US: Last week lawyer Stephen Downs and his 31-year-old son Roger went to Crossgates shopping mall in Albany, New York. The father was wearing a T-shirt with the words "Peace on Earth" that he had bought at the mall
The son's T-shirt said "Give Peace a Chance" and "No War With Iraq". As they were quietly eating in the food court, a security guard approached and asked that they take off their T-shirts. Roger Downs complied. His father protested that he had the right under the First Amendment to wear the T-shirt. The words were so innocuous, he pointed out, one might find them on a Christmas card.
The security guards called the police, who asked him to leave. When he claimed the right to remain he was handcuffed and charged with trespassing. Local peace activists were outraged and 150 people turned up next day wearing T-shirts with anti-war slogans, to protest at the censoring of customers' free speech rights. Since then Downs has become a national celebrity and an icon of the anti-war movement. The charges were dropped but they highlighted a little-known aspect about malls, the high streets of modern America, that they are privately owned and people can be banned for what they wear. The war of the T-shirts began last month when Brett Barber, a high-school student in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, wore a T-shirt to school bearing President Bush's picture and the words "International Terrorist" to protest against US policy on Iraq. The school asked him to take it off or go home. He went home, thereby renewing a debate over students' rights to free expression going back to the Vietnam War. In 1969, the US Supreme Court ruled against a Des Moines, Iowa, school that suspended students who wore black armbands to protest against the war. "High school is where emotions and hormones run high," said Robert Freehan, a Dearborn school district official. Wearing clothing with slogans can be "like yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre." But Barber may win out. Robert Sedler, a professor of constitutional law at Wayne State University, said it appears he is within his rights. In 1999 he successfully defended a student who wore a pentagram to school as a symbol of her religion, Wicca, whose members are sometimes called witches.
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The Second Lady of the United States is not amused at a lampoon on the Internet which has raised another First Amendment issue, the right to satirise political figures. Vice-President Dick Cheney's office this week asked the spoof website www.whitehouse.org to remove a satirical biography of Mrs Lynn Cheney from its pages. (The official White House site is whitehouse.gov.) The Vice-President's lawyer wrote objecting to the use of Mrs Cheney's "name and picture for purposes of trade" without her permission and to her portrayal "in a false light". The response of the site's operator, John Wooden of Brooklyn, was to give the picture of Lynn Cheney a false clown's nose and a missing tooth. Even outrageous and false satire is protected by the First Amendment, said the New York Civil Liberties Union, which rushed to the site's defence. The site now cautions visitors that the Vice-President "wishes you to be aware . . . that some/all of the biographic information contained on this parody page about Mrs Cheney may not actually be true." And, it added, the editors of the website were "confident that any rumors about Mrs Cheney formerly being a crystal meth pusher are 100 per cent likely to be untrue".
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The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution also took a battering this week. The US Supreme Court threw out the appeals of two men sentenced under California's "three strikes and you're out" law. Gary Ewing is serving 25 years without parole for stealing three golf clubs from a shop, and Leandro Andrade 50 years for shoplifting a few videos from a supermarket. The Eighth Amendment bans cruel and unusual punishment. Two members of the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, argued, in what critics have called an unusual decision, that this did not prohibit excessive prison sentences, and their views prevailed.
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Former President Bill Clinton is getting a bully pulpit again to talk to the nation. He and his 1996 election opponent Bob Dole have been hired by the CBS 60 Minutes programme to conduct weekly mini-debates on national issues in "point-counterpoint" style. Clinton said he often watches political shows on cable television degenerate into screaming matches and "there may be a market for people who want light instead of heat". Starting tomorrow evening, the duo will take turns each week working to a format where one picks a topic and the other responds. Said Dole, known these days for advertising Viagra, "It's going to be provocative but not mean or nasty. That would be a first for us."
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Last month I noted that Mary McGrory, whose liberal columns in the Washington Post go back to the Kennedy era, had confessed to being persuaded by Colin Powell's presentation against Saddam Hussein at the UN. Conservatives were delighted. McGrory has now published an apology after receiving a torrent of mail. "You have declared yourselves to be shocked, appalled, startled, puzzled and above all disappointed by what you thought was a defection to the hawk side," she wrote. "But it was my fault. I did not make it clear enough that while I believed what Colin Powell told me about Saddam Hussein's poison collection, I was not convinced that war was the answer. I guess I took it for granted that you would know what I meant." The letters, she wrote, "tell you if the demonstrations didn't, that opposition to the war is deep and widespread." She now says Powell is someone who has joined the "time-is-running-out crowd".
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"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." Thus spoke US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a Pentagon briefing on the war on terror. Now we know.