21.   With lax reporting standards, weak laws and a high mortality rate among banks, paper trails meander through tangles of shifting owners and sometimes disappear.

22.   Otherwise, they say, more lax standards in other countries will siphon work away from the U.S. labor force.

23.   He contends that disarray in industry, a crumbling infrastructure and lax environmental standards fuel the fear.

24.   Much of the waste is apparently dumped in Taiwan, though in many cases with lax standards, if any, for protecting the environment.

25.   Northeastern states, which have relatively strict emission regulations, have long complained that more lax standards in other states upwind from them increase their air pollution.

26.   The European Union has frequently complained about lax Asian standards on money-laundering, saying the prevalence of laundering aids the drug trade in Southeast Asia.

27.   The Failed Banks Recovery of Debts and Financial Malpractices Decree was passed last year to clamp down on corruption, fraud and lax standards in the Nigerian banking system.

28.   This has beenaggravated by lax accounting standards and insufficient transparency.

29.   They insisted that any new trade agreements must include labor and environmental standards to prevent corporations from moving factories out of America to nations with lax standards.

30.   With their own attention to appearance and strictly proscribed behavior, Japanese airline officials are privately horrified by what they see as lax standards on some Western carriers.