US Department of Transportation
(“Biden-Harris Administration Announces Final Rule Requiring Automatic Refunds of Airline Tickets and Ancillary Service Fees“):
The Biden-Harris Administration today announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) has issued a final rule that requires airlines to promptly provide passengers with automatic cash refunds when owed. The new rule makes it easy for passengers to obtain refunds when airlines cancel or significantly change their flights, significantly delay their checked bags, or fail to provide the extra services they purchased.
“Passengers deserve to get their money back when an airline owes them – without headaches or haggling,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “Our new rule sets a new standard to require airlines to promptly provide cash refunds to their passengers.”
The final rule creates certainty for consumers by defining the specific circumstances in which airlines must provide refunds. Prior to this rule, airlines were permitted to set their own standards for what kind of flight changes warranted a refund. As a result, refund policies differed from airline to airline, which made it difficult for passengers to know or assert their refund rights. DOT also received complaints of some airlines revising and applying less consumer-friendly refund policies during spikes in flight cancellations and changes.
Under the rule, passengers are entitled to a refund for:
Canceled or significantly changed flights: Passengers will be entitled to a refund if their flight is canceled or significantly changed, and they do not accept alternative transportation or travel credits offered. For the first time, the rule defines “significant change.” Significant changes to a flight include departure or arrival times that are more than 3 hours domestically and 6 hours internationally; departures or arrivals from a different airport; increases in the number of connections; instances where passengers are downgraded to a lower class of service; or connections at different airports or flights on different planes that are less accessible or accommodating to a person with a disability.
Significantly delayed baggage return: Passengers who file a mishandled baggage report will be entitled to a refund of their checked bag fee if it is not delivered within 12 hours of their domestic flight arriving at the gate, or 15-30 hours of their international flight arriving at the gate, depending on the length of the flight.
Extra services not provided: Passengers will be entitled to a refund for the fee they paid for an extra service — such as Wi-Fi, seat selection, or inflight entertainment — if an airline fails to provide this service.
DOT’s final rule also makes it simple and straightforward for passengers to receive the money they are owed. Without this rule, consumers have to navigate a patchwork of cumbersome processes to request and receive a refund — searching through airline websites to figure out how make the request, filling out extra “digital paperwork,” or at times waiting for hours on the phone. In addition, passengers would receive a travel credit or voucher by default from some airlines instead of getting their money back, so they could not use their refund to rebook on another airline when their flight was changed or cancelled without navigating a cumbersome request process.
The final rule improves the passenger experience by requiring refunds to be:
Automatic: Airlines must automatically issue refunds without passengers having to explicitly request them or jump through hoops.
Prompt: Airlines and ticket agents must issue refunds within seven business days of refunds becoming due for credit card purchases and 20 calendar days for other payment methods.
Cash or original form of payment: Airlines and ticket agents must provide refunds in cash or whatever original payment method the individual used to make the purchase, such as credit card or airline miles. Airlines may not substitute vouchers, travel credits, or other forms of compensation unless the passenger affirmatively chooses to accept alternative compensation.
Full amount: Airlines and ticket agents must provide full refunds of the ticket purchase price, minus the value of any portion of transportation already used. The refunds must include all government-imposed taxes and fees and airline-imposed fees, regardless of whether the taxes or fees are refundable to airlines.
The final rule also requires airlines to provide prompt notifications to consumers affected by a cancelled or significantly changed flight of their right to a refund of the ticket and extra service fees, as well as any related policies.
In addition, in instances where consumers are restricted by a government or advised by a medical professional not to travel to, from, or within the United States due to a serious communicable disease, the final rule requires that airlines must provide travel credits or vouchers. Consumers may be required to provide documentary evidence to support their request. Travel vouchers or credits provided by airlines must be transferrable and valid for at least five years from the date of issuance.
Offhand, these rules strike me as reasonable and well within the DOT’s statutory power. Especially as the industry consolidates, having consistent and transparent rules in place across airlines makes good sense.
While this is mostly good news for consumers, I would imagine that the second-order effect will be an increase in ticket prices. The main cause of flight cancelations and significant delays is weather. Currently, the airlines essentially hold ticket buyers hostage, forcing them to take another flight or accept a voucher for a later flight. Presumably, they’ll now lose money when customers don’t rebook.
NYT
(“Live Updates: Harvey Weinstein’s Conviction Is Overturned by New York’s Top Court“):
New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges, a stunning reversal in the foundational case of the #MeToo era.
In a 4-3 decision, the New York Court of Appeals found that the trial judge who presided over Mr. Weinstein’s case had made a crucial mistake, allowing prosecutors to call as witnesses a series of women who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them — but whose accusations were not part of the charges against him.
Citing that decision and others it identified as errors, the appeals court determined that Mr. Weinstein, who as a movie producer had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, had not received a fair trial. The four judges in the majority wrote that Mr. Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with, but instead for much of his past behavior.
Now it will be up to the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg — already in the midst of a trial against former President Donald J. Trump — to decide whether to seek a retrial of Mr. Weinstein.
“It is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges,” Judge Jenny Rivera wrote on behalf of the majority.
When reached by phone, Arthur Aidala, Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer, said, “This is not just a victory for Mr. Weinstein but for every criminal defendant in the state of New York, and we compliment the Court of Appeals for upholding the most basic principles that a criminal defendant should have in a trial.”
Spokeswomen for the Manhattan district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It was not immediately clear on Thursday morning how the decision would affect Mr. Weinstein, 71, who is being held in an upstate prison in Rome, N.Y. But he is not a free man. In addition to the possibility that the district attorney’s office may try him again, in 2022, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison in California after he was convicted of raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel.
The result strikes me as obvious. One would think a judge assigned to a case this high-profile would be smarter than this.
Jodi Cantor
(“Harvey Weinstein’s conviction was fragile from the start“) agrees:
The overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s New York sex crimes conviction on Thursday morning may feel like a shocking reversal, but the criminal case against him has been fragile
since the day it was filed. Prosecutors moved it forward with risky, boundary-pushing bets. New York’s top judges, many of them female, have held rounds
of pained debates over whether his conviction was clean.
Outside the justice system, evidence of Mr. Weinstein’s sexual misconduct is overwhelming. After The New York Times revealed
allegations of abuse by the producer in 2017, nearly 100 women came forward with accounts of pressure and manipulation by Mr. Weinstein. Their stories sparked the global #MeToo reckoning.
But while Mr. Weinstein’s alleged victims could fill an entire courtroom, few of them could stand at the center of a New York criminal trial. Many of the horror stories were about sexual harassment, which is a civil violation, not a criminal one. Others fell beyond the statute of limitations. One of the original accusers was dropped from the trial because of allegations of police misconduct.
Manhattan prosecutors, under pressure
for not pursuing charges earlier, made a series of gambles.
First, they proceeded with a trial based on only two victims, who accused him of sexually assaulting them but also admitted to having consensual sex with him at other times — a combination that many experts say is too messy to win convictions
. To prove their case against Mr. Weinstein, who denies all allegations of non-consensual sex, the prosecutors had little concrete evidence.
So to persuade the jury, the lawyers turned to a controversial strategy that would ultimately lead to the conviction’s undoing. They put additional women with accounts of abuse by Mr. Weinstein — so-called Molineux witnesses — on the stand to establish a pattern of predation. The decision seemed apt for the moment: In a legal echo of the #MeToo movement, Mr. Weinstein was forced to face a chorus of testimony from multiple women.
The women’s testimony was searing, and when Mr. Weinstein was convicted in 2020, and then sentenced to 23 years in prison, it looked like the prosecutors had expanded the possibilities for holding sex offenders accountable.
“I did it for all of us,” Dawn Dunning
, who served as a supporting witness in the trial, said in an interview afterward. “I did it for the women who couldn’t testify. I couldn’t not do it.”
But the move also risked violating a cardinal rule of criminal trials: Defendants must be judged only on the acts they are being charged with.
That became the main basis for Mr. Weinstein’s repeated appeals of his conviction. For years, his lawyers have argued that his trial was fundamentally unfair, because it included witnesses who fell outside the scope of the charges. In addition to the alleged sexual assault victims, prosecutors brought in character witnesses who portrayed Mr. Weinstein as a capricious, cruel figure.
In 2022, a New York appeals court dismissed those concerns and upheld
his conviction, after a vigorous debate by the judges. They wrote that the testimony from the additional witnesses had been instrumental in showing that the producer did not see his victims as “romantic partners or friends,” but that “his goal at all times was to position the women in such a way that he could have sex with them, and that whether the women consented or not was irrelevant to him.”
This February, when New York’s highest court heard the producer’s latest and final appeal, the proceedings did not garner much attention
. But they felt quietly dramatic: Seven of the state’s highest judges, four of them women, were debating whether the man whose alleged offenses formed the cornerstone of the #MeToo movement had been treated fairly in court.
Today the court decided, with a majority that included three female judges, to throw out the conviction and order a new trial. Mr. Weinstein remains convicted in California and will be moved to prison there.
“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the judges wrote in their decision on Thursday.
“No person accused of illegality may be judged on proof of uncharged crimes that serve only to establish the accused’s propensity for criminal behavior,” the opinion continued.
That the decision was only 4-3 is more of the same problem that led to this result: judges bending over backward to punish Weinstein for being a despicable human being. Alas, that’s not against the law.
Given that Weinstein is 72 and has a long sentence waiting for him in California—and that prosecutors thought this gambit was the only way to convict him in New York—it may well be prudent to simply let him rot away there.
If this isn’t about the Republicans, what is? It’s really a theatre reference. When a show is failing, they send in the clowns to distract. Entertain.
Think about it. If the shoe fits…there really is hope for this sad, angry group of failures. No rehearsal necessary. A One-Act Show.
Clowns.
There’s hardly one of these characters who doesn’t fit the bill. No rehearsal needed. You have your perverts, morons, cowards, make believers, big mouths and cheats.
To start with, there’s the Lead Clown, with one foot in jail. His failures are legendary. Physically, he’s rotund, with different hair color, style and makeup every day.
His persona changes constantly with the weather. As he changes, so do the SWIVEL HEADS. One day they’re for something, or someone the next day they’re opposed to that person or idea.
You could say it’s entertaining but it’s really not funny.
The Swivel Head has no backbone, so they’re extra easy to identify. The largest part of their anatomy are their mouths. They usually go nonstop but say very little.
They’re so desperate for a leader, they genuflect when they see or hear Donald Trump. That’s really funny. A guy who’s failed in almost every enterprise he’s been involved in, they elevate to the next thing to a Deity.
In thinking about it, he’s so inept, he probably couldn’t even make it as a Buffoon Clown.
In spite of that, Trump the Clown dominates the news. With the Republicans, the Democrats, the Media, the Publishing Industry, the Court System, almost everything. In fact, he’s almost as well known and popular as Taylor Swift.
As a businessman he’s anything but astute. He’s short of money and there’s a golden opportunity staring him right in the face and he’s not taking advantage of it.
He tried Baseball Cards and people really didn’t flip over them. Foot in the Mouth Disease occurred with his gold-plated sneakers. They ended up giving fans athlete’s feet. Painful.
I hate to do this. The poor clown needs help. And direction. He’s created the Circus. He’s got the mouth. The platform. The potential audience. Fools for fans. And the fools seem to be ready and willing to dance to his tune.
Exactly. Take note of this. Music. He should do a song and dance routine. THE BLONDE BOMB SHOW. It could be explosive.
Its author has had to fend off criticism and misinformation, but the report offers hope for a realistic conversation
As the dust settles around Hilary Cass’s report
– the most extensive and thoroughgoing evidence-based review of treatment for children experiencinggender distress ever undertaken – it is clear her findings support the grave concerns I and many others have raised. Central here was the lack of an evidential base of good quality that could back claims for the effectiveness of young people being prescribed puberty blockers or proceeding on a medical pathway to transition.I and many other clinicians were concerned about the risks of long-term damaging consequences of early medical intervention. Cass has already had to speak out
against misinformation being spread about her review, and a Labour MP has admitted she “may have misled” Parliament
when referring to it. The review should be defended from misrepresentation.
The policy of “affirmation” – that is, speedily agreeing with a child that they are of the wrong gender – was an inappropriate clinical stance brought about by influential activist groups and some senior gender identity development service (Gids) staff, resulting in a distortion of the clinical domain. Studies indicate that a majority of children in the absence of medical intervention will desist – that is, change their minds.
David Bell is a retired psychiatrist and former president of the British Psychoanalytic Society
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