Covington today issued a client advisory providing an overview of expected congressional investigation activity in the new Congress.  The advisory describes the new leadership and priorities for the major congressional oversight and investigation committees.  While Republicans, who now control both houses, are expected to focus their investigations on the Obama Administration, those investigations inevitably draw…

Yesterday, President Barack Obama signed into law a $1.1 trillion appropriations act that allocates approximately $5.4 billion in emergency funding to support the U.S. Government’s response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.  Although this funding falls short of the Administration’s initial $6.18 billion request—approximately $1.54 billion of which was to be allocated to a contingency fund similar to appropriations made in response to pandemic influenza—all emergency funding for Ebola provided by the act is available for immediate use.  The funding is split between the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), the Department of Defense (“DoD”), the Department of State, and the Agency for International Development (“AID”).  Government contractors and grant recipients can expect these agencies to use their respective shares of the funding to create a number of opportunities in the coming months.

The European Commission’s Work Programme for 2015 falls in line with Juncker’s political guidelines for his Presidency. The overall focus lies on the creation of jobs and economic growth, and the vision is to achieve this through a greener, more digital and more unified European economy. At the same time the Commission has restated its…

By Lala Qadir

The Supreme Court of Canada recently issued a 4-3 decision that gave the police a green light in conducting warrantless searches of an arrestee’s cell phone as long as the search is directly related to the suspected crime and records are kept.  Over three dissenting judges that characterized mobile phones as “intensely personal and uniquely pervasive sphere of privacy,” the majority held a balance can be struck that “permits searches of cell phones incident to arrest, provided that the search—both what is searched and how it is searched—is strictly incidental to the arrest and that the police keep detailed notes of what has been searched and why.”

Canada’s high court ruling stands in stark contrast to that of the United States.  Earlier this year, the United States Supreme Court heard argument on two cell phone cases—Riley and Wurie—ultimately holding that warrantless searches of cell phones, even when held incident to an arrest, were unconstitutional unless they were subject to specific exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

Over the past year, we have been tracking the uptick in executive and regulatory actions affecting the labor and employment practices of government contractors.  Last Friday, the D.C. Circuit upheld one of those regulations.  The decision concludes the first skirmish in what promises to be a lengthy and high-stakes legal battle involving industry, Congress, and the Administration.

In the wake of investment losses from the 2008 market downturn, many fiduciaries of employee benefit plans faced lawsuits brought by plan participants.  Most cases involved defined contribution plans, in which participants sought to recover investment losses that had directly reduced their individual benefits.  In contrast, fewer cases were brought against fiduciaries of defined benefit plans, largely because plan sponsors bear the investment risk in the defined benefit context–which means investment losses do not directly affect participants’ individual benefits.  Courts have generally held that participants lack standing to sue defined benefit plan fiduciaries for investment losses–until now.

The next few years will be difficult for Latin American countries.  Low petroleum and commodity prices are adversely affecting the economies of the region.  At the same time, there is increased pressure on the governments for economic and social reforms.

Colombia, which has had a strong economy, recently passing Argentina as the third largest in…