Democratic Senators Face Gun Owners Roused by Talk of New Laws

BECKLEY, W.Va. — Talk of stricter gun control has stirred up a lot of unease here, a place where hunters vie for top prize (a 26-inch LED television) in the Big Buck Photo Contest, and ads for a gun-simulator game ask, “Feel like shooting something today?”

Ryan Stone for The New York Times

Senator Joe Manchin III

Ryan Stone for The New York Times

Businessmen and community leaders in Beckley, W.Va., met with Senator Joe Manchin III last week to discuss gun control.

But before Senator Joe Manchin III invited a group of 15 businessmen and community leaders to lunch last week to discuss the topic, he had only a vague idea of how anxious many of his supporters were.

“How many of you all believe that there is a movement to take away the Second Amendment?” he asked.

About half the hands in the room went up.

Despite his best attempts to reassure them — “I see no movement, no talk, no bills, no nothing” — they remained skeptical. “We give up our rights one piece at a time,” a banker named Charlie Houck told the senator.

If there is a path to new gun laws, it has to come through West Virginia and a dozen other states with Democratic senators like Mr. Manchin who are confronting galvanized constituencies that view any effort to tighten gun laws as an infringement.

As Congress considers what, if any, laws to change, Mr. Manchin has become a barometer among his colleagues, testing just how far they might be able to go without angering voters.

On Thursday a group of Democratic senators led by Dianne Feinstein of California plans to introduce a bill that would outlaw more than 100 different assault weapons, setting up what promises to be a fraught and divisive debate over gun control in Congress in the coming weeks. But a number of centrist lawmakers like Mr. Manchin have already thrown the measure’s fate into question, saying that all they are willing to support for now is a stronger background check system.

As a hunter with an A rating from the National Rifle Association, Mr. Manchin gave advocates for new weapons laws reason for optimism after he said last month that gun firepower and magazine capacity might need to be limited.

But now, Mr. Manchin, who affirmed his support for gun rights by running a campaign commercial in 2010 showing him firing a rifle into an environmental bill, says he is not so sure. One of his local offices has been picketed, and even some of his most thoughtful supporters are cautioning him that stronger background checks are about all the gun control they can stomach. 

And on the afternoon the 15 residents met with Mr. Manchin in the conference room of a local arts center, they told him that going after guns and ammunition capacity would be much like banning box cutters after the Sept. 11 attacks, or limiting whiskey and six-pack sales to cure alcoholism.

“It takes about a second and a half to change a clip,” said Frank Jezioro, a former special agent with the Office of Naval Intelligence and now director of the state Division of Natural Resources.

Mr. Jezioro likened gunmen in mass shootings to suicide bombers: they will always find a way. “A guy can walk through this door right here with your Beretta five-shot automatic, and cut the barrel off at 16 inches, and put five double-ought buckshots in there and kill everybody in here in a matter of seconds,” he said. “And you don’t have to aim it.”

As it happened, there were at least two guns in the room. One was on the hip of a Beckley police detective who was invited to the lunch, the other at the side of the West Virginia state trooper who stood guard at the door.

Others at the lunch said that laws did little to help even the most violent societies. “Mexico, for instance, has got some of the strictest gun control laws in North America,” said Rick Johnson, the owner of a river expedition company. “They’ll put you in jail for a bullet in Mexico. And look how well it’s worked.”

“I can take my A.R.,” Mr. Johnson said, referring to his assault rifle, “load it, put one in the chamber and throw it up on this table, and the only way it’s going to hurt anybody is if I miss and hit someone in the head. The gun doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s the person pulling the trigger.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 24, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a New Hampshire senator who said she had been hearing from all corners of the state on the gun issue. She is Jeanne Shaheen, not Jean.

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Go forth and Tweet! Pope sees web networks as “portals of truth”

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict urged Catholics on Thursday to use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to win converts, as he launched his own smartphone app streaming live footage of his speeches.

The websites – often associated with endless postings of idle gossip and baby photos – could be used as “portals of truth and faith” in an increasingly secular age, the pontiff said in his 2013 World Communications Day message.

“Unless the Good News is made known also in the digital world, it may be absent in the experience of many people,” the 85-year old Pope said in the a letter published on the Vatican‘s website.

The Holy See has become an increasingly prolific user of social media since it launched its ‘new evangelization’ of the developed world, where some congregations have fallen in the wake of growing secularization and damage to the Church’s reputation from a series of sex abuse scandals.

The Pope himself reaches around 2.5 million followers through eight Twitter accounts, including one in Latin.

Belying his traditionalist reputation, the Pope praised connections made online which he said could blossom into true friendships. Online life was not a purely virtual world but “increasingly becoming part of the very fabric of society,” he said.

Social networks were also a practical tool that Catholics could use to organize prayer events, the pope suggested. But he called for reasoned debate and respectful dialogue with those with different beliefs, and cautioned against a tendency towards “heated and divisive voices” and “sensationalism”.

The websites were creating a new “agora”, he added, referring to the gathering spaces that were the centers of public life in ancient Greek cities.

The speech coincided with the launch of ‘The Pope App’, a downloadable program that streams live footage of the pontiff’s speaking events and Vatican news onto smartphones.

Pope Benedict‘s embrace of new media responds to the Church’s concern that it is invisible on the internet.

The Vatican commissioned a study of internet use and religion prior to the pope’s Twitter debut, which found the majority of U.S. Catholics surveyed were unaware of any significant Church presence online.

(Reporting by Naomi O’Leary; editing by Andrew Heavens)

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Paris Opera Ballet names Millepied of 'Black Swan'

PARIS (AP) — Benjamin Millepied, the "Black Swan" choreographer who helped transform Natalie Portman into an obsessed, paranoid ballerina for the film and later married the actress, was named director of the Paris Opera Ballet on Thursday.

Millepied, 35, is a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet who left in 2011 to create his own dance company in Los Angeles, L.A. Dance Project. He'll start at the Paris company in October 2014, when the current dance director, Brigitte Lefevre, retires.

Millepied and Portman, who have a son, met during the making of "Black Swan," Darren Aronofsky's psychological thriller that stars Portman as a ballet dancer.

Portman won the best actress Academy Award or her performance in the movie.

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Mind: Avoiding Cold Feet Down the Aisle

His charisma was big enough to make his bad habits seem small, more like quirks than flaws. The cigarettes on his breath; the extra weight around the middle; the indifference to clothing and appearances — surely these were minor things, correctable in time.

In the months leading up to the wedding, in 1988, even the fact that he’d been living with his mother at age 38 seemed somehow explainable, if not ideal.

“How about that for a red flag?” said Jincey Huck, a state court employee in St. Louis, of her first husband, who has since died. “Deep down I knew it was a mistake, but I wanted to be married, I wanted kids, all that. I had cold feet the entire time,” said Ms. Huck, now 51.

Psychologists have studied decision-making for more than a century, trying to tease apart how biases, emotion and personality affect big choices and small ones. They have studied people playing investment games. They have taken brain images during hypothetical moral decisions. They have compared the accuracy of snap judgments to long deliberation, trying to gauge the value of subconscious instincts.

But it’s a lot harder to simulate in a laboratory the sort of big life decisions that are risky and hard to reverse: Whether to move across the country. Whether to take a new job, or buy a new house, even switch from PC to Mac. And, perhaps biggest of all: whether to walk down the aisle or split up.

“Virtually every big, real-life decision requires the decision-maker to resolve 10 fundamental questions, or what I call cardinal issues,” said J. Frank Yates, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Michigan’s business school. People only feel real confidence, he said, when they begin to address them all, including trade-offs and timing.

Most people, of course, aren’t experts in decision science. They decide based on their own beliefs, whims and their gut.

So how instructive are gut feelings — particularly cold feet — when there are so many moving parts and the stakes are so high? A study published in the current issue of The Journal of Family Psychology provides an answer: plenty instructive, at least when it comes to marriage.

“Having doubts before marriage is not only common, it predicted a higher divorce rate for women and more dissatisfaction in marriages for men and women,” compared with newlyweds with no doubts, said Justin A. Lavner, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The study, with co-authors Benjamin R. Karney and Thomas N. Bradbury of U.C.L.A., is the first to examine premarital cold feet in a group of couples over time.

That gut-level doubt can portend coming trouble seems true by definition, self-evident. Yet most big decisions prompt some nervous hesitation, and research suggests that it is the nature and source of those doubts that matter, not their mere presence. Many of the psychological dynamics at play in premarital decision-making are similar to those that build around any big decision.

“The important thing to note is that most people who get divorced do not have major doubts going in” to the marriage initially, even if cold feet may increase the odds, said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook University. “At the same time there are factors — like disagreements with the other person’s parents — that may seem minor but become more important later, for instance, when you have kids.”

Several distractions can make these traps hard to appreciate. One is external pressure created by a wedding. “People get caught up in it and dismiss cold feet as, ‘Oh, that’s only the jitters,’ ” said Anne Milford, co-author with Jennifer Gauvain of “How Not to Marry the Wrong Guy” (Random House 2010), who interviewed about 200 women who had had strong doubts at the altar.

“Women most often said they knew they were making a mistake but did it anyway, often because they had no one who’d listen to them,” Ms. Milford said.

Two other elements that blur the decision are internal, less conscious, and can work against one another.

Both are types of idealization. In a series of studies, Sandra Murray of the State University at Buffalo and others have shown that new lovers have a strong tendency to idealize their partner, in the way that Ms. Huck did: Her friends are kind of sweet, when sober. He gets depressed mostly because he’s so sensitive.

Doubts don’t evaporate; they’re suppressed, only to return later.

The other is an expectation many have, of exquisite happiness. “People feel that they have to find the ideal, perfect Mr. or Ms. Right, who is their soul mate, with whom they will feel passionate love forever, and who will make them happy forever,” said Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “The Myths of Happiness” (Penguin, 2013).

She added: “Of course, both research and anecdotal evidence shows that this is not what typically occurs” and this type of person can easily become disappointed.

Being mindful of both distortions — and finding someone outside the wedding frenzy to listen — is one way to check whether those cold feet are ominous.

Another, Dr. Yates said, is to sit down and write about the doubts. “If a person writes about a decision problem, as opposed to simply thinking about it, she develops greater confidence in the correctness of the decision she eventually reaches,” he said in an e-mail. And that confidence is well placed, his studies have suggested.

“I really did ignore everything; I let it all slide,” said Ms. Huck, who is now happily remarried. “The worst part was afterward, knowing I’d done something I knew at the time was a mistake.”

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Markets Mixed in Early Trading

Wall Street markets opened mixed on Thursday as Apple slid more than 10 percent following a revenue miss, and analysts said equities may be due for a pullback after a six-day rally.

Apple missed Wall Street’s revenue forecast for a third consecutive quarter after iPhone sales came in below expectations, fanning fears that its dominance of consumer electronics was slipping. The shares began falling in premarket trading, and were down 11 percent, to $456.60, in early trading.

Over all, the Standard & Poor’s 500-share index was flat, the Dow Jones industrial average gained 0.2 percent, while the Nasdaq was 0.6 percent lower.

However, some positive economic news looked set to put a floor under stock prices. Growth in Chinese manufacturing accelerated to a two-year high this month and a buoyant Germany took the euro zone economy a step closer to recovery, business surveys showed on Thursday.

In the United States, the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell to its lowest since the early days of the 2007-9 recession, a hopeful sign for the sluggish labor market.

With signs the economy is improving, some investors are lauding the strength of the stock market rather than calling an end to the rally.

“The market has disconnected itself with Apple,” said Jack de Gan, chief investment officer at Harbor Advisory Corp in Portsmouth, N.H. “I think it shows great strength in the overall S.&P.”

The S.&P. 500 rose for a sixth day on Wednesday following stronger-than-expected results from I.B.M. and Google. But Apple could now halt that rally, which had lifted stocks to five-year highs.

In Europe, shares were mostly higher. The FTSE in London was 0.6 percent higher, while the DAX in Germany gained 0.2 percent in afternoon trading.

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The Lede Blog: Live Updates: Clinton Testifies on Benghazi Attacks

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Lede is following Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the American Consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Mrs. Clinton had been scheduled to testify before Congress last month, but an illness, a concussion and a blood clot near her brain forced her to postpone her appearance.

As our colleagues Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt reported, four State Department officials were removed from their posts on last month after an independent panel criticized the “grossly inadequate” security at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

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Te'o tells Couric he briefly lied about girlfriend

NEW YORK (AP) — Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o has told Katie Couric that he briefly lied about his online girlfriend after discovering she didn't exist, while maintaining that he had no part in creating the hoax.

Pressed by Couric to admit that he was in on the deception, Te'o said he believed that his girlfriend Lennay Kekua had died of cancer and didn't lie about it until December.

"Katie, put yourself in my situation. I, my whole world told me that she died on Sept. 12. Everybody knew that. This girl, who I committed myself to, died on Sept. 12," Te'o said in an interview to air Thursday on Couric's syndicated talk show. A segment of the interview with Te'o and his parents was broadcast Wednesday on "Good Morning America."

The Heisman Trophy runner-up said he only learned of the hoax when he received a phone call in December from a woman saying she was Kekua.

"Now I get a phone call on Dec. 6, saying that she's alive and then I'm going be put on national TV two days later. And to ask me about the same question. You know, what would you do?" Te'o said.

An Associated Press review of news coverage found that the Heisman Trophy runner-up talked about his doomed love in a Web interview on Dec. 8 and again in a newspaper interview published Dec. 10.

Te'o's father defended his son when Couric pointed out that many people don't believe the Irish star, suspecting he used the situation for personal gain.

"People can speculate about what they think he is. I've known him 21 years of his life. And he's not a liar. He's a kid," Brian Te'o said with tears in his eyes.

On Tuesday, the woman whose photo was used as the "face" of the Twitter account of Te'o's supposed girlfriend says the man allegedly behind the hoax confessed and apologized to her.

Diane O'Meara told NBC's "Today" show that Ronaiah Tuiasosopo used pictures of her without her knowledge in creating a fake woman called Lennay Kekua.

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The New Old Age Blog: Study Links Cognitive Deficits, Hearing Loss

There’s another reason to be concerned about hearing loss — one of the most common health conditions in older adults and one of the most widely undertreated. A new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine suggests that elderly people with compromised hearing are at risk of developing cognitive deficits — problems with memory and thinking — sooner than those whose hearing is intact.

The study in JAMA Internal Medicine was led by Dr. Frank Lin, a hearing specialist and epidemiologist who over the past several years has documented the extent of hearing problems in older people and their association with falls and the onset of dementia.

The physician’s work is bringing fresh, and some would say much-needed, attention to the link between hearing difficulties and seniors’ health.

In his new report, Dr. Lin looked at 1,984 older adults who participated over many years in the Health ABC Study, a long-term study of older adults conducted in Pittsburgh and Memphis. Participants’ mean age was 77; none had evidence of cognitive impairment when the period covered by this research began. In 2001 and 2002, they received hearing tests and cognitive tests; cognitive tests alone were repeated three, five and six years later.

The tests included the Modified Mini-Mental State exam, which is administered through an interview and yields an overall picture of cognitive status, and the Digit Symbol Substitution Test, a paper-only exercise that asks people to match symbols and numbers, which can reveal deficits in someone’s working memory and executive functioning.

Dr. Lin found that annual rates of cognitive decline were 41 percent greater in older adults with hearing problems than in those without, based on results from the Modified Mini-Mental State Exam. A five-point decline on that test is considered a “clinically significant” indicator of a change in cognition.

Using this information, Dr. Lin found that elderly people with hearing problems experienced a five-point decline on the exam in 7.7 years, compared with 10.9 years for those with normal hearing.

Results from the Digit Symbol Substitution Test showed the same downward trend, though not quite as steep: older people with hearing loss recorded a yearly rate of cognitive decline 32 percent greater on it than those with intact hearing. In both cases, the results showed an association only, with no proof of causality.

Still, given the fact that nearly two-thirds of adults age 70 and older have hearing problems, it is an important finding.

For caregivers and older adults, the bottom line is “pay attention to hearing loss,” said Kathleen Pichora-Fuller, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study.

Most people seek medical attention for hearing difficulties 10 to 20 years after they first notice a problem, she said, because “there’s a stigma about hearing loss and people really don’t want to wear a hearing aid.” That means years of struggling with the consequences of impairment, without interventions that can make a difference.

One consequence that may help explain Dr. Lin’s findings is social isolation. When people have a hard time distinguishing what someone is saying to them, as is common in older age, they often stop accepting invitations to dinners or parties, attending concerts or classes, or going to family events. Over time, this social withdrawal can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to the loss of meaningful relationships and activities that keep older people feeling engaged with others.

A substantial body of research by cognitive scientists has established that seniors’ cognitive health depends on exercising both body and brain and remaining socially engaged, and “now we have this intersection of hearing research and cognitive research lining up and showing us that hearing health is part of cognitive health,” said Dr. Pichora-Fuller, who originally trained as an audiologist.

Family physicians and internists, too, often dismiss older patients’ complaints about hearing, and should pay close attention to Dr. Lin’s research, she said.

“I hope this study will be a wake-up call to clinicians that auditory tests need to be part of the battery of tests they employ to look at an older person’s health,” agreed Patricia Tun, an adjunct associate professor of psychology at Brandeis University.

Although the tests are effective and cause no known harm, a panel of experts recently failed to recommend them for older adults because of a lack of supporting evidence, as I wrote last August.

Another potential explanation for Dr. Lin’s new finding lies in a concept known as “cognitive load” that Dr. Tun has explored through her research. Basically, this assumes that “we only have a certain amount of cognitive resources, and if we spend a lot of those resources of processing sensory input coming in — in this case, sound — it’s going to be processed more slowly and understand and remembered less well,” she explained.

In other words, when your brain has to work hard to hear and identify meaningful speech from a jumble of sounds, “you’ll have less mental energy for higher cognitive processing,” Dr. Tun said.

Even seniors who hear sounds relatively well often report that words sound garbled or mumbled, she noted, indicating a deterioration in hearing mechanisms that process complex speech.

Also, as yet unidentified biological or neurological pathways may affect both speech and cognition. Or hearing loss may exacerbate frailty and other medical conditions that older people oftentimes have in ways that are as yet poorly understood, Dr. Lin’s paper notes.

A limitation to his study is its reliance, in part, on the Modified Mini-Mental State exam, which asks older adults to respond to questions posed by an interviewer, according to Barbara Weinstein, a professor and head of the audiology program at CUNY’s Graduate Center.

Her research has shown that hearing-compromised seniors may not understand questions and answer incorrectly, confounding results. Another limitation arises from the failure to test participants’ hearing over time, as happened with cognitive tests, making associations more difficult to tease out.

Dr. Lin hopes to address this through another research project that would follow older adults over time and test whether interventions such as hearing aides help prevent the onset or slow the progression of cognitive decline. In the meantime, older people and caregivers should arrange for hearing tests if they have concerns, and consider getting a hearing aid if problems are confirmed.

Getting sound to the brain is the “first and most important step” in preventing sensory deprivation that can contribute to cognitive dysfunction, said Kelly Tremblay, a professor of speech and hearing science at the University of Washington.

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Bits Blog: Keeping the Internet Safe From Governments

Even before the World Conference on International Telecommunications took place last month in Dubai, Internet activists anticipated trouble. So did Congress, which issued a resolution calling it “essential” that the Internet remain “stable, secure and free from governmental control.”

The worries proved prescient. The conference, which supposedly was going to modernize some ancient regulations, instead offered a treaty that in the eyes of some critics would have given repressive states permission to crack down on dissent. The United States delegate refused to sign it. Fifty-four other countries, including Canada, Peru, Japan and most of Western Europe, voted no as well.

The OpenNet Initiative estimates that about a third of Internet users live in countries that engage in “substantive” or “pervasive” blocking of Internet content. They tended to be among the 89 countries that signed the treaty, including Russia, Cambodia, Iran, China, Cuba, Egypt and Angola.

Those in favor of a free and open Internet have long had a problem with the International Telecommunication Union, the affiliate of the United Nations that ran the conference. They see the I.T.U., which dates back to 1865, as longing for the pre-Internet era, when its influence and fortunes were greater. As a result, activists think, the I.T.U. has become aligned with, and a tool of, countries that desire more governmental control over public speech.

In the wake of the Dubai meeting, there are renewed calls to scale back United States financing of the I.T.U. drastically. The logic is, why are taxpayers supporting an organization whose motives they oppose?

“Paying for both sides of a conflict is unsustainable and illogical, and should simply be corrected,” says the De-Fund the I.T.U. Web site, which has posted a petition on the White House Web site.

The De-Fund site notes that the petition is not asking the United States government to take an unprecedented first step. “Many of our free-market democratic allies, led by Germany, France, Spain and Finland, have already de-funded the I.T.U. Likewise, right-thinking American companies like I.B.M., Cingular, Microsoft, Fox, Agilent, Sprint, Harris, Loral and Xerox, and others, have already withdrawn their private-sector contributions from the I.T.U.”

The petition was the brainchild of Bill Woodcock, the Berkeley-based research director of Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit institute. “This is really about whether people should be allowed to say what they think,” Mr. Woodcock said. “The Internet enables free speech, and that makes it very dangerous to countries that try to control public discourse.”

The United States government contributes about 8 percent of the I.T.U.’s budget. The 55 countries that voted against the treaty contribute about three-quarters of it. If the White House receives 25,000 signatures by Feb. 10, it will review and quite possibly act on the petition. As of Tuesday, it had about 600 signatures with minimal publicity.

A spokesman for the I.T.U., which is based in Switzerland, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

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First Test of New Term Comes in Cabinet Hearings

WASHINGTON – For President Obama, the first test of his second term will come quickly this week when Chuck Hagel and John Kerry, his nominees for the two biggest national-security posts, take critical steps toward winning Senate confirmation. They are likely to get very different receptions.

Senator Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat whom Mr. Obama selected to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, is expected to breeze through his hearing on Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he still leads.

Mr. Hagel, the president’s nominee to succeed Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, has begun the uphill task of winning over hostile Republicans. The Senate Armed Services Committee has set Jan. 31 for Mr. Hagel’s hearing, but in one of the most important steps of that campaign, he is scheduled to meet this week with a vocal skeptic and former close friend, Senator John McCain of Arizona.

But while Mr. McCain continues to express misgivings about Mr. Hagel’s positions on the Iraq war and Iran, officials note he has not declared he would vote against Mr. Hagel, a Republican former senator from Nebraska who, like Mr. McCain, is a Vietnam veteran.

White House officials say they are increasingly sanguine about Mr. Hagel’s chances to win confirmation. Democratic senators have fallen into line since he won the blessing of Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the most influential Jewish member of the Senate. The endorsement was viewed as crucial by the White House because it allayed concerns among Democrats about Mr. Hagel’s positions on Israel and his use of the phrase “Jewish lobby” to refer to pro-Israel lobbying groups.

Privately, administration officials figure that Mr. Hagel could get as many as 60 votes, a threshold that would allow him to overcome a filibuster. Even with a few votes shy of 60, Congressional aides said, it is not clear Republicans will try to block his confirmation.

Minutes after delivering his Inaugural Address on Monday, Mr. Obama signed papers formally nominating Mr. Hagel and Mr. Kerry, as well as two of his other choices for key administration jobs: John O. Brennan for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Jacob J. Lew for Treasury secretary. Mr. Lew would succeed Timothy F. Geithner, who announced his resignation this month. Mr. Brennan would succeed David H. Petraeus, who resigned in November after admitting to an extramarital affair.

“I’m sending a few nominations up, which I know will be handled with great dispatch,” Mr. Obama said, as Congressional leaders, and a chuckling Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., looked on.

But Republicans continue to express doubts about Mr. Hagel’s skepticism toward American sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, as well as about his openness to negotiating with Hezbollah. In recent meetings on Capitol Hill, Mr. Hagel has sounded a more hawkish tone.

“If he has answers for members who have concerns about his past statements,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who met with Mr. Hagel last week, “then I think the chances of his being confirmed will become fairly strong.

“If, on the other hand, he gives answers that appear contradictory or do not demonstrate how his thinking has evolved,” the outlook for his confirmation will be less clear, she said.

Aside from his Senate meetings, Mr. Hagel has kept a low profile in recent days. He did not attend the inauguration or show up for Mr. Biden’s swearing-in ceremony on Sunday, despite having a seat reserved for him (a logistical mix-up, an official said, since he had decided to stay home to prepare for his confirmation).

As Mr. Hagel’s prospects have improved, some analysts say the nominee to watch is Mr. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser Mr. Obama has chosen for the C.I.A.. Immediately after his nomination was announced, Mr. Brennan began encountering resistance from Republicans over alleged national-security leaks after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

But now, Mr. Brennan is facing thorny questions from Democrats over the use of drone strikes and the killing of American citizens in counterterrorism operations – decisions in which he was deeply immersed as a White House adviser.

Last week, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, wrote to Mr. Brennan, demanding that lawmakers be allowed to review the Justice Department’s legal opinion on assassinations, including that of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

The White House has fought to keep these opinions secret. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, has also called on the administration to release the legal opinion in the Awlaki case. She is likely to raise it in Mr. Brennan’s confirmation hearing, which is scheduled for Feb. 7.

The only nominee who seems likely to have a trouble-free experience is Mr. Kerry. Unlike Mr. Hagel, Mr. Kerry was a visible presence at the Capitol on Monday, shaking hands with Mr. Obama after his speech and chatting later with former President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Kerry’s hearing, in fact, may seem anticlimactic, coming the day after Mrs. Clinton’s long-awaited Congressional testimony on the deadly attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya. On Wednesday morning, she will testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The hearing will be led by Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the next highest-ranking Democrat on the committee, since Mr. Kerry cannot preside over his own confirmation.

She will testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the afternoon.

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

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