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"There might be a need to re-establish the relationship, starting with a summit," Mr. Abe said on a television talk show late Tuesday, referring to the fraying ties between Tokyo and Beijing over the uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. While he reiterated his position that there is "no room for negotiations" over Japan's current control of the islands, Mr. Abe said Asia's two largest economies should rebuild what he called a "strategic partnership of mutual benefit," according to comments quoted Wednesday by Kyodo News agency.

The apparent olive branch comes amid a flurry of diplomatic activity in the last week aimed at ratcheting down an increasingly heated standoff that saw both nations scramble fighter jets earlier this month, prompting debate in Japan over whether its planes should fire warning shots. Decades-old tensions over the islands, known as the Senkakus in Japan and Diaoyu in Chinese, flared anew last year when the Japanese government bought three of the islands, igniting violent protests against Japanese businesses in China.

To defuse tensions, a Japanese delegation led by former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama and including leading lawmakers from Mr. Abe's governing Liberal Democratic Party met in Beijing on Monday with Tang Jiaxuan, a former Chinese foreign minister with ties to Japan. That visit followed a meeting on Friday that the Chinese head of state, Xi Jinping, held with Natsuo Yamaguchi, the leader of a small Buddhist party that is a junior partner in Mr. Abe's ruling coalition.

After that meeting, Mr. Yamaguchi, of the New Komeito party, told reporters that he hand delivered a letter from Mr. Abe to the Chinese leader, though he did not disclose the letter's contents. He also said that during the meeting, he suggested to Mr. Xi that the two nations hold a summit, to which the Chinese leader replied that he would "seriously consider" the idea.

Despite such diplomatic efforts, on Monday, the Chinese leader, Mr. Xi, seemed to cast cold water onto hopes of a quick resolution to the islands dispute, saying that he will not bargain over China's territorial interests.

The delicate diplomacy underscores the emotions in both nations, where the islands have taken on different symbolic meanings. In China, they are seen as the last unreturned piece of Chinese territory seized during Japan's empire building a century ago, and thus a sign that Japan remains unrepentant about its early 20th-century militarism. To many Japanese, the islands have become emblematic of the broader challenge that their nation, long Asia's strongest power, faces from the emergence of an increasingly powerful China bent on settling old scores.

But China's rise is seen here not just as creating a military threat, but also an economic opportunity. This has led to the difficult balancing act faced at home by Mr. Abe, a conservative who became prime minister a month ago with promises to defend Japan's territorial claims but also improve ties. While his supporters in his party's nationalist wing want him to take a bolder stand against rising Chinese pressure, another traditional Liberal Democratic support group, big business, wants less friction with China, Japan's biggest export market.

To offset China's growing military strength, Mr. Abe is seeking Japan's first military spending increase in 11 years to bolster its ability to defend its southwestern islands, including the disputed island group. He has also vowed to improve ties with the United States, Japan's traditional protector, and is working to arrange a summit meeting with President Obama in Washington late next month.

However, concerns that both Japan and the United States may be declining powers has led to growing anxieties here about Tokyo's future ability to resist China's growing strength. In the islands row, many Japanese officials now say they think China's has embarked on a long-term strategy aimed at pressing Japan first to admit that a territorial dispute exists -- something that Tokyo has so far resisted acknowledging -- and then eventually agreeing to some form of joint stewardship, if not conceding the islands to China altogether.

This Chinese pressure has taken the form of almost daily appearances near the islands by ships and more recently aircraft from Chinese civilian agencies, but not the military to avoid a dangerous escalation. Still, the Japanese have responded in kind by sending their own ships and aircraft to intercept them, fanning fears that a misstep would trigger a violent clash. These concerns grew earlier this month, when both nations scrambled military fighter jets that shadowed each other.

In a show of American support for its longtime ally, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Jan. 20 that the United States opposes unilateral actions to try to undermine Japanese control of the islands, bringing an angry response from Beijing urging her to watch her words.

Years ago, players rarely spoke about the issue and league officials dismissed suggestions that on-field injuries could lead to life-altering health problems. Now, however, the league is facing lawsuits from thousands of former players, rules are being instituted in an attempt to diminish injuries on the field and even President Obama has said that the way football is played will have to change. This week, Bernard Pollard, a hard-hitting safety for the Baltimore Ravens, created a stir by saying that the N.F.L. would not exist in 30 years because of the rules changes designed with safety in mind, but that he also believed there would be a death on the field at some point.

At media day Tuesday, players reacted to the comments made by Pollard and Obama, with some agreeing with Pollard that recent rules changes would change the sport to such an extent that it would be less entertaining and lead to a loss of popularity. Pollard stood by his comments. He added, however, that while he was comfortable with the physical risk he was taking by playing football, he was not sure he would want future generations, including his 4-year-old son, to follow his example.

"My whole stance right now is that I don't want him to play football," Pollard said. "Football has been good to me. It has been my outlet. God has blessed me with a tremendous talent to be able to play this game. But we want our kids to have things better than us."

He said he did not want his son to go through the aches and pains caused by the physicality of the game.

"You keep playing football, you're going to have your injuries, no one is exempt from that," he said. "You're going to have concussions. You're going to have broken bones. That's going to happen. But I think for the most part, we know what we signed up for."

The sentiment was echoed by Baltimore quarterback Joe Flacco. "I play the game and I understand that I'm going to get hit," Flacco said. "Just because they fine the guys is not going to stop them from hitting me. I find it tough to fine people who are doing their job."

In a recent interview with The New Republic, Obama expressed concern about on-field injuries, though he added that N.F.L. players were grown men who are "well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies."

The president added: "I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won't have to examine our consciences quite as much."

While many current players seem focused on rules changes and how they will affect the nature of the game, more than 4,000 former N.F.L. players have filed a lawsuit against the league, contending that it knew hits to the head could lead to long-term brain damage but did not share that information with players. The judge in the case said Tuesday that she would hear oral arguments April 9 regarding the league's motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The family of Junior Seau, a former star linebacker who shot and killed himself last year, has also sued the N.F.L., claiming it failed to inform players about the risks of brain injury.

Pollard's counterparts on the San Francisco 49ers, safeties Dashon Goldson and Donte Whitner, considered one of the hardest-hitting tandems in the N.F.L., thought the key was not removing big hits, but making sure the hits that are delivered are legal.

"You can be vicious and you can hit people hard, but do it the right way," Whitner said. "For the most part, you know what you can and cannot do. Do you want to go out there and do the right things or do you want to make that big hit to gain a big name? That's what it comes down to."

Ravens guard Marshal Yanda said he thought the topic was so personal for Pollard because of the unique nature of being a hard-hitting defensive back, one of the positions most affected by the league's attempts to increase player safety.

"I think Bernard is frustrated because he plays a tough position where it's a bang-bang play and he's getting fined," Yanda said. "That's a tough deal as far as him playing football his whole life knowing how to play one way and then all of a sudden you have to change."

One of the few people to disagree entirely with Pollard's view that skewing the rules to protect offensive players would harm the league was Warren Sapp, a retired defensive tackle who at one point went by the Twitter handle @QBKilla. He said a desire for points would always result in defenses being limited.

"They like points," Sapp said. "I like it too. You're going to have to make some key stops here and there but it's an offensive game, no doubt about it."

For the past year and a half, by the party's own admission, the most important political decisions in this country of 65 million people have been made from abroad, by a former prime minister who has been in self-imposed exile since 2008 to escape corruption charges.

The country's most famous fugitive, Thaksin Shinawatra, circles the globe in his private jet, chatting with ministers over his dozen cellphones, texting over various social media platforms and reading government documents e-mailed to him from civil servants, party officials say.

It might be described as rule by Skype. Or governance by instant messenger, a way for Mr. Thaksin to help run the country without having to face the warrant for his arrest in a case that many believe is politically motivated.

His (remote control) return to power, even if somewhat limited by distance, is a remarkable turnaround for the brash telecommunications billionaire who was deposed in a military coup in 2006, the catalyst for several years of brinkmanship between critics and supporters that led to four changes of government and violent street protests that left nearly 100 people dead.

Officially, his sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, is the prime minister (he nominated her for the job in 2011). But from his homes in Dubai and London, from the gold mines he owns in Africa and during regular visits to nearby Asian countries, Mr. Thaksin, 63, has harnessed the Internet and mobile technology to create one of the most unusual ways of governing a country.

"We can contact him at all hours," said Charupong Ruangsuwan, the interior minister and secretary general of Mr. Thaksin's Pheu Thai Party. "The world has changed. It's a boundless world. It's not like a hundred years ago when you had to use a telegraph."

To illustrate the point during an interview, Mr. Charupong took out his iPhone and scrolled through a list of phone numbers for Mr. Thaksin. (Mr. Thaksin gives different numbers to different people, often depending on seniority, party officials say.)

"If we've got any problem, we give him a call," Mr. Charupong said.

Mr. Thaksin himself declined to talk by phone, or Skype, for this article.

The day-to-day governance of the country is carried out by Ms. Yingluck, who is genial, photogenic and 18 years younger than Mr. Thaksin. She cuts the ribbons and makes the speeches.

Ms. Yingluck, 45, has on occasion sought to play down her brother's role. Soon after taking office, when Mr. Thaksin joined a weekly cabinet meeting via Skype, reporters asked who was really the head of the government. Ms. Yingluck insisted that she was in charge and said Mr. Thaksin had joined the discussion to offer "moral support." She has since consistently said she is in charge.

But if there is one thing that allies and enemies of Mr. Thaksin agree on, it is that he is the one making the big decisions.

"He's the one who formulates the Pheu Thai policies," said Noppadon Pattama, a senior official in Mr. Thaksin's party who also serves as his personal lawyer. "Almost all the policies put forward during the last election came from him."

Sondhi Limthongkul, a leader of the "yellow shirt" movement that has taken to the streets many times to demonstrate against Mr. Thaksin, agreed, saying, "He's running the whole show."

"If you want a huge project in Thailand worth billions of baht, you have to talk to Thaksin," Mr. Sondhi, who seemed resigned to the turn of events, said in an interview.

Besides Skype, Mr. Thaksin uses various social media applications, including WhatsApp and Line, to keep in touch with the leaders of the party, senior party members say.

Many of the Skype sessions are reported in the Thai news media. This month, Mr. Thaksin had a video chat to discuss coming elections for governor in Bangkok. The one-hour video chat made news because party officials reported that Mr. Thaksin had told his colleagues that it did not matter whom they nominated because even a utility pole would defeat the opposition.

Workers often have little idea how much they and their employers are paying for coverage. In many cases, economists say, workers give up cash compensation to get and keep health benefits.

The disclosures, required by the 2010 health care law, are meant to make workers more cost-conscious. Health benefits are still tax-free. But labor unions and employer groups say it could be easier to tax them in the future, now that employers must report their value to the government.

The new information appears in Box 12 of the standard W-2 form, with a two-letter code, DD. The box shows the "cost of employer-sponsored health coverage." And that amount is not taxable, the Internal Revenue Service says on the back of the form.

Jay J. Makled, a union steward for the United Automobile Workers at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Mich., described his reaction after seeing that his health coverage cost nearly $16,000 last year: "It's quite expensive. I was surprised to see how much the company was paying for that benefit."

Hourly employees represented by the union there said they generally did not pay any of the premium.

The number on the W-2 form is supposed to reflect the part of the cost paid by the employer and the part paid by the employee.

Prof. Nicole Huberfeld, an expert on health law at the University of Kentucky, who received her W-2 form on Monday, said, "Most people who get health insurance from their employers have no idea how much it costs."

"People are often shocked when they see the cost, $12,000 to $16,000 a year," Ms. Huberfeld said. "Many Americans believe this is something they get free. But employers pay lower wages because they provide insurance."

In 2012, according to an annual survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance averaged $5,615 a year for single coverage and $15,745 for family coverage. Over five years, the costs have increased 25 percent for individual coverage and 30 percent for family coverage.

"Health coverage is a big piece of people's income and a large part of the social welfare budget," said C. Eugene Steuerle, a tax economist at the Urban Institute. "But the benefits are not taxable, and most of the spending is hidden, so we don't consider the trade-offs. If we want to get control of health care costs, people have to be aware of them."

That is the goal of the disclosure requirement, which was proposed by a bipartisan group of senators: two Republicans, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, and two Democrats, Max Baucus of Montana and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

Congress acted after Peter R. Orszag, then the director of the Congressional Budget Office, told lawmakers: "The economic evidence is overwhelming, the theory is overwhelming, that when your firm pays for your health insurance, you actually pay through reduced take-home pay. The firm is not giving that to you for free."

The tax-free treatment of employer-provided health benefits is the largest tax break in the tax code, costing the government roughly $180 billion a year in lost revenue, or 80 percent more than the home mortgage interest deduction, according to the administration.

Katie W. Mahoney, the executive director of health policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said, "It's useful for employees to know the value of coverage their employers provide." But she said some employers worried that reporting the benefit on the W-2 form could lead to taxing the benefit.

"That's not the intent of the current requirement," Ms. Mahoney said. "But once the information is collected by the government, it's very easy for another administration to have a different intent."

An employee of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. whose health coverage was listed as costing more than $20,000 said: "That knocks my socks off. When I saw the number, my eyes popped out. I appreciate my employer all the more."

The employee said he had been told not to discuss the cost publicly because the union did not want to suggest that some employees had "Cadillac coverage."

An employer that fails to comply with the reporting requirement could be subject to penalties of $200 per W-2 form, up to a maximum of $3 million, tax lawyers said.

Employers are exempt from the reporting obligation if they are required to file fewer than 250 W-2 forms, the I.R.S. said. That could change, but the agency said employers would be given at least six months' notice.

Now with just 4.6 percent of the global market for smartphones in 2012, according to IDC, RIM long ago exchanged dominance for survival mode. On Wednesday, the company will introduce a new line of smartphones called the BlackBerry 10 and an operating system of the same name that Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, says will restore the company to glory.

But Frank Mersch, who became one of RIM's earliest investors after seeing the block of wood, is far less excited by what he sees this time around.

"You're in a very, very competitive market and you're not the leader," Mr. Mersch, now the chairman and a vice president at First Street Capital in Toronto, said of RIM. "You have to ask: 'At the end of the day are we really going to win?' I personally think the jury's out on that."

The main elements of the new phones and their operating system are already well known. Mr. Heins and other executives at RIM have been demonstrating the units for months to a variety of audiences. App developers received prototype versions as far back as last spring.

While analysts and app developers may be divided about the future of RIM, there is a consensus that BlackBerry 10, which arrives more than year behind schedule, was worth the wait.

Initially RIM will release two variations of the BlackBerry 10, one a touch-screen model that resembles many other phones now on the market. The other model is a hybrid with a keyboard similar to those now found on current BlackBerrys as well as a small touch screen.

The real revolution, though, may be in the software that manages a person's business and personal information. It is clearly designed with an eye toward retaining and, more important, luring back, corporate users.

Corporate and government information technology managers will be able to segregate business-related apps and data on BlackBerry 10 handsets from users' personal material through a system known as BlackBerry Balance. It will enable an I.T. manager to, among other things, remotely wipe corporate data from fired employees' phones while leaving the newly jobless workers' personal photos, e-mails, music and apps untouched. The system can also block users from forwarding or copying information from the work side of the phone.

Messages generated by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and LinkedIn accounts are automatically consolidated into a single in-box that RIM calls BlackBerry Hub.

Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research called the new phones "beautiful" and described the operating system as "a giant leap forward" from RIM's current operating system. Ray Sharma, who followed RIM's glory years as a financial analyst but who now runs XMG Studio, a mobile games developer in Toronto, has been similarly impressed.

But both men are among many analysts who question the ability of BlackBerry 10, whatever its merits, to revive RIM's fallen fortunes.

"If it's good, it will help inspire the upgrade cycle," Mr. Sharma said. "But it has to be great in order to inspire touch-screen users to come back. If it's good, not great, I will be concerned."

Mr. Golvin was more blunt. "They'll need to prove themselves in the face of a simultaneous onslaught of marketing from Microsoft, not to mention the continued push from Apple plus Google and its Android partners," he wrote. "This is a gargantuan challenge for a company of RIM's size."

In the year since he took over from the founders, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, Mr. Heins has certainly remade RIM. He cut 5,000 jobs in a program to reduce operating costs by about $1 billion a year. Along the way, he also replaced RIM's senior management and straightened out its balance sheet. While unprofitable, RIM remains debt-free and holds $2.9 billion in cash.

With BlackBerry 10, RIM not only started over with its operating system, it also rebuilt the company through acquisitions. Its core operating system come from QNX Software Systems, the design of the user interface is largely the work of the Astonishing Tribe in Sweden while other main components, like the touch-screen technology, came from smaller companies that are now part of RIM.

Integrating all of those acquisitions, analysts and former RIM employees say, added to the delays that plagued BlackBerry 10.

Now that the new phones are finally here, Mr. Heins is counting on RIM's remaining base of 79 million users globally to eagerly upgrade. But where those customers reside may be as important in their numbers in determining the success of that plan.

In the United States, which leads the world in setting smartphone trends, about 11 million BlackBerry users switched to other phones between 2009 and the middle of last year, according to an analysis by Horace Dediu on Asymco, a wireless industry blog he founded.

Until the final months of 2012, RIM continued to increase its subscriber base through sales of low-cost handsets to less developed countries like Nigeria and Indonesia. Although BlackBerry 10 will be made available worldwide, the initial phones will be too expensive for a majority of BlackBerry fans in those regions.

RIM may also have confused its loyalists, particularly in North America and Europe, in the run-up to the BlackBerry 10 debut. Many of those users stuck with BlackBerrys because of their physical keyboards. But public demonstrations for BlackBerry 10 were centered on the touch-screen-only version and its virtual keyboard.

While some corporations have remained loyal to BlackBerry, RIM not only has to sell them on the new handsets, it also must persuade them to upgrade server software to accommodate the new operating system, a costly and time-consuming process. Companies whose employees continue to use older BlackBerrys will have to run two separate BlackBerry servers.

Mr. Heins's pitch to those corporations is that the BlackBerry 10 server software will also allow them to manage and control data on employees' Android phones and iPhones. But any corporation or organization that allows those phones to connect with its systems long ago installed mobile device management software from other companies, including Good Technology and SAP. RIM is likely to find that the competition in device management software is as severe as it is in the handset business.

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes.

Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and an author of the report, said the mortality figures that emerge from the new model "are shockingly high."

"When we ran the model, we didn't know what to expect," said Dr. Marra, who performed the analysis with his colleague, Scott R. Loss, and Tom Will of the Fish and Wildlife Service. "We were absolutely stunned by the results." The study appeared Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

The findings are the first serious estimate of just how much wildlife America's vast population of free-roaming domestic cats manages to kill each year.

"We've been discussing this problem of cats and wildlife for years and years, and now we finally have some good science to start nailing down the numbers," said George H. Fenwick, the president and chief executive of the American Bird Conservancy. "This is a great leap forward over the quality of research we had before."

In devising their mathematical model, the researchers systematically sifted through the existing scientific literature on cat-wildlife interactions, eliminated studies in which the sample size was too small or the results too extreme, and then extracted and standardized the findings from the 21 most rigorous studies. The results admittedly come with wide ranges and uncertainties.

Nevertheless, the new report is likely to fuel the sometimes vitriolic debate between environmentalists who see free-roaming domestic cats as an invasive species — super predators whose numbers are growing globally even as the songbirds and many other animals the cats prey on are in decline — and animal welfare advocates who are appalled by the millions of unwanted cats (and dogs) euthanized in animal shelters each year.

All concur that pet cats should not be allowed to prowl around the neighborhood at will, any more than should a pet dog, horse or potbellied pig, and that cat owners who insist their felines "deserve" a bit of freedom are being irresponsible and ultimately not very cat friendly. Through recent projects like Kitty Cams at the University of Georgia, in which cameras are attached to the collars of indoor–outdoor pet cats to track their activities, not only have cats been filmed preying on cardinals, frogs and field mice, they've been shown lapping up antifreeze and sewer sludge, dodging under moving cars and sparring violently with much bigger dogs.

"We've put a lot of effort into trying to educate people that they should not let their cats outside, that it's bad for the cats and can shorten the cats' lives," said Danielle Bays, the manager of the community cat programs at the Washington Humane Society.

Yet the new study estimates that free-roaming pets account for only about 29 percent of the birds and 11 percent of the mammals killed by domestic cats each year, and the real problem arises over how to manage the 80 million or so stray or feral cats that commit the bulk of the wildlife slaughter.

The Washington Humane Society and many other animal welfare organizations support the use of increasingly popular trap-neuter-return programs, in which unowned cats are caught, vaccinated, spayed and, if no home can be found for them, returned to the outdoor colony from which they came. Proponents see this approach as a humane alternative to large-scale euthanasia, and they insist that a colony of neutered cats can't reproduce and thus will eventually disappear.

Conservationists say that, far from diminishing the population of unowned cats, trap and release programs may be making it worse, by encouraging people to abandon their pets to outdoor colonies that volunteers often keep lovingly fed.

"The number of free roaming cats is definitively growing," Dr. Fenwick of the bird conservancy said. "It's estimated that there are now more than 500 TNR colonies in Austin alone."

They are colonies of subsidized predators, he said, able to survive in far greater concentrations than do wild carnivores by dint of their people-pleasing appeal. "They're not like coyotes, having to make their way in the world," he said.

Yet even fed cats are profoundly tuned to the hunt, and when they see something flutter, they can't help but move in for the kill. Dr. Fenwick argues that far more effort should be put into animal adoption. "For the great majority of healthy cats," he said, "homes can be found." Any outdoor colonies that remain should be enclosed, he said. "Cats don't need to wander hundred of miles to be happy," he said.

Under the settlement, reached last November, BP pleaded guilty to 14 criminal charges. Its payment of $4 billion will resolve all criminal charges related to the Macondo well blowout and destruction of the Deepwater Horizon rig, which spilled millions of barrels of oil and fouled hundreds of miles of shore along the gulf coast.

Several dozen people submitted letters to Judge Sarah S. Vance, of Federal District Court in New Orleans, requesting that she reject the plea agreement. Some wanted additional financial compensation, while others requested stronger punishment for BP supervisors or a more powerful apology.

"If I had my wish," wrote Ashley Manuel, daughter of Keith Blair Manuel, one of the 11 rig workers who died, "it would be that the three representatives from BP who sat in my grandparents' living room and lied to my face about the accident would sit in jail and feel the same pain and loss I feel."

Arguing in favor of the agreement, the British-based company filed an apology with the court, saying it "deeply regrets the tragic loss of life caused by the Deepwater Horizon blowout and explosion as well as the impact of the spill on the Gulf Coast region.

Had the judge not accepted the agreement, the company would have faced a long and expensive trial, potentially resulting in tougher penalties.

The company's stock price, which fell roughly by half after the accident, has recovered more than 40 percent of its loss over the last three years. The company has sold off billions of dollars of assets to pay for damages from the accident and is now a smaller company, but still one focused on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The company said it had already paid out more than $24 billion on various settlements and cleanup efforts.

The two top BP officers aboard the drilling rig, Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine, were charged with manslaughter in connection with each of the men who died, and David Rainey, a former vice president, was charged with obstruction of Congress and making false statements for understating the rate at which oil was spilling from the well.

A low-level engineer, Kurt Mix, was previously charged with obstruction of justice for deleting text messages about company estimates of the spill flow rate.

But resolving BP's criminal responsibility does not end the company's legal troubles. It still faces sizable potential civil fines before it can put the accident behind it. A settlement with the Justice Department has so far been elusive, and a trial to resolve the remaining civil litigation is scheduled for Feb. 25 in New Orleans.

Under the Clean Water Act, the company faces potential civil fines of $5 billion to $21 billion, based on a government estimate that 4.9 million barrels of oil were released from the Macondo well. The higher estimate could be applied if the company were found to be grossly negligent.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has publicly said that the Justice Department is committed to proving the company was grossly negligent. The company does not accept that it was grossly negligent, contending that it shared the blame for the accident with its contractors: Transocean, the rig owner and operator, and Halliburton, which conducted the cement job on the well.

BP has also argued that the government spill estimate is too high, and company lawyers earlier this month said in a filing to United States District Judge Carl J. Barbier that an estimated 810,000 barrels of escaped oil that it collected should not be counted toward any Clean Water Act fines. A ruling in the company's favor could reduce fines by $891 million to $3.5 billion.

The company announced some changes to its management team on Tuesday, including the promotion of John Minge, who has led operations in Alaska, to chairman and president of BP America. He will succeed Lamar McKay, who will now head BP's upstream business.

Bob Fryar, the executive vice president for production, will become the new executive vice president for safety and operational risk. Officials at BP said the moves did not represent a fundamental change in direction.