Hasta La Gadget!

We all love going out to eat. Whether restaurant outings are an everyday event or only for special occasions, sitting down and being served (hopefully) delicious food and drinks is one of society’s great pastimes. But if you’ve ever felt duped by a menu or ripped off when the check comes, that’s because you probably have been.

Restaurants are businesses and their goal is, quite obviously, to make money. How much they make can vary greatly, depending on a number of different factors. As Amanda Cohen, the chef at New York City’s Dirt Candy explained to Eater, “The price of ingredients barely enters into [the cost of a dish]. … You’re not paying $21 for your broccoli dogs, you’re paying $21 to rent your table; I just trick you into thinking you’re paying for the broccoli dogs because that’s the accepted convention. 76% of that dish is actually paying for the A/C, my line cook’s unemployment insurance, the gas and electricity. The toilet paper.”

But some deals are better than others, and there are smarter choices you can make at a restaurant to get the best value and overall experience. Here are 13 things to remember the next time you go out to eat. They’ll help you save money and maybe just have the best meal ever.

We’ll start with a sad truth about one of our favorite appetizers: Guacamole is a huge ripoff.

While avocados are one of the pricier fruits, the amount some restaurants charge for their “best” guacamole recipe is insane. According to Forbes, restaurants pay about fifty cents to a dollar for a single avocado. You pay about the same price for one in the grocery store, but some restaurants think they can charge you up to $14 for a bowl of mashed avocados and cheap spices and vegetables, because their “authenticity” gives the dish “value” — and because you love guacamole and are willing to pay through the nose for it. While you know you’re always going to be paying more for restaurant food than grocery food, the markup on guacamole is specifically glaring. A few restaurants in New York City are particular fans of this con. Grubstreet reports that both Rosa Mexicano and Dos Caminos charge $14 for a single bowl.

Speaking of bad deals on appetizers: edamame.

Most Japanese restaurants pay about two dollars for a whole pound of edamame. To prepare your appetizer, they take some out, steam them and add some simple salt to the dish. In the end, you may end up getting charged up to eight dollars for some beans. A nice profit for the restaurant, a bad value for you.

In fact, appetizers are generally some of the worst values for your dollar.

For the most blatant examples of ridiculous price inflation on menus, simply compare the prices of appetizers and main dishes. Our brains are easily duped when scanning a menu. There is a stark fluctuation in prices between an appetizer and entree dish that include the exact same ingredients. Jody Pennette, the founder of CB5 Restaurant Group, revealed to Forbes that restaurants have been raising the prices of appetizers “disproportionately to the increase in food costs” over the past 15 years. Restaurants get away with this because customers “form their perceptions of value by looking at the price of entrees.” That explains why you’ll get a $7 order of edamame and not complain when you follow it up with a $14 tuna roll.

You’re almost always losing money when you choose pasta over a meat-centric dish.

That’s because it takes more labor and a wider variety of ingredients to make the dish with meat and accompaniments. Cooking up a basic pasta dish only takes a restaurant chef about twenty minutes, and they don’t even use that many ingredients. The only time diners could be getting their money’s worth is when they order an elaborate veggie-filled pasta dish. One chef told The San Francisco Chronicle that a properly made vegetarian pasta could be “surprisingly expensive” if the chef uses “seasonal and local farm fresh vegetables.” And since diners expect pasta dishes to be on the lower-priced side, the restaurant feels it must keep the price of a pasta made with just vegetables at the same range as the other pasta dishes. Most of the time, chefs break even on those specific pastas.

But in general, Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant in New York, told Forbes that diners most interested in value would be smart to choose “labor-intensive, time-consuming, complex dishes, that call for hard-to-find ingredients.” Here’s the rule: If the dish you’re ordering seems like something you could easily whip up in your own kitchen for a lot cheaper than you’re paying at a restaurant, you’re most likely getting duped.

Before you think about that “special” entree, know this: Chefs are playing some serious mind games with those enticing dishes.

One of the first things you hear once you sit down at a restaurant could be one of the biggest scams. According to Sarah Zorn, the editorial director of the blog “Restaurant Girl,” specials are just an expensive way for the chef to clean out his or her kitchen of leftovers. There’s also a health issue to consider when you think about ordering the special: Dr. Oz reports that because the ingredients tend to be ones the chef needs to get rid of while still trying to make a profit, the dish will often include “aging meat and fish, old veggies and leftover sauces.” The safest bet is to pick a signature dish that you know the restaurant always needs (hopefully) fresh ingredients for.

Brunch may be fun, but you might be getting cheated on those omelets and Benedicts.

We hope you have tons of fun going to brunch, because you’re paying way too much for the meal itself. Almost everything on the brunch menu, from eggs to potatoes to sausage and bacon, is extremely inexpensive to purchase. Think about it: Eggs retail for ten cents a piece, yet order two eggs and toast at a restaurant and you’re paying at least $4 dollars. Not cool. If getting a bang for your buck is your primary concern, your best bet is a dish that has an expensive meat or fish component, such as steak and eggs. Thankfully, the New York Times has just reported that many restaurants in the Big Apple are paying extra special attention to making elaborate brunch dishes. That could make some New Yorkers feel better about splurging on brunch.

And you’re not off the hook if you order pancakes.

Forbes claims that the kitchen crew at restaurants gets “the last laugh” when people order the pancake dish at brunch. During brunch (which is usually busy), pancakes are one of the cheapest and easiest dishes to make: Mix up some eggs, flour and milk and throw them on a griddle for a few minutes until they cook. And you’ve probably spent more than $10 on a plate of pancakes a few times in your life. Make sure to eat every single piece of fresh fruit that comes on that plate — they’re probably the most expensive items.

No matter what meal you’re eating, side dishes are bad deals. That’s why vegetarians have it worst when it comes to fair prices.

Because vegetarians are often left with few meat-free options, they frequently turn to overpriced side dishes to fill them up. For example, restaurants will sometimes charge $5 or more for a baked potato or a side of fries, when the average cost of that dish is 65 cents. There’s a reason restaurants price these sides and small items so high, and it’s not just about making as much money as possible. The Wall Street Journal writes, “Straying outside a certain price range can be risky for a restaurant. A $3 soup on a menu where most appetizers are in the $8 to $12 range will either cause a run on the soup, or scare people away because they think something is wrong with it.”

And it just gets worse for vegetarians: Some chefs have ‘fessed up that their advertised “vegetarian” dishes aren’t always meat-free.

While we would like to think this doesn’t happen a lot, in a Food Network survey, 15 percent of chefs said the vegetarian dishes on the menu might not be completely vegetarian. One chef said he even saw a cook pour lamb’s blood in a vegan person’s pasta primavera.

Pescatarians aren’t safe either: Some of the fish you’re eating in a restaurant isn’t the kind you think you’re eating.

Think about all of the times you’ve browsed a menu at a swanky restaurant and seen “Chilean sea bass” under the entree section alongside an outrageous price tag and thought, “Wow, that’s some fancy fish.” And if you ordered it, it probably looked like this:

Well, “Chilean sea bass” is not a even technically a bass. It’s this menacing looking cod called the Patagonian Toothfish. And it looks like this:

Restaurants changed the name of the fish because “Patagonian Toothfish” sounded so scary. And the Chilean sea bass isn’t the only deceptively named fish: As populations of Atlantic and Pacific fish like halibut, sole and flounder have dwindled in recent decades, restaurants have taken more common fish and replaced their unappetizing names with made-up and exotic-sounding monikers. The slimehead fish, another cod fish, named for its “distinctive mucus canals,” now appears on menus as “orange roughy.”

Even more, in 2012, ocean conservation group Oceana released a nationwide report that tested the authenticity of fish samples from 674 restaurants in 21 states, including New York, California and Florida. It concluded that 33 percent of the 1,215 fish samples they collected were mislabeled. A couple of startling findings: Only seven out of the 120 red snapper samples were actually red snapper, and 84 percent of “white tuna” — (which is really albacore or toro) samples were actually escolar, a totally different fish that is not even in the tuna family and is notorious for causing gastrointestinal problems in some people. Restaurants most likely use escolar in place of white tuna because it’s cheaper.

If you’re looking for value on fish, don’t even think about getting salmon.

Salmon shouldn’t be billed as a fancy dish. In fact, it’s much cheaper than what you’re paying for it, and sometimes, restaurants are telling lies when the menu claims the salmon is “wild-caught.” The University of Washington Tacoma ran a study in 2011 and found that 38 percent of salmon samples from restaurants in the Tacoma area were promoting Atlantic farm-raised salmon as wild-caught Pacific salmon. Most of the salmon lies occurred at inexpensive sushi and teriyaki places, and while it’s hard for the customer to tell the difference between farm-raised Atlantic and wild-caught Pacific salmon when the fish is cut up or cooked, Erica Cline, one of the study’s leaders, said responsible restaurant chefs should be able to tell the difference by “the feel of the fish and its oil content.”

And if you need a drink with dinner to get over these unfortunate truths, make sure to go for quantity.

It helps if you have a decently sized party to share with. All wine and beer is seriously marked up at restaurants, but if you’re considering a glass of wine with your meal and you want to get the best deal, you should almost always buy the entire bottle. Joe Campanale, the beverage director for a number of restaurants in New York, including L’Artusi, Anfora and L’Apicio, told Zagat that while each restaurant in the industry varies on the amount they mark up a glass of wine, the “industry standard” is to “charge for a glass what the restaurant pays for the bottle.”

Juliet Chung reveals in the Wall Street Journal that how much a restaurant marks up a bottle and a glass of wine depends on how expensive the wine was when the restaurant bought it at wholesale price. For example, an inexpensive bottle of wine may get marked up three to four times its wholesale price, while a pricier bottle could only get marked up one or two times its price. But overall, if you are looking to “maximize the value per ounce,” you may be better off opting to invest in a more expensive bottle over a severely overpriced glass of mediocre wine.

We apologize for being a Debbie Downer, but … WOMP WOMP

Every few years in East-Central Europe, a new political movement emerges that challenges not only the status quo but the very substance of the political system. Sometimes the movement targets the party patronage system. Sometimes it focuses on the corruption that enriches those who participate in governance. Sometimes it elevates a set of issues that the media or the political elite has ignored.

In Poland, Janusz Palikot created a movement that spoke to the libertarian values of a younger generation, mixing together market liberalism with the legalization of marijuana and support for LGBT rights. In Bulgaria, Volen Siderov created a right-wing populist movement that attacked vested interests and also blamed minorities for a variety of social ills.

Hungarian environmentalists had been trying to create an authentic Green Party ever since the end of Communism. When they pulled together a new initiative Lehet Mas a Politika (LMP) in 2009, they didn’t call it a Green Party. Instead, they wanted to transform the entire process of doing politics in the country. The name of the party said it all: Politics Can Be Different.

LMP’s embrace of environmental sustainability and its attempt to alter the political status quo were both attractive to Katalin Ertsey. She’d been part of the first generation of Fidesz activists in the late 1980s. Unhappy with the trajectory of the party in the 1990s, she went into NGO work. But when she heard about LMP, she quickly enlisted.

“Obviously we knew that a Green party was needed sooner or later in Hungary,” she told in an interview in Budapest last May. “But we didn’t see that it was possible to break up the monolithic system of Hungarian parties. When the first news came out that some underground movement was thinking about establishing a Green Party, and knowing about the previous attempts by Élőlánc (Live Chain), in which my brother was involved, and seeing how that didn’t succeed, I immediately contacted LMP and started working, way before the official debut on October 8, 2008. I still believe that LMP has brought the only new idea into politics for 20 years. This ‘politics can be different’ suggests a whole new look at politics. I actually took that seriously.”

She entered parliament with LMP in 2010 and expected to work with all willing partners on the issues that LMP held dearly. But working across the aisle, she quickly learned, was not going to be easy, even with Fidesz members she still knows from the old days. “It’s really hard for some of my old friends to face what they are doing now,” she said. “They’re betraying in many ways everything that we fought for together and also what they believed in just a few years ago. I also reached out on issues to those Fidesz members that I didn’t know, like Ilona Ekes, whom I really appreciated for her work in 2006 in visiting people put in prison after the riots. Again, naively, I thought on women’s issues that we could form a non-partisan caucus. I tried it several times and failed. I’m still not giving up. But everything is along party lines now. Although there are a handful of decent Fidesz MPs, loyalty is more important than reaching across the aisle.”

LMP, too, fell victim to the polarizing effects of Hungarian politics. In advance of the elections that just took place — and which Fidesz won — the opposition tried to pull together an anti-Fidesz coalition. Half of LMP thought it was possible to align with the Socialist Party, among others, to defeat Fidesz. The other half thought such a strategy unlikely and preferred to remain independent. LMP split into two factions. The party that retained the name LMP managed to get just above the 5 percent threshold in the recent elections to get five seats in parliament. The breakaway faction, Dialogue for Hungary/PM, was part of the left-wing Unity Coalition that achieved a little more than 25 percent of the vote and 37 seats.

Ertsey also decided to leave politics. “Politics will not be different until we face the root of the problem, and that is how we have always ignored the fundamental issues,” she concluded. “As a nation, we have never faced our past: the Holocaust, Communism, the various national tragedies of the 20th century. It’s very clear in LMP’s opening statement that we are not giving up on having a dialogue on that. As I move away from party politics — I’m not running in the next elections — this is one of the projects or ideas that very much excites me: to go back and look at our past through something like a truth and reconciliation committee. We should also open the files and establish on a bipartisan basis an Institute for National Memory to look at the issues. Facing our past would help overcome our current situation, when most of our critics say, ‘Ah, you see, politics cannot be different.’ I still believe that it can be. But it will have to come from going to the roots of the problem.”

The Interview

Tell me about your decision to return to politics through Politics Can Be Different (LMP)?

For that, we also need to talk about why I left politics. It wasn’t a radical step, but it’s interesting to see how naive I was. I’d put a lot of effort into politics, from the first illegal movements through the organizations and movements we talked about all the way up to putting a party into parliament. We sent the boys into parliament in 1990, and I was like, “Okay I’ve done my job. I have some more things to do in civil society.” So I went on to work with NGOs. I worked for about 15 years for various NGOs, from Roma issues through environmental issues to social health care and education. I always worked on the capacity building of NGOs, because I see civil society as still very weak. Even though for 20 years it’s been a commonplace to talk about the fact that civil society needs to grow, the way we’ve ended up now is very much related to a weak civil society.

So, I didn’t shut the door on Fidesz, I just moved on with my life. I even went back in 1992 or 1993 to help out on some foreign relations issues. But it had changed so much. This was not what I was used to doing, so I quit. I was happy and active politically, but not in the formal arena. And I was not touched by a new political idea until the birth of LMP.

Obviously we knew that a Green party was needed sooner or later in Hungary. But we didn’t see that it was possible to break up the monolithic system of Hungarian parties. When the first news came out that some underground movement was thinking about establishing a Green Party, and knowing about the previous attempts by Élőlánc (Live Chain), in which my brother was involved, and seeing how that didn’t succeed, I immediately contacted LMP and started working, way before the official debut on October 8, 2008. I still believe that LMP has brought the only new idea into politics for 20 years. This “politics can be different” suggests a whole new look at politics. I actually took that seriously. And that’s why I have some difficulties now looking at how we are doing in Parliament, how much we can stop or slow Fidesz in dismantling what we once built together. It’s still the most exciting political project in the 20 years since we had our first free elections.

When I was here in 1990, civil society seemed quite vibrant, especially compared to the Czech Republic, where you had relatively few people involved as dissidents. Or Slovakia, where it was even weaker. Or Romania or Bulgaria. Civil society seemed pretty strong here in Hungary. Was I mistaken, or did civil society grow weaker? Or were there strategic decisions made at that time that led to the marginalization of civil society organizations?

The strength of civil society used to be its weakness. In Hungary, where oppression was a lot less than in Czechoslovakia or other countries, this whole movement of civil society was very strong when you were here 20 years ago. That push made it possible for NGOs and nonprofits to establish themselves as institutions relatively quickly. However, the rapid institutionalization took away the momentum. And the movement type of organizations either became irrelevant, or most of the leaders went into politics. Ferenc Miszlivetz talked about how important it was to keep these movement-type organizations alive, but there were too few organizations for this to happen and also have these two other things: an institutionalized nonprofit sector doing its economic activities of serving the needy and politicians serving in parliament. It’s just a question of numbers. Although I was working a lot on strengthening NGOs with capacity building and getting government funding (which was a big issue in the 1990s), that effort of strengthening the institutions has weakened the movements. NGOs that provide services to the disabled are still passionate about their topic, and they serve their constituents and lobby the government and all that. However, this vague but very lively idea of civil society for the sake of reflecting citizens’ views in the political arena is gone.

The only time when we finally saw these grassroots coming back again was in the late 1990s, early 2000s with Védegylet (Protect the Future), TASZ (Hungarian Civil Liberties Union), and some of the women’s organizations. The cornerstones of civil society had to wait for the first wave of nonprofits and institutionalization to pass. This rebirth of civil society started when things went really badly, and the Gyurcsany government really helped with that. Some of the tools were used by these NGOs to get the information out, to use fact-finding media, to publish scandals. Corruption in that sense helped civil society regain its feet. Ironically, now is the best time for civil society, because there’s so much to talk about. The student movement HaHa, or the Hungarian version of the Occupy movement: these are signs of a growing civil society. In that sense, the harsher the system, the more potential for civil society. That’s not to say that we wish for a harsher dictatorship. But they seem to go together.

It suggests that civil society has difficulty existing where there’s no crisis.

Yes, the whole lesson from the Hungarian transition was that Hungary was not a tough enough place to establish the kind of longstanding moral standards that still exist in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where they have tackled the whole issue of the archives and secret agents files and have basically said no to the previous regime. Here, the previous regime was not all that oppressive. And we are only smart retrospectively. But I hope that other societies struggling with these problems can learn this lesson.

Tell me how you interpret this phrase “politics can be different.”

To read the rest of the interview, click here.

LUCKNOW, India (AP) — A top government official says a state in north India has fired two police officers who failed to respond to a complaint by the fathers of two teenage girls who went missing and were later found gang-raped and killed.

Anil Kumar Gupta said Friday the policemen had been charged with criminal conspiracy after they refused to file a complaint or take any action when the fathers reported that the girls had been abducted. The teenage cousins were raped and killed Wednesday by attackers who then hung their bodies from a mango tree hours after they disappeared from fields near their home in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh.

Angry villagers held protests in the village, demanding action against the police and arrests. Four men have been arrested in the rapes.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (AP) — About four years ago, the Google team trying to develop cars driven by computers — not people — became convinced that sooner than later, the technology would be ready for the masses. There was one big problem: Driverless cars were almost certainly illegal in the U.S.

And yet this week, Google said it wants to give Californians access to a small fleet of prototypes it will make without a steering wheel or pedals. The plan is possible because, by this time next year, driverless cars will be legal in the tech giant’s home state.

And for that, Google can thank Google, and an unorthodox lobbying campaign to shape the road rules of the future in car-obsessed California — and maybe even the rest of the nation — that began with a game-changing conversation in Las Vegas.

The campaign was based on a principle that businesses rarely embrace: ask for regulation.

The journey to a law in California began in January 2011 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Nevada legislator-turned-lobbyist David Goldwater began chatting up Anthony Levandowski, one of the self-driving car project’s leaders. When talk drifted to the legal hurdles, Goldwater suggested that rather than entering California’s potentially bruising political process, Google should start small.

Here, in neighboring Nevada, he said, where the Legislature famously has an impulse to regulate lightly. It made sense to Google, which hired Goldwater.

Up to that point, Google had quietly sent early versions of the car, with a “safety driver” behind the wheel, more than 100,000 miles (160,927 kilometers) in California. Eventually, government would catch up, just as stop signs began appearing well after cars rolled onto America’s roads a century ago.

If the trigger to act was a bad accident, lawmakers could set the technology back years.

Feeling some urgency, Google bet it could legalize a technology that though still experimental had the potential to save thousands of lives and generate millions in profits.

The cars were their own best salesmen. Nevada’s governor and other key policy makers emerged enthusiastic after test rides. The bill passed quickly enough that potential opponents — primarily automakers — were unable to influence its outcome.

Next, Nevada’s Department of Motor Vehicles had to write rules implementing the law.

At the DMV, Google had an enthusiastic supporter in Bruce Breslow, then the agency’s leader.

Breslow had been fascinated by driverless cars since seeing an exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Seeing a career-defining opportunity, Breslow shelved other projects and shifted money so he wouldn’t have to ask for the $200,000 needed to research and write the rules.

At first, DMV staff panicked — they only had several months to write unprecedented rules on a technology they didn’t know. But Google knew the technology, and was eager to help.

“Very few people deeply understand” driverless car technology, said Chris Urmson, the self-driving car pioneer lured from academia who now leads Google’s project. Offering policymakers information “to make informed decisions … is really important to us.”

The task fell primarily to David Estrada, at the time the legal director for Google X, the secretive part of the tech giant that houses ambitious, cutting-edge projects. Estrada would trek from San Francisco to Nevada’s capital, Carson City, for meetings hosted by DMV staff.

Breslow credited Estrada with making suggestions that made the regulations far shorter, and less onerous, than they would have been. While others attended the meetings, Google seemed to have a special seat at the table.

Bryant Walker Smith, who teaches the law of self-driving cars as a fellow at Stanford University, described one rule-drafting session where Google — not the DMV — responded to suggestions from auto industry representatives.

“It wasn’t always clear who was leading,” Smith said. It seemed to him that both Google and the DMV felt ownership of the rules.

By the end of 2011, Nevada welcomed the testing of driverless cars on its roads. Google, however, was focused on its home state, where its Priuses and Lexuses outfitted with radar, cameras and a spinning tower of laser sensors were a regular feature on freeways.

In many ways, Google replicated its Nevada playbook: Frame the debate. Wow potential allies with joy rides. Argue that driverless cars would make roads safer and create jobs.

In January 2012, Google met with state Sen. Alex Padilla, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering graduate. Padilla was intrigued, and agreed to push a bill. Padilla said Nevada’s law helped him sell colleagues on the need to act. After all, who in California government wanted a flagship company moving jobs out of the state.

In March 2012, Padilla rode in the driver’s seat of a Google car with Levandowski riding shotgun to the news conference announcing his legislation.

In the months that followed, various groups tried to shape Padilla’s bill.

One was the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which objected that automakers would be liable for the failure of Google technology strapped onto one of their cars. Trial lawyers, a powerful constituency in the state, successfully lobbied to keep automakers on the hook.

Some inside the Capitol concluded that Padilla was most attuned to Google.

One thing that troubled Howard Posner, then the staffer on the Assembly Transportation Committee responsible for analyzing the bill and suggesting improvements, was that Padilla’s legislation would let cars operate without a human present.

Posner argued that lawmakers shouldn’t authorize this last step until the technology could handle it. The response, he said, was that Padilla didn’t want to do that — “which in my mind meant Google was not willing to do that.”

Padilla said that while Google’s high profile helped the bill succeed, his office made the decisions. “We’re always going to have the final say,” he said.

In September 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown went to Google’s headquarters and signed Padilla’s bill.

Now, California’s motor vehicles officials face an end-of-year deadline to write regulations that will allow driverless cars to go from testing to use by the public in June 2015.

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Follow Justin Pritchard at https://twitter.com/lalanewsman

CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) — Lawyers for the man suspected of killing 12 people in a mass shooting at a Colorado movie theater told a judge Thursday they want the public and the media barred from the entire jury selection process.

Prosecutors agreed that individual questioning of potential jurors should be closed but said the last step should be kept open, when the panel of 12 jurors and 12 alternates will be chosen. District Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. did not say when he would rule on the request.

James Holmes is charged with murder and attempted murder in the July 2012 attack, which also left 70 people wounded. He has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Jury selection is scheduled to start Oct. 14, and Samour has said it could take up to three months. About 5,000 potential jurors will get a summons, and Samour expects 3,200 to 3,500 to respond.

The trial is expected to take another five months.

Holmes appeared in court Thursday in shackles and red jail clothes. His thick beard had grown back out after he shaved it off late last year. He didn’t speak.

Defense attorney Daniel King argued that jury selection should be closed to protect potential jurors from harassment about their answers.

“That’s extremely troubling to us,” he said. He suggested a redacted transcript could be released after a jury is chosen, with prospective jurors’ names blacked out.

Prosecutor Karen Pearson said individual questioning should be closed to prevent potential jurors from learning through media reports what they would be asked.

Steve Zansberg, an attorney representing media organizations including The Associated Press, said outside the hearing that he plans to file a brief next week arguing against closure on First Amendment grounds.

“The First Amendment presumes that all aspects of a trial, including jury selection, are going to be open,” he said.

Samour said Holmes could be present during jury selection, except while members of the jury pool are filling out a lengthy questionnaire, when the judge and attorneys will also leave the room.

Prosecutors had objected, saying defense lawyers hadn’t cited any legal authority for allowing Holmes to be present.

Separately, KCNC-TV reported Thursday that the District Attorney’s Office has spent $685,462 on the case, but that doesn’t include most of the salaries of the prosecutors involved.

Responding to an open records request from the station, officials said about $84,000 of that was pay and benefits for one prosecutor who worked exclusively on the Holmes case for a time. Other prosecutors’ pay wasn’t included because they also worked on additional cases.

Other expenses included about $426,000 for victim assistance services, paid through a federal grant, and $163,000 in expert witness fees, paid by the state.

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Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP