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Energy
Energy’s New Legal Threat: Earthquake Suits
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Miguel Bustillo and Daniel Gilbert
After an earthquake toppled her chimney, sending rocks crashing through the roof and onto her legs, Sandra Ladra didn’t blame an act of God. She sued two energy companies, alleging they triggered the 2011 quake by injecting wastewater from drilling deep into the ground. Ms. Ladra’s lawsuit, now before the Oklahoma Supreme Court, highlights an emerging liability question for energy companies: Can they be forced to pay for damages from earthquakes if the tremors can be linked to oil-and-gas activity?

The EPA Defends the Clean Power Plan
WALL STREET JOURNAL
MS. MCCARTHY: We’re doing an extraordinary job making this the best, cooperative proposal EPA has ever put out. I am confident that we are not violating the Constitution. I feel confident we are going to get this rule over the finish line in a way that’s reasonable, appropriate and necessary in terms of actions we need to take on climate.

EPA’s McCarthy: Keystone alone wouldn’t be climate disaster
POLITICO
Andrew Restuccia and Elana Schor
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said Monday that building the Keystone XL pipeline alone would not be a disaster for the climate, as some opponents of the project contend. “No, I don’t think that any one issue is a disaster for the climate, nor do I think there is one solution for the climate change challenge that we have,” McCarthy said during an interview with POLITICO’s Mike Allen.

SEC Pushes Extractive Disclosure Rule Decision to 2016
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Samuel Rubenfeld
The Securities and Exchange Commission said it may not issue a rule until Spring 2016 governing how oil, gas and mining companies will disclose the payments they make to foreign governments, as required by a provision of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Technology
Senator to probe Google meetings at White House
THE HILL
Mario Trujillo
Senate investigators are turning their attention to meetings held at the White House during the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) years-old antitrust probe of Google. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is concerned that Google’s access to the administration could have biased the investigation, and plans to question the “FTC and the parties” about the meetings, according to his office.

Google Pressures AT&T’s Broadband Prices
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Thomas Gryta
AT&T Inc. brought its high-speed broadband service to Google Inc.’s backyard Monday, but at a higher price than in places where it competes with the Internet company. The telecom giant is offering its 1-gigabit-per-second GigaPower service for $110 a month in Cupertino, Calif., a city where Google, which is based in nearby Mountain View, isn’t rolling out its Google Fiber service. (Apple Inc.’s headquarters are in Cupertino.)

AT&T expects FCC sanction for throttling practice
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Alex Byers
AT&T believes it may face a fine from the FCC for slowing down wireless Internet service for some heavy data users, the company’s lawyers told a federal judge this month.

Finance
The Little Bank That Could
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Dodd-Frank thus appears to have achieved the opposite of its intentions. While the law’s Financial Stability Oversight Council anoints new “systemically important” firms every year, in most of those years the law’s burdens are preventing the creation of even a single potential competitor to these financial giants. Addressing this regulatory imbalance ought to be a priority for the 114th Congress.

Millions of Americans have little to no money saved
USA TODAY
Charisse Jones
Roughly a third of American adults don’t have any emergency savings, meaning that over 72 million people have no cushion to fall back on if they lose a job or have to deal with another crisis, according to a survey released today by NeighborWorks America, a national non-profit that supports communities.

Regulators Intensify Scrutiny of Bank Boards
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Victoria McGrane and Jon Hilsenrath
U.S. regulators are zeroing in on Wall Street boardrooms as part of the government’s intensified scrutiny of the banking system, shifting from light-touch oversight of bank directors to regular questioning. The Federal Reserve and other bank regulators are holding frequent, in some cases monthly, meetings with individual directors at the nation’s biggest banks, demanding detailed minutes and other documentation of board meetings and singling out boards in internal regulatory critiques of bank operations and oversight.

Prosecutors Scrutinize Minority Borrowers’ Auto Loans
NEW YORK TIMES
Michael Corkery and Jessica Silver-Greenberg
Minority borrowers were once starved for credit through redlining — banks’ refusal to provide mortgages in their communities. Now the booming auto industry has turned that historic wrong on its head, government authorities say, singling out minority borrowers and extending them the costliest car loans, a development that threatens to exacerbate the economic distress in some black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Politics
Ensuring Religious Freedom in Indiana
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Gov. Mike Pence
Some express concern that Indiana’s RFRA law would lead to discrimination, but RFRA only provides a mechanism to address claims, not a license for private parties to deny services. Even a claim involving private individuals under RFRA must show that one’s religious beliefs were “substantially burdened” and not in service to a broader government interest—which preventing discrimination certainly is. The government has the explicit power under the law to step in and defend such interests.

Indiana Law Tests Republicans’ 2016 Strategy for Social Issues
NATIONAL JOURNAL
Alex Roarty
On Monday, the debate grabbed hold of the Republican presidential primary. Candidates lined up to show their support for it and the embattled governor who signed it: Jeb Bush said Pence did the “right thing,” Rick Santorum said he stands “in defense of religious liberty and real tolerance,” and Marco Rubio said people should be able to “live out their religious faith in their own lives.”

Ind. to ‘clarify’ new law decried as anti-gay
WASHINGTON POST
Sandhya Somashekhar and Mark Berman
Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma (R) said the legislature would act as soon as this week to “clarify” the state’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which grants individuals and businesses legal grounds to defend themselves against claims of discrimination. The fix, Bosma said, would make clear that the law does not allow people to discriminate against gays, as critics contend.

Religious Liberty and Equality
NEW YORK TIMES
David Brooks
The movement to champion gay rights is now in a position where it can afford to offer this respect, at a point where steady pressure works better than compulsion. It’s always easier to take an absolutist position. But, in a clash of values like the one between religious pluralism and equality, that absolutism is neither pragmatic, virtuous nor true.

The New Intolerance
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Liberals used to understand that RFRA, with its balancing test, was a good-faith effort to help society compromise on contentious moral disputes. That liberals are renouncing it 20 years after celebrating it says more about their new intolerance than about anyone in Indiana.

Poll: Clear majority supports nuclear deal with Iran
WASHINGTON POST
Scott Clement and Peyton M. Craighill
By a nearly 2 to 1 margin, Americans support the notion of striking a deal with Iran that restricts the nation’s nuclear program in exchange for loosening sanctions, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds. But the survey — released hours before Tuesday’s negotiating deadline — also finds few Americans are hopeful that such an agreement will be effective.

Senate’s top Dems all agree: Chuck Schumer should be next party leader
WASHINGTON POST
Mike DeBonis
Now it is completely clear, thanks to the endorsement of another Senate leader, Conference Secretary Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who could have mounted a credible but long-shot bid for the top chair. “Senator Murray spoke to Senator Schumer several times over the past few days and told him that she planned to support him for leader next Congress and looks forward to continuing to be his partner in Senate Democratic leadership,” an aide said Monday. Roll Call first reported Murray’s endorsement.

Movement to Increase McDonald’s Minimum Wage Broadens Its Tactics
NEW YORK TIMES
Steven Greenhouse
While the movement may not be close to persuading McDonald’s to adopt a $15 minimum wage, even the campaign’s critics acknowledge it has achieved some of its goals by prompting a national debate about low-wage work and nudging various cities and states to raise their minimum wage.