BOSTON (AP) — The union representing British soccer players will announce on Tuesday the first comprehensive protocol for preventing the brain disease CTE, expanding the heightened concern over concussions to include the damage that can be caused by the less forceful blows from heading the ball.
The guidelines from the Professional Footballers’ Association, which represents current and former players in the Premier League, the FA Women’s Super League and the English Football Leagues, recommend no more than 10 headers per week – including practice – for professionals. Children under 12 shouldn’t head the ball at all, the PFA said, part of a chronic traumatic encephalopathy prevention protocol designed to reduce head impacts across a player’s lifetime.
“CTE is preventable. Period,” Dr. Adam White, Director of Brain Health at the PFA, said on Monday at the first-ever Global CTE Summit, which was held in San Francisco while the NFL descended on the Bay Area for Sunday’s Super Bowl.
“It is the principles of less heading, less force, less often and later in life that matter,” White told The Associated Press. “These could apply to any sport and are the best hope we have of stopping current and future players from the same fate as former generations.”
The degenerative brain disease now known as CTE was studied in boxers more than a century ago as punch drunk syndrome and first diagnosed in American football players in 2005. It has since become a concern in ice hockey, soccer and other contact sports and among combat veterans and others who sustain repeated blows to the head.
A 2017 study found CTE in 110 of 111 brains donated by former NFL players. The disease can only be identified posthumously through an examination of the brain.
The NFL, college football and many other sports have instituted protocols that guide teams and athletes on returning to play after sustaining a possible concussion.
But the British soccer protocol is the first comprehensive plan to combat CTE by addressing the less dramatic, subconcussive blows that can be common in practice, according to Chris Nowinski, the founder of the Concussion and CTE Foundation.
“For contact sports, CTE prevention protocols are equally important and possibly more important than concussion protocols,” he said.
Among the more recent concerns are the routine head hits sustained by football lineman, and those from soccer players heading the ball. Research funded by the union and the Football Association found that Scottish pros have a risk of dementia that is 3.5 times greater than the general population; studies of brains from British soccer players found the majority had CTE, including Jeff Astle, Gordon McQueen and Chris Nicholl.
“With what we know today about the disease, it would be a failure to our players to do nothing,” White said in a statement. “The science and solutions are clear, it just takes willingness from the sporting bodies to put athletes’ long-term health first and I am pleased that we have been able to do that in England. I encourage all sports to put as much, if not more, effort into CTE prevention protocols as they have concussion protocols.”
The protocol also includes annual education, support for research and care for ex-players who suspect they are living with CTE. It follows the publication of a CTE prevention framework published in 2023 by researchers assembled by the Concussion and CTE Foundation and Boston University’s CTE Center.
Nowinski called on sports leagues and their medical advisors to adopt CTE prevention protocols.
“There is now overwhelming evidence that more head impacts in sports will result in more athletes with CTE,” Nowinski said. “Sports administrators aren’t risking CTE themselves, but the policies they set are sentencing some athletes to a life with CTE, a burden that will primarily be carried by their spouses and children. Enough is enough.”
AP sports: https://apnews.com/sports
FILE - In this 1974 file photo, Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler looks to pass. (AP Photo/File)
FILE - In this Feb. 3, 2012, file photo, Chris Nowinski, head of the Sports Legacy Institute in Boston, talks about a hit count proposal to dramatically reduce youth athletes' exposure to repetitive brain trauma in multiple sports during a news conference at the Super Bowl XLVI media center in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, File)
FILE - Miami Fusion's Tyrone Marshall (15) assists Kansas City Wizards' Scott Vermillion after the two collided while going up for a header in the first half of a soccer match Aug. 29, 1999, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Ed Zurga, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — The Justice Department said Monday that it had withdrawn several thousand documents and “media” related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein after lawyers complained to a New York judge that the lives of nearly 100 victims had been “turned upside down” by sloppy redactions in the government's latest release of records.
The exposed materials include nude photos showing the faces of potential victims as well as names, email addresses and other identifying information that was either unredacted or not fully obscured.
The department blamed it on “technical or human error.”
In a letter to the New York judges overseeing the sex trafficking cases brought against Epstein and confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton wrote that the department had taken down nearly all materials identified by victims or their lawyers, along with a “substantial number” of documents identified independently by the government.
Clayton said the department has “revised its protocols for addressing flagging documents” after victims and their lawyers requested changes. Documents are promptly pulled down when flagged by victims, then evaluated before a redacted version of the document can be reposted, “ideally within 24 to 36 hours.”
Two lawyers for Epstein victims wrote the court Sunday seeking “immediate judicial intervention” because of what they described as thousands of instances when the government had failed to redact names and other personally identifying information.
Eight women who identify as Epstein victims added comments to the letter to Judge Richard M. Berman. One wrote that the records’ release was “life threatening." Another said she’d gotten death threats after 51 entries included her private banking information, forcing her to try to shut down her credit cards and accounts.
“There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred — particularly where the sole task ordered by the Court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication,” the lawyers, Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards, wrote.
Berman, who presided over Epstein’s sex trafficking case, scheduled a conference for Wednesday.
Also Monday, a section of the Justice Department’s Epstein files website that had contained public court records from Epstein and Maxwell’s criminal cases and civil lawsuits was no longer functioning.
A message seeking comment on the website issue was left for the Justice Department.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that there have been sporadic errors in redacting, or blacking out, sensitive information but that the Justice Department has tried to work quickly to address them.
“Every time we hear from a victim or their lawyer that they believe that their name was not properly redacted, we immediately rectified that. And the numbers we’re talking about, just so the American people understand, we’re talking about .001 percent of all the materials,” Blanche said.
Dozens of Associated Press reporters analyzing the files have so far found multiple occasions where a name was redacted in one document, only to be left exposed in another version of the same file.
In other places, names and email addresses are crossed out but not fully blackened out, so they’re still visible. Other text redactions can be easily overridden by simply double clicking on them to reveal the hidden text underneath.
The Justice Department has said all nude or pornographic images were redacted from the 2,000-some videos and 180,000 images in the release, even if they were commercially produced, as the agency considered all women depicted in the images as potential victims.
But reporters with The New York Times still found dozens of uncensored photos of naked young people with their faces unredacted.
The newspaper said the images have since been largely removed or redacted after it notified the Justice Department. It said some of the images appeared to have been taken on the beach at Epstein’s private Caribbean island while others are in a bedroom setting.
In another instance, the AP found a set of more than 100 images of a young, unidentified female lounging on a bed, standing on a beach and at other summertime locations while wearing a short top.
The images are almost fully blacked out so only the person’s arms and legs are clearly visible, save for the very last image, a profile photo that is completely unredacted and reveals her face.
Elsewhere in the files, the face of one of Epstein's alleged underage victims was clearly shown on an organizational chart created by federal investigators.
At an unrelated sex trafficking trial in New York on Monday, lawyers for two high-end real estate brokers and their brother asked for a mistrial because their names had appeared in some of the Epstein documents.
Deanna Paul, a defense lawyer at the trial of Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander, said prosecutors had “destroyed the possibility of a fair trial” by letting documents get out that falsely suggested an association with Epstein. The brothers have pleaded not guilty to drugging and raping multiple girls and women from 2008 to 2021. They aren't accused of having anything to do with Epstein's abuse of underage girls.
Judge Valerie E. Caproni rejected the mistrial request after she individually questioned jurors, all of whom said they hadn’t seen any news about the brothers. Still, she confronted a prosecutor about the matter, asking, “Government, really?”
“Yes, I understand where the court's coming from,” replied Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Espinosa.
She said the documents had been withdrawn from public circulation.
__ The AP is reviewing the documents released by the Justice Department in collaboration with journalists from CBS, NBC, MS NOW and CNBC. Journalists from each newsroom are working together to examine the files and share information about what is in them. Each outlet is responsible for its own independent news coverage of the documents.
A document that was included in the U.S. Department of Justice release of the Jeffrey Epstein files is photographed Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
A document that was included in the U.S. Department of Justice release of the Jeffrey Epstein files is photographed Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026, shows the report when Epstein was taken into custody on July 6, 2019. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
