Regulators

The Air Force dumped the incinerated partial remains of at least 274 American troops in a Virginia landfill, far more than the military had acknowledged, before halting the secretive practice three years ago, records show. The landfill dumping was concealed from families who had authorized the military to dispose of the remains in a dignified and respectful manner, Air Force officials said. There are no plans, they said, to alert those families now. The Air Force had maintained that it...

SEATTLE — Rules for marijuana? Yes, that's what officials in Washington state have come up with now that the drug has been legalized by voters. On Thursday, the state released its first draft of guidelines for its budding pot business. Among the highlights: —All pot-related businesses would have to have security systems, 24-hour video surveillance and insurance. —No sales of marijuana extracts, such as hash, would be allowed — unless the extract is infused into another product.

When someone in the Washington area begins to type the president's last name into the search box of Google's home page, the top three terms it suggests as the most popular selections are Obama, Obamacare and . . . Obama phone. Obama phone? A hotline, maybe, to the Oval Office? Hardly. "Obama phone" is the widely used — and misleading — nickname of a 28-year-old federal program known as Lifeline . It provides discounts, averaging $9.25 a month, on phone service for 13.3 million...

RULE SOFTENED: Regulators have weakened a rule intended to loosen the grip of the biggest U.S. banks over the trading of complex investments and help safeguard the financial system. MULTIPLE PRICE QUOTES: Under the rule, investment firms would be required to request price quotes for a derivatives contract from a minimum of two banks this year and three beginning in 2014. An earlier proposal had called for price quotes from at least five banks. HUGE MARKET: Critics say the action by the Commodity Futures...

Already months behind schedule, federal regulators charged with establishing the rules to implement new online crowdfunding portals still cannot say when they will issue those guidelines. On Monday, the frustration from entrepreneurs, investors and those trying to build those financing portals was on full display at a forum in Washington. During the event, David Blass, a chief counsel at the Securities and Exchange Commission, said his team is working diligently to craft regulations required to give the go-ahead...

It was Hank Paulson's bad luck that he launched the Treasury's work on a new "blueprint" for financial market regulation just as the worst credit bubble in history was about to reveal how badly the regulators had blown it. Paulson and his confederates, Robert Steel and David Nason, originally set out to update and streamline a regulatory apparatus that had failed to keep up with changes in global financial markets and bring a lighter touch to...

The nation's banking regulators are defying pressure from the Obama administration to line up in support of key proposed reforms, testifying before Congress on Tuesday that elements of the plan would actually weaken oversight of the financial industry. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner summoned the heads of half a dozen agencies for a caustic scolding Friday and told them they were interfering unacceptably in a political process, according to people familiar with the meeting.

With his "stimulus" bill, "cap and trade" solution to global warming, and proposed government takeover of health care, President Obama has made no secret of his desire to expand the size, role and budgets of federal health and safety regulators. Yet this summer, in a largely unreported action, the president took a radical step toward weakening the authority of federal health and safety regulators throughout the government. The president issued a memorandum to all federal agencies May 20, telling them, in effect,...

Insurance regulators from across the country were scrambling yesterday to address a growing threat to insurance companies and the consumers who depend on them. As the industry's financial condition deteriorates, many companies have asked their home-state regulators for permission to change the way they measure and report their financial strength. Some regulators have expressed a willingness to grant it. The requests have been pouring in since the National Association of Insurance Commissioners last...

Lloyd Eby's March 19 letter, " There's no such thing as disinterested regulators, " argued that governmental regulation cannot be "disinterested" since every regulation "is set up for and in support of some interest, and every regulator has an interest in whatever he or she is doing. " This is akin to suggesting that we should not have criminal laws because police officers "might be self-interested" in their jobs and might be bad guys to boot. But we nonetheless have police officers enforce the laws because society...

The Obama administration drew sharp criticism from environmental and oil industry groups Thursday when it issued a new draft of regulations for fracking on federal and Indian lands. Environmental groups said the new draft provided weaker water protections than a version the Interior Department proposed a year ago, while oil industry groups said they wanted regulation left in the hands of states and were opposed to any federal rules. In its first update of hydraulic fracturing regulations in three decades, the Interior...

RICHMOND, Va. — Republican Ken Cuccinelli proposed cuts to taxes and regulations on energy in the second policy statement of his campaign for governor Thursday in Virginia coal country. In outlining his energy policy proposals in Bristol, Va., Cuccinelli also said he would compel the state's ecological watchdog agency, the Department of Environmental Quality, to cushion adverse environmental findings about pending infrastructure projects with "positive indirect results" such...

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has reportedly taken action against the Japanese Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, shutting down a major source of liquidity for the Internet's unregulated shadow currency. Timothy Lee writes that the federal action against Bitcoin is unsurprising: In the wake of the Gawker story two years ago, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) described Bitcoin as an "online form of money laundering" and called for the authorities to shutter the...

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Water with traces of a radioactive hydrogen isotope leaked at a nuclear power plant in South Carolina, but the level of tritium in the water is well below limits that would make it dangerous to drink, federal regulators said. The leak was reported Tuesday night at the Catawba Nuclear Station in York County in a fiberglass pipe that takes water from a turbine pump to a holding pond, where it is tested before it is released back into Lake Wylie, the...

HANOI, Vietnam — Vietnam's booming Internet scene is littered with failed startups that tried to take on Google and other entrenched U.S web companies. That's not deterring a newly launched Russian-Vietnamese outfit which believes it can unseat the American search engine in this fast-growing Asian market and also contend with a jittery, authoritarian government seeking to clamp down on freedom of expression online. Like Google rivals elsewhere, Coc Coc, or "Knock...

WASHINGTON — Regulators have closed a small bank in Arizona, bringing the number of U.S. bank failures to 13 this year. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Tuesday seized Central Arizona Bank, based in Scottsdale, Ariz. The lender, which operated a single branch, had roughly $31.6 million in assets and $30.8 million in deposits as of March 31. Western State Bank, based in Devils Lake, N.D., agreed to assume all of the failed bank's deposits and to buy essentially...

Regarding George F. Will's Nov. 18 op-ed column, " Regulators above the law ": Mr. Will's support for "judicial dismantling" of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) suggests an unwillingness to recognize an imperative that once resulted, to the nation's great benefit, in the creation in 1913 of the bureau's parent organization, the Federal Reserve System, as an entity likewise independent of Congress. No such organization can function in the shadow of a Congress that would hound it to impotence with every conceivable objection.

Washington dealt a double blow Thursday to JPMorgan Chase as a Senate report accused its iconic chief executive of hiding information about a massive loss from regulators while the Federal Reserve unexpectedly said it had found a "weakness" in the bank's capital plans. The twin announcements, both unveiled in the late afternoon, escalates the problems for JPMorgan, the nation's largest bank and arguably its most prestigious. Once viewed as the strongest bank to emerge from the 2008...