Categories
New York City

Remembering 9/11

Writing in the Times recently, Dwight Garner described the novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer as “precious,” which it kind of is. But the book continues to resonate with me as a remembrance of 9/11.

The novel tells a story of Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old in New York City whose father died that day in the World Trade Center. After his father’s death, Oskar sets off on a journey through the city to find the lock that matches a key that belonged to his father. Early in the novel, Oskar remembers his father:

“Dad always used to tuck me in, and he’d tell the greatest stories, and we’d read the New York Times together, and sometimes he’d whistle ‘I am the Walrus,’ because that was his favorite song, even though he couldn’t explain what it meant, which frustrated me. One thing that was so great was how he could find a mistake in every single article we looked at. Sometimes they were grammar mistakes, sometimes they were mistakes with geography or facts, and sometimes the article just didn’t tell the whole story.

I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.”

The novel ends with a series of photographs of a man whose fall from the Twin Towers was captured by Richard Drew, a photojournalist on assignment with the Associated Press in an image that captures the horror of that day. Oskar reverses the series, flip-book style, so that the man appears to be falling upward. Oskar describes the effect:

“And if I’d had more pictures, he would have flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would have poured back into the hole that the plane was about to come out of. Dad would’ve left his messages backward, until the machine was empty, and the plane would’ve flown backward away from him, all the way to Boston.”

The chronology continues in reverse, with Oskar’s father walking backward to the subway and home, spitting coffee into his mug, unbrushing his teeth, and, the night before, telling Oskar a story, in reverse, from “I love you” to “Once upon a time…”

Categories
Law

Animal shelter not liable for dog attack on owner where owner had opportunities to observe animal’s aggressiveness

An animal shelter that fails to warn someone who adopts a dog of the animal’s aggressiveness is not liable for injuries when the dog later attacks the owner if the shelter’s negligence was not the cause of those injuries.

Though the North Shore Animal League America neglected to warn the owner that the dog had previously bitten someone in the face, the animal’s displays of aggressive behavior in the first three months that the owner brought it home gave the owner sufficient knowledge of the dog’s vicious tendencies, a state appeals court in Brooklyn ruled in a decision dated Aug. 17.

The ruling overturned an order by a trial judge who permitted the lawsuit to proceed based on the owner’s claims of negligence and breach of warranty implied by the adoption agreement.

The parties agreed that after the owner adopted the dog on May 19, 2012, the dog acted aggressively, including growling when the owner attempted to feed it. Eight weeks later, the dog bit the owner’s hand when she tried to retrieve a cookie from the floor, about seven weeks before the dog allegedly bit her in the face.

The weeks between the first bite on July 13 and the attack that followed “gave the plaintiff sufficient knowledge of the dog’s vicious propensities before she was bitten again on September 3, 2012,” wrote four judges of the Appellate Division’s Second Department. “Similarly, once she knew of the dog’s vicious propensities, the plaintiff was in the best position to take precautionary measures to prevent harm to herself and others.”

While New York law has held for two centuries that the owner of a domestic animal who either knows or should have known of that animal’s vicious propensities will be liable for harm the animal causes as a result, in this case the owner’s becoming independently aware of the dog’s tendencies meant that the shelter’s alleged failure to advise the owner of them “was not a proximate cause of her injuries,” the court added.

According to the court, the trial judge should have dismissed both the claim of negligence against the owner and the contention that the owner violated a warranty that the dog was fit to be a pet. Even if the adoption of an animal from a shelter were a transaction to which a so-called warranty of merchantability applies, the owner failed to notify the shelter of the dog’s propensities within a reasonable time after she discovered or should have discovered them, the court ruled.

Categories
Law

Law that allows owners of property that lies on border between school districts to choose school does not apply to condominiums, court rules

A New York law that allows the owner of property intersected by a boundary between two school districts to choose which school to send their children to does not apply to condominiums, a state appeals court in Brooklyn has ruled.

The decision means that owners of apartments in a 28-unit building in Bronxville cannot enroll their children in schools in Tuckahoe public schools, a top system in Westchester County.

Owners of apartments in the building testified at trial that they paid school taxes to Tuckahoe for nearly three decades and relied on representations from officials in the district that the right to select their school was available to them. The jury sided with the owners but the trial judge, at the urging of the district, set the verdict aside and entered judgment in the district’s favor.

The ruling on appeal turned on interpretation of New York’s education law, which denotes two circumstances when a homeowner may choose their child’s school: when a boundary between districts divides a dwelling or when the boundary crosses property that an owner-occupied single-family home is located on.

The owners alleged that the boundary crossed property that the condo association owned in common. (The boundary did not, they acknowledged, run through their individual units.) That led the appeals court to side with the district.

“Here, the plain language [of the law] and its legislative history demonstrate that the statute is applicable only where property is improved by one single family dwelling unit, and not multiple single family dwelling units, and where the school district boundary line intersects property that the dwelling unit is located on,” wrote Justice Cheryl Chambers on behalf of the Appellate Division’s second judicial department in a decision dated July 20. “The [trial court] properly determined that the subject 28-unit condominium complex is not ‘an owner-occupied single family dwelling unit’ located on property intersected by a boundary line within the meaning of [the law].”

The court also rejected the owners’ contention that they relied to their detriment on representations of district officials, finding no basis for concluding that district officials had engaged in any “wrongful or negligent conduct” or otherwise misled the owners.

The ruling may have consequences for the value of the owners’ apartments. Tuckahoe, which sites between White Plains to the north and New York City to the south, is one of the state’s safest cities, according to a survey last year by ValuePenguin, a personal finance website, which also noted Tuckahoe’s walkability and commuter-friendliness.

Categories
News

News quiz, week ending Aug. 5

Who wrote last Sunday in The Washington Post: “Donald Trump said he has made a lot of sacrifices. He doesn’t know what the word sacrifice means”?

Ride-hailing service Uber gave up its battle to enter which country?

On Monday, U.S. warplanes began an offensive against the Islamic State group in which country?

Who said in a statement released Monday, “While our party has bestowed upon [Donald Trump] the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are best among us”?

Apple swapped its emoji of a pistol for an emoji of what?

What is the title of the latest installment in the Harry Potter series?

Who said that Donald Trump is “woefully unprepared” and “unfit” to be president?

The U.S. Supreme Court blocked an order from a lower court that directed a public school district in Gloucester County, Virginia to do what?

A U.S. company got permission to land a spacecraft where?

What does the Twitter hashtag #palletsofcash refer to?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Answers

Ghazala Khan, whose son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq in 2004

China

Libya

Senator John McCain

A squirt gun

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

President Barack Obama

Allow a transgender student who identifies as a boy to use the boys’ bathroom at the high school

On the moon

Delivery of $400 million by the U.S. to Iran to settle a failed arms deal that dates to the overthrow of the shah in 1979. The settlement was announced in January on the same day a nuclear pact with Iran was completed and Tehran released four American hostages. Critics (and some members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard) referred to the payment as ransom. According to the Obama administration, the payment marked the first installment of a $1.7 billion refund and had nothing to do with Iran’s agreeing to release the prisoners.

Categories
Law

What the DNC hacking says about the need for campaign finance reform

The hacking of computers at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the publication of internal emails that followed may reveal as much about problems with our system of paying for political campaigns as it does about cybersecurity.

With its signs of complicity by Russia, the resignation of the DNC’s chairwoman, sounding off by Donald Trump, shades of the Watergate scandal and the widening scope of the intrusion, the incident leaves plenty to ponder. Add to that list the reality that our politics are overpowered by money.

The roughly 19,000 messages published by WikiLeaks show the lengths to which staff at the DNC went in their courting of benefactors, with offers of access, appeals to ego and flashes of desperation all intended to spur people to give. As the Times reported, the emails reveal “in rarely seen detail the elaborate, ingratiating and often bluntly transactional exchanges necessary to harvest millions of dollars from the party’s wealthy donor class.”

Republicans do it, too. Both parties chase wealthy supporters because a series of rulings by the Republican majority of the Supreme Court allow it and leave the parties with little incentive not to.

The pursuit has intensified since 2010, when the majority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission construed spending on political campaigns to be a form of speech entitled to protection under the First Amendment. Four years later, in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the same justices invalidated aggregate limits on contributions to candidates for federal office, political parties and political action committees.

The DNC emails show how the court’s elevating the First Amendment rights of donors over those of our democracy misconstrues the former and warps the latter. As Bert Neuborne, a professor of constitutional law at New York University Law School, asserts in his book, “Madison’s Music,” the failure (or refusal) of the majority to read the Bill of Rights as the Virginian wrote it has created the current reality by unmooring the Free Speech Clause from the rest of the First Amendment.

As Neuborne sees it, political contributions fall into a category of communication to which the the court has accorded less protection under the First Amendment than speech itself. He writes:

“The term ‘the freedom of speech’ as used in Madison’s First Amendment has no intrinsic literal meaning. Like any abstract legal concept, it must be given meaning by human judgment. That’s why threats, blackmail, extortion, false statements causing harm, obscenity, and ‘fighting words’ are treated by the Court as outside ‘the freedom of speech.’”

Because the act of spending money is communicative conduct and not pure speech, Congress can place reasonable limits on spending. The government also can recognize that “reinforcing political equality is unquestionably a substantial government interest,” according to Neuborne, and, therefore, a legal basis for limits on campaign finance.

Justice Breyer has argued as much. In his dissent in McCutcheon, Breyer explained that campaign finance laws “are rooted in the constitutional effort to create a democracy responsive to the people – a government where laws reflect the very thoughts, views, ideas, and sentiments, the expression of which the First Amendment protects.”

The solution lies with the court, which means that it lies with the next president. She or he may fill as many as four vacancies on the court as justices age or retire. In her speech on Thursday to the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton pledged to appoint justices “who will get the money out of politics and expand voting rights, not restrict them.” She also has promised to pursue a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

Though he has railed against political action committees, Donald Trump has said he would nominate conservatives to the court in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who constituted one-fifth of the majority whose rulings abrogated limits on campaign spending and touched off the free-for-all that the emails from the DNC chronicle.

Meanwhile, the status quo endures. At the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia on Tuesday, former Governor Charlie Crist of Florida, a onetime Republican who is now running as a Democrat for Congress, moved through the lobby amid a sea of the party’s top givers. “We must have set up five fundraisers today,” he told the Times. “This is the bank.”

Categories
News

News quiz, week ending July 29

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a bombing last Saturday that killed at least 80 people in what city?

Who won the Tour de France?

How many times has he won the Tour?

Which company agreed to buy Yahoo’s internet business?

Match the quote (letter) with the speaker (number):

a) “Don’t boo, vote.”

b) “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

c) “When they go low, we go high.”

d) “In the spring of 1971, I met a girl.”

###

1) Michelle Obama

2) Former President Bill Clinton

3) Hillary Clinton

4) President Barack Obama

John Hinckley Jr. will be freed from a mental hospital, a judge ruled. Why was Hinckley hospitalized?

What breakthrough did the ALS ice bucket challenge deliver?

A seven-year-old girl died on Tuesday after being hit by a rock thrown by what resident of the Rabat Zoo in Morocco?

How many Baltimore police officers were found guilty of crimes in the death of Freddie Gray?

Who became the world’s third-richest person?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Answers

Kabul

Chris Froome

Three

Verizon

a, 4; b, 3; c, 1; d, 2

He tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981. A jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity.

One of the projects it funded pinpointed a gene called NEK1 as a likely culprit.

An elephant

Zero

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, whose fortune is estimated to be worth $65.3 billion. He trails only Bill Gates, worth $78 billion, and Amancio Ortega, founder of the Zara clothing chain, whose fortune is estimated to be $73.1 billion.

 

 

Categories
Law

Sanders supporters lose bid to block superdelegates

A dearth of superdelegates (Photo: Jeff Solari, Wikimedia Commons)
A dearth of superdelegates (Photo: Nick Solari, Wikimedia Commons)
Supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders have lost their bid to block the Democratic Party’s use of superdelegates at this week’s convention in Philadelphia.

The First Amendment does not give individual members a right to control internal processes of the party, which is expected to nominate Hillary Clinton for president, a U.S. district court in Manhattan ruled recently in a challenge filed by Jeff Kurzon, an attorney and Sanders supporter.

Kuzon charged in court paper’s that the party’s use of superdelegates dilutes the power of the popular vote and sought a court order that would bar them from voting at the convention. The Democratic Party has 713 superdelegates, who include members of Congress and party leaders, and who can vote for the candidate of their choice. Clinton leads Sanders among superdelegates, 602-48.

“An individual’s First Amendment associational rights do not empower him to compel nomination procedures that guarantee his preferred candidate a ‘fair shot’ at winning a party’s nomination,” Judge Paul Oetken wrote in a ruling dated July 18.

Oetken, who noted that the party has “countervailing First Amendment rights – which would be clearly infringed by the injunction that Kurzon seeks in this case,” also rejected a contention by Kurzon that weighting the votes of superdelegates as the Democrats do violates party members’ rights to equal protection of the law. The prohibition on valuing one person’s vote over another does not apply to party nominating conventions, Oetken said.

The court disagreed with Kuzon that use of superdelegates constitutes a breach of contract. Even if rules for selection of delegates could be construed as an enforceable contract, they “are suffused throughout with references to the role of superdelegates and clearly permit their use,” wrote Oetken.

Because of the unlikelihood that Kuzon could succeed on the merits of his challenge, the court declined to determine whether the actions of a national political party constitute state action – a “difficult question,” according to Oetken and a prerequisite for Kuzon to have prevailed on his constitutional claims.

Eighty-five percent of the Democratic Party’s delegates to the convention are pledged, which means they are required to vote for a particular candidate based on the result of their state’s primary or caucus. The remainder are superdelegates.

The party’s rules committee, at the urging of Sanders’ supporters, agreed on Saturday to narrow the pool of superdelegates to elected officials within the party in future nominating contests

Categories
New York City

Heat dome

On Saturday at 7:00 p.m. in New York City the temperature was in the low 90s, which we imagine had something to do with a “heat dome” moving across the country. That sent us to the Angelika for a screening of Café Society, the new Woody Allen film.

Midway through the movie, we felt our pulse slow and the city cool. And by the time we emerged afterward onto Houston Street, a light wind had come up.

Categories
News

News quiz, week ending July 22

A gunman fatally shot three police officers on Sunday in which city?

Who won golf’s British Open?

What “first” did his victory represent?

What company launched a rocket on Monday to the International Space Station?

How many years in a row is the world on pace to set a record for high temperatures, according to scientists at NASA?

What actor and cast member of Saturday Night Live left Twitter after a harassment campaign directed at her?

How did Twitter respond?

Who was booed off the stage at the Republican National Convention when he did not endorse Donald Trump for president?

Why did the National Basketball Association decide to move its All-Star Game from North Carolina?

Senator Tim Kaine, whom Hillary Clinton named as her running mate, previously served as mayor of which city?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Answers

Baton Rouge

Henrik Stenson

He became the first Swedish man to win a golf major

SpaceX

Three

Leslie Jones

The company banned the organizer, Milo Yiannopoulos, from it service

Senator Ted Cruz

To protest a state law that bans transgender people from using bathrooms in public buildings that do not correspond with their gender at birth

Richmond, Virginia

Categories
News Sports

Mets end series with loss to Cubs

Wilmer Flores homered to score two runs in the eighth inning but that didn’t save the Mets from losing 6-2 to the Cubs on Wednesday at Wrigley Field.

The loss left the Mets with three wins in their last six games and looking up at the Marlins for the second wild-card slot. Bartolo Colon allowed the Cubs’ runs on eight hits in four and one-third innings.

The game marked the final meeting between the two teams during the regular season.

After the game, manager Terry Collins told reporters the Mets would continue to rely on Colon, 43, despite his struggles, which include three starts without finishing six innings. “We have no other options right now,” he said

The Mets start a three-game series on Friday in Miami. “We’ve got to make up some ground,” Collins added.