concluded that there had been a widespread pattern of phone hacking at The News of the World. Within a week of that article, a senior Scotland Yard officer, Assistant Commissioner John Yates, was ordered to review police files. The Casburn jurors were told that she made her call to The News of the World shortly after Mr. Yates briefed members of the counterterrorism unit on his plans for the investigation.

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DealBook: Deutsche Bank Posts Surprise $3 Billion Loss

FRANKFURT – Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest lender, reported a surprise net loss of 2.2 billion euros ($3 billion) for the fourth quarter of 2012 on Thursday, hurt by the diminished value of some assets as well as costs related to numerous legal proceedings.

The results underline the task ahead for Jürgen Fitschen and Anshu Jain, the co- chief executives who took over the bank less than seven months ago and have declared their intention to deal more severely with the legacy of the financial crisis.

“This is the most comprehensive reconfiguration of Deutsche Bank in recent times,” Mr. Fitschen and Mr. Jain said in a statement. They warned that “deliberate but sometimes uncomfortable change” lay ahead, adding that “this journey will take years not months.”

Deutsche Bank avoided a government bailout during the financial crisis, but has faced numerous lawsuits and official investigations, including a tax-evasion inquiry that led to a raid on company headquarters last month by German police.

“Significant” charges related to legal proceedings contributed to the loss, Deutsche Bank said, without providing specifics.

Analysts consider the bank to be among the most highly leveraged in Europe, and bank management has promised to reduce the number of risky activities, a process that sometimes requires it to recognize the reduced value of assets and book losses.

Despite the loss, Deutsche Bank said fourth-quarter revenue rose 14 percent, to 7.9 billion euros, from the period a year earlier. The bank also said it had increased the amount of capital held as insurance against risk, and reduced the amount of money it needed to set aside to cover possible bad loans. The bank said it had reduced total employee pay to the lowest level in years.

The bank had warned in December that it would incur major charges in the quarter, without saying how much.

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SciTimes Update: Recent Developments in Science and Health News

NASA

Researchers tracked the movement of carbon monoxide molecules orbiting a black hole within the galaxy NGC 4526 to determine its mass.

Thursday in science, possible advances in cancer diagnosis, weighing black holes, shocking photos from space and good news for a breed of penguins. Check out these and other headlines from around the Web.

How Heavy Is That Black Hole?: Concerned about the weight of black holes? ScienceNews.org reports that astrophysicists associated with the European Southern Observatory have developed a new technique to more accurately measure the masses of supermassive black holes.

A New Cancer Test?: Invasive tests to diagnose cancer could soon be a thing of the past, Scientific American reports. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have been looking at whether RNA fragments, called exosomes, which are shed from cancer tumor cells and can be detected in cerebral spinal fluid, blood and urine, can be analyzed to diagnose cancer types and evaluate the disease’s progression.

False Claims About Flu Relief: Flu sufferers are often desperate for relief, but the Food and Drug Administration is warning that scams abound. USA Today reports that the F.D.A. issued a warning letter about one flu-relief product, GermBullet, accusing its manufacturers of making a “false and misleading promotional statement” by claiming the substance reduces bacteria and viruses.

Tainted Steriods Law Suits: The first lawsuit has been filed in Nashville against a clinic where hundreds of people received spinal injections of a tainted steroid that caused meningitis and other side effects in 693 people nationwide and 45 deaths as of Monday. The Tennessean said that Wayne Reed, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease and was being cared for by his wife, Diana Reed, is suing the Saint Thomas Outpatient Neurosurgery Center and its owners, seeking $12.5 million in damages for Diana’s death from fungal meningitis. Denise Grady wrote about the family in October.

More Baby Penguins: There’s been a baby boom among white-flippered penguins ever since a farming couple in New Zealand turned much of their land into a safe haven for the birds, Scientific American reports. The birds, also known as korora, have nearly doubled their population in the last decade, and credit is being given to the farmers Francis and Shireen Helps.

The Storm From Above: And while strong winds and heavy rains were jolting many people across the eastern United States out of their sleep Wednesday night, a satellite was snapping images of the lightning flashes from the storm. The cool photos were published on LiveScience.

Science With a Side of Fries: Finally, science is alive and well, perhaps at your local bar or restaurant, where Americans are more frequently gathering to hear or join in scientific talks. As Reuters reported on Wednesday: “Want a beer with that biology? Or perhaps a burger with the works to complement the theory of everything?”

Read More..

SciTimes Update: Recent Developments in Science and Health News

NASA

Researchers tracked the movement of carbon monoxide molecules orbiting a black hole within the galaxy NGC 4526 to determine its mass.

Thursday in science, possible advances in cancer diagnosis, weighing black holes, shocking photos from space and good news for a breed of penguins. Check out these and other headlines from around the Web.

How Heavy Is That Black Hole?: Concerned about the weight of black holes? ScienceNews.org reports that astrophysicists associated with the European Southern Observatory have developed a new technique to more accurately measure the masses of supermassive black holes.

A New Cancer Test?: Invasive tests to diagnose cancer could soon be a thing of the past, Scientific American reports. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have been looking at whether RNA fragments, called exosomes, which are shed from cancer tumor cells and can be detected in cerebral spinal fluid, blood and urine, can be analyzed to diagnose cancer types and evaluate the disease’s progression.

False Claims About Flu Relief: Flu sufferers are often desperate for relief, but the Food and Drug Administration is warning that scams abound. USA Today reports that the F.D.A. issued a warning letter about one flu-relief product, GermBullet, accusing its manufacturers of making a “false and misleading promotional statement” by claiming the substance reduces bacteria and viruses.

Tainted Steriods Law Suits: The first lawsuit has been filed in Nashville against a clinic where hundreds of people received spinal injections of a tainted steroid that caused meningitis and other side effects in 693 people nationwide and 45 deaths as of Monday. The Tennessean said that Wayne Reed, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease and was being cared for by his wife, Diana Reed, is suing the Saint Thomas Outpatient Neurosurgery Center and its owners, seeking $12.5 million in damages for Diana’s death from fungal meningitis. Denise Grady wrote about the family in October.

More Baby Penguins: There’s been a baby boom among white-flippered penguins ever since a farming couple in New Zealand turned much of their land into a safe haven for the birds, Scientific American reports. The birds, also known as korora, have nearly doubled their population in the last decade, and credit is being given to the farmers Francis and Shireen Helps.

The Storm From Above: And while strong winds and heavy rains were jolting many people across the eastern United States out of their sleep Wednesday night, a satellite was snapping images of the lightning flashes from the storm. The cool photos were published on LiveScience.

Science With a Side of Fries: Finally, science is alive and well, perhaps at your local bar or restaurant, where Americans are more frequently gathering to hear or join in scientific talks. As Reuters reported on Wednesday: “Want a beer with that biology? Or perhaps a burger with the works to complement the theory of everything?”

Read More..

Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

A Cyberattack From China:
TimesCast: Chinese hackers infiltrated The New York Times’s computer systems, getting passwords for its reporters and others.

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.

The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

The attackers first installed malware — malicious software — that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times’s network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”

The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.

Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

Signs of a Campaign

The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of a cyberattack that caused damage at Iran’s main nuclear enrichment plant. Evidence suggests that the United States and Israel released a computer worm around 2008, not 2012.

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Hagel Offers Endorsement of U.S. Military Might

Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Chuck Hagel arrived for his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

WASHINGTON — Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee to be secretary of defense, engaged in a sharp exchange with his old friend, Senator John McCain, at the opening of his confirmation hearing on Thursday when Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, pressed him on his opposition to the escalation, or surge, of American forces in Iraq in 2007.

Mr. Hagel dodged a direct answer as Mr. McCain asked him repeatedly if history would judge whether Mr. Hagel was right or wrong to oppose the surge in forces when he was a Republican senator from Nebraska. The escalation, along with other major factors, is credited in helping quell the violence in Iraq at the time. When Mr. Hagel said he wanted to explain, Mr. McCain bore in.

“Are you going to answer the question, Senator Hagel, the question is whether you were right or wrong,” Mr. McCain said.

“I’m not going to give you a yes or no answer,” Mr. Hagel replied.

Mr. McCain did not let up.

"I think history has already made a judgment about the surge sir, and you’re on the wrong side of it,” Mr. McCain said, then seemed to threaten that he would not vote for Mr. Hagel if he did not answer the question.

It took the next questioner, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, to draw out Mr. Hagel out on the subject. “I did question the surge,” Mr. Hagel said. “I always asked the question, is this going to be worth the sacrifice?” He said 1,200 American men and women lost their lives in the surge. “I’m not certain it was required,” Mr. Hagel said. “Now, it doesn’t mean I was right.”

Mr. McCain, like many Republicans, was furious at Mr. Hagel’s skepticism about the Iraq War. It led to a falling-out between the two men, both Vietman veterans, that appeared to have been patched up when the two met last week after Mr. Hagel was nominated for the Pentagon job. Mr. McCain described their discussion as a “frank and candid” exchange between two “old friends.”

But Mr. McCain was only one of the Republicans who pressed Mr. Hagel at hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Before he even made his opening statement, Mr. Hagel faced a blast of objections from the ranking Republican on the committee, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who told Mr. Hagel that he would not vote for him because of his position of “appeasing” America’s adversaries.

“His record demonstrates what I view as a steadfast opposition to policies that diminish U.S. power and influence throughout the world, as well as a recent trend of policy reversals that seem based on political expediency rather than on core beliefs,” Mr. Inhofe said.

But even a reliable yes vote, Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who serves as the committee’s chairman, said in his opening statement that Mr. Hagel had made “troubling” statements about Israel and had expressed a willingness to negotiate on Iran on issues that Mr. Levin viewed as nonnegotiable. Mr. Levin said he expected Mr. Hagel to address those issues during the hearing.

Under aggressive but at times disjointed questioning from Mr. Inhofe, Mr. Hagel was asked why he thought the Iranian Foreign Ministry so strongly supported his nomination as defense secretary. Mr. Hagel swiftly replied, “I have a difficult time enough with American politics.” He then said, “I have no idea.”

Under more gentle but persistent questioning from Mr. Levin, Mr. Hagel said that he had voted against some unilateral American sanctions against Iran in 2001 and 2002 because it was a different era. “We were at a different place with Iran at that time,” he said.

Mr. Hagel faltered at one point, saying shortly before noon that he strongly supported the president’s policy on “containment” of Iran. He was quickly handed a note, which he read and then said to correct himself, “Obviously, we don’t have a position on containment.”

At that point Mr. Levin interjected, “We do have a position on containment, which is we do not favor containment.” The Obama administration’s policy on Iran remains prevention of its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

In his opening statement, Mr. Hagel said that the United States must lead other nations in confronting threats, use all tools of American power in protecting its people and “maintain the strongest military in the world.”

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