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Ruth King

EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘UnKoch’ Attacks Academic Freedom The group aims to block donations from the foundation they dread, but the gifts enable free inquiry. By Daniele Struppa

By on May 21st, 2018

Mr. Struppa is president of Chapman University.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing lately, throughout the academy and in the news, about donations the Charles Koch Foundation has been making to universities. In the heat of the debate, many details of these donations have been described inaccurately or distorted purposefully. But after the allegations, irate commentaries and internal academic battles, the actual outcome of opposition to these gifts is to limit the academic freedom the protesters claim to champion.

I am president of Chapman University, a midsize private institution in Southern California. We recently received a $15 million grant to establish an institute dedicated to challenging the perceived tension between economics and the humanities, reintegrating their study in the spirit of Adam Smith. The institute is the brainchild of my distinguished colleague Vernon Smith, a Nobel laureate in economics, and his collaborators. Appropriately enough, the institute is called the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy, where “Smith” refers to both Adam and Vernon.

The institute is doing exciting and innovative work, offering a curriculum that infuses the humanities with desperately needed energy. I was thrilled to see the enthusiasm among students taking courses developed by the institute.

Yet the Smith curriculum and the faculty who devise it have come under attack because one-third of the $15 million gift came from the Koch Foundation. The criticism, led by the “UnKoch My Campus” organization, takes a familiar tone: The Koch brothers are trying to infiltrate the university so they can dictate curricula and research priorities. Ultimately, the critics’ complaint is that the gift is a challenge to academic freedom.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Truth About Hamas and Israel Dozens of Palestinians died to further the terror group’s lies—and the Western media ate it up. By Ronen Manelis

By on May 21st, 2018

Brig. Gen. Manelis is the spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces.

Sami Abu Zuhri is the spokesman for the extremist group Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization funded by Iran. Hamas controls Gaza and has killed innocent Israeli, American, Brazilian, Kenyan, British, French and Chinese civilians. As chief intelligence officer of the Israel Defense Forces’ Gaza division from 2012-14, I came to know Mr. Abu Zuhri and other Hamas spokesmen from a distance. Their modus operandi is simple: Lie. Their lies support the stated goal of Hamas: the delegitimization and destruction of Israel.

For weeks the international media has reported on violence on the border between Gaza and Israel. Hamas has continued to lie to the world, which is why their rare acknowledgments of truth are especially revealing. Hamas spokesmen raced to the press last week to lament the death of innocent civilians. But a senior Hamas leader, Salah Bardawil, said in a May 16 interview with a Palestinian TV station: “In the last round of confrontations, if 62 people were martyred, 50 of them were Hamas.”

Hamas itself has confirmed that 80% of those killed in their violent riots last Monday were members of a terrorist group, not innocent civilians. Several more of the fatalities were claimed by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. On May 13, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas, said in an interview with Al Jazeera: “When we talk about ‘peaceful resistance,’ we are deceiving the public.” You can trust Hamas only when they admit to their lies.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROMJ MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on May 21st, 2018

Reprogramming cancer cells. I reported previously (9th July) that Ben Gurion University Professor Varda Shoshan-Barmatz had discovered that suppressing the protein VDAC1 inhibits tumor growth. Her team’s latest research shows that small interfering ribonucleic acids (siRNAs) can reprogram the cancer cells back to normal-like cells. Ointment for pre-skin cancer is in Phase 2 trials. http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/bgn/pages/news/cancer.aspx
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-researchers-say-they-have-found-way-to-curb-growth-of-cancer-cells/
http://www.vidacpharma.com/index.php/news/78-vidac-pharma-reports-positive-results-from-phase-2a-proof-of-concept-trial-of-vda-1102-ointment-in-actinic-keratosis

Improved fertility treatment. Researchers at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University are developing a new, single-dose fertility treatment based on a new telomerase-activating compound, which can improve both male and female fertility. It can also help protect the fertility of cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/tBLUUJapIoc?re;=0 http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/bgn/pages/news/Fertility%20.aspx

US Government funds Israeli flu vaccine trial. The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is sponsoring a US-wide Phase 2 trial of the M-001 Universal Flu vaccine from Israel’s BiondVax. A 9,630-person, EU-financed Phase 3 trial is already scheduled.
http://nocamels.com/2018/05/us-turn-to-israeli-flu-vaccine-maker-outbreak/

Reducing overuse of antibiotics. I reported previously (see here) on Israel’s MeMed which has developed ImmunoXpert – a fast test to determine whether an infection is bacterial or virus. ImmunoXpert is now EU approved and a recent study shows it can reduce unnecessary antibiotic use by nearly 90%.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3738353,00.html
http://www.me-med.com/html5/sbs.py?_id=11282&did=2466&G=11049&SM=11282

Treatments for rare diseases. Five Israeli bio-techs at Israel’s MIXiii-Biomed 2018 are developing new therapies for “orphan” (rare) genetic diseases. They include ART Bioscience (Duchenne’s), Eloxx (cystinosis), SpliSense (Cystic Fibrosis), NewStem (Fragile X Syndrome) and Minovia (mitochondrial diseases).
https://www.israel21c.org/5-israeli-startups-seeking-cures-for-rare-genetic-diseases/
https://www.artbioscience.com/ http://www.eloxxpharma.com/
http://www.integra-holdings.com/portfolio-items/splisense/http://www.iati.co.il/company/3793/newstem
http://www.iati.co.il/company/3522/minovia-therapeutics http://kenes-exhibitions.com/biomed/program/#day1

Analyzing the genes for better treatments. Israel’s Genoox employs machine learning algorithms to analyze large amounts of genetic data, helping doctors and clinicians to personalize treatment and researchers to develop new therapies. Genoox was selected by Israel’s Ministry of Health for its 100,000 Genome Project.
https://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-genomic-analysis-co-genoox-raises-6m-1001236471
https://www.genoox.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Use-Case-2-MOH.pdf

DIY ultrasound for pregnant mothers. (TY Hazel) Israeli startup PulseNmore.is completing development of a revolutionary handheld ultrasound device that will allow pregnant women to check on the health of their baby using a smartphone. On its website, PulseNmore says it’s in stealth mode, so shhh! this new “baby” is asleep.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-device-would-let-pregnant-women-take-ultrasound-scans-on-phone/
https://www.pulsenmore.com/

AI to treat brain disorders. Israel’s BrainQ is developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to treat neurological disorders. These identify high resolution spectral patterns in a patient’s Electroencephalogram (EEG) that can be used to treat patients after strokes or spinal injury with tailored electromagnetic therapy.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brainq-technologies-raises-88-million-to-treat-neurodisorders-with-artificial-intelligence-682666821.html http://brainqtech.com/

Stimulating the brain to relieve migraines. I reported previously (Oct 2016)on one Israeli bio-tech that had developed a non-invasive neural stimulation device to reduce the pain from migraines. Here is another – Neurolief’s neuro-modulation stimulates the brain stem, preventing secretion of agents that can trigger pain.
https://www.globes.co.il/en/article-neurolief-develops-non-invasive-neuro-modulation-system-to-treat-migraine-1001235443

Wiping out mosquito-borne viruses. (TY ToI) Israel’s Senecio has invented and implemented innovative technology for the mass releases of sterile mosquitoes to disrupt the breeding of the virus-spreading insects. It is a vital part of the battle to end diseases such as malaria, Zika virus, yellow fever, Chikungunya etc.
http://www.senecios.com/ https://www.youtube.com/embed/stR6CHFyCkc?rel=0
https://www.youtube.com/embed/jyxxFyv4fpA?rel=0

A robot that rehabilitates patients. (TY TIP) Scientists at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University have designed a robotic arm that plays tic-tac-toe. Patients can play against the robot to exercise upper limbs following surgery or strokes. Patients were more motivated to compete against the robot than against computer-controlled lights.
https://www.israel21c.org/playing-tic-tac-toe-with-robot-can-help-rehab-patients/
https://www.youtube.com/embed/FrlR84dbFsc?rel=0

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in France: April 2018 “Radical Islam is one of the greatest challenges facing our nation.” by Soeren Kern

By on May 20th, 2018

More than 250 French public figures — elected officials from all sides of the political aisle, representatives of different religions, intellectuals and artists — signed a manifesto against “the new anti-Semitism” brought to France by mass immigration from the Muslim world.

The manifesto, published by Le Parisien, sounded the alarm against a “low-level ethnic cleansing” of Jews in Paris and demanded that the verses of the Koran which call for the killing and punishment of Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims “be obsoleted” by theological authorities. In a counter-manifesto published by Le Monde, a group of 30 French imams insisted that Islam is not anti-Semitic.

“Anti-Semitism in Europe, in France, in Toulouse is no longer just by the far-right, but from political Islam.” — Aviv Zonabend, Deputy Mayor of Toulouse.

An estimated six million people — around one-tenth of France’s population — live in 1,500 neighborhoods classified by the government as Sensitive Urban Zones (zones urbaines sensibles, ZUS).

April 1. Interior Minister Gérard Collomb, in an interview with the newspaper Ouest-France, said that French authorities had foiled 20 jihadi attacks in 2017 and two in 2018. He also revealed that of the 26,000 known jihadis in France with S-files (fiche “S,” those considered highly dangerous), only 20 were deported during 2017.

April 4. French prosecutors called for Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, an MP for Essone (Île-de-France), to be given a suspended fine of €5,000 ($6,000) for “provocation to hatred or discrimination” for using the words “migratory invasion.” While running as a candidate for president in the 2017 elections, he tweeted: “In 2016, the Socialists compensated for the declining birth rate with the migratory invasion.” Dupont-Aignan said that his remarks were aimed at the Socialist Party rather than immigration and that, in any event, as an MP he is immune from prosecution. The public prosecutor disagreed: “We have a leading politician, a declared candidate in the presidential election, who publicly promotes, on his personal account, a conspiracy and racist theory born in the depths of the French far right…the thesis of ‘the great replacement’ by [French writer] Renaud Camus. A failure to condemn him would open the floodgates of uninhibited racist speech…against all those who do not belong to the national community, including migrants and immigrants.” The court will decide the matter on June 6.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Leaders at War with Western Civilization Why is the West Putting Up with It? by Giulio Meotti

By on May 20th, 2018

The archipelago of political Islam in Europe, from Tariq Ramadan to the Muslim Brotherhood, revolves around the orbit of the Qatar-Iran axis. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood openly sided with Khomeini’s revolutionaries as they overthrew the Shah, and now threatens Saudi Arabia and the UAE and others in the region.

After the revolution, for the first time, the Iranians declared war on their own cultural life: theaters were closed, concerts were banned, entertainers fled the country, cinemas were confiscated, broadcasting was forbidden.

Will Europe – the cradle of Western culture and civilization – open its eyes and stop regularly taking the side of the Iran’s tyrannical ayatollahs?

The United States just withdrew from the Iranian nuclear deal. The move is fully justified not only on the grounds security, but primarily because Iran’s Iranian Khomeinist revolution is a deadly and propulsive ideology that the West cannot allow to become a nuclearized one.

At the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, everything changed when Said and Sharif Kouachi murdered 11 people in its Paris office. Among the texts recovered on the Kouachi brothers’ laptop was the Iranian call for death against the novelist Salman Rushdie, calling it “fully justified”. The killers were inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini’s deadly edict against Rushdie. The bloodbath at Charlie Hebdo is one of the poisoned fruits of the Islamic Republic. The Iranian ayatollahs fear the allure of Western culture. That is why, since 1979, they are at war with it.

Never, before Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power, was a writer forced to live under the threat of deliberate murder, with a bounty on his head, for criticizing Islam. Before the Iranian Revolution, no Arab was marked for death. Since Khomeini, murdering literary dissidents has become a routine: the Algerian writer Tahar Djaout, the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda, Turkish writers murdered in Sivas, and recently butchered bloggers from Bangladesh. The fatwa against Rushdie was one of Iran’s most successful attacks on Western civilization and efforts to intimidate the West.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Club-K is Not For Dancing by Linda Goudsmit

By on May 20th, 2018

Club-K is not for dancing. Club-K is the Russian container complex of missile weapons hidden in standard 20 foot and 40 foot sea containers. These weaponized containers are virtually indistinguishable from sea containers containing ordinary non-military items.

Housed inside each Club-K container are four missiles which can carry biological, chemical, conventional, Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP), or nuclear warheads. The extreme danger of the Club-K system is its ability to evade detection among the millions of shipping containers carried on ships, trains, and trucks all over the world, including inside the United States. The mobile Club-K missile systems are exposed when the Universal Launch Module (erector) tilts up to the vertical position.

Novator Design Bureau designed the missile system and is now part of Russia’s state-owned Almaz-Antey conglomerate. This means that the Russian government has a stealth mobile missile system that can be transported by ship to the United States and then moved anywhere around the country on trains or trucks. What does that have to do with national security and port security in particular? EVERYTHING – this is how it works.

Vertical integration is when a company controls the supply chain from manufacturing to end sales. In a political variation on vertical integration Barack Obama transformed America’s national security into a supply chain nuclear menace. America has many enemies and Obama embraced them all. Obama began by welcoming the mendacious Muslim Brotherhood (MB) into the United States and placing its operatives in every government agency including Homeland Security where Obama authorized the censoring of any mention of Islam and the ideology that motivates jihad terrorism.

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Grotesque Spectacle of Michelle Goldberg Throwing Up Her Hate By Richard Baehr

By on May 20th, 2018

Here is the Goldberg article, which appeared Tuesday, a new low in many ways, even for the New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/opinion/jerusalem-embassy-gaza-protests.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

If you follow New York newspapers, which I do as someone who grew up there, a key question the last day or two was who was more offensive, bigoted, ignorant and disgusting concerning the American embassy opening and the violence on the Gaza border with Israel: Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times columnist , or the people who prepare the front page headlines in the New York Daily News? Take your pick: the Daily News or Goldberg.

I vote for Goldberg. It is hard to know where to begin to unpack her lies and deceptions, but let’s try a few. Goldberg:

This spectacle (the embassy opening), geared toward Donald Trump’s Christian American base, coincided with a massacre about 40 miles away. Since March 30, there have been mass protests at the fence separating Gaza and Israel. Gazans, facing an escalating humanitarian crisis due in large part to an Israeli blockade, are demanding the right to return to homes in Israel that their families were forced from at Israel’s founding. The demonstrators have been mostly but not entirely peaceful; Gazans have thrown rocks at Israeli soldiers and tried to fly flaming kites into Israel.

A massacre? Really? There have been such events in the history of the Arab Israeli conflict, almost all committed by Goldberg’s favorite team, Palestinian terrorists, but this was not one of them. Goldberg seems to regard a battle as a massacre if the casualties and damage were mostly on one side, the Arab side. In other words, to avoid being labeled a massacre, she would need some dead Jews for balance if Palestinians are getting killed. It is hard to tell, however, what would be an acceptable kill ratio for her or the “paper of record.” Two Jews for every Arab? Two Arabs for every Jew? One for one?

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Spinning a Crossfire Hurricane: The Times on the FBI’s Trump Investigation By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

By on May 20th, 2018

If you’re a fading Baby Boomer, you’re faintly amused that the FBI code-named its Trump-Russia investigation “Crossfire Hurricane.” It’s an homage to the Rolling Stones golden oldie “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” — which, come to think of it, might just be a perfect handle for John Brennan, the former Obama CIA director whose specter hovers over each critical juncture of the case.

The young’uns may not believe it, but back before it was known as “classic rock,” you couldn’t just play your crossfire hurricane on Spotify. You had to spin it. Fittingly, that is exactly what the New York Times has done in Wednesday’s blockbuster report on the origins of the Trump-Russia probe.

The quick take on the 4,100-word opus is that the Gray Lady “buried the lede.” Fair enough: You have to dig pretty deep to find that the FBI ran “at least one government informant” against the Trump campaign — and to note that the Times learned this because “current and former officials” leaked to reporters the same classified information about which, just days ago, the Justice Department shrieked “Extortion!” when Congress asked about it.

But that’s not even the most important of the buried ledes. What the Times story makes explicit, with studious understatement, is that the Obama administration used its counterintelligence powers to investigate the opposition party’s presidential campaign.

That is, there was no criminal predicate to justify an investigation of any Trump-campaign official. So, the FBI did not open a criminal investigation. Instead, the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation and hoped that evidence of crimes committed by Trump officials would emerge. But it is an abuse of power to use counterintelligence powers, including spying and electronic surveillance, to conduct what is actually a criminal investigation.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media See Only One Collusion Story By John Fund

By on May 20th, 2018

Anyone examining FBI and Justice Department abuses is smeared and ridiculed.

President Trump is opening a whole new chapter in the war between him and the investigators pursuing him. Today, he tweeted: “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes — and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

It’s unclear how the Justice Department will respond. In March, Justice’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, announced he would be examining exactly how the DOJ set about employing the so-called Steele dossier to help obtain permission from a special court, the FISA court, to eavesdrop on Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. Apparently, Trump is demanding that the DOJ now look at a range of recent developments, including the news that an FBI informant was fishing for information from Trump officials before any Justice investigation of possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia was supposed to have begun.

For well more than a year, we’ve heard about the “Did Trump Collude with Russia” storyline that the special counsel Robert Mueller is pursuing. In recent months, a parallel narrative has been developing. In this account, for which a case is slowly building, figures inside the Obama administration and in the Hillary Clinton campaign may have actively spied on and tried to undermine Trump’s presidential campaign.

But anyone who broaches the thought that there might be two stories relating to 2016 campaign skullduggery rather than just one is viciously attacked. When radio and TV host Mark Levin stitched together mainstream media reports to allege that FISA-court warrants had been sought by the Justice Department to investigate Team Trump, he was branded a conspiracy theorist by Trump critics. He has since been vindicated.

Trump foes have also launched attacks against Kimberly Strassel, my former colleague at the Wall Street Journal. She has done pathbreaking reporting on the Justice Department’s refusal to turn over documents on its 2016 actions to the House Intelligence Committee, chaired Representative Devin Nunes (R., Calif.).

Nunes believes that the American people deserve to know whether or not their intelligence agencies have followed the law.

On Friday, the Washington Post’s David von Drehle sniffed that “there’s nothing surprising about pundits under the influence of the president attacking U.S. intelligence agencies while minimizing the threat from Russia.”

But it’s Nunes who has faced the most vitriolic attacks. Nunes believes that the American people deserve to know whether or not their intelligence agencies have followed the law. “Someone has to watch the watchers,” he told me recently. “The Constitution vests Congress with oversight powers over the executive branch.”

But that’s not how the media see it. Last month, Jason Zengerle of the New York Times wrote a scathing profile of Nunes, whom he dismissed in a tweet as someone “who’s been propagating (and/or falling for) conspiracy theories since before the Deep State was even a gleam in Donald Trump’s eye.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In Politicized Justice, Desperate Times Call for Disparate Measures By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on May 20th, 2018

FBI director Comey and the Obama Justice Department applied a double standard in their handling of the Clinton-email and Trump–Russia investigations.

We wuz robbed. That’s the theme Democrats and their media allies are working hard to cement into conventional wisdom. And robbed in a very specific way: The 2016 presidential election, we’re to believe, was stolen from Hillary Clinton by disparate treatment. As Democrats tell it, the FBI scandalized their candidate while protecting Donald Trump.

You might think peddling that story with a straight face would be a major challenge. But they figure it may work because it was test-driven by the FBI’s then-director, James Comey, in his now infamous press conference on July 5, 2016 — back when the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus on which we rely to read the security tea leaves was simply certain that Mrs. Clinton would win.

If you or I had set up an unauthorized private communications system for official business for the patent purpose of defeating federal record-keeping and disclosure laws; if we had retained and transmitted thousands of classified emails on this non-secure system; if we had destroyed tens of thousands of government records; if we had carried out that destruction while those records were under subpoena; if we had lied to the FBI in our interview — well, we’d be writing this column from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth. Yet, in a feat of dizzying ratiocination, Director Comey explained that to prosecute Mrs. Clinton would be to hold her to a nitpicking, selective standard of justice not imposed on other Americans.

So it was that the New York Times, in this week’s 4,100-word exposé on the origins of the FBI’s Trump–Russia probe, recycled the theme: Government investigators were savagely public about Clinton’s trifling missteps while keeping mum about the Manchurian candidate’s treasonous conspiracy with Putin.

As we contended in rebuttal on Thursday, the Times’ facts are selective and its narrative theme of disparate treatment is hogwash: Clinton’s bid was saved, not destroyed, by Obama’s law-enforcement agencies, which tanked a criminal case on which she should have been indicted. And the hush-hush approach taken to the counterintelligence case against Donald Trump was not intended to protect the Republican candidate; it was intended to protect the Obama administration from the specter of a Watergate-level scandal had its spying on the opposition party’s presidential campaign been revealed.

But let’s put that aside. Let’s consider the disparate-treatment claim on its own terms.

The DNC Server

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