The judge, Robert G. Mahoney, said the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 did not give the SEC authority to charge an individual who no longer is an officer or director of an SRO.

SEC enforcement staff members, who have appealed the adverse ruling to the full commission, called it an “unduly narrow interpretation” of the law.

“If left undisturbed, the [administrative law judge’s] ruling would lead to the absurd result that officers and directors of SROs could evade the commission’s authority through resignation,” the appeal said.

What’s relevant in the case, according to SEC staff members, is when the alleged transgressions occurred, not Mr. Sodano’s status when the charges were brought.

The ruling is “absurd,” said Bill Singer, a securities lawyer with Stark & Stark of Lawrenceville, N.J., and a former Amex lawyer. “It points out the hypocrisy embedded in the SRO system, which retains for two years jurisdiction [over individual] brokers.

“What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander,” he added.

In his decision, Mr. Mahoney said the section of the exchange act that covers SRO officials “is unambiguous on its face, referring to the officers and directors of an SRO only in the present [tense].”

Legal technicality

After SEC enforcers brought formal charges against him last March, Mr. Sodano argued that, based on legislative history, Congress did not want the SEC to have authority over former SRO officials.

In 1987, Congress amended both the exchange act and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 to allow for a permanent bar against individual brokers or advisers, regardless of whether they were registered currently. At the same time, Congress did not likewise amend sections in those laws applying specifically to officers and directors at SROs, Mr. Sodano argued.

Mr. Mahoney ruled that when Congress includes particular language in one section of a statute but omits it in another section, “it is generally presumed that Congress acts intentionally.”

SEC spokesman John Nester said he was not aware of any attempt by the agency or anyone in Congress to change the laws. Calls to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee were not returned.

Unfair treatment alleged

Mr. Sodano’s lawyer, William Baker III, a partner in the Washington office of Los Angeles-based Latham & Watkins LLP, declined to comment. But in a filing with the SEC last month, Mr. Baker said the SEC enforcement team “grossly exaggerates” the violations and “ignores the extensive efforts” Mr. Sodano made to bring the exchange into compliance with order-handling rules.

The filing said that the SEC has not filed any enforcement actions against New York Stock Exchange officers for similar problems. The Amex itself settled related charges last March.

Mr. Sodano was hired by NASD chief executive Frank G. Zarb in June 1997 as the NASD’s chief financial officer. Today, Mr. Sodano is dean of the Frank G. Zarb School of Business at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y.

"Microsoft continues to have a stranglehold over the two products ... that nearly all consumers use," Houck said during an antitrust compliance hearing in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "Very little has happened in five years ... in those markets."

The California group of states -- the larger of two groups of states that sued Microsoft for antitrust violations -- will ask for an extension of all the middleware portions of the antitrust judgement, except for a section that governs the royalties Microsoft can charge PC manufacturers for the Windows operating system. Most of the antitrust judgment was scheduled to expire in November.

Microsoft lawyer Rick Rule said the company would need time to respond to Houck's proposal. Microsoft first heard of the plan to ask for an extension on Friday, he said, and the California group plans to file a formal extension request with the court in mid-October.

Rule seemed to suggest Microsoft would fight the five-year extension. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly declined to impose a 10-year judgment in 2002, he said. "We think the picture of the computer industry is much rosier," Rule added. "We think it's clear that the decree has done its job."

Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said the company will respond in more detail after it has seen the extension request. "We're a bit surprised that a few states are now requesting an extension of the consent decree, since they indicated just last month that they're not too fond of it," Evans said.

In August 2006, Microsoft already agreed to an extension of the section of the judgment requiring it to make its communications protocols available to other software vendors. Microsoft's efforts to fix technical documentation for the protocols have run into several delays. Houck on Tuesday asked Kollar-Kotelly to extend the communications protocol section of the judgment until 2012.

The California group does not "have any confidence" Microsoft will continue to improve the communications protocol program without oversight, Houck said. An independent auditor's report just issued questions whether Microsoft has released all the protocols mandated in the judgment, he added.

The California group's extension proposal comes after the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York group of states filed briefs last month saying the antitrust judgment has done its job. "There have been a number of developments in the competitive landscape ... that suggest that the Final Judgments are accomplishing their stated goal of fostering competitive conditions among middleware products, unimpeded by anticompetitive exclusionary obstacles erected by Microsoft," said the report from the DOJ and New York group, which includes five states.

But Houck Tuesday disputed that assessment. At the time of the judgment, a handful of PC vendors were preinstalling a competing Web browser on PCs, he said. Today, no major ones are, he said.

Abe, 52, a nationalist who entered office as Japan's youngest postwar premier, did not announce a date for his departure from office.

Word of Abe's resignation comes after his scandal-scarred government lost control of the upper house of parliament to the resurgent opposition. The LDP still controls the more powerful lower house, which chooses the prime minister.

Abe's resignation marks a rapid fall from power for a prime minister who came into office a year ago with ambitious plans to repair frayed relations with Asian neighbors, revise the 1947 pacifist constitution, and bolster Japan's role in international diplomatic and military affairs.

The prime minister, whose grandfather was premier and whose father was a foreign minister, initially met with success in fence-mending trips last autumn to China and South Korea.

But a string of scandals starting late last year quickly eroded support for Abe. Four Cabinet minister were forced to resign over the past nine months, and one — his first agriculture minister — committed suicide over a money scandal.

Abe also was facing a battle in parliament over extension of the country's refueling mission in support of the U.S.-led operation in Afghanistan.

Abe had said he would quit if he failed to win parliamentary passage of legislation extending the Afghan mission, in which Japanese ships refuel coalition vessels in the Indian Ocean.

"I have pondered how Japan should continue its fight against terrorism," Abe said Wednesday. "I now believe we need change. So Japan must continue its fight against terrorism under a new prime minister."

The plenary session of the lower house was to be delayed, media reports said, but an official of the lower house said she could not confirm that.

Opposition lawmakers said it was about time Abe resigned.

"It is irresponsible for him (to quit) after he gave a policy speech and was to face parliament questioning. He should have quit right after the upper house elections," Mizuho Fukushima, head of the opposition Social Democratic Party, told NHK.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said that in 2004 the IRS received about 3.8 million miscellaneous income statements reporting some $150 billion in earnings that could not be computer-matched to a filed tax return because of missing or erroneous ID numbers.

The inspector general's office, which does oversight of the tax agency, looked at a sampling of these mismatched IDs and calculated that some 6,000 of these individuals had not filed 2004 tax returns despite having income statements indicating they earned more than $100,000. That translates into some $630 million in income, it said.

Much of the income involved compensation for nonemployees such as independent contractors reported on unusable miscellaneous income statements.

The office said that it looked at 620 income and wage statements with mismatched names and ID numbers reporting more than $60,000 in earnings. Using IRS automated data systems, it was able to manually match half of those to taxpayer accounts in IRS records.

It urged that Congress pass legislation, backed by the administration, that would require employers to verify the accuracy of ID numbers for the employees they hire. The office also recommended that the IRS do more to investigate high-dollar miscellaneous income and wage statements with mismatched names and IDs.

The IRS, in response, said it supported the legislation but concluded that the cost of manually tracking down mismatched names and IDs might exceed that of the benefits.

"The IRS's opposition to this recommendation is confounding," said Inspector General J. Russell George, adding that their audit showed that increased examination of statements would more than pay for itself in increased revenue.

Although the United States has banned the sale of toys made with lead paint since 1978, those products continue to seep into the domestic market.

The CPSC also said China will increase inspections of consumer products destined for the U.S. and assist the agency in tracing hazardous products to the manufacturer, distributor and exporter in China.

"If there is a product recall by a U.S. company that sourced the goods from a Chinese supplier, under the new agreement, China will now let the CPSC know if that supplier also sells its products to other U.S. importers," said Eric Autor, international trade counsel for the National Retail Federation, who attended the summit.

Chinese officials also said China would now require U.S. importers to obtain "export registration" for products that cause concern.

China will also ask importers to provide product designs to Chinese suppliers that are in compliance with U.S. safety standards and that U.S. importers provide reasonable prices to manufacturers to prevent Chinese producers from cutting corners and using cheaper unsafe materials.

Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, said the agreement between the U.S. and China to eliminate the use of lead paint was "long overdue."

"China faces huge challenges in enforcing adherence to U.S. safety standards in products it exports to this country," Donald Mays, senior director of product safety with Consumers Union, said in a statement. "However, we are encouraged by the fact that U.S. toy manufacturers and retailers have indicated that they want federally mandated third-party testing of children's products."

China moved ahead of Canada as the leading source of imports into the United States, according to the most recent reading from the Commerce Department.

China also accounts for more than 80 percent of the world's toy production, primarily due to its low labor and raw material costs.

This year, Mattel (Charts, Fortune 500), the world's largest toymaker, faced three toy recalls that affected millions of its toys made in China. Mattel said those toys posed lead poisoning and choking risks to small children.

Another toymaker, RC2 Corp., recalled 1.5 million "Thomas & Friends" wooden railway toys in June that were also made in China over concerns that the surface paints on the toys contained lead.

"This is an important signal from the Chinese government that it is serious about working with CPSC to keep dangerous products out of American homes," CPSC's acting chairman, Nancy Nord, said in a statement. "We will be looking for meaningful cooperation on the ground, that means not just with the Chinese government but also with industry at both ends of the supply chain."

For its part, the CPSC has also come under fire from critics who said the agency is not doing enough to ensure that unsafe products do not reach store shelves.

Analysts point out that the CPSC currently doesn't have pre-market jurisdiction, which means that the agency can't test products for safety issues before they hit the market.

In the wake of the recent recalls affecting toys, toothpaste, tainted pet food and other products imported from China, some U.S. lawmakers are taking a closer look at U.S. manufacturers' and the CPSC's role in ensuring product safety.

To that end, on Wednesday, Mattel's CEO Robert Eckert is expected to testify before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Consumer Product Safety Commission about the problem of recalls of products made in China.

Separately, on Tuesday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., introduced a bill to ban the use of lead in the manufacturing of children's toys, jewelry and other products.

Current voluntary guidelines set forth by the CPSC recommend additional testing of potentially unsafe products rather than an immediate recall of products found to contain lead.

"After a summer of recalls, it's time we make it crystal clear that lead has no place in our children's products. We must keep these unsafe toys off our shores and out of our stores," Klobuchar said in a statement.

The bill provides that lead in any children's product shall be treated as a "banned hazardous substance." It would set a ceiling for a trace level of lead at 0.04 percent per part for children's products, and 0.02 percent for jewelry.

If enacted, this legislation would be the first time standards for lead levels in children's products would be set by federal law.

While current law does not ban lead in toys, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has voluntary guidelines set at 0.06 percent.

Later in the day, the CPSC and Chinese officials held a panel discussion to assess what responsibility, if any, retailers have to ensure that the products they sell comply with U.S. safety standards.

"The CPSC acknowledges that product recalls pose a certain challenge to retailers," said NRF's Autor, adding that the agency said that under Federal statutes, manufacturers, including importers, are responsible for product safety.

"By the time products reach retailers, their best safety enforcement is to do random samplings. That is less than a perfect solution to the problem," Autor said.

Given that retailers generally are unaware of who the Chinese suppliers are to U.S. manufacturers, Autor said he too believes the burden falls on U.S. importers to best maintain product quality and safety controls.

The hearing will be before Judge Charles A. Porter, rather than Judge Gary Larson, who had accepted the plea. That could help Mr. Craig’s lawyers, who are arguing, in effect, that Judge Larson erred in accepting the plea.

It is not known whether Mr. Craig will appear, said Judy Smith, a spokeswoman for Billy Martin, a lawyer for Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig was arrested on June 11 by an airport police officer and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct.

In exchange, prosecutors dropped a gross misdemeanor charge of interference with privacy. Mr. Craig has since said his plea was a mistake. He filed a request on Monday to withdraw it.

The jury pool was asked to fill out a lengthy questionnaire. One of the questions: "Do you regularly follow professional basketball or consider yourself a fan?"

U.S. District Judge Gerard Lynch also read aloud a list of names of possible witnesses, including Knicks players Stephon Marbury and Malik Rose.

During individual questioning, the judge dismissed one prospective juror, a coffee trader, after the man revealed his anguish over being fired from a job based on a co-worker's claim of inappropriate touching.

A maintenance man and Knicks fan was kept in the pool despite suggesting that game tickets were overpriced and that Thomas's track record as coach was poor. "I can speak freely? The team's not doing too well," he said as Thomas listened nearby.

Eight jurors were to be picked for a trial expected to last three weeks, meaning a verdict could come just before the Knicks open training camp.

Browne Sanders, a former Northwestern basketball star and married mother of three, wants reinstatement to her job as senior vice president of marketing and business operations. She's also seeking hefty damages after spending five years with the storied franchise.

The plaintiff contends she was fired in January 2006 "for telling the truth" while going through internal channels to stop the harassment by Thomas. Madison Square Garden, which owns the team, insisted her dismissal was because she "failed to fulfill professional responsibilities."