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A 30-year-old mother of three was viciously stabbed to death in front of her two young children in Salinas, California, on Sunday, June 25. The perpetrator, Rodrigo Bravo, 32, had an active restraining order placed against him and was accused of violating it multiple times in the past.
The children that witnessed the tragic murder of their mother were a two-year-old boy and a one-year-old girl.
By the time police responded to the residence on Natividad Road, Eleni Tavau had already suffered multiple stab wounds. Officers attempted to revive her, but she was ultimately transported to a local hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries.
Unable to outrun justice, the accused turned himself in at the county jail Sunday afternoon. He then appeared in court to face six felony charges, including second-degree murder and two counts of causing great bodily harm to minor children. Court documents stated that he used a knife to kill the mother of two of his children and that Bravo had previously been found guilty of assaulting Tavau and violating court orders in the past 12 months.
The Tavau family has now set up a GoFundMe page to cover the costs of bringing Eleni’s remains back to her native Samoa for a proper burial. Any donations from the public will be greatly appreciated and will honor her memory.
Bravo remains in custody with his bail set at more than 1 million dollars, and he was scheduled to stand trial on July 26. This tragic event serves as a reminder of domestic violence’s severe consequences and stresses the importance of court orders. Though the Tavau family is left to pick up the pieces of their lives without Eleni, their grief is seen, and we send them our heartfelt condolences.
The PM cited concerns the technology could fall into Iranian hands.
By JNS
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out providing the Iron Dome aerial-defense system to Ukraine.
“I think it’s important to understand that we’re concerned also with the possibility that systems that we would give to Ukraine would fall into Iranian hands and could be reverse-engineered and we would find ourselves facing Israeli systems used against Israel,” the premier said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published on Wednesday.
Kyiv has requested Iron Dome batteries to defend itself against Russian aerial threats, including Iranian-made drones.
Israel is also preventing the United States from transferring to Ukraine two Iron Dome batteries in its possession.
“We can save more Ukrainian lives today if we transfer those batteries. However, due to serious concerns, the government of Israel has blocked the United States from transferring these batteries,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen said in a letter sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee last Friday.
Israel developed Iron Dome and initially funded it. While subsequent rounds of funding were provided by the United States, Israel has veto power over any foreign transfers or sales.
Netanyahu also pushed back against accusations that Israel is not doing enough to support Ukraine in its war with Russia. He noted that Israel has provided Kyiv with a rocket and drone alert system.
“We are also helping Ukraine. We’re helping them in civilian defense, a civilian alert system that will obviate the need to get half the country in shelters for every missile fired. So we’re helping them with that.”
The prime minister also addressed accusations by the Ukrainian embassy in Israel that Jerusalem is actually taking a “pro-Russian stance” in the conflict by maintaining a neutral position.
“We’re not neutral. We’ve expressed our sympathy and position with Ukraine, but I am saying there is a limit, limitations that we have and concerns and interests that we have,” Netanyahu said.
“My first interest, regardless of sympathy and the steps that we take, is to ensure the security of the one and only Jewish state. We have the concerns that I told you. Also, our pilots are flying right next to Russian pilots in the skies over Syria in order to block the attempts of Iran to establish a second Hezbollah front in Syria.”
The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem summoned Ukraine’s ambassador after he accused Israel of taking a pro-Russia stance.
The dressing down is scheduled for July 3. Ambassador Yevgen Korniychuk will meet with Aliza Ben-Nun, the head of the ministry’s Strategic Affairs Directorate.
The post Netanyahu says Israel will not provide Ukraine Iron Dome appeared first on World Israel News.
Still from Elemental. (Pixar)
Pixar’s new film Elemental is so boring and unmemorable that it seems like a new low for the famed animation company. That’s impressive, considering that Pixar has already had quite a fall from it’s early glory days, slavishly following Disney Studios down the money-grubbing rathole, ruining its sterling reputation through bad sequels, cynical merchandizing, and a general anything-for-a-buck mentality.
I’m no fan of the Pixar style myself — too much ideologically poisoned Disneyfied nostalgia and sentimental slop weighing down fantastically talented animators — but even I can appreciate the more dazzling aspects of Toy Story (1995), The Incredibles (2004) Ratatouille (2007), and Coco (2017).
But Elemental, directed by Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur), is shockingly formulaic. It seems Sohn based the film’s premise on his own experience as the son of Korean immigrants, who ran a store in the Bronx in the 1970s. But even so, it’s impossible not to recognize that the Elemental narrative is a tired, retreaded variation on Inside/Out (2015). That Pixar film portrayed the basic emotions as contending characters representing Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. Their tech job is to manage via computer consoles the emotional life of a young girl, within the complex social system of her being.
In the Elemental variation of this idea, the basic natural elements of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air are anthropomorphized as characters trying to live harmoniously together in Element City. Fire beings are the newest immigrants, and they’re not fully accepted in society, especially by the richest class of Water beings.
There’s a cross-class romance involving fiery Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis) with lugubrious Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie). Her big trouble is her immigrant father, Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen), and his legacy of hardship in leaving his overheated home country and running a store in the rough working-class neighborhood of Element City. His dream is that Ember will eventually inherit the store and run it. And though she works maniacally hard, she can never quite measure up.
She’s always causing inadvertent chaos when her angry emotions get the best of her, setting inconvenient fires. This turns out to be because running the store is the wrong kind of work for her. She’s really meant to create glassmaking artworks, channeling her ability to concentrate heat. It’s Wade and his rich Water family whose upper-class connections provide her that opportunity with a fancy glassmaking internship.
Still from Elemental. (Pixar)
But the overall lack of inventiveness in Elemental means that these heavy ideological themes come across clumsy and didactic. The characters themselves are less engaging than in many other Pixar films. There’s a total absence of any truly dazzling visual effects, and the script isn’t particularly funny or moving, so you’re free to notice what a weird-ass story this is for an animated film. What do Fire and Water, Earth and Air, have to do with another tale of work and professional advancement?
But Pixar films are so often about characters’ working lives in complex social systems resembling human communities (mainly cities) that it seems like the studio’s storytelling talent veers automatically toward those narratives. Not only are they exhaustingly plotty but they normalize the idea of work as the essential fact of all life, supposedly what every entity on earth does all the time. Toy Story began it all the way back in 1995, with a plot about the way toys work at being the playthings of human children, and attend corporate-style meetings run by busy managers bearing clipboards, cautioning employees about their performance levels. In Monsters, Inc., all the monsters work in a factory trying to hit peak performance levels as “Top Scarers” by terrifying children at night, because kids’ screams power the city of Monstropolis.
I love Ratatouille, directed by Brad Bird — it’s my favorite Pixar film — but I gotta admit it’s all about work and achievement and professional success. In this story, it’s not enough for Remy the Rat (Patton Oswalt) to overcome intense prejudices against him as he tries to become a chef in Paris — he needs to become a top chef, with his own restaurant, and a big rep. And the human characters of Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano) and Colette Tatou (Janeane Garofalo) have to find their own levels of work proportionate to their talents — Alfredo can’t cook at all, so he becomes a waiter in Remy’s new restaurant, and Colette becomes Remy’s sous-chef.
And the food critic Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole) is despised as a villain because critics don’t work, see, they just critique the work of others. Anton Ego is only redeemed when he’s converted by Remy’s brilliantly inventive cooking and strives to serve that talent. He invests in Remy’s new restaurant, as both a great business opportunity and a recognition of truly worthy work done at the highest level.
Propaganda much, Pixar? That’s a plot turn worthy of mad right-wing novelist Ayn Rand. Pixar also inherits the pro-work mania from Disney itself, of course. In Disney films — imbued with the old Uncle Walt’s punitive Protestant work ethic that made him such a bitter enemy of labor unions and his own suffering workforce — not working obsessively hard is regarded as morally dangerous. That’s even if (especially if) animated characters find themselves living in paradise where the weather is perfect and the food falls off the trees and there’s no sane reason to work. A straight line can be drawn from the siren song “Bare Necessities” in Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967) to “Hakuna Matata” in The Lion King (1994). In both cases, the young male protagonist is temporarily swayed by likable but lazy sidekicks who want them to ignore their responsibilities, which involve huge, generally life-endangering, effort.
If you don’t think animated films can work any other way than the Disney/Pixar narrative models, just throw your mind back to the hugely popular Bugs Bunny cartoons that played before feature films in theaters in the 1930s through the ’50s. Guess how those tend to start? With Bugs Bunny happily living in his hole in the ground, probably reclining luxuriously while eating a carrot, or possibly strolling in the greenery singing an amusing song, until hunter Elmer Fudd or some other malefactor comes bothering and chasing and threatening him. Then the battle begins for Bugs’ freedom to do nothing but enjoy himself in nature.
It doesn’t have to be all work all the time, but nobody’s told the top talent at Pixar.
The first was his father, more than 35 years ago.
By JNS
Israeli President Isaac Herzog will address a joint session of Congress on July 19, U.S. lawmakers announced on Thursday.
The speech is meant to “commemorate the 75th anniversary of the statehood of Israel and reaffirm the special relationship between our two nations,” said a statement issued by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
The only other Israeli president to address both chambers of Congress was Herzog’s father, Chaim, in November 1987.
“The world is better off when America and Israel work together,” McCarthy said in the statement, noting that the United States was the first nation to recognize Israel, 11 minutes after it declared independence in 1948.
“Today, we continue to strengthen the unbreakable bond between our two democracies,” he added.
McCarthy traveled to Israel in May and addressed the Knesset, becoming only the second-ever person in his post to address the legislature in Jerusalem.
Schumer said in the statement: “I am pleased Congress will have the opportunity to hear from President Herzog, who has always been a great leader and is particularly influential at this time, to commemorate 75 years of the success of the State of Israel and the strong, enduring U.S.-Israel alliance.”
During his trip, Herzog will meet with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington and visit with Jewish community leaders in New York City.
Herzog met with the U.S. president at the White House last October under the previous Israeli government.
Biden has yet to extend an invitation to Washington to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since he took office again for the sixth time in December. The U.S. president said in March that he has no plans to invite Netanyahu in the “near term.”
The post Herzog to become second ever Israeli president to address Congress appeared first on World Israel News.
The explainer video, released by the Public Diplomacy Ministry, cites examples from CNN, BBC and other outlets.
“You’d think a bunch of innocent people died for some mysterious reason,” the video charged. “The network later apologized for the incorrect reporting but the damage was done.”
The post WATCH: ‘Fight the fake’: Israeli government warns against CNN, other foreign media appeared first on World Israel News.
The terrorist, Youssef Shahbazi Abbasalilo, was captured and interrogated by the Mossad in Iran. In a video released by the spy agency, Abbasalilo describes details of the plot to kill Israelis in Cyprus.
The post WATCH: Mossad caught leader of Cyprus terror cell in Iran, airs confession tape appeared first on World Israel News.
“Now that they have been exposed, they should do the only decent thing they can do: issue a public apology to the yeshiva community.”
By World Israel News Staff
A spate of recent reports in The New York Times on the Orthodox Jewish school system in New York have ignited widespread criticism due to allegations of inaccuracies, a lack of context, and outright falsehoods, the most recent of which was an email which proves the so-called newspaper of record was aware that data it was citing was incorrect.
At the heart of the controversy is a NYT article published on December 29, 2022, authored by Brian Rosenthal, which claimed an unusually high percentage of students at Brooklyn yeshivas were recipients of special education services. The Times ignored appeals from numerous yeshivas about the inaccuracy of the figures before the story went to print.
Adding fuel to the fire is an email, reportedly sent by Rosenthal to the State Education Department, which suggests he was aware that the data underpinning his claims were flawed. In the email, he purportedly pointed out inconsistencies in the state’s data, where the recorded number of special education students exceeded total enrollment for several schools.
The revelation of this email has amplified the controversy, with many within the yeshiva community viewing it as evidence of the newspaper’s lack of journalistic integrity in this matter. Rabbi Moshe Dovid Niederman, a member of Parents for Educational and Religious Liberty in Schools (PEARLS) executive board, has called for the Times to issue a public apology to the yeshiva community.
“This proves what we and the Orthodox community have been saying all along,” Niederman said. “The Times wasn’t objectively reporting facts about yeshivas but was pushing its anti-yeshiva narrative. Now that they have been exposed, they should do the only decent thing they can do: issue a public apology to yeshivas and the yeshiva community.”
Education experts consulted by Yeshiva World News (YWN) suggested that the state’s data, which the NYT relied on, likely represented cumulative figures rather than annual student numbers – which explains the reason why, as Rosenthal’s own clarifying email to the state asked, the number students “classified as special ed is higher than their overall enrollment.” The experts argued that the data may have included students who had received services in previous years but had since graduated or left the school.
As Attorney Avi Schick told YWN, the incident could potentially lead to legal scrutiny of the Times, highlighting the serious implications of this ongoing situation.
“It is normally very difficult to establish that a journalist acted with actual malice. But the revelation of this email demonstrates that Rosenthal knew the data he was relying on wasn’t accurate,” Schick said. “That is the kind of thing that can give a lawsuit legs and allow it it get to the discovery phase where the Times would have to disclose its own internal communications.”
The post NYT under fire for knowingly printing false data about Jewish schools in blistering report appeared first on World Israel News.
Justice Clarence Thomas, a Black justice who had long called for an end to affirmative action, deemed the admissions policies “rudderless, race-based preferences.”
By Associated Press
President Joe Biden said Thursday that he “strongly, strongly” disagrees with the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the use of affirmation action in college admissions, saying justices unraveled “decades of precedent” as the president stressed that race-based discrimination continues to exist in America.
He also urged colleges not to let Thursday’s ruling “be the last word.”
“They should not abandon their commitment to ensure student bodies of diverse backgrounds and experience that reflect all of America,” Biden said from the White House.
The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down affirmative action in college admissions, declaring race cannot be a factor and forcing institutions of higher education to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies.
The court’s conservative majority overturned admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest private and public colleges, respectively.
Chief Justice John Roberts said that for too long universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, — the nation’s second Black justice, who had long called for an end to affirmative action — wrote separately that the decision “sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the decision “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”
Both Thomas and Sotomayor, the two justices who have acknowledged affirmative action played a role in their admissions to college and law school, took the unusual step of reading a summary of their opinions aloud in the courtroom.
In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — the court’s first Black female justice — called the decision “truly a tragedy for us all.”
Jackson, who sat out the Harvard case because she had been a member of an advisory governing board, wrote, “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
The vote was 6-3 in the North Carolina case and 6-2 in the Harvard case. Justice Elena Kagan was the other dissenter.
President Joe Biden was expected to comment on the decision from the White House later Thursday.
Two former presidents offered starkly different takes on the high-court ruling.
Former President Donald Trump, the current GOP presidential frontrunner, wrote on his social media network that the decision marked “a great day for America. People with extraordinary ability and everything else necessary for success, including future greatness for our Country, are finally being rewarded.”
Former President Barack Obama said in a statement that affirmative action “allowed generations of students like Michelle and me to prove we belonged. Now it’s up to all of us to give young people the opportunities they deserve — and help students everywhere benefit from new perspectives.”
The Supreme Court had twice upheld race-conscious college admissions programs in the past 20 years, including as recently as 2016.
But that was before the three appointees of former President Donald Trump joined the court. At arguments in late October, all six conservative justices expressed doubts about the practice, which had been upheld under Supreme Court decisions reaching back to 1978.
Lower courts also had upheld the programs at both UNC and Harvard, rejecting claims that the schools discriminated against white and Asian American applicants.
The college admissions disputes are among several high-profile cases focused on race in America, and were weighed by the conservative-dominated, but most diverse court ever. Among the nine justices are four women, two Black people and a Latina.
The justices earlier in June decided a voting rights case in favor of Black voters in Alabama and rejected a race-based challenge to a Native American child protection law.
The affirmative action cases were brought by conservative activist Edward Blum, who also was behind an earlier affirmative action challenge against the University of Texas as well as the case that led the court in 2013 to end use of a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act.
Blum formed Students for Fair Admissions, which filed the lawsuits against both schools in 2014.
The group argued that the Constitution forbids the use of race in college admissions and called for overturning earlier Supreme Court decisions that said otherwise.
Roberts’ opinion effectively did so, both Thomas and the dissenters wrote.
The only institutions of higher education explicitly left out of the ruling are the nation’s military academies, Roberts wrote, suggesting that national security interests could affect the legal analysis.
Blum’s group had contended that colleges and universities can use other, race-neutral ways to assemble a diverse student body, including by focusing on socioeconomic status and eliminating the preference for children of alumni and major donors.
The schools said that they use race in a limited way, but that eliminating it as a factor altogether would make it much harder to achieve a student body that looks like America.
At the eight Ivy League universities, the number of nonwhite students increased by 55% from 2010 to 2021, according to federal data. That group, which includes, Native American, Asian, Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander and biracial students, accounted for 35% of students on those campuses in 2021, up from 27% in 2010.
The end of affirmative action in higher education in California, Michigan, Washington state and elsewhere led to a steep drop in minority enrollment in the states’ leading public universities.
They are among nine states that already prohibit any consideration of race in admissions to their public colleges and universities. The others are: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Oklahoma.
In 2020, California voters easily rejected a ballot measure to bring back affirmative action.
A poll last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed 63% of U.S. adults say the court should allow colleges to consider race as part of the admissions process, yet few believe students’ race should ultimately play a major role in decisions. A Pew Research Center survey released last week found that half of Americans disapprove of considerations of applicants’ race, while a third approve.
The chief justice and Jackson received their undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. Two other justices, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch, went to law school there, and Kagan was the first woman to serve as the law school’s dean.
Every U.S. college and university the justices attended, save one, urged the court to preserve race-conscious admissions.
Those schools — Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Notre Dame and Holy Cross — joined briefs in defense of Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions plans.
Only Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s undergraduate alma mater, Rhodes College, in Memphis, Tennessee, was not involved in the cases.
The post Biden ‘strongly disagrees’ with high court affirmative action ruling appeared first on World Israel News.
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