An Orthodox Jewish woman from Monsey, N.Y. is suing the Lancome cosmetics firm, claiming that its 24-hour makeup does not last as long as advertised and thus prevents her from looking good all Shabbat.

Rorie Weisberg of Monsey, N.Y. said in her lawsuit that Lancome’s Teint Idole Ultra 24H foundation does not last 24 hours and that the company is practicing false advertising, a violation of New YorkState business law, the New York Post reported Wednesday.

Weisberg’s lawsuit says her son is having a bar mitzvah next month and that she tried the Lancome foundation in advance to see if she could look good in her makeup for the entire 25-hour celebration. Jewish law prohibits removing and replacing makeup during the Sabbath.

“The 24-hour claim was central to plaintiff’s purchase decision, as a long-lasting makeup assists with her dual objectives of compliance with religious law and enhancement to her natural appearance,” according to the lawsuit.

The suit seeks unspecified damages from Lancome and its parent firm, L’Oreal, for Weisberg and other makeup purchasers, as well as a “corrective advertising campaign.”

A spokeswoman for L’Oreal said in a statement that the lawsuit has no merit and Lancome stands behinds its products.

“We will strenuously contest these allegations in court,” the spokeswoman said. “Consistent with our practice and policy, however, as this matter is currently in litigation, we cannot comment further.”

Former Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon testified in court Thursday against his former boss, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who is on trial for allegedly trying to win an ambassadorial post for Ze’ev Ben Aryeh, who police say tipped off Lieberman about a police probe against him in Belarus.

Ayalon was head of the Foreign Ministry appointments committee at the time and recalled that Lieberman told him in his office, “We need to appoint Ben Aryeh” as ambassador to Latvia.

Ayalon has no reason to love Lieberman, who dumped him from the Israel Beiteinu list of Knesset Member candidates in the last election.

Ayalon claims, “I am not vengeful and I don’t hold grudges…. A trial is about justice and truth; it is not at all about my personal political future.”

After Ayalon said in court that he was willing to shake hands with Lieberman, the defendant shot back, “I won’t shake hands with frauds and liars.”

The outcome of the trial will determine Lieberman’s political future. If he is found guilty of fraud and is jailed for at least three months, or if the court decides his crime is a “mark of shame,” he will be prohibited from holding a Cabinet position for seven years.

The trial of Avigdor Liberman, until recently Foreign Minister, recorded its first day of questioning Thursday on charges against him of bribery and breach of public trust.

After more than a decade of hounding by the police on various alleged crimes, the police and government prosecutors finally nailed down an indictment last year on charges that he unfairly tried to advance the career of diplomat Ze’ev Ben Aryeh, who was said to have provided him with inside information on one of the police investigations against Liberman in 2008, at the time he was a Knesset Member.

Liberman has followed in the footsteps of more than two handfuls of politicians charged with various crimes the past few years, and shouted to the hilltops, “Not guilty.”

He won some public sympathy because of the years of the fruitless investigations against him. Liberman is a Russian immigrant and former nightclub bouncer who has scared the establishment with his growing popularity as a shoot-from-the-hip nationalist.

When an indictment was finally handed down late last year, it just happened to coincide with the elections, forcing him to leave his position as Foreign Minister.

However, Liberman secured a promise from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he can return to his post in the event that the three-justice Jerusalem court declares he is innocent. Liberman needs to be acquitted to continue his political career. In the meantime, the Prime Minister also is Foreign Minister.

The prosecution was depending on Ben Aryeh, who was the ambassador to Belarus and had contacts there that enabled him to tell Liberman that the police were on his trail concerning other criminal charges. Liberman allegedly then tried to reward him with a similar position in Latvia, although Ben Aryeh eventually was not appointed.

A lot depends on Ben Aryeh, who the prosecution trotted out in court on Thursday, but he promptly turned the tables, claiming he never even asked for the job as ambassador to Latvia.

Ben Aryeh previously was convicted of failing to disclose information concerning Liberman’s alleged favoritism, and the government prosecutors rewarded him for cooperating in the investigation by sentencing him to four months of community service, without any jail sentence.

On Thursday, he suddenly suffered from a lapse of memory.

The government prosecuting lawyer reminded Ben Aryeh that he told police in 2010 that he asked Liberman’s help for a position.

Ben Aryeh then startled the lawyer and said, “I don’t recall that I asked for help from Liberman. You ask why I asked for help, but I say I didn’t ask for help.”

Another “only in Israel’ incident on Wednesday, the eve of the first day of questioning, was a report on Channel 10 television of a police transcript of testimony it obtained. It quoted then Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon as saying that Liberman ordered him to appoint Ben Aryeh.

Liberman’s attorneys were furious and charged that the police leaked the information to influence the trial against Liberman.

Further hearings are bound to show no less interesting remarks.

Ayalon will be called as a witness for the prosecution, and that is the same Ayalon who was summarily dropped by Liberman as a candidate for the Israel Beiteinu party that Liberman.

His memory will be much better than Ben Aryeh’s

The U.S. State Dept. has filed a motion to dismiss the claims of a group of Americans who allege American aid money to the Palestinian Authority funds terrorism.

The Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act requires the State Department to certify that none of the money is used for terror.

“It is estimated that since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the State Department, via USAID, has given over $4 billion to Palestinians, according to the Israel Law Center (Shurat HaDin). The sum includes U.S. funding to UNRWA, the United Nations body that operates in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The lawsuit, filed by 24 Americans living in Israel last November in the U.S. District Court for Washington, contends that the State Department has ignored Congressional safeguards and transparency requirements which govern financial assistance to the PA.

The Jewish Press and other media have frequently reported that the Palestinian Authority pays fat salaries to its suicide bomb masterminds serving time in Israeli jails, spends money to build monuments to glorify suicide bombers and funds its media to disseminate incitement to terror against Jews. Millions of dollars also are transferred to Hamas, which the State Dept. itself classifies as an illegal terrorist organization.

The attorneys for the U.S. government, who have asked the court not to allow the case to continue, claim that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring this civil action and that the case raises “political questions.”

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs and director of the Israel Law Center explained in a statement Tuesday that the issue is the lack of transparency on the part the officials at Foggy Bottom in Washington.

“Rather than defend the government’s foreign aid policy on its merits and provide proof that it truly knows where taxpayer money to the PA is going, the government’s lawyers are trying to dismiss the lawsuit on legal technicalities,” she said. ”They are saying that it is pure speculation that Americans can be injured by terrorism in Israel and that the issue of funding is a foreign policy power reserved to the U.S. President and cannot be reviewed by the courts.”

Darshan-Leitner added emphasized that the lawsuit does not challenge the Executive Branch’s right to conduct foreign policy but simply want transparency.

“U.S. funds are being utilized by the Palestinians for terrorism which threatens Americans, and the plaintiffs will be responding to this motion and asking that the case be allowed to go forward,” Darshan-Leitner stressed.

The Department of Justice has declined to comment on the case when asked to do buy the Washington Free Beacon.

An Algerian immigrant who admitted to planning to blow up synagogues in New York City was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Ahmed Ferhani, 28, was the first person convicted under a state terror statute that went into effect following the 9/11 attacks. He was sentenced last Friday.

Ferhani could have been sentenced to up to 25 years in prison, but entered a plea agreement in December. He also will serve five years of probation under the terms of the agreement.

“By targeting a synagogue, which I knew to be a Jewish house of worship, in this manner, I intended to create chaos and send a message of intimidation and coercion to the Jewish population of New York City, warning them to stop mistreating Muslims,” he said in December during his plea bargain hearing in state Supreme Court.

Ferhani and his alleged accomplice, Mohamed Mamdouh, whose case is still pending, were arrested after they bought three firearms and what they believed was a live grenade from an undercover police detective. They reportedly had planned to disguise themselves as Chassidic Jews in order to get into the synagogues

Comes the news [reported at the JewishPress.com -ed.] that Frederick Cohn, the Jewish defense lawyer for Abdel Hameed Shehadeh, asked Brooklyn-based federal judge Eric Vitaliano to exclude Jews from the jury. Shehadeh is charged with three counts of making false statements in connection with his attempts to join jihadis in Pakistan. “Your Honor” Cohn explained in February,

I’m not wild about having Jews on the jury in this case. Given that there’s going to be inflammatory testimony about Jews and Zionism, I think it would be hard for Jews to cast aside any innate antipathy. The American Jewish community is heavily aligned with Israel and Zionism.

This news brings to mind the London trial, almost exactly a decade ago, of Abdullah el-Faisal, when the defense successfully excluded Jews and Hindus from a trial jury. Carla T. Main explained at the time in the National Review what happened:

In a bizarre judicial move that has largely slipped under the radar screen in the United States, England’s Central Criminal Court, known as the Old Bailey, several weeks ago banned Jews and Hindus (and anyone married to one) from serving on the jury in a trial of Abdullah el-Faisal. The Muslim cleric had been running around England writing, recording, and speaking about his hatred of Americans, Jews, and Hindus, and waxing poetic about Osama bin Laden. He was tried and convicted of soliciting the murder of nonbelievers (read: Americans, Jews, and Hindus) and using threatening words to stir up racial hatred.

It may be difficult for Americans to appreciate just how unusual this act of juror cherry picking was in England, steeped as we are in the high drama that jury selection has become in the United States. But it is worth bearing in mind that in England there is no such thing as jury selection. Jurors are pulled from the pool at random, lottery-style.

At the behest of the defense, the court took steps that the defense itself was unable to take to eliminate from the jury panel those whom he feared — without a wit of evidence — might not be impartial. The judge reportedly announced, “For obvious reasons, members of the jury of the Jewish or Hindu faith should reveal themselves, even if they are married to Jewish or Hindu women, because they are not fit to arbitrate in this case.”

Comments: (1) As ever, Muslims raise startling new issues and Islam drives the social and legal agenda in the West. (2) Has anyone else noticed the propensity of Islamists defendants to hire Jewish lawyers? (3) Are the el-Faisal and Shehadeh one-off aberrations or the start of an ominous trend? Only time will tell.

Originally published at DanielPipes.org and National Review Online, The Corner, March 11, 2013.

In a precedent decision, which will undoubtedly be considered good news for all Israeli same-sex couples, especially those who aren’t getting along so much any more, a family court in Ramat Gan allowed the couple Prof. Uzi Even and Dr. Amit Kama, both men, to divorce, Ynet reports.

In the ruling, first of its kind, the judge determined that the family court is “the natural forum, the proper forum in which to hear this kind of a divorce case, since the rabbinical court does not recognize same-sex marriages and views them as sinful.” The judge further ruled that the rabbinical court is too “foreign and artificial a forum” to discuss the issue of same-sex relations.

Prof. Even, 64, is a former Meretz MK, and head of the School of Chemistry at Tel Aviv University. Dr. Amit Kama, 44, is a professor of Communications at Emek Yizrael College. The two met 19 years ago, and since they live as a couple. Their struggles for the rights of same-sex couples received wide coverage in the local Media.

Even was the first openly gay man elected to the Knesset. The two have adopted Yossi, a 30-year-old man who had been living with them for almost 14 years. That adoption—although largely symbolic, given their son’s age—was also a ground breaking family cort case.

For the record, when Even and Kama met, almost two decades ago, homosexual relations were prohibited by law, and they could be subject to ten years in prison – although that was not very likely.

Now, having been the most celebrated Israeli gay couple, the two decided to go their separate ways (no idea which one of them broke the news to Yossi).

Professor Even said there was no legal way for him to turn from being married to being divorced. “This is an absurd situation and I fought it for three years,” he said. “I met someone else and I live with him. He is a foreign national and the Interior Ministry wants to deport him, which was hurting me, because I could not go on with my life without solving the problem of my divorce. They would not give him resident status, only a tourist visa, because I’m already married and there was no legal way for me to get a divorce.”

According to Even, when he approached the rabbinic court, which is in charge of marriages and divorces of Jewish residents, “it started a holy raucous. They refused to record our documents, receive the fee, schedule a meeting. They told us to wait. So we waited a few days. Finally I had enough and I took back the suit, and filed it instead with family court.”

Even suggests that the court’s decision could serve as a precedent not just for the gay community, but for the public at large. “Now we’ll wait and see if the Ministry of the Interior will endorse the decision. I’m doubtful that they will be enlightened about it.”

“Why are they having so much trouble changing my marital status? Why are they forcing me to remain married to someone I no longer live with?”

Even and Kama were married in Canada and their status was changed to married by the Israeli interior ministry. Their marriage hit the rocks back in 2009 and they’ve been living separately since. The two have signed a separation agreement which was accepted by family court in 2011. The couple then requested that the court recommend to the interior ministry to change their status from married to single.

The family court judge indeed recommended the status change, but the Ministry of the Interior refused to change the status based solely on the signed agreement, arguing they had to approach the rabbinical court. But the rabbinical court rejected their request for a ruling saying it did not have the legal framework within which to discuss it.

The family court judge who granted the couple the divorce wrote in his ruling that the various branches of the civil court are the natural forum for such a case, where there exists a long list of decisions determining the specific rights and obligations of same-sex couples.

You’re looking at the demolition of five buildings in the Ulpana neighborhood of the Jewish town of Beit-El, north of Jerusalem, November 27, 2012. The High Court has decided that the multi-family dwellings built by Jews were on a privately owned Palestinian land, and so they had to be demolished, in the name of justice, liberty and the pursuit of really crazy and wasteful choices.

In a country of law, if such a dispute erupts more than 10 years after an enclave of residential buildings had been erected and families had set roots there for close half a generation – a dispute between the land’s sellers, a dispute over a stupid missing document, a dispute fueled by “evidence” provided by the Ramallah-based officials of the great democratic state of Palestine – then the two sides would have gone to court and debated their opposing positions; then the court would have decided. And should the court have decided that the half of the Arab family that disagreed with the sale of the land was right, then the same court would have decided on an amount of money that either the other half of the family, or the innocent buyers, were to pay in compensation.

But to demolish the buildings? What insane, sociopathic judge would have decided on demolition as a remedy for injustice?

When the right wins the day – again – in the coming elections, before we do anything else, before we implement the Judge Levi recommendations, before we protest yet another Palestinian move for independence that reneges on all our mutually signed agreements, before we send the first IAF plane to hit back at Gaza for this or that volley of rockets at our civilians, before we do any of that – we must change the way we pick supreme court justices.

In a civilized country, the sovereign, which is the people (you, me, my wife, all of us) choose representatives and they decide who will be our high court judges. Once they decide, those judges are no longer under anybody’s thumb, totally independent. But to get there they must receive our approval.

Not so in Israel, where our elected representatives are a minority in the body that picks high court justices, and the older justices basically nominate their friends, family, the nice girl from Apt. B-2.

This has to stop, now, this is a travesty, this court is not enjoying the support of the people, it is, in fact, an enemy of the people. And the nice thing is, the people have the power to change this. So, let’s.