You may be tempted this season to give in to the plea from that persistent sales clerk at one of the big retailers — “Are you sure you don’t want to save 15 percent today?” — and open up a couple of store-brand credit cards. After all, a 15 percent discount, or no interest payments for 18 months, sounds enticing when you are buying gifts by the armful.

But before you start filling out the application, there are some things you need to know. If you carry a balance on store-brand cards, known in the industry as private-label cards, or if you miss a payment on your no-interest purchase, you can end up wiping out those initial savings, and then some. And when you open a new credit card, your credit score can suffer, too.

As one expert put it, if you strip away the store discounts and brand names that come with these cards, many are essentially the same products marketed to subprime borrowers, or individuals with tarnished or fairly new credit histories. Would you really chose a card with an interest rate of say, 25 percent, or about 9 percentage points higher on average than many other credit cards?

“You are typically not getting the card because it has a lower interest rate or the financing is attractive,” said John Grund, a partner at First Annapolis, an advisory firm focused on the payments industry. “The first-purchase discount or, in the case of big-ticket items, promotional financing, is attractive to consumers. Then, it’s a function of ongoing benefits.”

Congress was aware of the lure of easy credit, so the credit card legislation it passed this year asked regulators to come up with a way to evaluate consumers’ ability to pay their credit card bills before they get the cards. Indeed, the Federal Reserve’s proposed new rules, set to take effect in February, require consumers to list more information on their card applications, like their income and assets.

But while that sounds like the new rules will make it tougher to get that store credit card, don’t bet on it. Retailers are not required to verify that information, and they have told the Fed that the quick check of credit scores they now do is adequate. Besides, they said, customers standing at the checkout may not be comfortable giving clerks sensitive information like a pay stub.

Chi Chi Wu, a staff lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center, said the proposed rules did not go far enough. “The Fed explicitly cited the fact that  inflatable tent   it didn’t want to hinder retailers from being able to instantly open credit card accounts at point of sale as the reason for not requiring verification,” she said. “We think that is not a good reason, since the current financial crisis was caused in part by the failure of lenders to ensure consumers could afford the loans they are given.”

In all the bustle of holiday shopping, the retailers will be counting on you to focus on all the benefits of these cards — and the benefits can be valuable, if you know how to use them. But you should also be considering the card’s terms along with the possible effect on your credit score. If you are looking to refinance your home, buy a new one or take out an auto loan, you may need every last point to buoy your score.

“If it costs you 5 or 10 points and it drops your score to 790, it’s a nonissue,” John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education at pearl strands  Credit.com, said. “But if takes your score from 700 to 690, that is a problem.”

There are several reasons opening one or more cards may drag down your credit score. First, the credit-scoring companies do not look fondly on new applications for credit. Inquiries stay on your credit report for two years, though they only count toward your score for the first 12 months. Once you get the new card, the new account itself also weighs on your credit standing for several months, in part because it reduces the average age of your credit history, which accounts for about 15 percent of your score.

Of course, if you have a pristine credit history and thousands of dollars in available credit on general-purpose cards (the type issued by MasterCard, Visa or American Express), you don’t have to be overly concerned about opening a store-only card, which tends to carry much lower credit lines. You are also more likely to qualify for what is known as a co-branded card, where a retailer like Toys “R” Us partners with a bank that issues a MasterCard, which can be used anywhere and carries somewhat lower interest rates.

“If I am someone who has the optimum mix of six or seven cards, it’s probably not terribly material as opposed to someone who is new to credit or who has a lower score,” said Shon Dellinger, vice president of myFico.com, which provides consumer information and credit products. “But if you’re shopping around and open up four cards to save 20 percent on each, that’s really not the right mind-set.”

In fact, people with less-than-perfect credit can be more harmed by opening a private-label card and carrying a balance than if they opened a general-purpose card. That’s because the credit limits are typically much lower — say, around $500 — than those of a traditional credit card. “So what happens is even modest purchases, a suit or some boots, can cause that card to be highly utilized because of the fact that it has a low limit,” Mr. Ulzheimer said. “The purchase freshwater pearl necklace  might be negligible on a regular MasterCard or Visa.”

And your so-called credit utilization rate factors into your credit standing. When computing your FICO score, Fair Isaac, the company that developed the score, considers how maxed out each of your individual cards is, as well as your total amount of debt — and how that compares with your total available credit.

There are other reasons to read the fine print before getting these cards. Some retailers offer promotions where you do not pay interest for a certain period, as long as you pay off the balance by the time the promotional period ends. But if you do not pay off the balance, you will owe interest on your average balance during the promotional period — but interest will accrue starting on the date you bought the item. So if you bought a $1,000 television and you have paid off $800 by the end of the promotional period, you will still owe interest on your average balance, dating back to the day you bought the TV.

Sears and Best Buy are now running no-interest promotions. But if you participate in one of these plans, you need to pay attention to the date the promotion ends. At Sears, promotions begin on the date you make your purchase, said Chris Brathwaite, a Sears spokesman. That means if you bought the TV on Dec. 12, 2009, the bill must be paid off by the same date a year later — even if your statement happens to arrive on the 14th of each month, Mr. Brathwaite said.

Since most store cards have higher rates than most general-purpose cards, you do not want to fall behind. And if you do, you can do major damage to your credit score. Those with a FICO score of 780 — the scale ranges from 300 to 850 — who are 30 days or more overdue can lose 90 to 100 points from their scores, Mr. Dellinger said.

“Only get credit if you need it, and if you do get it, make sure you aren’t overextending yourself so you can do some of the basics like paying your bills on time,” he added.

Every day.

For the next five years.

That is the goal Robert A. McDonald, Procter & Gamble’s new chief executive, has been promoting in recent weeks and that will be an important benchmark for his tenure.

If he is successful, it will be an important new chapter for the company, after Mr. McDonald’s predecessor, A. G. Lafley, spent the last decade revitalizing the 172-year-old company and doubling its sales.

Now the consumer products giant has to keep expanding its reach beyond its core markets of the United States, Western Europe and Japan, and start winning over new customers in places like Nigeria, India and Somalia.

P.& G., best known as the maker of Crest toothpaste, Tide detergent and Pampers diapers, is taking on steep challenges.

One is that its rivals Unilever and Colgate have long had a presence in many of these far-flung countries, so much so that they are called walled cities within the industry because of the difficulties new competitors face in penetrating these new markets.

“It will be a knife fight, it will be brutal,” said William Schmitz, an industry analyst with Deutsche Bank North America. “It will be fought in shampoo, detergent, deodorant, and Unilever and Colgate won’t roll over.”

The other big challenge is how a company that built itself on selling premium products at premium prices can shift to selling an array of low-priced products for consumers who often live on only a few hundred dollars a month or less.

In some cases, potential customers do not use many of P.& G.’s products and may even have to be taught how to do so.

At his first presentation as a chief executive to P.& G. shareholders last October, Mr. McDonald talked at length about the expansion plan and described the growth prospects in less developed countries as “absolutely amazing amazing.”

Today, sales from developing markets represent 32 percent of P.& G.’s $78 billion in annual revenue, up from 23 percent four years ago. Sales from developing countries are doubling every four years.

Unilever and Colgate, though, already get about 45 percent of their sales from emerging markets.

Today, P.& G. has annual sales cultured pearl jewelry  of $25 billion from developing countries, compared with $8 billion eight years ago. Procter already operates in 80 countries, selling its wares everywhere — large superstores in cities and tiny storefronts in remote villages.

“For several years, they have been very quietly laying the groundwork,” said Lauren Lieberman, an industry analyst with Barclays Capital, said of P.& G.’s push into developing countries. “Now they are ready to fully explore the strategy.”

The pitch from P.& G. executives to Wall Street is relatively simple: Americans spend about $110 a year per capita on Procter’s products. The worldwide per-capita figure is $12. In Mexico, the number is $20; it’s less than $3 in China and less than $1 in India.

The goal, these executives say, is to get the per-capita numbers in China and India to look like Mexico’s. If that were to happen, Mr. McDonald told shareholders, sales at P.& G. would increase by $40 billion — a statement repeated, almost as a mantra, by various other Procter executives at any number of industry conferences.

Of course, customers in developing countries have wholesale pearl jewelry   little money to spend. And getting Procter’s goods to small towns and villages is a difficult logistical challenge.

“Distribution in emerging markets is extraordinarily expensive, and it is fraught with missteps,” said Ali Dibadj, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “You are taking things down to the village level.”

Products, too, have to be adjusted. Procter & Gamble has had to break down products like shampoos and soaps into smaller and less expensive sizes. In these countries, for instance, P.& G. makes sure that a small package of shampoo, enough for one or two uses, does not cost more than the price of an egg.

“There may be one billion new customers,” said Mr. Schmitz of Deutsche Bank. “But it is a question of the price per customer and what they can buy. How can you maintain profit margins when you are trying to sell small shampoos or little bars of soap in deepest India or sub-Saharan Africa?”

Procter has come up with marketing efforts that are decidedly different than those in the United States and other more developed countries.

Many infants, for instance, simply go without diapers, which means that P.& G. goes to hospitals and mobile clinics to demonstrate the use of diapers. Because the cost of diapers are often an issue and because children and parents often share the same family bed, P.& G. is promoting diaper use only at nighttime.

“It’s an educational effort showing the importance of a good night’s sleep to the family,” said Werner Geissler, Procter & Gamble’s vice  chairman for global operations. “What we want them to do is use one diaper per night. And, if they can afford it, we are promoting use of diapers for outings, like when a family visits friends.”

Earlier this month, to promote greater use of its feminine hygiene products, P.& G. started a scholarship and a hygiene education program for young girls, featuring its Always sanitary pads.

The company was promoting the pads as a way to reduce stress during their periods and to provide greater comfort, enabling the girls to study silver pearl jewelry   better.

This comes on top of a similar P.& G. program — called “Live your Life” — which featured young Nigerian girls writing essays about their first menstrual period, with a scholarship granted to the winning entry.

Procter & Gamble executives say they think their company and Unilever can find plenty of business without engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Even more, P.& G. is confident it can trump the products offered by local and regional companies.

“When two or three companies come in offering these products, it builds awareness of them,” Mr. Geissler said.” Across emerging markets, we can take market share without having to do battle with Unilever.”

Federal prosecutors want to delay civil litigation against one of Bernard L. Madoff’s largest investors until a “parallel criminal investigation” is resolved, according to court documents filed on Friday.

 If the request is granted, it would postpone for six months a civil case filed in Manhattan in June by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Stanley Chais, a retired Hollywood business manager and philanthropist who was one of the earliest investors in Mr. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

The government’s request filed in Manhattan is the first public confirmation of a criminal investigation involving one of the large conduit funds freshwater pearl strand    through which thousands of people invested indirectly with Mr. Madoff over the years.

With about $1 billion invested, the three partnerships Mr. Chais set up were not the largest of these “feeder funds.” That status belongs to Fairfield Sentry, a $7 billion fund set up by the Fairfield Greenwich Group.

But the Chais partnerships are the oldest of the feeder funds. The earliest one, the Lambeth Company, was formed in 1970, just a decade after Mr. Madoff, at age 22, set up the brokerage firm that was his legitimate face on Wall Street.

The legal brief supporting the prosecutors’ request said they expected to decide by mid-June whether to present evidence to a pearl jewelry wholesale  grand jury and seek an indictment against Mr. Chais, who is 83 and being treated for leukemia.

Besides investing his own fortune with Mr. Madoff, Mr. Chais set up more than four dozen Madoff accounts for his children and grandchildren, in addition to the partnerships through which nonfamily members invested.

The S.E.C. sued Mr. Chais in June, contending that he steered clients’ money to Mr. Madoff — and collected hundreds of millions of dollars in management fees — “despite having clear indications that Madoff was conducting a fraud.”

Eugene R. Licker, a lawyer for Mr. Chais, released a statement on Friday noting that his client had “consented to the government’s expected and routine motions to intervene.”

“The supporting papers say nothing more than was set forth in the S.E.C. complaint, which Mr. Chais has denied,” he said. “The government, of course, feels compelled to investigate, and we are confident that the investigations will support Mr. Chais’s denials of any wrongdoing.”

Mr. Madoff pleaded guilty to fraud in March and is serving a 150-year sentence in North Carolina.

In a letter to the court on Friday, William J. Stellmach, an single strand necklace  assistant United States attorney, said that the S.E.C. had also agreed to delay its litigation.

He said that the delay was necessary “to protect the substantial public interests at stake in a substantially related, overlapping criminal investigation.”

Mr. Stellmach said the criminal investigation focuses on “whether Chais and others” engaged in conspiracy, securities fraud and money laundering.

Eleven months into his presidency, a set of Obama principles, if not quite a doctrine, is beginning to emerge — a philosophy about when to use American military force, when to forsake it and when to threaten its use to back up diplomatic pressure.

 The president’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday explored what happens when the concept of “just and unjust wars” intersects with the realities of commanding the only military that can act as the world’s policeman of last resort. Just what does that speech suggest about how Mr. Obama will handle the hardest cases on his desk?

The speech came at an inflection point in Mr. Obama’s presidency — a moment when diplomatic engagement is giving way to consideration of far tougher measures. Just a few weeks ago Mr. Obama’s emissaries warned the Pakistani government that unless it gets serious about routing Al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban forces operating in its mountains and cities, he will.

There is the imminent decision about how to corral the world’s powers into truly effective sanctions on Iran — with the unspoken reality that if the effort fails, Mr. Obama and his allies may have to choose between living with a nuclear-capable Iran or living with the blowback from any military or covert attack to set back its program.

And there are the continuing humanitarian disasters where Mr. Obama told the Nobel committee “force can be justified” to protect civilians. He seemed to be thinking of Sudan’s Darfur region, Somalia, Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and perhaps the long-running cases of North Korea’s gulags and Myanmar’s repression. But in each, the world has not wanted to risk outright military intervention, and few other levers of influence, from peacekeepers to sanctions, have proved effective.

Mr. Obama’s evolving approach — it may draw from too many different foreign policy philosophies to qualify as a doctrine — lacks bumper-sticker simplicity. It is far more shaded than the 2002 Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive action against emerging threats: After the failure to discover unconventional weapons in Iraq, Mr. Bush’s theory lost so much credibility that he stopped talking about what constituted an imminent or severe enough threat for America to act alone.

Nor does Mr. Obama’s approach have the boundaries and well-understood rules of cold-war-style containment, which started with the Truman administration, became the  inflatable water games   justification for Vietnam and ultimately succeeded, many historians believe, with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

As one of Mr. Obama’s national security strategists put it just after the announcement of the decision to add 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, “we live in messy times, which don’t lend themselves to easy doctrines.”

But by reaching back to the concept of “just war” at the moment he was accepting a prize for peace, Mr. Obama was signaling that after nearly a year in office, his views about the need to resort to force at times have begun to harden. It was almost certainly not the speech that the Nobel committee expected to hear, nor the one Mr. Obama himself might have written six years ago. Then, as a state senator, he had used his opposition to the Iraq war to speak for the first time on issues of war and peace.

The main paragraph in Oslo acknowledged the lessons drawn from the philosophies of nonviolence preached by Mahatma Gandhi (who never won the Nobel Peace Prize) and Martin Luther King (who did, in 1964) and then made a decisive turn. As a head of state who must defend his country, Mr. Obama said, “I cannot be guided by their examples alone.”

“I face the world as it is,” Mr. Obama declared, a phrase he later repeated to bolster his bona fides as a realist. “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations twisted pearl necklace   cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”

That juxtaposition of Hitler and Al Qaeda made it clear that Mr. Obama has no doubt that only force will work when it comes to dealing with the group that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.

Perhaps that explains a statistic that the White House has not advertised: Since Mr. Obama came to office, the Central Intelligence Agency has mounted more Predator drone strikes into Pakistan, mostly aimed at suspected Qaeda or Taliban havens, than during Mr. Bush’s eight years in office. (Armed Predators were in short supply during the first years of Mr. Bush’s presidency.)

In short, in Mr. Obama’s world view, the war against Al Qaeda is the ultimate “just war,” because it is directly linked to an act of aggression. Similarly he praised the first President Bush’s decision to go to war against Iraq in 1991 for its invasion of Kuwait the previous year, because it “sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression.”

In Mr. Obama’s second year in office, the hard part of this calculation will be how to prosecute such a war in Pakistan — the sovereign territory of an ally that, so far, has had neither the will nor the ability to take on Al Qaeda in its own territory. During a visit to Pakistan last month, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, told Pakistani officials that Mr. Obama would not view the border as a barrier if he was responding to strikes by Al Qaeda or the Taliban emanating from Pakistan — which occur almost daily. Yet on that issue, the president was silent in Oslo.

Iran is the other looming case. Mr. Obama made the argument in Oslo that his commitment to seeking a world without nuclear weapons — one of the reasons he coral jewelry   was awarded the prize — would fail unless the world insisted “that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system.”

“Sanctions must exact a real price,” he said. “Intransigence must be met with increased pressure — and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one.”

Yet inside the White House there is real doubt that the world will stand as one. Russia and China are reluctant to sign on to sanctions against Iran, particularly sanctions that strike at its oil exports or gasoline imports. Mr. Obama declared that “those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war.” But he stopped short of answering the hardest question about Iran, one he might face in months. In his conception of “just war,” would Israel be justified in striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, as it has often hinted, because they pose an “existential threat”?

Or would that veer closer to Mr. Bush’s justifications for toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, a dictator who was not preparing an imminent attack of his own?

Michael Walzer, the author of the classic work “Just and Unjust Wars,” published first in 1977 and updated through decades of subsequent conflicts, large and small, wrote a few years ago that the Iraq invasion’s “cause was not (as in 1991) an actual Iraqi attack on a neighboring state or even an imminent threat of attack; nor was the cause an actual, on-going massacre.” Many of the threats Mr. Obama talked about — the plotting of terrorists in well-protected mountain redoubts, the gradual development of nuclear weapons capacity, “genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma” — unfold over years. Each has proved resistant to preventive diplomacy.

Striking too early risks shades of Mr. Bush’s discredited pre-emption doctrine, a return to American unilateralism. Striking too late invites disaster. That conundrum is “the world as it is.”

Asking for understanding from his fans, business partners and fellow competitors on the PGA Tour, Tiger Woods announced on his Web site Friday that he would be taking an “indefinite break from professional golf” to try to rebuild his personal life.

Woods, the top-ranked golfer in the world and the multimillion-dollar face for numerous companies that he endorses, has not been seen in public since crashing his SUV into a neighbor’s tree in an early-morning accident on Nov. 27. He has spent the last two weeks in his Orlando, Fla., area home, recovering from injuries and hearing a flood of reports of marital infidelities linking him to multiple women that have swamped the worldwide airwaves.

In his third statement since the accident drove him into seclusion, Woods again used his Web site to reiterate and amplify his apologies for the inflatable bouncer  fallout from the alleged multiple affairs to which he has alluded without ever admitting.

“I am deeply aware of the disappointment and hurt that my infidelity has caused to so many people, most of all my wife and children,” Woods wrote. “I want to say again to everyone that I am profoundly sorry and that I ask forgiveness. It may not be possible to repair the damage I’ve done, but I want to do my best to try.

“I would like to ask everyone, including my fans, the good people at my foundation, business partners, the PGA Tour, and my fellow competitors, for their understanding. What’s most important now is that my family has the time, privacy, and safe haven we will need for personal healing.”

“After much soul searching, I have decided to take an indefinite break from professional golf,” the statement continued. “I need to focus my attention on being a better husband, father, and person.”

The PGA Tour issued a statement shortly after the announcement, voicing support for Woods, whose presence in a Tour event usually is a guarantee of double the television ratings of an event without him.

“We fully support Tiger’s decision to step away from competitive golf to focus on his family,” the Tour statement said. “His freshwater pearl pendant   priorities are where they need to be, and we will continue to respect and honor his family’s request for privacy. We look forward to Tiger’s return to the PGA Tour when he determines the time is right for him.”

The reaction from one of the Tour’s television partners also was swift, but included the concern about the duration of Woods’s hiatus.

"We’ve obviously done golf tournaments without Tiger before,” said Sean McManus, the president of CBS Sports and News, “but we all know how much better they do when Tiger is playing well on the weekend. We’ll adjust, but I guess a lot of it depends on what the definition of the word ‘indefinite’ is.”

Asked about whether there was a tradeoff between Woods not playing and him playing with the news media circus that would surely accompany his return, McManus said: “I’m not as concerned about missing the circus as I am about missing him on the golf course. When he was injured a year ago, we didn’t have him in the PGA Championship.”

“Golf is still a strong sport and we look forward to his return on the golf tour,” McManus added. “We’ll adjust and life will go on, but a tournament with Tiger Woods is a much bigger sport.”

Woods’s decision to take the break for an indeterminate period will likely shift the focus of speculation away from the almost daily updates on his dalliances to what date he will make his return to the sport he has dominated for since 1997.

His recent pattern has been to skip the season opener in Maui and the Sony Hawaiian Open and begin his United States schedule at the San Diego Open at Torrey Pines Golf Course at the end of January. That event is scheduled for Jan. 28-31 in 2010. From there, to begin    his run-up to the first major championship of the season at the Masters, Woods would normally play in the W.G.C.-Accenture World Match Play on Feb. 18-21, the W.G.C.-CA Championship at Doral March 11-14, the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill March 25-28.

His next event would be the season’s first major championship, the Masters Tournament, at Augusta, Ga., April 8-11.

Under normal circumstances, the odds on a healthy Woods missing the year’s first major championship would be astronomical. But the circumstances that have ensued since the car accident have been anything but normal. Woods’s marital indiscretions have been the No. 1 topic of discussion on every outlet from internet postings to tabloid magazines at grocery checkouts to reports in the mainstream news media.

One No. 1-ranked golfer who has been though his share of domestic upheaval voiced his support of Woods on Friday. Greg Norman, who spoke to the Golf Channel in cultured freshwater pearl  Naples at his Shark Shootout, sympathized with Woods for what he has been going through.

“I feel sorry for Tiger,” Norman said, “but he’s got to figure out his situation for himself personally. From the game of golf, I’m sure we’d like to see him back out there performing to the level he has played. He’s been a great asset to the game and he’ll continue to be that way.

“From a personal perspective, I wish him well. I hope he sorts it out — family is family and nobody likes to be in that position.”

Bloomberg News reported that Woods’s image was taken down Friday from the homepage of the Web site for Accenture Plc., the consulting company that has used him in its marketing since 2003.

There were no immediate reactions from any of Woods’s other sponsors, including Nike, AT&T, Gillette, Tag Heuer watches and Gatorade.

After Woods’s strong on-course performance in 2009 that included six victories, the expectation was for 2010 to be the year he added to his major championship victory total of 14 and resumed his chase of Jack Nicklaus’s record total of 18.

But that quest is now on hold indefinitely as Woods attempts to sort out the major damage done to his marriage by his off-course behavior.