Avodas HaMelech: Public knowledge & lashon harah

Justice: Harvard Prof Sandel #5

Testimony of dogs sends men to jail

NYTimes

A dog's sniff helped put Curvis Bickham in jail for eight months. Now that the case against him has been dropped, he wants to tell the world that the investigative technique that justified his arrest smells to high heaven.

The police told Mr. Bickham they had tied him to a triple homicide through a dog-scent lineup, in which dogs choose a suspect's smell out of a group. The dogs are exposed to the scent from items found at crime scene, and are then walked by a series of containers with samples swabbed from a suspect and from others not involved in the crime. If the dog finds a can with a matching scent, it signals — stiffening, barking or giving some other alert its handler recognizes.

Dogs' noses have long proved useful to track people, and the police rely on them to detect drugs and explosives, and to find the bodies of victims of crime and disaster. A 2004 report by the F.B.I. states that use of scent dogs, properly conducted, "has become a proven tool that can establish a connection to the crime."[...]

Ezagui case & Chabad

Home Page See Federal Indictment under documents

Ezagui Case from Pidyon Shevuim Trust on Vimeo.

Aish HaTorah:Does G-d care about intermarriage?

Aishe HaTorah

Belinda and I struggled with the idea: Does God care if we intermarry?

"What are we waiting for?" Belinda asked, buoyant yet somewhat confused as we sat facing each other. For weeks we had been talking about the prospect of getting married.

I held back. I was not supposed to marry a gentile, I thought. To do so would be a betrayal of my family, my ancestors, my tradition. Yet it would sound racist if I told her that.

Then I realized: It would sound racist to me as well.

I needed time to think, to read up on intermarriage, to figure things out. Belinda, who is Chinese, and I had been dating for a few months. Never before had things felt so "right," and yet there was an underlying sense that something was very "wrong."[...]

EJF, R' Tropper and Chabad

This post is a bit complicated. I don't have time to translate the Hebrew material or to organize it. Don't waste your time if you have not been following the discussions. I am not claiming the charges are true or taking sides.

First read the letters from these two links

• לקריאת המכתב המלא, בפרסום ראשון - לחץ כאן

• הרב התלונן: המיליארדר איים לחסל אותי

Then read the main article on Haredim site

Kiruv skills save Black marriages for $500,000

Mother Jones\ /Senator Lieberman's praise in Congressional Record

Stephen Baars has a few impediments to connecting with his current audience. Among them: He's a redheaded white guy. He's a rabbi. And he has a British accent.

None of these was a big problem when Baars was offering his "Bliss" marriage enhancement seminars to suburban Jews in Bethesda, Maryland. But in 2006, much to his surprise, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded him a five-year, $500,000-a-year "Healthy Marriage" grant. His federally mandated mission: to bring down the divorce rate in Washington, DC, whose population is more than 55 percent black and 20 percent poor. So for the past two years or so, Baars has been running ads in local papers and on black radio stations to entice couples to drop by his office in a gritty area just north of the Capitol and "create relationships that win!"

On a warm Thursday night in May, Baars, dressed in a gray suit and yarmulke, is sitting alone in his third-floor conference room, awaiting some bliss seekers. He understands that achieving his federal grant's goal is "a tough nut to crack." "When you're dealing with that degree of poverty, it's very hard for people to take this seriously," he says. "I read many black magazines," he adds—but even so, the cultural disconnect can be daunting. "Twenty or thirty percent of the people who come here can't deal with it."[...]