New Yorkers may feel that The Metropolitan Transportation Authority was the target of a domestic terrorism attack this morning when they walked out of their homes to head to work and discovered that the subways and buses in the city weren’t rolling. Transit workers walked off the job Tuesday morning because their demands hadn’t been met by the city during several days of particularly vile and angry labor talks. According to Roger Toussaint, the union president, workers “are tired of being underappreciated and disrespected.” So they decided they would disrespect the city they serve, by attempting to bring it to its knees just a few days before Christmas.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg calls the strike “cowardly,” and immediately put an emergency plan into effect to alleviate the gridlock caused by the strike. He added that a strike by transit workers during the busiest time of the year is “illegal and morally reprehensible.” More than 7 million people ride the subways and buses every day during a regular week in New York City, but that number is greatly increased this time of year. The walkout could cost the city as much as $400 million a day, and will cause untold repercussions for businesses at the height of the shopping and tourist season.

There hasn’t been a citywide transit strike in New York City in more than 25 years. Because it is illegal for mass transit workers to strike in New York, the bus and subway employees who are striking—over 33,000 employees—will face huge fines for participating. Peter Kalikow, the head of the MTA, calls the strike “a slap in the face” to all New Yorkers. State lawyers are headed to court today to block the walkout, which was called by the union just three hours after a midnight deadline. Toussaint said the proposed new contract with the MTA should have been a “no-brainer,” and the union feels the strike is justified.

Bloomberg is urging New Yorkers to make arrangements to carpool, walk, or ride bikes to work, or work at home if possible. Meanwhile, New York yellow taxis are attempting to help ease the congestion on city streets by taking up to four passengers at a time. Many people are having trouble understanding the new pricing structure for taxis implemented by Bloomberg, with the city divided into zones. Manhattan has been divided into four zones, with a $10 fare per person for travel within a single zone and an additional $5 for traveling into another zone. The confusion hasn’t impeded the demand for taxis this morning, though. A line of yellow cabs circles the block outside Penn Station, with drivers and hopeful passengers screaming out locations, hoping to match up with other people heading to the same locations so they can share rides.

One subway booth in New York City has a sign posted saying, “Strike in Effect. Station Closed. Happy Holidays.” Obviously city transit workers aren’t interested in peace and goodwill to all men. No matter how angry they are about the impasse with the MTA, it’s a sad day indeed when they let their acrimony ruin the holidays for the millions of people who are responsible for them having jobs in the first place.

Most Jews abandoned that part of the ritual long ago, but there are some ultra-Orthodox sects in a few Hasidic communities that still practice it as part of ritual circumcisions. But a heated debate has been brewing between religion and science in New York City, where the state Health Department is drawing up its first set of safety guidelines to govern circumcision. The debate was sparked last year by the death of a child who had undergone the metzitzah b’peh circumcision ritual by a mohel who used the centuries-old method.

Doctors have been concerned for years that the metzitzah b’peh procedure could spread disease, but until now the government has not gotten involved in the debate. But last year New York City health officials said the practice had given a baby an infection that caused it to die. The infection was caused by herpes simplex type 1, a common virus in saliva that causes cold sores. Up to 70% of all adults carry the herpes simplex 1 virus, and it is difficult to detect when the virus is contagious. Usually the virus is harmless to adults, but it can be deadly to newborns.

New York City officials say they have linked four other herpes infections since 1988 to two mohels, and two more were reported in 2005, including one in which a child suffered brain damage. Although there have been suggestions by government officials and the medical community that the practice should be stopped, such suggestions have been staunchly opposed by some Hasidic leaders who say that Jewish law commands the act. When the city’s health commissioner recommended that infants not be circumcised, Jewish leaders threatened protests.

Dr. Jonathan M. Zenilman, a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor, said that although documented infections from the metzitzah b’peh procedure have been rare, there is enough potential risk involved to justify a ban on the ritual. “This is something that is pretty much counter to all of the infection-control measures that we have,” Zenilman said. He added that asking mohels to police themselves to prevent risks would be ineffective, particularly since it is unusual for someone to know if they even have the herpes simplex 1 virus since its effects are relatively benign in adults, and it is difficult to tell when it is contagious.

The state guidelines being considered will stop short of a ban, but will include voluntary precautions that may reduce the chances of infection. State Health Department spokesman Robert Kenny did not discuss details, saying that the guidelines are still being developed. But he said that rabbis will probably be asked to inform their congregations about the risks, and steps will be taken to “ensure that mohels have full knowledge of their health status” before they perform the ritual. The guidelines will advise parents to seek medical care immediately if their baby develops a fever or rash following a bris. Several religious leaders have also suggested that mohels be required to undergo regular testing for disease, refrain from doing circumcisions if they have a cold sore, and be required to rinse their mouths with alcohol prior to performing the ritual.

There is mixed reaction among the Hasidic community to the idea of guidelines. Rabbi David Niederman of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg has said that there is too little definitive medical evidence to justify the government warning the public about a ritual that has been performed safely, thousands of times a year, for thousands of years. Niederman said that he has received calls from worried mothers and he believes that they have been alarmed unnecessarily. “We are not fanatics,” Niederman said. “If there is evidence that this practice is not safe, we will not do it. We will be the first ones to act. That is embodied in the same Torah that tells us to make a bris for a child.”

The debate over the metzitzah b’peh ritual began in Europe during the mid-19th century when doctors began to suspect that the procedure might be spreading tuberculosis. Since then there has been ongoing disagreement over whether the practice had been recommended years ago for medical reasons, or whether it is actually required under Jewish law. Most Reform and modern Orthodox mohels decided that it was simply recommended for medical reasons, and now they clean a circumcision wound with a sponge or sterile gauze.

Rabbi J. David Bleich, a professor at Yeshiva University, said that guidelines proposed by health authorities will not settle the disagreement over the validity and safety of the procedure. “Whatever changes are going to come are not going to come because of government pressure,” he said. “If you want to change the way rabbis are doing things, the way to do it isn’t to threaten them.”

On Wednesday a state judge ruled that the city must provide the public with the names of the 28 people who have been identified so far among the tapes of nearly 130 emergency calls made that day. But on Thursday, the city filed an appeal, which effectively puts a halt to the release of those tapes for the moment. The Times will now have to seek an appellate hearing to lift the stay. The newspaper, along with relatives of several Sept. 11 victims, hopes that the tapes may offer a glimpse into the experiences of the 2,749 people who were killed when the twin towers came down.

Sally Regenhard, whose son was one of the firefighters killed that day, is one of the plaintiffs joining the Times in its lawsuit. Regenhard said that allowing only half of the conversations to be heard isn’t enough, and that the public should be allowed to hear both sides of the conversations to get a true picture of what was happening inside the towers. “What we’re getting is only half the truth, half of the story,” Regenhard said, adding that if families were able to listen to tapes of the callers who have not yet been identified, they may be able to hear their loved ones’ voices. “Only a mother could listen to recordings and maybe hear some glimmer of your child’s voice, even though his name may have been garbled,” she said.

The victims’ families are represented by attorney Normal Siegel, who told reporters that he wants to learn whether operators’ instructions may have affected the evacuations of the buildings. “We will potentially hear Operator A say, ‘Go to the roof,’” Siegel said. “We might hear Operator B say, ‘Stay in place. We’re coming to get you.’” The appeals court ruling will allow the release of the 28 tapes to the public only if the families of those callers consent to the release. So far, at least three families have asked to listen to the voices of their loved ones during their final hours.

One of those victims was Christopher Hanley, 35, an employee of Radianz, a division of Reuters. Hanley’s parents shared the tape of their son’s emergency call with The New York Times. Hanley made a call to 911 from the Windows on the World restaurant just four minutes after a hijacked airplane struck the north tower. He had been attending a conference there, and he had to repeat his story to two different dispatchers. “Yeah. Hi. I’m on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center. We just had an explosion on the, on the like 105th floor,” Hanley told a dispatcher. Later, he says, ‘We have smoke and…it’s pretty bad.” The dispatcher tells him to “sit tight. Do not leave, okay?” The police dispatcher then transferred the call to the fire department dispatcher, who told Hanley to stay put and promised that firefighters were on the way. “All right,” Hanley replied. “Please hurry.”

The cameras are the first installment in a program to place 500 cameras throughout the city at a cost of $9 million. Hundreds more cameras will be installed later if the city receives the $81.5 million in federal grants it has requested in an effort to encircle Lower Manhattan and parts of midtown with a “ring of steel” for surveillance, modeled after a similar security system in London’s financial district. The city already has about 1,000 cameras in the subway system, with over 2,000 more scheduled to be installed by 2008. Over 3,000 cameras already monitor housing projects throughout the city.

The New York Police Department considers itself to be at the forefront of counterterrorism efforts since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, so the heightened security seems to be a no-brainer. Officials claim that the money would be well spent to protect the Big Apple, especially in light of the information revealed that said al-Qaida members once cased the New York Stock Exchange and other financial institutions. “We have every reason to believe New York remains in the cross-hairs, so we have to do what it takes to protect the city,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

New York’s approach to security isn’t a new idea, it’s just the latest to be implemented. Chicago has spent approximately $5 million on a 2,000-camera system to monitor the streets of the Windy City. Homeland Security officials in Washington, D.C. will be spending nearly $10 million to install surveillance cameras and sensors on a rail line near the Capitol.

Like most government plans to protect citizens, the installation of the cameras has drawn fire from civil liberties activists and privacy advocates. Critics have said that the NYPD’s camera installation program needs to be studied more and safeguards need to be implemented that will preserve privacy of ordinary citizens and prohibit abuses of the system such as voyeurism and racial profiling. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that the department “is installing cameras first and asking questions later.”

Commissioner Kelly responded to criticism by establishing a panel of four corporate defense lawyers to advise the police department on the legalities of surveillance policies. But he insisted that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear in terms of privacy, because the cameras will be installed only in public areas. “The police department must be flexible to meet an ever changing threat,” Kelly said. “We also have to ensure whatever measures we take are reasonable as the Constitution requires. That’s the only way to retain public support and preserve individual freedoms.”

Although cameras can’t help prevent crimes, they can help investigators identify suspects after a crime has been committed. The London cameras have had little or no impact on crime rates, and they didn’t keep terrorists from bombing the city’s subway system last year. But they did provide investigators with 80,000 videotapes that helped identify and retrace the steps of the suicide bombers so that other suspects were not successful in a follow-up attack.

Timothy Horner, a specialist with the Kroll security firm and a former captain in the NYPD, said that the security system only makes sense in a city that will forever be considered a target for criminals and terrorists. “It’s not a cure-all, and the department is not thinking that way,” he said. “But we really want law enforcement to use whatever tools they can to keep us safe.”