11.   Legal experts have speculated that federal authorities intervened because of more lax standards for corroboration needed in a federal case.

12.   Lax accounting standards make the risks of investing in Russian companies largely unknown.

13.   Poor nations, they argue, will use lax standards to gain an export advantage, harming workers and the environment.

14.   Rather, Lugar contended, the problem was excessive leverage and lax lending standards.

15.   That is the lowest level of constitutional scrutiny, a lax standard that nearly all laws tested against it over the years have been able to survive.

16.   The banking industry traditionally oscillates between periods of lax lending standards and periods of contraction as many of the earlier loans turn bad.

17.   The speeches have been vague even by the lax standards of convention oratory, an art form that was tailor-made for bloviation.

18.   Though the Ecuadorean government has promised to tighten lax standards and even looser enforcement that made the spill possible, skepticism of that pledge is almost universal.

19.   Though the technology was basically sound, MediSense hemorrhaged money and lost market share because of lax manufacturing standards and a scattershot sales force.

20.   Weak disclosure laws and lax accounting standards let management hide damaging news from investors.