Free Republic

ROCHESTER NY--Local attorney Sylvia Josh says she felt pressured by a Rochester judge to support the judge's political campaign. She leveled the charge against Rochester City Court Judge Ellen Yacknin. Josh claims Yacknin asked her to support her bid for the New York State Supreme Court. Josh said the incident happened outside Yachnin's courtroom, moments before Josh was to argue a case before Yacknin. Josh signed a deposition in which she made the allegations against Yacknin. State Republican chairman, Steve Minarik, wants the Democratic party to renounce Yacknin's candidacy for State Supreme Court Justice. “It is clearly an ethical violation....

JERUSALEM — The Mossad, Israel's spy agency, this week brought home to her final rest one of its legendary female operatives, Sylvia Raphael. Only now is it being revealed that she was one of the secret agents who penetrated the PLO bases in Jordan and Lebanon four decades ago when a little-known gang leader named Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) was beginning his terrorist attacks. Her story reads like . . . well, like a spy novel. Raphael was born in 1937 in South Africa to a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother. That made her non-Jewish, technically . ....

The house here in this city's northwest section where the "Father of Black History," lived, worked and launched "Negro History Week" in 1926 is now a National Historic Site, thanks to the U.S. Congress. The house is named for author, editor, publisher, historian and educator Carter G. Woodson, who lived from December 1875 to April 1950. The Senate passed the Carter G. Woodson House Bill on Nov. 24, 2003, making Woodson's home a historic site, according to Sylvia Cyrus-Albritton, interim executive director of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which Woodson created in 1915. The...