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The purpose of this paper is to analyze recent regulations and proposed regulations issued by the US Department of Labor (DOL) that relate to the reporting of compensation paid to service providers to employee benefit plans.

The paper reviews the statutory provisions of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, as amended (ERISA), applicable DOL regulations as available in the Federal Register and certain public comments and a DOL FAQs document regarding the applicable regulations available on the DOL's web site. The paper also relies on observations of common market practice based on actual experience.

Recent DOL regulations – in particular those related to Form 5500 reporting and the “Necessary Services Exemption” – may significantly affect the reporting obligations of certain private investment fund sponsors with respect to their employee benefit plan investors. It shows that, although the scope of these regulations is understandable in the context of participant‐directed defined contribution plans, they may be less so in the context of defined benefit plans, which invest more frequently in private investment funds. There are some potential exceptions, on which private investment fund sponsors may be able to rely. Achieving compliance with the rules as drafted, however, may be time‐consuming and costly.

Private investment fund sponsors may wish to begin looking at their compensation and service provider arrangements in light of these regulations and consider how best to respond.

The paper contains two experienced ERISA practitioners' analysis of recent regulations on which relatively few stakeholders have seemed to focus to date.

Online news‐retrieval services have undergone rapid evolution in the past year. Public awareness of microcomputer‐based services available in homes and offices has increased tremendously. Both BRS and DIALOG have segmented their products to include separate, less expensive access for home micro‐computer users; both new services include some access to indexing of current‐events topics. The demise of the New York Times Information Service (NYTIS) as an independent vendor has left the marketing of its databases to Mead Data Central's NEXIS system. The void caused by the withdrawal of NYTIS has posed problems for its former users, and created opportunities for expansion of news‐retrieval services available on the large utilities. Additional databases have been introduced in the past year to cater to specialized audiences and markets. This paper summarizes the new developments which have occurred since publication of the author's survey of news‐retrieval systems in Reference Services Review one year ago.

Purpose – UK laws surrounding the duty to prevent individuals being drawn into terrorism often focus on the need to safeguard the populace from exploitation by terrorist or extremist groups. It is within this context that countering violent extremism (CVE) work often takes place. This chapter explores how this legal duty shapes CVE projects in the UK, drawing on practitioner’s perspectives.

Methods – Writing from the perspective of practitioners from ConnectFutures, an organization that has been operating since 2013 in the UK and internationally, who advocate for a contextual safeguarding approach to provide a more holistic attitude to the prevention of violent extremism and exploitation.

Findings – Exploring the intersections between multiple forms of criminal exploitation, as well as engaging in the spaces and places young people experience harm, allows practitioners working in the CVE space to contribute to the protection of individuals from terrorist and extremist radicalization.

Originality/Value – Applying the new developed contextual safeguarding framework to CVE projects provides a contemporary and alternative ways to conduct CVE work. The chapter provides overviews of three CVE projects running with young people today in the UK, exploring how the new frameworks are adopted within these programs, all designed to address the complex causes of violent extremism.

Sport teams not only compete with other teams for the ultimate prize but also for a share of customer mind space. For winning fan loyalty and resultant economic success, management of sport teams need to focus on team-branding, and thus, developing and measuring a team’s brand equity becomes essential, which is the core purpose of this paper.

Current work builds upon previous efforts to develop a reliable and, more importantly, a parsimonious sport team brand-equity (STBE) index, as opposed to the usual multi-dimensional reflective scales, too complicated and not of much use to practitioners.

The authors propose that the STBE index having eight indicators is enough to capture the full domain of the concept and provide a snapshot about the ability of a team’s administration to create strong emotional bonds with its fans.

Apart from demographics of the respondents, an important drawback is that the STBE index is from the perspective of television or online viewers and not those watching live in stadiums. This work contributes to extant sports brand equity literature by proposing a simpler scale made of casual variables, as opposed to reflective scales running into large number of similar items, a first of its kind in this domain. The authors also are able to forward the growing call for developing more of such scales through this effort.

Not only can the present scale be easily used by sport-marketers and researchers, it will be especially useful for marketing managers who want to associate their brands with sport teams, as it affects performance of their own brand.

The work represents a novel effort for developing a team-based brand equity and, to the authors’ knowledge, has not been attempted in this literature before.

The recent House of Lords decision in Carmichael v. National Power plc decided that a casual/zero‐hours worker was self‐employed and thus excluded from most of the basic employment statutory rights. The aims of this article are to note the incidence and characteristics of the casual workforce in the UK and EU; to explore the current legal framework applying to casual workers, including the decision and implications of Carmichael; to note recent and intended legal measures which have particular relevance for casual workers; to evaluate the likely effectiveness of those recent or proposed legal measures; and to consider possible alternative strategies to establish an appropriate framework for casuals.