news items

There's a story that has gotten a lot of press coverage in Israel about a woman in Jerusalem who starved her son. She was videotaped removing his feeding tube after he had already been hospitalized. Here's a Haaretz article about it: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1105049.html

To me, the strange thing about this story is that the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) community has interpreted this news story as a plot by the hospital to defame Haredim (because the woman is Haredi) and has therefore responded with rioting.

I have not been following the story too closely, but today I struggled through an article (from a few days ago) in Hebrew that announced that the district attorney in Jerusalem will indict the woman. The second headline said that people close to the mother are expected to make the following offer: in return for the state dropping the indictment, the family will leave Israel. Or confirmed that I translated the headline correctly.

How would that help anything? Why would that be an offer worth considering?

Reading Israeli newspapers is pretty challenging for me, so I'd like to request that in the future, articles I read make more sense. Thanks in advance.

News item number two was brought to my attention by my mom, and is also a bit surprising: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/world/middleeast/06kenan.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

Amos Kenan, an Israeli writer, died on Tuesday. He was, at various times, a member of Hashomer Hatzair (progressive Zionist), Lechi (revisionist Zionist), the anti-Zionist Canaanite movement, and Ariel Sharon's Shlomtzion Party. How does that work?