Wealth Matters: Protect Yourself from Investment Fraud This Madoff Day

Left to right: Louis Lanzano/Associated Press; Stephen Chernin/Getty Images; Richard Carson/Reuters

Three men accused of defrauding clients arriving at federal court. From left, Marc Dreier in Manhattan on May 11, 2009; Bernard Madoff in Manhattan on March 12, 2009; and R. Allen Stanford in Houston last Feb. 29.

THIS is the time of year when most people think of gifts and holiday gatherings. I couldn’t help thinking of frauds past.

Four years ago this week, Marc S. Dreier, a high-flying lawyer, was arrested and later charged with defrauding his clients of $700 million. A few days later, Bernard L. Madoff’s fraud was uncovered. Totaling an estimated $65 billion, Mr. Madoff’s fraud was in a class by itself. And then, a short time afterward, some of the brokers who had been selling fraudulent certificates of deposit for R. Allen Stanford began to turn on him; he was arrested in February 2009 and later convicted of a $7 billion fraud.

These schemes collapsed with the economy in 2008. But on their anniversaries, it may be a good time to ask whether you have done all you can to lower your risk of being caught up in a similar fraud. Call it Madoff Day (celebrated on Dec. 11, the day of his arrest).

Protecting yourself against fraud, or simply bad advice, is easier said than done. The most common advice is to make sure your money is held by an independent custodian or firm whose job is to keep your money safe. That wasn’t the case with either the Madoff or Stanford fraud. But that is only one small step.

So what else can investors do to protect themselves, not only from unscrupulous advisers but also from rushing into an investment that is clearly too good to be true?

Marc H. Simon, a lawyer who lost two years of bonuses, his job and months of unreimbursed expenses when Mr. Dreier’s law firm collapsed, said he has thought a lot about what he could have done differently.

Mr. Simon said that six or seven years before the fraud was uncovered, he knew of inconsistencies in the firm’s 401(k) plans. But the big red flag should have been that Mr. Dreier had sole control over every major decision at the law firm. Still, that had been Mr. Dreier’s pitch: work for him and don’t worry about the irksome details partners typically face.

“People like Drier and Madoff were highly intelligent individuals, they were very charismatic and they were giving people what they wanted,” Mr. Simon said. “It is harder to bring into question those who are providing you something you want.”

Randall A. Pulman, a lawyer in San Antonio who represents many victims of Mr. Stanford’s fraud, agreed that the will to believe was what ensnared people.

“For you and me, it’s too good to be true,” he said. “For the guy who has been working in the oil fields, how is he supposed to know?”

Of course, fraud and just plain bad advice are not limited to the poor or unsophisticated. Robert P. Rittereiser, the former chief financial officer of Merrill Lynch and former chief executive of E. F. Hutton, is working as the receiver for two funds suing J. Ezra Merkin, a former money manager who steered money to Mr. Madoff. Mr. Rittereiser did not think investors in Mr. Merkin’s funds knew that their money was simply being passed on to Mr. Madoff. But even if they did, they may not have seen anything to be concerned about.

“They were investing money and getting appropriate returns for the kind of fund it was,” Mr. Rittereiser said. “Most of them had a relationship of some kind and confidence with Merkin and the people he was dealing with.”

So how do you protect yourself? The first step would seem to be picking an honest adviser. The good news is that only about 7 percent of advisers have disciplinary records, said Nicholas W. Stuller, president and chief executive of AdviceIQ, a company that evaluates advisers. The bad news is that those violations appear only after someone has filed a complaint.

Mr. Stuller’s company, which has now approved some 2,400 advisers, rejects anyone with any type of infraction — from a securities fine to a misdemeanor for getting into a fight. He said this policy might keep some good advisers off the site, but his goal is to search the records of federal and state regulators to find advisers he knows are clean.

“There are advisers who have significant negative disciplinary history with one regulator but appear to be pristine with another regulator,” Mr. Stuller said. “There was a guy in Minnesota who was stealing insurance premiums. In his enforcement record, it says, ‘We’re going to alert Finra,’ but his Finra record is clean,” he said, referring to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. “That’s where the regulators don’t talk to each other.”

AdviceIQ’s main competitor, BrightScope, takes a different approach. It notes disciplinary actions taken against advisers but leaves it up to the consumer to go to regulators to determine what the violations were.

“We want the consumer to go to the source data, because there is a lot of liability in publishing that,” said Mike Alfred, co-founder and chief executive of BrightScope. “Many of these folks are good advisers, and they’ll take care of you. But what if they had one crazy client who put all his money in Internet stocks in 2000 and then sued?”

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Morsi Defends Wide Authority in Egypt as Turmoil Rises

CAIRO — Egypt descended deeper into political turmoil on Thursday as the embattled president, Mohamed Morsi, blamed an outbreak of violence on a “fifth column” and vowed to proceed with a referendum on an Islamist-backed constitution that has prompted deadly street battles between his supporters and their opponents.

As the tanks and armored vehicles of the elite presidential guard ringed the palace, Mr. Morsi gave a nationally televised address offering only a hint of compromise, while standing firmly by his plan for a Dec. 15 constitutional referendum. His opponents quickly rejected, even mocked, his speech and called for new protests on Friday.

Many said the speech had echoes of his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, who always saw “hidden hands” behind public unrest. Mr. Morsi said that corrupt beneficiaries of Mr. Mubarak’s autocracy had been “hiring thugs and giving out firearms, and the time has come for them to be punished and penalized by the law.” He added, “It is my duty to defend the homeland.”

Mr. Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, spoke a day after the growing antagonism between his supporters and the secular opposition had spilled out into the worst outbreak of violence between political factions here since Gamal Abdel Nasser’s coup six decades ago. By the time the fighting ended, six people were dead and hundreds were wounded.

The violence also led to resignations that rocked the government, as advisers, party members and the head of the commission overseeing the planned vote on a new constitution stepped down, citing the bloodshed.

Mr. Morsi also received a phone call from President Obama, who expressed his “deep concern” about the deaths and injuries overnight, the White House said in a statement.

“The president emphasized that all political leaders in Egypt should make clear to their supporters that violence is unacceptable,” the statement said, chastising both Mr. Morsi and the opposition leaders for failing to urge their supporters to pull back during the fight.

Prospects of a political solution also seemed a casualty, as both sides effectively refused to back down on core demands.

The opposition leadership refused to negotiate until Mr. Morsi withdrew a decree that put his judgments beyond judicial review until the referendum — which he refused to do. And it demanded that the referendum be canceled, which he also refused.

The hostilities have threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the constitutional referendum with concerns about political coercion. The feasibility of holding the vote also appears uncertain amid attacks on Brotherhood offices around the country and open street fighting in the shadow of the presidential palace.

Though Mr. Morsi spoke of opening a door for dialogue and compromise, leaders of the political opposition and the thousands of protesters surrounding his palace dismissed his conspiratorial saber rattling as an echo of Mr. Mubarak. And his tone, after a night many here view as a national tragedy, seemed only to widen the gulf between his Islamist supporters and their secular opponents over his efforts to push through the referendum on an Islamist-backed charter approved over the objections of other factions and the Coptic Christian church.

Outside the palace, demonstrators huddled around car radios to listen to Mr. Morsi’s words and mocked his attempts to blame outside infiltrators for the violence, which began when thousands of his Islamist supporters rousted an opposition sit-in.

“So we are the ones who attacked him, the ones who attacked the sit-in?” one protester asked sarcastically. “So we are the ones with the swords and weapons and money?” asked another.

Some left for the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, where a mob had broken in, looted offices, and made a bonfire out of the belongings of the group’s spiritual leader — until riot police officers chased them away with tear gas.

“I never thought I would say this, but even Mubarak was more savvy when he spoke in a time of crisis,” said Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

Two employees of The New York Times contributed reporting.

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Ransomware Is Expanding in the United States

CULVER CITY, Calif. — Kidnappers used to make ransom notes with letters cut out of magazines. Now, notes simply pop up on your computer screen, except the hostage is your PC.

Michal Czerwonka for The New York Times

Security researchers Eric Chien, left, and Vikram Thakur at Symantec, where Mr. Chien has been tracking ransomware schemes.

Sometimes victims get a message, ostensibly from the F.B.I., accusing them of breaking the law and demanding a fine.

In the past year, hundreds of thousands of people across the world have switched on their computers to find distressing messages alerting them that they no longer have access to their PCs or any of the files on them.

The messages claim to be from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, some 20 other law enforcement agencies across the globe or, most recently, Anonymous, a shadowy group of hackers. The computer users are told that the only way to get their machines back is to pay a steep fine.

And, curiously, it’s working. The scheme is making more than $5 million a year, according to computer security experts who are tracking them.

The scourge dates to 2009 in Eastern Europe. Three years later, with business booming, the perpetrators have moved west. Security experts say that there are now more than 16 gangs of sophisticated criminals extorting millions from victims across Europe.

The threat, known as ransomware, recently hit the United States. Some gangs have abandoned previously lucrative schemes, like fake antivirus scams and banking trojans, to focus on ransomware full time.

Essentially online extortion, ransomware involves infecting a user’s computer with a virus that locks it. The attackers demand money before the computer will be unlocked, but once the money is paid, they rarely unlock it.

In the vast majority of cases, victims do not regain access to their computer unless they hire a computer technician to remove the virus manually. And even then, they risk losing all files and data because the best way to remove the virus is to wipe the computer clean.

It may be hard to fathom why anyone would agree to fork over hundreds of dollars to a demanding stranger, but security researchers estimate that 2.9 percent of compromised computer owners take the bait and pay. That, they say, is an extremely conservative estimate. In some countries, the payout rate has been as high as 15 percent.

That people do fall for it is a testament to criminals’ increasingly targeted and inventive methods. Early variations of ransomware locked computers, displayed images of pornography and, in Russian, demanded a fee — often more than $400 — to have it removed. Current variants are more targeted and toy with victims’ consciences.

Researchers say criminals now use victims’ Internet addresses to customize ransom notes in their native tongue. Instead of pornographic images, criminals flash messages from local law enforcement agencies accusing them of visiting illegal pornography, gambling or piracy sites and demand they pay a fine to unlock their computer.

Victims in the United States see messages in English purporting to be from the F.B.I. or Justice Department. In the Netherlands, people get a similar message, in Dutch, from the local police. (Some Irish variations even demand money in Gaelic.) The latest variants speak to victims through recorded audio messages that tell users that if they do not pay within 48 hours, they will face criminal charges. Some even show footage from a computer’s webcam to give the illusion that law enforcement is watching.

The messages often demand that victims buy a preloaded debit card that can be purchased at a local drugstore — and enter the PIN. That way it’s impossible for victims to cancel the transaction once it becomes clear that criminals have no intention of unlocking their PC.

The hunt is on to find these gangs. Researchers at Symantec said they had identified 16 ransomware gangs. They tracked one gang that tried to infect more than 500,000 PCs over an 18-day period. But even if researchers can track their Internet addresses, catching and convicting those responsible can be difficult. It requires cooperation among global law enforcement, and such criminals are skilled at destroying evidence.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 7, 2012

An article on Thursday about a new computer threat called ransomware constructed incorrectly a hypothetical Web address incorporating a subdomain. The address would be blog.nameofsite.com, not nameofsite.blog.com. (Subdomain names precede the domain name; they do not follow it.)

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Recipes for Health: Warm Hummus — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

In this comforting Turkish version of hummus the chickpea purée is warmed in the oven and topped with pine nuts. In the authentic version, a generous amount of melted butter would be drizzled over the top before baking. I have substituted a moderate amount of olive oil for the butter.

2 garlic cloves

2 cups cooked chickpeas (if using canned, rinse thoroughly)

Salt to taste

1 teaspoon cumin seeds, lightly toasted and ground

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

3 tablespoons lemon juice (more to taste)

3 tablespoons sesame tahini

1 tablespoon pine nuts

1/2 teaspoon Turkish red pepper or Aleppo pepper

1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Oil a small baking dish or oven-proof bowl. Turn on a food processor fitted with the steel blade and drop in the garlic. Process until the garlic adheres to the sides of the bowls. Turn off the machine and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the chickpeas and cumin and turn on the machine.

2. Combine 3 tablespoons of the olive oil, the lemon juice, and the tahini, and add to the machine. Process until the mixture is smooth. Season to taste with salt. Scrape into the baking dish or bowl. Drizzle on the remaining tablespoon of olive oil and sprinkle on the pine nuts and red or Aleppo pepper.

3. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes and serve hot with pita bread.

Yield: 2 cups

Advance preparation: The hummus can be made a day ahead, but don’t garnish it with the olive oil, pine nuts and red pepper until ready to serve. Leftovers will keep for three or four days in the refrigerator.

Nutritional information per tablespoon: 42 calories; 3 grams fat; 0 grams saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 2 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 3 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram dietary fiber; 1 milligram sodium (does not include salt to taste); 1 gram protein

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

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IHT Rendezvous: Typhoon Bopha: Hurricane Sandy Times Two

HONG KONG — The official death toll from Typhoon Bopha climbed to 325 by Thursday afternoon, and with nearly 400 Filipinos still unaccounted for, the typhoon appeared as if it would be twice as deadly as Hurricane Sandy, the storm that thrashed the Caribbean and the eastern United States six weeks ago.

Sandy killed at least 253 people, including 132 in the United States. President Obama is expected to ask Congress this week for about $50 billion to help states in their post-Sandy recovery efforts.

Typhoon Bopha, known as Pablo in the Philippines, arrived on Tuesday, packing winds up to 100 miles per hour. It washed away entire villages and hamlets; wiped out roads and bridges; flattened cornfields and banana plantations; wrecked fishing fleets; and buried homes under landslides and walls of mud.

In some towns, dead bodies were gathered together in rows, their faces covered by tarpaulins, sodden blankets or palm fronds.

“Bodies of victims were laid on the ground for viewing by people searching for missing relatives,” The Associated Press reported. “Some were badly mangled after being dragged by raging floodwaters over rocks and other debris. A man sprayed insecticide on the remains to keep away swarms of flies.”

In one village, the mud-caked body of a child lay under a sheet with a note attached. It read: “4 yrs. old, male.”

One survivor, Julius Julian Rebucas, told Reuters that his mother and brother had been swept away in a flash flood. “I no longer have a family,” he said.

He can be seen being carried to an ambulance in a BBC video here.

Bopha struck most heavily in the southern Philippines, which typically dodges the 20 or so typhoons that slam the country every year. My colleague Floyd Whaley spoke to a military official who said most of the fatalities were in the province of Compostela Valley, a mountainous gold mining area, and the adjoining province of Davao Oriental.

The Philippine news site Rappler had a live blog going, tracking the progress of the storm and giving government information on deaths, damage and where people could donate food or supplies.

The national weather agency of the Philippines was sending regular updates on its Twitter feed here. Its Web site is located here.

Twitter also assembled the addresses of accounts offering information on relief efforts, and the service recommended using the hashtag #pabloPH for storm-related tweets and searches.

A New York Times slide show of the storm’s aftermath is here.

When floods hit Manila in the summer, a quarter-million people in the capital were made homeless. But as we reported on Rendezvous, “on social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, and through text messages, Filipinos demonstrated a remarkable civic spirit as they shared news of evacuation centers and dropoff points for donations of emergency supplies.

“They praised rescue teams, and they encouraged each other. They pleaded for calm — and there were few reported signs of panic, even from those who were stranded. And they prayed.”

Gwen Garcia, the governor of the Philippine province of Cebu, endorsed practical preparations — and prayer — in a tweet on Tuesday:

In his article, Floyd also noted that “last December, Tropical Storm Washi — another out-of-season storm that hit south of the usual Philippine typhoon belt — killed more than 1,200 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

“This year, officials put out strong warnings days in advance and carried out mandatory early evacuations of vulnerable communities.”

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Tool Kit: Apps and Accessories Help Make the iPad a Scaled-Down Darkroom

Over the years, I’ve been in and out of relationships with dozens of film cameras, Pentax, Canon, Nikon, Minolta and others, as a result of my passion for photography.

In the late 1990s, after college, I snapped so many photos that I ended up building a 5-by-6-foot darkroom in the corner of my living room in Brooklyn. There, standing amid long, dark strips of film under the glow of a dim red light, I spent countless hours mixing pungent chemicals and developing and printing photographs.

I have since retired most of my film cameras. Now, my camera bag is all digital, and my darkroom is 7 inches wide and 9.5 inches long: an Apple iPad.

The chemicals I once used have been replaced by a tiny, white USB connector that allows me to transfer my photos from any digital camera into the iPad in a matter of seconds.

What inspired me to jump from film to digital was immediacy — or impatience, depending on how you look at it. In the old days, I’d have to finish a roll of film, get home, develop it, wait, then wait some more. With digital, you snap a picture and there it is, like magic, on the back of your digital camera. With the iPad as a darkroom, it’s also editable immediately.

Editing your photos on an iPad instead of a conventional laptop also means you can carry one device fewer on your travels. Although most applications on the iPad will shrink the size and therefore the quality of your images when you import them, there are apps that can deal with full-size images. You can even connect wirelessly to printers intended to work with the iPad.

For older iPads with a 30-pin connection, Apple sells the $29 Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit. It comes with two connectors that plug directly into the iPad’s base. One has a USB cable slot, which works with almost any camera, and the other has a slot for SD memory cards.

There are also many less expensive third-party connectors, including a 2-in-1 Camera Connection Kit ($10) available from Amazon.

The cables for newer iPads, with the lighting connector, are overpriced, with each connector costing $30.

To transfer the photos from your camera, you plug a connector into the base of your iPad, connect your camera with a USB cord, then turn the camera on. The iPad will detect that the device is connected and allow you to select which images you would like to import. It’s quicker than a Polaroid.

The immediacy of digital has pushed photographers to want to edit their photos and then share them right away. A number of applications allow you to do this, some free and some costing as much as $20.

SnapSeed ($5) is an app made specifically for multitouch photo-editing. Sliding your finger up and down on the screen will allow you to alter the image, changing the contrast, brightness or saturation. A feature called Selective Adjust allows you to drag little adjustable pointers all over a picture to tweak the lighting in specific areas.

Apple’s own iPhoto application ($5) for the iPad also has some advanced features. You can apply filters, turning a color photo into a sepia or “vintage” image. If you’re in a rush, “auto-enhance” will try to improve the image for you. There are also brushes that pop out from the bottom of the screen, making your iPad feel like a painter’s palette. These can be used to remove red-eye and soften or sharpen an image.

Adobe, the big maker of graphics and photoediting software, offers two photo-specific iPad applications. Photoshop Express, which is free, has some limited editing features, like adjusting tint, saturation and exposure, but it’s really for novices. Advanced users will want to try Photoshop Touch ($10). This application offers similar controls to Adobe software on a standard computer — layers, curves, the ability to add text, and other advanced features. But be warned: the app is somewhat confusing to navigate, and you will have to take some time with its tutorial before jumping in.

For photographers who want to take iPad editing to another level, there are more advanced — and expensive — options.

Jeff Carlson, author of the book “The iPad for Photographers,” sometimes bypasses the iPad camera connection kit in favor of an EyeFi SD card and an app called ShutterSnitch ($16). EyeFi cards, which range from $40 to $100 depending on speed and memory size, can connect directly with your iPad wirelessly. Mr. Carlson said that although EyeFi offers a free app, ShutterSnitch is much faster and has a more advanced interface.

Mr. Carlson said he sometimes captures RAW images with his digital cameras. These are uncompressed and large files, often used by professional photographers because they preserve more of the image quality than standard JPEG files. To handle these files he sometimes uses the apps piRAWnha or Photoraw, both $10. But his favored application is Photosmith ($20) an advanced tool that can wirelessly transfer pictures to your desktop computer for printing or editing later.

The only question remaining is which iPad to use. The newer iPads with retina displays are the best choice for editing, as the screen is phenomenally crisp. But they are also expensive. Of course the iPad Mini is lighter, and a fraction of the price, so it might be a better option for vacation snaps. But if you’re someone who really wants to get into your digital photos, you might be disappointed with the Mini’s screen resolution and prefer the big version.

Although digital cameras have changed the way most photographers shoot, I haven’t retired all of my film equipment just yet. There is one area of photography that most app makers and digital camera companies seem to have neglected: black and white.

All of the apps mentioned in this article can strip the color out of an image like a scene from the movie “Pleasantville,” but none have succeeded in recreating the authentic look of black and white photos. In most instances, shooting black and white on digital cameras can feel like making a pizza in a microwave: sure, it looks like a pizza, but it’s just not right.

So every once in a while I will still shoot a roll of 3200-speed black-and-white film on one of my old cameras. Then off I go to a darkroom to get it developed. Nowadays, while I sit waiting amid those pungent and familiar smells, I have my digital darkroom with me, and I edit photos on my iPad while the chemicals work their magic.

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Recipes for Health: Winter Squash and Walnut Spread — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

2 pounds pumpkin or winter squash, such as kabocha or butternut, seeds and membranes scraped away, cut into large pieces (if using butternut, cut in half crosswise, just above the bulbous bottom part, then cut these halves into lengthwise quarters and scrape away the seeds and membranes)

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1/2 medium onion, finely chopped

2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh mint

1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (1 1/4 ounces/35 g) lightly toasted walnuts, finely chopped

1 ounce Parmesan, grated (about 1/3 cup)

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1. Heat the oven to 425 degrees. Line a baking sheet with foil and oil the foil. Place the squash on the baking sheet and rub or toss with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil. Place in the oven and bake until tender, 40 to 60 minutes depending on the type of squash and the size of the pieces. Every 15 minutes use tongs to turn the pieces over so different surfaces become browned on the foil. Remove from the oven and allow to cool, then peel and place in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Pulse several times, scrape down the sides of the bowl, then purée until smooth.

2. Heat another tablespoon of the olive oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet and add the onion. Add a generous pinch of salt, turn the heat to medium low and cook, stirring often, until very tender, sweet and lightly caramelized, about 20 minutes. Remove from the heat and add to the squash. Add the mint, nutmeg, walnuts, Parmesan, and 1 tablespoon olive oil and pulse together. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve on croutons.

Yield: 2 cups

Advance preparation: This will keep for three to four days in the refrigerator and freezes well. It benefits from being made a day ahead.

Variation: Omit the Parmesan for a vegan version. If desired, blend in 1 to 2 teaspoons of light miso.

Nutritional information per tablespoon: 35 calories; 2 grams fat; 0 grams saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 1 gram monounsaturated fat; 1 milligram cholesterol; 4 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram dietary fiber; 15 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 1 gram protein

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

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Recipes for Health: Winter Squash and Walnut Spread — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

2 pounds pumpkin or winter squash, such as kabocha or butternut, seeds and membranes scraped away, cut into large pieces (if using butternut, cut in half crosswise, just above the bulbous bottom part, then cut these halves into lengthwise quarters and scrape away the seeds and membranes)

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1/2 medium onion, finely chopped

2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh mint

1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (1 1/4 ounces/35 g) lightly toasted walnuts, finely chopped

1 ounce Parmesan, grated (about 1/3 cup)

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1. Heat the oven to 425 degrees. Line a baking sheet with foil and oil the foil. Place the squash on the baking sheet and rub or toss with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil. Place in the oven and bake until tender, 40 to 60 minutes depending on the type of squash and the size of the pieces. Every 15 minutes use tongs to turn the pieces over so different surfaces become browned on the foil. Remove from the oven and allow to cool, then peel and place in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Pulse several times, scrape down the sides of the bowl, then purée until smooth.

2. Heat another tablespoon of the olive oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet and add the onion. Add a generous pinch of salt, turn the heat to medium low and cook, stirring often, until very tender, sweet and lightly caramelized, about 20 minutes. Remove from the heat and add to the squash. Add the mint, nutmeg, walnuts, Parmesan, and 1 tablespoon olive oil and pulse together. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve on croutons.

Yield: 2 cups

Advance preparation: This will keep for three to four days in the refrigerator and freezes well. It benefits from being made a day ahead.

Variation: Omit the Parmesan for a vegan version. If desired, blend in 1 to 2 teaspoons of light miso.

Nutritional information per tablespoon: 35 calories; 2 grams fat; 0 grams saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 1 gram monounsaturated fat; 1 milligram cholesterol; 4 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram dietary fiber; 15 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 1 gram protein

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

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Euro Watch: Spending Data Points to Continuing Woes in Euro Zone

PARIS — European consumers continue to cut back on spending, official data showed Wednesday, indicating that the region’s financial crisis and ailing job market were weighing on hopes of an economic recovery.

Retail sales in the 17-nation euro zone fell 1.2 percent in October from September, and were down 3.6 percent from a year earlier, Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, reported Wednesday.

For the entire 27-nation European Union, sales declined 1.1 percent from September and 2.4 percent from October 2011, Eurostat said.

The big dip in retail sales was partly a result of front-loading of purchases before value-added taxes rose in some countries, said James Nixon, an economist in London for Société Générale.

The fiscal crisis in the euro zone and the austerity measures employed to combat it have made companies reticent about hiring, helping to drive the euro zone into recession in the third quarter. That has created a vicious circle, in which falling consumer spending is expected to weigh further on the economy.

A reading Wednesday on euro zone activity from a private data and analysis firm also suggested the economy continued to contract. Markit Economics’ composite purchasing managers’ index for November came in at 46.5. That was a bump upward from the 40-month low of 45.7 in October, but the 10th straight month below 50, a level that suggests shrinking output.

On Friday, Eurostat reported that unemployment in the euro zone rose to a record 11.7 percent in October from 11.6 percent a month earlier, and that the jobless rate among those under 25 years of age was 23.9 percent.

The European Commission on Wednesday expressed grave concern about the problem of youth unemployment, noting that just the immediate cost to governments — in terms of lost revenue and social outlays — worked out to an estimated €150 billion, or $196 billion, a year, or 1.2 percent of E.U. gross domestic product.

It recommended a new program to address the problem, with measures including job guarantees for young people, labor market changes to reduce obstacles to hiring across European borders, and further efforts to provide high-quality training and apprenticeship programs.

The European commissioner for employment and social affairs, Laszlo Andor, said in a statement that the cost of failing to help put young people to work would be “catastrophic.”

The European Central Bank and its British counterpart, the Bank of England, will hold policy meetings Thursday, and though signs of weakness would appear to give the central banks scope for action, neither is believed to be planning any major changes to current monetary policy.

Economists expect the E.C.B. to leave its main refinancing rate at 0.75 percent, while the Bank of England is expected to stand pat at 0.5 percent.

Action by the central banks has helped to calm markets and relieve the pressure on the euro, but conditions remain unsettled. As an indication of the stresses that have sent investors scurrying for the perceived safety of major sovereign bonds, yields on France’s 10-year sovereign debt fell on Wednesday to around 2 percent, the lowest level on record.

The dismal retail sales data came as the European Stability Mechanism, the euro zone’s permanent new bailout fund, said it had issued about €39.5 billion in bonds to cover the recapitalization of Spain’s banking sector.

Euro zone leaders agreed in June to provide up to €100 billion to help Spanish banks, which have been battered in the aftermath of a property bubble collapse and economic dislocation caused by austerity measures. The funds were originally raised by the bloc’s temporary bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, and the transaction Wednesday represented an effective transfer of that money from the old facility to the permanent one.

The fund said that €37 billion would be handed over some time in December to the Spanish government’s own banking rescue fund, the FROB, to cover the needs of BFA-Bankia, Catalunya Banc, NCG Banco and Banco de Valencia. The FROB will use the remaining €2.5 billion to capitalize Spain’s “bad bank,” a company called Sareb that is being used to sift through soured assets.

The action Wednesday “is an important event as the E.S.M. has now started to actively fulfill its role as the permanent rescue mechanism for the euro zone,” Klaus Regling, the head of the European Stability Mechanism, said in a statement.

Mr. Nixon, of Société Générale, predicted that the euro zone economy would shrink in the fourth quarter at an annualized 1.2 percent rate, but said he expected some of the northern European economies, including Germany, to start pulling away from the laggards in 2013.

“We may have reached a bottom,” Mr. Nixon said, citing an easing of tension in the market for sovereign debt and smoother financing conditions. “At least things aren’t getting worse any faster.”

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Changing of the Guard: How Crash Cover-Up Altered China’s Succession

BEIJING — “Thank you. I’m well. Don’t worry,” read the post on a Chinese social networking site. The brief comment, published in June, appeared to come from Ling Gu, the 23-year-old son of a high-powered aide to China’s president, and it helped quash reports that he had been killed in a Ferrari crash after a night of partying.

It only later emerged that the message was a sham, posted by someone under Mr. Ling’s alias — almost three months after his death.

The ploy was one of many in a tangled effort to suppress news of the Ferrari crash that killed Mr. Ling and critically injured two young female passengers, one of whom later died. The outlines of the affair surfaced months ago, but it is now becoming clearer that the crash and the botched cover-up had more momentous consequences, altering the course of the Chinese Communist Party’s once-in-a-decade leadership succession last month.

China’s departing president, Hu Jintao, entered the summer in an apparently strong position after the disgrace of Bo Xilai, previously a rising member of a rival political network who was brought down when his wife was accused of murdering a British businessman. But Mr. Hu suffered a debilitating reversal of his own when party elders — led by his predecessor, Jiang Zemin — confronted him with allegations that Ling Jihua, his closest protégé and political fixer, had engineered the cover-up of his son’s death.

According to current and former officials, party elites, and others, the exposure helped tip the balance of difficult negotiations, hastening Mr. Hu’s decline; spurring the ascent of China’s new leader, Xi Jinping; and playing into the hands of Mr. Jiang, whose associates dominate the new seven-man leadership at the expense of candidates from Mr. Hu’s clique.

The case also shows how the profligate lifestyles of leaders’ relatives and friends can weigh heavily in backstage power tussles, especially as party skulduggery plays out under the intensifying glare of media.

Numerous party insiders provided information regarding the episode, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the authorities. Officials have investigated the aftermath of the car wreck, they say, including looking into accusations that a state oil company paid hush money to the families of the two women.

Under Mr. Hu, Mr. Ling had directed the leadership’s administrative center, the General Office, but was relegated to a less influential post in September, ahead of schedule. Last month, he failed to advance to the 25-person Politburo and lost his seat on the influential party secretariat.

Mr. Hu, who stepped down as party chief, immediately yielded his post as chairman of the military, meaning he will not retain power as Mr. Jiang did. “Hu was weakened even before leaving office,” said a midranking official in the Organization Department, the party’s personnel office.

Mr. Ling’s future remains unsettled, with party insiders saying that his case presents an early test of whether Mr. Xi intends to follow through on public promises to fight high-level corruption.

“He can decide whether to go after Ling Jihua or not,” said Wu Guoguang, a former top-level party speechwriter, now a political scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. “Either way, this is a big card in Xi Jinping’s hand.”

Mr. Ling, 56, built his career in the Communist Youth League. At an early age, he secured the patronage of Mr. Hu, who led the Youth League in the early 1980s and brought Mr. Ling to the General Office in 1995. “Hu didn’t come with a lot of friends, but Ling was someone he knew he could trust,” said the Organization Department official. “Officials said that if Ling called, it was like Hu calling.”

Mr. Ling played a central role in moving Youth League veterans into high offices and undermining Mr. Hu’s adversaries. Mr. Ling also wielded leverage over Internet censorship of leaders’ affairs, and sought to use it to benefit his patron.

“Negative publicity, including untruths, about Xi Jinping were not suppressed the way publicity about Hu Jintao was,” said one associate of party leaders.

As his influence grew, Mr. Ling tried to keep a low profile. About a decade ago, his wife closed a software company she owned and formed a nonprofit foundation that incubates young entrepreneurs. The couple sent their son, Ling Gu, to an elite Beijing high school under an alias, Wang Ziyun. “Ling Jihua told his family not to damage his career,” a former Youth League colleague said. “But it seems it can’t be stopped.”

Still living under an alias, Ling Gu graduated from Peking University last year with an international relations degree and began graduate studies in education. One of his instructors said his performance plunged later in his undergraduate years. “I think there were too many lures, too much seduction,” he said.

Before dawn on March 18, a black Ferrari Spider speeding along Fourth Ring Road in Beijing ricocheted off a wall, struck a railing and cracked in two. Mr. Ling was killed instantly, and the two young Tibetan women with him were hospitalized with severe injuries. One died months later, and the other is recovering, party insiders said.

Ian Johnson and Edward Wong contributed reporting.

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