Law & Regulation

Residents took to the streets of Chengdu to protest a $5.5 billion ethylene plant under construction by PetroChina, reflecting a surge in environmental awareness by urban, middle-class Chinese determined to protect their health and the value of their property. Read More

A funny thing happened on the way to exercising my presumed right, as a shareholder, to attend yesterday's annual shareholder meeting of private military contractor L-3 Communications, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan's financial district. Read More

The Lee family, for all its public-relations woes and legal entanglements, remains the dominant shareholder in Samsung, the jewel in South Korea's conglomerate crown. Read More

The settlement, announced Friday, brings the government far less than it had originally sought over alleged violations of accounting rules. Fannie's regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, in 2006 sought to require the three former executives to pay back more than $115 million of bonuses and pay fines that it said at the time could total more than $100 million. Read More

Watchdog groups say the companies are trying to derail legislation that would require public disclosure of their giving. Read More

The Bush administration has argued strongly in favor of the doctrine, which holds that the F.D.A. is the only agency with enough expertise to regulate drug makers and that its decisions should not be second-guessed by courts. The Supreme Court is to rule on a case next term that could make pre-emption a legal standard for drug cases. The court already ruled in February that many suits against the makers of medical devices like pacemakers are pre-empted. Read More

There's something peculiar in the report on financial market regulation issued March 31 by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The plan, touted by some as a bold expansion of federal control over capital markets and dismissed by others as a mere rearranging of the deck chairs on the financial Titanic, includes an incongruous section on the insurance industry. Read More

As legislation moves through Congress that would empower the F.D.A. to regulate the tobacco industry, Reynolds, whose brands include Camel cigarettes, is attacking what it views as the bill's vulnerability: a weak, overextended F.D.A. Read More

A new advocacy group closely tied to Monsanto has started a counteroffensive to stop the proliferation of milk that comes from cows that aren't treated with synthetic bovine growth hormone. Read More

The Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co. of Henan, China, is a green energy company, producing polysilicon for solar energy panels. But the byproduct -- silicon tetrachloride -- is a highly toxic substance that poses environmental hazards. Read More