Rav Sternbuch: Making of an Apikores

Rav Sternbuch: Brazilian anusim & mamzerus

Rav Ovadiah Yosef's view on abuse

NPR Abuse scandal plagues Chasidic Jews in Brooklyn

NPR

Gene therapy success in eye disease

Wall Street Journal

A small but provocative study showed that a form of gene therapy significantly improved the vision of patients left legally blind by a rare genetic eye disease. The benefit was especially striking among children.

Researchers said the findings amount to an important advance toward medicine's ambitious but generally unrealized dream of replacing disease-causing mutant or missing genes with normal DNA to treat and cure debilitating illnesses. [...]

Obama attacks Fox to stop growing criticism

Wall Street Journal

Blogger Donald Sensing has a fascinating analysis of President Obama's war against Fox News. He describes the effort as "directly out of the Saul Alinsky playbook." Alinsky was the author of "Rules for Radicals," bible of left-wing community organizers. One of his rules, or "power tactics": "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Sensing analyzes how Obama is carrying out this advice: [...]


NYTimes

Late last month, the senior White House adviser David Axelrod and Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive of Fox News, met in an empty Midtown Manhattan steakhouse before it opened for the day, neutral ground secured for a secret tête-à-tête.

Mr. Ailes, who had reached out to Mr. Axelrod to address rising tensions between the network and the White House, told him that Fox’s reporters were fair, if tough, and should be considered separate from the Fox commentators who were skewering President Obama nightly, according to people briefed on the meeting. Mr. Axelrod said it was the view of the White House that Fox News had blurred the line between news and anti-Obama advocacy.[...]

Falashmura:Never ending Ethiopian immigrantion

Haaretz

The menu in the kitchen at the Falashmura transit camp in Gondar, northern Ethiopia, is written in English, even though none of the camp's residents or kitchen workers speak that language. In any event, says Ori Konforti, the menu is not there for the benefit of the diners. It is for the guests, Jews from around the world whose contributions finance the camp's operations. In his book "Tzionut Hafuh al Hafuh" (Zionism Upended, recently published in Hebrew by the Zionist Library), Konforti writes: "There are no intact tables there, no sink and no running water. Everything seems to the Western visitor derelict and dirty. Clearly it is all designed to generate empathy and contributions."

Konforti, who until last year was the Jewish Agency's representative in Ethiopia, says that American-Jewish groups wish to keep the immigration of the Falashmura going in order to generate more contributions from supporters who want to be involved in tikkun olam ("repairing the world" activities), enhance the bringing together of Jews from around the world and improve their own relations with the black community in the United States. Israel, he says, became entangled in commitments to the Falashmura, a group with an almost infinite potential for immigration, due to pressure by nongovernmental organizations and politicians, especially from the Shas party. [...]