Police: Chiefs' Belcher accused in murder-suicide

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher fatally shot his girlfriend Saturday, then drove to Arrowhead Stadium and committed suicide in front of his coach and general manager.

Authorities did not release a possible motive for the murder-suicide, though police said that Belcher and his girlfriend had been arguing recently. The two of them have an infant child.

Belcher thanked general manager Scott Pioli and coach Romeo Crennel before shooting himself in the parking lot of the team's practice facility, police spokesman Darin Snapp said. Police had locked it down by mid-morning and reporters were confined to the street just outside the gates.

The Chiefs were scheduled to play the Carolina Panthers on Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium. The Panthers were advised by the league to travel to Kansas City as planned, though no official announcement on the game itself had been made.

Belcher was a 25-year-old native of West Babylon, N.Y., on Long Island, who played college ball at Maine. He signed with the Chiefs an undrafted free agent, made the team and stayed with it for four years, moving into the starting lineup. He'd played in all 11 games this season.

"The entire Chiefs family is deeply saddened by today's events, and our collective hearts are heavy with sympathy, thoughts and prayers for the families and friends affected by this unthinkable tragedy," Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt said in a statement.

"We sincerely appreciate the expressions of sympathy and support we have received from so many in the Kansas City and NFL communities, and ask for continued prayers for the loved ones of those impacted," Hunt said. "We will continue to fully cooperate with the authorities and work to ensure that the appropriate counseling resources are available to all members of the organization."

Authorities reported receiving a call Saturday morning from a woman who said her daughter had been shot multiple times at a residence about five miles away from the Arrowhead complex. The call actually came from Belcher's mother, who referred to the victim as her daughter, leading to some initial confusion, police said.

Police then received a phone call from the Chiefs' training facility.

"The description matched the suspect description from that other address. We kind of knew what we were dealing with," Snapp said. The player was "holding a gun to his head" as he stood in front of the front doors of the practice facility.

"And there were Pioli and Crennel and another coach or employee was standing outside and appeared to be talking to him. It appeared they were talking to the suspect," Snapp said. "The suspect began to walk in the opposite direction of the coaches and the officers and that's when they heard the gunshot. It appears he took his own life."

The coaches told police they never felt in any danger, Snapp said.

"They said the player was actually thanking them for everything they'd done for him," he said. "They were just talking to him and he was thanking them and everything. That's when he walked away and shot himself."

Snapp described the girlfriend as in her early 20s and that she and the player had a child together. He said Belcher's mother told police they had recently been arguing.

Belcher is the latest among several players and NFL retirees to die from self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the past couple of years. The death of the beloved star Junior Seau, who shot himself in the chest in at his California home in May, sent shockwaves around the league.

Kansas City Mayor Sly James said that he spoke to Pioli after the incident, and while he refused to discuss the GM's emotional state, the mayor said Pioli was "extremely concerned that fans of this team are not disappointed and not left in the cold."

"I think they think there's an obligation to the people of this city, the fans of the team and the fans of the other team to play the game," James said.

The season has been a massive disappointment for the Chiefs, who were expected to contend for the AFC West title. They're just 1-10 and mired in an eight-game losing streak marked by injuries, poor play and fan upheaval, with calls for Pioli and Crennel to be fired.

The Twitter account for a fan group known as "Save Our Chiefs" recently surpassed 80,000 followers, about 17,000 more than the announced crowd at a recent game.

"The Oakland Raiders are empathizing with the Chiefs organization," the Chiefs' AFC West rivals said in a statement. "Our hearts are wounded by such an unimaginable tragedy in our NFL family."

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Associated Press Writer Heather Hollingsworth contributed to this report.

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Saints' Vilma, Smith attend Williams hearing

WASHINGTON (AP) — Saints defensive end Will Smith says he's glad he got a chance to hear former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams testify at an appeals hearing in the bounties case.

Smith and New Orleans linebacker Jonathan Vilma attended Friday's session, where Williams was cross-examined by the players' lawyers for about four hours.

Smith described the hearing as "peaceful" and "not awkward."

Smith and Vilma — along with two former Saints, free-agent defensive lineman Anthony Hargrove and Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita — were suspended by the NFL for the Saints' cash-for-hits program that the league says Williams ran from 2009 to 2011.

Smith, suspended four games, and Vilma, suspended for the entire current season, have been playing while their appeals are pending.

Smith declined to discuss any details of Friday's hearing.

"We got to hear what Gregg had to say," Smith said. "We wanted to make sure we were there just to hear him out.".

Right from the start, the NFL said Williams was in charge of a pay-for-pain bounty system with the New Orleans Saints.

The former defensive coordinator — who told the league about others' involvement — was being cross-examined Friday by lawyers for players appealing their suspensions in the case.

"We know what we did and know what we didn't do," Smith said.

The hearing is part of the latest round of player appeals overseen by former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. Former Saints assistant coach Mike Cerullo faced questions Thursday, when lawyers for the league and for players spent more than nine hours in a Washington office building.

Tagliabue and various lawyers declined to comment Thursday or Friday.

Vilma and Smith traveled to Washington after playing in New Orleans' 23-13 loss at Atlanta on Thursday night.

Neither player was required to attend Friday, but Smith said this week that "part of the things that we wanted all along was to face our accusers."

The NFL has described Vilma and Smith as ringleaders of a performance pool designed to knock targeted opponents out of games. The league has sworn statements from Williams and Cerullo saying Vilma offered $10,000 to anyone who knocked quarterback Brett Favre out of the NFC championship game at the end of the 2009 season.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell issued the initial suspensions, which also included a full-season ban for Saints head coach Sean Payton.

Lawsuits brought by Vilma and the NFL Players Association to challenge Goodell's handling of the case, including his decision in October to appoint Tagliabue as the arbitrator for the appeals, are pending in federal court in New Orleans.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Ginger Berrigan gave the parties until Monday to answer questions about whether the NFL's collective bargaining agreement prevents a commissioner from handing out discipline for legal contact, and whether the CBA's passages about detrimental conduct are "ambiguous, hence unenforceable."

In March, the NFL announced that its investigation showed the Saints put together a bounty pool of up to $50,000 to reward game-ending injuries inflicted on opponents. "Knockouts" were worth $1,500 and "cart-offs" $1,000 — with payments doubled or tripled for the playoffs, the league said.

According to the league, the pay-for-pain program was administered by Williams, with Payton's knowledge. At the time, Williams apologized for his role, saying: "It was a terrible mistake, and we knew it was wrong while we were doing it."

Later that month, Payton became the first head coach suspended by the league for any reason — banned for all of this season without pay — and Williams was suspended indefinitely.

Williams was known for his aggressive, physical defenses as a coordinator for Tennessee, Washington, Jacksonville and New Orleans, and during his time as head coach of Buffalo. In January, he was hired by St. Louis to lead their defense.

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

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Hacking Report Criticizes Murdoch Newspaper and British Press Standards

LONDON — The leader of a major inquiry into the standards of British newspapers triggered by the phone hacking scandal offered an excoriating critique of the press as a whole on Thursday, saying it displayed “significant and reckless disregard for accuracy,” and urged the press to form an independent regulator to be underpinned by law.

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson on Thursday with his inquiry on press standards.

The report singled out Rupert Murdoch’s defunct tabloid The News of the World for sharp criticism.

“Too many stories in too many newspapers were the subject of complaints from too many people with too little in the way of titles taking responsibility, or considering the consequences for the individuals involved,” the head of the inquiry, Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, said in a 46-page summary of the findings in his long-awaited, 1,987-page report published in four volumes.

“The ball moves back into the politicians’ court,” Sir Brian said, referring to what form new and tighter regulations should take. “They must now decide who guards the guardians.”

The report was published after some 337 witnesses testified in person in 9 months of hearings that sought to unravel the close ties between politicians, the press and the police, reaching into what were depicted as an opaque web of links and cross-links within the British elite as well as a catalog of murky and sometimes unlawful practices within the newspaper industry.

“This inquiry has been the most concentrated look at the press this country has ever seen,” Sir Brian said after the report was made public.

But in a first reaction, Prime Minister David Cameron resisted the report’s recommendation that a new form of press regulation should be underpinned by laws, telling lawmakers that they “should be wary” of “crossing the Rubicon” by enacting legislation with the potential to limit free speech and free expression.

Mr. Cameron’s remarks drew immediate criticism from the leader of the Labour opposition, Ed Miliband, who said Sir Brian’s proposals should be accepted in their entirety.

Mr. Cameron ordered the Leveson Inquiry in July, 2011, as the phone hacking scandal at The News of the World blossomed into broad public revulsion with reports that the newspaper had ordered the interception of voice mail messages left on the cellphone of Milly Dowler, a British teenager who was abducted in 2002 and later found murdered. Sir Brian said there had been a “failure of management and compliance” at the 168-year-old News of the World, which Mr. Murdoch closed in July, 2011, accusing it of a “general lack of respect for individual privacy and dignity.”

“It was said that The News of the World had lost its way in relation to phone hacking,” the summary said. “Its casual attitude to privacy and the lip service it paid to consent demonstrated a far more general loss of direction.”

Speaking after the report was published, Sir Brian said that while the British press held a “privileged and powerful place in our society,” its “responsibilities have simply been ignored.”

“A free press in a democracy holds power to account. But, with a few honorable exceptions, the U.K. press has not performed that vital role in the case of its own power.”

“The press needs to establish a new regulatory body which is truly independent of industry leaders and of government and politicians,” he said. “Guaranteed independence, long-term stability and genuine benefits for the industry cannot be realized without legislation,” he said, adding: “This is not and cannot reasonably or fairly be characterized as statutory regulation of the press.”

In the body of the exhaustive report, reprising at length the testimony of many of the witnesses who spoke at the hearings, the document discusses press culture and ethics; explores the press’s attitude toward the subjects of its stories; and discusses the cozy relationship between the press and the police, and the press and politicians.

John F. Burns, Sandy Lark Turner and Sandy Macaskill contributed reporting.

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Tagliabue holds Saints bounties hearing in DC

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and lawyers for the league and the players' union have arrived for a hearing in the Saints bounties case.

Tagliabue is overseeing the latest round of player appeals in Washington.

Former Saints assistant Mike Cerullo, a key witness in the NFL's investigation, is scheduled to speak Thursday. Former New Orleans defensive coordinator Gregg Williams is to participate in Friday's session.

Two Saints players who were suspended, linebacker Jonathan Vilma and defensive end Will Smith, had said they plan to attend when Williams is there.

Vilma's lawyer attended Thursday's hearing at an office building.

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Cost of Brand-Name Prescription Medicines Soaring

The price of brand-name prescription medicines is rising far faster than the inflation rate, while the price of generic drugs has plummeted, creating the largest gap so far between the two, according to a report published Wednesday by the pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts.

The report tracked an index of commonly used drugs and found that the price of brand-name medicines increased more than 13 percent from September 2011 to this September, which it said was more than six times the overall price inflation of consumer goods. Generic drug prices dipped by nearly 22 percent.

The drop in the price of generics “represents low-hanging fruit for the country to save money on health care,” said Dr. Steve Miller, the chief medical officer of Express Scripts, which manages the drug benefits for employers and insurers and also runs a mail-order pharmacy.

The report was based on a random sample of six million Express Scripts members with prescription drug coverage.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the trade group representing brand-name manufacturers, criticized the report, saying it was skewed by a handful of high-priced specialty drugs that are used by a small number of patients and overlooked the crucial role of major drug makers.

“Without the development of new medicines by innovator companies, there would be neither the new treatments essential to progress against diseases nor generic copies,” Josephine Martin, executive vice president of the group, said in a statement.

The report cited the growth of specialty drugs, which treat diseases like cancer and multiple sclerosis, as a major reason for the increase in spending on branded drugs. Spending on specialty medicines increased nearly 23 percent during the first three quarters of 2012, compared with the same period in 2011. All but one of the new medicines approved in the third quarter of this year were specialty drugs, the report found, and many of them were approved to treat advanced cancers only when other drugs had failed.

Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, a professor of pharmaceutical economics at the University of Minnesota, said the potential benefits of many new drugs did not always match the lofty price tags. “Increasingly it’s going to be difficult for drug-benefit programs to make decisions about coverage and payment and which drugs to include,” said Mr. Schondelmeyer, who conducts a similar price report for AARP. He also helps manage the drug benefit program for the University of Minnesota.

“We’re going to be faced with the issue that any drug at any price will not be sustainable.”

Spending on traditional medicines — which treat common ailments like high cholesterol and blood pressure — actually declined by 0.6 percent during the period, the report found. That decline was mainly because of the patent expiration of several blockbuster drugs, like Lipitor and Plavix, which opened the market for generic competitors. But even as the entry of generic alternatives pushed down spending, drug companies continued to raise prices on their branded products, in part to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of an ever-shrinking portfolio, Dr. Miller said.

Drug makers are also being pushed by companies like Express Scripts and health insurers, which are increasingly looking for ways to cut costs, said C. Anthony Butler, a pharmaceuticals analyst at Barclays. “I think they’re pricing where they can but what they keep telling me is they’re under significant pressure” to keep prices low, he said.

Express Scripts earns higher profits from greater use of generic medicines than brand name drugs sold through their mail-order pharmacy, Mr. Butler said. “There’s no question that they would love for everybody to be on a generic,” he said.

Dr. Miller acknowledged that was true but said that ultimately, everyone wins. “When we save people money, that’s when we make money,” he said. “We don’t shy away from that.”

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U.S. Growth Revised Up, but Year-End Slowdown Is Feared

Even as the government said that the United States economy grew faster than first estimated in the third quarter, economists warned that the rate of expansion could slow sharply before the end of the year as worries mount about the fiscal impasse in Washington.

Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press

An employee on the assembly line this month at Generac Power Systems in Whitewater, Wis., a maker of residential generators.

The Commerce Department said Thursday that gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 2.7 percent in the three months ended Sept. 30, well above the 2 percent estimate it initially made in late October. But the revision was driven by increased inventory accumulation and a jump in federal spending — factors unlikely to be repeated in the current fourth quarter, economists said.

What’s more, the revised figures show spending by businesses on equipment and software declined by 2.7 percent in the third quarter, the first decrease since the end of the recession in mid-2009 and a sign of just how cautious many companies have become amid the uncertainty in Washington and slowing growth in Asia and Europe.

“It’s a nice headline number,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight, of the 2.7 percent rate, “but it exaggerates the underlying momentum in the economy. Sustainable improvements in growth are not driven by inventories.”

The two biggest growth areas in the third quarter — inventory growth and federal spending — “are likely to be minuses in the fourth quarter,” he said. Mr. Gault expects the annual rate to sink to 1 percent this quarter, hurt by a fiscal stalemate in Washington as well as the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy.

To be sure, there were signs of optimism in Thursday’s data. Residential fixed investment rose 14.2 percent, a sign that the housing recovery is gaining steam. Indeed, a separate report Thursday from the National Association of Realtors showed pending home sales rose to a two-and-a-half-year high.

And not all economists took a pessimistic view. “The economy certainly hasn’t taken off, but it’s nowhere close to a stall,” said David Kelly, chief global strategist for JPMorgan Funds. “The economy is still underperforming its full potential, but once we get past the ‘fiscal cliff’ uncertainty, we could see stronger growth next year.”

The new estimate of growth represents a substantial increase in the level of the second quarter, when the economy grew at a rate of just 1.3 percent. It also marks the fastest rate of expansion since the fourth quarter of 2011, when the economy grew at a 4.1 percent annual pace.

This was the second of the government’s three estimates of quarterly growth. The final figure is scheduled for Dec. 20.

“Over all, it was a disappointing report,” said Michelle Meyer, senior United States economist with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.  The accumulation of inventories went from subtracting 0.1 percentage points from the initial estimate to adding 0.8 percentage points, she said.

    “A lot of that inventory build was unintentional, which suggests a downside risk for the fourth quarter,” she said.  “Businesses had expected stronger sales and consumer spending and were caught off guard."

    Ms. Meyer said she expected the economy to grow by 1 percent in the fourth quarter and 1 percent in the first quarter of 2013, well below the level needed to bring down the unemployment rate, which stood at 7.9 percent in October.

    On Thursday, the government also reported that first-time unemployment claims dropped by 23,000 to 393,000 last week. But Ms. Meyer cautioned that these figures were much more volatile than usual because of the Thanksgiving holiday as well as Hurricane Sandy.

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Israel Plays Down Significance of Palestinians’ U.N. Bid

JERUSALEM — With Western support swelling in favor of a Palestinian bid for enhanced status at the United Nations, Israel engaged in damage control on Wednesday, a day before the vote.

Israeli officials began to play down the significance of a draft resolution that calls for the upgrading of the Palestinian status from observer to nonmember observer state — a move also opposed by the United States. Israel has also toned down its threats of countermeasures after the vote in the General Assembly, which is virtually certain to pass, aware that a harsh reaction would only isolate it further.

“The United Nations General Assembly will pass a one-sided anti-Israel resolution that should come as a surprise to nobody, and certainly not to anyone in Israel,” said Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesman. “We always said that the reality was that the Palestinians have an automatic majority in the General Assembly.”

While Mr. Regev acknowledged “a certain amount of disappointment” over the decision of some friendly European countries to support the Palestinians or abstain from the vote, he said: “Ultimately what we will see at the United Nations is diplomatic theater. It will in no way affect the realities on the ground.”

Israel’s response, he said, will be “proportionate” to how the Palestinians act after the vote.

At first, Israel had hoped to deter the Palestinians from pursuing a vote. Officials warned that such a step could result in Israeli responses as drastic as the cancellation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords or the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.

When that effort failed, Israel focused on ensuring what it called a “moral majority” in the vote, meaning that even if a majority of nations voted in favor of the Palestinian bid, the major world powers and most European countries would not.

But France announced on Tuesday that it would support the Palestinian bid. Other European nations, including Switzerland, Denmark and Norway, have followed.

Britain, which had previously lobbied along with the United States to try to get the Palestinians at least to postpone their maneuver, said it would consider voting for the resolution pending certain amendments and public assurances, including a clear commitment from the Palestinians that they would return immediately to negotiations with Israel without preconditions and that they would not pursue Israel for war crimes in the International Criminal Court. Otherwise, Britain says, it will abstain.

Germany has said it will not vote for the resolution, but has not yet specified if it will vote against it.

Israelis and the Palestinians agree on one thing: support for the Palestinian bid grew as a result of the recent fighting in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the coastal enclave. The conflict elevated Hamas’s stature among Palestinians at the expense of that of Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate president of the Palestinian Authority, which holds sway in parts of the West Bank. “Before the military confrontation there were several European countries willing to oppose the resolution,” said Oded Eran, a former Israeli ambassador to the European Union. The new support, he said, is meant “to give Abbas a moral victory over Hamas in the contest between violence and diplomacy. i would not rush to conclude that it is an anti-Israeli stand.”

Husam Zumlot, a Palestinian official who has been active in lobbying in Europe, said more countries had decided “to support the diplomatic horizon and not the military-security approach that they see leads nowhere.”

Israel has argued that the Palestinian move is a unilateral action that violates peace accords and that a vote for the resolution — which, according to the draft, “reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to independence in their state of Palestine on the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967” — will make it harder to negotiate a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But looking at a resounding defeat in the General Assembly, Israeli representatives are increasingly describing the bid for enhanced status as meaningless.

“Other than symbolic value for the Palestinians,” said Yigal Palmor, the spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, “it may give them some procedural advantages, such as access within the United Nations system to some things, but that’s it. It does not change the status of the territory.”

Mr. Palmor added that there would be no automatic response from Israel. “We are going to see where the Palestinians take this,” he said. “If they use it to continue confronting Israel in other U.N. bodies, there will be a firm response. If not, then there won’t.”

In a statement on Wednesday, Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, urged Israeli restraint.

“Whatever happens at the General Assembly,” he said, “we call on Israel to avoid reacting in a way that damages the peace process or Israel’s international standing. We would not support a strong reaction which undermined the peace process by sidelining President Abbas or risked the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.” Mr. Palmor said Israel would adhere to its agreements with the Palestinians and would “work by the book.” That, he said, means that Israel will take only those countermeasures, possibly in the financial realm, that will not violate any signed accords.

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Bonds, Clemens, Sosa on Hall ballot for first time

NEW YORK (AP) — The most polarizing Hall of Fame debate since Pete Rose will now be decided by the baseball shrine's voters: Do Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa belong in Cooperstown despite drug allegations that tainted their huge numbers?

In a monthlong election sure to become a referendum on the Steroids Era, the Hall ballot was released Wednesday, and Bonds, Clemens and Sosa are on it for the first time.

Bonds is the all-time home run champion with 762 and won a record seven MVP awards. Clemens took home a record seven Cy Young trophies and is ninth with 354 victories. Sosa ranks eighth on the homer chart with 609.

Yet for all their HRs, RBIs and Ws, the shadow of PEDs looms large.

"You could see for years that this particular ballot was going to be controversial and divisive to an unprecedented extent," Larry Stone of The Seattle Times wrote in an email. "My hope is that some clarity begins to emerge over the Hall of Fame status of those linked to performance-enhancing drugs. But I doubt it."

More than 600 longtime members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America will vote on the 37-player ballot. Candidates require 75 percent for induction, and the results will be announced Jan. 9.

Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza and Curt Schilling also are among the 24 first-time eligibles. Jack Morris, Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines are the top holdover candidates.

If recent history is any indication, the odds are solidly stacked against Bonds, Clemens and Sosa. Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro both posted Cooperstown-caliber stats, too, but drug clouds doomed them in Hall voting.

Some who favor Bonds and Clemens claim the bulk of their accomplishments came before baseball got wrapped up in drug scandals. They add that PED use was so prevalent in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s that it's unfair to exclude anyone because so many who-did-and-who-didn't questions remain.

Many fans on the other side say drug cheats — suspected or otherwise — should never be afforded the game's highest individual honor.

Either way, this election is baseball's newest hot button, generating the most fervent Hall arguments since Rose. The discussion about Rose was moot, however — the game's career hits leader agreed to a lifetime ban in 1989 after an investigation concluded he bet on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds, and that barred him from the BBWAA ballot.

The BBWAA election rules allow voters to pick up to 10 candidates. As for criteria, this is the only instruction: "Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played."

That leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

"Everyone has their own way of dealing with the issue, and in the absence of hard and fast rules, there will continue to be a wide diversity of opinions," Stone said.

Clemens was acquitted this summer in federal court on six counts that he lied and obstructed Congress when he denied using performance-enhancing drugs.

Bonds was found guilty in 2011 by a federal court jury on one count of obstruction of justice, ruling he gave an evasive answer in 2003 to a grand jury looking into the distribution of illegal steroids. Bonds is appealing the verdict.

McGwire is 10th on the career home run list with 583, but has never received even 24 percent in his six Hall tries. Big Mac has admitted to using steroids and human growth hormone.

Palmeiro is among only four players with 500 homers and 3,000 hits, yet has gotten a high of just 12.6 percent in his two years on the ballot. He drew a 10-day suspension in 2005 after a positive test for PEDs, and said the result was due to a vitamin vial given to him by teammate Miguel Tejada.

Biggio topped the 3,000-hit mark — which always has been considered an automatic credential for Cooperstown — and spent his entire career with the Houston Astros.

"Hopefully, the writers feel strongly that they liked what they saw, and we'll see what happens," Biggio said last week.

Schilling was 216-146 and won three World Series championships, including his "bloody sock" performance for the Boston Red Sox in 2004.

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F.D.A. May Tap Experts on Energy Drinks

The Food and Drug Administration said in a letter released on Tuesday that it was likely to seek advice from outside experts to help determine whether energy drinks posed particular risks to teenagers or people with underlying health problems.

The letter appears to signal a change in the agency’s approach to the drinks, which contain high levels of caffeine.

Previously, F.D.A. officials have said that they were investigating possible risks posed by popular products like 5-Hour Energy, Monster Energy and Red Bull. But an agency spokeswoman, Shelly Burgess, said the new letter was the first time that the F.D.A. had said it might turn to outside experts.

The F.D.A. letter, which was released Tuesday by Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, follows disclosures that the agency received reports of 18 deaths and over 150 injuries that mentioned the possible involvement of energy drinks.

The filing of such reports with the F.D.A. does not prove that a product was responsible for a death or an injury. Energy drink makers have said their products are safe and were not responsible for the health problems.

The officials said a review of the drinks might be “greatly enhanced by also engaging specialized expertise” from an outside group, like the Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences.

Industry analysts said the letter indicated that the F.D.A. did not plan any immediate actions on energy drinks, an interpretation that set off a rally on Tuesday in the stock of Monster Beverage, the producer of Monster Energy. Company shares closed at $51.97, up over 13 percent. Any regulatory outcome is likely to be “benign,” Judy Hong, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, said in a note to investors, according to Bloomberg News.

In Canada, however, the use of an outside panel led to limits on caffeine levels in energy drinks.

In their letter, F.D.A. officials indicated that an outside review would focus on the possible risks posed by high levels of caffeine, a stimulant, to certain groups. They reiterated that daily consumption of significant levels of caffeine, which is found in products like coffee and tea, is safe.

“Areas of particular focus would include such matters as the vulnerability of certain populations to stimulants and the incidence and consequence of excessive consumption” of energy drinks, especially by young people, F.D.A. officials wrote.

In Canada, an expert panel made several recommendations, including arguing that such beverages be labeled “stimulant drug-containing drinks.”

Health Canada, that country’s counterpart to the F.D.A., did not adopt many of the group’s recommendations, but it has put in place new rules limiting caffeine levels in cans of energy drinks to 180 milligrams.

Some larger-size cans of energy drinks sold in the United States, like the 24-ounce can of Monster Energy and the 20-ounce can of Red Bull, have caffeine levels above that limit.

An eight-ounce cup of coffee, depending on how it is made, can contain from 100 to 150 milligrams of caffeine.

In the new letter, F.D.A. officials also said that studies that had examined other ingredients, like taurine, that are often used in energy drinks had determined those substances were safe. The agency also said that a survey suggested that energy drinks constitute a small portion of the caffeine consumed in this country, even by teenagers.

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State of the Art: Tablets Are Hot Holiday Gifts, but Which One to Buy? - Review

From left: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times, Jim Wilson/The New York Times, Everett Kennedy Brown/European Pressphoto Agency

From left, the Kindle PaperWhite, the iPad Mini and the  Nexus 7.

The other day, I joined NPR for a segment about high-tech holiday gifts. I was ready for the calls from listeners. I’d brushed up on cameras, phones, laptops, music players and game consoles. I was prepared to talk about limiting screen time, digital addiction, cyberbullying. I knew where to get the best deals.

But all six callers had the same question: “What tablet should I get?”

There were variations, of course. “— for my kid?” “— for my elderly father?” “— just for reading?” “— for not much money?” But in general, it was clear: the gadget most likely to be found under the tree this year is thin, battery-powered and flat.

No wonder people are confused. The marketplace has gone tablet-crazy. There’s practically a different model for every man, woman and child.

There’s the venerable iPad, of course. And now the iPad Mini. There are new tablets from Google, also in small and large. There are Samsung’s Note tablets in a variety of sizes, with styluses. There are $200 touch-screen color e-book/video players. There’s a new crop of black-and-white e-book readers. There are stunningly cheap plastic models you’ve never heard of. There are tablets for children (and I don’t mean baby aspirin).

So how are you, the confused consumer, supposed to keep tabs on all these tablets? By taking this handy tour through the jungle of tablets 2012. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.

DIRT-CHEAP KNOCKOFFS You can find no-name tablets for $100 or even less. You can also find mystery-brand Chinese tablets in toy stores, marketed to children.

Don’t buy them. They don’t have the apps, the features, the polish or the pleasure of the nicer ones. The junk drawer is already calling their names.

E-BOOK READERS The smallest, lightest, least expensive, easiest to read tablets are the black-and-white e-book readers. If the goal is simply reading — and not, say, watching movies or playing games — these babies are pure joy.

Don’t bother with the lesser brands; if you’re going to get locked into one company’s proprietary, copy-protected book format, you’ll reduce your chances of library obsolescence if you stick with Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Each company offers a whole bunch of models. But on the latest models, the page background lights up softly, so that you can read in the dark without a flashlight. (These black-and-white models also look fantastic in direct sun — now you get the best of both lighting conditions.)

The one you want is the Kindle PaperWhite ($120), whose illumination is more even and pleasant than the equivalent Nook’s.

Of course, plain, no-touch, no-light Kindles, with ads on the screen saver, start as low as $70. But the light and the touch-screen are really worth having.

COLOR E-READERS/PLAYERS Amazon and B.& N. each sell a seven-inch tablet that, functionally, lands somewhere between an e-book reader and an iPad. They have beautiful, high-definition touch screens. They play music, TV shows, movies and e-books. They can surf the Web. They even run a few handpicked Android apps like Netflix and Angry Birds.

They’re nowhere near as capable as full-blown, computerlike tablets of the iPad/Nexus ilk, mainly because there are so few apps, accessories and add-ons. But they cost $200; you’re paying only a fraction of the price.

The big two here are, once again, Amazon and B.& N. If you’re not already locked in to one of those companies’ books and videos because you owned a previous model, the Nook HD is the one to get. It’s much smaller and lighter than the Kindle Fire HD. It has a much sharper screen. And the $200 price includes a wall charger (the Fire doesn’t) and no ads (the Fire does). Or get the classy Google Nexus 7, also $200. Although its book/music/movie catalog is far smaller, its Android app catalog is far larger (but see “iPad versus Android,” below).

BIG COLOR READERS/PLAYERS This year, both Amazon and B.& N. have introduced jumbo-screen (9-inch) versions of their HD tablets. Here again, B.& N. offers a better value than its 9-inch Kindle Fire HD rival. For $270, the Nook HD+ offers a sharper screen, lighter weight, no ads, a memory-card slot and a wall charger.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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Protesters Gather Again in Cairo Streets to Denounce Morsi

CAIRO — Thousands of people flowed into the streets of Cairo, the Egyptian capital, Tuesday afternoon for a day of protest against President Mohamed Morsi’s attempt to assert broad new powers for the duration of the country’s political transition, dismissing his efforts just the night before to reaffirm his deference to Egyptian law and courts.

By early Tuesday afternoon in Cairo, a dense crowd of hundreds had gathered outside the headquarters of a trade group for lawyers, and thousands more had filed in around a small tent city in Tahrir Square. In an echo of the chants against Hosni Mubarak, Egyptian’s ousted president, almost two years ago, they shouted, “Leave, leave!” and “Bring down the regime!” They also denounced the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group allied with Mr. Morsi.

A few blocks away, in a square near the American Embassy and the Interior Ministry headquarters, groups of young men resumed a running battle that began nine days ago, throwing rocks and tear gas canisters at riot police officers. Although those clashes grew out of anger over the deaths of dozens of protesters in similar clashes one year ago, many of the combatants have happily adopted the banner of protest against Mr. Morsi as well.

Egyptian television had captured the growing polarization of the country on Monday in split-screen coverage of two simultaneous funerals, each for a teenage boy killed in clashes set off by disputes over the new president’s powers. Thousands of supporters of Mr. Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood marched through the streets of the Nile Delta city of Damanhour to bury a 15-year-old killed outside a Brotherhood office during an attack by protesters. And in Tahrir Square here in Cairo, thousands gathered to bury a 16-year-old killed in clashes with riot police officers and to chant slogans blaming Mr. Morsi for his death. “Morsi killed him,” the boy’s father said in a video statement circulated over the Internet.

“Now blood has been spilled by political factions, so this is not going to go away,” said Rabab el-Mahdi, a professor at the American University in Cairo and a left-leaning activist, adding that these were the first deaths rival factions had blamed on each other and not on the security forces of the Mubarak government since the uprising began last year. Still larger crowds were expected in the evening, as marchers from around the city headed for the square. Many schools and other businesses had closed in anticipation of bedlam, and on Monday, the Brotherhood called off a rival demonstration in support of the president, saying it wanted to avoid violence.

Egypt’s Supreme Judicial Council met again on Tuesday to consider its response to the president, and the leader of Al Azhar, a center of Sunni Muslim learning that is regarded as the pre-eminent moral authority here, met with groups of political leaders in an effort to resolve the battle over the president’s decree and the deadlock in the constitutional assembly, which is trying to draw up a new constitution.

But even as Mr. Morsi met with top judges Monday night in an effort to resolve the crisis, a coalition of opposition leaders held a news conference to declare that preserving the role of the courts was only the first step in a broader campaign against what Abdel Haleem Qandeil, a liberal intellectual, called “the miserable failure of the rule of the Muslim Brothers.” Mr. Morsi “unilaterally broke the contract with the people,” he declared. “We have to be ready to stand up to this group, protest to protest, square to square, and to confront the bullying.”

Mr. Morsi’s effort to remove the last check on his power over the political transition had brought the country’s fractious opposition groups together for the first time in a united front against the Brotherhood. But the show of unity papered over deep divisions between groups and even within them, said Ms. Mahdi of the American University.

“This is not a united front, and I am inside it,” she said. “Every single political group in the country is now divided over this — is this decree revolutionary justice or building a new dictatorship? Should we align ourselves with folool” — the colloquial term for the remnants of the old political elite — “or should we be revolutionary purists? Is it a conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the pro-Mubarak judiciary, or is this the beginning of a fascist regime in the making?”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

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Eagles lose receiver DeSean Jackson to injury

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The Philadelphia Eagles will place wide receiver DeSean Jackson on injured reserve after he sustained multiple rib fractures in Monday night's loss to Carolina.

Jackson leads the team with 45 catches and 700 yards receiving, but has only two touchdowns. Coach Andy Reid says the injury could take six weeks to heal.

Reid says running back LeSean McCoy remains in phase one of his concussion recovery and Michael Vick is in the fourth of five stages. Vick has missed the last two games and McCoy didn't play against the Panthers.

Defensive tackle Fletcher Cox injured his tailbone and offensive lineman King Dunlap sprained his knee. Neither will practice Wednesday.

The Eagles (3-8) have lost seven straight games. They'll visit Dallas (5-6) next Sunday night.

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

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Books: Woe Is Syphilis, and Other Afflictions of Famous Writers

The old Irishman was a swollen, wheezing mess, blood pressure wildly out of control, kidneys failing, heart fibrillating. “What we have here,” said his new Spanish doctor, “is an antique cardiorenal sclerotic of advanced years.”

In fact, what the doctor had there was William Butler Yeats: the poet had a long list of chronic medical problems and experienced one of his regular cardiac crises while wintering in Spain. He still had three poetically productive years ahead of him before he died of heart failure in 1939, at age 73.

What makes antique case histories like Yeats’s so compelling to research, so interesting to read? Admittedly, they have educational value — medicine moves forward by looking back — but their major attraction is undoubtedly the operatic vigor of their emotional punch. As we contemplate the poor health of historic notables, we can sigh gustily at the immense suffering our ancestors considered routine, wince at the lunatic treatments they so innocently underwent, and marvel over and over again that the body, the brain and the mind can take such divergent paths.

These pleasures are present in abundance in the newest addition to the genre of medical biography, “Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough.” Dr. John J. Ross, a Harvard physician, writes that he stumbled into the field by accident while trying to enliven a lecture on syphilis with a few literary references. The discovery that Shakespeare was apparently obsessed with syphilis (and suspiciously familiar with its symptoms) hooked Dr. Ross.

The resulting collection of 10 medico-literary biographical sketches ranges from the tubercular Brontës, whose every moist cough is familiar to their fans, to figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose medical stories are considerably less familiar.

Dr. Ross’s discussion of Shakespeare is unique in the collection for its paucity of relevant data: so few details are known of the playwright’s life, let alone his health, that all commentary is necessarily supposition. Dr. Ross is not the first to note that references to syphilis are “more abundant, intrusive and clinically exact” in Shakespeare’s works than those of his contemporaries. This observation, along with the apparent deterioration of Shakespeare’s handwriting in his last years, leads to the hypothesis that Shakespeare had syphilis repeatedly as a young man, and wound up suffering more from treatment than disease.

The Elizabethans dosed syphilis with a combination of hot baths (treating the disease by raising body temperature endured into the 20th century), cathartics and lavish quantities of mercury. The drooling that accompanies mercury poisoning was considered a sign of excellent therapeutic progress, Dr. Ross writes: “Savvy physicians adjusted the mercury dose to produce three pints of saliva a day for two weeks.”

And so, when Shakespeare signed his will a month before he died with a shaky hand, was his tremor not possibly a sign of residual nerve damage from the mercury doses of his sybaritic youth? No amount of scholarship is likely to confirm this theory, but details of the argument are gripping and instructive nonetheless.

The story of the blind poet John Milton runs for a while along similar lines. Much is known about the long deterioration of Milton’s vision and other particulars of his delicate health, but Dr. Ross observes that many of his problems seem to have cleared up once he actually became blind. Was he vigorously medicating himself with lead-based nostrums in hopes of forestalling what Dr. Ross argues was probably progressive retinal detachment, then recovering from lead poisoning once his vision was irretrievably gone? Another intriguing if unanswerable question.

Just as the competing injuries of disease and treatment battered the luminaries of English and American literature, so did pervasive mental illness.

Jonathan Swift was a classic obsessive-compulsive long before he succumbed to frontotemporal dementia (Pick’s disease). Poor Hawthorne, so forceful on the page, was in person a tortured shrinking violet, the embodiment of social phobia and depression. Emily Brontë’s behavior was strongly suggestive of Asperger syndrome; Herman Melville was clearly bipolar; Ezra Pound was just nuts.

Yet they all wrote on, despite continual psychic and physical torments. Perhaps the thickest medical chart of all belongs to Jack London, who survived several dramatic episodes of scurvy while prospecting in the Klondike (he was treated with raw potatoes, a can of tomatoes and a single lemon), then accumulated a long list of other medical problems before killing himself (inadvertently, Dr. Ross argues) with an overdose of morphine from his personal and very capacious medicine chest.

Dr. Ross has not written a perfect book. The fictionalized scenes he creates between some of his subjects and their medical providers should all have been excised by a kindly editorial hand, which might also have addressed more than a few grammatical errors. Frequent leaps from descriptive to didactic mode as Dr. Ross updates the reader on various medical conditions can be jarring, like PowerPoint slides suddenly deployed in a poetry reading. True literary scholars might dismiss the book as lit crit lite, a hodgepodge of known facts culled from the usual secondary sources.

But all these caveats fade into the background when Dr. Ross hits his narrative stride, as he does in chapter after chapter. Then the stories of the wounded storytellers unfold smoothly on the page, as mesmerizing as any they themselves might have told, those squinting, wheezing, arthritic, infected, demented, defective yet superlative examples of the human condition.

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News Analysis: St. Jude Medical Suffers for Redacting a Product Name

Peter Muhly for The New York Times

Dr. Ernest Lau holds a Durata lead from a St. Jude Medical Fortify ICD, an implanted heart defibrillator.

IS covering a product’s name in a public document a sign that a company has something to hide? And how should doctors, patients and investors react if the product at issue is one on which peoples’ lives and a company’s fortunes depend?

Such questions now loom over St. Jude Medical after the disclosure last week that its executives had blacked out the name of a heart device component when they released a critical federal report involving the product. The value of St. Jude has since plummeted more than $1 billion, or 12 percent. But the company’s actions may have a more lasting impact on its reputation and the health of patients, some experts say.

Last week’s incident was the latest development in a controversy involving the component, an electrical wire that connects an implanted defibrillator to a patient’s heart. St. Jude officials say the wire, which is known as the Durata, is safe. But uncertainty about the company’s statements is growing, underscored by its handling of the report, which involved a Food and Drug Administration inspection of a plant that makes the Durata.

St. Jude released that report in October as part of a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The F.D.A. provides device makers with the reports in an unaltered form, and they may contain criticisms of a company’s procedures.

But the version of the report that St. Jude filed with the S.E.C. left some doctors and analysts uncertain about which company product or products were at issue for a simple reason — St. Jude had redacted, or blocked out, all 20 references to the Durata in it.

Company executives said they had done so based on their “good faith” interpretation of how the F.D.A. would act if it publicly released the report under the Freedom of Information Act. But both an F.D.A spokeswoman and a lawyer who specializes in medical devices took exception with that view, saying that names of approved products typically do not qualify as the type of confidential business information that the F.D.A. would redact.

Among other things, F.D.A. inspectors found significant flaws in the company’s testing and oversight of the Durata. It was those revelations and the implications that the problems could lead to further F.D.A. action against St. Jude that led to the sharp fall last week in its stock price.

In 2005, Guidant, a device maker that no longer exists, also found itself under scrutiny. Back then, its executives decided not to tell doctors that one of its defibrillators could short-circuit when a patient needed an electrical jolt to save a life. The expert who brought the Guidant problem to light, Dr. Robert Hauser, a heart specialist in Minnesota, has also raised concerns about the St. Jude wires, adding that he believes that its executives have been less than forthright.

“Patients and physicians would appreciate more information,” Dr. Hauser said.

In an earlier interview, St. Jude’s chief executive, Daniel J. Starks, said the company had hidden nothing about the Durata or another heart wire named the Riata, which it stopped selling in 2010.

“We’ve been more transparent than others,” said Mr. Starks, referring to company competitors like Medtronic.

Still, some Wall Street analysts share Dr. Hauser’s view. And if one St. Jude executive can claim credit for shaping their opinion, it would be Mr. Starks.

Earlier this year, he sought, among other things, to have a medical journal retract an article written by Dr. Hauser that was critical of the Riata. The publication refused.

Now, after St. Jude’s latest misfire, Wall Street analysts, who usually agree more than disagree, are placing wildly differing bets on St. Jude, with some valuing it at $48 a share and others at $30. On Monday, St. Jude closed at $31.86 on the New York Stock Exchange.

One of those bearish analysts, Matthew Dodds of Citigroup, said he thought the Food and Drug Administration might act soon on Durata. “I believe that a lot of their actions have made the situation worse, ” he said of the company’s executives.

A St. Jude spokeswoman, Amy Jo Meyer, reiterated the company’s stance that it had interpreted agency rules in “good faith” when releasing the redacted report about the Durata. An F.D.A. spokeswoman, Mary Long, said the agency did not consider the names of approved products to be confidential. And a lawyer, William Vodra, said that while device makers try to make a confidentiality argument for product data they consider embarrassing, like injury reports, they rarely succeed.

“In my experience, the F.D.A. consistently rejects” such arguments, Mr. Vodra wrote in an e-mail.

For patients, the dilemma may become more excruciating. The company’s earlier heart wire, the Riata, has begun failing prematurely in some of the 128,000 patients worldwide who received it. And those patients and their doctors face a difficult decision: whether to leave it in place or have it surgically removed, a procedure that carries significant risks.

St. Jude executives say that the Durata, which uses a different type of insulation than the Riata, is not prone to such problems.

And with the Durata already implanted in 278,000 people, many heart specialists certainly hope they are right.

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Japan Expands Its Regional Military Role

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Coast guard officials from a dozen Asian and African nations, at right, joined a training cruise around Tokyo Bay aboard a Japanese Coast Guard cutter.

TOKYO — After years of watching its international influence eroded by a slow-motion economic decline, pacifist Japan is trying to raise its profile in a new way, offering military aid for the first time in decades and displaying its own armed forces in an effort to build regional alliances and shore up other countries’ defenses to counter a rising China.

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Visiting coast guard officers from other nations snapped photos of the engine room, above, the electronics-studded bridge and 20-millimeter cannon.

Already this year, Japan crossed a little-noted threshold by providing its first military aid abroad since the end of World War II, approving a $2 million package for its military engineers to train troops in Cambodia and East Timor in disaster-relief and skills like road building. Japanese warships have not only conducted joint exercises with a growing number of military forces in the Pacific and Asia, they have also begun making regular port visits to countries long fearful of a resurgence of Japan’s military.

And after stepping up civilian aid programs to train and equip the coast guards of other nations, Japanese defense officials and analysts say, Japan could soon reach another milestone: beginning sales in the region of military hardware like seaplanes, and perhaps eventually the stealthy diesel-powered submarines considered well suited to the shallow waters where China is making increasingly assertive territorial claims.

Taken together those steps, while modest, represent a significant shift for Japan, which had resisted repeated calls from the United States to become a true regional power for fear that would move it too far from its postwar pacifism. The country’s quiet resolve to edge past that reluctance and become more of a player comes as the United States and China are staking their own claims to power in Asia, and as jitters over China’s ambitions appear to be softening bitterness toward Japan among some Southeast Asian countries trampled last century in its quest for colonial domination.

The driver for Japan’s shifting national security strategy is its tense dispute with China over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that is feeding Japanese anxiety that their country’s relative decline — and the financial struggles of their country’s traditional protector, the United States — are leaving them increasingly vulnerable.

“During the cold war, all Japan had to do was follow the U.S.,” said Keiro Kitagami, a special adviser on security issues to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. “With China, it’s different. Japan has to take a stand on its own.”

Japan’s moves do not mean it might transform its military, which serves a purely defensive role, into an offensive force anytime soon. The public has resisted past efforts by some politicians to revamp Japan’s pacifist constitution, and the nation’s vast debt will limit how much military aid it can extend. But it is also clear that attitudes in Japan are evolving as China continues its double-digit annual growth in military spending and asserts that it should be in charge of the islands Japan claims as well as vast swaths of the South China Sea that various Southeast Asian nations say are in their control.

Japanese leaders have met the Chinese challenge over the islands known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China with an uncharacteristic willingness to push back, and polls show the public is increasingly in agreement. Both major political parties are also talking openly about instituting a more flexible reading of the constitution that would allow Japan to come to the defense of allies — shooting down any North Korean missile headed for the United States, for instance — blurring the line between an offensive and defensive force.

The country’s self-defense forces had already begun nosing over that line in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Japan backed up the United States-led campaigns by deploying naval tankers to refuel warships in the Indian Ocean.

Japanese officials say their strategy is not to begin a race for influence with China, but to build up ties with other nations that share worries about their imposing neighbor. They acknowledge that even building the capacity of other nation’s coast guards is a way of strengthening those countries’ ability to stand up to any Chinese threat.

“We want to build our own coalition of the willing in Asia to prevent China from just running over us,” said Yoshihide Soeya, director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Keio University in Tokyo.

Or, as the vice minister of defense, Akihisa Nagashima, said in an interview, “We cannot just allow Japan to go into quiet decline.”

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Online sales jump 24 percent early on Cyber Monday: IBM

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Online sales jumped during the first hours of Cyber Monday suggesting strong growth from earlier in the holiday shopping season continues, according to data from International Business Machines Corp.

Online sales were up 24.1 percent as of 12:00pm EST on Cyber Monday, compared to the same period a year earlier, said IBM, which tracks transaction data from 500 U.S. retail websites. In 2011, the early Cyber Monday year-over-year growth was 15 percent, IBM noted.

Strong online sales growth on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday sparked concern that shoppers may just be buying earlier, threatening revenue later in the season.

“So far that is not the case,” said Jay Henderson, Strategy Director, IBM Smarter Commerce. “Extending the shopping season has really just fueled additional online spending rather than cannibalizing days later in the season.”

(Reporting By Alistair Barr)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Longoria agrees to deal adding $100 million

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Tampa Bay Rays third baseman Evan Longoria has agreed to a new contract through 2022 that adds six guaranteed seasons and $100 million.

The agreement announced Monday with the three-time All-Star incorporates the remainder of the 27-year-old's existing contract, which called for him to earn $36.6 million over the next four seasons. The new deal includes a team option for 2023.

"We drafted Evan in 2006 with the belief that he and the organization would grow with each other and together accomplish great things," Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg said in a statement. "That is why the Rays and Evan signed a long-term contract in 2008, and it is why we are extending our commitments. Evan has clearly become a cornerstone player and a fixture in our organization. We are proud of what we have accomplished these past seven years, and I expect the best is yet to come."

Just six games into his major league career, Longoria agreed in April 2008 to a $17.5 million, six-year contract that included club options potentially making the deal worth $44 million over nine seasons.

"Evan has all of the attributes we seek in a player," Rays executive vice president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. "His determination and work ethic inspire others around him. He is devoted to his craft and strives to improve himself every year, and he defines success in terms of team performance and achievement. It's exciting to know that Evan will be manning third base for the Rays for many years to come."

Tampa Bay selected Longoria as the third overall pick in the 2006 amateur draft, making him the first player drafted under Sternberg and Friedman.

Longoria played in just 74 games in 2012 because of a partially torn left hamstring. He underwent a minor procedure on the hamstring Nov. 20 and is expected to be ready for spring training.

Tampa Bay was 41-44 during Longoria's absence, and 47-27 with him in the starting lineup.

The two-time AL Gold Glove winner and 2008 AL Rookie of the Year ranks second on the Rays career list with 130 home runs, third with 456 RBIs and fourth with 161 doubles. Longoria is one of 11 active players to average at least 25 homers and 90 RBIs during his first five seasons.

Longoria will donate more than $1 million during the contract to the Rays Baseball Foundation, the team's charitable foundation.

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Wealth Matters: Dealing With Doctors Who Accept Only Cash

James Edward Bates for The New York Times

Dr. Stanford Owen no longer accepts insurance. He charges patients like Monica Knight $38 a month.

A FEW weeks ago, my wife and I were at our wits’ end: our 4-month-old daughter wouldn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time at night. We had consulted books and seen our pediatrician, but nothing was working. So my wife called a pediatrician who specializes in babies who struggle with sleep problems.

The next day, he drove an hour from Brooklyn to our house. He then spent an hour and a half talking to us and examining our daughter in her nursery. He prescribed some medicine for her and suggested some changes to my wife’s diet. Within two days, our baby was sleeping through the night and we were all feeling better.

The only catch was this pediatrician did not accept insurance. He had taken our credit card information before his visit and given us a form to submit to our insurance company as he left, saying insurance usually paid a portion of his fee, which was $650.

A couple of weeks later, our insurance company said it wouldn’t pay anything. Here’s how the company figured it: First, it said a fair price for our doctor’s fee was $285, about 60 percent less, because that was the going rate for our town. Then, it said the lower fee was not enough to meet our out-of-network deductible.

While we were none too happy with the insurance company, we remained impressed by the doctor: he had made our baby better and was compensated for it, all the while avoiding the hassle of dealing with insurance.

Last year, I wrote about doctors who catered only to the richest of the rich and charged accordingly. But after my experience, I became interested in doctors for the average person who take only cash. What pushes a doctor to go this route, often called concierge medicine? And how hard is it to make a living?

As to why doctors decide to switch to a concierge practice, the answer is almost always frustration.

“About four years ago, one insurance company was driving me crazy saying I had to fax documents to show I had done a visit,” said Stanford Owen, an internal medical doctor in Gulfport, Miss. “At 2 a.m., I woke up and said, ‘This is it.’ ”

Dr. Owen stopped accepting all insurance and now charges his 1,000 patients $38 a month.

“When I decided to abandon insurance, I didn’t want to lose my patient base and make it unaffordable,” he said. “I have everything from waitresses and shrimpers to international businessmen. It’s a concierge model, but it’s also the personal doctor model.”

Dr. Owen, who once had three nurses and 10 examining rooms, said it was now just him and a receptionist. He has become obsessed with keeping overhead low, but he said that, for the first time since the 1990s, his income was going up.

At the other end of the spectrum is David Edelson, who runs a practice called HealthBridge in Great Neck, N.Y. In addition to five doctors, the practice has a full fitness center and provides the services of a personal trainer, nutritionist, acupuncturist, sleep expert and stress-management consultant.

“The current model for primary care is broken,” Dr. Edelson told me. “Either I can go down with the ship, sell my practice to a hospital or take my practice in the wrong direction. Or I can develop a better mousetrap, which is more time dealing with patients and their care.”

Dr. Edelson has reduced his own practice to 300 patients, from more than 3,000. Of those, 250 pay $1,800 a year for concierge services and 50 others receive scholarships. He estimated that from the combination of the membership fee for the extra services and what gets billed to insurance for typical care, he will make $600,000, and more of that will end up in his pocket.

“We’re bringing in the same fees but we’re reducing our overhead,” he said. Fewer patients means fewer medical assistants, receptionists and staff members to deal with insurance.

But of the five doctors in the practice, he is the only one to go fully concierge. Another, William Klein, is testing the model, with 15 percent of his patients in the concierge program. Dr. Klein said he was hedging his bets because he was not sure what the new federal health care law would mean for primary care physicians.

Weren’t some patients getting shortchanged by this hybrid model? He said he saw no difference in care.

“It’s like paying for first class and not coach,” Dr. Klein said. “Everyone is getting to the same destination, but some people have a better seat.”

This approach to medicine is not without risks for the doctors and downsides for patients.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 23, 2012

An earlier version of this column gave an incorrect middle initial for Mr. Harris. It is M., not V.

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Euro Finance Ministers Struggle to Reach Accord on Greece

BRUSSELS — Finance ministers from the euro area met on Monday for the third time in three weeks, seeking to bridge differences over bailouts for Greece that have bitterly divided creditor countries like Germany and the International Monetary Fund.

The haggling continues against the background of a financial catastrophe unfolding in Greece, where the economy has shrunk by about one-fifth in three years and unemployment is hovering at around 25 percent. The unrelenting gloom means suffering for the Greek public and also makes it increasingly improbable that the country can pay back its debts in full.

Ministers said ahead of the meeting that they had made strides in a teleconference on Saturday toward reaching a joint position. “All the parameters of the solution are on the table,” the French finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, said on arriving at the meeting.

But diplomats in Brussels said they expected the meeting to be long and stormy and run late into the night — as did a similar gathering last week — as the parties try to find alternative ways of giving Greece relief in light of opposition by major creditors like Germany and the Netherlands to forgiving some Greek debt.

To reach a deal, the I.M.F. may also have to compromise, loosening its budgetary expectations for Greece and accepting that the country will not be able to hit a target of reducing debt to 120 percent of gross domestic product by the end of the decade.

The seemingly endless round of meetings over Greece is a sign that after nearly three years of crises, the politicians are still trying to contain contagion in the euro zone, which began with a huge hole in Greek accounts, even as that country’s debt prospects continue to worsen.

For Greece, the immediate goal is unlocking a loan installment worth €31.5 billion, or $40.8 billion, from an international bailout program.

If ministers reach a deal, Greece is likely to get a larger amount of about €44 billion because two additional installments are due by the end of the year under the program.

In June, creditors froze aid from the current program, worth €130 billion, after determining that Greece was failing to meet the conditions of that bailout, its second.

“Greece has fully delivered its part of the agreement, so we expect our partners to deliver their part too,” Yannis Stournaras, the Greek finance minister, said Monday ahead of the meeting.

The complication that has led to further delays and acrimony among lenders — as well as to the flurry of meetings — are conflicting views about how quickly Greece can grow its economy, lure investors, pay down its towering debt and return to the markets to borrow money once aid programs expire later this decade.

Since June, the Greek economy has worsened and social problems in the country have become more acute as employment has climbed. Those factors have already led Greece’s lenders to agree that the government in Athens will need two years longer than previously agreed, or until 2016, to meet its budget targets.

But that concession will cost more money because of a range of factors including revenues from privatizations that will not be as large as expected. The cost could come to nearly €33 billion on top of existing bailouts to help Greece reach a primary budget surplus, which excludes debt repayments.

The prospect of paying more to Greece has perturbed a number of lenders, particularly Germany, where transferring more wealth to the poorer-performing economies of Southern Europe is politically toxic, particularly as Chancellor Angela Merkel gears up for a re-election fight next year.

Rather than being willing to write down their countries’ Greek holdings, ministers on Monday were instead discussing other options of making Greece’s debt more manageable — like lowering interest rates, lengthening the deadlines for debt repayments, allowing the country to buy back its bonds at a steep discount and asking national governments to return profits made on bonds held by the European Central Bank.

Many analysts regard those measures as necessary but insufficient to remedy Greece’s problems. They say that Germany and other reluctant creditors will have to take politically unpalatable losses, or haircuts, on their holdings of Greek debt to keep the country in the euro area, even if they are able to agree on other measures to reduce the size of the country’s deficit and reform the economy.

The result is a standoff, with Germany trying to keep the bill for Greece as low as possible at least until after the German elections in 2013.

Those concerns were on display over the weekend. Jörg Asmussen, a member of the E.C.B.’s Executive Board, told the German newspaper Bild that a write-down of Greek debt should not be part of the deal, echoing repeated statements from the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, who said it would be illegal.

Maria Fekter, the Austrian finance minister, seemed to agree, saying Monday, “That’s not on the agenda at the moment.”

“A debt cut for the public bodies, and in fact the taxpayers, was not wanted by any country,” she said.

On the other side is the I.M.F., which insists that fresh money, or even a write-down, will be needed to put Greece on a pathway to manageable debt by the end of the decade. By its own rules, the I.M.F. can lend money only if the debt is “sustainable” or can be paid back by a recipient country, like Greece.

On Monday, the Fund was pressing ministers to agree that Greece’s debt should immediately be cut by 20 percent of G.D.P. through methods like lowering interest rates and extending maturities on loans, and to pledge further reductions in future, with the aim of reaching sustainable levels.

Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the I.M.F., has insisted that Greece pare its debt to 120 percent of gross domestic product by 2020. But that target has steadily become considered unfeasible.

Greek debt is now estimated at 175 percent of G.D.P., and its economy could shrink again, pushing that figure to 190 percent next year, and even up to 200 percent by 2014, according to some E.U. officials.

That means the I.M.F. will almost certainly have to make concessions to help keep Greece afloat by loosening its debt target, perhaps to around 124 percent by the end of the decade.

Arriving at the meeting in Brussels on Monday, Ms. Lagarde pledged “to work towards a solution that is credible for Greece,” and added, “We are going to work very intensely on that.”

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Bangladesh Fire Kills More Than 100 and Injures Many

MUMBAI — More than 100 people died Saturday and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, in one of the worst industrial tragedies in that country.

It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it started about 7 p.m. on Saturday, a retired fire official said by telephone from Dhaka, the capital. At least 111 people were killed, and scores of workers were taken to hospitals for treatment of burns and smoke inhalation.

“The main difficulty was to put out the fire; the sufficient approach road was not there,” said the retired official, Salim Nawaj Bhuiyan, who now runs a fire safety company in Dhaka. “The fire service had to take great trouble to approach the factory.”

Bangladesh’s garment industry, the second-largest exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor fire safety record. Since 2006, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an antisweatshop advocacy group in Amsterdam. Experts say many of the fires could have been easily avoided if the factories had taken the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods and have too few fire escapes, and they widely flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, most of them women.

Activists say that global clothing brands like Tommy Hilfiger and the Gap and those sold by Walmart need to take responsibility for the working conditions in Bangladeshi factories that produce their clothes.

“These brands have known for years that many of the factories they choose to work with are death traps,” Ineke Zeldenrust, the international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, said in a statement. “Their failure to take action amounts to criminal negligence.”

The fire at the Tazreen factory in Savar, northwest of Dhaka, started in a warehouse on the ground floor that was used to store yarn, and quickly spread to the upper floors. The building was nine stories high, with the top three floors under construction, according to an garment industry official at the scene who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. Though most workers had left for the day when the fire started, the industry official said as many as 600 workers were still inside working overtime.

The factory, which opened in May 2010, employed about 1,500 workers and had sales of $35 million a year, according to a document on the company’s Web site. It made T-shirts, polo shirts and fleece jackets.

Most of the workers who died were on the first and second floors, fire officials said, and were killed because there were not enough exits. None of them opened to the outside.

“The factory had three staircases, and all of them were down through the ground floor,” said Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, the operations director for the Fire Department, according to The Associated Press. “So the workers could not come out when the fire engulfed the building.”

In a telephone interview later on Sunday, Major Mahbub said the fire could have been caused by an electrical fault or by a spark from a cigarette.

In a brief phone call, Delowar Hossain, the managing director of the Tuba Group, the parent company of Tarzeen Fashions, said he was too busy to comment. “Pray for me,” he said and then hung up.

Television news reports showed badly burned bodies lined up on the floor in what appeared to be a government building. The injured were being treated in hallways of local hospitals, according to the reports.

The industry official said that many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition and that it would take some time to identify them.

One survivor, Mohammad Raju, 22, who worked on the fifth floor, said he escaped by climbing out of a third-floor window onto the bamboo scaffolding that was being used by construction workers. He said he lost his mother, who also worked on the fifth floor, when they were making their way down.

“It was crowded on the stairs as all the workers were trying to come out from the factory,” Mr. Raju said. “There was no power supply; it was dark, and I lost my mother in dark. I tried to search for her for 10 to 15 minutes but did not find her.”

A document posted on Tarzeen Fashions’ Web site indicated that an “ethical sourcing” official for Walmart had flagged “violations and/or conditions which were deemed to be high risk” at the factory in May 2011, though it did not specify the nature of the infractions. The notice said that the factory had been given an “orange” grade and that any factories given three such assessments in two years from their last audit would not receive any Walmart orders for a year.

It was unclear whether Walmart had suspended the company or was still buying clothes from it. The Web sites of Tuba Group lists the retailer and others like Carrefour, a French retail chain, as customers. A spokesman for Walmart, Kevin Gardner, said the company was “so far unable to confirm that Tazreen is supplier to Walmart nor if the document referenced in the article is in fact from Walmart.”

Bangladesh exports about $18 billion worth of garments a year. Employees in the country’s factories are among the lowest-paid in the world, with entry-level workers making a government-mandated minimum wage of about $37 a month.

Tensions have been running high between workers, who have been demanding an increase in minimum wages, and the factory owners and government. A union organizer, Aminul Islam, who campaigned for better working conditions and higher wages, was found tortured and killed outside Dhaka this year.

Fire safety remains weak across much of South Asia. In September, nearly 300 workers were killed in a fire at a textile factory in Karachi, Pakistan, just weeks before it passed an inspection that covered several issues, including health and safety.

Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Stephanie Clifford from New York.

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