Americans Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson won the Nobel prize in economics on Monday for developing a theory that helps explain how incentives and private information affect the functioning of markets.

Hurwicz, 90, is the oldest Nobel winner ever, according to the academy. "I really didn't expect it," said the Moscow-born researcher, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

The three winners "laid the foundations of mechanism design theory," which plays a central role in contemporary economics and political science, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Essentially, the three men, starting in 1960 with Hurwicz, studied how game theory can help determine the best, most efficient method for allocating resources, the academy said.

Their research has helped explain decision-making procedures involved in economic transactions including, for example, what insurance polices will provide the best coverage without inviting misuse.

It has been used in everything from negotiations over labor issues to the auctioning of government bonds and has helped countries and companies better understand how markets function even when conditions are rocky.

Hurwicz told reporters he was surprised to have won the award.

"There were times when other people said I was on the short list, but as time passed and nothing happened I didn't expect the recognition would come because people who were familiar with my work were slowly dying off," he said.

Maskin, 56, is professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey; and Myerson, 56, is a professor at the University of Chicago in Illinois.

The 30 men, mostly Algerians, have been charged with membership of a terrorist organization, conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack and forgery.

The alleged mastermind Abderrahmane Tahiri, alias Mohamed Achraf, was extradited from Switzerland in April 2005.

Spanish authorities suspect Tahiri planned to ram a truck loaded with 1,100 pounds of explosives into the National Court in downtown Madrid.

"This was an organized and structured terrorist group, uncovered in November 2003, with radical Salafist tendencies, which defended the jihad (holy war) and intended carrying it out in Spain through violent actions such as that planned against the National Court and the persons within," according to the indictment.

"With that explosion, they hoped to kill the persons within (judges, clerks and public in general) and destroy the files held against the 'mujahedeen brotherhood' inside," the indictment said.

Investigating magistrate Fernando Grande-Marlaska said such an attack could have killed up to 1,000 people.

The prosecution is demanding sentences of between two and 46 years for the accused.

The trial is expected to last several months.

Police uncovered the alleged plot with the help of an unnamed informant who had lived with some of the accused.

In an initial investigation, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon claimed Tahiri set up a cell known as the "Martyrs for Morocco" while he served time in a Spanish prison for credit card fraud between 1999 and 2002.

Garzon said the cell had links with other Islamic terrorists, including the group believed to be behind the March 11 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people.

The Food and Drug Administration said Friday it would look into claims from an advocacy group that certain lipsticks contain potentially dangerous levels of lead. Similar claims in the past have not been confirmed, the agency said.
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics said that a third of the 33 red lipsticks examined by an independent lab contained a level of lead exceeding 0.1 parts per million—which is the FDA's limit for lead in candy. The FDA does not set a limit for lead in lipstick.

The organization commissioning the lipstick study says its goal is to pressure companies to remove toxic chemicals from their products and replace them with safer alternatives. The lead tests were conducted by an independent laboratory last month on red lipsticks bought in Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Hartford, Conn., the organization said.

The FDA said concerns about lead in lipstick have been raised occasionally in the print media and on the Internet.

"These concerns have not generally been supported by FDA's own analysis of products on the market. In the present case, we are looking into the specific details of the issues raised," said Stephanie Kwisnek, a spokeswoman at the FDA. "We will need to confirm the factual basis of these reports independently in order to determine what action, if any, may be needed to protect public health."

The trade association representing the cosmetic industry acknowledged "negligible" levels of lead in some lipsticks, but said it is not intentionally added.

"Consumers are exposed daily to lead when they eat, drink water and breathe the air," said John Bailey, an executive vice president at the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association. "The average amount of lead a woman would be exposed to when using cosmetics is 1,000 times less than the amount she would get from eating, breathing, and drinking water that meets Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards."

Authorities said Clark violated a court order in August 2006 by placing several calls to his father-in-law. He had been charged with multiple counts of failure to comply with the order.

Clark's wife, Monica Rodriguez Gonzalez, filed for a domestic violence protective order in June 2006, claiming that Clark had abused her. The order prohibited Clark from having any contact with her and eight other people, including their child.

Clark was disqualified after reaching the finals of the popular TV show's second season in 2003 for failing to reveal a previous arrest.

He later accused "Idol" judge Paula Abdul of coaching him and initiating an affair. She denied his allegations, and Fox TV cleared Abdul of any wrongdoing.

Mr. Pitt has devoted his entire professional career, a period of more than 40 years, to the field of public finance. During his career, Mr. Pitt has worked extensively in virtually every area of public finance as either a bond lawyer or an investment banker in over 45 states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, involving several thousand financings.

He was initially associated with the Chicago law firm of Chapman and Cutler for five years, after which he was one of the founding partners of the Chicago law firm of Borge and Pitt. The firm operated as a public finance boutique for nearly 20 years with offices in Chicago and New York before merging with the national law firm of Katten Muchin & Zavis, now known as Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP.

After ten years with KMZ, rounding out 34 years as a practicing public finance lawyer, principally as bond counsel or underwriters' counsel, Mr. Pitt broadened the scope of his experience and began nearly ten years of public finance investment banking by joining First Chicago Capital Markets, Inc., which in 1998 merged with Banc One Capital Markets, Inc., where Mr. Pitt was a Managing Director and headed up municipal and investment grade corporate securities origination. In August 2000, he joined the Municipal Securities Group of PaineWebber Incorporated, now known as UBS Securities LLC, and was a Managing Director in the MSG's Healthcare Finance Group until June 2004, when he joined Morgan Keegan's Fixed Income Banking Group in its newly established Chicago Public Finance Investment Banking Office as a Managing Director. He remained there for three years and joined Greenberg Traurig in August 2007.

"It isn't everyday that you can add an industry legend. George has been a trendsetter and model of success in the public finance world for decades. His presence has already created excitement within our Chicago public finance practice and among our clients." said Keith J. Shapiro, Co-Managing Shareholder of the Chicago office.

Mr. Pitt earned his B.A. from Northwestern University and his J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law.

About Greenberg Traurig, LLP

Greenberg Traurig, LLP is an international, full-service law firm with more than 1,700 attorneys and governmental affairs professionals in the U.S., Europe and Asia. The firm is ranked seventh on The American Lawyer's Am Law 100 listing of the largest law firms in the U.S., based on number of lawyers.

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The case involved Khaled el-Masri, who says he was detained while on vacation in Macedonia in late 2003, transported by the United States to Afghanistan and held there for five months in a secret prison before being taken to Albania and set free, evidently having been mistaken for a terrorism suspect with a similar name.

Mr. Masri says he was tortured while in the prison. After prosecutors in Germany investigated the case, a court there issued arrest warrants in January for 13 agents of the Central Intelligence Agency. The German Parliament is continuing to investigate the episode, which has become a very public example of the United States government’s program of "extraordinary rendition."

Mr. Masri, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, brought a lawsuit in federal court against George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence from 1997 to 2004; three private airline companies; and 20 people identified only as John Doe. He sought damages for treatment that he said violated both the Constitution and international law.

Shortly after he filed the lawsuit in December 2005, the government intervened to seek its dismissal under the state secrets privilege, asserting that to have to provide evidence in the case would compromise national security. That argument succeeded in the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., which dismissed the case without permitting Mr. Masri’s lawyers to take discovery. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., upheld the dismissal in March.

In their Supreme Court appeal, El-Masri v. United States, No. 06-1613, Mr. Masri’s lawyers argued that these rulings allowed the state secrets doctrine to become "unmoored" from its origins as a rule to be invoked to shield specific evidence in a lawsuit against the government, rather than to dismiss an entire case before any evidence was produced.

The Supreme Court created the doctrine in a 1953 decision, United States v. Reynolds, which began as a lawsuit by survivors of three civilians who had died in the crash of a military aircraft. In pretrial discovery, the plaintiffs sought the official accident report.

But the government, asserting that the report included information about the plane’s secret mission and the equipment that it was testing, refused to reveal it. The Supreme Court upheld the government, ruling that evidence should not be disclosed when "there is a reasonable danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged."

Mr. Masri’s lawyers argued that this decision, which the court has occasionally invoked but has not revisited, did not justify dismissing a case before any evidence was requested. Ben Wizner, Mr. Masri’s lawyer at the civil liberties union, said in an interview that the courts had permitted the doctrine to evolve from an evidentiary privilege to a broad grant of immunity, a way for the executive branch to shield itself from judicial scrutiny.

In this case, Solicitor General Paul D. Clement offered to let the justices see, "under appropriate security measures," the classified declaration that the government filed in the lower courts to support its claim of privilege. The court evidently did not think that step was necessary.

The court will soon have other opportunities to revisit the state secrets issue. Last week the A.C.L.U. filed an appeal that raises the issue as part of a challenge to the National Security Agency’s program of wiretapping without court warrants.