News Roundup: The World, Minus Menorahs

I’m feeling over-Hanukkah-ized these days. This is, granted, the week where, in Jewish media, real news moves over to make room for cool Hanukkah songs, but sometimes the need strikes me to remind myself that there are still things happening in the rest of the world.

• Another kosher meat processor, G&G Poultry, faces legal trouble — this time in Berks County, PA, because of allegedly dumping poultry blood, feathers, hearts and gizzards into a Schuylkill River tributary.
• Russian oligarch billionaire Arkady Gaydamak just left Israel with no plans to return. Gaydamak is one of my favorite Israeli political figures — both a philanthropist and a wild personality, he sent thousands of people from Sderot to a beachfront vacation during the 2006 bombings and is renown in Israel for stepping into the middle of tricky situations and throwing massive amounts of money around to solve them. He also allegedly smuggled arms to combatants in civil wars in Africa.
• Al Franken has been flip–flopping back and forth with the lead in the Minnesota Senate race, which has been down to the double and even single digits in the past few days.
• And a great post about whether Haredi neighborhoods in Israel will start having separate grocery lines for men and women. Frum Satire’s typically great take on things: “This new decree…is trying to compete with Saudi Arabia for tough laws on women so they can eventually ban them all together (I hear they are working on ways to have children and make kugel without women).”