Current Events in July 2013

Anyone familiar with the restaurant scene in New York City knows that the chain restaurants dotting the most heavily-trafficked areas of midtown -- Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Applebees, and the like -- aren’t just subpar cuisine options; they’re also shockingly overpriced. The foot traffic provided by tourists staying in nearby hotels, along with the hordes of theatergoers on Broadway, ensures that these restaurants can charge obscene prices without anyone batting an eye.

A recently-filed lawsuit adds insult to injury, alleging that some of these restaurants are also automatically adding a secret gratuity without telling the diner in advance.

The suit, filed by tennis star Ted Dimond, says that at least five midtown eateries are in violation of city laws prohibiting restaurants from adding a built-in tip or other surcharge, except for groups of 8 or more diners. Even when that requirement is met, restaurants can only add tips of up to 15 percent. The complaint singles out the Applebee’s on W. 50th Street, the Ruby Tuesday on Seventh Avenue, the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Broadway, and the Red Lobster and Olive Garden located in Times Square.

More restaurants may be named

Dimond’s lawyer, Evan Spencer, told the Daily News that unwitting consumers, unaware of the built-in tip, have been leaving additional gratuities of up to 40 percent.

The News quoted a statement by Spencer calling the named defendants “the tip of the iceberg,” suggesting that there may be more restaurants padding customer’s already sky-high bills.

Indeed, court papers say that up to 1,000 other restaurants may be in violation of the law. Those restaurants could be identified as the litigation progresses.

“This is a significant consumer rights and antitrust case,” Spencer’s statement said. “These restaurants have jointly conspired to raise prices in a deceptive manner ... and the named defendants are only the tip of the iceberg.”

After the Supreme Court’s decision essentially killing California’s Proposition 8, proponents of so-called “traditional marriage” have filed an emergency order asking that a stay on same-sex marriage in the state be reinstated.

Prop 8, a ballot initiative passed in November 2008, limited the right to marry to opposite-sex couples. In a ruling on Wednesday, the Supreme Court held that anti-gay marriage groups did not have standing to defend the law.

Arizona group behind suit

Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based group formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund, asked the Supreme Court to overturn the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’s lifting of a stay that prohibited same-sex marriages in California.

The Ninth Circuit lifted the stay on Friday, two days after the Supreme Court’s decision came down.

Alliance Defending Freedom says the Ninth Circuit ignored the stay’s requirement that it be kept in effect “until final disposition by the supreme court.”

According to the group, that clause requires that the stay remain in effect for at least 25 days, which is the amount of time that petitioners are typically given to request a rehearing after a ruling from the high court.

“Hang it up”

John Eastman, who chairs the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes gay marriage, told NBC News that his group views the Ninth Circuit’s decision “as illegitimate and lawless.”

Ted Boutrous, an attorney for the American Foundation for Equal Rights, told reporters that anti-gay groups “should hang it up and quit trying to stop people from getting married,” according to The Guardian.

Lack of standing

The Supreme Court’s standing decision was based on the the fact that California’s current governor and attorney general declined to defend the law; the court held that the anti-gay marriage groups could not stand in elected officials’ shoes, given that they had not suffered “a concrete and particularized injury that is fairly traceable to the challenged conduct, and is likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision."

“We have never before upheld the standing of a private party to defend the constitutionality of a state statute when state officials have chosen not to,” read the opinion, penned by Chief Justice John Roberts. “We decline to do so for the first time here.”
The Supreme Court’s decision came just before Gay Pride Weekend in San Francisco.

Starting today, children have more privacy protection on the Internet. That's because a new Federal Trade Commission rule goes into effect that's intended to put parents in charge of their children's online activities.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) previewed the new rules last December, saying that he wanted to give a "very hard time" to companies that "make their living off of grinding out through various technological tricks private information about kids 12 and under." 

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has been beefed up under direction from Congress. It expands coverage to include mobile devices and social networks and also widens the definition of personal information to include cookies and other identifiers that track a child's activity online.

The rule also covers geolocation information, photos, videos and audio recordings. For purposes of the rule, a child is anyone 13 or younger. 

"No-brainer"

"To me this is such a no-brainer, it's an absolute priority. Children's privacy is an absolute top-line issue for me. I'm going to do every single thing I possibly can to make [COPPA] strong, stronger and yet stronger," said Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

“At the FTC, protecting children’s privacy is a top priority,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez. “The updated COPPA rule helps put parents in charge of their children’s personal information as it keeps pace with changing technologies.”

COPPA requires website and online operators that collect information about children under 13 to get parental permission before collecting, using or disclosing the information.

Getting everyone on board with the program is likely to be a challenge. The FTC has set up something called “safe harbor” programs, under which trade groups create self-compliance programs for their members.

COPPA safe harbor programs are offered by Aristotle International, Inc., the Children’s Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, ESRB Privacy Online, TRUSTe, and Privo, Inc.

The FTC has also released two new pieces designed to help small businesses that operate child-directed websites, mobile applications and plug-ins ensure they are compliant with upcoming changes to the rule.

The first is a document, “The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule: A Six-Step Compliance Plan for Your Business, which is designed especially for small businesses and contains a step-by-step process for companies to determine if they are covered by COPPA, and what steps they are required to take to protect children’s privacy. 

Finally, the FTC has updated a guide for parents, “Protecting Your Child’s Privacy Online,” that explains what COPPA is, how it works and what parents can do to help protect their children’s privacy online.

Brisdelle (paroxetine) has won the approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use as a treatment for moderate to severe hot flashes (vasomotor symptoms) associated with menopause.

Brisdelle, which contains the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor paroxetine mesylate, is currently the only non-hormonal treatment for hot flashes approved by the FDA.

There are a variety of FDA-approved treatments for hot flashes, but all contain either estrogen alone or estrogen plus a progestin.

The scourge of hot flashes

Hot flashes associated with menopause occur in up to 75 percent of women and can persist for up to five years, or even longer in some women. Hot flashes are not life-threatening, but the symptoms can be very bothersome, causing discomfort, embarrassment and disruption of sleep.

“There are a significant number of women who suffer from hot flashes associated with menopause and who cannot or do not want to use hormonal treatments,” said Hylton V. Joffe, M.D., M.M.Sc., director of the Division of Bone, Reproductive and Urologic Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “Today’s approval provides women with the first FDA-approved, non-hormonal therapeutic option to help ease the hot flashes that are so common in menopause.”

Positive test results

The safety and effectiveness of Brisdelle were established in two randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies in a total of 1,175 postmenopausal women with moderate to severe hot flashes (a minimum of seven to eight per day or 50-60 per week).

The treatment period lasted 12 weeks in one study and 24 weeks in the other study. The results showed that Brisdelle reduced hot flashes compared to placebo. The mechanism by which Brisdelle reduces hot flashes is unknown.

Side effects

The most common side effects in patients treated with Brisdelle were headache, fatigue and nausea/vomiting.

Brisdelle contains 7.5 mg of paroxetine and is dosed once daily at bedtime. Other medications such as Paxil and Pexeva contain higher doses of paroxetine and are approved for treating conditions such as major depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder.

All medications that are approved for treating depression, including Paxil and Pexeva, have a Boxed Warning about an increased risk of suicide in children and young adults. Because Brisdelle contains the same active ingredient as Paxil and Pexeva, a Boxed Warning about suicide is included in the Brisdelle label.

Additional labeled warnings include a possible reduction in the effectiveness of tamoxifen if both medications are used together, an increased risk of bleeding, and a risk of developing serotonin syndrome (signs and symptoms can include confusion, rapid heart rate, and high blood pressure).

Brisdelle will be dispensed with a medication guide that informs patients of the most important information about the medication. The guide will be distributed to patients each time the prescription is refilled.

Non-invasive brain stimulation may help stroke survivors recover speech and language function, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Stroke.

Between 20 percent to 30 percent of stroke survivors have aphasia, a disorder that affects the ability to grasp language, read, write or speak. It's most often caused by strokes that occur in areas of the brain that control speech and language.

"For decades, skilled speech and language therapy has been the only therapeutic option for stroke survivors with aphasia," said Alexander Thiel, M.D., study lead author and associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. "We are entering exciting times where we might be able in the near future to combine speech and language therapy with non-invasive brain stimulation earlier in the recovery. This could result in earlier and more efficient aphasia recovery and also have an economic impact."

Aphasia treatment

In the small study, researchers treated 24 stroke survivors with several types of aphasia at the rehabilitation hospital Rehanova and the Max-Planck-Institute for neurological research in Cologne, Germany. Thirteen received transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and 11 got sham stimulation.

The TMS device is a handheld magnetic coil that delivers low intensity stimulation and elicits muscle contractions when applied over the motor cortex.

During sham stimulation the coil is placed over the top of the head in the midline where there is a large venous blood vessel and not a language-related brain region. The intensity for stimulation was lower intensity so that participants still had the same sensation on the skin but no effective electrical currents were induced in the brain tissue.

Patients received 20 minutes of TMS or sham stimulation followed by 45 minutes of speech and language therapy for 10 days.

Significant results

The TMS groups' improvements were on average three times greater than the non-TMS group, researchers said. They used German language aphasia tests, which are similar to those in the United States, to measure language performance of the patients.

"TMS had the biggest impact on improvement in anomia, the inability to name objects, which is one of the most debilitating aphasia symptoms," Thiel said.

Researchers, in essence, shut down the working part of the brain so that the stroke-affected side could relearn language. "This is similar to physical rehabilitation where the unaffected limb is immobilized with a splint so that the patients must use the affected limb during the therapy session," Thiel said.

"We believe brain stimulation should be most effective early, within about five weeks after stroke, because genes controlling the recovery process are active during this time window," he said.

He’s facing up to 13 years in jail, up to $13,000 in fines, and an unforgiving judge.

His crime? Using water-soluble chalk on an outdoor sidewalk.

Jeff Olson, a former staffer for U.S. Senator Patty Murray, was charged in April with 13 counts of vandalism stemming from anti-bank slogans and drawings that he made on the sidewalk outside a San Diego Bank of America.

Olson told the San Diego Reader that, when the Occupy Wall Street protests swept across the country in the fall of 2011, he wanted to speak out in a different way.

"I thought my time would be better spent at the banks, trying to convince people to ditch these banks for local credit unions. I believed that was the best way to hold the executives and the corporations accountable for bringing this country to the brink of collapse," Olson told the Reader.

He began standing outside a Bank of America in North Park, San Diego, holding signs and, eventually, using chalk to scribble slogans like “stop big banks” and drawings, one showing octopus-like tentacles growing out of the bank, holding cash.

The chalk drawings were made between February and August 2012.

Mayor: “A stupid case”

Olson’s activism drew the attention of Darrell Freeman, a vice president of corporate security for Bank of America, who pressed the office of San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith to pursue criminal charges. Those charges came in April.

Bob Filner, the mayor of San Diego, said on Friday that the prosecution is “a stupid case.”

“It’s chalk,” Filner said, according to Los Angeles Times. “It’s water-soluble chalk. They were political slogans.”

But Goldsmith’s office says Olson’s behavior is “defacement” that caused “real and substantial monetary damages.”

“The [prosecution does] not fear that this reading of [the law] will make criminals of every child using chalk,” Goldsmith’s office said in court documents. “Chalk festivals may still be permitted. Kids acting without malice may still engage in their art. Circumventing the rules, without permission, under the color of night, and now waiving [sic] a banner of the First Amendment, does not negate the fact that defacement occurred, a private business suffered real and substantial monetary damages, and Defendant is responsible.”

Olson’s attorney, Tom Tosdal, is handling the case pro bono.

Judge issues gag order, forbids First Amendment defense

If the case wasn’t already disturbing enough, on Thursday Judge Howard Shore, who is handling the trial, issued a gag order forbidding Olson or anyone else involved in the case from talking to reporters.

Shore said he was troubled by the fact that media outlets had reported the maximum punishment of 13 years in jail and $13,000 in fines, even though the prosecution’s complaint clearly listed 13 charges, with the sentence range for each listed as “1 Yr/$1,000.”

Shore said the maximum sentence is “not going to happen and I would be surprised if it ever happened to any defendant with no criminal record.”

Earlier in the week, Shore granted a prosecution motion to forbid Olson’s attorney from using the First Amendment or free speech as a defense during the trial.