Free Republic

As a boy growing up in Butte, Bart Riley loved spending time at the family business, Riley Meats, on West Park Street. Young Bart and his siblings would help out cleaning the shop after his father was done cutting meat for the day.

European Union lawmakers have pledged rapid approval of a draft EU law to regulate market benchmarks such as LIBOR, though they sparred over how comprehensive the new regime should be. Big fines for Barclays and other banks over the past 18 months for rigging interest rate benchmarks such as the London Interbank Offered Rate or LIBOR, prompted the European Union to propose the rules to supervise such indexes for the first time.The draft law proposes that an administrator is appointed to oversee how each major benchmark is compiled, ensuring there is a record of who contributed to it. …

Shale gas companies operating in Europe will soon have to respect a muscular legislative package which the European Commission is preparing to publish in December or January, EurActiv has learned. This will almost certainly take the form of an unconventional fuels directive, similar to other EU laws covering wastewater and environmental impact assessments. … The legislation will set down rules for dealing with the risks of: Venting and flaring of greenhouse gasesSeismic disturbancesGroundwater contamination and management of the water supply and reservesImpacts on air quality, and noise emissionsAssociated infrastructural problems caused by heavy industrial activity“Methane is also an issue and...

The Obama Administration announced a “tech surge” to try and repair the busted Obamacare web site, but even bigger problems lie ahead. The next wave of woes will relate to the coverage itself, and will saddle some consumers with significant and unexpected costs. People will undoubtedly find that subsidies that they received were miscalculated, and that they owe more money than they were told. The current IT problems are a sideshow to these looming harms. The next wave of troubles will be hard to fix. The President will need to seek relief from Congress. …

David Cameron will this week demand the return of powers from Brussels amid new evidence of the massive cost of EU regulation to Britain. A report published today by the Open Europe think-tank claims that the top 100 EU regulations are costing the UK more than £27 billion a year, outweighing benefits in a quarter of cases. … Annual figures for the five costliest EU regulations are capital rules for banks at £4.5 billion; the Working Time Directive, £4.1 billion; the EU Climate and Energy Package, £3.4 billion; the Temporary Agency Workers Directive, £2 billion; and the Energy Performance of...

In a Sunday morning report which tries to put the best possible face on a project which appears to be on track to make the $22 billion "Big Dig" in Massachusetts look like a petty cash disbursement, Juliet Williams at the Associated Press claimed that the $68 billion involved thus far "would span the state." No it wouldn't, unless all of the formerly Golden State north of the San Francisco Bay Area — roughly one-fourth of the state's land mass — were to secede. Williams also wrote: "Voters in 2008 approved $10 billion in bonds to start construction on an...

Bureaucracies in the Obama Administration have thus far published approximately 11,588,500 words of final Obamacare regulations, while there are only 381,517 words in the Obamacare law itself. That means unelected federal officials have now written 30 words of regulations for each word in the law. …