I've been vacationing by the shores of Gitche-Gumee this week, so I'm trying to give myself a little blog-cation as well. Here are some entertaining and controversial legal or employment-related developments from the news before I left. With apologies to John Oliver, let's just call it "Last Week Today." (Hey! I'm on vacation!)

Feel free to debate and discuss in the comment ...

A heartwarming tale for the coming Rosh Hashanah holiday . . .

In the course of arranging for an on-site inspection related to a worker injury lawsuit, Attorney Bailey (counsel for the defendant) wrote a letter to opposing counsel, Attorney Dinhofer, confirming that the on-site would take place on September 14.

Attorney Bailey apparently mis-typed the date, which should have ...

If you have a poor performer, is it better to make a clean break and fire him, or is it better to prolong his (and your) agony?

That is obviously a biased question, but some employers will do almost anything to avoid firing an employee, including the following:

• Nothing
• Issue 8 bazillion warnings but never act on them
• Offer a demotion, or a transfer to a less demanding job
• Let the employee ...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been ordered to pay $938,771 in attorneys' fees to Freeman after getting its clock cleaned in that lawsuit it filed over background checks and disparate impact based on race and ethnicity. (Freeman had asked for more than $1.5 million.)

In better news for the EEOC, it settled its background-check case against BMW for $1.6 million ...

This is my "Labor Day" post. (hehe)

Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer announced this week that she is expecting twin girls, and Yahoo's stock reportedly took an immediate dive. (H8rs!) Mayer said that she plans to take only two weeks off, and she can probably manage that because she has a nice nursery right off her CEO office. (You may recall that she had it built at the same time that she outlawed ...

From the annals of "Oh, no - I didn't -" . . .

The Winston-Salem Journal (my hometown paper - yay!) reports that a company is suing a former employee in the North Carolina Business Court for breach of his confidentiality and non-compete agreements.*

*The article ran in the Winston-Salem Journal but was written by a reporter from the Greensboro News & Record.

Douglas Poling was fired by Evo ...

Bless their hearts.

Employers, it is a losing battle to debate theology with your employees who request religious accommodation. If you don't believe me, ask Consolidated Coal Company and its parent, CONSOL Energy, which have been ordered to pay more than half a million dollars to an employee who retired rather than have his hand scanned by a biometric screener, which he believed was ...

What could WDBJ7-TV have done to prevent Wednesday morning's tragic on-air murders? Unfortunately, probably not a thing.

I'm a second-guesser, and I have spent much of the last 48 hours racking my brain about what the CBS affiliate in Roanoke, Virginia, could have done differently. Based on what I've been able to discern, the station did everything right.

(I see that Eric Meyer of The ...

Four quick thoughts on the Ashley Madison hack:

1. Should you post anything on the internet that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the New York Times? "No" used to be standard advice, but that isn't practical any more. I do online banking, but that doesn't mean I want my financial information all over the internet. Nor my credit card information, which is stored with ...