Sighs abound because the dreamboat tourist must go home to California by Monday. The air brims with remarks like “Don’t want him to go” and “If we could get him here permanently” and “I can’t picture him out of the team, to be honest.” Around a stadium tucked snugly into narrow roads of row houses and pubs and fish-and-chips stands, it is trendy to root openly for a distant workers’ strike on the faint hope that it could enable his return.

In the two details that make this curious, the lovelorn happen to be some of the most informed, exacting fans on Earth — those of the English Premier League — and the object happens to be an American soccer player who is not a goalkeeper.

Landon Donovan, from that soccer guppy the United States, joined the 132-year-old club Everton in January on a 10-week loan from Donovan’s primary team, the Los Angeles Galaxy, that was to end this weekend. At the time not even the instigator of the arrangement, Everton’s manager, David Moyes, foresaw the glee that would ensue. Trained eyes did not envision the impact of Donovan’s “coruscating pace down the flanks,” as Greg O’Keeffe wrote in The Liverpool Daily Echo.

For all his record-setting scoring and assisting for the United States national team, the 28-year-old Donovan had not wowed many in his previous stints in the German Bundesliga. And in the English bastions of soccer wisdom known as pubs, fans, when rarely asked, can flash a knack for sipping and sneering simultaneously while pooh-poohing American soccer for its ostensibly laggard pace and physicality.

Moyes “seems to have mistaken Landon Donovan for someone who can hack it in European football,” sneered one unmistakably knowledgeable writer in The Guardian, an assertion barely noticed and hardly outlandish. Peter Howard, an Everton fan who witnessed his first Everton match in 1952, thought Moyes would employ Donovan “sparingly” and said, “I thought he’d be slower than he is.” Mark Tolond, an Everton fan for all 48 of his years, thought Donovan came “as a cover” for “four or five players injured.” Anthony Golding, 22, standing alongside a rack of Donovan T-shirts in the Everton merchandise store, said, “I thought he’d be a fringe player.”

Plugged into a strong roster for 13 heady matches since, Donovan has propelled a seeing-eye corner kick for an assist in a stirring win over kingpin Chelsea and flourished in a stirring win over kingpin Manchester United. He has gone airborne courtesy of the 19-year-old Everton prodigy Jack Rodwell, who hoisted the smallish Donovan for homage from a rousing home crowd after Donovan’s goal on March 7 in a 5-1 win against Hull City. He has elicited routine chants of “U.S.A.! which, according to fans, doubles as a dig across the park toward the other major stadium just a stroll away, that of the colossus Liverpool, where fans roil in ire with that club’s American owners.

For an autograph signing, Donovan’s presence coaxed a line that zigzagged through the merchandise store, snaked out the door and hogged about 300 yards of sidewalk. He has triggered Facebook pages like “Keep Landon Donovan at Everton!!” (10,240 fans by Saturday) and “Evertonians Will Never Forget Landon Donovan!!!! (1,867 fans). He has thrived while donning the beloved No. 9 shirt worn by a lineage of Everton luminaries beginning with the 1920s and Dixie Dean, whose muscular statue outside the stadium wears an Everton scarf.

“How quickly he has settled in has surprised me,” Moyes said of Donovan early and, in variations, often.

And in that common assessment, Donovan has tweaked the image of the United States as a country that needs to use its hands to excel. Its exports to England have entailed mostly a stash of outstanding goalkeepers (like Brad Friedel, Marcus Hahnemann and Everton’s Tim Howard) and a sprinkling of credible outfield players, including John Harkes in the 1990s, Claudio Reyna in the 2000s and, of late, mainstays like Brian McBride and Clint Dempsey at Fulham.

From the first moments in a well-reviewed debut match at Arsenal in North London on Jan. 9, Donovan materialized with Premier League pace. “He really impressed me from the first whistle,” Tolond said. “When we got the ball, he was taking on their fullback,” a tack English fans adore with uncommon relish. “He was dangerous.” By February, he “took apart” the elite Chelsea defender Ashley Cole, according to Tolond, before Cole broke his ankle in an honest collision with Donovan.

Everton has had strong finishes of sixth, fifth and fifth the past three seasons, and Donovan’s charges helped lend the offense a fresh dimension of precious space as Everton elbowed into 9th place, from 12th. His distaste for trepidation made a six-decade viewer like Peter Howard marvel that Donovan “takes players on,” that he is “not frightened” and that, in loftiest praise, “To me, he’s an old-fashioned English winger.”

Fans have forgiven even his howling miss from two yards on Feb. 28 at Tottenham. Golding said: “I can’t picture him out of the team, to be honest. He’s made his mark.”

Donovan, while asserting in February that previous European tours found him unready “technically, tactically, mentally and physically,” said he studied and prepared utterly this time. “It’s been really great,” he said to reporters, “and I can’t imagine many players in the world, let alone Americans, can say they have played against and beaten Chelsea and Manchester United in the space of 10 days.”

So as the love-in blossomed across winter, so did a wish that Donovan could remain beyond the March 15 mandate. Moyes pronounced himself “keen to keep Landon,” judged Donovan “keen to stay” and concluded that “all parties are keen.” Donovan stated a wish for an extra month.

Los Angeles Manager Bruce Arena stated a wish to honor the contract for a Galaxy season scheduled to begin on March 27, two days into the Major League Soccer season. Evertonians dreamed of Donovan on a wing opposite the gifted and freshly healed Spaniard Mikel Arteta. And then, M.L.S. players last Thursday authorized a strike by March 25 barring a deal with management.

As Donovan’s 10 rambunctious weeks found their curtain with a substitute turn Saturday in a 2-2 draw at Birmingham City, and as he went over to Everton’s sliver of supporters for a farewell, and as the price of Donovan T-shirts here dipped to £4.99 ($7.50) from £9.99 ($15) at closing time, fans over here have taken unusual interest in labor relations over there.

“All’s we want is this strike to continue!” Peter Howard said, loosing a huge laugh. “Till the end of the season would be better!”

Some of the cases involve people who are suspected of having mailed tens of thousands of dollars to themselves from Iraq, or of having stuffed the money into duffel bags and suitcases when leaving the country, the federal investigators said. In other cases, millions of dollars were moved through wire transfers. Suspects then used cash to buy BMWs, Humvees and expensive jewelry, or to pay off enormous casino debts.

Some suspects also tried to conceal foreign bank accounts in Ghana, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Britain, the investigators said, while in other cases, cash was simply found stacked in home safes.

There have already been dozens of indictments and convictions for corruption since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But the new cases seem to confirm what investigators have long speculated: that the chaos, weak oversight and wide use of cash payments in the reconstruction program in Iraq allowed many more Americans who took bribes or stole money to get off scot-free.

“I’ve had a continuing sense that there is ongoing fraud that we have not been able to nail down,” said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who leads the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent oversight agency. “This spate of new cases is evidence that that sense was reasonably well placed.”

The cases were uncovered during the first phase of a new, systematic inquiry into financial activities, which investigators said began in earnest last summer. A related investigation of rebuilding funds for Afghanistan began in February.

Mr. Bowen’s office agreed to answer general questions on the new inquiry but declined to divulge the names of the suspects, who include private contractors, military officers and civilian officials.

Developed in the Treasury Department, the financial monitoring effort goes by the generic name of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or Fincen, which continually generates data on suspicious financial transactions in support of more than 275 federal and state law enforcement agencies, according to a December report by the Government Accountability Office.

Stephen Hudak, a spokesman at the Treasury Department for Fincen, said it generated 15 million to 16 million reports a year on suspicious financial activity or major currency transactions, including cash deposits of more than $10,000. He said that transactions in banks, check-cashing outlets, wire services, casinos, stockbrokers’ offices and insurance companies were covered.

“Basically, we follow dirty money,” Mr. Hudak said. “Authorized users can access Fincen’s databases to make connections in criminal investigations.”

Mr. Hudak confirmed that Fincen was being used to investigate reconstruction corruption in Iraq.

Because the investigation has covered only limited areas in the United States so far, Mr. Bowen said he estimated that dozens of additional cases would be opened by the end of the year. Mr. Bowen, who spoke by phone from Baghdad, described the effort as a “concerted, focused, forensic financial review involving all the Iraq reconstruction funds.”

Congress has appropriated about $53 billion for reconstruction projects, and the rest of the money has come from Iraqi assets and international pledges. According to testimony before the Wartime Contracting Commission last month by Arnold Fields, who leads the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Congress has appropriated $51 billion to rebuild that country since 2002.

John Brummet, the assistant inspector general for audits in that office, said that the office’s staff members had been studying the Iraq investigation for nearly a year and that they had started a related effort last month.

“What we’re trying to do is basically replicate what they’ve done without having to pay the price of the learning curve,” Mr. Brummet said.

Investigations involving the inspector general’s office for Iraq’s reconstruction have led to 35 indictments and 27 convictions for fraud in numerous forms; the number of convictions rises to 58 when cases pursued by other government agencies are included, according to figures compiled by the Justice Department.

Mr. Bowen would not comment on whether indictments had yet been written up for the new cases, which numbered 52 by last week. But he said that at least 45 of those had come directly from the forensic effort.

Wayne White, who until 2005 was a senior intelligence official with the State Department focused on Iraq and is now a scholar with the Middle East Institute in Washington, said he was not surprised that new cases were still turning up.

Since Iraq’s economy collapsed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the country’s dealings with foreign companies and contractors have been laced with bribery, kickbacks and other fraud, Mr. White said, adding that weak oversight of the reconstruction efforts almost guaranteed that those problems would not be rooted out.

“That’s been very disappointing, and we’ve seen it in Afghanistan as well,” Mr. White said.

A senior federal official said that some of the new cases appeared to be closely linked to known networks of conspiracy and fraud and were likely to extend investigators’ knowledge of cases that had already ended with convictions. Many other cases seem to be entirely new, the official said.

Mr. Bowen said that many of the new cases involved bribes and kickbacks for awarding lucrative work to contractors, and that in a number of cases, spouses or other relatives of the suspects are accused of setting up fraudulent companies to hide the illicit gains.

When people who turn up in the net are initially contacted by investigators, the reaction “runs the gamut,” Mr. Bowen said. Some deny wrongdoing and others admit to accepting small bribes, which on further investigation rise into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

One suspect, he said, made the job especially easy on investigators who arrived at his door. “I’ve been waiting for you,” the suspect said.

The public did, indeed, come to adore as more than 12,000 fans packed the Fair Grounds, a track nestled in an old neighborhood. They craned their necks to glimpse Rachel Alexandra and roared as if their favorite Mardi Gras float had just appeared when she stepped on the track for the $200,000 New Orleans Ladies Stakes.

Then the gates popped open, and the good times this town is known for did not exactly roll. In fact, by the time the race was over, horseplayers and horse lovers alike were forlorn. Rachel Alexandra had not only lost but perhaps derailed what was supposed to be a race for the ages against Zenyatta in the $5 million Apple Blossom Invitational on April 9 at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark.

Her co-owner Jess Jackson began hedging his bets last week when he said he would send his filly to Arkansas only if she were dead-solid perfect. After Saturday’s race, her trainer Steve Asmussen said she that was anything but and that they would reassess her schedule.

“If I thought she’d get beat, I wouldn’t have run her today,” Asmussen said when asked if the showdown was still on. “So I’m definitely going to be cautious.”

It did not look as if the race would fall apart when jockey Calvin Borel bounced Rachel Alexandra into a comfortable stalking position behind Fighter Wing for three-quarters of a mile, then pressed the button for that finishing gear that had been so reliable in her eight straight victories as a 3-year-old last year.

Rachel Alexandra rocketed past Fighter Wing and looked like a winner at the mile mark. But guess what? There was a faster horse on the track. It was not Zenyatta, either.

Zenyatta was at Santa Anita Park in Southern California preparing to run her record to 15-0 just a half hour later by turning in what can only be labeled as a transcendent performance in the $250,000 Santa Margarita Invitational. She was last into the stretch but passed her seven rivals like a sports car on the most crowded and unforgiving German autobahn for a length-and-a-quarter victory.

Rachel Alexandra was vanquished by a mare named Zardana, who was Zenyatta’s stablemate and came from John Shirreffs’s barn in California to take a measure of Rachel Alexandra.

Shirreffs and everyone else got their answer at the top of the stretch when she blew by Rachel Alexandra on her way to a three-quarter-length victory.

“She was beat when the other horse went by her,” Borel said. “She needed the race, that’s all.”

After six months away from the track, Rachel Alexandra was found wanting. Asmussen took the blame for the setback, saying he had not trained her well.

Zardana, a 6-year-old, had come here in the hopes of earning her own invitation to the Apple Blossom. She has won 8 times in 19 starts and more than $420,000 in prize money. She has proved a useful horse but was the most unlikely candidate to take down a superstar like Rachel Alexandra.

But that was not the feeling in Shirreffs’s barn. He and her owner, Arnold Zetcher, thought they had a talented runner in top shape, and they might catch Rachel Alexandra below her peak.

“The strategy was simply to get her to relax,” jockey David Flores said.

Zardana did, covering the mile-and-one-sixteenth distance in 1 minute 43.55 seconds and rewarding her backers $21 for a $2 bet to win.

Back in California, Zenyatta eliminated doubts about her fitness or her greatness in spectacular fashion. Her regular rider, Mike Smith, let her lope behind the field for most of the race.

“John kept telling me that it’s a mile-and-an-eighth race, which meant I want you to make this as easy as possible for her,” he said.

When he finally asked Zenyatta, a big girl, for run in the lane, she was stopped once, twice and looked beat. Instead, she seemed to shrink herself into an aerodynamic torpedo and dive into ever so small holes before exploding.

“Before her, I never thought any horse of this size can do what she can do,” Smith said. “She did all out there today. All I did was a little guiding.”

Between Zardana’s upset of Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta’s continuing demonstration of brilliance, the arguments will continue over who really is the best horse in the land.

Asked about Rachel Alexandra’s defeat, Zenyatta’s owner, Jerry Moss, was subdued. One of the conditions Oaklawn made for giving away a $5 million purse was that both horses show up. “I’m sorry she lost,” he said, “but she lost to a better horse today.”

In the moments after the defeat, Asmussen, too, acted as if he agreed. He did not say the big race was off, but he did not sound as if his horse was ready to tangle with Zenyatta.

“How tired she is off this will be established in the coming days,” he said. “You take her back, you evaluate her, you see how her mood is, her diet, how she goes back to the racetrack, how she breezes. No crystal ball could see that far ahead.”

By announcing that he would send his education blueprint to Congress on Monday, President Obama returned to a campaign promise to repair the sprawling federal law, which affects each of the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools. His plan strikes a careful balance, retaining some key features of the Bush-era law, including its requirement for annual reading and math tests, while proposing far-reaching changes.

The administration would replace the law’s pass-fail school grading system with one that would measure individual students’ academic growth and judge schools based not on test scores alone but also on indicators like pupil attendance, graduation rates and learning climate. And while the proposal calls for more vigorous interventions in failing schools, it would also reward top performers and lessen federal interference in tens of thousands of reasonably well-run schools in the middle.

In addition, President Obama would replace the law’s requirement that every American child reach proficiency in reading and math, which administration officials have called utopian, with a new national target that could prove equally elusive: that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career.

“Under these guidelines, schools that achieve excellence or show real progress will be rewarded,” the president said in his weekly radio address, “and local districts will be encouraged to commit to change in schools that are clearly letting their students down.”

Administration officials said their plan would urge the states to achieve the college-ready goal by 2020.

The No Child law, passed in 2001 by bipartisan majorities, focused the nation’s attention on closing achievement gaps between minorities and whites, but it included many provisions that created what Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Friday called “perverse incentives.”

In an effort to meet the law’s requirements for passing grades, many states began dumbing down standards, and teachers began focusing on test preparation rather than on engaging class work.

“We’ve got to get accountability right this time,” Mr. Duncan told reporters Friday. “For the mass of schools, we want to get rid of prescriptive interventions. We’ll leave it up to them to figure out how to make progress.”

The administration’s turn toward education signaled that the president hoped to get beyond health care and broaden the agenda before the midterm elections make progress on legislative issues more difficult.

Mr. Duncan has been working behind the scenes on rewriting the No Child law with a bipartisan group of senior lawmakers in both chambers, and administration officials say they hope to complete work on a new bill by August, when the elections will dominate the Congressional agenda. Many skeptics question that timetable.

And while leading Congressional Democrats praised the plan, the nation’s two major teachers unions did not. “We are disappointed,” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said of the proposal, “From everything that we’ve seen, this blueprint places 100 percent of the responsibility on teachers and gives them zero percent of the authority.”

Christopher Edley Jr., a former Clinton administration official who is dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on civil rights law, said a briefing document he read had left him concerned about the administration’s direction.

“I worry about retreating from the notion of quality education as a civil right,” Mr. Edley said. “N.C.L.B. had some good sticks in it to compel equity. I’m alarmed by the frequent references to ‘incentives,’ and the apparent intention to reduce the federal role in forcing compliance.”

Representative John Kline of Minnesota, the top Republican on the House education committee, was also skeptical. “From 30,000 feet, the blueprint seems to set a lot of right goals,” Mr. Kline said. “Yet when we drill down to the details, we are looking at a heavier federal hand than many of us wish to see.”