Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace in talks for Soviet thriller

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace are in talks to star in “Child 44,” a thriller that Ridley Scott and Michael Costigan are producing for Scott Free Productions, individuals with knowledge of the deal told TheWrap. “Safe House” filmmaker Daniel Espinosa will direct from a script by Richard Price, who is adapting Tom Rob Smith‘s novel.

Set in Josef Stalin‘s Soviet Union, the story follows Leo Demidov, a disgraced intelligence agent investigating a series of child murders. The paranoid Soviet government then becomes suspicious of his investigation.

The book, the first in a trilogy, is based on the true story of Ukrainian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo.

Hardy will play the officer and Rapace his wife.

The actors will first shoot “Animal Rescue,” a drama that Michael Roskam is directing for Fox Searchlight. Hardy, fresh off a year in big films such as ‘The Dark Knight Rises,” just wrapped “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Rapace, who appeared in 2012′s “Prometheus,” will next be seen in “Dead Man Down.”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

---

Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

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DealBook: Deutsche Bank Posts Surprise $3 Billion Loss

FRANKFURT — Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest lender, reported a surprise quarterly net loss of $3 billion on Thursday, as new management tallied the cost of past mistakes and tried to draw a line under the bank’s troubled past.

The fourth-quarter loss of 2.2 billion euros included about 1 billion euros the bank set aside to cover legal proceedings and investigations, including accusations that Deutsche Bank was among institutions that rigged global benchmarks used to set rates on trillions in loans. The bank also booked losses in recognition of the diminished value of acquisitions going as far back as its purchase of Bankers Trust in the United States in 1998.

While the loss partly reflected problems peculiar to Deutsche Bank, it was a reminder of the weak state of European banking more than four years after the beginning of the financial crisis. Deutsche Bank is considered relatively healthy by European standards. Hesitant action by national regulators means that many other banks have not yet been forced to recognize the full scope of bad investments and depend on the European Central Bank for cash they need to operate.

The loss at Deutsche Bank contrasts with strong earnings recently by competitors like JPMorgan Chase. Still, its shares rose 2.9 percent in Frankfurt trading as investors apparently concluded that the German bank’s relatively new co-chief executives, Jürgen Fitschen and Anshu Jain, were front-loading the bad news. Investors were also rewarding the bank’s efforts to increase the size of the reserves it holds as insurance against losses.

The two men took over the reins less than seven months ago and have declared their intention to deal more severely with the legacy of the financial crisis. The new approach includes raising the amount of capital the bank keeps in reserve compared with the amount of money it lends to customers or otherwise puts at risk. Deutsche Bank has suffered from the perception that it is among the most highly leveraged banks in Europe.

The bank said on Thursday that it had raised its so-called core Tier 1 capital ratio, a measure of the size of the reserves in relation to the amount of money at risk, to 8 percent from less than 6 percent a year ago. Some analysts questioned whether the bank really had become safer or whether the improved ratio simply reflected changes in the way the bank calculates risk.

For now, though, investors are willing to give Deutsche Bank the benefit of the doubt, analysts said.

“The new management under co-C.E.O. Anshu Jain is starting to deal with D.B.’s legacy issues,” analysts at JPMorgan Cazenove said in a note to clients.

Capital is also an issue for Deutsche Bank in the United States, where the Federal Reserve is proposing that foreign banks hold more capital at their local operating units. Stefan Krause, the bank’s chief financial officer, said in a call with analysts that Deutsche Bank was prepared to allocate more capital to the United States in 2015, adding that the rules “were really not very helpful in terms of helping global financial markets.”

The quarterly results showed the bank was clearing its books of bad assets and reducing risk, its executives said. Late last year Deutsche Bank created a “noncore operations unit” to dispose of bad investments or holdings that did not produce an adequate return.

“We are willing to take pain,” Mr. Jain said at a news conference. “That is the real story of the fourth quarter. We are willing to take losses.”

Deutsche Bank said revenue in the fourth quarter rose 14 percent, to 7.9 billion euros, from the period a year earlier. The bank warned in December that it would incur major charges in the quarter, but most analysts had not expected the loss to be nearly so big. Before taxes, the loss was 2.6 billion euros.

For the full year, Deutsche Bank reported a net profit of 665 million euros after subtracting 3.5 billion euros related to legal problems or diminished value of assets.

The bank’s problems are far from over. Deutsche Bank continues to cope with the consequences of behavior by some employees, including a tax evasion inquiry that led to a raid on company headquarters last month involving hundreds of police officers. Executives acknowledged on Thursday that the bank could face additional lawsuits related to its sale of securities tied to the United States subprime mortgage market.

“Although they have taken some chunky provisions, litigation is an ongoing drag on the industry,” said Jon Peace, a bank analyst with Nomura in London. “There is probably going to be more litigation drag in 2013.”

Deutsche Bank is among institutions accused of helping to manipulate the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which is used to set rates on trillions of dollars of mortgages and other debt. Mr. Jain said on Thursday that during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, he and other bankers discussed whether it would be possible to work out a global settlement with authorities and complainants. While the bankers did not make any decisions, Mr. Jain said, they agreed that a comprehensive settlement might make sense and would discuss it further.

In response to lapses of the past, executive bonuses have been curtailed, and employees have undergone mandatory ethics training which stresses integrity in trading and dealing with clients, Mr. Fitschen said.

“If you cannot commit yourself to those values without reservation,” he said, “Deutsche Bank is not the place for you.”

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China's ethnic Manchus rediscovering their roots

BEIJING — Nobody would suspect that this impish toddler is of noble lineage. Yiyi has the same buzz cut as other 3-year-old Chinese boys, the familiar habit of scattering his fleet of toy cars across the living room rug.

But his family name gives him away: Yehenala, a famous Manchurian clan that once ruled China.

When Yiyi was born, his father and grandfather made the unusual decision to give him the old Manchu name. Generations earlier, the family had shortened the name to Ye to disguise the fact that they were aristocrats in a communist country founded on the principle of overturning feudalism.

"We are proud of our royal blood," said the boy's father, Ye Jia, a 40-year-old state company employee who says he would change his name too if the bureaucracy wasn't so complicated.

The name is a mouthful in a country where almost all family names are written by a single character and pronounced with a single syllable. Yiyi is the only child with such an exotic name in his Beijing preschool class.

But his father thinks it will serve him well in the long run. "Even his teacher says he's special," Ye said.

Descended from a horse-riding nomadic people of northeastern China, the Manchus were the last imperial rulers of the country, establishing the Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644 until 1912. After the abdication of the last emperor, Pu Yi, his clan changed its name to Jin. The Yehenalas, related to Cixi, the empress dowager who was de facto ruler in the late 19th century, became Ye or Na.

A century later, ethnic Manchus are rediscovering their roots.

A few universities have revived the study of the nearly extinct Manchu language, which is more like Mongolian than Chinese. There are culture seminars to study the dance, food and music of Manchuria, even Internet forums. Many people have also begun using their Manchu family names, even if few are legally registered like little Yehenala Yiyi.

Although aristocracy is no longer a dirty word in China (daytime television is full of historical dramas about imperial times and luxury goods are advertised as fit for royalty), China's imperial kin continue to live modestly, not flaunting their lineage like European nobility.

The Ye family has faded black-and-white photographs of Cixi and other illustrious relatives in their brocaded costumes of old, but they are kept tucked away in a folder.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Tse-tung's decade-long purge of the elites, the stigma attached to being a member of the old aristocracy was so great that many imperial descedents were unaware of their own lineage. Ye Longpei, Yiyi's 70-year-old grandfather, didn't find out until he was an adult that his own grandfather had been the youngest brother of the empress Cixi.

His father, who was then close to dying, confided the family secret in 1975, in the waning days of the Cultural Revolution, during a walk to the Summer Palace, Cixi's retreat in northwest Beijing.

"That's how shameful it was to be part of the royal family. This is something that nobody would brag about," said Ye, a retired schoolteacher who lives with his son's family in a comfortable but nondescript two-bedroom walk-up apartment south of downtown Beijing.

Chinese history deals harshly with the Qing Dynasty. Pu Yi is still despised as a collaborator for having headed the puppet state of Manchuko, which was established by Japanese occupiers during the 1930s. Some memoirs about Cixi describe an insatiable sexual appetite and cruelty, although her relatives say the stories are fabricated.

"Cixi became the scapegoat for everything that was wrong with old China," said Na Genzheng, a 61-year-old descendant of one of the empress' brothers. One of the more outspoken family representatives, he keeps a photograph of Cixi flanked by tall vases, shrine-like, in a niche in his living room. He specializes in Manchu script, producing loopy calligraphy that looks a little like Arabic written vertically.

"People don't appreciate her contribution and the family's to Chinese culture," he said.

His illustrious ancestor, he said, "lived in a period of transition and promoted reforms learned from Western countries." Cixi's descendants held a large family reunion in 2008 on the 100th anniversary of her death and are trying to salvage her reputation.

Some things Manchu have been incorporated seamlessly into Beijing culture, such as the popular pastry saqima and the figure-hugging dresses known as cheongsam. Like the Yiddish woven into New York slang, Beijingers use Manchu-derived insults such as "moceng," meaning "slow," and "mama huhu," meaning "mediocre" or "careless."

Not all Manchus can trace their lineage to emperors, but many have ties to the former imperial bureaucracy. (In fact, a large number of descendants found jobs in the civil service or in state-owned companies, many joining the Communist Party.) In far western China, near the Kazakhstan border, descendants of a garrison of Qing soldiers still speak a dialect of Manchu, among the few native speakers left in China.

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There's No Place for Fear When Riding a 100-Foot Wave

Garrett McNamara felt many things as the monster wave approached. Excitement. Awe. Joy. The one thing he did not feel, however, is fear.

That might seem unusual, given that he was about to ride what is believed to have been a 100-foot wave on Monday. But there was no place in his heart, or mind, for such things. He was focused utterly on the moment.

“If you have fear then it means you are not living in the moment,” McNamara told Wired by e-mail from Nazaré, Portugal. “You are either stuck in the past or worrying about the future. It is important to not think and just do! Follow your heart and fear does not exist.”

The folks at Guinness still have to confirm the height of the wave, but McNamara is believed to have set a new record for the biggest wave ever ridden by a surfer. He holds the current record of 78 feet. It takes a lot of time and preparation for such a feat, and McNamara didn’t just roll up to the beach and paddle out to the perfect wave. He monitored the storm for about a week before even flying to Portugal from Hawaii. He’s been surfing the Nazaré area since 2010 and has never seen predictions like he saw for Monday. So he called his friends Kealii Mamala and Kamaki Worthington to keep an eye on him for safety’s sake and catch some waves of their own.

Nazaré is where McNamara set his previous record, eclipsing a benchmark Mike Parson held since riding a 77-foot wave at Cortez Bank in 2001. At the time, McNamara was believed to have ridden a 90-footer, but careful analysis of videos and photos revealed it was 77.7559 feet. We’ll have to wait to know the actual height of Monday’s ride, but calculations won’t take away from this accomplishment.

Nazaré has unique and perfect conditions for big-wave surfing thanks to the Nazaré Canyon, an underwater canyon that is 1,000 feet deep, three miles wide and 105 miles long that funnels Atlantic swells through and creates monster waves.

McNamara’s gave a big shout-out to his friends, fans and support team for helping prepare mentally and emotionally for the ride.

“To ride big waves you have to be ready mentally, physically and spiritually,” McNamara said. “All these waves are just so fun to ride and are normal to me. This one was the longest drop of my life though.”

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Despite previous beating, Rihanna back with Chris Brown

NEW YORK (Reuters) – It’s official: R&B diva Rihanna says she is back together with Chris Brown, who is still on probation for assaulting her in 2009, saying “It’s different now.”

“I decided it was more important for me to be happy,” Rihanna told Rolling Stone magazine in an interview published on Wednesday on its website.

“I wasn’t going to let anybody’s opinion get in the way of that. Even if it’s a mistake, it’s my mistake,” she said of her renewed romance with singer Brown, 23, that has prompted consternation from fans and celebrity media because of their history.

“After being tormented for so many years, being angry and dark, I’d rather just live my truth and take the backlash,” said Rihanna, 24, adding, “I can handle it.”

The couple’s reconciliation had been rumored for months, even before the pair unveiled a duet, “Nobody’s Business,” in November. That track was included on Rihanna’s latest album “Unapologetic.”

Brown pleaded guilty in 2009 to beating and punching Rihanna. He was sentenced to community service, anger management classes, given a restraining order and is still on probation.

The Barbadian singer told Oprah Winfrey in an emotional interview in August that she and Brown now had a “very close friendship,” and that she still loved him.

“When you add up the pieces from the outside, it’s not the cutest puzzle in the world,” Rihanna admitted to Rolling Stone, which hits newsstands this week with her gracing the cover above the headline, “Rihanna Crazy In Love.”

“You see us walking somewhere … and you think you know. But it’s different now. We don’t have those types of arguments anymore. We talk,” she said. “We value each other.”

But she noted that Brown is on probation with her as well, saying, “He doesn’t have the luxury of (messing) up again.”

“That’s just not an option … And I wouldn’t have gone this far if I ever thought that was a possibility.”

The interview was published three days after Brown’s latest dustup, which involved fellow musician Frank Ocean, over a parking space at a West Hollywood recording studio. Ocean has said he wants Brown prosecuted following the Sunday brawl.

In 2012 Rihanna was rated by Time and Forbes magazines as among the world’s and celebrity arena’s most powerful people.

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Philip Barbara)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Illness Walks the Runway

A top fashion designer quarantines a sneezing underling, forcing her to work in a closet. An industry P.R. executive makes colleagues douse their hands with Purell. Germ-phobic magazine editors are powerblasting offices with antiseptic wipes and Lysol.

Such is the dread gripping the fashion world as it prepares for New York Fashion Week, beginning Feb. 7, with a killer flu and a stomach-bug norovirus on the loose.

The eight-day event, when fashionistas from around the world pack into small spaces to attend runway shows and parties — only to cram onto the same flights and repeat the process in London, Milan and Paris — is always an occasion for sickness paranoia. In past years, sniffles in the front row could prompt icy stares and social ostracism.

But with this season’s flu panic, the fear is approaching hysteria. Stressed-out designers recoil in horror if someone coughs within earshot. Frail models shiver their way between fittings, terrified someone will spy their runny noses. And frenemies everywhere are reconsidering the wisdom of the double-cheek kiss, the standard greeting of the global fashion tribe. Air kissing seems safe for now.

“This will be the season where everyone in fashion becomes mysteriously nonaffectionate,” said Laura Brown, executive editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Staff members in her West 57th Street offices, she added, have been scouring doorknobs with sanitizing wipes. “We can give a nudge and a wink instead.”

To be fair, much of the paranoia is founded. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deaths from the current flu season reached “epidemic” levels, in part because of an unusually severe flu strain. Adding to the flulike epidemic is a surging new strain of norovirus, which can cause sudden diarrhea and projectile vomiting, and the worst whooping cough outbreak in 60 years.

And while there is some evidence that the flu season has peaked almost everywhere in the country, except for the West Coast, flu activity continued to be high in New York through the week ending Jan. 19, as tracked by the C.D.C., and on the rise in parts of Europe including Italy. (Milan hosts a fashion week starting Feb. 20.)

Norovirus also seems to be surging abroad; it has reached epidemic levels in France, according to the latest report from the country’s doctor network Réseau Sentinelles, with more than one million French people visiting doctors for it in the past five weeks.

Yet even as flu season appears to be ebbing in New York, it remains a worry inside the fashion bubble. With sleep-deprived colleagues huddled in close quarters day and night, things can go viral quickly, especially in the petri dish that is Fashion Week.

“Fashion people are at risk for a variety of viral syndromes because they work long hours and they move in a pack,” said Dr. Robert Glatter, known in fashion circles for making house (or studio) calls.

Dr. Barry Cohen, whose primary-care office on Spring Street faces Marc Jacobs’s studios, says he has been bombarded with rheumy-eyed industry divas begging for quick fixes. “Fashion people touch each other all day, so they get exposed over and over,” he said.

And when the pack is moving fast and furious, it can’t slow down for the weak. “Fashion Week season is a nonstop assault on the immune system,” said Derek Blasberg, an editor at large for Harper’s Bazaar. “Early shows, late dinners, crammed into tents and airplanes: you don’t want to sit next to anyone coughing, because if you get sick, you’re screwed.”

The viral assault does not end with New York. “By the time we finish the New York shows, we’re already a wreck, because New York simply has too many shows,” said Mickey Boardman, editorial director of Paper magazine. “Then you get on a plane and hit the ground running in London, where there’s always fun parties. You’re eating French fries for dinner and drinking Cokes from your minibar, and your sleep patterns are messed up.”

“You’re putting your life at risk,” he added.

WHILE KEEPING THE WORLD trendy has its hazards, fashionistas have developed stylish tactics to avoid getting the bug. Many have dutifully gotten their flu shots. (It’s not too late, though it takes about two weeks to build up immunity — just in time for London Fashion Week.)

Others follow variations of what could be called the standard fashion-world starvation diet, whether it’s drinking large quantities of SmartWater fortified with packets of the vitamin supplement Emergen-C, or force-feeding themselves nothing but raw greens, like koalas munching eucalyptus leaves. Dr. Glatter says he has even treated some fashion people for diarrhea from eating too much kale.

Then there are the juicers. The designer Cynthia Rowley swears by Juice Press, the three-year-old Manhattan chain popular with fashion insiders for its 17-ounce $10 bottles of cold-pressed fruits and vegetables. “I’m addicted,” said Ms. Rowley, who added that she chugged the stuff with staff members when they were not taking spin classes en masse at SoulCycle.

“Nobody’s sick at my office,” she bragged dangerously. “We work in one room, so if one person drops, they take down the whole team.”

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DealBook: Top Federal Prosecutor of Corporate Crime Resigns

1:42 p.m. | Updated with formal announcement

Lanny A. Breuer, the federal prosecutor who led the Justice Department’s response to corporate crime in the wake of the financial crisis, announced on Wednesday that he is stepping down after nearly four years in the post.

As head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, one of the most senior roles at the agency, Mr. Breuer tackled corporate bribery and public corruption. But it was his focus on Wall Street that received the most attention, from supporters and critics alike.

While he has come under fire for a dearth of prosecutions on Wall Street in response to the crisis, Mr. Breuer also oversaw an aggressive crackdown on money-laundering and interest-rate manipulation at some of the world’s biggest banks. In two weeks last month, he joined a nearly $2 billion case against HSBC for money-laundering and a $1.5 billion settlement with UBS for rate-rigging. Next week, he is expected to take a similar rate-rigging action against the Royal Bank of Scotland.

“I think the criminal division is a fundamentally different place than it was four years ago,” Mr. Breuer said in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s the highlight of my professional career.”

His departure, effective March 1, was widely expected. Mr. Breuer had told friends for weeks that he was ready to leave the public sector. While he has not announced his next step, it is expected that he will return to private practice. He was previously a partner at Covington & Burling, a white-shoe law firm.

By virtue of his perch at the Justice Department in Washington, Mr. Breuer became the face of Wall Street prosecutions in the aftermath of the financial crisis. But when few such cases materialized, critics like the Occupy Wall Street protesters turned on him, portraying him as an apologist for banks at the center of the mortgage mess.

In contrast, he drew praise for the sweeping crackdown on rate-rigging in the banking industry, which has largely involved international benchmark rates.

In a rate manipulation case last month, Mr. Breuer’s team secured a major payout from UBS and a guilty plea from the bank’s Japanese unit, making UBS the first big global bank in more than two decades to have a subsidiary plead guilty to fraud. Mr. Breuer, who announced the action after rejecting a last-minute plea from the bank’s chairman, also filed criminal charges against two former employees at the bank.

The deal sent a strong signal that the authorities wanted to hold banks responsible for their wrongdoing.

Following the UBS model, the Justice Department is now pursuing a guilty plea from a Royal Bank of Scotland subsidiary in Asia over its role in the interest rate manipulation scandal, people briefed on the matter said. That settlement, which could come as soon as next week, is likely to include more than $650 million in fines imposed by American and British authorities, two other people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

In an interview, Mr. Breuer said the rate-rigging case amounted to “egregious criminal conduct.” He struck a similar tone about two other major financial cases — the convictions of executives from Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, a now-defunct mortgage lender, and the 110-year prison term imposed on R. Allen Stanford for his Ponzi scheme.

Mr. Breuer has also focused on money-laundering, creating a task force in 2010 that has levied more than $3 billion in fines from banks, including the record fine against HSBC. He stopped short of indicting HSBC after some regulators warned that doing so could destabilize the global financial system.

Mr. Breuer argued that the charges he did not bring — for example, against Goldman Sachs and other banks suspected of fraud after selling toxic mortgage securities to investors — could not have been proved. It was not for a lack of trying, he said, noting that United States attorneys across the country, after reviewing the same evidence he did, also declined to act.

“It’s important for me to hold the financial institutions accountable,” he said. “There’s never been a time that a prosecutor said we should bring a securitization case and I said no.”

Under Mr. Breuer, the division has also increasingly used a 1977 law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, to prosecute corporate bribery.

He also helped run the Justice Department’s investigation of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in the company paying $4.5 billion in fines and other penalties and pleading guilty to 14 criminal charges related to the rig explosion in 2010.

In a statement, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. praised Mr. Breuer. “Lanny has led one of the most successful and aggressive criminal divisions in the history of the Department of Justice,” he said.

Mr. Holder stood behind Mr. Breuer when questions arose about his involvement in the botched gun-trafficking case known as Operation Fast and Furious. The pair, who were both largely cleared after an inspector general investigation, worked together at Covington.

For years, Mr. Breuer moved in and out of government. The son of Holocaust survivors who fled Europe and settled in Queens, he landed at the Manhattan district attorney’s office after graduating from Columbia Law School. In between stints at Covington, he worked as a White House special counsel, defending President Bill Clinton amid federal investigations and impeachment proceedings.

In the interview on Tuesday, Mr. Breuer reflected on his unusual path to the Justice Department.

“The fact that I got to go from Elmhurst, Queens, to the criminal division is remarkable,” he said.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/30/2013, on page B3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Top Federal Prosecutor of Corporate Crime Will Resign.

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Senate overwhelmingly approves John Kerry for secretary of State

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to confirm Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) as the next secretary of State, filling a crucial national security spot in President Obama’s second-term Cabinet.

The 94-3 vote clears the way for Kerry to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton after she steps down Friday.

Kerry, who will become America’s 68th top diplomat, failed to win only three Republican votes — those of Sens. John Cornyn and Rafael “Ted” Cruz, both of Texas, and Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma. 

A spokesman for Cornyn said Kerry supported liberal positions that most Texans oppose. Cruz has criticized Kerry, who fought in the Vietnam War, as anti-military.

Earlier Tuesday, Kerry received the unanimous endorsement of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a voice vote. He served on the committee for 28 years and chaired it for the last four.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the ranking Republican on the committee, praised Kerry as a “realist” on foreign affairs issues, and said he was always “open to discussion” with colleagues of the opposite party.

Corker, noting that Kerry’s father was a foreign service officer, said he knew of no one “who’s lived a life that’s been ultimately more oriented toward being secretary of State.”

Leading Republican senators had promoted Kerry as an alternative to Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, for the job. Rice withdrew her name from consideration after Republicans criticized her for statements she made on TV talk shows after the deadly Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

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Liveblog: RIM Launches BlackBerry 10, Its Hail Mary Pass

This is it. The BlackBerry Experience event in New York will be RIM’s saving grace or its swan song. Everything is riding on the BlackBerry 10 operating system and the Z10 smartphone. And no matter how it goes, Wired will be there live beginning at 10 a.m. Eastern (7 a.m. Pacific).

Everything we’ve seen and heard suggests the OS is amazing and the phone is something people will actually want to buy, so it all comes down to the apps. They’ve gotta be awesome, and RIM knows it. That’s why they’ve been courting developers for month and have 70,000 apps available at launch.

After reorganizing the company and a few false starts, RIM will introduce the final version of its BlackBerry 10 operating system and at least one BlackBerry 10 smartphone, which is expected to become available in February. This is RIM’s Hail Mary pass. We’ll be there to see it thrown. Will consumers be there to catch it?

Roberto is a Wired Staff Writer for Gadget Lab covering augmented reality, home technology, and all the gadgets that fit in your backpack. Got a tip? Send him an email at: roberto_baldwin [at] wired.com.

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