Android Kucluk

SEATAC, Wash. — Supporters of a $15 minimum wage, approved by voters here in November but partly struck down last week by a county judge, asked the state's highest court to hear an appeal.

The SeaTac wage statute, which has been challenged repeatedly by business groups that say it will cripple businesses and lead to job cuts, takes partial effect on Wednesday, covering about 1,600 hospitality and travel workers in the city. Coverage for an additional 4,700 low-wage workers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, which is within city limits, was struck down on Friday by Judge Andrea Darvas of King County Superior Court, who agreed with the arguments by lawyers for the business groups — led by Alaska Airlines — that the legal reach of voters did not extend into airport property administered by the Port of Seattle.

The appeal request filed with the Washington Supreme Court hinges on that same issue, the limits of authority. Can a local government with one of the nation's busiest airports within its borders administer wage rates at airport-based companies?

"The legal question is whether the airport is a legal island," Sergio Salinas, the president of a Service Employees International Union local unit that has pushed for the SeaTac wage, said at a news conference here.

Washington already has the highest state minimum wage in the nation, at $9.32 an hour, but stands to be surpassed by California, which recently approved a $10 minimum, phased in over two years. The federal minimum is $7.25.

The SeaTac statute, which passed by 77 votes with about 6,000 cast, exempts airlines and small businesses, including restaurants with fewer than 10 employees. But Alaska Airlines, in its court arguments, has said higher costs paid by contractors would be passed along to consumers.

Tuesday's legal filing does not guarantee that the state's Supreme Court will take the case. The court may decide that a lower appeals panel should take up the matter first. But both sides have said they think the legal issues in the case will ultimately be brought to the high court.

The debate over minimum wages has recently taken on broader political dimensions, with plans by Democrats to push ballot initiatives in 2014, increasing wages — and creating opportunities to discuss economic inequality — in hotly contested congressional races. And Seattle's new mayor, Ed Murray, who pledged support during his campaign for a $15 minimum wage in Washington's largest city, last month created a committee of business and labor leaders and elected officials that will report back to him early in the year on legislative plans.

CAIRO — Egyptian prosecutors on Tuesday ordered three detained journalists from the news channel Al Jazeera English to be held in custody for 15 more days, on charges that include belonging to a terrorist group and harming the country's reputation abroad.

Human rights organizations have denounced the charges, accusing the authorities of deliberately confusing the act of reporting on the Muslim Brotherhood with belonging to the group, which has been officially classified as a terrorist organization. Rights advocates said the accusations had sent a worrying signal about the military-backed government's approach to press freedoms.

Four journalists from Al Jazeera were arrested on Sunday, and one, an Egyptian cameraman, was later released. Prosecutors began interrogating the three remaining in custody, including the bureau chief, Mohamed Fahmy, a Canadian-Egyptian citizen; Peter Greste, an Australian correspondent; and Baher Mohamed, an Egyptian producer.

The arrests were part of a widening government crackdown on the Brotherhood, the Islamist group that fell from power after the military's ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, a Brotherhood leader, in July.

Last Wednesday, the government designated the Brotherhood a terrorist group, and in recent days, Egyptian courts have convicted hundreds of Mr. Morsi's supporters who participated in protests, sentencing them to prison.

The charges against the journalists also appeared intended as retaliation against Al Jazeera, the Qatari channel whose Arabic-language service has strongly backed Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood. The English language news service takes a far more independent editorial position.

Several journalists from both the English- and Arabic-language services have been detained since Mr. Morsi's ouster, and two Al Jazeera Arabic journalists have remained in prison for months.

Prosecutors released a lengthy list of accusations on Tuesday, saying the journalists worked for a network affiliated with the Brotherhood, joined a terrorist group and possessed the kind of equipment typically found in Egyptian news bureaus, including cameras, gas masks and microphones, without a permit.

Mr. Fahmy, a veteran journalist who has worked for CNN and contributed to The New York Times, was singled out in the statement, accused both of terrorism and of turning suites in the Marriott into a news media center where he "manipulated" footage to harm Egypt's reputation, prosecutors said.

A brother, Sherif Fahmy, said that Canadian diplomats had not attended the beginning of his brother's interrogation. Mr. Fahmy, who suffered a dislocated shoulder unrelated to his arrest, had not been allowed to see doctors at Tora Prison, where he was being held, the brother said.

Ragia Omran, a human rights advocate, called the terrorism-related accusations "ridiculous" and said they could be applied to "anyone who works in journalism."

The charges, she said, were part of a pattern of aggressive prosecutions under the military-backed rulers, including convictions of protesters, that were seldom pursued even under Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's authoritarian president who was deposed in 2011.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Pascal Abidor sued the government after American border agents handcuffed him, placed him in a cell and questioned him for several hours, then seized and kept his laptop for 11 days.

The government's right to search travelers' electronic devices at the border was upheld in a ruling released by a federal judge on Tuesday, which dismissed a lawsuit challenging this policy.

In his opinion, Judge Edward R. Korman of the Eastern District of New York found that the plaintiffs did not have standing for their lawsuit because such searches occur so rarely that "there is not a substantial risk that their electronic devices will be subject to a search or seizure without reasonable suspicion."

Even if the plaintiffs did have standing, Judge Korman found that they would lose on the merits of the case, ruling that the government does not need reasonable suspicion to examine or confiscate a traveler's laptop, cellphone or other device at the border.

"There's no silver lining to this decision," said Catherine Crump, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the plaintiffs. "It's not just that we lost the case. It's that the judge decided against us on multiple alternative grounds."

The lawsuit was filed in 2010 by Pascal Abidor, a graduate student in Islamic studies, who sued the government after American border agents removed him from an Amtrak train crossing from Canada to New York. He was handcuffed, placed in a cell and questioned for several hours, then his laptop was seized and kept for 11 days.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the National Press Photographers Association were also plaintiffs in the case, arguing that their members travel with confidential information that should be protected from government scrutiny.

In rejecting this argument, Judge Korman cited the rarity of electronic device searches and questioned whether travelers need to carry computers containing sensitive data when they travel abroad.

"While it is true that laptops may make overseas work more convenient," he wrote, "the precautions plaintiffs may choose to take to 'mitigate' the alleged harm associated with the remote possibility of a border search are simply among the many inconveniences associated with international travel."

Mr. Abidor said he was disappointed but not entirely surprised by the ruling.

"I can't say it wasn't foreseeable based on the line of questioning by the judge during the initial hearing," Mr. Abidor said. "He just seemed so skeptical of the basic premise that people need to travel with devices."

Officials for the United States Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment.

In his opinion, Judge Korman emphasized how infrequently border agents search or detain electronic devices, but it is unclear how accurately the government tracks these statistics.

According to Customs and Border Protection, the agency conducts about 15 device searches a day at American entry points. But a 2011 assessment of this practice by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the border agency, cited problems with how these incidents are counted.

The report noted: "C.B.P.'s system for entering the results of electronic device searches did not allow analysts to accurately identify incidents and seizures related to electronic device search activity, thus hindering C.B.P.'s ability to monitor and evaluate performance and making it difficult to provide accurate operational data concerning searches of electronic devices."

While the courts have generally supported the government's authority to search travelers at the border, based on the government's interest in combating crime and terrorism, a decision last year placed some limits on more intrusive device searches.

Last March, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California ruled in United States v. Cotterman that reasonable suspicion of criminal activity was required for a forensic search of a device confiscated at the border — a more extensive exam, as opposed to a cursory look at photos or other files.

That decision applies to states covered by the Ninth Circuit, including California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii. Judge Korman's ruling will not have as much of a legal impact, since it comes from a district court rather than a circuit court.

"It maintains the status quo, which is that the government is free everywhere except in the Ninth Circuit to conduct all types of electronic device searches without reasonable suspicion," Ms. Crump from the A.C.L.U. said. "We are considering an appeal, but we haven't made a decision one way or the other yet."

A personal escort — flying first class to be well rested and alert — will accompany the painting "The Head of Christ" from the moment it leaves the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, until it is safely locked in the vault at Springfield Museums in Massachusetts this month, when it will be exhibited in the United States for the first time.

A 24-hour escort is not an unusual requirement for valuable international museum loans. What makes the security arrangements — estimated to cost more than $31,000 — notable in this case is that the painting is a fake.

And it is not just any fake, but an imitation Vermeer by the most notorious forger of all: Han van Meegeren, the World War II-era painter whose counterfeits were so convincing that, after the war, he had to create one for witnesses to avoid harsh punishment for selling a national treasure to the Nazi leader Hermann Göring.

Clearly, some forgeries are more equal than others. In New York, buyers of some of the dozens of multimillion-dollar fakes sold through the Knoedler & Company gallery, now shuttered, have filed lawsuits, complaining that their vaunted Modern masterpieces are now "worthless."

But the Boijmans loan, "The Head of Christ," and other famous fakes with which it is being exhibited in a traveling show retain a valuable mystique. "They're not original artworks, but they're so prestigious that they require the same security measures as an authentic work," said Julia Courtney, Springfield Museums' curator of art.

Citing security concerns, the lending and borrowing museums all declined to reveal the works' estimated worth or insurance information. But the paintings are being treated like the real thing. "The requirements for security are not different than other works we give on loan," said Friso Lammertse, the curator of old master paintings at the Boijmans. Never mind that the accustomed home of "The Head of Christ" is a Boijmans storage room.

So, in addition to a personal escort, van Meegeren's "Christ," for example, will have an outside conservator scrutinize every inch of the canvas and frame when it leaves a museum and after it arrives, to report on its condition.

"The Head of Christ" is part of the exhibition "Intent to Deceive: Fakes and Forgeries in the Art World," which includes two other van Meegerens, "The Girl With the Blue Bow," once credited to Vermeer, from the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, N.Y., and "The Procuress," from the Courtauld Gallery in London.

The show will travel to the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fla.; the Canton Museum of Art in Ohio; and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Other forgeries in the show are by celebrated con men like Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian who said he sold a thousand fakes; John Myatt, whose collaborator infiltrated archives at the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, to plant fake provenance documents; and Mark A. Landis, a former gallery owner who dressed as a Jesuit priest during the quarter-century he spent trying to donate his forgeries to more than 40 American museums.

What links these men, said Colette Loll, the exhibition's curator and an art investigator, are "frustrated artistic ambitions, chaotic personal lives and a contempt for the art market and its experts."

Ms. Loll, who organized the exhibition with the nonprofit group International Arts & Artists, said she was shocked when she heard the $31,000 estimate for the security arrangements demanded by just the Boijmans.

That sum is close to the $39,500 that "Christ and the Scribes in the Temple" — the painting van Meegeren created in 1945 to prove he was a forger rather than a collaborator — fetched at Christie's auction house in 1996.

Forgeries invariably raise knotty questions about the value of art and faith in the market, and fuel cynicism about art experts.

In November, a spirited debate about the value of forgeries played out on the website and pages of The New York Times after the art critic Blake Gopnik declared that forgers could be "an art lover's friend."

And last year, Jonathon Keats, who wrote "Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age," argued that "forgeries are more real than the real artworks they fake" because "they genuinely manipulate society rather than merely illustrating alternate points of view."

Interest in counterfeits may have less lofty roots, however. Everybody loves a juicy scandal. The van Meegerens can also draw on the continuing fascination with World War II and the Nazis' looting of Europe. Hailed as a kind of folk hero during his 1947 trial for having duped Göring, van Meegeren was later shown to be a Nazi sympathizer and inveterate rogue who swindled buyers out of the equivalent of $106 million.

One of his facsimiles, "The Supper at Emmaus," cited by the dean of Vermeer scholars as a, perhaps the, "masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer" was bought in 1938 by the Rembrandt Society of Rotterdam for the Boijmans for 520,000 guilders, the equivalent of about $6.4 million today. "The Head of Christ," sold for 475,000 guilders in 1941 ($4.4 million today), was thought to be a study for "The Supper at Emmaus."

Part of the enduring lure of the van Meegerens, undoubtedly, is the satisfaction of knowing that the most rarefied connoisseurs were duped by what now look to be ham-handed fakes.

As Jonathan Lopez wrote in his 2008 book about van Meegeren, "The Man Who Made Vermeers," "Although the best forgeries may mimic the style of a long-dead artist, they tend to reflect the taste and attitudes of their own period." Biblical scenes tapped into a sentimental and pastoral Germanic tradition, he notes, while the portraits of girls resembled 1920s flappers.

The works in "Intent to Deceive" are less art than artifacts; they have genuine historical significance. In that sense, these fakes underscore the persistent appeal of the real thing. Copies of a van Meegeren fake would not command such costly security precautions or draw visitors.

"The Head of Christ" and its traveling companions are being exhibited precisely because they are authentic — authentic forgeries.

I can't remember what we were eating at Toro, the new tapas restaurant in far western Chelsea, when one of the people at my table looked up in wonder.

It could have been when we were swaying like drunken sailors over the suquet de mariscos, a chowder by way of Catalonia with cool sea urchin and warm lobster bobbing in parsnip-infused milk. Or when we had finished the last shrimp in the gambas al ajillo and were scraping up the last bits of a sauce for which a tank full of lobsters must have given their shells.

Or when we were crunching through croquetas of ham mixed with unmistakably earthy meat from a pig's head. Or when we were cutting into another croqueta, this one filled with unusually fluffy and moist salt cod sitting under two golden hoops of fried lemon peel. Or when we had emptied a sardine tin of its raw mackerel marinated in a Thai-derived green curry, rich with coconut milk and sharpened with lime juice.

But I remember his smile and his question: "How can a place this big have food this good?"

Toro, opened in September by the chefs Ken Oringer and Jamie Bissonnette and based on their enduringly popular Boston original, has factory-height ceilings, an industrial-chic design and 120 seats at long communal tables and smaller, unshared ones. It isn't all that large compared with Morimoto across 10th Avenue, or Buddakan on the east side of the same building, or the teeming mess halls of the meatpacking district a few blocks south. By local standards, it is a bungalow in a neighborhood of McMansions.

But by the cozy standards of the Barcelona tapas joints that inspired Mr. Oringer and Mr. Bissonnette, Toro might as well be a Home Depot. It sells almost as many items. The beverage list alone is a major treatise on Spanish drinking.

There are spins on Spain's beloved gin and tonic, dressed up with lemon grass syrup or yellow Chartreuse, although my Vauvert Elixir was a bit flat and cloying, as if the tonic came from a bartender's hose. More inviting at the start of a meal are the feisty and autumn-crisp hard ciders or the cavas, a few of which settle any doubts that Spain is making world-class sparkling wine. Moving beyond bubbles, Toro stocks the garnachas and tempranillos you'd expect, but it has discoveries in store, too, from underappreciated grapes like xarel-lo and mencia.

You may need a drink before ordering dinner, because the menu gives you something like 60 choices. Some are fully traditional Spanish classics like toast spread with raw tomatoes that shimmer with olive oil; others are non-Iberian interpretations like yellowfin tuna in white soy sauce with tissue-thin vinegared cucumbers.

This presents a corollary to my dinner companion's question: How can a menu this big have so many excellent dishes, and so few disappointments?

I've certainly tasted things at Toro I wouldn't be in a hurry to order again. One November night, I stayed cool to several dishes that could have used more warmth themselves. Chilly deviled eggs were somewhat generic despite being topped with a slip of preserved tuna belly. A $36 plate of streaky jamón Ibérico should have been warmer, too, to help soften the flavorful fat. This was an oversight I didn't expect from a restaurant that goes to the trouble of hand-slicing the tagged Spanish hams that it proudly hangs from the ceiling. And while I loved the way mint yogurt brightened the wintry sweetness of rutabagas, sunchokes and carrots in a vegetable paella, I had no luck finding the soccarat, the crunchy bottom layer of browned rice that our server had promised would be the best part. The pan had been hustled off the flame before the crust had set.

But there were fewer misfires each time I went, suggesting that the kitchen is settling down to business. I was happy to sink into the profoundly Spanish flavors of a vegetable stew called escalivada, with smoked eggplant in olive oil that carried the sweetness of simmered red peppers and onions. I immediately wanted more of the hot blowfish tails seared in a crust of North African spices. And I wondered how the simple combination of potatoes, octopus, harissa and charred onions could result in a contender for the best octopus dish in a city that's gone cephalopod-mad.

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah took its fight against same-sex marriage to the United States Supreme Court on Tuesday, asking the court to suspend same-sex unions that became legal when a judge struck down the state's voter-approved ban.

The state wants the marriages to stop while it appeals a decision Dec. 20 by Judge Robert J. Shelby of United States District Court that banning gay couples from marrying violated their right to equal treatment under the Constitution.

In papers filed Tuesday, the state asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor to overturn court decisions to let the marriages go forward. Justice Sotomayor handles emergency requests from Utah and other Rocky Mountain states, and she is expected to refer it to the entire court. The justices could rule within days.

Nearly two-thirds of Utah's 2.8 million residents are Mormons and they dominate the state's legal and political circles. Judge Shelby's decision came as a shock to many in the state, which approved the ban on same-sex marriage in 2004.

Since the judge's decision, more than 900 gay couples in Utah have gotten marriage licenses. Judge Shelby and the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit have already refused to halt weddings while the state appeals.

MIAMI — A federal judge in Orlando struck down a Florida law on Tuesday that required welfare recipients to undergo mandatory drug testing.

Judge Mary S. Scriven of United States District Court wrote in her decision that the state's testing requirement was unconstitutional. "The court finds there is no set of circumstances under which the warrantless, suspicionless drug testing at issue in this case could be constitutionally applied," she wrote. The ruling made permanent an earlier, temporary ban by the judge.

The requirement had been a signature legislation of Gov. Rick Scott, who argued that the drug testing was necessary to help protect taxpayers and families. Mr. Scott said Tuesday that the state would appeal the ruling.

"Any illegal drug use in a family is harmful and even abusive to a child," he said in a statement. "We should have a zero-tolerance policy for illegal drug use in families — especially those families who struggle to make ends meet and need welfare assistance to provide for their children."

The case was also being closely watched by several other states, including Georgia, which passed similar legislation this year but found it dogged by legal challenges and statistics showing the requirement was ineffective. In Florida, less than 3 percent of those tested were found to have been using narcotics.

The decision stems from a 2011 suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Florida Justice Institute on behalf of a Central Florida resident, Luis W. Lebron, a Navy veteran who had filed for public assistance. Mr. Lebron, the single father of a 5-year-old who also provided care for his disabled mother, argued that it was unfair to require drug testing when no suspicion of drug abuse existed.

Judge Scriven agreed.

Howard Simon, executive director of the A.C.L.U. of Florida, said that "the courts are now signaling to politicians that they are not going to treat poor people as if they were exempt from constitutional rights."