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Friday September 29, 2006

Shorts: U.S.

U.S. sues N.Y. town on religious rights

new york (jta) | The U.S. government sued a New York municipality for religious discrimination against Orthodox Jews.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, Sept. 26 in Federal District Court, says the village of Suffern violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 when it refused to grant a zoning exemption for a private group, Bikur Cholim Inc., to run Shabbos House, a home that offers lodging and meals to Orthodox Jews visiting patients at a hospital on Shabbat and other Jewish holidays.

Bikur Cholim has also filed suit against Suffern.

Congresswoman leads Sudan rebuke

washington (jta) | A U.S. congresswoman who is Jewish led 87 colleagues in writing a letter to Sudan’s president rebuking him for saying Jews are lying about Darfur.

“We are grateful that the American Jewish community as well as other faith communities have made a priority of raising the issue of genocide in Darfur,” said the letter initiated by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and sent Monday, Sept. 25 to Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

“Instead of using the ancient technique of making the Jewish community the scapegoat for your failures, we hope that you will take a close look at your own actions.”

Bashir is resisting international demands that he allow U.N. peacekeepers to police accords in the Darfur region aimed at ending massacres committed there by government-allied militias.

Last week, he told the U.N. General Assembly that the reports of massacres are “fictions” and that the groups “who made the publicity, who mobilized the people, invariably, are Jewish organizations.”

Alleged Israeli lover denounces ex-gov.’s tell-all memoir

trenton, n.j. (jta) | An Israeli who was James McGreevey’s declared love interest attacked the former New Jersey governor’s memoir.

McGreevey, who stepped down in 2004 after declaring he was gay, published a memoir this month titled “The Confession.” In it, he details an affair he said he had with Golan Cipel, an Israeli whose appointment to serve as homeland security adviser in New Jersey raised eyebrows.

But Cipel, who says he is straight and suffered sexual harassment by McGreevey, issued a statement attacking the book as a “pack of lies.”

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