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At the time, McNeil told the FDA that it was paying contractors to act as secret shoppers and buy up samples from between 4,500-5,000 stores, mostly gas stations and convenience stores. The company told the FDA about the plan, but the FDA says it was told that McNeil was only sampling from stores, and using secret shoppers to avoid confusing the public.

Americans get the most medical radiation in the world, even more than folks in other rich countries. The U.S. accounts for half of the most advanced procedures that use radiation, and the average American’s dose has grown sixfold over the last couple of decades.

Danny Barak, 48, jumped from his office on the 17th floor of one of Tel Aviv’s most prominent office towers on Friday, the spokeswoman said.

Barak, who is survived by his wife and four children, did not leave a note explaining his suicide.

“It is a mystery,” the spokeswoman said.

Barak, who founded Leader Capital Markets, was CEO since 2001. He held 15.5 percent of the company, which is a subsidiary of Leader Holdings & Investments.

“Danny’s professional abilities contributed to the establishment of Leader Capital Markets as a leading entity in Israel’s capital market,” Leader Capital Markets Chairman Yair Fudim said in a statement.

“Danny Barak’s death is a heavy loss not just to our group but to the entire Israeli capital market.”

Following the recent sale of Leader Holdings to businessman Dan David, Barak was due to step down as CEO in 2011 though he had been offered to stay on as chairman of Leader Capital Markets, the spokeswoman said.

The investment bank is engaged in underwriting, corporate research, securities trading for institutional investors and asset management.

Fannie and Freddie, now 80 percent owned by U.S. taxpayers, already have drawn $145 billion from an unlimited line of government credit granted to ensure that home buyers can get loans while the private housing-finance industry is moribund. That surpasses the amount spent on rescues of American International Group Inc., General Motors Co. or Citigroup Inc., which have begun repaying their debts.

“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”

Last week’s report into the banking crisis by Central Bank boss Professor Patrick Honohan revealed that minutes from the bank’s financial stability group had shown that predictions of a crash in the market were deliberately left out of a crucial report in 2006.

“It was decided in 2006 to exclude from the main text of the report data and references to a likely 15 per cent house price overvaluation that was contained in a themed research paper,” according to Prof Honohan’s report.

The explosive report entitled Assessing the Role of Income and interest Rates in Determining Irish House Prices was produced by Central Bank economists Kieran McQuinn and Gerard O’Reilly in 2006 as the housing market appeared to be booming.

The housing report is highly technical but crucially it suggests that Irish house prices were being overvalued by as much as 15 per cent.

“After 2002, the chart shows a divergence between predicted and actual prices, with actual house prices being higher than that predicted by the model.

“As of 2005 Q4, this gap is about 15 per cent,” the report warns. The bank did not publish the findings of this research in its key Financial Stability Review report for the year — its key temperature reading for the Irish economy in 2006.

It was included as one of four separate documents released with a report in November 2006.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines.

American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan. The American-led offensive in Marja in southern Afghanistan has achieved only limited gains. Meanwhile, charges of corruption and favoritism continue to plague the Karzai government, and Mr. Karzai seems increasingly embittered toward the White House.

So the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan. Yet the American officials also recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact.

Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.

The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced.

Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts. Afghanistan has a national mining law, written with the help of advisers from the World Bank, but it has never faced a serious challenge.

“No one has tested that law; no one knows how it will stand up in a fight between the central government and the provinces,” observed Paul A. Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business and leader of the Pentagon team that discovered the deposits.

At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection either. “The big question is, can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?” Mr. Brinkley said. “No one knows how this will work.”

With virtually no mining industry or infrastructure in place today, it will take decades for Afghanistan to exploit its mineral wealth fully. “This is a country that has no mining culture,” said Jack Medlin, a geologist in the United States Geological Survey’s international affairs program. “They’ve had some small artisanal mines, but now there could be some very, very large mines that will require more than just a gold pan.”

The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency.

The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.

“The Ministry of Mines is not ready to handle this,” Mr. Brinkley said. “We are trying to help them get ready.”

Like much of the recent history of the country, the story of the discovery of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is one of missed opportunities and the distractions of war.

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.

But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.

Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.

Chimay, 47, chairman and chief investment officer of Chimay Capital Management Inc., was arrested yesterday in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, on a New York state warrant, said Adam Kaufmann, chief of the investigation division of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Chimay yesterday, accusing him and his firm of fraud for touting investments he claimed were tied to the Chimay royal family of Belgium, and then stealing millions of dollars to pay his divorce lawyers and the mortgage on his house in the Hamptons on Long Island east of New York City.

“He lied to investors, took their money and used it to support his lifestyle,” Kaufmann said in a phone interview.

The SEC obtained an emergency court order to freeze the assets of Chimay and his firm.

Chimay Capital claimed to be the U.S. investment arm of the royal family based in the Chimay region of Belgium and dating to the 14th century, according to the SEC.