Here's some good news in advance of The Simpsons' panel at Comic-Con.
Harry Shearer has signed a new deal to return to the Fox animated comedy, the network announced Tuesday. With the deal, all six principal voice actors are confirmed to return for the historic 27th and 28th seasons.
Read more at The Hollywood Reporter.
Harry Shearer returning to ‘The Simpsons’ Read More »
Jewelry hung from Rosa Zacharia’s ears and neck. Bracelets adorned her wrists and she wore rings on six of her fingers. She and her family were dressed to the nines.
Life appeared to be pretty good for Zacharia and her husband, Naftali, and their three girls: Sara, Rahel and Yoheved.
This was the image of the Zacharia clan captured at a Tel Aviv photo studio on May 29, 1929. Naftali mailed it to Chicago, to his brother Suleim, who went by Simonto, perhaps a diminutive of Siman Tov.
The information on the pre-statehood Israelis was handwritten on the back of the photograph. It constituted nearly all that Suleim Zacharia’s granddaughter, Valerie Chereskin, knew about them. Also known was that Naftali and Rosa had a tea shop in Jerusalem.
Chereskin, who owns an eponymous public-relations firm near San Diego, California, contacted “Seeking Kin” for help in locating the Zacharia daughters and their descendants, hoping to meet them during the visit to Israel she and her husband Jay Hansen were planning.
“Seeking Kin” recently reached Shai Shuhami. Based on the information presented to him, the Jerusalem business owner confirmed that he was Chereskin’s second cousin. Shuhami was unaware that he had relatives in America.
His mother, Yoheved – the littlest girl in the photograph – is 86 and lives in Maale Adumim, a West Bank city near Jerusalem. The same photograph adorns her living room wall.
“This is the greatest feeling in the world,” Shuhami said. “There’s nothing that arouses curiosity more than when searching for one’s roots: from where one comes and to where one is heading.”
Echoing Shuhami’s enthusiasm, Chereskin said, “This is amazing. I’ll be happy all day.”
With little to go on, Chereskin wasn’t optimistic about finding her kin. Had the search been conducted in reverse – the Israelis looking for their American kin – the odds would’ve been infinitesimal because, upon reaching America, Suleim Zacharia changed his name to Harry Marks.
That was 101 years ago, when he sailed from the port of Liepaja, Latvia.
Chereskin and her sister, Gail Jelinek, who lives near Chicago, knew of his difficult background in Urmia, in northwest Iran’s Kurdistan region.
Naftali and Suleim had three other siblings. A brother, Sarteep, traded their 11-year-old sister Maral to someone for the man’s sister, whom Sarteep married.
“My grandfather fought his brother about it,” Jelinek said.
Another sister was Gulbahar. Jelinek and Chereskin do not know what became of Sarteep or Gulbahar. In 1914, Sarteep exhibited an eye disease and was turned back from the ship on which he was supposed to sail with Suleim to America.
Maral was said to have died in the desert en route to Israel.
After Suleim’s father died, his mother’s second husband refused to let Suleim live with them. Suleim worked herding sheep, sleeping among the animals for warmth. He ate grass as they did, sometimes coming to his mother’s back door for food. Through the windows of classrooms, he’d glimpse his friends; Suleim did not attend the school because he couldn’t pay the tuition.
In Chicago, Suleim worked in a metal factory that during World War II manufactured torpedoes. He died of heart failure at 51, in 1946.
The search was among the most challenging since “Seeking Kin” began four years ago.
In researching the Zacharias, “Seeking Kin” followed several sources, including Israeli cemetery records and conversations with Yosi Mizrahi, a Jerusalem retiree who is an authority on the now-extinct Mamila neighborhood, where the tea shop stood just outside the Old City’s walls and where he said many Urmia natives settled. A friend of “Seeking Kin” checked with the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Ohr Yehuda, near Tel Aviv.
Nissan Aviv, a retired singer-actor who had advertised on the website of Nash Didan – Aramaic for “our people” – then suggested posting the request on Nash Didan’s website.
Aviv, 87, recalls 4,000 Jews living in his hometown of Urmia, most observant and many working in the textile industry.
“In Urmia, our synagogue had more than 12 Torah scrolls. It was a big, beautiful synagogue,” said Aviv, of Tel Aviv.
Ultimately the Zacharias were found by Hezi Yitzhaki, a businessman who lives in the Jerusalem suburb of Motza and whose grandmother was from Urmia. Responding to the “Seeking Kin” post, Yitzhaki combed records of the ministries of the interior and foreign affairs, and of the Jewish Agency for Israel, searching for families whose names and dates matched what Chereskin knew.
Yitzhaki settled upon the correct family, but with great difficulty – and after contacting the Shuhamis, he learned why: Two of the girls shown in the photo were not the children of Naftali and Rosa, who was later known as Shoshana. The eldest girl, Sara, was Shoshana’s sister; the girl standing between the two adults, Rahel, was Naftali’s daughter from his first marriage.
In a short conversation with “Seeking Kin,” Yoheved said that she was the eldest of Naftali and Shoshana’s seven children. Four are deceased, including a brother, Ben-Tzion, who was shot to death at 13 in the Old City. One brother, Eli, and one sister, Ruth, are living.
Yoheved demurred from answering further questions, preferring to first meet Chereskin.
“It would bring together a whole circle of the family connection,” Chereskin said of the gathering with the Israelis. “It would bridge that whole gap between the old country and the new country.”
Hillel Kuttler in 2011 launched “Seeking Kin,” his column on people searching for long-lost relatives and friends.
1929 Photo launches a family connection across the ocean Read More »
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras launched a desperate bid to win fresh aid from skeptical creditors at an emergency euro zone summit on Tuesday, before his country's banks run out of money.
But German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on arrival there was still no basis for reopening negotiations with Athens.
“It is not a matter of weeks but of a few days” to save Greece from collapse, Merkel told reporters.
With Greek banks down to their last few days of cash and the European Central Bank tightening the noose on their funding, Tsipras tried to convince the bloc's other 18 leaders to authorize a new loan swiftly.
Merkel and French President Francois Hollande said after conferring on Monday in Paris that the door was still open to a deal to save Greece from plunging into economic turmoil and possibly having to ditch the euro.
But some of Athens' 18 partners in Europe's common currency vented exasperation at five years of crisis wrangling with Greece. Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite complained: “With the Greek government it is every time manana.”
Merkel, under pressure in Germany to cut Greece loose, made clear it was up to Tsipras to present convincing proposals after Athens spurned tax rises, spending cuts and pension and labor reforms that were on the table before its 240 billion euro ($262.7 billion) bailout expired last week.
Euro zone finance ministers complained that their new Greek colleague Euclid Tsakalotos, while more courteous than his abrasive predecessor Yanis Varoufakis, had brought no new proposals to a preparatory meeting before the summit.
“I have the strong impression there were 18 … ministers of finance who felt the urgency of the situation and there is one … who doesn't feel the urgency of the situation,” Belgian Finance Minister Johan Van Overtveldt said.
Greek officials said the leftist government broadly repeated a reform plan Tsipras sent to the euro zone last week before Greek voters, in a referendum on Sunday, overwhelmingly rejected the austerity terms previously on offer for a bailout.
Jeroen Dijsselbloem, chairman of the Eurogroup of currency zone finance ministers, said the ministers would hold a conference call on Wednesday to review a Greek request for a medium-term assistance program from the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund, due to be submitted within hours.
Reflecting the irritation of several ministers, he said the Eurogroup was still awaiting a Greek letter with one clear set of proposals.
A Greek government official retorted: “Some are maintaining 'we don't have proposals'… Is it really that 'we don't have proposals' or is it that they don't like our proposals?”
Tsipras met privately with the leaders of Germany and France, the currency area's main powers, and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker just before the summit began. Euro zone officials said there was no plan to issue any statement at the end of the summit. One official said there could be another emergency summit on Sunday after more work by finance ministers.
WORKING TO EXCLUDE GREECE?
Earlier Juncker, who has tried to broker a last-minute deal, told the European Parliament: “There are some in the European Union who openly or secretly are working to exclude Greece from the euro zone.”
He did not name names but may have been referring to German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who has made no secret of his scepticism about Greece's fitness to stay in the euro and last week suggested a possible “temporary” exit.
From the Greek side, the key to making any deal politically acceptable will be to secure a stronger commitment from Merkel and other lenders to reschedule Greece's giant debt burden, which the International Monetary Fund says is unsustainable.
Without some firmer pledge of debt relief, neither Greece nor the IMF is likely to accept a deal. But that may be more than Germany and its northern allies can swallow.
Schaeuble said on arrival that anyone who had read the EU treaty knew debt write-offs were forbidden in the euro zone. He did not rule out other forms of restructuring.
At stake is more than just the future of Greece, a nation of 11 million that makes up just 2 percent of the euro zone's economic output and population. If Greek banks run out of money and the country has to print its own currency, it could mean a state leaving the euro for the first time since it was launched in 1999. The precedent could raise risk for other countries.
Yet even in France, one of the euro zone countries most sympathetic to Athens, an opinion poll published on Tuesday showed one in two people want Greece to leave the euro zone.
TSIPRAS STRENGTHENED AT HOME
Strengthened by the overwhelming 61.3 percent 'No' vote in Sunday's referendum, the leftist Tsipras won the unprecedented support of other Greek party leaders on Monday.
But he gave little clue of what reform concessions he would make to try to convince deeply skeptical European leaders to lend Athens more money after five months of acrimonious and fruitless negotiations with his leftist administration.
Even with the country on the brink of economic collapse, Greek officials said the government was still seeking exceptions from its reform pledges to protect special interests.
Athens wants to keep a 30 percent discount on value added tax on Greek islands and delay defense spending cuts. It is also resisting raising VAT on restaurants to 23 percent, and wants to wait until 2019 to phase out an income supplement for poorer pensioners, officials said.
Juncker told EU lawmakers he was working night and day to get negotiations reopened and chided the Greeks for their aggressive attitude, saying it was unacceptable to accuse the EU of behaving like “terrorists”, as Varoufakis did last week.
European Central Bank policymaker Ewald Nowotny suggested the bank might be able to provide some sort of bridge funding while Greece negotiated a longer-term conditional loan to see it over a crucial July 20 bond redemption to the ECB.
But one of his hardline ECB colleagues, Ilmars Rimsevics of Latvia, said Greece had effectively voted itself out of the euro and issuing a second currency was the most likely next step.
An ECB policy paper said the central bank could not be overly generous with emergency funding nor provide liquidity on insufficient collateral.
A bank closure in force since the talks collapsed was prolonged until Thursday at least, and cash withdrawals remain limited to 60 euros a day, with 20 euro notes running out.
The Athens stock exchange was also ordered closed for two days on Tuesday and Wednesday to throttle speculation.
Greece faces last chance to stay in euro as cash runs out Read More »
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump suffered a fresh blow on Tuesday with the announcement that a professional golfing event scheduled for October at a Trump course in Los Angeles will be moved, the latest fallout from his vitriol against undocumented immigrants from Mexico.
A statement issued by Hope Hicks, Trump's campaign spokeswoman, said the real estate mogul met on Monday with representatives from the PGA of America and they agreed “it is in everyone's best interest not to conduct the 2015 Grand Slam of Golf at Trump National Golf Club, Los Angeles in October.”
“Due to the controversy surrounding statements made by Mr. Trump having to do with illegal immigrants pouring into the United States from Mexico and other parts of the world, Mr. Trump does not want his friends at the PGA of America to suffer any consequences or backlash with respect to the Grand Slam of Golf,” Hicks said.
The decision to move the Grand Slam of Golf event, which usually features a handful of the best professional golfers competing against one another, came a day after sports broadcaster ESPN announced it would move the ESPY Celebrity Golf Classic from Trump National Golf Club to Pelican Hill Golf Club in the Los Angeles area.
In addition, the PGA of America said it is in the process of exploring options, including a venue for its annual PGA Junior League Golf Championship scheduled to be held at the same Trump course in Los Angeles. It said the group will comment further at the appropriate time.
Since his June 16 candidacy announcement speech, in which he vented about illegal immigrants, Trump has seen a steady flow of business away from him. Univision declared it would not broadcast the Miss USA pageant, and NBC, Macy's, Serta and NASCAR cut ties with him.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio, considered a top contender to represent the Republican Party in the November 2016 election, told Fox Business News that Trump's comments have distracted from serious debate about how to reform the U.S. immigration system.
“We have a broken legal immigration system and we have an illegal immigration problem that isn't just composed, by the way, of a porous border with Mexico,” he said.
Trump said on Monday that some of his criticism of Mexico had been distorted, but stuck to his stance that many undocumented immigrants coming across the Mexican border are criminals.
Another golf event drops Trump course due to attack on immigrants Read More »
Nine more Druze-Israelis were arrested in connection with attacks on two ambulances carrying wounded Syrians to Israeli hospitals.
The arrests reported on Tuesday by the Hebrew-language news website Walla bring the total number of arrests in the attacks last month to 21. One Syrian died in the attacks.
Police imposed a gag order on the investigation into the incidents.
A mob of Druze-Israeli protesters near the village of Majdal Shams on the Golan Heights on June 22 night dragged two wounded Syrian fighters from an ambulance, beating one to death and seriously injuring the second.
Earlier the same day a group of protesters attacked an ambulance driving by the Druze village of Hurfish, where residents blocked the path of the ambulance and threw stones at it.
The Druze attackers believed the injured men were members of Syrian rebel groups, which have been targeting Druze-Syrians living near the border with Israel as part of the country’s four-year civil war.
Israel treats wounded from the civil war in the field and at local hospitals regardless of what side they are fighting for. More than 1,600 wounded Syrians have been treated in Israeli hospitals during the civil war, according to the Israel Defense Forces.
9 more Druze-Israelis arrested in ambulance attacks Read More »