Displaying posts published in

2016

One in four life science innovations has Israeli roots, says expert- David Shama

Annual biomed conference is Israel’s ‘calling card’ for medical professionals interested in the latest in life science technology

Few people realize that more than one out of every four of the medicines, treatments, and technologies in use today have Israeli roots.

“Research in Israel is present in between 25% and 28% of the world’s successful biotech-based solutions,” according to Ruti Alon, a General Partner at Pitango Venture Capital and chairperson of the upcoming IATI-Biomed Conference, set to take place in Tel Aviv in May. “Many of the patents in pharmaceuticals that are now being used to treat cancer, heart problems, and much more were developed at Israeli institutions like Hebrew University or the Weizmann Institute,”

“All of the big pharma and health tech firms, from Merck to Pfizer to Sanofi, and many more, have R&D centers in Israel, and there are dozens, if not hundreds of start-ups that over the years have come up with unique solutions to some of the most pressing problems in biotech,” said Alon.

Some of those solutions and patents are part of the main treatments in some of the world’s most devastating diseases.

Exelon, for example, is a treatment for Alzheimer’s that helps patients cope with the disease and remain independent longer. Marketed by Novartis, the drug is based on research that was conducted at Hebrew University. Doxil, sold by Johnson and Johnson, effectively helps treat numerous cancers, and it, too, was developed at Hebrew U, along with researchers at Hadassah Medical Center. And, of course, there’s multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone, developed at the Weizmann Institute and marketed by Israel’s own Teva Pharmaceuticals.

Many of Israel’s biotech and life science solutions were first introduced to the world at the annual IATI-Biomed Conference, now in its 15th year.

Interfaith Forum Ignores Islamic Immigration Questions Andrew Harrod

“Just using that expression ‘illegal immigrants’ is a form of oppressing the stranger,” a “very painful…inappropriate language biblically,” stated Rabbi Gerald Serotta at a Fairfax, Virginia, February 25 panel before about 50 listeners. Like him, “Welcoming the Stranger: Refugees and Immigrants in Our Midst,” a presentation of the controversial Islamic Gülen movement’s Rumi Forum, was uniformly uncritical towards current Middle Eastern refugee issues.

Serotta, an advisory board member of the leftwing rabbinical organization Truah, began the panel’s presentation of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theological perspectives on immigrants and refugees. Love for the stranger “suffuses the Hebrew Bible” with 36 corresponding scriptural passages, he stated while repeating the talking point that “people are not illegal, they may be undocumented.” He noted Judaism’s forefathers like Abraham migrating in the Old Testament and concluded that the “reason why we are commanded to love the immigrant is because the immigrant is us. We have moved in history.”

Patricia S. Maloof, former United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Director of Refugee Programs, reinforced Serotta’s Old Testament teachings with references to the New Testament. Hebrews 13:2 admonition to welcome strangers recalled Abraham’smeeting with angels in Genesis while the Holy Family itself fled to Egypt when King Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents threatened infant Jesus. His discussion of any charity shown to the “least of these” being like loving Himself taught that “by helping the stranger we are seeing Christ in the stranger,” she said.

ISIS forces children to execute Mosul civilians; creation of future jihadists – Jim Kouri

A former police advisor, who trained police officers in Middle Eastern countries including Iraq, reported to Conservative Base that Muslim children are being used in terrorist operations more and more in Iraq, Syria, Libya and other locations. According to Dennis Ronald Forrestal, a decorated law enforcement and intelligence veteran, one of the methods of hardening youngsters and making them feel guilt-free for killing is to force them to execute prisoners.

For example, in the war-torn Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday, the leader of the dreaded Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (also called “Daesh“ locally) used children as young as 10-years-old to execute at least 20 people.

“ISIS used Yazidi children who were kidnapped from their families to carry out terrorist and execution operations against the civilians, after the escape of the majority of its fighters. These children were kidnapped, brainwashed and forced to carry out criminal operations,” Forrestal reported.

“ISIS executed 20 people in Mosul for cooperating with the Iraqi security forces. ISIS forced 10-year-old children to [perform] the executions,” he added.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is attempting to create a whole new generation of children educated — or brainwashed — with religious extremism and filled with hatred for the non-believers, according to Britain’s counterterrorism think-tank, Quilliam Foundation.

The Quilliam think-tank reports that “The [Daesh] organization… focuses a large number of its efforts on indoctrinating children through an extremism-based education curriculum, and fostering them to become future terrorists. The current generation of fighters sees these children as better and more lethal fighters than themselves, because rather than being converted into radical ideologies they have been indoctrinated into these extreme values from birth, or a very young age.”

Video: The precariousness of Israel’s narrow waistline Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

1. Pressuring Israel to retreat to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines – which is an 8-15-mile sliver along the Mediterranean, dominated by the Judea & Samaria mountain ridge – ignores Jewish history and represents a victory of wishful-thinking over the 1,400-year-old reality of Mideast violence, unpredictability, doublespeak, tyranny and hate-education.

2. Mideast peace agreements are as durable as are Arab regimes, policies and accords, which have been, since the 7th century, the world’s most shifty, intolerant, violent, volatile and treacherous, as currently reflected by the intensifying Arab Tsunami from northwestern Africa to the Persian Gulf.

3. “Land for Peace” assumes that an Israeli withdrawal from Judea & Samaria would convince Arabs to accord the “infidel” Jew that which Muslim “believers” have denied one another for 1,400 years: peaceful coexistence and compliance with agreements.

4. “Land for Peace” would usher the Arab Tsunami into the mountain ridges of Judea & Samaria, which tower over 80% of Israel’s population and infrastructures, including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Israel’s only international airport. It also towers over the Jordan Valley, Israel’s longest border.

5. “Land for Peace” would doom Jerusalem to be an enclave connected to the coastal plain through a 4-mile-wide corridor, which would be dominated by mountains under Arab sovereignty.

6. The width of pre-1967 Israel (8-15 miles) is equal to the length of DFW airport in Texas, the distance between JFK and La Guardia airports in NY, Kennedy Center and RFK Stadium in Washington, DC. The area of pre-1967 Israel (0.2% of the Arab World) is smaller than the gunnery range at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada.

7. Former Chairman of the US Joint C-o-S, the late General Earl Wheeler told President Lyndon Johnson: “The minimum requirements for Israel’s defense include most of the West Bank, the whole of Gaza and the Golan Heights.” 100 retired US Generals and Admirals cautioned Israel against withdrawing from Judea & Samaria, stating that is would be impossible to demilitarize the area effectively. The late Admiral Bud Nance:” The eastern mountain ridge of the West Bank is one of the world’s best tank barriers…. The western mountain ridge of the West Bank constitutes a dream platform of invasion to Israel’s narrow [8-15 miles] coastal plain. Control of the West Bank provides Israel the time [50 hours] to mobilize reservists [75% of Israel’s military], which are critical to Israel’s survival during a surprise Arab attack.” Most reservists reside in the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv-Haifa area, which is dominated by the Judea & Samaria mountain ridge.

ISIS Follows’ Palestinian Children’s Jihadi Indoctrination By Rachel Ehrenfeld

The Western media is shocked, shocked, by the findings of a six months’ study, documenting the jihadist indoctrination of “The Children of the Islamic State.” Released on March 7, the research by the London-based Quillian Foundation, which was supported and endorsed by the United Nations, “documented 254 instances where children have been used in Islamic State propaganda.”
It has also noted that “Schools and the education system…to shaping the hearts and minds of the next generation. The indoctrination that begins in schools intensifies in training camps, where children between the ages of 10 and 15 are instructed in shari’a, desensitised to violence, and are taught specific skills to best serve the state and take up the banner of jihad.”
That, however, should have come as no surprise for to the U.N., the media, or anyone following Palestinian indoctrination of children to jihad against Israel, especially after the Palestinian Authority was formed in 1994.

The Quillian report noted with worry that there are 31,000 pregnancies in the ISIS-controlled territories. But generations of Palestinians children have been fed a steady jihad, beginning in their mothers’ wombs.
According to the CIA Fact Book, the Gaza Strip, which it lists as a “country”, had 1,179,165 children and young adults in July 2015. There were 799,072 children (0-14 years; male 410,599/female 388,473);and 380,093 young adults (15-24 years; male 194,798/female 185,295)
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) runs 252 school in Gaza, serving more than 240,000 children. The majority of the teachers in these schools are members of Hamas, which the U.N. has failed to designate as a terrorist group.

MAX BOOT: A CRINGE-WORTHY PRESIDENCY

Reading Jeff Goldberg’s fascinating account in The Atlantic of his conversations with the president of the United States, the conclusion I came to was that Obama was born in the wrong country. (And, yes, contrary to the sinister suspicions of “birthers” like Donald Trump, he really was born in this country.) He would have made a great Scandinavian prime minister.

As Goldberg relates: “Obama has always had a fondness for pragmatic, emotionally contained technocrats, telling aides, ‘If only everyone could be like the Scandinavians, this would all be easy.’” And like a good Scandinavian, he views global warming as the world’s biggest security threat: “ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States,” he told Goldberg. “Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.”

I see Obama as another Jesper Berg, the fictional prime minister of Norway in the great TV series “Occupied” (viewable on Netflix), another handsome, intelligent politician who is also transfixed by the threat of global warming and is nonchalant when the Russians start to invade his country in order to seize its oil production. (Berg had tried to shut down the entire oil industry because he thought it contributed to global warming.)

Like Berg, Obama doesn’t seem unduly disturbed by evidence of Russia’s nefarious designs. He says of Vladimir Putin: “He understands that Russia’s overall position in the world is significantly diminished. And the fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn’t suddenly make him a player. You don’t see him in any of these meetings out here helping to shape the agenda. For that matter, there’s not a G20 meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any of the issues that are important.”

This is almost a caricature of the Scandinavian mindset which holds that the only thing that matters is multilateral meetings at forums like the United Nations or the G20. Putin doesn’t seem to have gotten that memo. He may not be “helping to shape the agenda” at international talkfests, but he is shaping the agenda on the ground with his ferocious aggression which has left the United States and our allies reeling.

MY SAY: A MULTIPLE CHOICE QUIZ

QUESTION: Who is more decent and more qualified to be president than a lying scoundrel and mountebank (def. charlatan, confidence trickster, fraud) ?

1.Marco Rubio

2. Ted Cruz

3.Ben Carson

4.Jeb Bush

5. John Kasich

6.Bobby Jindal

7. Joe the Plumber

ANSWER: All the above. We had a choice….rsk

Israel Gives Much More to the U.S. Economy Than You Imagined Aaron Menenberg

From manufacturing to medical research, the Jewish state is crucial to the economic health of the U.S.

” it becomes easy to see that the BDS movement’s attack on Israel’s economy, not to mention its encouragement of academic and scientific boycotts, directly hurts Americans. Just as the movement claims to be helping the Palestinians, but in fact harms Palestinian interests, it also harms what is perhaps America’s most important interest: its economic success. Regardless of your position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if you support a stronger American economy and workforce, you should oppose boycotting Israel. It is important for Americans to know this, and for the anti-boycott effort to expand to include them.”

The movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (often referred to as BDS) hopes to economically isolate the Jewish state to the point that it is pressured into permitting the creation of a Palestinian state under conditions that would threaten Israel’s security and even its very existence. Those of us who fight against this support Israel’s right to exist and are usually motivated by religion, a specific worldview, or a moral code. But when boycotts hurt Israel’s economy, they hurt America as well. Israel makes massive and often unknown contributions to America’s economy and quality of life. If the boycott movement were to achieve its aims, Americans would lose regardless of their position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the last few presidential election cycles, the economy has ranked among the top two most important issues to voters, and this year will likely be the same. This means that this fight is much bigger than the pro-Israel community, and the coalition to fight boycotts of Israel should expand to include those concerned about American domestic policy as well. Americans needs to understand that this hurts them too.
The U.S.-Israel alliance is expansive. Pro-Israel advocates understand that the alliance contributes to America’s security and its position as a moral, democratic leader in the world. Decades of polling show Americans outside the foreign policy establishment support Israel because of the democratic, liberal values shared by our two nations. But the alliance is much deeper than that. As of December 2015, according to the World Bank, Israel is the 37th largest economy in the world by gross domestic product (GDP), an extraordinary accomplishment for such a young and perpetually beleaguered nation. But last year Israel was also America’s 23rd largest trade partner. From Israel, America receives unusually high amounts of investment; helpful and profitable technologies and services; and advancements in science, agriculture, the environment, and healthcare that improve the quality of and, in some cases, quite literally save our lives. Our exports to Israel create jobs in America. Through Israeli innovations and collaboration, our scientists and medical professionals become smarter and more effective at their jobs, and our agriculture and environmental sectors become more efficient and productive. The impact of the alliance is as wide as it is deep.

Trump v. Clinton — What a Choice! Whoever winds up winning the presidential election, the Republic will be the loser By Michael Tanner

The Trump steamroller may have hit a bit of a speed bump over the past week, but The Donald still looks like the clear Republican front-runner. At the same time, there is a growing #NeverTrump movement, with Republican, conservative, and libertarian officeholders, media personalities, and voters vowing that they will not vote for Trump if he is the nominee. In fact, polls suggest that roughly half of those Republicans who do not currently back Trump would not support him if he won the nomination. Such numbers tend to shrink as the general election draws nearer and the partisan choices become starker, but there is no doubt that many more Republicans than usual are prepared to bolt the party, rather than support a vulgar charlatan who flirts with bigots and casually urges Americans to commit war crimes.

But if Republicans don’t want to support Trump, what are their options?

A very few might grit their teeth and vote for Hillary Clinton. But one suspects that a dishonest left-winger, who doesn’t think the Obama administration is liberal enough, would not be a palatable choice for most. Could they really vote for her knowing that she would, for example, most likely appoint the next Supreme Court justice? Many more might just stay home, but that would not only lead to a Clinton victory, it would almost certainly guarantee Democratic control of the Senate, and possibly even threaten the House.

Some have talked about a more conventional scenario in which a conservative mounts a third-party challenge, but the barriers to such a run are enormous. Potential candidates would have to meet petition-signature requirements, with filing deadlines as early as mid-August. In California, the candidate would have to get signatures equivalent to 1 percent of the total number of registered voters, which could be roughly 178,000. Oklahoma would require signatures equivalent to 3 percent of the total votes cast in the last general election. Any third-party effort would be extremely costly and require an organizational infrastructure that few minor parties have.

Missouri Update: Crazy Campus Radicals Are Financially Crippling the University By David French

For months, news has trickled out of Missouri regarding the negative fallout from the fall student protests. The university capitulated in the face of a racial “crisis” wholly of the protesters manufacture (demanding a chancellor’s resignation over random racial incidents completely outside his control), and the chickens are truly coming home to roost. Previously, I’ve posted about declining student applications and declining donations, yet the true dimensions of the financial disaster are only just now coming into focus. Fox Sports has obtained a copy of the interim chancellor’s letter to the university community:

I am writing to you today to confirm that we project a very significant budget shortfall due to an unexpected sharp decline in first-year enrollments and student retention this coming fall. I wish I had better news.

The anticipated declines which total about 1,500 fewer students than current enrollment at MU in addition to a small number of necessary investments are expected to leave us with an approximate $32 million budget gap for next year. A smaller entering freshman class will have continuing impact on finances as they progress toward their degrees at MU.

Unexpected decline? Only to those who think weeks of coverage dedicated to campus crazies has no effect on market decisions in a competitive college environment. At any rate, the budget shortfall means considerable pain all around:

We are implementing an across-the-board hiring freeze for all units on campus. We urge all campus administrators to carefully review their staffing levels and to not refill any positions unless they are absolutely necessary to the mission. Decisions to add faculty or staff must be exceptional, but will be left to the discretion of the deans, vice chancellors, vice provosts and the director of athletics.