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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently denounced the U.S. Department of Labor's six factor test for determining whether an intern is an employee in favor of [...]

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently affirmed a lower court's conclusion that a doctor in a service corporation was actually an employer, and thus could not [...], The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently affirmed a lower court's conclusion that a doctor in a service corporation was actually an employer, and thus could not bring a claim under federal discrimination statutes based upon her termination. The authors of this article discuss the case, which highlights the complex test that courts apply in determining whether a member of a professional business entity is eligible for protection under federal discrimination statutes.

In 2001--when Jack Welch retired as CEO of General Electric Co.--he was lauded as successfully delivering a significant return to investors during his tenure and was praised for his management [...]

Reversing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that a court may enforce the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 's mandatory duty to [...]

********** On April 10, 2007, the IRS and the Treasury Department issued final regulations under Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 409A. (1) Congress added IRC Section 409A to the Internal [...], The Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department recently issued final Section 4093 regulations, applicable to certain nonqualified deferred compensation plans. This article reviews the final regulations and highlights critical items to be considered by plan sponsors so that their deferred compensation arrangements will comply with the Section 409A provisions by the required deadline. Most deferred compensation plans subject to IRC Section 4093 will need to be reviewed and amended prior to December 31, 2007, in order to meet the documentation deadline for compliance with IRC Section 4093. Failure to take action could subject plan participants to harsh tax results.

In the wake of Enron and other corporate financial meltdowns, participants lost millions of dollars in company stock held in their employers' tax-qualified retirement plans. Congress reacted and passed the [...]

The role instabilities play in governing the evolution of solar and astrophysical plasmas is a matter of considerable scientific interest. The large number of sources of free energy accessible to such nearly collisionless plasmas makes general modeling of unstable behavior, accounting for the temperatures, densities, anisotropies, and relative drifts of a large number of populations, analytically difficult. We therefore seek a general method of stability determination that may be automated for future analysis of solar wind observations. This work describes an efficient application of the Nyquist instability method to the Vlasov dispersion relation appropriate for hot, collisionless, magnetized plasmas, including the solar wind. The algorithm recovers the familiar proton temperature anisotropy instabilities, as well as instabilities that had been previously identified using fits extracted from in situ observations in Gary et al. (2016). Future proposed applications of this method are discussed. Waves in some plasma systems can grow, rather than damp, in time drawing energy from the departures from equilibrium. We present a means of efficiently determining if a particular system is susceptible to such unstable behavior. Such determination is typically made by solving a difficult mathematical problem or making simplifying assumptions about the system. Our technique is compared to previously studied cases with good agreement. We then discuss plans for future application of the technique to measurements of the solar wind, a hot and tenuous magnetized plasma that fills our solar system. An efficient and automated algorithm for the general determination of solar wind stability is presentedThis method agrees with traditional stability calculations, including for systems with multiple sources of free energyThis method will be applied to future observations as a method for rapid determination of solar wind stability

Intervals of enhanced magnetic fluctuations have been frequently observed in the solar wind. But it remains an open question as to whether these waves are generated at the Sun and then transported outward by the solar wind or generated locally in the interplanetary medium. Magnetic field and plasma measurements from the Wind spacecraft under slow solar wind conditions on 19 March 2005 demonstrate seven events of enhanced magnetic fluctuations at spacecraft-frame frequencies somewhat above the proton cyclotron frequency and propagation approximately parallel or antiparallel to the background magnetic field Bo. The proton velocity distributions during these events are characterized by two components: a more dense, slower core and a less dense, faster beam. Observed plasma parameters are used in a kinetic linear dispersion equation analysis for electromagnetic fluctuations at k x Bo?=?0; for two events the most unstable mode is the Alfvén-cyclotron instability driven by a proton component temperature anisotropy T?/T||?>?1 (where the subscripts denote directions relative to Bo), and for three events the most unstable mode is the right-hand polarized magnetosonic instability driven primarily by ion component relative flows. Thus, both types of ion anisotropies and both types of instabilities are likely to be local sources of these enhanced fluctuation events in the solar wind. Ion temperature anisotropies and proton beam/core flows are sources of enhanced field observationsFor two events Alfven-cyclotron modes are most unstableFor three events magnetosonic modes are most unstable

This article discusses a recent United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decision that affirmed a ruling by the Administrative Review Board of the Department of Labor, which had determined that a company's disclosure of the identity of an Securities and Exchange Commission whistleblower who had caused an official investigation, resulting in the employee's workplace ostracism, constituted illegal retaliation under § 806 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a study of the variation of the relative abundance of helium to hydrogen in the solar wind as a function of solar wind speed and heliographic latitude over the previous solar cycle. The average values of AHe, the ratio of helium to hydrogen number densities, are calculated in 25 speed intervals over (~27 day) Carrington rotations using Faraday cup observations from the Wind spacecraft between 1995 and 2005. We find that for solar wind speeds between 350 and 415 km s-1, AHe varies with a clear 6 month periodicity, with a minimum value at the heliographic equatorial plane and a typical gradient of 1% per degree in latitude. Once the gradient is subtracted, we find that AHe is a remarkably linear function of solar wind speed. We identify the implied speed at which AHe is zero as 259 +- 12 km s-1 and note that this speed corresponds to the minimum solar wind speed observed at 1 AU. The vanishing speed may be related to previous theoretical work in which enhancements of coronal helium lead to stagnation of the escaping proton flux. During solar maximum the AHe dependences on speed and latitude disappear, and we interpret this as evidence of two source regions for slow solar wind in the ecliptic plane, one being the solar minimum streamer belt and the other likely being active regions.