Free Republic

President Trump issued his first prison commutation Wednesday to a man whose business was caught employing 389 illegal immigrants in a single shift, dismaying anti-illegal immigration advocates and a former prosecutor on the case. With Trump's rare use of clemency, Sholom Rubashkin left prison seven years into a 27-year sentence. "He was up to his hips in illegal immigration," said Robert Teig, a former assistant U.S. attorney involved in prosecuting Rubashkin. Before his conviction, Rubashkin oversaw operations at Agriprocessors, his father's company and once one of the nation's largest kosher meat producers.

Halal and Kosher are terms often heard in the context of meat and dairy, and although it's common knowledge that the terms refer to guidelines on what can be consumed and what cannot, few know what either really means, let alone how they differ. "Is this kosher?" has become a common expression that has transcended the context of religion and food to the point that it simply means "Is this acceptable?" in a colloquial sense. Halal and Kosher refer to what's permitted by Islamic and Jewish religious laws respectively. Halal is an Islamic term that means lawful or permitted. Although...

Kitchens that are shared between office workers may soon be banned from storing pork products like sausage rolls over fears that they are “offensive”. New guidelines proposed by interfaith group CoExist House say that employers should consider worker’s religions before allowing ham sandwiches placed in the fridge alongside other products. The group also suggests that alcohol should not be served at corporate events in case it upsets members of certain faiths.

SYDNEY - New Zealand last week banned shechita, the kosher slaughter of animals. The country's new animal welfare code, which took effect Friday, mandates that all animals for commercial consumption be stunned prior to slaughter to ensure they are treated "humanely and in accordance with good practice and scientific knowledge." The regulation shocked the Jewish community. "This decision by the New Zealand government, one which has a Jewish prime minister, is outrageous," said Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, acting president of the Organization of Rabbis of Australasia. Advertisement "We will be doing everything possible to get this decision reversed." Gutnick, who travels...

You see it in sectors like food, consumer products and transport companies,” he said. The Israeli airline El Al is now privatized. “But they continue not to fly on Saturday,” Mr. Melnick said, in order to keep ultra-Orthodox customers. Tamar El-Or, an anthropologist at Hebrew University, studied ultra-Orthodox shopping patterns. “There are lines of cellphones and credit cards and Internet suppliers and software and DVDs and clothes and so many things produced or altered or koshered for them, because they have a certain organized power to get the producers to make what they want,” she said.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the radical vegetarian group that in an advertising campaign once compared the slaughtering of chickens to the murder of Holocaust victims, is taking aim at one of the world's largest kosher meat processors. AgriProcessors Inc., the Postville, Iowa-based firm that markets meat under the Rubashkin and Aaron's Best label and is found in America's biggest supermarket chains, is being accused by the group of violating humane slaughter laws and Halacha, or Jewish ritual procedure.