Monday, August 8, 2011
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Child-Murder Arrest After 53 Years
Maria Ridulph's abduction shattered America's sleepy, suburban 1950s fairy tale. Winston Ross on the incredible story of how the alleged killer—18 then, 71 now—was finally caught.
The last time anybody saw 7-year-old Maria Ridulph alive, she was just outside her home, near the corner of Archie Place and Center Cross in the small town of Sycamore, Ill., 50 miles west of Chicago. It was December, and she was playing with a friend, Cathy Sigman, enjoying the first snowfall of the year, when a young white male in a multicolored sweater approached them and introduced himself as "Johnny.”
Johnny asked the girls if they wanted a piggyback ride. Maria agreed, and he hoisted her onto his back and tromped up and down the sidewalk. Then he asked if they had any dolls. Maria said she did, and ran back to her house to find one. While she was gone, Johnny touched Cathy on the arm and thigh and told her she was pretty, the 8-year-old later told police. Maria came back with the doll, and Cathy went home to get her mittens. But when she returned, Maria and Johnny were gone.
That was 53 years ago.
"It changed my life forever," said Cathy Sigman, now Cathy Chapman, who lives in St. Charles, in an interview with The Daily Chronicle of DeKalb County, Ill. "My childhood was never the same since."
The search for Maria Ridulph and the man in the multicolored sweater became a nationwide obsession. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Eisenhower demanded daily updates. The girl's skeleton turned up four months later, found by mushroom hunters, but her killer was never caught.
Obama's Sole Middle East Policy is to Attack Israel!
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has explained repeatedly over the years that Israel has no Palestinian partner to negotiate with. So news reports this week that Netanyahu agreed that the 1949 armistice lines, (commonly misrepresented as the 1967 borders), will be mentioned in terms of reference for future negotiations with the Palestinian Authority seemed to come out of nowhere.
Israel has no one to negotiate with because the Palestinians reject Israel’s right to exist. This much was made clear yet again last month when senior PA “negotiator” Nabil Sha’ath said in an interview with Arabic News Broadcast, “The story of ‘two states for two peoples’ means that there will be a Jewish people over there and a Palestinian people here. We will never accept this.”
Given the Palestinians’ position, it is obvious that Netanyahu is right. There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that Israel and the PA will reach any peace deal in the foreseeable future.
Add to this the fact that the Hamas terror group controls Gaza and will likely win any new Palestinian elections just as it won the last elections, and the entire exercise in finding the right formula for restarting negotiations is exposed as a complete farce.
So why is Israel engaging in these discussions? The only logical answer is to placate US President Barack Obama.
Read Caroline Glick in The Jerusalem Post
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Airplane Passenger gets heart attack on flight, Flight Crew has no clue what to do, gives him a sandwich and a soda and charges him for it!
When Per-Erik Jonsson went into a cardiac arrest on a RyanAir flight from the U.K. to Sweden on Sunday, all the airline staff did was offer him a sandwich.
Jonsson, 63, broke into a cold sweat and asked his wife for some water roughly one hour into the flight, Sweden'sThe Local reports.
His wife soon realized that Jonsson had lost consciousness and alerted plane staff as Jonsson's stepdaughter, Billie Appleton, tried to rouse him. "He didn't respond when I tried to shake him. But after I slapped him in the chest, he began breathing again," Appleton, who happens to be a nurse, told The Local. Appleton said she shouted for a doctor and told flight crew that Jonsson needed oxygen.
But the flight crew, Appleton claims, was ill-equipped to handle the situation. Instead, she says, the airline "said he had low blood pressure and gave him a sandwich and a soda."
Appleton slapped Jonsson on the chest to get him to breath again, news.com.au reports.
Once Jonsson had recovered slightly, the flight crew came to the family asking for payment for the sandwich and soda.
EU regulations mandate that cabin crew be trained in first-aid and pilots should alert air traffic control about a seriously ill passenger.
In a statement to The Local, Ryanair defended the cabin crew, saying they had acted appropriately.
Leon Weinstein survived the Warsaw Ghetto. But it is the story of the little girl that he wants to tell.
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| Leon Weinstein & Daughter Natalie |
She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name.
She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartimeWarsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper.
Natalie Yazinska.
Her mother, Sima, sobbed.
"The little one must make it," Leon Weinstein told his wife. "We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive."
He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: "I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this."
A cold wind cut at the skin that December morning, so Leon Weinstein bundled Natalie, 18 months old, in heavy pants and a thick wool sweater. He headed for a nearby apartment, the home of a lawyer and his wife. The couple did not have a child. Weinstein hoped they wanted one.
He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us.
Walking away, he could hear her whimper, but forced himself not to look back until he crossed the street. Then he turned and saw a man step out of the apartment. The man read Weinstein's note. He puzzled over the baby.
Cradling Natalie in his arms, the man walked half a block to a police station and disappeared inside.
Weinstein was beside himself.
What if the Gestapo took her from the police? What if they decided that she was a Jew?
Today, at his small Spanish-style home in Mid-City, Weinstein, 101, recalls in agonizing detail what it was like to give up his baby in 1941 amid the Nazi juggernaut. He is frail, but his wit and memory are keen. He remembers well what followed: killing Germans, dodging death, hunting for Natalie.
Holocaust scholars vouch for his account, calling him one of the last living fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, almost certainly the oldest. For years, Weinstein kept his memories buried.
No more.
It is important to tell about Nazi horrors, he now says, so they are never forgotten. It is, he says, important to tell the story of his search for his little girl.
Weinstein was born in the Jewish village of Radzymin, Poland. As a child, he was independent, even stubborn. His family adhered to Orthodox Judaism, but he never fully believed. He defied his elders and grew into something of a tough. Eyes gleaming, he recalls those who called him a "dirty Jew."
"They'd meet my fists," he says. "Then they'd be picking their teeth from the ground."
By 15, he had run away from home and was living in Warsaw, where he worked as a tailor's assistant, then for a clothing company. In his 20s, he married Sima. After Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, they were forced to live in Radzymin with other Jews.
Natalie was born the next year. When she was a year old, Weinstein heard a Nazi guard say that German troops would soon send everyone in Radzymin to a death camp.
He prepared to flee and begged his extended family to leave too. They refused, saying Germans would never do such a thing.
But Weinstein had seen Nazi cruelty first-hand. So he slipped away, with his wife and daughter, into the nearby forest. It was far from a haven: anti-Semitic Polish thugs roamed there.
Using forged papers that identified him as a Christian, Weinstein and his family headed to Warsaw. They hoped that the sprawling capital would be a good hiding place. Sima had no papers; if the Naziscaught her, all three might be killed.
A Polish couple promised to hide Sima, but Weinstein and the baby would draw too much attention. They decided to leave Natalie on the lawyer's doorstep. Weinstein would head for the confines of the Warsaw Ghetto, where fellow Jews would give him shelter.
"This was a place completely unimaginable," Weinstein says. "A place worse even than the hell that Dante described."
The ghetto was surrounded by an 11-foot-high brick wall, barbed wire and guards. More than 400,000 Jews had been forced inside the 3.5-square-mile area. By early 1943, an estimated 300,000 of them had been shipped to Treblinka, a death camp in northeast Poland.
Nazis rationed food for those who remained and many died of starvation. Disease killed thousands more. Weinstein feared constantly for Natalie and Sima and was certain he would die.
He joined the ghetto resistance. "If we were going to die," Weinstein says, "we would do it on our own terms. We would die standing proud, on our feet, making a statement to the world. We would take as many of those bastards as we could kill."
He helped organize and train resistance fighters. On occasion, using his forged papers, he talked his way out of the ghetto and smuggled weapons back inside.
On April 19, 1943, the first night of Passover, the Nazis began their final push to wipe out the ghetto. When German tanks rolled forward, Jewish fighters appeared at windows, on rooftops, along street corners. They hurled grenades, Molotov cocktails, bricks and rocks. Weinstein ran along rooftops in a fury, strafing Nazis with a machine gun.
The resistance held, but only for a while. "When could I have been killed?" Weinstein says. "Every five minutes." He says it again, pausing between each word. "Every…five…minutes."
One day he was crouched on the second floor of an abandoned building when he heard the footsteps of Nazi troops on the stairs. It's over, he told himself.
He looked out a window. A solitary soldier stood guard below.
Weinstein leaped. His steel-toed boots slammed into the soldier's head. "He fell like a sack of stones," Weinstein says. "I could see his skull, his blood, brains. For killing a man who hunted me, I felt nothing but good — and I was so excited I felt no pain.
"I was alive at least for another day."
Weinstein hid in sewers that swarmed with rats and human waste. He eventually found a way out that seemed safe, but was too weak to lift the iron cover.
Was this how he would die?
He fell asleep and dreamed of his grandfather, a deeply religious man. " 'You must keep going,'" his grandfather told him. "'You must. Don't stop.'"
Weinstein awoke with new energy. He hunched his back against the manhole cover, gathered all of his strength and pushed. It opened.
In the early morning darkness, he hunted for someone who would shelter a fleeing Jew who stank of sewage and looked as though he might collapse and die.
A Warsaw couple he had known before the war took him in.
Weinstein asked after his relatives who had stayed behind in Radzymin. All were dead. He looked for Sima. He learned she was dead too.
By spring 1945, the war was over, and surviving Jews began to leave the country. Weinstein was not among them. He had to find Natalie.
His first stop was the street where he'd left his little girl. It was mostly rubble, but one building stood untouched — the police station.
He walked in. "Do you remember hearing about an abandoned girl who was taken here?"
One officer did. The girl had been taken to a nearby convent.
The nuns there remembered, too. The baby was among several they tried to shelter. Disease claimed some, but the baby named Natalie survived. When the fighting drew near, she was sent to a cloister in the countryside.
Over bombed-out roads, pedaling hard on his bicycle, Weinstein made his way there. But Natalie was gone, sent to another group of nuns. On he went, to convent after convent, sometimes sleeping in fields.
The story was the same. Natalie had been there, but nobody knew where she was now. Nobody knew if she was alive.
After six months, Weinstein returned to the city, exhausted.
Then, against all hope, he decided to visit a convent near the ghetto. He walked past a statue of the Virgin Mary, then into a hall where dozens of pale, thin orphans stood.
"Mister, mister." They grabbed at his tall, brown boots. "Mister, mister, take me, take me."As he drew away, frustrated, a nun walked past, carrying a bony, blond girl, who looked about 4. He looked into the child's eyes. They were blue.
This, he said, was Natalie.
"She is yours?" the nun asked. "How can we know?"
"If she is," Weinstein said, "then she has a little brown birthmark, the size of a pencil eraser, just near her right hip."
The nun lifted the girl's dirty gray shirt and they looked.
He had found Natalie.
Weinstein and Natalie moved to France.
In time, he married Sophie, another Holocaust survivor and they had a son, Michael.
In 1952, the family took a ship to New York, then a train to L.A., where Weinstein became a successful clothing manufacturer. In 1993, Michael died in a car accident. Twelve years later, Sophie died of heart disease.
Weinstein remains full of life. He recites the Torah at Congregation Atzei Chaim, the Beverly Grove synagogue he has attended for seven decades.
He reads three newspapers and sips at least one glass of Chivas Regal, on the rocks, every day.
He rarely goes more than two waking hours without telephoning the woman who fusses over him, who tends to his every need. She is a psychologist known by her married name: Natalie Gold Lumer.
Every Friday night, father and daughter share a Shabbat meal. They gather with family and friends, light candles, hold hands, tell stories and offer lengthy prayers of thanks.
"It was terrible, what I went through," Weinstein said at a dinner not long ago. "But it was worth what I came away with: my beautiful daughter."
Natalie looked at him, shaking her head. There was a long silence.
"To have a father with such courage," she said, finally. "Well, I owe everything to him....I owe him my life."
Friday, August 5, 2011
Rabbis Ban I Pod !
With the heading "Daas Torah" in large bold letters, 54 Rabbis banned the I Pod and the MP4 even if it contains words of torah!
Amongst the signers is of course Rabbi Moishe Green, who will sign any ban.
The ban basically states that it is prohibited to buy or sell any of the above mentioned devices and even to hear "words of torah."
They also warn sellers not to sell or load these devices with words of torah even if it is for a Mitzvah...
Nowhere in the ban does it state that it is prohibited to molest and sodomize children!
(Hat tip: Failed Messiah)
Medical Study: You can be fat, not exercise & drink and smoke and you can still live to be 100 years old!
Academics studied almost 500 people between 95 and 109 and compared them with over 3,000 others born during the same period.
They found those who lived extremely long lives ate just as badly, drank and smoked just as much, took just as little exercise and were just as likely to be overweight as their long-gone friends.
The study was carried out by researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who interviewed 477 very long lived Ashkenazi Jews.
Prof Nir Barzilai, director of the college's Institute of Ageing Research, said previous studies of this group had identified certain genes which protected them from the effects of a normal Western lifestyle.
This research, published today (Wednesday) in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, indicates it really is the genes that matter.
He explained that this study provided evidence that these and other "longevity genes" helped "to buffer them against the harmful effects of an unhealthy lifestyle".He said the first woman he interviewed, an 109-year-old, told him she had smoked 40 cigarettes a day for 90 years. While most people would have died of lung cancer or heart disease, she soldiered on.
Prof Barzilai emphasised that the research did not mean most people could live unhealthy lives and not expect to pay a price in the end.
He said: "Although this study demonstrates that centenarians can be obese, smoke and avoid exercise, those lifestyle habits are not good choices for most of us who do not have a family history of longevity.
69% Say Scientists Have Falsified Global Warming Research
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults shows that 69% say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs, including 40% who say this is Very Likely. Twenty-two percent (22%) don’t think it’s likely some scientists have falsified global warming data, including just six percent (6%) say it’s Not At All Likely. Another 10% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here .)
The number of adults who say it’s likely scientists have falsified data is up 10 points from December 2009 .
Fifty-seven percent (57%) believe there is significant disagreement within the scientific community on global warming, up five points from late 2009. One in four (25%) believes scientists agree on global warming. Another 18% aren’t sure.
Republicans and adults not affiliated with either major political party feel stronger than Democrats that some scientists have falsified data to support their global warming theories, but 51% of Democrats also agree.
Levi Aron Pleads Not Guilty In Kletzky Murder. Suspect Fit For Trial! Asked for not Kosher food during initial questioning!
Despite the alleged confession, police and prosecutors say they are continuing to work on verifying Aron's horrific and bizarre explanation for the boy's death. It remains unclear why Aron would have taken the child in the first place.
The medical examiner's office said the boy was given a cocktail of prescription drugs. But Aron's confession didn't mention that, and he denied ever tying up the boy.
The suspect was asked if he wanted a kosher meal. "No, I'll eat anything," he replied, according to the documents. They considered McDonald's before settling on Chinese food.
Before the arraignment, State Assemblyman Dov Hikind told reporters that the victim's family and community were still coming to grips with the gruesome slaying.
"The idea of an insanity defense is just not acceptable," Hikind said. "He planned and plotted this entire horror that he committed."
A pretrial hearing was set for Oct. 14.
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