In my last post, I noted a difference between a comment by Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby that appeared in the Times last Thursday and a transcript of the briefing at which Kirby made the comment.
The discrepancy appears to reflect a mistake by the reporter, she tells me in an email. According to the reporter, she was typing what Kirby said and “it’s definitely possible” that she entered it incorrectly.
That happens of course. I appreciate her reply, which leaves me feeling better than if I were to learn that the Pentagon edits transcripts, other than to correct typographical errors, without telling the public.
Of course, there may be plenty of other things the Pentagon does without telling the public, but that’s another story.
In a briefing Thursday following U.S.-led airstrikes against 12 of the Islamic State’s oil refineries in Syria, Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesperson, acknowledged limits on the effectiveness of the bombardment without plans to follow-up with troops.
“We get caught up in the immediacy of these airstrikes,” Admiral Kirby said, “but this is going to take time, and nobody here in this building is not unaware of that.”
Of course, the comment caught my eye. I had to read the sentence several times to make sense of it. Kirby is saying, it seems, that the Pentagon thinks the aerial campaign in Syria will take awhile.
However, that spurred me to want to read Kirby’s comment in context – to know what he had said before and after the those sentences. Here’s what Kirby said, according to a transcript the Defense Department has posted online:
“We get caught up in the immediacy of these airstrikes. And it’s dramatic, and that footage is pretty cool. But this is going to take – this is going to take time. This is – this is not – this is not a short-term effort. And nobody here in the building is taking anything but a sober, clear-eyed view of the challenge in front of us.
So what did Kirby say? I will ask the Pentagon and the Times and let you know what I learn.
The briefing contained some other comments that, while less strained than Kirby’s comment above, are entertaining nonetheless.
For example, the current campaign in Iraq and Syria is costing taxpayers between $7 million and $10 million a day, according to Kirby, who added:
But, again, I want to remind you, that is an estimate right now. I know we owe you a better answer, and we’re continuing to work on that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer that we come back after we do the pencil work is different than that.
Pencil work? That makes me wonder whether the Pentagon plans to sketch a picture of a spreadsheet.
Later a reporter asked Kirby about a separate round of airstrikes by the U.S. against leaders of the Khorasan group in and around the Syrian city of Aleppo. According to the Pentagon, the group, which is reported to be an offshoot of al-Qaida, was in the advanced stages of an attack on a target in either the U.S. or Europe.
Specifically, the reporter wanted to know when the Pentagon thought the attack might happen. According to Kirby:
Far better to be [to] the left of a boom than to the right of it. And that’s what we’re trying to do, is get to the left of any boom to prevent the planning from going any further, and certainly to prevent them getting into an execution phase, which we don’t believe they were in yet, and that’s where you want to be.
Apparently when trying to prevent terror attacks, as when driving in some countries, it’s best to stay on the left.
Ride-sharing services may be facing legal risks in some cities but the taxi alternatives have permission to pick up passengers at the airport in Music City.
Nashville has become the first U.S. airport to authorize pick-ups by Uber, Lyft and other so-called transportation network companies provided the companies obtain a permit, pay a fee and identify themselves clearly.
Drivers who satisfy the guidelines will be able to retrieve passengers in areas designated for such pickups.
“This is a major milestone to embrace ever-evolving technology and accommodate new app-based transportation service operators,” Rob Wigington, chief executive of the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority, said in a press release. “We are continuously listening to the needs of our passengers, so that we can better provide and enhance the Nashville Airports Experience.”
The authorization comes as ride-sharing services face questions from public officials in California and elsewhere about the services’ adherence to consumer-protection laws. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that district attorneys in San Francisco and LA are questioning whether the companies mislead customers in connection with how carefully the companies review the backgrounds of drivers.
Regulators in California, which is home to Uber, Lyft and Sidecar, also are asking the companies to discontinue their practice of allowing customers to share rides. California law reportedly bars transportation services from charging more than one person for the same ride.
Ride-sharing services tap smartphones and GPS to connect drivers and passengers. Drivers who hold licenses and satisfy certain criteria can use the services to earn money with their cars.
According to the Tennessean, officials in Nashville held discussions with Lyft and Uber to lay out a system that would respond to demand for the services while addressing taxi operators’ concerns that their companies are being treated unfairly. As part of the plan, the companies will pay $3.50 per trip to pick up passengers. Taxis pay $1.50.
Uber is available in about 112 cities throughout the U.S. and Canada. Lyft serves about 63 cities in the U.S., while Sidecar serves 10.
The companies now compete with taxis in many cities. In August, New York City council member Ben Kallos proposed legislation that would direct the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission to create an app that would allow passengers to hail nearby drivers without having to wave down a taxi.
Kallos said the proliferation of ride-sharing services may mean the apps need an app.
“I think my nightmare would be hopping into a yellow cab in the future where they’ve got a phone for Uber a phone for Lyft a phone for Hailo…and they’ve literally got a dashboard covered in phones because they want to make sure they’re signed up for every single e-hail app,” Kallos told Mashable. “My preference would people to have one phone, one interface.”
Plans by a group that is planning to sue New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority after the agency rejected a proposed advertisement that refers to Muslims killing Jews highlights how cities can differentiate between categories of speech in accepting advertising on city-owned buses.
The M.T.A. said in a statement released Friday that it had rejected a request by American Freedom Defense Initiative, a pro-Israel group, to run advertisements that feature the quotation, “Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah,” credited to “Hamas MTV.” The ad reportedly parodies ads sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations that presented jihad as an idea of individual struggle rather than incitement to terrorism.
The ads ran on buses in cities other than New York, according to the M.T.A.
Under the First Amendment, a city’s allowing advertising on public buses does not make that property a public forum. Rather, a bus is a commercial forum, which means that a city can limit advertising so long as the city’s review of proposed ads is viewpoint neutral and substantially related to an important government interest.
In its statement, the agency defended its policy as viewpoint neutral. “The M.T.A. does not decide whether to allow or not allow a proposed advertisement based on the viewpoint that it expresses or because that viewpoint might be controversial,” the agency said.
The M.T.A. said that its security chief “concluded the proposed advertisement would lead reasonable observers to interpret it as urging direct, violent attacks on Jews, given turmoil in Gaza, Syria and Iraq and New York City’s heightened security concerns.”
Laws that encourage people to test themselves for HIV can bolster efforts to eliminate AIDS-related deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.
That’s the conclusion of a report published Wednesday by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and the South African AIDS Trust, a nongovernmental organization that coordinates efforts to counter HIV and AIDS in South Africa, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana.
The report examines laws relating to home or self-testing in the seven countries where the South African AIDS Trust operates as well as in the USA, United Kingdom and France. Though about 24.7 million people live with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, only about half know whether they have contracted the virus, according to the United Nations.
Michael Sidibe (l), executive director of UNAIDS, meets on January 18, 2013 with President Jacob Zuma of South Africa. (Photo courtesy of UNAIDS)
The compendium, which the law firm Arnold & Porter produced pro bono in tandem with law firms in each of the countries covered, examines whether self-testing is legal, the regulations that govern distribution of devices that make such tests possible, and protections for privacy.
“One of the key critical success factors in fulfilling the UNAIDS and global goal of zero new infections, zero deaths and zero discrimination is people knowing their own HIVsero-status and having the ability to act on the knowledge,” writes Jonathan Gunthorp, the South African AIDS Trust’s executive director, in a preface to the report.
Self-testing for HIV creates opportunities for people to access HIV treatment and prevention services. The opportunity is especially great in sub-Saharan Africa, where fewer people know their HIV status compared with people elsewhere in the world. More than 1.1 people in the U.S. live with HIV infection but about 84% of them know they have the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
All of the countries surveyed by the South African AIDS Trust provide citizens who have HIV with antiretroviral drugs that suppress the HIV virus and halt progression of the disease.
Among countries surveyed, the U.S. is the only one that has a home HIV test in the market. The Food and Drug Administration approved the kit, which is manufactured by OraSure Technologies, in 2012. Though the U.K. also has endorsed self-testing for HIV a test that satisfies the European Union’s standards for medical devices has yet to appear on shelves.
According to the report, South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia all would permit device makers to market home tests, although South Africa currently prohibits pharmacies from selling them. (Presumably the test could be sold over-the-counter.) By contrast, Botswana and Tanzania require that HIV tests be supervised by a trained professional.
Protections for privacy vary by jurisdiction as well, the report finds. Though France and Mozambique shield test results completely, most countries permit disclosure of test results pursuant to a court order or to guardians or partners, as well as in situations where a person is charged with a sexual offense or a disclosure is necessary for purposes of medical treatment.
Constitutional privacy protections exist in South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, while Mozambique, Botswana and Tanzania all have laws that protect HIV tests results specifically. The U.K. and France adhere to privacy protections enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights. In America, rules governing the confidentiality of HIV tests vary by state.
Depending on the jurisdiction, people who test positively for HIV may have a legal duty to disclose such information to sexual partners and insurers. Though none of the countries requires an employee to disclose his or her HIV status to an employer generally, the U.S. and U.K. require disclosure instances in which an employee’s HIV status ties directly to the job.
All of the countries surveyed offer counseling in connection with testing for HIV. For example, Tanzania requires counseling before and after testing for anyone who receives a test in a state-sponsored testing center. In France, counselors must discuss the limits in reliability of so-called rapid tests. Counseling that follows tests tends to give guidance on such topics as notifying partners, connecting with care and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, depending on the test result.
“HIV self-testing is not a magic bullet,” adds Gunthorp. “In combination with other innovative thinking, however, it may hold the key to increasing reach of testing, opening new options for hard to reach communities, making life easier for semi-discordant couples, and supporting both prevention and treatment.”
The report also examines laws that govern the liability of manufacturers for harm to consumers from devices themselves or from failure of a test to diagnose someone correctly.
On Saturday I heard a report on WFAN, a sports-talk station here in New York City, that a student at a public high school somewhere in the land was suspended recently after tweeting about his lack of playing time on the boys’ basketball team.
Or was he benched? Did I even hear the report? I haven’t been able to find the story.
Of course, educators want to teach kids how to voice concerns in a constructive way. But suspending a student for carping about playing time would be outrageous.
Still, the report, if true, raises the issue of student liberties in an age of social media. Suppose a student were to sue his school for suspending him after taking to Twitter to complain about playing time. Might he have a case?
The answer, I think, would be yes.
In 1969, the Supreme Court held that students have a First Amendment right to engage in political protest. The case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, barred a school from punishing students who showed up at school in black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.
However, for other types of speech, the Supreme Court has tended to balance the civil liberties of students and teachers with the need for school officials to lay down rules of conduct. For example, in 1988, the Supreme Court held that the principal of a Missouri high school could prevent the publication in a newspaper written and edited by a journalism class of articles about teen pregnancy and the effects of divorce on children in a school.
Writing for the majority, Justice White distinguished between the silencing of student speech in a public forum and regulation of student speech that ties to the curriculum:
“The latter question concerns educators’ authority over school-sponsored publications, theatrical productions, and other expressive activities that students, parents, and members of the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school. These activities may fairly be characterized as part of the school curriculum, whether or not they occur in a traditional classroom setting, so long as they are supervised by faculty members and designed to impart particular knowledge or skills to student participants and audiences.
Educators are entitled to exercise greater control over this second form of student expression to assure that participants learn whatever lessons the activity is designed to teach, that readers or listeners are not exposed to material that may be inappropriate for their level of maturity, and that the views of the individual speaker are not erroneously attributed to the school.”
That means school officials generally can censor speech in academic programs so long as the regulation does not favor any particular point of view and that the officials show a reasonable educational justification.
In April, a high school in Lakeland, Florida denied a request by an editor of the student magazine – who herself had endured chemotherapy – to write an article about a proposed constitutional amendment that would permit the use of medical marijuana.
“The fact that some members of the audience might disapprove of, or take offense to, a particular story is not an educationally reasonable basis for censorship,” Frank Lomonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, told the Lakeland Ledger. “Students can, and occasionally do, take their schools to court under the First Amendment and win if they are censored, and a situation like this one could certainly be a candidate.”
The courts have allowed a school to remove an editor who disregarded the school’s policy prohibiting all discussion of drugs in the student newspaper, and to suspend a student who make a sexually explicit speech at a school assembly after being advised by teachers that the remarks would be inappropriate.
That brings me back to the news report about the hoopster. Athletic programs tie to a school’s academic mission, but no one who reads a tweet from a student’s account would reasonably think the message carries the imprimatur of the school.
In that event, the action in the hoopster’s case could shift from the basketball court to a federal court.
Ball boys and girls shield players from sun at the U.S. Open. (Photo by Brian Browdie)
An 84-degree afternoon in September may not be the best time to take up tennis.
“Don’t turn your back to the net,” Sam, the Ghanaian tennis instructor, told me from across the court under an azure sky in Central Park on Thursday.
What I didn’t tell Sam is that I turned after hitting my forehand because circling back to the center of the court consumed less energy than moving there laterally while bouncing on the balls of my feet.
What I did tell Sam is that I’m out of shape. That is, I’m out of tennis shape, which is part of what brought me to Court 27.
My path started six days earlier under an equally blue sky at the U.S. Open. I made the trip aboard the No. 7 train from Times Square. “So you don’t have a car?” a nice lady from Fort Worth who happened to be seated next to me, asked me as we chatted about life in Manhattan, the players we hoped to see (she Roger Federer; me, Eugenie Bouchard) and the mild weather until recently in our respective cities.
“Lately we’ve had 13 days of 100 degrees, which means that the kids start football practice at 6:00 p.m. and the coaches tell them to drink water throughout the day,” the Texan told me.
I know what she means. On Court 27, I stopped play every 10 minutes or so to drink from a paper cone that I filled with water from a yellow and red Igloo cooler attached to the fence that runs behind the baseline.
Later I consumed a quart of lemon-lime Gatorade. Old-school flavor. While I drank I recalled the bounce in my legs that my 17-year-old self managed effortlessly in singles and doubles matches throughout four years on the tennis team during high school in Pennsylvania.
My sister and I also played a prodigious amount of tennis in our youth. Most nights after dinner we descended into our neon-lit basement, where we battled at table tennis for a half-hour before returning to our homework.
“I decided to take up a new sport at age 41,” Jessica, a woman who played on the adjacent court told me afterward while we sat on a steel bench painted green, our faces flush from the humidity.
Maybe tennis is my new, old sport.
Throughout the lesson, Sam directed me to stand at the service line, then in the back court and later at the net. At each spot, he hit a series of balls to my left or right. Maybe a dozen forehands, followed by roughly the same number of backhands. “Turn your body perpendicular to the net,” he called on the forehands that I hit wide. “Come up over the ball. Step into the shot.”
For every forehand I returned, I hit four more wide, deep or into the net. I also hit three balls beyond the fence. The ratio remained roughly the same on backhand and volleys. Sometimes, usually after rest, I experienced a surge of spring in my legs – a groove? – only to tire and bury the ball in the net a shot later.
At the Open, I made my way to the distant courts, where I watched Garbine Muguruza and Carla Suarez Navarro of Spain defeat their compatriot Arantxa Parra Santonia and Marina Erakovic of New Zealand in three sets.
I marveled at the apparent ease with which the women seemingly made every shot, even the ones that cost points. Every other game, the players retreated to chairs at courtside, where attendants shaded them with umbrellas opened expressly for that purpose. The teammates sipped water or sports drinks. Otherwise they said little, sitting quietly in the shade. Suarez Navarro tapped her feet continuously, as if she could not wait for play to resume.
After my lesson, I made my way back to the tennis center, which has an LED clock above the door the faces the courts. The clock has orange digits that give the place an air of precision. Near the other door a gentleman strung rackets on a stringing machine. All those rackets arrayed in a line appealed to me.
As I left the center, I passed a man a who headed toward the courts, two rackets poking through the opening in his backpack. “Beautiful day and so few people here,” he said as we paused to survey the rows of courts. “This is fun.”
A man who painted faces and made balloons in New York’s Central Park in exchange for donations cannot continue a lawsuit claiming the city cracked down on him selectively, a federal trial court in Manhattan has ruled.
The city did not single Alexander Alhovsky out for special treatment when it fined him for vending outside locations designated for so-called expressive matter vendors, according to a ruling released August 19 by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Alhovsky, who vended under the name Sasha the Clown along a walk that connects the park’s southeast entrance to the Central Park Zoo, was fined by police on two occasions in July 2010 and arrested on another for allegedly failing to abide by a rule that requires expressive matter vendors to limit their activity to spots designated by park officials.
Park police also charged Alhovsky’s spouse, Oksana Goncharenko, with storing personal belongings in violation of park rules.
The couple claimed that though they were among five mobile vendors in the vicinity of the walk – including a puppeteer, a juggler and a balloon-shaper – officials pestered only them in violation of federal law, which requires that the government treat all similarly situated people alike.
The court disagreed. “As balloon-shapers and facepainters, plaintiffs constituted ‘expressive matter vendors,’ who provided their art to customers in exchange for donations,” Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote in an opinion dated August 19. “By contrast, some of the named comparators, including four of the five named in response to interrogatories, were pure ‘entertainers’ – i.e., jugglers and puppeteers who did not sell their wares.”
At issue are rules adopted by the city that limit expressive matter vendors to vending in so-called green spots, which the city makes available daily on a first come, first serve basis. The vendors may perform their acts outside the green spots on a mobile basis, which means without the use of a cart, display stand or other device.
The city’s focus on Alhovsky and Goncharenko to the exclusion of other vendors in the vicinity demonstrated an intent to discriminate against the couple, the duo charged.
The number of violations that park officials handed out to vendors dissuaded the court. “Plaintiffs’ failure to establish differential treatment in their deposition testimony is only compounded by the documentary data, which indicates that, out of twenty-three notice of violations issued during a two-year time period to mobile vendors, ten of which were issued on Wien Walk, plaintiffs received only four such tickets,” Buchwald added.
The court also declined to hear a negligence claim by Alhovsky, who charged that he had been injured while rushing to claim a green spot from which to vend. Alhovsky can pursue the claim, which arises under New York law, in a state court, Buchwald ruled.
