National Football League officials improperly sought to influence a government study on the link between football and brain disease, according to a senior House Democrat in a report issued Monday. New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone says the league tried to strong-arm the National Institutes of Health into taking the project away from a researcher that the NFL feared was biased. The NFL had agreed to donate $30 million to the NIH to fund brain research but backed out after the institutes refused to take a $16 million grant away from prominent Boston University researcher Robert Stern. More...