Anti Bris Milah Group Also Marched in Los Angeles Gay "Pride" Parade

Last Sunday the anti Bris Milah "people" had a very "good" day marching in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles Gay "Pride" parades.  They also were a part of a Seattle Pride Demonstration.


Baruch Hashem Jewish reporters are now talking about the Homo-Anti Bris Milah connection at least on twitter.  Hopefully they will start doing their job and report on it in all their media outlets and taking this in to consideration before the talk about politicians who march with them.  Maybe they'll also start calling out politicians who attack those who point out the connection and are so pro homo that they have no problem banning Milah.

 

Deadly Meningitis Outbreak Among Gays (Homosexual Relations Are Dangerous)

gay man who die from meningitis

Deadly meningitis outbreak among gays worries officials

By Kristina Krohn, NBC News

A deadly bacterial meningitis outbreak striking gay men in New York City is unlikely to abate any time soon, New York City health officials warn. The disease has sickened 22 and killed seven NYC men over the last two years.

After four cases of meningococcal disease among gay men were reported in Los Angeles county in recent months, there were concerns that the New York City outbreak had spread, but public health officials in Los Angeles and New York say the strains are not connected.

The New York City outbreak has been linked to parties, online websites or apps that men used to find other men for "close or intimate sexual contact," according to health officials. But for more than half of the men sickened by meningitis, there was no evidence that the men had used any of these means to encounter other men, according to public health officials.

The specific strain linked to all the cases in New York City is part of serogroup C. It’s the same strain that first surfaced when a woman came down with meningitis in New York City back in 2003. The speed in which meningitis kills has complicated the search for people at risk.

In New York, “we’ve had several cases who have been actually found dead in their apartment before they’d even gone to see a medical provider. So that is, to us, absolutely terrifying,"  Dr. Jay Varma, the New York City Deputy Commissioner for Disease Control in the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, told The Edge Boston in early March.

Last week, health officials in West Hollywood, Calif. warned members of the public to be alert after the death of Brett Shaad, 33, from meningitis infection. Three other cases of meningitis, including two deaths, had been identified among Los Angeles-area gay men since November.
 
Public health officials in Los Angeles are being careful not to cause alarm. “Right now we do not have an outbreak of meningococcal disease in LA County,” Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of Public Health for the Los Angeles County Health Department, told NBC, citing outbreak definition requirements from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

Shaad, an otherwise healthy lawyer, died within a week of developing symptoms. Elizabeth Ashford, a spokesperson for the family, expressed concern that the fact that Shaad was gay has been used to unfairly target him and others affected with meningitis. Allegations that Shaad was involved in any parties or other risqué activity are false, Ashford said.  “This is not a gay disease, but this is a deadly disease and that is why people should be conscientious about this disease,” she said.

Initially, meningitis symptoms may resemble the flu, with worsening headache, vomiting, and a sudden high fever (over 101.3). Over hours to days, patients develop difficulty thinking and may fall into a coma.

Meningococcal disease, caused by the bacteria Neisseria meningitidis, infects the lining around the brain. Once someone becomes sick, without treatment it is always fatal -- even with treatment, up to a third of patients die, Fielding said. There is a vaccine that can prevent illness, and both the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have listed clinics offering free vaccines on their websites.

Varma is concerned the outbreak is getting worse. There were a total of thirteen known cases of bacterial meningitis among men last year (triple the total in 2011). But already in the first three months of 2013, four men have been hit, not including Shaad and others in Los Angeles.
“Normally people think of an outbreak as a lot of people getting sick at one point in time – but here the number of cases is much higher than we normally expect,” said Varma.

The rate of meningitis in gay men in New York City has spiked to 60 times higher than their straight counterparts. Last fall health officials advised vaccination for some HIV-positive men, but recently expanded the recommendation to include all gay men statewide who have “traveled to the City” and “met through an online website, digital application ("app"), or at a bar or party” since September 1, 2012.

“Many people are scared,” said Anthony Fortenberry, the director of nursing at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, which serves New York’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities.
Reports of a strange illness affecting gay men in two major cities may conjure images of the early years of AIDS -- as well as the stigma that surrounded patients with HIV. But experts are quick to note the differences, especially since meningitis infection can be stopped.

Dr. Mike Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, understands the “fear factor,” but “this is very different,” he said. “With HIV/AIDS we never had the hope of eliminating it, we didn’t even know what was causing it initially. This, we know what is causing it. We have vaccines and antibiotics that can greatly reduce or eliminate carriage,” and stop the spread of the disease, Osterholm said.

At first, the meningitis outbreak in New York City seemed to infect only HIV positive men, but by March half of the men sickened were HIV negative. Three of the last five men sickened have died.

It is unclear why the current outbreak, so far, is affecting only gay men. Only two of the men knew each other and there is no evidence they infected each other, Varma said.
“Many of the outbreaks happen in settings where a lot of people live or socialize together, like college dorms or army barracks,” Osterholm said.  “When an outbreak occurs in one of these settings, health officials can track down everyone who lives in the setting, can vaccinate them and provide prophylactic medications.”
Getting the vaccine is not "outing" yourself. “It does not mean you are gay or that someone you know is gay. It is about protecting yourself,” said Fortenberry.
Osterholm agreed. “This has nothing to do with being gay,” he said.
The bacteria is spread by close contact – such as kissing, or sharing a toothbrush, a cigarette or even a coffee cup.
 
To date an estimated 6,700 people have been vaccinated in New York City since the start of the outbreak;1,182 people in March alone.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommends that children and teenagers get vaccinated but immunity wanes, leaving most adults unprotected.
Varma warns that the outbreak will likely continue until at-risk men get vaccinated. People interested in getting vaccinated can find clinics through a website run by New York City’s department of health. In Los Angeles, locations for free vaccines for the uninsured can be found here.
Kristina Krohn, MD, is an Internal Medicine and Pediatrics Resident at the University of Minnesota and the 2012-2013 Stanford NBC News Media and Global Health Fellow.

For L.A. Investigator, Exposing Kosher Meat Fraud Was A Mitzvah

Eric Agaki (man who exposed kashrus scandal)

 

A semi-automatic weapon sits propped beside the front door of the ranch-style home that Eric Agaki shares with his wife, a couple of goats, some chickens and a horse. Only it’s not the real thing.
“That’s an air gun for raccoons,” Agaki says. “For intruders I’ve got other things.”
Agaki, 41, is particularly concerned with home security, and with good reason. A private investigator for the past 10 years, Agaki has put murderers in jail and staked out hundreds of spouses suspected of extramarital affairs.
Most recently, he exposed the unkosher business practices of the Doheny Glatt Kosher Meat Market, one of this city's largest purveyors of kosher meats.
Days before Passover, Agaki showed a group of Los Angeles rabbis the video he shot of Michael Engelman, Doheny's owner, loading boxes of meat into the trunk of an SUV in a McDonald’s parking lot. A second video showed Engelman at his store in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood, where a worker carried the boxes inside. The mashgiach, or rabbinic overseer, was nowhere in sight.
As a result of Agaki’s seven-month investigation, the Rabbinic Council of California revoked Doheny Market’s kosher certification on March 24. The following day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched an investigation. Within a week, Engelman sold his shop to businessman Shlomo Rechnitz.
All of this happened because of Agaki, though the investigator has not been paid a dime.

photo taken by Agaki

“I decided to do it as a mitzvah,” he says.
Born in Israel to Persian Jewish parents, Agaki moved to L.A. at age 12. He never served in the Israeli army, but he has more than a decade of training in the Israeli hand-to-hand combat method known as Krav Maga. His height may not intimidate, but his thick torso and massive biceps would be enough to ward off many threats. As would the Kahr CW9 handgun he carries at all times.
“I’m licensed to carry an exposed gun,” he says, pulling back his shirt to reveal a silver 9mm pistol tucked into a brown leather holster.
In his decade of private investigation, Agaki has never had to use the handgun. Nor has he had to use the collection of shotguns, hunting rifles and Civil War-era reproduction pistols that he keeps in a refrigerator-sized safe in his bedroom. He uses the four wood-handled pistols for Civil War reenactments, which he participates in once a year at an event billed as the largest annual Civil War battle reenactment west of the Mississippi.
For fun, he also collects knives and swords. A glass case filled with Samurai blades sits near the mezuzah at the entrance to his living room.
In September, a group of rabbis approached him with a host of rumors that Engelman was up to no good. Agaki clocked more than 150 hours of work on the case.
“Just the hours I put in, without all the research, is close to $20,000,” he says.
Agaki started his firm, Hover View Investigations, after graduating at the top of his class from the Nick Harris Detective Academy in Van Nuys. It was a dream deferred. He had enrolled at the academy right after high school, but had to drop out when he couldn’t afford the tuition.
Eventually he opened a candy store in Westwood Village. Later Agaki worked as a dental technician, then as a helicopter pilot. Finally a girlfriend encouraged him to return to his original passion.
Twelve years after he first enrolled, Agaki was back at the Harris academy. Within two weeks he convinced an instructor to put him on a case with the school’s affiliated agency. The case involved a husband who suspected his wife of drug abuse.
He followed the woman all day and photographed her hiding bags of cocaine in the trunk of her car.
“I’m very good at keeping myself hidden when I follow you by car,” Agaki says. In P.I. lingo, the skill is known as “rolling surveillance.”
Not long after, Agaki was hired by another firm to track a suspected cheating husband who routinely drove between 80 and 120 miles per hour on the freeway. Where other private investigators had failed, Agaki was able to track him 76 miles from Thousand Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley, to Riverside County, where the suspect parked at a nudist colony in Corona.
After sweet-talking a secretary, Agaki managed to slide into the nudist colony in under an hour -- a process that normally takes weeks.
“To be a good P.I., you have to have good hand-eye coordination, be a good driver, be some kind of an actor and be a good videographer,” Agaki says. “You also need to know people and be able to profile them.”
For all of his successes as a P.I., Agaki says it is the Doheny case of which he is most proud.
“I’ve put a murderer behind bars,” he says. “But this had an impact on a lot of people.”

(jewishjournal.com)

More On The Los Angeles Kashrus Scandal

Despite the situation, Doheny Market was open for business on Thursday and its front window displayed a new kosher certificate  -- valid only until April 1.

The name and signature of Rabbi Meshulom Dov Weiss appear on the certificate, and the rabbi’s son, Rabbi Menachem Weiss, told the Journal that he and his father are working with Engelman to ensure that everything sold by Doheny is certified kosher. Weiss said that any opened meat packages had been removed from the store, and that two mashgiachs will now be on site at all times, and seven video cameras were to be installed throughout the premises, allowing the father to monitor the store via the web from his home in North Hollywood.

“We’re not going into it naïve,” Menachem Weiss told the Journal on Thursday. “These are the precautions that we’re putting into place to allow him to stay in business from now until April 1. What happens after that, we’ll have to see.”

The Weisses have acted as supervisors for Doheny before, for about 18 months starting in 2007 or 2008. Menachem Weiss did not remember the exact years, but said that Engelman brought them in after the RCC informed him – along with the rest of the shops they certified – that from then on, all meat sold under RCC kosher supervision had to be not just kosher, but glatt kosher.

For meat to be considered kosher, it must be from the right kind of animal and must be slaughtered and prepared properly. For large animals – not poultry – the animal’s innards must be checked to ensure that there are no signs of disease. If, for instance, a cow has a hole in its lung, the animal is not considered kosher by any standard.

But to be kosher under the higher “glatt” standard – the word means “smooth” in Yiddish – the animal’s lungs must have no signs of ever having had any ulcers. If the ulcers have healed, the meat is considered kosher – but not glatt kosher.

When the RCC began to insist upon the higher standard, it brought with it higher prices. Engelman, Weiss said, initially decided to drop the RCC’s certification and to continue selling kosher meat that did not meet the glatt standard under the Weisses’ supervision.

However without the RCC certification, Weiss said, Doheny’s business suffered, and Engelman decided to adhere to the glatt standard and return to the RCC.

“Our intent is not to replace the RCC,” Menachem Weiss said. “Our hope is that the RCC will take Mike back; we’re trying to help Mike earn back the trust of the community.”

Whether that’s possible remains to be seen, but it may not only be Doheny that needs to win back the trust of kosher consumers in Los Angeles. The RCC’s reputation may have sustained some damage as well.

“I have no clue who to trust anymore,” said another woman shopping at Pico Glatt Mart on Thursday said, asking to be identified only as Friede. “I don’t trust RCC.”

Suspicions about Doheny Meats practices were brought to the RCC's attention repeatedly over the last three years, according to Daryl Schwarz, the owner of the now-closed Kosher Club.
Schwartz also said that, as early as 2010, he reported seeing the empty boxes, fraudulent labels and fraudulent tape to Rabbi Nissim Davidi, the RCC’s kashrut administrator.
“It was numerous times over the years,” Schwartz said.

In other developments, Eric Agaki, the investigator who broke the case, said that so far he has only enough evidence to prove that Doheny was repackaging meat that was Kosher, but not Glatt Kosher, though he fully suspects Doheny was using treyf.

Los Angeles, CA - Surveillance Video Allegedly Catches Kosher Meat Distributor Selling Treif

Los Angeles, CA - A month’s long undercover investigation has resulted in a major local Kosher meat distributor being stripped of its certification by California’s Rabbinical Council.
KTLA (http://bit.ly/10EBFQO) is reporting that Doheny Glatt Kosher Meats lost its certification after investigators uncovered an ongoing practice of switching Kosher meats with USDA products.
Eric Agaki, an investigator with Hover View Investigations Inc., told KTLA that employees from Doheny Glatt were frequently viewed repackaging the boxes at times when the mashgiach was not on site.
Agaki also told KTLA that Doheny Glatt was in possession of a “stack” of fraudulent labels.
Doheny Glatt operates a retail market onsite at its Pico location, as well as providing Kosher meats for many of the areas restaurants, merchants and caterers.
The Rabbinical council notified members of the Jewish community via email that meat purchased before 3:00 p.m. Sunday meets Kosher certifications.