U.S. Asks Court to Limit Texas on Ballot Rules

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Thursday moved to protect minority voters after last month's Supreme Court ruling striking down a central part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with the Justice Department asking a court to require Texas to get permission from the federal government before making changes.

In a speech before the National Urban League in Philadelphia, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the request would be the first of several legal salvos from the administration in reaction to the Supreme Court's decision. "My colleagues and I are determined to use every tool at our disposal," he said, "to stand against such discrimination wherever it is found."

Last month's ruling, Shelby County v. Holder, did away with a requirement that Texas and eight other states, mostly in the South, get permission from the Justice Department or a federal court before changing election procedures. On Thursday, the administration asked a federal court in Texas to restore that "preclearance" requirement there, citing the state's recent history and  relying on a different part of the voting rights law.

Republicans harshly criticized the announcement, in a sign that both parties view the battle over voting laws as important to future elections.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas cast Mr. Holder's remarks as an attempt by the Obama administration to weaken the state's voter-integrity laws and said the comments demonstrated the administration's "utter contempt for our country's system of checks and balances."

"This end run around the Supreme Court undermines the will of the people of Texas, and casts unfair aspersions on our state's common-sense efforts to preserve the integrity of our elections process," Mr. Perry said in a statement.

For years, Republicans across the nation have pushed for tougher voter identification laws, shorter voting hours and other measures they say are intended to reduce voter fraud. The efforts have intensified across the South, from Texas to North Carolina, after the Supreme Court's ruling freed many states and localities from federal oversight.

Democrats have said the steps are intended to reduce voting by minorities, students and other heavily Democratic groups.

State Representative Trey Martinez Fischer, Democrat of San Antonio, who is the chairman of the Mexican-American Legislative Caucus, said racial discrimination in Texas was not a thing of the past.

"The fact that intervention in Texas is the Department of Justice's first action to protect voting rights following the Shelby County decision speaks volumes about the seriousness of Texas' actions," Mr. Fischer said.

"Texans should be proud that the resources of the federal government will be brought to bear to protect the voting rights of all," he added.

President Obama mentioned his concern about voting problems — especially long waits at the ballot box — in both his victory speech on the night of his re-election and in his second Inaugural Address. Several recent polls and studies found that voters in heavily Democratic areas face longer lines, although the reasons remain unclear.

The new move by the Justice Department relies on a part of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court left untouched in the Shelby County case. The court struck down the coverage formula in Section 4 of the law, which had identified places subject to the preclearance requirement based on 40-year-old data. The court suggested that Congress remained free to enact a new coverage formula based on contemporary data, but most analysts say that is unlikely.

Striking down the law's coverage formula effectively guts Section 5 of the law, which requires permission from federal authorities before covered jurisdictions may change voting procedures.

The move by the Justice Department on Thursday relies on a different part of the law, Section 3, which allows the federal government to get to largely the same place by a different route, called "bail-in." If the department can show that given jurisdictions have committed constitutional violations, federal courts may impose federal oversight on those places in a piecemeal fashion.

Lawyers for minority groups have already asked a court in Texas to return the state to federal oversight. The Justice Department's action — filing a "statement of interest" in that case — will bring the weight of the federal government behind those efforts.

Richard H. Pildes, a New York University professor who specializes in election law issues, said the move was "a dramatically significant moment in the next phase of the Voting Rights Act's development" after the Supreme Court's ruling.

Ashley Southall and Jonathan Martin contributed reporting from Washington, and Manny Fernandez from Houston.

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DealBook: Wall Street’s Exposure to Hacking Laid Bare

The indictment on Thursday of a long-running hacking ring is kindling fears that rogue programmers are going beyond theft and developing the capacity to wreak havoc on the broader financial system.

Five Eastern European computer programmers were charged by the United States attorney in New Jersey with hacking into the servers of more than a dozen large American companies and stealing 160 million credit card numbers in what the authorities called the largest hacking and data breach case ever.

But one company had nothing to do with credit cards or bank accounts: Nasdaq.

In a separate indictment unsealed in federal court in New York, one of the men, Aleksandr Kalinin of Russia, was charged with having gained access for two years to the servers of the Nasdaq stock exchange.

While Mr. Kalinin never penetrated the main servers supporting Nasdaq's trading operations — and appears to have caused limited damage at Nasdaq — the attack raised the prospect that hackers could be getting closer to the infrastructure that supports billions of dollars of trades each hour.

"As today's allegations make clear, cybercriminals are determined to prey not only on individual bank accounts, but on the financial system itself," Preet Bharara, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said in announcing the case.

It is a pivotal moment, just a week after a report from the World Federation of Exchanges and an international group of regulators warned about the vulnerability of exchanges to cybercrime. The report said that hackers were shifting their focus away from stealing money and toward more "destabilizing aims."

In a survey conducted for the report, 89 percent of the world's exchanges said that hacking posed a "systemic risk" to global financial markets. "A presumption of safety (despite the reach and size of the threat) could open securities markets to a cyber 'black swan' event," the report said.

At a Senate hearing on cybersecurity on Thursday, a representative of several financial industry groups, Mark Clancy, said that "for the financial services industry, cyberthreats are a constant reality and a potential systemic risk to the industry."

Over the last few years, accidental technological mishaps at the trading firm Knight Capital and the Nasdaq and BATS stock exchanges have revealed how even isolated programming errors can quickly ripple through the markets, causing significant losses in minutes.

The exchanges have been bolstering their defenses and their preparations for an assault on their computer systems. On July 18, an industry group led an exercise, referred to as Quantum Dawn 2, in which the exchanges and other financial firms responded to a simulated attack on the nation's stock markets.

The attack on Nasdaq is far from the first time an exchange has been singled out by hackers. In a survey conducted for the World Federation of Exchanges report, 53 percent of all exchanges said they had experienced a cyberattack during the last year.

This year, the Prague Stock Exchange and several Czech banks were reportedly disabled for a brief time by an attack.

The public-facing Web sites of a number of American exchanges have been hacked. Just last week, Nasdaq said that hackers had gained access to the passwords of people using one of its online forums. Its sites were breached in October 2010, too. At the time, the exchange said the breach affected a single system, known as Directors Desk, used by company board members to exchange confidential information.

The indictments unsealed on Thursday indicate a more wide-ranging scheme that prosecutors say gave Mr. Kalinin and his accomplices access to an unknown amount of information on numerous Nasdaq servers.

They were able to "execute commands on those servers, including commands to delete, change or steal data," according to the indictment in Manhattan court.

At certain points they had enough information to "perform network or systems administrator functions" on the servers, the New Jersey indictment said. Mr. Kalinin had access to the servers, intermittently, until October 2010, according to the Manhattan indictment. Nasdaq discovered the breach itself and alerted the authorities, according to a person briefed on the investigation.

A spokesman for Nasdaq said the company had no comment on the case.

Paul M. Tiao, a former senior adviser on cybersecurity at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the Nasdaq breach was worrying because the servers the defendants attacked could have eventually provided an entryway to the more closely guarded trading systems.

"This is the beginning of the process through which you can imagine that some bad actors would find their way into much more sensitive infrastructure," said Mr. Tiao, now a partner at the law firm Hunton & Williams. "This is a significant cause for concern."

The indictment from the United States attorney in New Jersey, which included information on the Nasdaq breach, said that Mr. Kalinin, who went by the nicknames Grig and Tempo, first cracked Nasdaq's systems in late 2007 using so-called SQL injections. This technique infects a computer system with malicious software that in turn allows the attackers to steal or manipulate the contents of the system.

When an accomplice in Florida asked about attacking Nasdaq, Mr. Kalinin wrote on instant message: "NASDAQ is owned."

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DealBook: SAC Capital Advisors Is Indicted, and Called a Magnet for Cheating

Federal authorities, under fire for handling Wall Street with kid gloves, have delivered a crippling blow to one of its most successful firms, SAC Capital Advisors, whose outsize trading profits have drawn government scrutiny for more than a decade.

Calling SAC "a veritable magnet of market cheaters," federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against the hedge fund on Thursday, a rare move against a large company that could threaten its survival. The authorities argued that the firm and its units permitted a "systematic" insider trading scheme to unfold from 1999 to 2010, activity that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in profit for the firm, owned by its founder, the billionaire stock picker Steven A. Cohen.

The indictment offers the most detailed account yet of SAC's inner workings, citing e-mails indicating that Mr. Cohen and other top executives failed to prevent possible insider trading.

In one e-mail about the technology company Sun Microsystems, an SAC analyst informed Mr. Cohen that, "My edge is contacts at the company and their distribution channel." In an instant message, an employee informed Mr. Cohen that he planned to bet against Nokia's shares and then apologized for being "cryptic," explaining that SAC's compliance chief "was giving me Rules 101 yesterday — so I won't be saying much." (Mr. Cohen never responded to the message.) SAC, the indictment says, also recruited employees who possessed what the fund called "an edge," including one trader who was fired from another hedge fund on suspicion of insider trading.

The United States attorney's office in Manhattan and the F.B.I., which brought the charges, have spearheaded the largest and most prominent securities fraud cases in the nation's history, including those against Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and Raj Rajaratnam. Yet federal prosecutors on Thursday portrayed the "rampant insider trading" at SAC as having no equal, pointing to more than a decade of abuses that took place while managers turned a blind eye.

The scheme at SAC, said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, was "substantial, pervasive and on a scale without known precedent in the history of hedge funds."

Mr. Cohen, 57, was not charged, but the 41-page indictment is a stinging attack on him nonetheless, declaring that he "fostered a culture that focused on not discussing inside information too openly, rather than not seeking or trading on such information in the first place." Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil action against Mr. Cohen, accusing him of failing to supervise his employees.

The criminal indictment lists eight former SAC employees who the government said engaged in misconduct while at the fund; six of them have already pleaded guilty to individual criminal charges, and are expected to testify in a trial against SAC.

One of the cooperating employees emerged publicly for the first time in Thursday's indictment. Richard Lee, 34, pleaded guilty earlier this week to insider trading charges, according to the indictment. It was Mr. Lee whom Mr. Cohen hired despite a warning from a previous employer that he was part of an "insider trading group."

The earlier employer was Citadel, a large fund based in Chicago. Citadel, which has not been accused of wrongdoing, said "it does not have, and never has had, an 'insider trading group.' "

"Richard Lee has accepted responsibility for his prior conduct," said Mr. Lee's lawyer, Richard D. Owens of Latham & Watkins.

In response to Thursday's developments, a spokesman for the firm said, "SAC has never encouraged, promoted or tolerated insider trading." The spokesman added, "The handful of men who admit they broke the law does not reflect the honesty, integrity and character of the thousands of men and women who have worked at SAC over the past 21 years."

Despite the onslaught, SAC was open for business on Thursday with Mr. Cohen at the center of the firm's cavernous trading floor in Stamford, Conn., sifting through information, buying and selling stocks, and trying to make money for his investors. Banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley continued to trade with SAC and finance its operations, though several are discussing the implications that the indictment will have on their relationships, said people with knowledge of those conversations. SAC is also wrestling with how to stanch an exodus of its investors, which is expected to accelerate after the indictment.

For its part, the government signaled that it could pursue hefty penalties, staking claim to "any and all assets" of SAC.

SAC managed about $15 billion at the beginning of the year, but the government's investigation has buffeted the firm; investors have withdrawn about $5 billion in recent months. Mr. Cohen's fortune and employee money accounts for about $9 billion of SAC's assets under management.

While prosecutors could theoretically pursue all of SAC's money, they have no plans to do so, a person briefed on the matter said. Instead, they are likely to demand that SAC forfeit money that is traceable to any illicit trading, a sum that could reach a few billion dollars.

By filing the indictment under the theory of corporate criminal liability, the government is wielding a potent weapon. If prosecutors can show that SAC traders were acting "on behalf of and for the benefit of" SAC when breaking the law — and six such traders are likely to testify to that — then the theory allows the government to impute liability to the firm itself.

To avoid charging corporations every time an employee commits a crime, the government often relies on so-called deferred prosecution agreements, which suspend an indictment so long as the company improves its behavior. Prosecutors seized on this approach after the Justice Department indicted Enron's accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, in 2002, leading the firm to collapse and terminate 28,000 jobs. Deferred-prosecution agreements have drawn ire from critics of Wall Street who have complained that no Wall Street banks faced criminal charges after the financial crisis.

But in the case of SAC, which has about 1,000 employees in five offices across the globe, the government rejected that more cautious measure, limiting the fund's ability to defend itself.

"In the corporate criminal world, avoiding indictment is the key battleground," said Alan Vinegrad, a former federal prosecutor now a partner at Covington & Burling. "Once you have the indictment, either it's a deferred prosecution agreement or you have your work cut out for you."

At the heart of the government's case is an attack on SAC's pursuit of an edge in stock trading. Though it has pushed into other investment strategies, at its core SAC has traditionally been an information-driven hedge fund, aggressively trading stocks around market-moving events like earnings releases and merger announcements.

At the height of SAC's powers in 2006 and 2007, Mr. Cohen is reported to have earned about $900 million each year, helping to give the firm a certain mystique. But it also generated whispers about whether the fund routinely crossed the line.

The indictment paints Mr. Cohen and his staff as promoting a culture of lax compliance and crooked morals. In one example, an SAC employee forwarded an e-mail to Mr. Cohen in which a prospective hire was praised for his access to industrial companies. The message described him as "the guy who knows the quarters cold, has a share house in the Hamptons" with a senior executive at a big industrial company.

In another instance, prosecutors quote internal e-mails from two SAC analysts saying that a third colleague had a "black edge," secret information about a company so good that it almost guaranteed an investment's success.

SAC used the word "edge" in a marketing document to summarize the fund's investment strategy in 2008, a year that much of the activity at the center of the indictment occurred. But by 2011, in a deposition for a private lawsuit, and at a time when the investigation was heating up, Mr. Cohen said, "I hate that word."

The charges will not necessarily destroy SAC. One option for Mr. Cohen would be to shut down SAC and open up a family office that manages his own personal fortune. But the S.E.C. could seek to have him barred from stock trading for other investors for life.

The government will face off against an army of lawyers from two of the world's most sophisticated law firms: Willkie Farr & Gallagher and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Martin Klotz at Willkie and Daniel J. Kramer at Paul Weiss have headed the SAC representation. For the criminal case, the fund has also enlisted Mark F. Pomerantz and Theodore V. Wells Jr., both at Paul Weiss and two of the country's most renowned criminal defense lawyers.

Paul Weiss finds itself in a familiar position. Two decades ago, it represented Mr. Milken.

William Alden contributed reporting

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The Lede: Video of Juror Who Says George Zimmerman ‘Got Away With Murder’

Updated | 10:15 p.m. As my colleague Lizette Alvarez reports, a juror in the trial of George Zimmerman told ABC News that she believed Mr. Zimmerman "got away with murder" in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

The juror, known as Maddy and identified as Juror B29 in the courtroom, said that she and the others on the six-woman jury had no choice but to vote for an acquittal in the case because of Florida law and the evidence presented at the trial in Sanford, Fla. Mr. Zimmerman, 29, argued that he shot Mr. Martin, 17, who was unarmed, in self-defense.

"You can't put the man in jail even though in our hearts we felt he was guilty," the juror said in an interview broadcast on ABC's "World News" on Thursday. "But we had to grab our hearts and put it aside and look at the evidence."

The juror also said that she felt sympathy for the Martin family. Of the charges against Mr. Zimmerman, she said, "The law couldn't prove it."

"George Zimmerman — look, George Zimmerman got away with murder. But you can't get away from God," she told Robin Roberts, the "Good Morning America" anchor. "And at the end of the day, he's going to have a lot of questions and answers he has to deal with."

The juror, whose full name has not been revealed by the court, allowed her face to be shown during the interview but withheld her full name because of concerns for her safety, ABC News reported.

She is the second of six jurors to come forward. Offering a different perspective on the jury negotiations was Juror B37, who spoke to CNN's Anderson Cooper with her face hidden from the cameras.

In a lengthy interview, Juror B37 said she believed that Mr. Zimmerman was "justified" in shooting Mr. Martin. She said she believed the defense's argument that, while Mr. Zimmerman should not have followed the teenager, he shot and killed him in self-defense.

Shortly after the CNN interview was broadcast, four other jurors, as The Lede previously reported, distanced themselves from Juror B37, saying that her statements did not reflect their views.

It is not known if Juror B29 was among them, or if the remaining jurors share the perspective that Juror B29 offered in the interview.

A transcript of the interview, which is scheduled to continue on Friday on "Good Morning America," was provided by ABC News.

ROBIN ROBERTS:
So what was your — what was your first vote?
JUROR B29:
My first vote was second-degree murder.
ROBIN ROBERTS:
Second-degree murder?
JUROR B29:
In between, that nine hours, it was hard. You know, a lot of us that wanted to find something that — something that we could connect to the law. For myself, he's guilty, because the evidence shows he's guilty.
ROBIN ROBERTS:
He's guilty of?
JUROR B29:
Killing Trayvon Martin. But as the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him intentionally, you can't find — you can't say he's guilty.
ROBIN ROBERTS: Did you want to step out at all? Did you want to——
(OVERTALK)
JUROR B29:
I was the juror that was gonna give 'em the hung jury, oh, I was. I fought to the end. It's hard for me to sleep, it's hard for me to eat, because I feel that I was part, or I feel that I was forcefully included in Trayvon Martin's death. And as I carry him on my back I'm hurting as much as Trayvon's Martin's mother, 'cause there's no way that any mother should feel that pain.
ROBIN ROBERTS:
But you feel in your heart of hearts that you and the jury approached it and came with the decision, and you stand by that decision to this day?
JUROR B29:
I stand by the decision because of the law. If I stand by the deci— decision because of my heart, he would've been guilty.
ROBIN ROBERTS:
I know that you've heard some people have said point blank, they've said, "George Zimmerman got away with murder." How do you respond to those people that say that?
JUROR B29:
George Zimmerman — look, George Zimmerman got away with murder. But you can't get away from God. And at the end of the day, he's gonna have a lot of questions and answers he has to deal with. The law couldn't prove it. But, you know — you know, the world goes in circles.

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Aid to Egypt Can Keep Flowing, Despite Overthrow, White House Decides

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has concluded it is not legally required to determine whether the Egyptian military engineered a coup d'état in ousting President Mohamed Morsi, a senior administration official said Thursday, a finding that will allow it to continue to funnel $1.5 billion in American aid to Egypt each year.

The legal opinion, submitted to the White House by lawyers from the State Department and other agencies, amounts to an escape hatch for President Obama and his advisers, who had concluded that cutting off financial assistance could destabilize Egypt at an already fragile moment and would pose a threat to neighbors like Israel.

The senior official did not describe the legal reasoning behind the finding, saying only, "The law does not require us to make a formal determination as to whether a coup took place, and it is not in our national interest to make such a determination."

"We will not say it was a coup, we will not say it was not a coup, we will just not say," the official said.

News of the administration's legal determination began circulating on Capitol Hill after a deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, briefed House and Senate members in closed-door sessions earlier on Thursday.

The White House said it would continue to use financial aid as a lever to pressure Egypt's new government to move swiftly with a democratic transition. On Wednesday, the Pentagon delayed the shipment of four F-16 fighter jets to the Egyptian Air Force to signal the administration's displeasure with the chaotic situation in Egypt.

Such case-by-case decisions, the official said, would be the model for how the United States disbursed aid in the coming months. The administration might also "reprogram" assistance to promote a transition, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the White House's internal deliberations.

"We will work with the Congress to determine how best to continue assistance to Egypt in a manner that encourages Egypt's interim government to quickly and responsibly transition back to a stable, democratic, inclusive, civilian-led government that addresses the needs and respects the rights and freedoms of all its people," the official said.

Had the administration been forced to determine whether the tumultuous events of July 3 in Cairo were a coup d'etat, it is difficult to see how it could have avoided that conclusion.

Responding to days of antigovernment demonstrations, Egypt's generals deposed Mr. Morsi; put him under arrest, along with other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood; and suspended the Constitution.

Mr. Obama did not use the word "coup" in his initial statement about Mr. Morsi's ouster, and he has not done so since. Rather, he warned the military to resist violence and to act swiftly to restore a democratically elected government, with a transition process that includes all elements of Egyptian society, including the Brotherhood.

The generals, citing the vast popular uprising against Mr. Morsi, disputed that it was a coup. They have installed a transitional government, led by a civilian judge, but they have declined to release Mr. Morsi and have rounded up other leaders of the Brotherhood. The exclusion of the Brotherhood, American officials said, is one of the factors that contributed to the decision to halt the F-16 shipment.

Shortly after Mr. Morsi was ousted, one of his senior advisers, Wael Haddara, accused the American administration of "verbal acrobatics," and asked, "With the entire world calling this a coup, why isn't the American administration calling it so?"

Under the terms of the Foreign Assistance Act, no aid other than that for democracy promotion can be given to "any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup d'état." The law does not allow a presidential waiver, and stipulates that aid cannot be restored until "a democratically elected government has taken office."

The State Department's legal adviser, however, appears to have leaned heavily on a national-security rationale for arguing that the White House could continue to supply aid.

"Egypt serves as a stabilizing pillar of regional peace and security and the United States has a national security interest in a stable and successful democratic transition in Egypt," the official said. "We believe that the continued provision of assistance to Egypt, consistent with our law, is important to our goal of advancing a responsible transition to democratic governance and is consistent with our national security interests."

Among the potential dangers in the cut-off of aid is a reduction in the ability of the Egyptian military to halt smuggling of weapons to Hamas, which could use them against Israel. The aid program is also a pillar of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, and Israeli officials have urged the United States not to suspend it.

There is little appetite for cutting off aid on Capitol Hill. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and the head of a foreign aid subcommittee, said he would "review future aid to the Egyptian government."

But calls for the aid flow to be maintained have come from Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the senior Democrat and Republican, respectively, on the Senate foreign relations committee.

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Scores Reported Dead as Train Derails in Spain

A high-speed passenger train that was reportedly traveling at more than double the speed limit derailed just outside a station in northwest Spain on Wednesday evening, killing at least 60 of those on board, according to local news reports.

The train, carrying 218 passengers and 4 crew members, was traveling between Madrid and Ferrol when it derailed at 8:41 p.m., the Spanish national train company Renfe said in a statement. It was about two miles from the station in the city of Santiago de Compostela.

Citing unidentified sources, the Web site of the Spanish newspaper El País reported that the train had been traveling at 110 miles per hour, but that the speed limit for the stretch of track where the derailment occurred was 50. The train derailed with such force that one car leapt 15 feet in the air and 45 feet from the tracks, the newspaper said.

Renfe said in a statement early Thursday that its technicians and those from Adif, the state-owned railroad company that reports to the Ministry of Public Works, had arrived to help in the rescue, repair tracks and "clarify the causes of the accident."

Pictures from the scene showed the train lying zigzagged on its side across the tracks. At least one car had been torn open and was jammed on top of another. What appeared to be bodies were covered in makeshift blankets by the side of the tracks as emergency workers struggled to pull the dead and injured from the train's windows as night fell.

"The road is full of cadavers," a radio reporter, Xaime López, said on the station Cadena Ser. "It's striking: you almost can't even count them."

Precise casualty figures were not immediately available, but El País, citing local officials, said at least 60 people had died and more than 100 were injured, 10 to 20 of them seriously. The derailment occurred on the eve of an annual religious and cultural festival in Santiago de Compostela that attracts hordes of visitors and pilgrims, according to the region's tourist board.

The Spanish government is working from the assumption that the derailment was an accident, The Associated Press reported, not an act of terrorism. A total of 191 people were killed in the 2004 bombing by Islamist extremists of four commuter trains in Madrid.

Calls to the offices of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain and representatives of the Spanish government in the United States were not immediately answered Wednesday night.

A passenger, Sergio Prego, told Cadena Ser that the train had jumped off the tracks at a curve. "It was a disaster," he said. "I was lucky."

Another passenger, Ricardo Montesco, who was in the second car, told a local radio station: "It happened very fast. At a curve, the train started rolling over, some cars were on top of others and a lot of people were trapped at the bottom. We had to get out from underneath the cars and we realized the train was on fire."

If the initial casualty estimates hold, the accident will rank among Europe's most deadly rail crashes in recent years. In 2006, an underground metro train in Valencia, Spain, derailed and killed 41 people. Excessive speed on a curve was cited as a factor.

Elias E. Lopez contributed reporting.

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Obama Nominates Caroline Kennedy to be Ambassador to Japan

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday nominated Caroline Kennedy to be ambassador to Japan, moving to give a scion of America's most enduring political dynasty a diplomatic post that has often gone to political heavyweights.

In naming Ms. Kennedy, whose nomination has been rumored for months, Mr. Obama is keeping with a well-established tradition of rewarding important campaign supporters with plum embassies. He recently put forward big-dollar fund-raisers to be envoys in London, Berlin, Copenhagen and Madrid.

But Ms. Kennedy's value to Mr. Obama has been less about money than mystique. As the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, her imprimatur on his candidacy in 2008 — along with that of her uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts — elevated Mr. Obama at a crucial moment against his better-known rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

And it gave Ms. Kennedy lasting ties to Mr. Obama, something analysts said would come in useful in Japan, where officials and journalists have been buzzing with speculation about what a Kennedy in Tokyo would mean for Japan's standing in the United States.

Ms. Kennedy, 55, a lawyer and an author who has served as director of numerous nonprofit organizations, has never worked in government and has no special expertise in Japan. But some experts said her lack of knowledge is outweighed by her connections to the Oval Office. She shares that with other marquee figures who have served as ambassador to Tokyo, including former Vice President Walter F. Mondale; Howard Baker, a former senator and White House chief of staff; and Thomas S. Foley, a former House speaker.

"For those who say she doesn't know a lot about Japan, I say 'sure,' but neither did Walter Mondale," said Kurt M. Campbell, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs.

"What you really want in an ambassador is someone who can get the president of the United States on the phone," Mr. Campbell said. "I can't think of anybody in the United States who could do that more quickly than Caroline Kennedy."

Her stature, he said, should assuage Japan's worries that in Washington, Tokyo takes a back seat to Beijing. The current ambassador to China, Gary F. Locke, was commerce secretary during Mr. Obama's first term, but he hardly knows the president as well as Ms. Kennedy does.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Japanese Foreign Ministry welcomed the nomination, noting that "Caroline Kennedy has the deep confidence of President Obama" and that her choice reflected "the great importance the Obama administration attaches to the Japan-U.S. alliance."

If confirmed, Ms. Kennedy would replace John V. Roos, a lawyer and major fund-raiser for the president. Mr. Obama chose Mr. Roos over Joseph S. Nye Jr., a Harvard professor who was the preferred candidate of Mrs. Clinton, then Mr. Obama's newly appointed secretary of state.

Mr. Roos was barely known in Japan when he arrived in 2009. But he built up a following on Twitter with frequent posts about baseball, Justin Bieber and Mrs. Clinton — many of them in Japanese. He was the first envoy to attend a peace memorial in Hiroshima, and he dealt with the tsunami and subsequent crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

While Ms. Kennedy may not have firsthand ties to Japan, historians note that her father played a critical role as president in repairing the alliance between Japan and the United States.

Relations had become frayed over the signing of a 1960 treaty that made permanent the American military base on Okinawa. President Kennedy sent another Harvard academic, Edwin O. Reischauer, as his ambassador to Tokyo, and Mr. Reischauer, with his Japanese wife, Haru, worked to wean the countries away from their post-World War II relationship as occupier and occupied. The president also sent his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, on a fence-mending tour of Japan.

Ms. Kennedy would not face anywhere near that kind of tension. These days, American officials worry most about clashes between Japan and China over disputed islands in the East China Sea. But the Japanese bridled when Mr. Obama skipped a meeting last month with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the sidelines of the Group of 8 meeting in Northern Ireland.

None of Mr. Obama's other diplomatic appointments are likely to draw the attention that Ms. Kennedy's has.

Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue magazine and a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama, was rumored to be under consideration for posts in London and Paris. But she was passed over for London in favor of Matthew Barzun, a technology executive who was the Obama campaign's national finance chairman and served as the ambassador to Sweden from 2009 to 2011.

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Killer of Two Undercover Detectives Is Sent Back to Death Row

The anonymous 12-member jury took just five hours to reach its decision to return Mr. Wilson to federal death row, where no other New Yorker has served time in six decades.

As the jury foreman responded to preliminary questions from a 22-page verdict sheet, Mr. Wilson, 31, slumped forward with his chin in his hands as the tension rose in the courtroom in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. When the foreman finally said "yes" to the death penalty, Mr. Wilson leaned back and looked over to his family. They wept as he was led away.

Outside the courthouse on Wednesday, Rodney Andrews Sr., the father of one of the victims, Detective Rodney J. Andrews, said that he was pleased with the outcome. "He's done too many things," Mr. Andrews said of Mr. Wilson. "He's proven that he's not going to change." Mr. Andrews said that he wanted to watch Mr. Wilson's execution, and when asked why, he replied, "For satisfaction."

Detective Andrews's wife, MaryAnn, said she was too emotional to speak. The family of Detective James V. Nemorin, the other victim, did not attend court on Wednesday.

In a statement, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said: "It was an assault on the society that those officers represented, and for that reason their murders had to be answered with the full force of punishment at society's disposal. To do otherwise is to invite chaos."

Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District, whose office prosecuted the case, said that she hoped the verdict would bring closure to the victims' families.

Mr. Wilson's lawyers declined to comment. A judge is expected to formally sentence Mr. Wilson in the fall.

The legal case against him has lasted more than a decade.

On March 10, 2003, Mr. Wilson killed Detective Andrews, 34, and Detective Nemorin, 36, who were participating in a sting operation to buy an illegal gun. He shot each once in the back of the head at point-blank range on a secluded street on Staten Island.

 In choosing the death penalty, the jury unanimously found that prosecutors proved every element of their case, including that Mr. Wilson committed the murders for financial gain and that he poses a future danger.

The jury rejected arguments posed by the defense — that life in prison was punishment enough and that Mr. Wilson's rough childhood filled with bad influences should spare him from death. Only one member of the jury found that the federal prison system could restrict Mr. Wilson's inappropriate behavior. Only two found that "Ronell Wilson's life has value." None felt that his background mitigated against the imposition of the death penalty.

 Death penalty trials are exceedingly rare in New York, where the state's highest court struck down the death penalty in 2004 and where capital cases at the federal level are often resolved before trial.

 Federal prosecutors vigorously sought the death penalty against Mr. Wilson, taking the case from state prosecutors on Staten Island, when capital punishment at the state level was invalidated. They won a death verdict in 2007, the first one in New York since 1953.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his death sentence in 2010, ruling that the prosecutor had violated Mr. Wilson's constitutional right not to testify by telling jurors that if Mr. Wilson had felt any remorse, he would have taken the stand. The panel commuted the sentence to life in prison without parole, but prosecutors decided to again seek death.

 With Mr. Wilson's guilt never in doubt, the question at the heart of the monthlong sentencing trial was: How much punishment is enough?

Prosecutors argued that prison alone would not do. The prosecutors showed a dramatic video of several guards at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn storming into a recreation pen to retrieve Mr. Wilson, who had refused to be handcuffed. When the guards emerged from the pen with Mr. Wilson, he smiled.

One of their witnesses described seeing a guard, Nancy Gonzalez, walk away from Mr. Wilson's cell one day, leaving him there with his pants down and his genitals exposed. Mr. Wilson had several sexual encounters with Ms. Gonzalez, fathering a child, Justus, who was born in March.

Defense witnesses described Mr. Wilson's difficult childhood, during which he shuttled between relatives as his mother, an alcoholic and drug addict, was often absent. He spent years in an overcrowded and squalid home, where the adults who influenced him were criminals.

Life in prison was punishment enough, Mr. Wilson's lawyers argued, for someone who never really had a chance.

But Celia Cohen, one of the prosecutors, said that only the death penalty assured justice. "He's not going to stop until he's dead," she said in her closing argument. "Truer words were never said."

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DealBook: Trader and S.E.C. Lawyer Spar Over E-Mail

The Securities and Exchange Commission waited more than three years to have a chance to shred the credibility of Fabrice Tourre, a former Goldman Sachs trader, in front of a jury. It finally got its chance on Wednesday.

Over the course of two hours, the government's lawyer, Matthew T. Martens, and Mr. Tourre, who has been accused of participating in a scheme to defraud investors, verbally sparred over what Mr. Tourre knew about a 2007 trade he helped structure. Mr. Tourre seemed exasperated on the stand, and at one point during the questioning, tipped over the water container on the witness stand while reaching for a document.

"So the statement was false," Mr. Martens asked just minutes after Mr. Tourre took the stand, challenging him over an e-mail he had written.

"It was not accurate," Mr. Tourre responded, frustration rising in his voice.

"Is there a difference between something being inaccurate or false?" Mr. Martens shot back.

"There is," Mr. Tourre said.

Mr. Tourre testified at the midpoint of the trial, one of the biggest cases to come out of the 2008 financial crisis. Mr. Tourre is also one of only a few Wall Street employees to land in court over their actions during the period, and the rarity of the trial underpins its importance.

For Mr. Tourre, who is now enrolled in a doctoral economics program at the University of Chicago, an unfavorable verdict from the civil trial could yield a fine, or worse, a ban from the securities industry. For the S.E.C., which has been dogged by its failure to thwart the crisis and hold executives who played a role in it accountable, its reputation is on the line and victory in the case is crucial.

On Wednesday, Mr. Tourre and Mr. Martens sparred over what could turn out to be a critical misstatement Mr. Tourre made in an e-mail to ACA Management, a company that both invested in the trade in question and helped construct it.

In 2007, at Goldman's behest, ACA helped put together a trade for the hedge fund Paulson & Company. The firm and its leader, John A. Paulson, sensed that the housing market was heading for a collapse and made more than $1 billion by betting against the security ACA had assembled. Earlier this week, a former ACA executive, Laura Schwartz, testified that had she known Mr. Paulson was placing a negative or bearish bet she never would have gone ahead with the transaction.

A central question in the case is whether Mr. Tourre should have corrected ACA's impression that Paulson & Company had a positive outlook on the security. In another correspondence, a January 2007 e-mail that was forwarded to Mr. Tourre, Ms. Schwartz described the Paulson & Company hedge fund as having an "equity perspective," indicating that she believed the hedge fund wanted the security to rise in value.

Mr. Tourre acknowledged that he did not correct her error, and that a firm in ACA's position should have had such a misunderstanding corrected. But Mr. Martens, the S.E.C. lawyer, was not able to get Mr. Tourre to say under oath that he had actually read that phrase in the e-mail from Ms. Schwartz.

Mr. Tourre had forwarded the e-mail to a lawyer at Goldman, saying, "Let's sit down and discuss when you get a chance." Mr. Tourre said all he could recall was that his note to the lawyer referred to the final sentence in the three-sentence e-mail, concerning credit analysis of the deal.

The courtroom was packed on Wednesday, as lawyers including Thomas Ajamie, a well-known plaintiffs' attorney, watched Mr. Martens in action. Mr. Tourre, dressed in a black suit, crisp white shirt and purple tie, looked much younger than his 34 years. He smiled at repetitive questions from Mr. Martens, often raising his eyebrows.

He spoke quickly with a thick accent, and had trouble pronouncing some simple words, which may color the jury's view of him. On more than one occasion, he referred to "bonds" but it sounded more like "bones."

"Sorry, it is my French accent," Mr. Tourre said to the court reporter, who had asked him to repeat a word.

While the highlight of the day was Mr. Tourre's testimony, most of Wednesday was consumed with the cross-examination by Mr. Tourre's lawyers of Ms. Schwartz, the ACA employee who worked with Goldman and Paulson & Company in 2007 to assemble the trade.

Though Ms. Schwartz proved to be an articulate witness for the S.E.C., Sean Coffey, Mr. Tourre's lawyer, spent hours taking apart her testimony, painting her as a poorly informed executive who did not seem to read newspaper articles on the hedge funds she counted as her clients. At one point, she could not remember doing a simple Internet search on Paulson & Company before meeting with them on the trade in question.

Ms. Schwartz, Mr. Coffey contended, was confused about Paulson & Company's role in the trade from the start.

In early January 2007, Ms. Schwartz received an e-mail from Gail Kreitman, a business acquaintance of hers who was then a Goldman saleswoman, about an unnamed client looking to meet with ACA. That same day Ms. Schwartz called Ms. Kreitman to discuss the e-mail. That call was followed up with an electronic meeting invitation to executives at Goldman and ACA, and referred to Paulson as an "equity" investor, meaning he would be a long investor, betting that the security would rise in value.

"Did she tell you the investment strategy?" Mr. Coffey asked Ms. Schwartz about her call with Ms. Kreitman.

"I have no recollection." Ms. Schwartz said.

"You had never set eyes on Fabrice Tourre when you wrote this calendar invite," he said. Ms. Schwartz testified that she did not believe she had met Mr. Tourre at that point.

Mr. Coffey contended that Ms. Schwartz simply assumed Paulson & Company was taking a long position, and never bothered to directly ask Goldman or the hedge fund. Ms. Schwartz has testified that her impression that Paulson & Company was long was based on numerous documents and e-mails stating that Mr. Paulson was the equity investor. She said Goldman never corrected e-mails stating that.

While there were initial representations to ACA from Goldman that left the impression with ACA that Paulson & Company was going long on the trade, Mr. Coffey presented multiple other exhibits, including the offering document, which showed that no investor was taking that equity piece of the trade.

The jury also heard more about the another S.E.C. investigation Ms. Schwartz had been embroiled in. A week before the trial, the court was notified that the S.E.C. had decided not to bring a case against Ms. Schwartz, a reprieve that Mr. Tourre's lawyers hope will shade the jury's view of her.

Once the S.E.C. had decided not to move forward with the charges, it met with Ms. Schwartz to prepare her to testify at Mr. Tourre's trial. Mr. Martens asked Ms. Schwartz what he told her at the end of that preparation session. "You told me to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may. I have told my truth."

Mr. Tourre is expected to continue his testimony on Thursday, and possibly into Friday.

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Fallen Leader May Face Trial Soon in China

BEIJING — Bo Xilai, the disgraced former Communist Party official, was indicted on Thursday on criminal charges of bribery, corruption and abuse of power, state media reported, paving the way for a prominent trial expected to start within weeks that could be a climactic chapter in a scandal that exposed sordid political machinations at the top levels of the party.

Jason Lee/Reuters

Bo Xilai would be the first Politburo member to be tried on criminal charges since 2008.

The charges were filed at a court in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, in eastern China, a court employee said. Mr. Bo was removed in March 2012 from his senior post as party chief of Chongqing, a municipality of 30 million in southwest China. He was later expelled from the Communist Party and its elite 25-member Politburo.

Officials from Shandong have been in Chongqing recently to discuss trial details there, according to one person in Chongqing with official contacts.

The party's General Office has circulated an internal document giving further details of the basis for the charges, said one person in Beijing with high-level contacts. The document accused Mr. Bo, 64, of taking about $3.3 million in bribes, embezzling almost $1 million and abusing his power as a senior official. The document also said a main source of the bribes was Xu Ming, a billionaire who lives in Dalian, the northeastern city where Mr. Bo had been the mayor.

Mr. Xu, once listed by Forbes as one of the 10 richest people in China, has been detained since spring 2012 and is also expected to be criminally charged. Mr. Xu entered into real estate ventures in Chongqing after Mr. Bo became party chief there in December 2007, and he made frequent trips on his private plane to the city. Mr. Xu was part of an inner circle of Bo family allies that included Ma Biao, a business executive, and Yu Junshi, a former military intelligence officer who served as a Bo family fixer. All were detained in spring 2012.

Last August, Mr. Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, was given a suspended death sentence, which usually equals a life prison term, for murdering Neil Heywood, a British business executive whose body was discovered in a Chongqing hotel room in November 2011. In February 2012, the Chonging police chief, Wang Lijun, fled to a nearby American consulate to tell officials there of the murder.

Several political analysts said Mr. Bo's punishment could range from a prison term of 15 to 20 years to a suspended death sentence. Like those of his wife, Mr. Bo's upcoming court sessions are expected to amount to little more than a show trial, in which a verdict has already been negotiated by Communist Party leaders.

Shi Da contributed research.

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