RUTHFULLY YOURS

Frederick Law Olmsted and Robert Moses’s Priceless Riverside Park .Riverside Park is a one-of-a-kind piece of infrastructure, seamlessly bringing together park, highway, railway and river.

In 1914 Robert Moses, who would become the park- and highway-building czar of New York City, was taking a ferry across the Hudson River from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As he looked back at the receding shore he could see Riverside Drive, a curving tree-lined boulevard that fronted a sinuous line of grand mansions and stolid apartment houses. Below lay the boulder-strewn slopes of Riverside Park.

It wasn’t much of a park in 1914, rudely gashed by a rail line that ran along the waterfront with clattering trains belching dense coal smoke and carrying reeking livestock to slaughter.
Less than 25 years later, Moses could cruise the Hudson River and see the fragments of Riverside Park knitted together in rounded slopes and swales of trees and lawns that descended in gentle terraces. Stone walls retained those terraces and buried the rail line, making room for an auto parkway lined with greenery along the water’s edge.

A masterpiece is usually thought the work of a single artistic or design intelligence. But Riverside Park (including Riverside Drive, for they are inseparable as experienced) is the work not only of Moses, but of Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape genius behind Central Park, and the almost unknown Clifton Lloyd, the architectural engineer whom Moses picked to realize his vision.

Repression lifted slightly in the 1990s but the economy did not, and state-sponsored terrorism abroad continued.

Most backers of the nuclear accord with Iran hopefully insist that the theocratic regime will moderate once sanctions are lifted. Plugged back into the global economy, Iran will become less militant. The “pragmatists”—those surrounding President Hasan Rouhani, who supposedly want better relations with the West, will grow in strength; the “hard-liners”—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the ideologically ardent clergy—will weaken.

This is an unlikely scenario. Consider what happened after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, died in 1989. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the mentor of Mr. Rouhani, was elected president shortly afterward and remained in office until 1997. Mr. Rafsanjani, with Mr. Rouhani always at his side, encouraged and welcomed European engagement. A regime of global sanctions did not exist, and American sanctions were far less effective then. Tens of billions of dollars in foreign investment and trade arrived.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Liver cells produced from stem cells. Scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have successfully engineered large amounts of functioning liver cells from stem cells. It is a major breakthrough as currently, biotechs testing new liver treatments have to rely on donated or purchased organs.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=155111&CultureCode=en

Simple test for smoke inhalation damage. Researchers at Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center have devised a simple blood test to determine the extent of damage done to the lungs of smoke inhalation victims. High levels of free DNA in the blood indicates greater damage and will determine resuscitation and treatment requirements.
http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Health-and-Science/Simple-blood-test-can-predict-how-much-damage-is-suffered-by-victims-of-smoke-inhalation-410315

Award for 3D denture scanning. Israel’s HoloDent produces a 3D holographic image of the mouth, reducing the time taken to produce dentures to just 30 minutes. (see Sep 2013 newsletter) The students on the BioDesign program that designed HoloDent at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have won Startup Open Israel award.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/27308

Successful trials for novel treatment. Israeli biotech Peritech announced successful results in its pivotal trials for PP-110 – an advanced treatment for hemorrhoids. Worth reading here about how PP-110 works.
http://www.peritech-p.com/?p=183

One device to check them all – anywhere. (TY Michelle) Israeli startup Tytocare is developing a handheld diagnostic device that enables a local nurse to check a patient’s ears, throat, heart and lungs, skin, temperature etc. and then send data and photos electronically to a medical specialist. Tytocare has just raised $11 million.
http://www.imedicalapps.com/2015/07/tytocare-smartphone-stethoscope-otoscope/
http://www.geektime.com/2015/07/14/israeli-tyto-care-raises-11-million-with-an-astounding-solution-for-parents/ http://tytocare.com/

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

A green park on top of Tel Aviv’s highway. Tel Aviv’s congested Ayalon highway is to be transformed into an oasis of greenery. The Ayalon Roofing Project will create a 593-acre public space for recreation, while enabling traffic to continue flowing below. It will be Israel’s largest municipal project, costing over NIS 2bn.
http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Environment/Tel-Aviv-approves-mega-project-for-green-oasis-above-Ayalon-Highway-409868

Keeping your computer healthy. Israeli startup Fixico has been chosen by IBM to export its remote Endpoint Management product to the private market. Now you can download Fixico to check your computer’s functions, disk and programs upon startup. Fixico has free basic features or paid-for advanced service.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/automatic-pc-repair-uses-ibms-tech-to-keep-computers-clean/

Chickenhawk is a political term used in the United States to describe a person who strongly supports war or other military action (i.e., a war hawk), yet who actively avoids or avoided military service when of age. Trump’s accounts of serial deferments and why he did not serve in Vietnam are a tad vague….rsk

Janet Levy writes:

I’ve been confounded by the so-called “conservative” electorate’s infatuation with this bloviating buffoon. There’s almost nothing conservative or even moderate about his views. If Trump is clueless enough to vilify Pam Geller’s Draw Mohammed contest as
“disgusting” and “insulting,” how will he fight the global jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of America?

For all of you conservatives out there, did you know that the Donald was pro-abortion, has supported and donated to Hillary Clinton, has been pro-illegal immigration, is good buddies with Chuck Schumer, has favored a single-payer health care system (Obamacare) and is unopposed to the Kelo decision, which enables the state to confiscate private property?

Trump is hardly a trailblazing conservative who will scale back the “fundamental transformation of America.”

“There are districts where immigrant gangs are taking over entire metro trains for themselves. Native residents and business people are being intimidated and silenced… The reasons for this: the high rate of unemployment, the lack of job prospects for immigrants without qualifications for the German labor market and ethnic tensions among migrants.” — Der Spiegel.

“Every police commissioner and interior minister will deny it. But of course we know where we can go with the police car….[O]ur colleagues can no longer feel safe there in twos, and have to fear becoming the victim of a crime themselves. We know that these areas exist. Even worse: in these areas, crimes no longer result in charges. They are left to themselves. Only in the worst cases do we in the police learn anything about it. The power of the state is completely out of the picture.” — Bernhard Witthaut, Chief Police Commissioner of Germany.

“The gangs traffic in heroin and cocaine, run brothels or are active in the contraband smuggling business. The brutality with which they carry out their activities has made them very powerful, the police are afraid of them. The state is passive with respect to these clans, the politicians ignore the phenomenon… This negligence has, over the years, enabled the emergence of a criminal parallel society. This would not have happened if the authorities had acted early and decisively.” — Der Spiegel.

President Obama’s refusal to allow Congress to review the newly-discovered “side deals” with Iran has Republican lawmakers steaming, even pushing to halt the larger deal’s review process, on the argument that the White House isn’t complying with the law.

Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.,) and Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), who discovered the side deals during a meeting with IAEA officials two weeks ago, argue that the fact that Secretary of State John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz were “briefed” on the side deals undermines the claim that they’re too confidential to be revealed to Congress. “Secretary Kerry, Secretary Moniz, and others in the Administration indicate that they were ‘briefed on the contents’ of the arrangements,” they wrote in a Thursday letter to Moniz and State Department undersecretary Wendy Sherman, a key player in the negotiations. “Who provided these briefings? Were they IAEA officials? Iranian officials? U.S. government officials?”

Senator Mike Lee has just introduced a bill to defund President Obama’s federal takeover of local government via the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation. Lee’s bill is called the “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act” (it’s too new to have a number). In addition to defunding AFFH, Lee’s bill defunds Obama’s creepy and controlling housing “Assessment Tool,” which could be used as a basis for “disparate impact” suits against your locality. Lee’s bill has a number of co-sponsors, most notably including presidential candidate Marco Rubio. Other co-sponsors are Tom Cotton, Mike Enzi, Jeff Sessions, and David Vitter.

Rubio joining Lee on this bill is, to my knowledge, the first time a presidential candidate has weighed in on AFFH. We’re still waiting for Hillary to declare her position on a battle whose epicenter is now her home town. (Hillary’s Scooby Van was last seen headed as far away from the controversy as possible.)

A new GAO report on last year’s surge of “unaccompanied” “minors” from Central America listed some of the reasons that U.S. government officials had identified for the flow. Among them:

Honduran youth and coordinators of community centers who were interviewed as part of a USAID focus group indicated they believed the United States would allow migrant minors, mothers traveling with minors, and pregnant women to stay for a period of time upon arrival in the United States.

As if to confirm the portion I emphasized above in bold, a federal judge ruled recently that the handful of “mothers traveling with minors” who weren’t released immediately after turning themselves in – i.e., those few held in family detention centers pending the resolution of their cases – must be let go. The judge said the accommodations weren’t up to snuff.

Last week, the New York Times ignited a firestorm when it reported that 2016 Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton was under criminal investigation for sending classified information over the private e-mail server she used as secretary of state. That turned out not to be true. The inspector general (IG) for the intelligence community had indeed referred the case to the FBI and other investigators, but as a “security referral” rather than a “criminal referral.” The candidate, it seemed, could breathe a sigh of relief. According to Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, Hillary’s e-mail “isn’t . . . even close” to being a criminal matter.

Did Hillary break the law? Maybe, but it’s too soon to say.

The federal statute on mishandling classified information makes it a crime to “knowingly remove[] [classified] documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location.”

Levin concedes that the odds are against him. But Plunder and Deceit, his arresting new book, takes its shot. It is a clarion call to young people: “an appeal to reason and audacity”; an appeal that they “find the personal strength and will to break through the cycle of statist propaganda and manipulation, unrelenting emotional overtures, and the pressure of groupthink” that has atrophied their generation’s capacity to oppose a rapacious government that leaves too many of them broke, unsafe, and ignorant of who and what most threatens them.

In the interest of full disclosure, Mark is a longtime friend of mine. We are both conservative lawyers with fond remembrances of time served in the government, in particular, the Justice Department. Does that make me biased in his favor? Sure it does. But it also gives me an unusual familiarity with his work, which is copious: Though a renowned talk-radio host, Mark is the author of several bestselling books that are as serious and scholarly as they are accessible and popular.