DealBook: BlackRock Reports 29% Increase in Earnings

4:41 p.m. | Updated

The giant money manager BlackRock said that investors are showing an increasing willingness to take on risk after years of shying away from it, helping the firm post record profits for the final quarter of 2012.

Over the last few months, BlackRock’s customers have been opting for stocks, or equities, instead of the apparently low-risk investments in bonds that they have favored since the financial crisis, the company’s chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, said. The trend has, if anything, sped up the new year, Mr. Fink said. In the first week of 2013, investors put more money into stock-based mutual funds than any other week in the last five years, according to the data company EPFR.

“It was an extraordinary amount of reallocation into equities and we are benefiting from that,” Mr. Fink said Thursday in a call with analysts. “I think this is going to be one of the major themes of 2013.”

A steady improvement in stock prices has encouraged many investors, but they have also been pushed into stocks by the low interest rates being offered by benchmark government bonds.

Within BlackRock the clearest sign of this movement came in the company’s exchange traded funds business, iShares. During the final three months of 2012, customers put $35.7 billiion into iShares E.T.F.’s, which are baskets of assets that can be traded as a single stock. That is the biggest inflow since BlackRock acquired the iShares business from Barclays in 2009. Most of the new money, $30.1 billion, went into E.T.F.s that hold individual stocks.

BlackRock has aggressively courted this business by starting an aggressive marketing campaign last year and creating a new series of low-cost E.T.F.’s in part to compete with other fund managers who have lowered their fees. Mr. Fink said the new low-cost funds attracted about $4 billion. BlackRock also acquired Credit Suisse’s European E.T.F. business at the end of the fourth quarter.

The influx of money helped push up BlackRock’s revenues and profit, though the company saw growth across most of its business lines, including its hedge funds and consulting operations. The company reported net income of $695 million in the fourth quarter, or $3.96 a share, on an adjusted basis. The earnings were significantly better than the $3.73 a share that analysts polled by Thomson Reuters predicted.

“This is our strongest quarter ever,” Mr. Fink, said in an interview. “Things just all came together.”

The firm said that its board had voted to increase the quarterly dividend 12 percent, to $1.68, and to increase its share buyback program. BlackRock’s stock rose sharply after the announcement, closing the day up 4.4 percent, at $232 a share.

The company’s success in the fourth quarter was driven in part by customers entrusting it with more money to manage. The total amount of money being managed by BlackRock climbed 8 percent from a year earlier, to $3.79 trillion. But the profits were also helped by customers moving or being put into products that charge higher fees.

Last year, it appeared that the breakneck growth that BlackRock had been experiencing for years was slowing, with quarterly profits slipping. Now, though, the company has found a way through marketing, management changes and new acquisitions to continue growing despite its size. Mr. Fink said that the slower growth had been caused by acquisitions and by investments the company was making, which are now helping the company’s performance.

“We’ve said it was going to take some time to reorganize,” Mr. Fink said . “It’s all starting to pay off.”

The fourth-quarter results excluded several one-time adjustments related mostly to charges incurred as a result of regulatory changes. Factoring in those adjustments, BlackRock earned $690 million on $2.5 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter.

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Algeria attackers reportedly led by one-eyed militant

Islamist militants attacked and occupied a natural gas complex partly operated by energy company BP in southern Algeria.

WASHINGTON -- The attackers who seized an Algerian gas field and took foreigners hostage early Wednesday were commanded by the notorious one-eyed Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the Mauritanian news agency ANI reported as the crisis continued.

Belmokhtar recently left Al Qaeda’s North African affiliate to form a splinter group that he said included foreign militants. French intelligence officials nicknamed him “The Uncatchable” in 2002.

Mauritanian news reports said earlier that an Islamist group had claimed responsibility for the attack and occupation of the Ain Amenas natural gas field in southeastern Algeria, saying they were targeting Algeria because it had cooperated with French operations against Islamists in Mali. 

The United States, Britain, Japan, Norway, and Ireland said they believed they had citizens among those held hostage; France was also among the countries whose nationals were seized, according to Algerian state media, which reported that more than 20 foreigners were being held.

U.S. officials have sought Belmokhtar for several years. He helped smuggle insurgents to fight U.S. forces in Iraq, an American official said, and he led the group responsible for the December 2008 kidnapping of Robert Fowler, a former Canadian diplomat and U.N. envoy who was held for 130 days.

Belmokhtar has smuggled contraband and committed kidnappings for ransom for most of his adult life, American officials said.

“Our contacts all characterize Belmokhtar as more of a smuggler than an ideological warrior,  more of an opportunist and bandit rather than a jihadi,” said an internal State Department cable in 2007 that later was released by the website WikiLeaks.

U.S. officials say Belmokhtar has been involved in Islamist militancy for nearly two decades. He joined the guerrillas that fought Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and an insurgency against the Algerian government in the 1990s. He later was sentenced in absentia to life in prison in Algeria.

In a 2005 interview, Belmohktar claimed responsibility for establishing links between his Algerian organization and Al Qaeda.

Last month, Belmokhtar reportedly broke away from Al Qaeda to form his own militia and criminal group in Gao, in northern Mali, where militants have seized considerable territory. In a video statement released Dec. 6, he said his new group included foreigners. Witnesses in Mali have reported seeing Arab fighters.

The hostage-taking Wednesday could affect deliberations in Washington on  whether to provide additional support for the French military intervention against insurgents in Mali. The Obama administration has not yet decided whether to increase support, in part because it could spark terrorist attacks on Americans living and working in North Africa.

ALSO:

Building collapses in Egyptian city; 22 dead

Bombing in Syrian city kills at least 22 people

American-born Israeli convicted of murdering two Palestinians

Emily Alpert in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Leaked Document: RIM Targeting 'Crazy Multi-Taskers' for BlackBerry 10

The people who will be selling RIM’s make-or-break BlackBerry 10 phone must push the device on “crazy multi-taskers” and “people who want to be successful,” according to an internal training document that’s leaked ahead of the phone’s January 30 launch.

The directives are contained within what appears to be a 37-page PowerPoint training document from Canadian carrier Rogers, which was posted by the guys over at Crackberry. The phone is RIM’s last chance at relevance, and how well the sales guys do selling the phone will play a key role in whether RIM enjoys a resurgence or a long, slow road to the handset-maker graveyard.

The document details RIM’s next-generation operating system features and devices. Most of it has been explained by RIM already. Flow, Hub, keyboard, BBM Video and screen-sharing features are highlighted with tips on what the features are and how they work via bullet points. The Remember calendar and organization feature gets some love in the document with a kitchen redesign scenario that showcases the feature’s ability to keep photos, details and information organized in one spot.

More exciting is the Time Shift mode in Story Maker, which takes multiple photos milliseconds before and after the shutter is pressed. The perfect photo can then be chosen from the frames before and after your photo where everyone blinked.

But the document doesn’t stop at just packing BlackBerry 10 information in an easy-to-read package, it also helps Rogers’ sales associates determine who is a BlackBerry 10 user. Sales associates are supposed to identify “crazy multi-taskers” and “people who want to be successful.” Everyone wants to be successful, so that’s not exactly all that helpful.

But identifying “crazy multi-taskers” probably will involve finding someone in the store who’s shopping for a phone while e-mailing seven people and launching a startup. RIM has been bullish on making sure that the new BlackBerry 10 operating system can be used quickly and seamlessly with just one hand.

All of these sales tips and tricks could be for naught if RIM can’t deliver the apps people want. According to the document, BlackBerry World has 70,000 apps. A good start for a new operating system. But is all of this enough to take on Android and iOS in the competitive mobile market? We’ll find out when RIM launches all its new goodies on January 30 in New York.

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

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Obama calls for research on media in gun violence

NEW YORK (AP) — Hollywood and the video game industry received scant attention Wednesday when President Barack Obama unveiled sweeping proposals for curbing gun violence in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.

The White House pressed most forcefully for a reluctant Congress to pass universal background checks and bans on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines like the ones used in the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.

No connection was suggested between bloody entertainment fictions and real-life violence. Instead, the White House is calling on research on the effect of media and video games on gun violence.

Among the 23 executive measures signed Wednesday by Obama is a directive to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and scientific agencies to conduct research into the causes and prevention of gun violence. The order specifically cited “investigating the relationship between video games, media images and violence.”

The measure meant that media would not be exempt from conversations about violence, but it also suggested the White House would not make Hollywood, television networks and video game makers a central part of the discussion. It’s a relative footnote in the White House‘s broad, multi-point plan, and Obama did not mention violence in media in his remarks Wednesday.

The White House plan did mention media, but suggested that any effort would be related to ratings systems or technology: “The entertainment and video game industries have a responsibility to give parents tools and choices about the movies and programs their children watch and the games their children play.”

The administration is calling on Congress to provide $ 10 million for the research.

The CDC has been barred by Congress to use funds to “advocate or promote gun control,” but the White House order claims that “research on gun violence is not advocacy” and that providing information to Americans on the issue is “critical public health research.”

Since 26 were killed by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary in December, some have called for changes in the entertainment industry, which regularly churns out first-person shooter video games, grisly primetime dramas and casually violent blockbusters.

Hollywood, in turn, has suggested willingness for self-reflection. Motion Picture Association of America chairman and CEO Christopher Dodd — a former longtime U.S. senator from Connecticut — earlier said the MPAA stands “ready to be part of the national conversation.”

After the Newtown massacre, Wayne Pierre, vice-president of the National Rifle Association, attacked the entertainment industry, calling it “a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people.” He cited a number of video games and films, most of them many years old, like the movies “American Psycho” and “Natural Born Killers,” and the video games “Mortal Kombat” and “Grand Theft Auto.”

President Obama‘s adviser, David Axelrod, had tweeted that he’s in favor of gun control, “but shouldn’t we also question marketing murder as a game?”

Others have countered that the same video games and movies are played and watched around the world, but that the tragedies of gun violence are for other reasons endemic to the U.S.

Several R-rated films released after Newton have been swept into the debate. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former California governor and action film star, recently told USA Today in discussing his new shoot-em-up film “The Last Stand”: “It’s entertainment. People know the difference.”

Quentin Tarantino, whose new film “Django Unchained” is a cartoonish, bloody spaghetti western set in the slavery-era South, has often grown testy when questioned about movie violence and real-life violence. Speaking to NPR, Tarantino said it was disrespectful to the memory of the victims to talk about movies: “I don’t think one has to do with the other.”

In 2011, the Supreme Court rejected a California law banning the sale of violent video games to children. The decision claimed that video games, like other media, are protected by the First Amendment. In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer claimed previous studies showed the link between violence and video games, concluding “the video games in question are particularly likely to harm children.”

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the government can’t regulate depictions of violence, which he said were age-old, anyway: “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed.”

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Study Links Segregation and Lung Cancer Deaths in Blacks

African-Americans who live in highly segregated counties are considerably more likely to die from lung cancer than those in counties that are less segregated, a new study has found.

The study was the first to look at segregation as a factor in lung cancer mortality. Its authors said they could not fully explain why it worsens the odds of survival for African-Americans, but hypothesized that blacks in more segregated areas may be less likely to have health insurance or access to health care and specialty doctors. It is also possible that lower levels of education mean they are less likely to seek care early, when medical treatment could make a big difference. Racial bias in the health care system might also be a factor.

“If you want to learn about someone’s health, follow him home,” said Dr. Awori J. Hayanga, a heart and lung surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who was the lead author of the study.

The study, published in JAMA Surgery on Wednesday, divided all counties in the country into three levels of segregation: high, medium and low. It found that lung cancer mortality rates, a ratio of deaths to a population, were about 20 percent higher for blacks who lived in the most segregated counties, than for blacks living in the least segregated counties.

Lung cancer is the top cause of preventable death in the United States. Blacks have the highest incidence of it and are also more likely to die from it. For every million black males, 860 will die from lung cancer, compared with 620 white males among every million white males. The rates were calculated over the period of the study, from 2003 to 2007.

The study drew on federal mortality data from that period, and segregation data from about a third of United States counties that had African-American populations large enough to measure. About 28 percent of the American population lives in counties with low segregation, 40 percent in counties with moderate segregation, and 32 percent in counties with high segregation.

The gap in outcomes persisted even after accounting for differences in smoking rates and socio-economic status, said Dr. Hayanga said.

For whites, high levels of segregation had the opposite effect, a finding that surprised the authors. Whites who lived in highly segregated counties had about 6 percent lower mortality rates from lung cancer than those who lived in the least segregated counties, though researchers pointed out that the difference was slight enough that it was not clear whether it was meaningful.

Dr. David Chang, director of outcomes research at the University of California San Diego Department of Surgery, who wrote an accompanying editorial, said he hoped that the study would focus attention on the environmental factors involved in the stark disparities in health outcomes in the United States because they lend themselves to change through policy. Medical researchers tend to focus on factors like the genetics and the behaviors of individuals that are harder to change.

“We don’t need drugs or genetic explanations to fix a lot of the health care problems we have,” he said.

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Bits Blog: Facebook Unveils a New Search Tool

8:53 p.m. | Updated

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook has spent eight years nudging its users to share everything they like and everything they do. Now, the company is betting it has enough data so that people can find whatever they want on Facebook. And on Tuesday, it unveiled a new tool to help them dig for it.

The tool, which the company calls graph search, is Facebook’s most ambitious stab at overturning the Web search business ruled by its chief rival, Google. It is also an effort to elbow aside other Web services designed to unearth specific kinds of information, like LinkedIn for jobs, Match for dates and Yelp for restaurants.

Facebook has spent over a year honing graph search, said Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, at an event here at Facebook’s headquarters introducing the new product. He said it would enable Facebook users to search their social network for people, places, photos and things that interest them.

That might include, Mr. Zuckerberg offered, Mexican restaurants in Palo Alto that his friends have “liked” on Facebook or checked into. It might be used to find a date, dentist or job, other Facebook executives said.

“Graph search,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, “is a completely new way to get information on Facebook.”

Graph search will be immediately available to a limited number of Facebook users — in the “thousands,” Mr. Zuckerberg said — and gradually extended to the rest.

Every Internet platform company has been interested in conquering search.

But Facebook search differs from other search services because of the mountain of social data the company has collected over the years. It knows which parks your friends like to take their children to, or which pubs they like to visit, and who among their network is single and lives nearby.

The company is betting that its users are more eager to hear their friends’ recommendations for a restaurant than advice from a professional food critic or from a stranger on Yelp.

Its search tool is based on the premise that the data within Facebook is enough and that its users will have little reason to venture outside its blue walled garden. What they cannot find inside the garden, its search partner, Bing, a Microsoft product, will help them find on the Web.

For now, the Facebook tool will mine its users’ pictures, likes and check-ins, but not their status updates. Graph search, Mr. Zuckerberg explained, is aimed at answering questions based on the data contained in your social network, not serving you a list of links to other Web sites.

Say, for example, you are searching for a grocery store in Manhattan. You would type that question into a box on your Facebook page and the results would show stores your friends liked or where they had checked in.

It remains unclear how users will react to having others mine the data they share on Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg took pains to reassure users that what they post would be found only if they wanted it to be found. Before the new search tool is available to them, he said, users will see this message: “Please take some time to review who can see your stuff.” Facebook tweaked its privacy controls last December.

Mr. Zuckerberg said Tuesday that initially, photos posted on Instagram, which Facebook owns, would not be part of the database of photos that can be searched. Nor would he specify how soon graph search would be available to those who log in using the Facebook app on their cellphones.

The search tool is plainly designed with an eye toward profits. If done right, said Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner, it could offer marketers a more precise signal of a Web user’s interests. “It’s going to lend itself to advertising or other revenue-generating products that better matches what people are looking for,” he said. “Advertisers are going to be able to better target what you’re interested in. It’s a much more meaningful search than keyword search.”

News of the new search tool offered a modest lift to Facebook shares, which rose 2.7 percent to a close at $30.10 Tuesday. Google remained stable, with a share price of nearly $725. Google retains two-thirds of the search market, and Facebook’s search tool by itself is not likely to affect Google’s business.

Still, introduction of graph search sharpens the divide between Facebook and Google.

“If Facebook can truly provide relevant answers based on mining data from the social graph, it has an advantage,” said Venkat N. Venkatraman, a business professor at Boston University.

Google has been scrambling for several years to collect social data and incorporate it into search results, as Web users increasingly turn to social networks to seek friends’ recommendations.

It introduced Google Plus, its Facebook rival, in 2011, and from the beginning said its main purpose was to use social information to improve and personalize all Google products, from search to maps to ads. Last year, Google began showing posts, photos, profiles and conversations from Google Plus in Google search results. A search for restaurants in Seattle, for instance, could show posts and photos shared by friends in addition to links from around the Web. Google declined to comment for this article.

The kind of personal search that Facebook is promising is rife with potential privacy hazards, which Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged repeatedly. “The search we wanted to build is privacy aware,” he maintained. “On Facebook, most of the things people share with you isn’t public.”

The American Civil Liberties Union immediately posted a warning, reminding Facebook users to review their privacy settings. It pointed out that advertisers who, until now, could target only certain categories of people anonymously — “users under 35 who live in Texas,” for instance — could now find specific users under 35 who live in Texas, if their privacy settings allowed them to be found. It cautioned that “controlling your personal data means controlling not only who can see your information but how it can be found and what can be done with it.”

But Facebook pointed out that even though a business owner could personally search for specific personal data, a brand page could not. Detailed searching of Facebook data for the sake of sending promotional messages would violate the site’s internal policies.

The search team was led by two former Google engineers, Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky. As they explained in a blog post on the Facebook Engineering Department page, graph search solves a problem of Facebook’s own making: it has collected so much information.

“As people shared more and more content, we saw that we needed to give them better ways to explore and enjoy those stories and memories,” they wrote.

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L.A. City Council drops $3-billion bond measure for this year

The Los Angeles City Council scrapped plans Tuesday for placing a $3-billion bond measure on the May 21 ballot, opting instead to consider it in a future election year.

Councilmen Mitchell Englander and Joe Buscaino, who had proposed the bond, said they would spend more time communicating with the public about the proposal before trying to send it to voters. "We're going to continue working on this, obviously," said Buscaino, whose district stretches from San Pedro to Watts.

The proposal, which would have increased property taxes for 20 years, had signatures from seven of the council's 15 members only two weeks ago. But in recent days, some on the council complained there hadn’t been enough outreach to the public.

Some neighborhood activists had warned that a protracted debate over the bond measure would doom passage of a proposed half-cent sales tax hike, which is on the March 5 ballot and being promoted as a way to eliminate potholes. The sales tax, known as Proposition A, is seen as a way of erasing a $220-million budget shortfall.

The search for street repair money is being driven, in part, by a fear that major sources of funding for road work are disappearing. Money from Proposition 1B, a state measure that provided $87 million for streets over a three-year period, runs out in June. Funding from President Obama’s stimulus package was depleted in summer.

A 2011 survey found that nearly one-third of the city’s streets are in D or F condition, the worst rating possible. With the current funding available, repairing those streets will take 60 years, city officials said.

The general fund, which pays for basic services, provides less than 1% of the money allocated by the city for street maintenance and repairs. Nevertheless, city officials have managed to increase the amount it spends on road work anyway, by tapping state and federal funding and special transportation taxes.

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes of life’s struggles

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In a memoir to be published on Tuesday, Sonia Sotomayor writes of the chronic disease, troubled family relationships and failed marriage that accompanied her rise from a housing project in the Bronx to a seat on America’s highest court.

The first Hispanic and the third woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, the 58-year-old justice, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009, describes the insecurities she has felt as a minority who benefited from racial remedies.

She signed on to write the sweeping, 315-page book, “My Beloved World,” early in her tenure. She received a $ 1.175 million book advance in 2010 from publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, according to financial disclosure records.

Sitting down for a rare interview in her Supreme Court chambers, Sotomayor said that after being thrust into the public limelight with her nomination to the court, she felt the need for introspection to hold onto her identity.

The court’s nine justices, appointed for life, typically decline to sit for interviews or offer any personal observations related to cases. Book tours offer rare opportunities to draw them out on issues, even if only a little.

“I began to realize that if I didn’t stop and take a breath and figure out who this Sonia was, I could be in danger of losing the best in me,” she said. She didn’t want the memoir to be a retelling of her public persona, but rather to reveal who she is as a person, she said.

The interview was part of an orchestrated media blitz to promote the book, which included appearances on Sunday night’s popular CBS News program “60 Minutes” and in People Magazine.

In the coming-of-age story, Sotomayor paints a picture of her young self as a boisterous child, once rescued by a fireman neighbor when she got her head stuck in a bucket, trying to hear what her voice sounded like.

TROUBLED FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS

She exudes the same energy when speaking on the phone or talking through the door to her assistant, often calling people “sweetie.” Her chambers are spacious, bright and elegant, decorated with modern art on the walls.

Her environs have not always been so pristine. She describes the difficulty of growing up with a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who was frequently absent. Diagnosed with diabetes at a young age, she wet the bed, fainted in church and learned to inject daily doses of insulin to regulate her blood sugar.

Her father died when Sotomayor was nine, leaving a room full of drained liquor bottles hidden under his mattress, in jacket pockets and closets. While his death sent Sotomayor’s mother into a state of grief, it was also a relief. Until then, her mother had worked long hours as a nurse to stay out of the house and avoid conflict.

At her Supreme Court nomination, Sotomayor ascribed her success to her mother. In the book, Sotomayor portrays a more complicated relationship, describing the pain caused by her mother’s absence and lack of affection. Sotomayor told Reuters that the part in the book about her relationship with her mother, who is still alive, was the most difficult to write.

The justice is open about her insecurities. At Princeton, which admitted her in 1972 under an affirmative action program, Sotomayor questioned her right to be there at times. Other students could be hostile to minorities, and the college newspaper routinely published letters bemoaning the presence of students on campus through racial remedies known as affirmative action.

It gave her the sense that vultures were “circling, ready to dive when we stumbled,” she writes.

VESTIGES OF DISCRIMINATION

The book comes out as the Supreme Court is weighing a landmark case about the role of race in college admissions. Sotomayor was careful in the Reuters interview not to discuss current cases, but said there was value to affirmative action programs.

“It’s impossible to not recognize that the vestiges of discrimination take a long time to erase,” she said. “It just doesn’t happen overnight.”

But she also called affirmative action a “double-edged sword.” She said some people still attribute her position on the court to affirmative action, based on her identity as a Latina justice.

“That’s hurtful. To have your accomplishments naysaid is not something you welcome, and not something that makes you feel good,” she said.

Sotomayor’s book is not the first literary window into a justice’s personal life. Justice Clarence Thomas described his experience with poverty, racism and affirmative action in “My Grandfather’s Son,” and retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote about her early life growing up on an Arizona cattle ranch in “Lazy B.” Sotomayor’s self-portrait is the most revealing, down to the references to the old-lady underwear a friend persuaded her to abandon.

She describes the blow of being denied a job offer at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison after working there as a summer associate while she was at Yale Law School. That disappointment hung over her like a cloud until she became a judge, she writes. The firm declined to comment.

She also opens up about her marriage to her high school sweetheart, Kevin Noonan, which ended with an amicable divorce. On their wedding night, she insisted that he flush down the toilet Quaaludes that were given as a gift by his friends, showing her respect for the law. She says the marriage failed, in part, because of her self-reliance, but that she is still open to finding a happy relationship.

(Editing by Howard Goller and Lisa Shumaker)

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Well: How to Go Vegan

When I first heard former President Bill Clinton talk about his vegan diet, I was inspired to make the switch myself. After all, if a man with a penchant for fast-food burgers and Southern cooking could go vegan, surely I could too.

At the grocery store, I stocked up on vegan foods, including almond milk (that was the presidential recommendation), and faux turkey and cheese to replicate my daughter’s favorite sandwich. But despite my good intentions, my cold-turkey attempt to give up, well, turkey (as well as other meats, dairy and eggs) didn’t go well. My daughter and I couldn’t stand the taste of almond milk, and the fake meat and cheese were unappealing.

Since then, I’ve spoken with numerous vegan chefs and diners who say it can be a challenge to change a lifetime of eating habits overnight. They offer the following advice for stocking your vegan pantry and finding replacements for key foods like cheese and other dairy products.

NONDAIRY MILK Taste all of them to find your favorite. Coconut and almond milks (particularly canned coconut milk) are thicker and good to use in cooking, while rice milk is thinner and is good for people who are allergic to nuts or soy. My daughter and I both prefer the taste of soy milk and use it in regular or vanilla flavor for fruit smoothies and breakfast cereal.

NONDAIRY CHEESE Cheese substitutes are available under the brand names Daiya, Tofutti and Follow Your Heart, among others, but many vegans say there’s no fake cheese that satisfies as well as the real thing. Rather than use a packaged product, vegan chefs prefer to make homemade substitutes using cashews, tofu, miso or nutritional yeast. At Candle 79, a popular New York vegan restaurant, the filling for saffron ravioli with wild mushrooms and cashew cheese is made with cashews soaked overnight and then blended with lemon juice, olive oil, water and salt.

THINK CREAMY, NOT CHEESY Creaminess and richness can often be achieved without a cheese substitute. For instance, Chloe Coscarelli, a vegan chef and the author of “Chloe’s Kitchen,” has created a pizza with caramelized onion and butternut squash that will make you forget it doesn’t have cheese; the secret is white-bean and garlic purée. She also offers a creamy, but dairy-free, avocado pesto pasta. My daughter and I have discovered we actually prefer the rich flavor of butternut squash ravioli, which can be found frozen and fresh in supermarkets, to cheese-filled ravioli.

NUTRITIONAL YEAST The name is unappetizing, but many vegan chefs swear by it: it’s a natural food with a roasted, nutty, cheeselike flavor. Ms. Coscarelli uses nutritional yeast flakes in her “best ever” baked macaroni and cheese (found in her cookbook). “I’ve served this to die-hard cheese lovers,” she told me, “and everyone agrees it is comparable, if not better.”

Susan Voisin’s Web site, Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, offers a nice primer on nutritional yeast, noting that it’s a fungus (think mushrooms!) that is grown on molasses and then harvested and dried with heat. (Baking yeast is an entirely different product.) Nutritional yeasts can be an acquired taste, she said, so start with small amounts, sprinkling on popcorn, stirring into mashed potatoes, grinding with almonds for a Parmesan substitute or combining with tofu to make an eggless omelet. It can be found in Whole Foods, in the bulk aisle of natural-foods markets or online.

BUTTER This is an easy fix. Vegan margarines like Earth Balance are made from a blend of oils and are free of trans fats. Varieties include soy-free, whipped and olive oil.

EGGS Ms. Coscarelli, who won the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars with vegan cupcakes, says vinegar and baking soda can help baked goods bind together and rise, creating a moist and fluffy cake without eggs. Cornstarch can substitute for eggs to thicken puddings and sauces. Vegan pancakes are made with a tablespoon of baking powder instead of eggs. Frittatas and omelets can be replicated with tofu.

Finally, don’t try to replicate your favorite meaty foods right away. If you love a juicy hamburger, meatloaf or ham sandwich, you are not going to find a meat-free version that tastes the same. Ms. Voisin advises new vegans to start slow and eat a few vegan meals a week. Stock your pantry with lots of grains, lentils and beans and pile your plate with vegetables. To veganize a recipe, start with a dish that is mostly vegan already — like spaghetti — and use vegetables or a meat substitute for the sauce.

“Trying to recapture something and find an exact substitute is really hard,” she said. “A lot of people will try a vegetarian meatloaf right after they become vegetarian, and they hate it. But after you get away from eating meat for a while, you’ll find you start to develop other tastes, and the flavor of a lentil loaf with seasonings will taste great to you. It won’t taste like meat loaf, but you’ll appreciate it for itself.”

Ms. Voisin notes that she became a vegetarian and then vegan while living in a small town in South Carolina; she now lives in Jackson, Miss.

“If I can be a vegan in these not-quite-vegan-centric places, you can do it anywhere,” she said. “I think people who try to do it all at once overnight are more apt to fail. It’s a learning process.”

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What are your tips for vegan cooking and eating? Share your suggestions on ingredients, recipes and strategies by posting a comment below or tweeting with the hashtag #vegantips.

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The Caucus: Credit Rating Agency Warns of Downgrade if Debt Limit Is Not Raised

Fitch Ratings Ltd. warned on Tuesday that Congress’s failure to raise the federal government’s statutory borrowing limit would “very likely” prompt a downgrading of the United States Government’s credit rating, and the agency seemed to suggest that Congress should simply do away with the debt ceiling altogether.

In a pointed statement, Fitch dismissed the assurances of some Republicans that the Treasury Department would be able to use incoming tax receipts to prioritize the payment of government debt and interest, as well as vital services like military pay and Social Security. That warning echoed the Treasury’s own assessment that breaching the debt ceiling could not be managed in any way that would minimize the economic turmoil or avoid default.

“It is not assured that the Treasury would or legally could prioritize debt service over its myriad of other obligations, including Social Security payments, tax rebates and payments to contractors and employees. Arrears on such obligations would not constitute a default event from a sovereign rating perspective but very likely prompt a downgrade even as debt obligations continued to be met,” Fitch wrote.

Standard & Poor’s, a larger credit rating agency, downgraded United States debt a notch in August 2011 after the last standoff over the federal debt limit, reflecting “our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policy making and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned.”

Fitch and Moody’s Investors Service, the other major rating agency, did not follow suit, keeping the rating of United States Treasury debt at AAA. Far from serving as a unifying moment, the S.&P. downgrade divided Washington further. Republicans said the downgrade resulted from President Obama’s refusal to dramatically cut spending to get the federal deficit under control. Democrats said it was a reflection of political paralysis that stemmed from Republican intransigence.

The Fitch warning seemed to hem in Republicans further, however. Mr. Obama has repeatedly said he will not negotiate over the debt ceiling, and on Monday, he compared Republican refusal to raise it to a criminal taking a hostage. Fitch appeared to side with the president.

“In Fitch’s opinion, the debt ceiling is an ineffective and potentially dangerous mechanism for enforcing fiscal discipline. It does not prevent tax and spending decisions that will incur debt issuance in excess of the ceiling while the sanction of not raising the ceiling risks a sovereign default and renders such a threat incredible,” the agency wrote.

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