DealBook: Private Equity Giant to Sell Gunmaker; Cites Massacre

12:12 p.m. | Updated

The investment firm Cerberus Capital Management announced Tuesday that it would sell its stake in the country’s largest gun maker after one of the company’s guns was used in the Connecticut school shootings.

Cerberus said that it was putting the company, Freedom Group, up for sale just hours after one of its largest investors, the California teachers’ pension fund, said it was reviewing its relationship with the firm. Also late Monday, the California treasurer raised concerns about the state’s pension funds’ investments in gun companies.

Cerberus, a private-equity and hedge fund firm based in New York, is owned by the billionaire financier Stephen A. Feinberg. His father lives in Newtown, Conn., where the shooting rampage occurred. The authorities say that Adam Lanza, the shooter, used a semiautomatic rifle made by Bushmaster, one of Freedom Group’s brands, to kill 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, as well as his mother and himself.

Early Tuesday morning, about 1 a.m. — after several media outlets highlighted Cerberus’s ties to the gun maker, and the California officials issued statements — Cerberus issued a 400-word statement announcing the planned sale of the company. “It is apparent that the Sandy Hook tragedy was a watershed event that has raised the national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level,” the release said.

“The debate essentially focuses on the balance between public safety and the scope of the Constitutional rights under the Second Amendment,” Cerberus said. “As a firm, we are investors, not statements or policy makers.” The statement added: “It is not our role to take positions, or attempt to shape or influence the gun control policy debate. That is the job of our federal and state legislators.”

It is unclear who, if anyone, would be a potential buyer for Freedom. Over the last two days, shares of the publicly traded United States gun makers, Sturm, Ruger & Company and Smith & Wesson, dropped precipitously on the fears of increased gun regulation. Several foreign gun manufacturers, including Forjas Taurus of Brazil and Herstal Group of Belgium, could be possible suitors, according to a banker familiar with the weapons industry.

Cerberus said that it would retain a financial adviser to sell its interests in Freedom Group and then return the sale proceeds to its investors. “We believe that this decision allows us to meet our obligations to the investors whose interests we are entrusted to protect without being drawn into the national debate that is more properly pursued by those with the formal charter and public responsibility to do so,” said the statement.

The publicity-averse Mr. Feinberg came under scrutiny last decade after buying two of the country’s most well-known companies, the automaker Chrysler and the finance arm of General Motors. Cerberus, which made those acquisitions just before the financial crisis struck, suffered losses on both deals, and Mr. Feinberg told his investors that Cerberus would in the future stay away from prominent investments.

Despite that vow, Mr. Feinberg again has found himself under the spotlight because of a Cerberus holding. Freedom Group’s origins date to 2006, when Cerberus acquired Bushmaster Firearms. The firm then consolidated the fragmented gun industry, acquiring at least six other brands and rolling them into one company to create Freedom Group, which is based in Madison, N.C. Freedom is on track to post about $900 million in revenue this year.

Other brands under the Freedom Group umbrella include Remington Arms, the country’s largest and oldest maker of rifles; Marlin Firearms, a manufacturer of lever-action rifles; and Advanced Armament, a maker of pistol silencers. The company proposed an initial public offering in 2009, but withdrew its plans last year after its financial performance weakened.

Mr. Feinberg has a penchant for investing in defense-related businesses. Its holdings include the military contractor IAP Worldwide Services and the satellite provider GeoEye. Cerberus also explored an investment in Blackwater USA, the private-security contractor since renamed Xe Services, but a deal never materialized.

A major Republican donor, Mr. Feinberg has a number of former prominent political and military officials on Cerberus’s payroll, including Dan Quayle, the former vice president; John Snow, the former Treasury Secretary; and George A. Joulwan, the former Supreme Allied Commander of Europe. He is also an avid shooter and hunter — favoring a Remington 700 — and has a membership at the upscale hunting club Mashomack Preserve Club in Pine Plains, N.Y.

A fellow firearms enthusiast and Cerberus executive, George Kollitides, has served as Freedom Group’s chief executive since March. Mr. Kollitides is a trustee of the N.R.A. Foundation and a director of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association.

Mr. Feinberg, 52, was raised in Spring Valley, N.Y., in Rockland County, and after graduating from Princeton, started his Wall Street career working at Drexel Burnham Lambert during the bank’s heyday in the 1980s. After developing a specialty trading in the distressed debt of troubled companies, Mr. Feinberg struck out on his own to start Cerberus.

His father, Martin Feinberg, 86, lives in Newtown, Conn., according to public records. It is unclear whether Mr. Feinberg’s father played any role in Cerberus’s decision to divest its stake in Freedom Group.

Though Freedom Group was unable to complete its I.P.O., the deal has been a successful one for Cerberus, according to a person briefed on the investment.

If it is able to sell Freedom Group for a profit, some of the beneficiaries would be Cerberus’s investors, which include two of the country’s largest and most influential pension funds — the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or Calstrs, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or Calpers.

On Tuesday, Ricardo Duran, a spokesman for Calstrs, applauded Cerberus’s decision to unload Freedom Group and said it would remain an investor with the firm. Calstrs has $600 million invested in Cerberus funds, which, as a result, give it a 2.4 percent stake in Freedom Group.

“They are taking a very responsible approach to this and we are happy that they’re selling,” said Mr. Duran.

Bill Lockyer, the California Treasurer, said that the state’s pension funds should not own stakes in any companies that make assault weapons.

“Our objective is to make sure that both Calpers and Calstrs are scrubbed clean of any investment in any company that makes guns that are illegal in this state and expose our communities to violence and death,” said Mr. Lockyer, in a statement. “We’re pleased that Cerberus is taking this action but our initiative extends far beyond one company.”

Neil Gough contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

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Car Bomb Kills at Least 17 in Pakistani Tribal Region

Qazi Rauf/Associated Press

A car bomb ripped through the women’s waiting area of a bus stop in Pakistan's Khyber tribal region on Monday.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A powerful car bomb exploded near government offices in a town in the northwestern tribal belt on Monday, killing at least 17 people and wounding dozens, local officials said.

The car bomb attack, in the Khyber tribal agency, followed a Taliban assault on the nearby international airport in Peshawar over the weekend that left at least 15 people dead, 10 of them militants, underlining the continued potency of Islamist fighters in the area.

In Monday’s attack, officials said that a vehicle loaded with an estimated 90 pounds of explosives was detonated by remote control in Jamrud, close to Peshawar, which borders the tribal belt.

Although the blast occurred near the offices of a senior government official, its immediate force ripped through the women’s waiting area of a bus stop, said Jahangir Azim, a senior official in the Khyber agency. The dead included four Afghan women and three children, he said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, which damaged shops and vehicles across a wide radius. The dead and an estimated 44 wounded people were taken to hospitals.

Khyber is home to several Islamist militant groups, some of which are affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban, while others are fighting both the Taliban and the government.

Officials said they were unsure whether Monday’s attack was aimed at the government offices or at members of the Zakakhel subtribe, which has recently sided with the government against the Taliban. One bus stop in the vicinity of the blast is used by the Zakakhel to travel to their home area of Tirah Valley, which has recently seen fighting between members of a government-sponsored tribal militia and two rival Islamist groups.

“At the moment we are not in position to allege someone for the blast or to tell exactly what was the motive behind the attack by the perpetrators,” Asmatullah Wazir, a local government official, said by telephone.

In the Taliban attack against the Peshawar airport, five militants died during a failed attempt to break through the airport’s perimeter wall on Saturday night, while another five died during a shootout with security forces at a nearby house on Sunday morning.

At least five other people, including three civilians and two police officers, died in the attack, which was the first concerted attack on the Peshawar airport. Although the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, officials identified several of the attackers as Uzbeks, suggesting that elements linked to Al Qaeda had also participated.

Together, the two attacks killed at least 32 people and wounded more than 80, highlighting the challenges facing the security forces in the run-up to general elections that are due in the next six months.

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Charlie Brown’s Christmas Reunion Will Ruin Your Childhood

We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

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Sometimes we don’t get art. Sometimes we really, really, don’t get it: 

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We love A Charlie Brown Christmas. We love Louie. We’re not quite if we love the two mixed together, but we’ll let you know right after we tell kids that Santa doesn’t exist: 

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Meet Basse Andersen of Arendal, Norway. He’s the biggest chicken/scaredy cat in the entire world. And on the bright side, he probably never has any bouts with the hiccups. 

Shifting gears from scaredy cats to actual cats, here’s the latest chapter in the eternal battle between printers and cats:

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Duke moves to No. 1 in AP poll after Indiana loss

Duke is back in a familiar place — No. 1.

The Blue Devils advanced one spot to replace Indiana at the top of The Associated Press' Top 25 on Monday, drawing closer to UCLA's record for most No. 1 rankings.

Duke has reached No. 1 at least once in a record 16 seasons under coach Mike Krzyzewski, and has played more games as the No. 1 ranked team in 33 years under Coach K (209) than as an unranked team (141).

No team in the country has the resume that the Blue Devils do: They own three wins over teams ranked in the top five at the time — then-No. 3 Kentucky, then-No. 2 Louisville and then-No. 4 Ohio State, all in a span of 16 days.

"We're proud of it. I think it's a lot different than a preseason ranking," forward Mason Plumlee said. "We feel like we've earned it, not like we've been given anything. (But) if we don't get any better during the season, we're not going to be No. 1 at the end of the season."

Indiana (9-1) held the top spot from the preseason poll through the first five weeks of the season. Butler beat the Hoosiers 88-86 in overtime Saturday.

The Blue Devils (9-0), whose only game in the past 2½ weeks was a victory over Temple on Dec. 8, received 62 first-place votes from the 65-member national media panel.

They will debut their latest No. 1 ranking at home Wednesday night against Cornell.

"I don't anticipate us being rusty — if anything, we might be a little overanxious to play," Plumlee said. "This team loves to play, so when we don't get a game in a week or so, you can get a little anxious."

It is the 123rd week Duke has been ranked No. 1, 11 weeks behind UCLA. All but 31 weeks of Duke's stay on top have come since the 1991-92 season. The Blue Devils' last time at No. 1 was an 11-week run in 2010-11.

"We even know when we watch film on a team that they'll be a different team against us because that's almost always the case," Plumlee said. "They'll shoot a little better, play a little better and maybe the No. 1 ranking adds to that. We consistently get teams' best (effort)."

Michigan (11-0), which received the other No. 1 votes, and Syracuse moved up one place each to second and third. They were followed in the top 10 by Arizona, Louisville, Indiana, Ohio State, Florida, Kansas and Illinois.

Butler (8-2), which beat then-No. 9 North Carolina last month in the EA Sports Maui Invitational, moved into the poll at No. 19. This is the Bulldogs' first appearance in the rankings since the first week of 2010-11.

Wichita State (9-1) dropped out from 23rd after losing 69-60 at Tennessee. The Shockers spent two weeks in the rankings.

North Carolina, with 107 weeks, is the only other school ranked No. 1 for at least 100 polls.

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A Conversation With S. Matthew Liao: Studying Ethical Questions as We Unlock the Black Box of the Brain

Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

CAUTION S. Matthew Liao urges advance thinking about new technologies.

In a world of proliferating professions, S. Matthew Liao has a singular title: neuroethicist. Dr. Liao, 40, the director of the bioethics program at New York University, deploys the tools of philosophy, history, psychology, religion and ethics to understand the impact of neuroscientific breakthroughs.

We spoke over four hours in two sessions. A condensed and edited version of the conversations follows.

You’re a philosopher by training. How did philosophy lead to neuroethics?

Mine’s the typical immigrant’s story. My family moved to Cincinnati from Taiwan in the early 1980s. Once here, my siblings gravitated towards the sciences. I was the black sheep. I was in love with the humanities. So I didn’t go to M.I.T. — I went to Princeton, where I got a degree in philosophy. This, of course, worried my parents. They’d never met a philosopher with a job.

Do you have any insight on why scientific careers are so attractive to new Americans?

You don’t need to speak perfect English to do science. And there are job opportunities.

Define neuroethics.

It’s a kind of subspecialty of bioethics. Until very recently, the human mind was a black box. But here we are in the 21st century, and now we have all these new technologies with opportunities to look inside that black box — a little.

With functional magnetic imaging, f.M.R.I., you can get pictures of what the brain is doing during cognition. You see which parts light up during brain activity. Scientists are trying to match those lights with specific behaviors.

At the same time this is moving forward, there are all kinds of drugs being developed and tested to modify behavior and the mind. So the question is: Are these new technologies ethical?

A neuroethicist can look at the downstream implications of these new possibilities. We help map the conflicting arguments, which will, hopefully, lead to more informed decisions. What we want is for citizens and policy makers to be thinking in advance about how new technologies will affect them. As a society, we don’t do enough of that.

Give us an example of a technology that entered our lives without forethought.

The Internet. It has made us more connected to the world’s knowledge. But it’s also reduced our actual human contacts with one another.

So what would be an issue you might look at through a neuroethics lens?

New drugs to alter memory. Right now, the government is quite interested in propranolol. They are testing it on soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. The good part is that the drug helps traumatized veterans by removing the bad memories causing them such distress. A neuroethicist must ask, “Is this good for society, to have warriors have their memories wiped out chemically? Will we start getting conscienceless soldiers?”

What do you think?

It is a serious business removing memories, because memories can affect your personal identity. They can impact who you think you are. I’d differentiate between offering such a drug to every distressed soldier and giving it only to certain individuals with a specific need.

Let’s say you have a situation like that in “Sophie’s Choice,” where the memories are so bad that the person is suicidal. Even if the drug causes them to live in falsehood, that would have been preferable to suicide.

But should we give it to every soldier who goes into battle? No! You need memory for a conscience. Doing this routinely might create super-immoral soldiers. As humans we have natural moral reactions to the beings around us — sympathy for other people and animals. When you start to tinker with those neurosystems, we’re not going to react to our fellow humans in the right way anymore. One wonders about the wrong people giving propranolol routinely to genocidal gangs in places like Rwanda or Syria.

Some researchers claim to be near to using f.M.R.I.’s to read thoughts. Is this really happening?

The technology, though still crude, appears to be getting closer. For instance, there’s one research group that asks subjects to watch movies. When they look at the subject’s visual cortex while the subject is watching, they can sort of recreate what they are seeing — or a semblance of it.

Similarly, there’s another experiment where they can tell in advance whether you’re going to push the right or the left button. On the basis of these experiments some people claim they’ll soon be able to read minds. Before we go further with this, I’d like to think more about what it could mean. The technology has the potential to destroy any concept of inner privacy.

What about using f.M.R.I. to replace lie detectors?

The fact is we don’t really know if f.M.R.I.’s will be any more reliable or predictive. Nonetheless, in India, a woman was convicted of poisoning her boyfriend on the basis of f.M.R.I. evidence. The authorities said that based on the pictures of blood flow in her brain, she was lying to them.

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European Mobile Stocks Fall After Costly Spectrum Auction

BERLIN — Shares of four big European cellphone operators fell Monday after they paid more than twice what investors had been expecting in a spectrum auction in the Netherlands, raising concern that a damaging bidding war could sap the industry.

The Dutch auction began Oct. 31 and ended Friday, raising 3.8 billion euros, or $5 billion, for spectrum that the companies plan to use for high-speed service using Long Term Evolution, or LTE, technology. But analysts warned that the sale, to be followed next year by a much larger spectrum auction in Britain, could herald a new round of expensive infrastructure levies that might restrict operators at a time when their sales have been stagnating.

The winners were KPN, the former Dutch monopoly; Vodafone, the British mobile group; the German company T-Mobile; and the Swedish operator Tele2.

LTE supports all of the typical high-speed applications, including audio and video streaming and Internet browsing, but is much faster, cutting download times and significantly expanding the capacity of existing networks to handle increases in data traffic.

After the bidding, KPN, which is owned in part by the Mexican communications mogul Carlos Slim Helú, canceled its dividend for 2012 and lowered its projected investor payout for 2013 to cover the 1.35 billion euros the company spent in the auction.

On Monday, the first day of stock trading after the completion of the auction, shares of KPN fell nearly 15 percent in Amsterdam, the steepest drop in more than a decade. Shares of Vodafone were down 1.7 percent by the close of the day in London. Shares of Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile, fell 0.3 percent in Frankfurt, and shares of Tele2 declined 1 percent in Stockholm.

“The money raised in the Dutch auction was a lot more than investors were expecting,” said Phil Kendall, an analyst at Strategy Analytics in Milton Keynes, England. “The concern now is that the sums will now be so great the technology will be unprofitable.”

Mr. Kendall said mobile operators were eager to obtain additional spectrum because extensive bandwidth had become increasingly critical to handle the explosion of mobile Internet data, which is testing the capacity of some carriers’ grids and causing overloading.

“Really, for many operators, the only way they will be able to differentiate themselves from other operators is by having enough spectrum to manage the demand on their services,” Mr. Kendall said. “That is why there is such intense interest in buying more frequency.”

More radio spectrum, or wireless network capacity, is crucial to delivering the high speeds advertised for LTE, which theoretically can produce download rates of up to 300 megabits per second on a wireless connection. Such speeds and the expanded capacity of the networks are considered essential to support the rapid expansion of the wireless Internet, as well as the increasing use of mobile grids for robotic communication between devices.

Speeds on the first generation of LTE networks activated in Germany, South Korea, Sweden and the United States have averaged much less, generally 10 to 25 megabits per second, in part because operators do not have enough spectrum to exploit the technology’s full potential.

The Dutch auction also raised the specter of another costly round of infrastructure fees on the cellphone industry similar to those in 1999 and 2000, when operators paid billions for the first European 3G mobile licenses.

Investors were concerned that the Dutch prices could set a precedent for auctions planned in Britain and perhaps Poland next year, as well as others that will be held across Europe over the next five years, as bandwidth is freed up and sold by national governments to wireless carriers. Germany, which held its latest spectrum auction in 2010, has indicated that it may hold another in 2016.

Those license sales in 1999 and 2000, engineered in most cases by governments to extract the maximum from mobile operators, led to large profit write-downs by operators including Vodafone and Telefónica, which owns the carrier O2.

With completion of the Dutch auction, the focus will now shift to Britain, where the sector’s regulator is planning to begin its spectrum auction in January.

All four British mobile network operators are expected to bid: Everything Everywhere, the venture of Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom; Vodafone; O2 U.K.; and 3, a unit of Hutchison Whampoa. The former landline monopoly BT has not ruled out a potential bid, which could further raise the stakes.

Matthew Howett, an analyst at Ovum, a research firm in London, said the British auction could raise £2 billion to £4 billion, or $3.2 billion to $6.5 billion.

“The £2 billion to £4 billion range that is widely touted is based on similar auctions elsewhere in Europe,” he said. “There is nothing to suggest that the U.K. should be any different. It’s possibly the most competitive market in Europe and all existing operators will want to make sure they walk away with spectrum to feed the almost insatiable appetite we in the U.K. now have for data.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 17, 2012

An earlier version of this article erroneously stated the amount paid by KPN for spectrum in the auction. It was 1.35 billion euros, not $1.35 billion.

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Syrian Airstrike Kills Palestinian Refugees

DAMASCUS, Syria — Syrian government forces for the first time hit the country’s largest Palestinian refugee neighborhood with airstrikes on Sunday, killing at least eight people in the Yarmouk district of Damascus and reportedly driving dozens of formerly pro-government Palestinian fighters to defect to the rebels.

The New York Times

For many Yarmouk residents — refugees from conflict with Israel and their descendants — the attacks shattered what was left of the Syrian government’s claim to be a champion and protector of Palestinians.

New signs emerged on Sunday of political pressure on President Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Assad’s vice president was quoted as saying neither side could win the war and calling for “new partners” in a unity government, a possible sign that at least some in the government were exploring new ways out of the crisis. The comments came as two close allies, the government of Iran and the leader of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, appeared to slightly temper their support.

In Yarmouk, flesh stuck to the walls and burned body parts littered the ground at the Sheik Abdul Qader mosque, which had offered shelter to Palestinians and others displaced by fighting in other areas. Minutes before, a reporter saw a Syrian fighter jet fire rockets at the camp. Women, crying children and white-bearded men thronged the streets with hurriedly packed bags, not sure where to look for safety.

For many Yarmouk residents — refugees from conflict with Israel and their descendants — the attacks shattered what was left of the Syrian government’s claim to be a champion and protector of Palestinians, a position that the Assad family relied upon as a source of domestic and international legitimacy during more than 40 years of iron-fisted rule.

“For decades the Assad regime was talking about the Palestinians’ rights,” said a Palestinian refugee who gave his name as Abu Ammar as he debated whether to flee with his wife and five children from the camp, on the southern edge of Damascus. “But Bashar al-Assad has killed more of us today than Israel did in its latest war on Gaza.”

He added: “What does Bashar expect from us after today? All of us will be Free Syrian Army fighters.”

The Palestinian militant group and political party Hamas has broken with Mr. Assad over his crackdown on what began as a peaceful protest movement, and while most Palestinian parties still profess neutrality, a growing number of Palestinians support — and have even joined — the rebels.

The Syrian government long held the loyalty of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, giving them health care, education, and access to professional careers, among other rights denied by other Arab host countries. But those policies also gave Palestinians a stake and sense of belonging in Syria that has led many to join the uprising.

Several of Mr. Assad’s allies signaled a new push for a peaceful solution. Iran’s Foreign Ministry called for an end to military action, the release of political prisoners and a broad-based dialogue to form a transitional government that would hold free elections, Iran’s state news agency reported.

Mr. Assad’s vice president, Farouk al-Shara, said that neither the government nor the rebels could end the conflict militarily, the pro-Syrian Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar reported. And he called for a solution involving a cease-fire and brokered by international leaders that would establish a “national unity government with wide powers.”

He added that the battle was for the country’s very existence, not “the survival of an individual or a regime,” and that Syria’s leaders “cannot achieve change without new partners.”

The impact of the statements was unclear. Mr. Shara, a Sunni Muslim like most of the rebels, has been floated by the Arab League as a possible successor, but many of Mr. Assad’s opponents reject any dealings with leaders of the current government.

In neighboring Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, appeared to acknowledge for the first time that the Syrian uprising is at least in part driven by popular sentiment.

“Today, in Syria,” he said in a videotaped address at a graduation ceremony, “there is a big part of the population with the Syrian regime and a part against it, and the latter armed themselves to fight the regime.”

An employee of The New York Times reported from Damascus, and Anne Barnard from Beirut. Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut, and Hala Droubi from Dubai.

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Be Careful When Downloading Your Twitter Archive

Twitter is rolling out the long-awaited feature of downloading your entire tweet history, it seems, but be careful. You might not like what you find in there. Sometimes we remember our tweets with rose-colored lenses.

RELATED: ‘Human Virus’ Snakes Through Twitter

The Next Web was the first to notice a few users posting about being able to download their tweet history this weekend. Not everyone can do it, though. Twitter is slow-rolling the new feature, so only a limited number of people have access to the option. To check if you’re one of the lucky few, go to your settings page. At the very bottom there should be a new section with a big button offering you the chance to download your archive. Twitter will send you an email with three different compression files of your tweet history after a few minutes. You’ll decompress a .html file and be able to sort through all the dumb stuff you’ve said on Twitter by month and by year. 

RELATED: Twitter Finally Grows Up

The Verge has the best screen shots of what the process looks like. One of their readers even posted a link to his history in the comments of their post. You can check it out here if you’re interested to see what the feature is like. Just don’t judge the poor guy too harshly. 

RELATED: Sexy Piggy Banks, Analogies and Haley Barbour

We don’t have the option to download our archive yet. We checked. And, in case you think you’re clever, we checked to see if you could game the url to get your history by subbing in your username into the Verge commenter’s URL. You can’t, unfortunately. 

RELATED: Arm Wrestling, Strangers and Pricey Prophylactics

Twitter CEO Dick Costello promised the feature would be here by the end of the year, so it seems like he’s just delivering what he promised. You should get it soon, too. 

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Texans clinch AFC South with 29-17 win over Colts

HOUSTON (AP) — The Houston Texans have a message for the Indianapolis Colts:

Now we own the AFC South.

The Texans are division champions for the second straight year after beating the Colts 29-17 Sunday. Andre Johnson gained 151 yards receiving and a touchdown, Bryan Braman scored a special teams score on a blocked punt, and Shayne Graham kicked five field goals.

The Texans (12-2) grabbed their first AFC South title last season after the Colts nosedived without injured quarterback Peyton Manning. Manning is gone to Denver and rookie Andrew Luck couldn't do much against the inspired Houston defense.

The Colts (9-5) had won three straight games and needed a win to clinch a playoff berth a year after going 2-14 in 2011. Before that, they took the division seven times since Houston entered the league in 2002.

Thanks in great part to three sacks from J.J. Watt, Houston bounced back six days after an embarrassing 42-14 loss to New England on national television. The Texans will have home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs if they win out.

Luck threw for 186 yards with two touchdowns in the return to his hometown. He had led the Colts to a rookie-record six wins on drives in the fourth quarter or overtime this season, and he got the Colts within six points late in the third quarter.

But Houston's defense shut him down after that, and the Texans used Arian Foster to eat up the clock. Foster ran for a season-high 165 yards to leave him with 1,313 yards rushing, giving him his third straight year with at least 1,200.

Watt increased his AFC-leading sack total to 19 ½ — the NFL record for a season is 22 1-2 — and finished with 10 tackles. He also forced a fumble for the third straight game.

Luck was sacked five times playing behind a makeshift offensive line missing center Samson Satele (ankle) and right tackle Winston Justice (biceps).

Johnson, who has 11,008 yards receiving in his career, scored on a 3-yard reception to make it 10-0 in the first quarter. The Texans didn't score a touchdown on offense after that, but were helped by Braman's special teams effort.

Braman blocked his second punt of the season, recovered it and returned it 8 yards for his first career touchdown to make it 20-3 just before halftime.

Vick Ballard had 60 yards rushing on a Colts drive that ended with an 8-yard touchdown reception by Dwayne Allen to cut Houston's lead to 23-17 in the third quarter. Ballard finished with a career-high 105 yards rushing.

Houston couldn't do anything on its next drive and punted. But Indy sputtered, and interim coach Bruce Arians even drew an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on a punt, giving Houston the ball at the Colts 39.

Graham added a 46-yard field goal to push the lead to 26-17 and made his fifth field goal with about a minute left.

Rookie T.Y. Hilton and Luck connected on a 61-yard touchdown pass just before halftime.

Watt's forced fumble on Mewelde Moore on the Houston 1 was recovered by Tim Dobbins early in the second quarter, robbing the Colts of points. And the Colts stalled inside the red zone again and had to settle for Adam Vinatieri's 26-yard field goal to cut Houston's lead to 10-3.

The Texans had set the tone as they got to Luck early, sacking him twice on the Colts' second drive. Antonio Smith got to him first, and Watt put a move on backup tackle Jeff Linkenbach and took him down for a 15-yard loss.

On offense, Johnson was dominant. He put Houston up 10-0 when he waltzed into the end zoen for a 3-yard touchdown reception. Johnson kept things going earlier in the drive when he caught a pass, lost it and then grabbed it again just before it touched the ground for a 10-yard gain on third-and-9.

___

Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

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Mislabeled Foods Find Their Way to Diners’ Tables

ATLANTA — The menu offered fried catfish. But Freddie Washington, a pastor in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who sometimes eats out five nights a week and was raised on Gulf Coast seafood, was served tilapia.

Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

Consumers are misled most frequently when they buy fish, investigators say, because diners have such limited knowledge about seafood. 

It was a culinary bait and switch. Mr. Washington complained. The restaurant had run out of catfish, the manager explained, and the pastor left the restaurant with a free dinner, an apology and a couple of gift certificates.

“If I’m paying for a menu item,” Mr. Washington said, “I’m expecting that menu item to be placed before me.”

The subject of deceptive restaurant menus took on new life last week when Oceana, an international organization dedicated to ocean conservation, released a report with the headline “Widespread Seafood Fraud Found in New York City.”

Using genetic testing, the group found tilapia and tilefish posing as red snapper. Farmed salmon was sold as wild. Escolar, which can also legally be called oil fish, was disguised as white tuna, which is an unofficial nickname for albacore tuna.

Every one of 16 sushi bars investigated sold the researchers mislabeled fish. In all, 39 percent of the seafood from 81 grocery stores and restaurants was not what the establishment claimed it was.

“This thing with fish is age old, it’s been going on forever,” said Anne Quatrano, an Atlanta chef who opened Bacchanalia 20 years ago and kick-started the city’s sustainable food movement. “Unless you buy whole fish, you can’t always know what you’re getting from a supplier.”

Swapping one ingredient for a less expensive one extends beyond fish and is not always the fault of the person who sells food to the restaurant. Many a pork cutlet has headed to a table disguised as veal, and many an organic salad is not.

The term organic is regulated by the Department of Agriculture, but many other identifying words on a menu are essentially marketing terms. Unscrupulous chefs can falsely claim that a steak is Kobe beef or say a chicken was humanely treated without penalty.

In cases of blatant mislabeling, a chef or supplier often takes the bet that a local or federal agency charged with stopping deceptive practices is not likely to walk in the door. “This has been going on for as long as I’ve been cooking,” said Tom Colicchio, a New York chef and television personality. “When you start really getting into this stuff, there’s so many things people mislabel.”

At Mr. Colicchio’s New York restaurants, all but about 5 percent of the meat he serves is from animals raised without antibiotics, he said. It costs him about 30 percent more, so he charges more. “Yet I have a restaurant down the street that says they have organic chicken when they don’t, and they charge less money for it,” he said. “It’s all part of mislabeling and duping the public.”

Consumers are misled most frequently when they buy fish, investigators say, because there are so many fish in the sea and such limited knowledge among diners. The Food and Drug Administration lists 519 acceptable market names for fish, but more than 1,700 species are sold, said Morgan Liscinsky, a spokesman with the agency.

Marketing thousands of species in the ocean to a dining public who often has to be coaxed to move beyond the top five — shrimp, tuna, salmon, pollock and tilapia — is not an exact science.

The line between marketing something like Patagonian toothfish as Chilean sea bass or serving langostino and calling it lobster is a fine one.

Robert DeMasco, who owns Pierless Fish, a wholesaler in New York, used a profanity to describe someone who buys farm-raised fish and sells it as wild. “But on some of this, they’re splitting hairs,” he said.

In 2005, a customer sued Rubio’s, a West Coast taco chain, for misleading the public by selling a langostino lobster burrito. The FDA ruled that practice acceptable, which allowed chains like Long John Silver’s and Red Lobster to sell the crustacean called langostino and legally attach the word lobster to it. Maine lobstermen and lawmakers fought the decision unsuccessfully.

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