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When a party or candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the election, do voters view the winner as legitimate? This scenario, known as an electoral inversion, describes the winners of two of the last six presidential elections in the United States. We report results from two experiments testing the effect of inversions on democratic legitimacy in the US context. Our results indicate that inversions significantly decrease the perceived legitimacy of winning candidates. Strikingly, this effect does not vary with the margin by which the winner loses the popular vote, nor by whether the candidate benefiting from the inversion is a co-partisan. The effect is driven by Democrats, who punish inversions regardless of candidate partisanship; few effects are observed among Republicans. These results suggest that the experience of inversions increases sensitivity to such outcomes among supporters of the losing party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 10-yr record of PM2.5 (particulate matter of aerodynamic diameter ≤ 2.5 μm), collected in Cache Valley near downtown Logan, Utah, reveals a strong peak in the PM2.5 concentration climatology that is tightly localized in mid-January. The cause of this subseasonal variation in the PM2.5 climatology is investigated through dynamical downscaling and large-scale diagnostics. Climatological analysis of the U.S. winter mean ridge reveals a mid-January subseasonal shift in the zonal direction, likely in response to variations in the Rossby wave source over the central North Pacific Ocean. This displacement of the winter mean ridge, in turn, has an impact on regional-scale atmospheric conditions-specifically, subsidence with local leeside enhancements and midlevel warming over Cache Valley. The analyses of this study indicate that the subseasonal peak of long-term mean PM2.5 concentrations in Cache Valley is linked to the large-scale circulations' subseasonal evolution, which involves remote forcing in the circumpolar circulations as well as possible tropical-midlatitude interactions. This subseasonal evolution of the winter mean circulation also affects precipitation along the West Coast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continental temperature inversions significantly influence air quality, yet little is known about their variability in frequency and intensity with time or sensitivity to dynamical changes with climate. Inversion statistics for six upper-air stations in the American Southwest are derived for the period 1994--2008 from radiosonde data reported by the Global Telecommunication System (GTS) and National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), which use different significant level standards. GTS data indicate that low-level elevated inversions have increased in frequency at four of six sites, consistent with enhanced regional stagnation projected by models. NCDC data, in contrast, show remarkable declines in weak, near-surface inversions through 2001, indicating local surface conditions may counteract atmospheric dynamics in regulating inversion activity and air quality. To further test the sensitivity of inversion activity to climate, associations between wintertime inversion frequency and large-scale circulation are quantified using the self-organizing map technique. Twenty-four representative circulation patterns are derived from North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) 500-hPa geopotential height fields, and these patterns are correlated with inversion frequency at each site. Inversion activity in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Albuquerque and Santa Teresa, New Mexico, is found to correspond well with large-scale anticyclonic ridging; however, sensitivities to large-scale circulation in Denver, Colorado, and Flagstaff and Tucson, Arizona, are weak. Denver stands out in exhibiting a higher percentage of near-surface inversions in winter than the other southwestern sites. These findings indicate that dynamical changes with climate will not uniformly influence inversions and hence urban air quality conditions in the American Southwest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent months, the US Internal Revenue Service has issued or announced new regulations that address several issues of importance to Canadian-based taxpayers--specifically, concerns about reorganizations involving foreign interests in us real estate (FIRPTA), inversions, and the portfolio interest exemption. This article describes the changes to the law contained in these regulations and the rationale behind the changes. The regulations under section 897 of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) will be expanded to take into account the new rules permitting foreign mergers to qualify for non-recognition treatment, among other changes. The temporary regulations relating to the inversion rules refine the parameters of the scope of IRC section 7874 to better define when a domestic corporation will be affected by this provision and to prevent the use of certain foreign partnerships to avoid it. Lastly, the proposed regulations relating to the portfolio interest exemption address the application of the 10 percent shareholder test when a non-resident alien or a foreign corporation is a partner in a partnership that receives interest income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]