Your customized headlines for Fri, Apr 20, 2012

At a time when the Securities and Exchange Commission is under pressure to enforce existing rules and write new ones, it has been busy giving companies permission to ignore the law.

Companies that bump against legal restrictions — brokerages, stock exchanges, life insurance companies, and mutual fund managers, for example — routinely argue that no harm would come from cutting them slack.

Two years after a blowout on BP's Macondo well killed 11 men and triggered the largest oil spill in U.S. history, oil companies are again plying the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Forty-one deep-water rigs are in the gulf. The vast majority of them are drilling new holes or working over old ones, while the other behemoths are idle as they await work or repairs. A brand new rig — the South Korean-built Pacific Santa Ana, capable of drilling to a depth of 7.5 miles — is on its way to a Chevron well.

Under pressure to reduce the long waits that many veterans face for mental health care, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced Thursday that it will hire 1,900 mental health workers, an increase of more than 9 percent.

Apple is spoiling for a fight with the Justice Department, following charges that the technology giant worked with publishers to fix the prices of e-books.

In court Wednesday, Apple lawyer Daniel Floyd told a federal judge in New York, that the company would like to see the case go to trial, Reuters reported.

— For just $500 and an open-book test, you too can become a "forensic expert" who testifies in court.

— How drug companies fend off generic competition.

— A museum in Italy starts burning its own artwork to protest budget cuts.

Bruno Iksil, a London-based trader for JPMorgan Chase, single-handedly moved the derivatives market last week by making huge bets on corporate bonds, panicking other hedge fund managers who took to calling him "Voldemort" for his power over Wall Street.

When last we checked in on California's plans to build a high-speed rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the situation was grim. Costs had shot upward and legislators were nervous. So then Gov. Jerry Brown's administration revised its bullet-train plan, whittling the price tag down to $68 billion.