The new federal consumer watchdog agency is considering drafting new rules governing transparency and safety in the rapidly growing market for prepaid cards . Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray said the cards have fewer regulatory protections than bank accounts and debit cards. The agency said it will focus rule-making on three key areas: disclosure of fees and terms, liability for unauthorized transactions and niche product features, such as overdrawing an account. The agency is holding a field hearing on the cards Wednesday in North Carolina. Read full article > >

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Consumer agency to target prepaid cards

President Obama won his 34th and 35th consecutive Democratic primary contests on Tuesday night, claiming victories in Arkansas and Kentucky. But his margin was surprisingly small in Arkansas — a state in which he was opposed by Tennessee lawyer John Wolfe, who had previously been on the presidential primary ballot in Louisiana, Missouri and New Hampshire and will be on the ballot in Texas next week. Wolfe has also run unsuccessfully for Congress four times. Read full article > >

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Obama challenged in Arkansas primary

OSAKA, Japan — Toru Hashimoto is the product of a fed-up country. He is also its chief rabble-rouser. The telegenic Osaka mayor wants wholesale changes to Japan’s sleepy status quo. He would like to transfer power from Tokyo to a collection of new regional fiefdoms, bigger than the existing prefectures, that would collect taxes and make streamlined decisions. He holds a tea-partyish small-government philosophy, but he speaks about it in such forceful terms that critics here have given it a different name: Hashism. Read full article > >

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Behind Hashimoto, Osaka’s telegenic mayor, a sign of Japan’s discontent

PHILADELPHIA — The final, fraying vestiges of the Philadelphia Phillies ’ superiority over the Washington Nationals unraveled Tuesday night at Citizens Bank Park. The Phillies sent to the mound Roy Halladay , more obelisk than pitcher, their ace, the right-hander whom the Nationals had never beaten. He proved just as helpless as the rest of his teammates from preventing the sudden reversal of a rivalry. Read full article > >

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Nationals vs. Phillies: Washington retakes NL East lead by beating Roy Halladay for the first time

Three decades after private-equity firms transformed American business, American politics is finally catching up — breathless and bewildered. For the past week, the spotlight of the presidential campaign has fallen on Mitt Romney’s 15 years as an executive at the private-equity firm Bain Capital. President Obama has at times portrayed Romney, his likely GOP challenger, as a kind of pinstriped vampire who sucked profits out of hapless companies while factories closed and workers suffered. Read full article > >

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Both parties struggling with how to talk about private-equity industry

A small clue to Bernice Bennett’s past leapt out at her from the computer screen, on a scanned ledger filled with addresses entered with the precision penmanship that is a lost art. It was 72 years ago that census workers fanned out across the country, visiting houses to personally count the 132 million people living in the United States in 1940. And now the National Archives has opened up the once-confidential details of daily life in a nation living in the vise of economic collapse and impending war. Read full article > >

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1940 census draws historians and genealogists

JPMorgan Chase has spent upward of $20 million on lobbying and campaign contributions in the past three years. On Tuesday, the bank received a healthy dividend on that investment. Its chairman, Jamie Dimon, has admitted that the firm was “sloppy” and “stupid” in making trading bets that lost $2 billion. But Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee wouldn’t hear of it; they preferred to blame government. Read full article > >

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Senators put federal regulators, not JPMorgan, on the hot seat

Novelist John Grisham could hardly spin a more provocative fiction: The president and his surrogates mount an aggressive campaign to intimidate the chief justice of the United States, implying ruin and ridicule should he fail to vote in a pivotal case according to the ruling political party’s wishes. Read full article > >

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The public trial of Justice Roberts

PRESIDENT OBAMA isn’t backing down from his campaign ad attacking Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital. Actually, “attack” may be too weak a description for a video that likens Bain to “ a vampire ” and depicts Mr. Romney as a plutocrat who callously destroyed hundreds of steel jobs for his own enrichment. Several prominent members of Mr. Obama’s own party thought the commercial was a bit over the top. (Not to mention highly derivative of previous ones financed by backers of Mr. Romney’s Republican primary rivals.) Read full article > >

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Editorial Board: President Obama wants it both ways on private equity

One afternoon, as Heather Schoell was having porcupine-quill-like needles inserted into her feet, she casually mentioned to her acupuncturist that Cashew, her floppy-eared beagle, was suffering from anxiety. Read full article > >

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Pet acupuncture more popular as practice becomes more mainstream

Eugene J. Polley, an electronics engineer who revolutionized American leisure by inventing the first wireless TV remote control, a gadget that also featured the first mute function to silence the more obnoxious sounds of television, died May 20 at a hospital in Downers Grove, Ill. He was 96. Read full article > >

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Eugene J. Polley, engineer who invented the first wireless TV remote control, dies at 96

More than a year after it was first announced, Bristol Palin’s latest foray into reality TV will finally become, well, a reality on June 19. Except that the premise has changed again slightly, bringing the premise tally to three, to date. Read full article > >

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Bristol, retooled again, set for debut; ‘House’ heads home

Barack Obama might embarrass himself tonight. Well, not embarrass himself as much as be embarrassed by the Arkansas presidential primary results. See, the president isn’t very popular in that state — he has essentially zero chance of carrying it in November — and there’s a no-name candidate on the ballot, and so there’s some speculation that the president might do very poorly indeed . Read full article > >

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Jonathan Bernstein: The primaries that matter today

When the Woodgrove girls’ lacrosse team completed a stunning district title run last May, their on-field celebration lacked the traditional championship banner. The first-year school hadn’t purchased one yet. Read full article > >

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Woodgrove High athletics program is thriving in Virginia AA girls’ sports in only its second year

For some time now, commercial barbecue sauce has been progressing from its Dark Ages, when slow-smoked meats were tortured with bland, sweet, corporate slathers, to a more enlightened era of complex boutique sauces flavored with everything from habaneros to peaches. The homemade sauces in our second annual Smoke Signals barbecue sauce recipe contest reflect that evolution. Read full article > >

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A trio of winning sauces in our 2nd annual Smoke Signals barbecue sauce contest