Divorce recalcitrant to pay NIS 700,000

YNET

Man asks for court's intervention after being fined for refusing to divorce his wife for 14 years; judges rule against him, order him to compensate woman

The Tel Aviv District Court accepted recently a Family Court ruling, ordering a man who refused to give his wife a divorce to pay her NIS 700,000 (about $188,000) in damages.

This was the first time a superior court discussed this matter. In its ruling, the court essentially backed the precedent recognizing a refusal to grant a divorce as an injustice requiring compensation. [...]

Rav Sternbuch - Beshalach

Kidney transplants: Monster or Savior? Turkish dDoctor Draws New Scrutiny

NYTimes

For a surgeon wanted by Interpol and suspected of harvesting human organs for an international black-market trafficking ring, Yusef Sonmez, was remarkably relaxed as he sipped Turkish red wine in a bustling kebab restaurant facing the wind-whipped Sea of Marmara.

Dr. Sonmez, refreshed from a ski trip to Austria, spoke last month while on a break from business trips to Israel and operations on cancer patients here.

He boasts about the satisfaction of his kidney transplant surgeries, more then 2,400 by his count. He keeps friends (and, incidentally, investigators) up to date on his life via a blog and his Web site listing contact details. And in his seaside villa on the Asian side of Istanbul, he treasures a framed copy of a signed letter in 2003 from the Ministry of Health in Israel commending him for his life-saving aid to “hundreds of Israeli patients who are suffering from kidney diseases and awaiting transplants.”

The return of the hat - hats are having a fashion moment

NYTimes

THERE was a time when only beggars went bareheaded. This was some while ago, a century or so. But up until World War II and the period just after, a gentleman was not considered properly dressed without a hat. Even the names of hats were rich in character and historical association. The bowler, or derby, with the rigid shape of an upended bean pot, was named for a 19th-century English earl who popularized the style. The fedora’s name came from a play of that title, written for Sarah Bernhardt by the otherwise largely forgotten French dramatist Victorien Sardou.

Then the hat went the way of the dodo. Social historians are divided about the cause of the sartorial die-off, although an often repeated canard attributes it to President Kennedy and his rarely covered thatch of luxuriant hair. The real blame probably belongs to automobiles, though. Hats were knocked off when you entered a car and inevitably got squashed beneath a passenger’s wayward behind or went into orbit when you lowered the top to a convertible. [...]

Dispute between Chabad & Russia - Derails Art Loans From Russia

NYTimes

Diplomats in Washington and Moscow have been seeking to negotiate an agreement to pave the way for the loans but have so far been unsuccessful.

The legal dispute centers on the so-called Schneerson Library, a collection of 12,000 books and 50,000 religious documents assembled by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement over two centuries prior to World War II, and kept since in Russia.

For decades the Chabad organization, which is based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, has been trying to regain possession of the library, saying that it was illegally held by the Soviet authorities after the war.

In 1991 a court in Moscow ordered the library turned over to the Chabad organization; the Soviet Union then collapsed, and the judgment was set aside by the Russian authorities. The Russian government now says it wants to preserve the library for Russian Jews and scholars. [...]

Shaken-Baby Syndrome Faces New Questions in Court

NYTimes

There are two irreconcilable versions of how that calm shattered. Rueda says that Noah was crying, and she picked him up, sat on the couch and gave him the bottle to help put him to sleep. While she was feeding him, she felt Noah's arm go limp, and when she moved to take the bottle out of his mouth, he made a sound that she didn't recognize. "I could tell something was happening," she says. She stood up and put Noah on her shoulder, patting him on the back. "As I did this, his body tensed up in a ball. It was as if he was looking for air, and he couldn't breathe." Rueda put Noah on the floor and started C.P.R., at the same time reaching for her phone to call 911. She put the dispatcher on speakerphone so she could keep tending to Noah. "I said, 'Please, please get someone here,' " she said. "I knew it could hurt him if there wasn't enough oxygen going to his brain."

Erin Whitmer's account of the moments before Noah lost consciousness is entirely different. "Around 2:30 on April 20, 2009, Noah was shaken," she wrote on her blog Noah's Road, on the one-year anniversary of the incident. "He'd been crying. He needed something that his day care provider wasn't providing him. Maybe he was tired of lying on the mat where she'd had him. Maybe he needed a hug, a laugh, a kind touch. Instead, she picked him up, her fingers gripping him tightly, feeling the softness of his velour pants and his cotton onesie under her fingers, and she shook him." [...]

Israel, Alone Again?

NYTimes

ISRAELIS want to rejoice over the outbreak of protests in Egypt's city squares. They want to believe that this is the Arab world's 1989 moment. Perhaps, they say, the poisonous reflex of blaming the Jewish state for the Middle East's ills will be replaced by an honest self-assessment.

But few Israelis really believe in that hopeful outcome. Instead, the grim assumption is that it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power. Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.

Either result would be the end of Israel's most important relationship in the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood has long stated its opposition to peace with Israel and has pledged to revoke the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty if it comes into power. Given the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas's control of Gaza and the unraveling of the Turkish-Israeli alliance, an Islamist Egypt could produce the ultimate Israeli nightmare: living in a country surrounded by Iran's allies or proxies. [...]