WASHINGTON — Soon after lawmakers finished work on the nation’s new financial regulatory law, a team of JPMorgan Chase lobbyists descended on Washington. Their goal was to obtain special breaks that would allow banks to make big bets in their portfolios, including some of the types of trading that led to the $2 billion loss now rocking the bank.

Several visits over months by the bank’s well-connected chief executive, Jamie Dimon, and his top aides were aimed at persuading regulators to create a loophole in the law, known as the Volcker Rule. The rule was designed by Congress to limit the very kind of proprietary trading that JPMorgan was seeking.

Even after the official draft of the Volcker Rule regulations was released last October, JPMorgan and other banks continued their full-court press to avoid limits.

JPMorgan’s blunder amplifies calls for tighter regulation

Using a computer may protect against memory loss late in life, as long as you also make sure to exercise, a new study suggests.
In the study, which included older adults, computer use and exercise reduced the risk of memory loss, whereas doing either activity alone did not.

Participants who engaged in moderate physical activity (such as brisk walking) and used a computer were 64 percent less likely to have mild cognitive impairment compared with those who did not exercise and did not use a computer.

(CBS) Memory loss might start a lot sooner than originally thought, a new study suggests. The study found signs of age-related cognitive decline in men and women who were only 45 years old.

PICTURES: Alzheimer’s disease: 7 things that raise your risk

For the study, researchers tracked nearly 5,200 men and 2,200 women for 10 years beginning in 1997. All were civil servants between the ages of 45 and 70 who lived in the U.K.

A 15-year-old who a witness says jumped in front of a Staten Island bus was carrying a suicide note when she was struck, distraught because she was the target of bullying at her school, according to a relative.

Amanda Diane Cummings, a sophomore at Staten Island’s New Dorp High School, was hit by a city bus on Dec. 27 and died Monday from her injuries. A police spokesman told The Staten Island Advance that Amanda had a suicide note with her when a witness saw her jump in front of the bus at about 7:30 p.m., but authorities did not disclose the contents of the note.

A defunct German satellite is expected to fall to Earth this weekend, with experts predicting that up to 30 big pieces of the junked spacecraft could hit the planet. But exactly when and where the satellite will fall remains a mystery.

The 2.7-ton Roentgen Satellite, or ROSAT, will likely plummet to Earth on Saturday or Sunday, according to the latest update from the German Aerospace Center.

“Currently, the re-entry date can only be calculated to within plus/minus one day,” agency officials said in a statement. “This time slot of uncertainty will be reduced as the date of re-entry approaches. However, even one day before re-entry, the estimate will only be accurate to within plus/minus five hours.”

As the U.S. economy began to tank, the number of abused kids landing in the hospital with severe brain injuries spiked, a new study shows.

Anecdotes linking child abuse to the recession have surfaced before,
but there had been no hard data to back the connection until now.

“It’s definitely disturbing,” said Elizabeth Gershoff, a psychologist who studies parenting but was not involved in the study.

Although there is no proof that financial hardship itself is causing
the uptick in abuse, earlier research has tied parental stress to child
maltreatment.

“Living in poverty for parents can be very stressful,” Gershoff, of
the University of Texas at Austin, told Reuters Health. “And that in
turn leads to harsher parentin

Six-year-olds often times forget their own last names, but I remember Tuesday, September 11, 2001, like it was last week. I remember wearing my favorite jumper and my mother braiding my hair. I remember eating scrambled eggs off a yellow plate. And then I remember the radio anchor said, ‘Wow! Have you guys seen what’s on TV?’ My mother flipped it on, just in time to see the second plane collide with the South Tower. We saw the fireball burst from the building. The six-year-old that I was screamed and covered my ears. That day at school, few of us understood that our lives had changed. Many of my fellow first-graders thought it was something from a movie, a big joke. But I remember walking past the teacher’s lounge, and hearing them all crying and praying, and I knew it was no joke. It was real.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Oil prices plunged more than 8% Thursday as weak economic data and a strengthening dollar drove crude to its biggest one-day drop since April 2009.

The main U.S. oil contract for June delivery settled down $9.44, or 8.6%, to $99.80 a barrel. That’s its lowest level since mid-March and marks its biggest one-day percentage drop in two years. Brent crude, the European benchmark, fell $10.73 to $110.46 a barrel.

DES MOINES, Iowa – A standout Iowa high school wrestler refused to compete against a girl at the state tournament on Thursday, relinquishing any chance of becoming a champion because he says wrestling a girl would conflict with his religious beliefs.

(CNN) — A car pulled from a California canal Friday night was not the same vehicle a witness claimed he saw being driven into the water with a young boy trapped inside, the Stanislaus Sheriff’s Department said Saturday.

Authorities are continuing to search the canal near the area where a 4-year-old boy was abducted earlier this week.

Police say Jose Esteban Rodriguez snatched Juliani Cardenas from his grandmother’s arms Tuesday afternoon in the northern California town of Patterson.