Italian seismologists face manslaughter for not predicting earthquake

CBS

No one can predict earthquakes. But six seismologists and a government official are being tried for manslaughter in the deaths of more than 300 people in the 2009 tremblor in L'Aquila, Italy. The city's public prosecutor says the scientists downplayed the possibility of a quake to an extent that townsfolk did not take precautions that could have saved their lives. A judge has just set the trial to begin on September 20.

The case, which was brought in 2010, hinges on the statements of Bernardo De Bernardinis of Italy's Civil Protection Agency at a press conference a week before the quake. His agency had asked the scientists to convene and discuss whether the increasing seismic activity in the area might indicate a risk of a major quake.

At the subsequent press conference, De Bernardinis, who is being tried along with the scientists, told the crowd, “The scientific community tells me there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favorable.” (via Nature News) People say that as a result of this reassurance, they didn't leave their homes or take other precautions against the quake struck. [....]

Krauthammer: What Obama did to Israel

Washington Post

Every Arab-Israeli negotiation contains a fundamental asymmetry: Israel gives up land, which is tangible; the Arabs make promises, which are ephemeral. The long-standing American solution has been to nonetheless urge Israel to take risks for peace while America balances things by giving assurances of U.S. support for Israel’s security and diplomatic needs.

It’s on the basis of such solemn assurances that Israel undertook, for example, the Gaza withdrawal. In order to mitigate this risk, President George W. Bush gave a written commitment that America supported Israel absorbing major settlement blocs in any peace agreement, opposed any return to the 1967 lines and stood firm against the so-called Palestinian right of return to Israel.

For 2 1 / 2 years, the Obama administration has refused to recognize and reaffirm these assurances. Then last week in his State Department speech, President Obama definitively trashed them. He declared that the Arab-Israeli conflict should indeed be resolved along “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” [...]

Agudath Israel Affirms Abuse Cases Go First To Rabbi

Forward           (hat tip Baruch Pelta)

One of America’s leading ultra-Orthodox groups has reaffirmed that its followers must consult a rabbi before going to law enforcement authorities with suspicions of sexual abuse committed by community members.

The admonitions, from speakers at a conference sponsored by Agudath Israel of America, came even though a recent rabbinic edict permits reporting such crimes to secular authorities. A New Jersey district attorney with many Orthodox constituents said the advice given at the conference could be a violation of state law, though that view wasn’t shared by the district attorney for Brooklyn, where many other Orthodox Jews live.

At the daylong “Halacha Conference for Professionals,” held in Brooklyn on May 15, speakers elaborated on a recent ruling by Rabbi Shalom Elyashiv, one of ultra-Orthodoxy’s foremost authorities on Jewish religious law, or Halacha. Elyashiv recently decreed that Jews with reasonable suspicions that a case of sexual abuse has occurred are permitted to go to secular law enforcement authorities, notwithstanding traditional religious prohibitions against mesirah, or informing on fellow Jews.

But at a panel discussion titled “Molestation Issues and Reporting: Current Halachic Thinking,” the panel’s leader, Rabbi Shlomo Gottesman, cautioned that Elyashiv never explained what constitutes “reasonable suspicion.” To establish this, Gottesman said, a person should consult a rabbi “who has experience in these issues” before going to secular authorities.

Orthodox Jew asks: Does acknowledging being out of touch with reality help or hinder us?

One of the participants at the White Conference on abuse made the effort to contact me to clarify a number of points I made at the Conference. One of the comments she made struck me as a very cogent expression of what many Orthodox Jews think or act as if they hold such a view. I wasn't sure how to respond.

Lastly, it was repeatedly stated that we, orthodox Jewry, are out of touch with reality. Though this may be true (examples cited were scrutinizing others during the matchmaking process and being involved in irrelevant details such as tablecloths) does it actively help us? Does acknowledging this provide any practical benefit? Might it deflect us from properly addressing these problems and allow us to accept the situation as it is? It seems that it might simply dismiss the problem. Is it possible to clarify what benefit this sort of statement brings?

Rabbi's follower clashes with New Square burn victim's family

LOHUD

Early in the news conference, a six-year New Square resident, Shulem Sofer, began screaming that Sussman was lying. He yelled out that Rottenberg broke the community's rules and that it was justifiable to try to burn down Rottenberg's home, but not to injure the man.

"The rabbi never said to do fire to people," Sofer screamed in a high-pitched voice. "It's anti-Semitism. It's anti-New Square."

Sussman countered that people in the United States are free to pray where they want, but Sofer said he followed the grand rebbe's rules.

"I am from Jew land," he said, drawing laughter from the crowd. [....]

White Conference in the Press: Rabbis finally break silence on sex abuse

London Jewish Chronicle

The groundbreaking event took place at the William Alanson White Institute, a top psychoanalytic training and treatment centre, on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

The rabbis explained the halachic view of sexual abuse, mental health experts explained its psychological consequences, while survivors described lives traumatised by guilt, shame and betrayal.

Dr Alison Feit, director of the Jewish Centre for Trauma and Recovery, told the 120 members of the audience: "For too long family and communal concerns have been prioritised over the needs of the victims. [...]

Sex abuse coverups - interview with ex-cop

http://www.earthbook.tv/religion/channelhome/channelvideos/149/640/

Drugging the Vulnerable: Atypical Antipsychotics in Children and the Elderly

Time

Pharmaceutical companies have recently paid out the largest legal settlements in U.S. history — including the largest criminal fines ever imposed on corporations — for illegally marketing antipsychotic drugs. The payouts totaled more than $5 billion. But the worst costs of the drugs are being borne by the most vulnerable patients: children and teens in psychiatric hospitals, foster care and juvenile prisons, as well as elderly people in nursing homes. They are medicated for conditions for which the drugs haven't been proven safe or effective — in some cases, with death known as a known possible outcome.

The benefit for drug companies is cold profit. Antipsychotics bring in some $14 billion a year. So-called "atypical" or "second-generation" antipsychotics like Geodon, Zyprexa, Seroquel, Abilify and Risperdal rake in more money than any other class of medication on the market and, dollar for dollar, they are the biggest selling drugs in America. Although these medications are primarily approved to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which combined affect 3% of the population, in 2010 there were 56 million prescriptions filled for atypical antipsychotics.

In a presentation this week at an American Psychiatric Association meeting, Dr. John Goethe, director of the Burlingame Center for Psychiatric Research in Connecticut, reported that over the last 10 years, more than half of all children aged 5 to 12 in psychiatric hospitals were prescribed antipsychotics — and 95% of these prescriptions were for second-generation antipsychotics.

Many of these children didn't have a condition for which the drugs have been shown to be helpful: 44% of youngsters with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 45% of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were treated with them. [...]

Expert warns national-religious educators of denial of sexual abuse

JPost

The denial and complacency within the national-religious sector regarding sexual assault of minors is wrong and harmful to the victims, an expert warned a forum of educators on Wednesday – emphasizing the danger of the belief that a rabbinic figure would not molest a child.

Speaking at the Rehovot campus of Orot Teachers’ College on their annual conference dedicated to leadership, Adi Fishman, an Education Ministry expert on preventing and treating sexual assault, specializing in the national-religious sector, said “the religious public’s feeling – as though its children are more protected from sexual assault than those of other populaces – is wrong.”

“When, indeed, nothing has yet happened, that feeling can be a convenient defense mechanism. But once a sexual assault does occur, the belief that ‘things like that don’t happen in our society’ can mar the educator or parent’s ability to assist the victimized child,” she added. “An educator must first and foremost be aware that there is a good [likelihood] that there is a sexually assaulted child in his classroom. We know that one of every four girls, and five boys, will be sexually assaulted.” [...]

Religious dispute in New Square leads to severe burning of dissident

CBS

An orthodox Jewish father of four said he was apparently punished for worshipping his own way after an attack left him with burns covering 50 percent of his body.

CBS 2’s Dave Carlin reported a rift exploded into a fiery confrontation in Rockland County Sunday morning.

“His upper body is third-degree burns all over,” the victim’s son-in-law, Moshe Elbaum, said.

Elbaum said the top half of Aron Rottenberg’s body is covered in excruciatingly painful burn wounds. He said his father-in-law suffered the burns defending his family, confronting a man who police said was trying to fire bomb their home.

“He tried to murder people who were sleeping in the house,” Elbaum said.

Early Sunday morning, Rottenberg, 43, was sleeping in his Truman Avenue home in New Square when a family member saw an intruder in the backyard.

Rottenberg, a plumber, went outside to face the suspect, who police said had a device with flammable liquid and a long, improvised fuse. In the struggle, the device caught fire, injuring both men.

Police arrested 18-year-old Shaul Spitzer, also of New Square, and charged him with first-degree attempted arson and first-degree assault, both felonies.

Elizabeth Smart's molester sentenced to life: In only minority of cases molester is a stranger

Foxnews

Earlier this month, Robert Steele, Mitchell's attorney, appealed to the court to lighten Mitchell’s sentencing because despite the actions of his client, “in a legal sense, the story is not the extreme psychological injury. The story is her overcoming the extreme conduct of my client.”

Mitchell’s attorney had hoped his client is detained in a federal mental facility instead of a prison.

It has been nine years since Smart’s kidnapping because the case hit a few legal hurdles after the former street preacher was declared mentally ill and unfit in to stand trial in state court.

Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?

NYTimes

In any other set of twins, the natural conclusion about the two events — Krista’s drinking, Tatiana’s reaction — would be that they were coincidental: a gulp, a twinge, random simultaneous happenstance. But Krista and Tatiana are not like most other sets of twins. They are connected at their heads, where their skulls merge under a mass of shaggy brown bangs. The girls run and play and go down their backyard slide, but whatever they do, they do together, their heads forever inclined toward each other’s, their neck muscles strong and sinuous from a never-ending workout.

Twins joined at the head — the medical term is craniopagus — are one in 2.5 million, of which only a fraction survive. The way the girls’ brains formed beneath the surface of their fused skulls, however, makes them beyond rare: their neural anatomy is unique, at least in the annals of recorded scientific literature. Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus is a kind of switchboard, a two-lobed organ that filters most sensory input and has long been thought to be essential in the neural loops that create consciousness. Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.

What actually happens in moments like the one I witnessed is, at this point, theoretical guesswork of the most fascinating order. No controlled studies have been done; because the girls are so young and because of the challenges involved in studying two conjoined heads, all the advanced imaging technology available has not yet been applied to their brains. Brain imaging is inscrutable enough that numerous neuroscientists, after seeing only one image of hundreds, were reluctant to confirm the specific neuro­anatomy that Cochrane described; but many were inclined to believe, based on that one image, that the brains were most likely connected by a live wire that could allow for some connection of a nature previously unknown. A mere glimpse of that attenuated line between the two brains reduced accomplished neurologists to sputtering incredulities. “OMG!!” Todd Feinberg, a professor of clinical psychiatry and neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, wrote in an e-mail. “Absolutely fantastic. Unbelievable. Unprecedented as far as I know.” A neuroscientist in Kelowna, a city in British Columbia near Vernon, described their case as “ridiculously compelling.” Juliette Hukin, their pediatric neurologist at BC Children’s Hospital, who sees them about once a year, described their brain structure as “mind-blowing.” [...]

Psychiatrists who offer public comments about public figures

NYTimes

Of course, it’s only natural for the media to seek comment from experts. But as a psychiatrist, I cringe at statements like these, for they cross an ethical line that goes back to a presidential campaign nearly half a century ago.

Just before the 1964 election, a muckraking magazine called Fact decided to survey members of the American Psychiatric Association for their professional assessment of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican nominee against President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Ralph Ginzburg, the magazine’s notoriously provocative publisher, had heavily advertised the issue in advance, saying it would call Mr. Goldwater’s character into question.

A.P.A. members were asked whether they thought Mr. Goldwater was fit to be president and what their psychiatric impressions of him were. It was not American psychiatry’s finest hour. [...]

Report about Sunday's White Institutes Conference on Sexual Abuse in Orthodox World

It was truly an amazing conference. I think everyone was inspired and encouraged to do more. The conference was clearly a remarkable achievement.

Richard B. Gartner, Ph.D. Training and Supervising Analyst, Faculty, and Founding Director of Sexual Abuse Service, William Alanson White Institute for Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology, New York City

Yesterday's conference, "Understanding and Treating Sexual Abuse in the Orthodox Jewish World," was a groundbreaking, extraordinary event. In a short time, the Sexual Abuse Service, headed by Conference Chair and Service Director Julie Marcuse and Conference Co-chair Alison Feit, put together a very full, tightly-run conference that included messages from two prominent rabbis (Daniel Eidensohn and Yosef Blau) ; personal statements from three survivors of sexual abuse; keynotes by Julie, Ali, and myself; small groups led by various members of the Service; further panel papers by Abby Stein, Julie, and Ernesto Mujica, and a brief summing up by Alan Slomowitz.

The audience was rapt and in almost all cases very open to what psychoanalysis has to offer the Orthodox community. One person said to me she was astonished to come to a meeting where psychoanalysts listened rather than judged the community and where so much helpful information was offered.  The conference was sold out and there were probably as many turned away as attended. The conference was aimed both at mental health practitioners in the community as well as what we call (thanks to Jill Bellinson's input) first responders in the Red Cross model (those to whom sexual abuse is first disclosed but who have had no training in how to deal with such a difficult subject with its multi-layered meanings in the Orthodox community).  The audience was clearly wanting more, and there have been some feelers already to have speakers come out to the community, as well as a clear desire for more offerings from the Institute.

Jill Bellinson did an absolutely knock-out job at organizing the details, rounding up and instructing the volunteers, and at every stage of the planning being a voice of clarity and reason as difficult choices were made.  Donations made it possible for us to offer glatt kosher food to the attendees, who in many cases made it clear they felt surprisingly comfortable in our milieu. Sondra Wilk as always was superb at making things happen.

In addition to all I have named, I want to recognize the efforts and contributions of people who led small groups, manned the safe room, participated in the planning (I am sure I will leave out some names, and I apologize to anyone I have forgotten): Gail Harris, Daniel Gensler, Sharon Kofman, Seth Aronson, Evelyn Hartman, and Rivki Jungreis; Shloimie (Stephen) Zimmermann, who was a willing and helpful (as well as brave) supervisee in a live consultation meeting with me; and a group of  wonderful volunteers.

It was a day about which the Sexual Abuse Service and the Institute can be very proud.

==================================

Dr. Asher Lipner

All I can add as an advocate for abuse prevention and treatment in the Orthodox community is that everyone I spoke to was equally as impressed as Dr. Gartner.  I too would like to take this opportunity to make the following remarks of thanks:

Thanks to Dr. Gartner for his remarks, his enlightening supervision, and his grasping the need and readiness of our community to learn from his wisdom.
Thanks to Dr. Julie Marcuse whose brainchild this was and who put her all into seeing it through.
Thanks to the awesome courageous survivors Esther Malka, Mark and Joel, who never disappoint and who need to keep taking their show on the road.  Next stop Oprah Winfrey? 
Thanks to Dr. Alison Feit for a brilliant overview of what we have all been learning over years about how and why abuse is allowed to occur in our community and the psychoanalytic explanation for the human behaviors involved.
Thanks to Dr. Shloimie Zimmerman for a "massive" case presentation that left all of us emotionally moved and more sensitive to the experiential real life challenge of doing clinical work with survivors.
Thanks to Dr. Mujica for being so cool, both as a presenter and as a support for the survivors who spoke.
Thanks to Rabbi Eidensohn for the Kiddush Hashem of showing that the Torah can be and should be the most powerful tool we can utilize to prevent and help survivors heal.
Thanks to Rabbi Blau for modeling what a rabbi should be in this day and age.
Thanks to Dr. Nosson Solomon, Past President and one of the cofounders of Nefesh for attending and participating.
Thanks to Rivkie Yungries, currently of Nefesh for publicizing the event on the Nefesh listserve.
Thanks to Sondra Wilk for helping my friend and I and I don't know who else, in "the safe room," where we had a shared moment of survivor support.

Thanks to all of us for showing all of us that we care, and we are starting to get it!!!