Watson returns as Ryder Cup captain

NEW YORK (AP) — The Americans are bringing back Tom Watson as Ryder Cup captain with hopes of ending two decades of defeats in Europe.

"We're just really tired of losing Ryder Cup," PGA of America President Ted Bishop said Thursday during a news conference at the Empire State Building.

Watson faces a tall order.

The Americans have lost seven of the last nine Ryder Cups and have not won away from home since 1993, when Watson was the captain at The Belfry in England. They are coming off a staggering loss this year at Medinah, where Europe strung together a remarkable rally from a 10-6 deficit going into the final day to win by one point.

Watson is the first repeat captain for the U.S. team since Jack Nicklaus in 1987, when the Ryder Cup was played on his home course of Muirfield Village in Ohio. Watson, one of the most respected figures in golf worldwide, becomes the seventh U.S. captain to get more than one shot.

His selection received an immediate endorsement from Tiger Woods, whom Watson has strongly criticized because of Woods' behavior.

"I'd like to congratulate Tom Watson on his selection as Ryder Cup captain," Woods said in a statement. "I think he's a really good choice. Tom knows what it takes to win, and that's our ultimate goal. I hope I have the privilege of joining him on the 2014 United States Team."

Watson had said Woods needs to "clean up his act" in the months after Woods' personal life fell apart after being caught in multiple extramarital affairs, though the Stanford alums have never been particularly close.

Watson went out of his way Thursday to praise Woods as "the best player maybe in the history of the game."

"My relationship with Tiger is fine," he said. "Whatever has been said before is water under the bridge. No issues."

Watson breaks the PGA of America's prototype in a big way. The eight-time major champion will be 65 when the 2014 Ryder Cup is played at Gleneagles in Scotland, making him the oldest captain in Ryder Cup history. Sam Snead was 57 when he was captain in 1969, and the oldest European captain was John Jacobs (56) in 1981.

Watson has not been back to the Ryder Cup since that '93 victory at The Belfry, though he sounded as if he couldn't wait to get started.

The PGA of America first contacted him more than a year ago about the job, Watson, with that familiar gap-tooth grin, replied: "Boy, I've been waiting for this call for a long time."

The matches will be played in Scotland, contributing to Watson's selection. As much as he is beloved around the world for his timeless game, epic duels with Nicklaus and graciousness in any outcome, the Scots consider him one of their own. Watson won his first major at Carnoustie in 1975 when he quickly understood how to play links golf. He won five British Open titles, the most of any American, with four of those in Scotland.

He nearly made it six claret jugs three years ago, when at 59, he came within an 8-foot par putt on the last hole from winning at Turnberry. Watson missed the putt, and then lost to Stewart Cink in a playoff.

The ovation he heard that week in Turnberry might be different at Gleneagles.

"They're going to be cheering against me," he said during a brief appearance on the "Today" show to announce his captaincy.

The PGA of America broke from its model of taking former major champions in their late 40s who still play the PGA Tour and are in touch with the players. Watson last played a full schedule in 1998, though the PGA of America had to wonder if perhaps the young captains were too close to the players.

As for the pressure of bringing back the Ryder Cup?

"This responsibility is a challenge," Watson said. "But I've been there before, and I love it."

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AP Golf Writer Doug Ferguson contributed to this report.

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World’s Population Living Longer, New Report Suggests

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a new report, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases more associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are dramatic: infant mortality has declined by more than half between 1990 and 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

But while developing countries made big strides – the average age of death in Brazil and Paraguay, for example, jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 28 in 1970 – the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries between 1990 and 2010. The two years of life they gained was less than in Cyprus, where women gained 2.3 years of life and Canada, where women gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organizationfinanced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women in this country formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said.

The World Health Organization issued a statement Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differ substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others are similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries – representing about 15 percent of the world’s population – produce quality cause-of-death data.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which measured disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published Thursday in the Lancet, a British health publication.

The one exception to the trend was sub-Saharan Africa, where infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternal causes of death still account for about 70 percent of all illness. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death there rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared to a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The change means that people are living longer, an outcome that public health experts praised. But it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing noncommunicable diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization in Geneva. “It’s not something that medical services can address as easily.”

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Deposit Insurance Bill Dies in the Senate

WASHINGTON — A federal program giving unlimited insurance guarantees to some no-interest bank accounts, enacted at the height of the financial crisis, will die out at the end of the year after the defeat Thursday of a Senate plan to extend it.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, led efforts to add two more years to the life of the Transaction Account Guarantee program, but Republican opponents used a procedural vote on the bill’s budgetary impact to effectively kill it.

Noninterest-bearing transaction accounts are used by businesses, local governments, hospitals and farmers who need a safe place to keep money on a short-term basis for such recurring expenses as payrolls.

Critics of open-ended government backing of the program said the accounts had also become a haven for the wealthy and a deterrent to people investing in more risky job-creating enterprises.

With the measure’s demise, federally backed insurance for so-called TAG accounts will revert to the $250,000 level that applies to most other bank accounts. The increased insurance protection was put in place in October 2008 as the financial crisis raised fears of a run on banks. It was revised and renewed in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul act.

At the end of September, about $1.5 trillion was guaranteed in transaction accounts at American banks and thrifts, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

The two-year extension was supported by smaller community banks that argued that the financial recovery was still fragile and that the shrinking of federal protections would result in depositors moving their money to big banks that are less vulnerable to future financial downturns.

The extension was opposed by credit unions seeking the same advantages as banks, and by conservative groups who associated the TAG program with the federal bailouts of 2008 and 2009 and said the program was no longer needed.

“We are not in a financial crisis anymore,” said Senator Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania. “I don’t understand how you can justify it now.” Republicans were also upset that Senator Reid used tactics to keep them from amending the bill.

In July, Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, said that “our judgment so far has been it’s not necessary to extend it” when asked about the program at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, The White House, in a statement issued Tuesday, said it supported the bill but was re-evaluating “the use of this emergency measure created during extraordinary times and a responsible approach to winding down the program.”

The bill failed after Republicans, led by Senator Toomey, said it did not meet a requirement that legislation not add to the federal deficit. The vote to waive that requirement was 50-42, well short of the 60 needed. Opponents said the TAG program had cost the F.D.I.C. almost $2.5 billion, although supporters argued that those losses were covered by insurance premiums that banks paid the F.D.I.C.

The Independent Community Bankers of America had warned that failure to extend the TAG program would destabilize smaller community banks and lead to a concentration of funds in a small number of large institutions.

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Lawmaker: NFL players 'trying to back out' on HGH

WASHINGTON (AP) — A congressman accused the NFL Players Association of "trying to back out" of an agreement to start testing for human growth hormone in pro football.

Speaking at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing about the science behind the testing, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the panel's ranking Democrat, noted Wednesday that nearly two full NFL seasons have passed since the league and the players' union signed a labor deal in August 2011 that set the stage for adding HGH to the sport's drug program.

The NFLPA won't concede the validity of a test that's used by Olympic sports and Major League Baseball, and the sides haven't been able to agree on a scientist to help resolve that impasse. HGH is a banned substance that is hard to detect and used by athletes for what are believed to be a variety of benefits, whether real or only perceived — such as increasing speed or improving vision.

"They say they need more time ... before doing what they agreed to do. To me, it seems obvious the Players Association is simply running out the clock," Cummings said in his opening statement. "Although they agreed to HGH testing, they are now trying to back out of the contract."

Cummings and committee chairman Darrell Issa, a California Republican, both said additional hearings are expected.

"It is our hope (to) move these parties closer together," Issa said.

Issa also said there could be a connection between head injuries in football and the use of HGH, "based in part on the strength of the players hitting each other."

The committee did not ask anyone from the league or union to testify Wednesday. Witnesses included Pro Football Hall of Fame member Dick Butkus, U.S. Anti-Doping Agency Chief Science Officer Larry Bowers, and National Institutes of Health Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak.

Bowers told the committee "there is a broad consensus among scientific experts who regularly work in the growth hormone field" that the test is reliable and valid, and that "the chances of an athlete who has not used synthetic growth hormone testing positive are comparable to the chance of that same athlete being struck by lightning during his or her lifetime."

He closed by saying: "I would like to point out that the only people who are still questioning the methodology and validity of the ... test are lawyers, not scientists."

Tabak said many studies vouch for the reliability of HGH testing, even though the naturally occurring hormone and the artificial form are tough to tell apart.

He also pointed out the "serious risks" to athletes who give themselves HGH.

Even once scientific issues are resolved, there will be other matters the league and union need to figure out, including who administers the test and what the appeals process will be. The latter could be of particular import in the aftermath of the decision in the New Orleans Saints' bounty case Tuesday, when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's suspensions of four players were tossed aside by former Commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

The collective bargaining agreement that ended the NFL lockout 16 months ago included a provision for HGH testing — but only once the NFLPA approved the process.

"First, I applaud the NFL and players for taking a bold and decisive position on HGH in their 10-year agreement. Now let's get on with it," Butkus told the committee. "The HGH testing process is proven to be reliable. It's time to send a clear message that performance-enhancing drugs have no place in sports, especially the NFL."

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Connect with Howard Fendrich on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HowardFendrich

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

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The New Old Age: The Gift of Reading

This is the year of the tablet, David Pogue of The Times has told us, and that may be good news for seniors who open holiday wrappings to find one tucked inside. They see better with tablets’ adjustable type size, new research shows. Reading becomes easier again.

This may seem obvious — find me someone over 40 who doesn’t see better when fonts are larger — but it’s the business of science to test our assumptions.

Dr. Daniel Roth, an eye specialist and clinical associate professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., offered new evidence of tablets’ potential benefits last month at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

His findings, based on tests conducted with 66 adults age 50 and over: older people read faster (a mean reading speed of 128 words per minute) when using an iPad, compared to a newspaper with the same 10-point font size (114 words per minute).

When the font was increased to 18 points — easy to do on an iPad — reading speed increased to 137 words per minute.

“If you read more slowly, it’s tedious,” Dr. Roth said, explaining why reading speed is important. “If you can read more fluidly, it’s more comfortable.”

What makes the real difference, Dr. Roth theorizes, is tablets’ illuminated screen, which heightens contrast between words and the background on which they sit.

Contrast sensitivity — the visual ability to differentiate between foreground and background information — becomes poorer as we age, as does the ability to discriminate fine visual detail, notes Dr. Kevin Paterson, a psychologist at the University of Leicester, who recently published a separate study on why older people struggle to read fine print.

“There are several explanations for the loss of sensitivity to fine detail that occurs with older age,” Dr. Paterson explained in an e-mail. “This may be due to greater opacity of the fluid in the eye, which will scatter incoming light and reduce the quality of the projection of light onto the retina. It’s also hypothesized that changes in neural transmission affect the processing of fine visual detail.”

Combine these changes with a greater prevalence of eye conditions like macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy in older adults, and you get millions of people who cannot easily do what they have done all their lives — read and stay connected to the world of ideas, imagination and human experience.

“The No. 1 complaint I get from older patients is that they love to read but can’t, and this really bothers them,” Dr. Roth said. The main option has been magnifying glasses, which many people find cumbersome and inconvenient.

Some words of caution are in order. First, Dr. Roth’s study has not been published yet; it was presented as a poster at the scientific meeting and publicized by the academy, but it has not yet gone through comprehensive, rigorous peer review.

Second, Dr. Roth’s study was completed before the newest wave of tablets from Microsoft, Google, Samsung and others became available. The doctor made no attempt to compare different products, with one exception. In the second part of his study, he compared results for the iPad with those for a Kindle. But it was not an apples to apples comparison, because the Kindle did not have a back-lit screen.

This section of his study involved 100 adults age 50 and older who read materials in a book, on an iPad and on the Kindle. Book readers recorded a mean reading speed of 187 words per minute when the font size was set at 12; Kindle readers clocked in at 196 words per minute and iPad readers at 224 words per minute at the same type size. Reading speed improved even more drastically for a subset of adults with the poorest vision.

Again, Apple’s product came out on top, but that should not be taken as evidence that it is superior to other tablets with back-lit screens and adjustable font sizes. Both the eye academy and Dr. Roth assert that they have no financial relationship with Apple. My attempts to get in touch with the company were not successful.

A final cautionary note should be sounded. Some older adults find digital technology baffling and simply do not feel comfortable using it. For them, a tablet may sit on a shelf and get little if any use.

Others, however, find the technology fascinating. If you want to see an example that went viral on YouTube, watch this video from 2010 of Virginia Campbell, then 99 years old, and today still going strong at the Mary’s Woods Retirement Community in Lake Oswego, Ore.

Ms. Campbell’s glaucoma made it difficult for her to read, and for her the iPad was a blessing, as she wrote in this tribute quoted in an article in The Oregonian newspaper:

To this technology-ninny it’s clear
In my compromised 100th year,
That to read and to write
Are again within sight
Of this Apple iPad pioneer

Caregivers might be delighted — as Ms. Campbell’s daughter was — by older relatives’ response to this new technology, a potential source of entertainment and engagement for those who can negotiate its demands. Or, they might find that old habits die hard and that their relatives continue to prefer a book or newspaper they can hold in their hands to one that appears on a screen.

Which reading enhancement products have you used, and what experiences have you had?

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DealBook: Live Blog: DealBook's Post-Election Conference

The fiscal cliff in the United States, the European debt crisis and the slowdown in China’s economy have all weighed on deal-making. The 2012 election results were supposed to provide some clarity to our fiscal future, but the outcome of the much-debated tax increases and budget cuts remains uncertain. Our inaugural conference, “DealBook: Opportunities for Tomorrow,” will explore the challenges and the possibilities in this environment.

Writers and editors at The New York Times will interview leaders and chief executives from Wall Street to Silicon Valley in a day-long conference at the Times Center in New York. Whether you’re attending in person or watching our video feed above, you can read up-to-minute analysis from our live blog of the day’s events and take part in the conversation on Twitter with the hash tag #DBconf.

The official conference web site includes biographies of the speakers and an agenda for the day’s events.

For the best viewing experience, readers who want to watch the embedded video below should turn off auto-refresh.

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Afghan Army Still Needs Support, Pentagon Says

WASHINGTON — As President Obama considers how quickly to withdraw the remaining 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan and turn over the war to Afghan security forces, a bleak new Pentagon report has found that only one of the Afghan National Army’s 23 brigades is able to operate independently without air or other military support from the United States and NATO partners.

The report, released Monday, also found that violence in Afghanistan is higher than it was before the surge of American forces into the country two years ago, although it is down from a high in the summer of 2010.

The assessment found that the Taliban remain resilient, that widespread corruption continues to weaken the central Afghan government and that Pakistan persists in providing critical support to the insurgency. Insider attacks by Afghan security forces on their NATO coalition partners, while still small, are up significantly: there have been 37 so far in 2012, compared with 2 in 2007.

As bright spots the report identified the continued transition by Afghan security forces into taking the lead on most routine patrols throughout the country and a decline in violence in populated areas like Kabul, the Afghan capital, and Kandahar, the largest city in the south.

The assessment, “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,” is required twice a year by Congress and covers the six-month period from April 1 through the end of September. Although the problems in the report have been familiar for years to national security officials in Washington, the report’s publication comes at an important juncture in the war.

American officials say that Gen. John R. Allen, the senior American commander in Afghanistan, wants to keep a large majority of the 68,000 troops in Afghanistan through the fighting season next fall so that Afghan forces have as much support as possible as they move out on their own by 2014. But military officials anticipate that the White House may push for a more rapid withdrawal to cut losses in an increasingly unpopular war.

More than 2,000 American service members have died in the war, which has cost the United States more than $500 billion since 2001. More than 1,200 American service members have died in Afghanistan from the beginning of 2010 to the present, which is roughly the period of the surge.

Obama administration officials have said that progress in the war in large part depends on whether the Taliban could rebuild after the hammering it took during the surge, when American forces, with 33,000 additional troops, aggressively pursued insurgents and drove them from critical territory in the south.

But the report was blunt in its assessment of the Taliban’s current strength. “The Taliban-led insurgency remains adaptive and determined, and retains the capability to emplace substantial numbers of I.E.D.s and to conduct isolated high-profile attacks,” the report said, using the term for homemade bombs. “The insurgency also retains a significant regenerative capacity.”

The report said that although the insurgents had less capability to directly attack American and Afghan forces, they had increasingly resorted to “assassinations, kidnappings, intimidation tactics, encouraging insider attacks and strategic messaging campaigns.”

A defense official who briefed reporters at the Pentagon sought to offer a more positive picture of the Afghan security forces’ abilities than the report would suggest. Acknowledging that the progress of the security forces had been “incremental,” the official said that many of the forces patrol and carry out some operations independently, without help from NATO. “They often don’t rely on any assistance from us at all,” said the official, who declined to be named under ground rules imposed by the Pentagon.

But the official said there were nonetheless broad problems with the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police, which together number 350,000 personnel. The security forces still depend over all on American air power, communications, intelligence gathering, logistics and leadership. That is true especially at the level of a brigade, which typically is composed of 3, 000 to 5,000 troops.

The official acknowledged that it would be a “challenge” to have the security forces ready to defend their own country by the end of 2014, when most American troops are to be out of Afghanistan. The White House is debating how many American forces should be left in the country after 2014 and it has opened negotiations with the Afghans on what their mission should be.

The defense official said that the rise in violence in Afghanistan — measured by what the report termed “enemy initiated attacks” — was a result of Afghan security forces pushing into Taliban-dominated areas, forcing the Taliban to fight back. The official cited three volatile districts in Kandahar Province — Maiwand, Panjwai and Zhari — as highly contested, violent areas.

Although the report did not provide month-by-month specific numbers of enemy-initiated attacks, it plotted them on a bar graph that showed, for example, that in July 2012 there were slightly more than 3,000 enemy-initiated attacks. In July 2009, before the surge began, the graph showed some 2,000 enemy-initiated attacks.

The official said it was a sign of progress that the report found that enemy-initiated attacks had declined in the city of Kandahar by 62 percent from a year ago.

The report found many problems with the Afghan government that American security officials have been aware of for years. The government, the report said, suffers from “widespread corruption, limited human capacity, lack of access to rural areas due to a lack of security, a lack of coordination between the central government and the Afghan provinces and districts, and an uneven distribution of power among the judicial, legislative and executive branches.”

One area of improvement, the report said, was the American relationship with Pakistan, which has been acrimonious in recent years. The report noted that the Pakistanis had agreed to reopen their country to trucks transporting matériel for the war in Afghanistan. However, the report said that “tensions remain” over insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan and cross-border attacks.

The report had been due to be released in early November, before the presidential election, but was delayed. The Pentagon did not give a reason for the delay.

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting.

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Tagliabue overturns Goodell on Saints suspensions

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — In a sharp rebuke to his successor's handling of the NFL's bounty investigation, former Commissioner Paul Tagliabue overturned the suspensions of four current and former New Orleans Saints players in a case that has preoccupied the league for almost a year.

Tagliabue, who was appointed by Commissioner Roger Goodell to handle the appeals, still found that three of the players engaged in conduct detrimental to the league. He said they participated in a performance pool that rewarded key plays — including hard tackles — that could merit fines. But he stressed that the team's coaches were very much involved.

"My affirmation of Commissioner Goodell's findings could certainly justify the issuance of fines. However, this entire case has been contaminated by the coaches and others in the Saints' organization," the ruling said.

Tagliabue oversaw a second round of player appeals to the league in connection with the cash-for-hits program run by former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams from 2009-2011. The players initially opposed his appointment.

Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma had been given a full-season suspension, while defensive end Will Smith, Cleveland linebacker Scott Fujita and free agent defensive lineman Anthony Hargrove each received shorter suspensions.

Tagliabue cleared Fujita of conduct detrimental to the league.

Saints quarterback Drew Brees offered his thoughts on Twitter: "Congratulations to our players for having the suspensions vacated. Unfortunately, there are some things that can never be taken back."

None of the players sat out any games because of suspensions. They have been allowed to play while appeals are pending, though Fujita is on injured reserve and Hargrove is not with a team.

Shortly before the regular season, the initial suspensions were thrown out by an appeals panel created by the league's collective bargaining agreement. Goodell then reissued them, with some changes, and now those have been dismissed.

Now, with the player suspensions overturned, the end could be near for a nearly 10-month dispute over how the NFL handled an investigation that covered three seasons and gathered about 50,000 pages of documents.

"We respect Mr. Tagliabue's decision, which underscores the due process afforded players in NFL disciplinary matters," the NFL said in a statement.

"The decisions have made clear that the Saints operated a bounty program in violation of league rules for three years, that the program endangered player safety, and that the commissioner has the authority under the (NFL's collective bargaining agreement) to impose discipline for those actions as conduct detrimental to the league. Strong action was taken in this matter to protect player safety and ensure that bounties would be eliminated from football."

Meanwhile, the players have challenged the NFL's handling of the entire process in federal court, but U.S District Judge Ginger Berrigan had been waiting for the latest round of appeals to play out before deciding whether to get involved.

NFL investigators found that Vilma and Smith were ring leaders of a cash-for-hits program that rewarded injurious tackles labeled as "cart-offs" and "knockouts." The NFL also concluded that Hargrove lied to NFL investigators to help cover up the program.

Goodell also suspended Williams indefinitely, while banning Saints head coach Sean Payton for a full season.

Tagliabue's ruling comes after a new round of hearings that for the first time allowed Vilma's attorneys and the NFL Players Association, which represents the other three players, to cross-examine key NFL witnesses. Those witnesses included Williams and former Saints assistant Mike Cerullo, who was fired after the 2009 season and whose email to the league, accusing the Saints of being "a dirty organization," jump-started the probe.

"We believe that when a fair due process takes place, a fair outcome is the result," the players' union said in a statement. "We are pleased that Paul Tagliabue, as the appointed hearings officer, agreed with the NFL Players Association that previously issued discipline was inappropriate in the matter of the alleged New Orleans Saints bounty program.

"Vacating all discipline affirms the players' unwavering position that all allegations the League made about their alleged 'intent-to-injure' were utterly and completely false.

"We are happy for our members."

A statement released on Vilma's behalf said the linebacker is "relieved and gratified that Jonathan no longer needs to worry about facing an unjustified suspension.

"On the other hand, Commissioner Tagliabue's rationalization of Commissioner Goodell's actions does nothing to rectify the harm done by the baseless allegations lodged against Jonathan. Jonathan has a right and every intention to pursue proving what really occurred and we look forward to returning to a public forum where the true facts can see the light of day."

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Global Update: Hand-Held Device Locates Hot Spots of Lead Contamination

Using a hand-held scanner to map hot spots where the soil is full of lead could protect children in mining towns against brain damage, scientists at Columbia University concluded in a new study.

Touched to the ground, the device, an X-ray fluorescence scanner, can measure the soil’s lead content in less than a minute, said Alexander van Geen, a geochemist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and an author of the study, which is in the current issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. The “XRF guns,” which are often used by scrap-metal sorters, cost between $15,000 and $40,000.

His team tested the scanners in Cerro de Pasco, Peru, a town in the high Andes with mines dating back 1,400 years. Samples as close as 100 yards apart showed widely variable lead levels, so it is possible to find and mark off the areas most dangerous to young children, who get fine lead dust on their hands while playing and then put their fingers in their mouths.

“People assume the contamination is everywhere, and it’s not,” Dr. van Geen said. “It could be in one backyard and not in another.” Or, he said, in an untested playground, schoolyard, or any place where children gather.

The technology could be useful anywhere families live close to mines or smelters, which is common in Latin America and Africa, he said. Lead is a byproduct not just of lead mines, but of mining for gold, silver, copper and other metals.

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Economic Scene: Behind Tax Loopholes, Some Worthy Goals

If there is one idea that everybody seems to agree on while peering over the fiscal cliff, it is that we should close the loopholes that riddle the tax code. It is offered as a painless way to raise money, like fixing a leak or ending some unfair privilege.

But there is a problem with this consensus. Many of the things the government promotes with loopholes are truly valuable to lots of Americans. Tax credits and deductions may be murky and convoluted, and perhaps are not the best way to achieve government objectives. But that doesn’t mean they serve no purpose at all.

Consider education. The federal government has helped Americans pay for college since World War II. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty featured the Higher Education Act, which included grants and loans for low-income families. Jimmy Carter’s Middle Income Student Assistance Act vastly increased federal aid by granting access to the middle class.

Right after winning re-election to a second term, Bill Clinton set out to surpass these efforts and provide access to at least two years of higher education to all Americans. Rather than offering federal spending as the Democrats who preceded him did, President Clinton mainly offered tax breaks for higher education: $40 billion worth of them over five years, tucked into the 1997 Taxpayer Relief Act.

It was a strategy for the times. Three years earlier, Republicans had taken control of both chambers of Congress for the first time since the 1950s. “Republicans would vote for any tax reduction that came along without questioning it much,” said Michael Graetz, an expert on taxation at Columbia Law School who worked in the administration of George H. W. Bush. “Democrats found that the only way they could get the kind of spending they wanted was in the form of tax benefits.”

Through the hall of mirrors that is government budgeting, President Clinton’s tax breaks for higher education accomplished two conflicting goals. They amounted to the biggest expansion in federal money for higher education since the G.I. bill. At the same time, they made the government look smaller.

Today, the political tide has turned decidedly against tax breaks. Last week, House Speaker John A. Boehner may have put President Clinton’s higher-education benefits on the chopping block. In exchange for less spending on federal entitlements, he said Republicans could drop their vow of “no new revenues” and let the government raise $800 billion over 10 years by cutting or paring tax breaks.

Though the offer to raise money by closing loopholes has a bipartisan pedigree — based on a plan proposed last year by the Democrat Erskine Bowles and the Republican Alan Simpson, the chairmen of President Obama’s deficit commission — it relies on rhetorical sleight of hand. If tax breaks are equivalent to government spending, eliminating them is equivalent to spending cuts. Mr. Boehner’s offer to do away with tax breaks in exchange for cutting entitlements raises no new revenue. It amounts to cutting spending twice.

Loopholes make up a huge chunk of our government. Known as tax expenditures in the arcane lexicon of budget experts, they have grown a lot since the early 1990s — a consequence of our increasing demand for government programs coupled with our resistance to raising taxes. Last year they added up to more than 7 percent of the nation’s economic output, a sizable figure considering that all federal taxes took some 15 percent of the economy.

Many breaks do the same job as taxing and spending. One of them, for instance, allows employers to pay for employees’ health insurance tax-free. As an alternative, the government might collect the revenue and offer health plans to workers. Rather than offer a mortgage interest deduction, the government could offer grants to help Americans buy homes. A subsidy for the poor could replace the earned-income tax credit.

According to Eric Toder and Donald Marron of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, including all the spendinglike exclusions as regular items in the budget increases the size of the federal government by about 4 percent of our gross domestic product. That’s about $600 billion in “hidden” spending through the tax code last year alone.

We may want to trim or eliminate certain tax breaks for specific reasons — because they are poorly targeted or inefficient. The exclusion for employer-provided health insurance — which will cost the government $1 trillion over the next five years, according to the Tax Policy Center — is pretty inefficient as a tool to deliver health care.

It leaves out not only the unemployed, but also 42 percent of working Americans, whose companies don’t provide coverage despite the subsidy. By encouraging unlimited spending on health by high earners, the tax break contributes to making the United States one of the most costly health care systems in the world.

Most federal tax breaks benefit primarily higher-income Americans, who face higher tax rates and therefore get a bigger break from deductions. Rather than strengthen middle-class homeownership, the deduction for mortgage interest mainly helps the affluent buy bigger homes than they otherwise would, leading to higher home prices. Critics argue that the tax break for charitable donations is often merely a subsidy for church donations and college football stadiums.

And some breaks aimed carefully to help low-income and middle-income Americans — like the earned-income tax credit — can pack some unhelpful incentives too. Even President Clinton’s tax breaks for higher education fell short of the goal. They eased the financial burden of college, for sure, but participation was much smaller than the administration had anticipated. A report by the Congressional Research Service found that the program did very little to increase enrollment.

Just because some tax breaks are inefficient and misdirected does not necessarily mean that the goals they serve are unworthy, however. It only means that there may be more effective ways to achieve government objectives.

For instance, President Obama’s fiscal stimulus made some of President Clinton’s higher-education tax credits refundable, so they could help lower-income Americans who owed no income tax and could not benefit from a tax credit.

Ending the tax break for health insurance provided by employers could make sense, for example, when subsidies are available for everybody to be insured. Tax breaks for individual retirement account contributions could be rolled back in exchange for more generous Social Security benefits for the poor.

It makes sense to have an open debate about the purpose, efficacy and cost of our many tax loopholes. But that is not the same thing as simply looking for loopholes to close. It is a debate about the purpose of government and how best to achieve its goals.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @portereduardo

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