U.K. Court: Anti-Gay Couple Can't Be Foster Parents

Fox News

A British court has ruled that a Christian couple can no longer care for foster children because of their opposition to homosexuality.

Eunice and Owen Johns provided foster care for nearly two dozen children in the 1990s — but after Great Britain instituted equality laws, they were banned from the program in 2007.

Social workers red-flagged the couple during an interview when they explained that they did not approve of homosexuality because of their Pentecostal faith.

The Associated Press reported that judges at London’s Royal Courts of Justice determined that laws protecting homosexuals from discrimination take precedence over the couple’s religious beliefs.[...]

Ethiopians as Jews - 2 letters of Rav Moshe Feinstein

Concerning the status of Ethiopians as Jews - there is a teshuva printed in the Igros Moshe which refers to a previous letter on the subject. This other letter was not published in the Igros Moshe but was published in HaPardes (59:1) in 1984. There are clear differences between the two letters and it seems strange that the second letter was not included in the Igros Moshe - especially since it was addressed to Mordechai Tendler who was involved in editiing the Igros Moshe. I am publishing them both here.   HaPardes is available at Hebrew Books

Violence in Chareidi schools

BCHOL

אלימות מזעזעת ב'חיידר' אשדודי: ילד דקר את חברו בראשו • מחריד
האלימות הגואה ברחוב הישראלי הגיעה גם לכיתות ה'חיידרים': ילד כבן 13, תלמיד 'חיידר' אשדודי ידוע, שלף במהלך קטטה מברג מכיסו, ודקר את חבירו בראשו • הרב חיים ולדר ל'בחדרי חרדים' בעקבות האירוע: "האלימות המילולית בציבור החרדי מפחידה אותי הרבה יותר" • ויש תמונות מהזוועה

Chabad Seminar: identifying, reporting and preventing child indecent abuse

Collive

As part of a series on protecting children, an educational seminar to take place March 8th, 2011, at 8:00 PM, at Bais Rivka, 310 Crown Street, Brooklyn, is going to revolve around identifying, reporting and preventing child indecent abuse - a largely unaddressed issue in our community.

Noted lecturer and Chabad.org columnist Mrs. Bronya Shaffer is coordinating the event and believes it should be mandatory given the necessity to address child indecent abuse issues.

(As of now, participating schools include Bais Rivka High School, Bnos Menachem, Darchei Menachem, Bnos Yisroel, Beis Chaya Mushka, Oholei Torah, Lubavitch Yeshiva and is being endorsed by Igud Hamenahalim.)

In an article titled Creating a Sane Environment: Protecting the Innocence of Children, Rabbi Manis Friedman chillingly surmises that close to half the people he has met were abused.

That is a staggering figure from someone who has been working in our educational system for decades and certainly reflects national survey averages of a 25% rate of childhood indecent abuse (this is an average of slightly varying statistics from different agencies and includes both men and women).

The panel will consist of Dr. David Pelcovitz, Rabbi Shloime Sternberg, Professor Gavriel Fagin and Assistant District Attorney Henna White. Mrs. Shaffer will emcee.

Union Education,What Wisconsin reveals about public workers & political power.

Wall Street Journal

It's important to understand how revolutionary this change was. For decades as the private union movement rose in power, even left-of-center politicians resisted collective bargaining for public unions. We've previously mentioned FDR and Fiorello La Guardia. But George Meany, the legendary AFL-CIO president during the Cold War, also opposed the right to bargain collectively with the government.

Why? Because unlike in the private economy, a public union has a natural monopoly over government services. An industrial union will fight for a greater share of corporate profits, but it also knows that a business must make profits or it will move or shut down. The union chief for teachers, transit workers or firemen knows that the city is not going to close the schools, buses or firehouses.

This monopoly power, in turn, gives public unions inordinate sway over elected officials. The money they collect from member dues helps to elect politicians who are then supposed to represent the taxpayers during the next round of collective bargaining. In effect union representatives sit on both sides of the bargaining table, with no one sitting in for taxpayers. In 2006 in New Jersey, this led to the preposterous episode in which Governor Jon Corzine addressed a Trenton rally of thousands of public workers and shouted, "We will fight for a fair contract." He was promising to fight himself.[...]

child abuser Elior Chen defended by misguided individuals

YNET
    

"הרב המתעלל" שעינה שני אחים קטנים חויב לפצות את המשפחה ב-700 אלף שקלים. השופט: "מעשי ההתעללות הם אכזריים, מחרידים ומזעזעים". התובע: העונש הולם את מעשיו. אביו של חן: "השופט כתב את מה שהתקשורת הכתיבה לו". נציג העדה החרדית: "זה משפט דרייפוס". הסנגור הבטיח לערער לעליון

Techeles rediscovered?

NYTimes

The scholar, Zvi C. Koren, a professor specializing in the analytical chemistry of ancient colorants, says he has identified the first known physical sample of tekhelet in a tiny, 2,000-year-old patch of dyed fabric recovered from Masada, King Herod’s Judean Desert fortress, later the site of a mass suicide by Jewish zealots after a long standoff against the Romans. [...]

Objective behavioral test accurately diagnoses ADHD,,

Time

Does your child have ADHD, or is he merely rambunctious? Few questions divide parents, teachers, and mental-health professionals as often as this one. Some 5.4 million children ages 4 to 17 had ever been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2007, according to the most recent data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The previous year, the total was 4.6 million, meaning 17.4% of all recorded ADHD cases were diagnosed in a single calendar year. There is little hard evidence to suggest that the pace of growth since 2007 has slowed.

The surge in ADHD diagnoses has worried mental-health clinicians because diagnosis of the disorder can be highly subjective. And yet between 1992 and 2000, production of the stimulant methylphenidate — which is marketed as Ritalin — increased 730%, according to the British Medical Journal. But there is a better way to diagnose ADHD — an objective, widely available test developed at McLean Hospital, the psychiatric arm of Harvard Medical School. The test is so good that it could settle the ADHD-diagnosis debate. [...]

Child Abuser Elior Chen sentenced to 24 years in jail

YNet

Judge Yoram Noam wrote in the verdict that "the crimes Chen committed were committed together with others – group members – who congregated in his shadow and worshipped him. The defendant employed a reign of terror over the children which included violence, contempt, and degradation."

"The personal circumstances of the defendant, as well as his wife and children's place of residence abroad, are pushed aside before the public interest in a severe penalty," the judge wrote of his sentence. [...]

Pediatrician in Abuse Case Killed Himself

NYTimes

Dr. Melvin D. Levine, a nationally known pediatrician who was found dead last week, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, a medical examiner said on Friday.

Dr. Levine, 71, was found in the woods near his Rougemont, N.C., home with a gunshot wound to his forehead. His death was reported a day after a class-action sexual abuse and malpractice suit was filed against him in Boston. [...]

Rabbi Akiva said not to live in community run by rabbis

Pesachim (112a): There were seven things that Rabbi Akiva instructed his son Rabbi Yehoshua,…Do not live in a town whose leaders are Torah scholars [because they are absorbed in their studies and not with community affairs – Rashi]…

Brooklyn Rabbi-Therapist Accused Of Molesting client Since She Was 12

CBS News

A father was convinced his 16-year-old daughter was having a relationship with a 17-year-old boy, so the father set up a hidden camera in the house. What he recorded shocked him — what he saw the daughter doing to please the young man.

They are Orthodox Jews, in Brooklyn. The father had already taken the daughter to seek counseling with Rabbi Nechemya Weberman in years past. Just as he had taken her older sister. It is a common practice in the community for a respected person to be a counselor, or serve as a therapist. Weberman is affiliated, police said, with Brooklyn’s United Talmudic Community, a yeshiva.

Now, the father went to the Brooklyn DA’s office with the tape, and Rabbi Weberman. The Brooklyn DA’s office has set up special channels of communication to bridge cultural gaps that might be beneficial to both sides. However, the more that investigators talked to the parties involved — especially when they spoke with them separately — the more that there were questions which indicated something was not right. Around Feb. 16, the girl told a counselor at school that the rabbi has been raping her for years. The counselor reported it, and when the investigators talked to her again, she claimed there were at least 16 incidents at 263 Classon Avenue, in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, which serves as Weberman’s home and office. It is where the counseling sessions took place. The girl told investigators it began in 2007, when she was 12; and continued through 2010. [...]

Abuse Suspects, Your Calls Are Taped. Speak Up.

NYTimes

The men charged with beating, stabbing or burning their wives or girlfriends have plenty to say. Lately, their words have been used against them in New York courts as never before.

“I need you to prepare the kids to start lying,” one man said to his girlfriend. He had been charged with burning her face with a hot iron as she knelt in view of their children.

Another cooed “baby” to the girlfriend he was charged with grabbing by the hair and scratching with keys. “Whatever you do,” he directed, “do not speak to the D.A.”

A third insisted to his brother that he was surprised at all the blood after he used a kitchen knife on the woman he had been with since they were teenagers. “I just stuck her like a little,” he said. [...]

Foster care is not the best choice for most children with problem families

NYTimes

In my column this week I examined the work of an organization called Youth Villages, which offers intensive in-home services to help children in the foster care system return to their families, or extended families, wherever it is possible to do so safely. My point was to highlight the fact that this approach, which is vastly underutilized and underfunded, is proving to be superior to the current practices in the child welfare system. It’s now common for youth to remain in foster care or residential treatment for years. When they age out of these systems, many are unable to live successfully as adults.

Readers raised legitimate questions, including whether this strategy is safe. A number expressed doubts — even consternation — at the idea that Youth Villages could consider the troubled families who get entangled in the child welfare, mental health and juvenile justice systems as suitable for raising children. “For those hundreds of thousands of cases in which the parents create the unsafe environment, children should be removed from homes” explained Lucas from Champaign, Ill. (48). “[T]hat is, unless the author can justify leaving infants in the care of low-functioning addicts or toddlers in the care of convicted child sex offenders.” [...]