The inspiring story of Avi Rosenblum: born to African-American parents, raised by Jewish adoptive parents and now a soldier in the IDF. http://www.israellycool.com/2016/10/21/watch-inspiring-african-american-lone-soldier-avi-rosenblum/
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTSwww.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
Controlled release innovation gets European patent. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Intec has received a European patent for its Accordion oral treatment delivery system. Designed to improve efficacy and safety of any oral treatment, Accordion utilizes an efficient gastric retention and specific release mechanism. Intec itself has incorporated Accordion into its Parkinson’s, insomnia and gastric ulcer treatments.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160906005739/en/Intec-Pharma-Granted-European-Patent-Accordion-Pill%E2%84%A2%E2%80%93Carbidopa http://israelactive.com/?s=Accordion
Rosacea treatment is safe and effective. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Foamix has reported good results from the Phase II trials of its FMX103 treatment for papulopustular rosacea. The condition, suffered by millions, is characterized by facial redness from inflamed lesions. http://www.foamixpharma.com/
500 aneurysms successfully treated. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Rapid Medical has announced its 500th successful operation to treat life-threatening aneurysms (swellings of arterial wall) using its Comaneci Adjustable Remodeling Mesh. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rapid-medicals-comaneci-adjustable-remodeling-mesh-exceeds-500-successful-aneurysm-treatments-592723241.html
An easier thyroid cancer test. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Rosetta Genomics thyroid cancer diagnostic test (“RosettaGX Reveal”) can now be performed from a sample on the ThinPrep slides popular with clinicians. Previously, the sample had to come from a thyroid Fine Needle Aspirate (FNA) biopsy.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160907005941/en/RosettaGX-Reveal%E2%84%A2-Thyroid-miRNA-Classifier-Utilized-ThinPrep%C2%AE
Dispelling myths about celiac disease. A team of Tel Aviv University researchers has analyzed the medical records of 10,000 Israeli teenagers with celiac disease. The findings show no evidence of clinicians’ belief that sufferers are likely to be underweight or below average height.
https://www.fromthegrapevine.com/health/new-research-long-held-belief-celiac-disease-dispelled#!
A decade of IDF bone marrow donations. It is now ten years since the Ezer Mizion bone marrow registration booth became an integral part of the IDF recruiting station. Since then, 1100 IDF soldiers have donated their stem cells to cancer patients worldwide. Many of those saved told their stories at an event honoring the donors.
http://www.ezermizion.org/blog/1100-thank-yous/
13 miles in an Israeli bio-suit. (TY Geoffrey) Paraplegic Claire Lomas completed the UK’s Great North run in an exoskeleton from Israel’s ReWalk. Claire, who is 16-weeks pregnant, took five days to complete the 13.1-mile race. (The BBC, of course, doesn’t mention that ReWalk is Israeli.)
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-37332178
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/163142/israeli-invention-helps-paralysed-woman-finish-race
Combined PET/MRI scanner. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Aspect Imaging has launched a brand new integrated simultaneous PET-MRI that combines PET and MRI modalities. The system is based on Aspect’s compact MRI plus the SimPET system from Seoul National University’s Department of Nuclear Medicine.
http://www.aspectimaging.com/news/aspect-imaging-seoul-national-university-partner-launch-worlds-first-commercial-simultaneous-preclinical-petmri-complete-solution/
GSK markets Israeli growth formula for children. Multinational GlaxoSmithKline signed an agreement with Israel’s Nutritional Growth Solutions for GSK to produce and market Horlicks Growth+, developed by Schneider Children’s Medical Center for enhancing height and weight in underdeveloped children.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israels-ng-solutions-signs-child-formula-deal-with-gsk-1001157015
A foreign wind-energy company is in such a hurry to collect the maximum possible amount of subsidies from the U.S. Treasury that it has taken an unprecedented step: It has promised to share the federal gravy with individual voters in two Vermont towns, Grafton and Windham. Earlier this month, Spanish energy company Iberdrola announced that it plans to distribute about $565,000 per year among 815 registered voters in the two towns. The payments would continue for 25 years.
But here’s the catch: On November 8, the towns of Grafton and Windham are holding referenda to decide the fate of Iberdrola’s 82-megawatt Stiles Brook wind project. If voters reject the project, Iberdrola will pay them nothing.
The climate-change carpetbaggers — both foreign and domestic — are in a hurry to get their wind projects approved and underway before the end of the year. If they can get started before December 31, they will get a $23-per-megawatt-hour production tax credit on the electricity produced by their projects. On January 1, that subsidy falls to about $18 per megawatt-hour. It decreases another 20 percent per year until it expires in 2019.
Iberdrola and other wind promoters may be eager to collect more federal subsidies, but they are facing lots of angry voters in Vermont. As I reported on NRO in August, the battle over renewable-energy siting has been raging in the state for years, and wind-project siting has become a defining issue in Vermont’s gubernatorial race.
Sue Minter, a Democrat, favors state control over siting. She’s being supported by fellow Vermonter Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and an ardent proponent of schemes that claim that the world can be run solely on renewable energy. Minter’s opponent on the November 8 ballot is Phil Scott, a Republican, who has vowed to protect Vermont’s ridgelines from wind-energy development. While the race is close, Scott can likely count on support from most or all of the voters who supported Peter Galbraith in the Democratic primary. Galbraith made opposition to wind energy the primary focus of his campaign.
Three presidential debates in which there was only one question on the subject that, more than any other, would transform America under Hillary Clinton. “We can be the 21st-century clean-energy superpower and create millions of new jobs and businesses,” the Democratic nominee declared during the second debate. Does she really think that? Does she even know what she really thinks?
Privately, Mrs. Clinton is as close as you can get to an energy realist in a party completely in hock to the environmental movement. She wants to defend fracking and natural gas, but daren’t in public. As the WikiLeaks hack reveals, she tells a blue-collar audience that environmentalist activists should get a life, but doesn’t tell them that to their faces. “The honeymoon won’t last ten minutes,” green activist Bill McKibben warned earlier this week, threatening to redouble the green onslaught on her from November 9.
In truth, McKibben and his allies have already won. Whatever she thinks, Clinton is a prisoner of her public positions. She promises to install half a billion solar panels by 2020, a sevenfold increase from today, and has set a target to generate one-third of America’s electricity from renewable sources by 2027. It would mean that the U.S. would beat the EU’s 27 percent target by three years and six percentage points.
This is an absurdly vast challenge. Even the Europeans have soured on the costs and immense practical difficulties of integrating unreliable wind and solar into the grid. The benefits of Mrs. Clinton’s plan would flow mostly to China — eight of the top ten manufacturers of solar photovoltaic panels last year were Chinese. Its costs would fall on Americans in the form of spiraling electricity bills, a large part of which would go to pay for grid-management tools to reduce the risk of blackouts, and even these may not work very well.
A case in point: South Australia, where coal-fired power stations have been replaced with wind farms. Forty percent of its electricity comes from renewable energy — and the state has the most expensive electricity in Australia. When, earlier this year, the last coal-fired power station was taken off-line, South Australians were warned they were heading into uncharted waters. “There’s an increased level of risk that we haven’t seen anywhere in the world,” Matthew Warren, chief executive of the Australian Energy Council, said last May.
Four months later, South Australians learned what that meant. During a heavy storm on September 28, a cascade of events occurring within 12 seconds — faults on transmission towers, a consequent sudden reduction in output from six wind farms, which shut down to prevent damage, whereupon the interconnector from neighboring Victoria shut down as well — led to the collapse of the system, plunging the state into a blackout.
Renewables apologists said the weather and the transmission towers were the cause, with climate scientist Professor Will Steffen of the Australian National University blaming climate change for contributing to increased storm intensity. “This is a prelude to a disturbing future. And it’s only going to get worse if we don’t address climate change,” he said. As Australian blogger Joanne Nova explains, “A stable grid needs ‘synchronous inertia’ — big reliable turbines that drive at near constant speeds. Coal turbines are 600 tons and spin at 3,000 rpm. That’s inertia.”
Even with today’s safer and more targeted anti-cancer drugs, scientists have been unable to satisfactorily explain the phenomenon of why treated cancers so often recur. The common theory is that the cancer cell develops internal resistance to treatment, and overrides the toxic effects of the drug.
Now, a team of Israeli scientists provide the key for reducing recurrence, allowing anti-cancer drugs to do work as intended.
Led by Prof. Yuval Shaked of the Technion-Israel Institute, the study shows that tumor relapse occurs when the body, in effect, mobilizes itself in favor of the tumor, causing recurrence of the disease, increasing its aggressiveness and creating metastases (tumor spread). Even selective, highly focused treatments that almost exclusively harm cancer cells lead to a similar response.
“The administration of an anti-cancer drug is very aggressive intervention in the body,” Shaked said in a statement. “Therefore, the body responds to chemotherapy the way it responds to trauma. This creates the effect of a double-edged sword: although chemotherapy kills cancer cells, it also causes the secretion of substances that confer resistance to the tumor.”
The study, which was recently published in the scientific publication The Journal of Pathology, mice with multiple myeloma – a malignant disease of the plasma cells produced in bone marrow and spread throughout the body – were treated with the selective anti-cancer drug Velcade (bortezomib). Velcade is based on the discovery of ubiquitin, for which professors Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion won the Nobel Prize (along with the late American biologist Irwin Rose) in 2004.
Shaked found that treatment with Velcade led to a physiological reaction that actually reinforced the intensity of the myeloma in the mice. According to Shaked, the drug caused inflammatory cells in the bone marrow to enhance the aggressiveness of the disease and provide the cancer cells with resistance to treatment. Still, “treatment with Velcade is essential and necessary,” says Shaked, “but its disadvantage is that along with the benefit there is damage.”
Next steps: Inhibiting the mechanism that enhances the tumor
Understanding the mechanisms that enhance the tumor and accelerate the spread of metastases “will enable us to develop methods to inhibit them,” he stresses. In fact, when the researchers inhibited the secreted factor related to the activity of inflammatory cells, they observed a decrease in the proliferation of cancer cells. Now, they are working on various ways to inhibit the body’s response to anti-cancer treatments.
So now Hillary finally knows what the “(C)” stands for in government documents: It’s Cartwright . . . as in four-star Marine General James E. Cartwright, the retired 67-year-old former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the expendable federal official against whom laws protecting classified information actually get enforced.
(C), see? Oh wait — sorry. I don’t mean to confuse Mrs. Clinton by starting this second paragraph with “(C)”. After all, as she diva-’splained to the FBI, she could only “speculate” that “(C)” must have something to do with organizing paragraphs “in alphabetical order.” Speculation was necessary, she said, apparently with a straight face, because she didn’t really know what “(C)” meant.
The question arose because the “(C)” designation — applicable to classified information at the confidential level — turned up in at least one of Clinton’s personal e-mails. Those would be the e-mails that, she repeatedly insisted, never, ever contained classified information. Or at least, that’s what she insisted until government agencies confessed that hundreds of the e-mails do contain classified information. Then Clinton’s “never, ever” tale morphed into the more narrowly tailored lie that there were no e-mails “marked classified.” Alas, that claim could not withstand examination of the e-mails, during which the “(C)” markings were found . . . whereupon the explanation underwent more, shall we say, refining. Thus the final, astonishing claim that she didn’t know what the markings meant, along with the laugh-out-loud whopper that maybe it was all about alphabetical order.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
In case you’re keeping score: When a person being prosecuted for a crime changes her story multiple times, as if she were playing Twister (kids, ask your parents), the prosecutor gets to prove each of the evolving lies at the trial. As you’d imagine, juries grasp that the truth doesn’t need an editor. That’s why people whose explanations can’t keep up with the evidence are pretty much a lock to get convicted.
But that’s when it’s “(C)” as in Cartwright, not Clinton.
General Cartwright pled guilty this week to making false statements to FBI agents who were investigating his mishandling of classified information. The general admits to falsely concealing his communications with two journalists. They involved “Stuxnet,” a covert American–Israeli operation to infect the computer systems that controlled Iran’s main nuclear-enrichment facility. The information was top secret, regarding a crucial program. Its exposure caused diplomatic problems and threatens our spy agencies’ relationships with foreign intelligence services, which are based on the ability to keep secrets secret.
Still, compared with Clinton, Cartwright is a piker. As the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reports, Cartwright appears to have been a “confirming” source. That is, reporters from the New York Times and of Newsweek already had the Stuxnet intelligence (from some other leaker whom the administration has not prosecuted). Cartwright merely acknowledged the information’s accuracy — and, he says, only after it had appeared in published news reports. His claimed purpose was to prevent additional intelligence from being published to the detriment of our national security. This does not excuse his conduct, but it may go a long way toward explaining why the Justice Department charged only a felony false-statement count, not a classified-information offense.
Clinton, by contrast, willfully set up a homebrew e-mail system. Given that the secretary of state’s duties preponderantly involve intelligence matters, this made it inevitable that classified information would unlawfully be transmitted and stored on non-secure servers (i.e., outside the multi-layered protection of the government’s classified communications system). Thus did the FBI find, for example, that of the 110 e-mails on Clinton’s non-secure system that were — contrary to her claims — classified at the time she sent or received them, eight involved top-secret information.
“By its Second Amendment, Americans have ensured that they will never be short of the means to defend their freedom from tyrants, foreign invaders, terrorists or criminals.Fanciful, you think, no threat to democracy could possibly arise on our quiet, law-abiding shores. Quite possibly so — and let us hope it is. Then again, a Jewish shopkeeper in 1930 Berlin probably shared the same opinion.”
Much of last week was dominated by charge and counter-charge concerning deals allegedly struck to legalise a seven-shot shotgun, the weapon’s opponents seeing it as a tool of mayhem and terror. Be that as it may, a gun serves the purpose of the person who holds it, good or bad.
Many surprises await the traveller in the US of A. However, no matter how much one expects to be dazzled amazed or stunned, no catalyst for instant culture shock can compete with the variety of guns and ammo offered for sale. Openly, even in some supermarkets. I still have a supermarket flyer, kept as a souvenir, which advertises a selection of rifles and pistols with the appropriate ammo for all.
It took me almost a week to stop looking for concealed guns everywhere, wondering who might be packing an equalizer. My fearful imagination battled thoughts that I might at any moment be caught up in the homicidal rampage of a mad gunman. Eventually I started to relax. And think. And talk to the armed citizens our foreign correspondents unvaryingly depict in their dispatches as symptoms of US society’s collective insanity. Casting aside preconceptions was a good start because, gradually, I came to understand that Americans view their right to bear arms in a somewhat different context than we Australians think they do. However, there are also some intriguing similarities, which, to me, signify a certain degree of an emotional affinity and conceptual confluence on the subject of gun control.
But first, just for some context, let me recall a bus trip I took with my wife in 1981 from Melbourne to Uluru (then still known as Ayers Rock). Ah, memories of a nose caked with red dust and those jarring, corrugated roads come flooding back! Likewise the spectacle of my fellow, full-to-burst passengers jiggling like a mob of St.Vitus Dance patients as they waited in line at the coyly named “comfort stops” along the way. One overnight stop was Coober Pedy, an unruly opal town where life has gone underground to escape the withering heat. We went to a supermarket, mostly because it was the only air-conditioned sanctuary that wasn’t a pub or a church. It was in that supermarket where an astonishing spectacle stopped me in my tracks.
Neatly stacked on easy-to-reach shelves, row upon row of red gelignite sticks and spools of fuse by the metre. It was a revelation — high explosives for sale just down the aisle from the lettuce and cheese. More than that, explosives in an Australian supermarket were treated as a fact of life. Nobody was shocked, surprised or outraged. Me neither, when I thought about it.
Now, let’s get back to Americans’ alleged “fascination” with guns, which isn’t the right word at all. Like Coober Pedy miners and their off-the-shelf high explosives, the Americans with whom I spoke accepted guns as a fact of life. Underpinning this was the conviction that the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms isn’t something bizarre, outlandish or provocative. Rather — and this is what Australians find hard to grasp — many felt it was a civic responsibility. When I heard that, I asked what kind of responsibility? To kill anyone you do not like? The response was hearty, indulgent laughter. Gently, I was advised to read the Second Amendment, which I did. Pasted it below, please do read it.
second amend
I had always sided with those who advocated a complete ban on weapons. I also accepted as an axiom that the gun ownership means crime, injury and the deaths of innocents. Every time a mass shooting occurred, whether here or abroad, I was distressed, thinking I or someone I love could have been at the wrong place at the wrong time. The closest I have come to being a victim was at the time of the Hoddle Street massacre. I was on my way to work, close to the stretch of busy Melbourne inner-city road that Julian Knight had selected as his killing ground. I heard the news and was shocked. But amidst my thoughts and concern for Knight’s victims, in the back of my mind were the words of the Second Amendment.
I thought, ‘Hang on, the Second Amendment says nothing of the right to shoot innocents or to rob banks — nothing of the sort.’ All it says is that Mr. and Mrs. American Citizen have the right to form militias and bear arms to protect both their democracy and freedom. The Second Amendment also implies that the maintenance of collective and individual freedom is the right and responsibility of the citizenry, and it likewise countenances the possibility that recourse to arms might be required to achieve as much. Those who misuse the right enshrined in the Second Amendment are criminals and the law takes care of them — or rather, should take care of them. This simple chain of reasoning changed the way I thought and felt about guns in private citizens’ hands. Who knows, had their victims had guns and thus were able to defend themselves, Julian Knight and Martin Bryant might not have slaughtered so many. Who knows how many victims of law-breakers and killers might still be alive.
“Is the November election rigged? Certainly not in the way you might have thought it was. The election is afflicted with something far more dangerous than a single plot to flip the outcome. The affliction is diffuse, decentralized, and funded by millions of dollars.”
Donald Trump gaslighted the left when he suggested the upcoming elections may be “rigged.” The usual comic trove of Democrats posing as academics, journalists, and civil rights groups pounced on Trump. It’s a revived “Southern strategy” that tars “Democrats as cheaters,” wailed Rutgers professor Lorraine Minnite.
Democrats as cheaters? You mean Democrats like Wendy Rosen, Melowese Richardson, and Lessadolla Sowers?
Whether Trump was correct or not depends on the meaning of “rigged.” If “rigged” means a group of Democrats sit in central command and control the output of voting machines from outer space, then no, the election isn’t rigged.
But what Democrats are really doing is far more dangerous, far more diffuse, and far harder to fix than a conspiracy to control voting machines.
The integrity of our elections is suffering from a coordinated, multi-million dollar attack on multiple fronts. It’s far more complicated than one centralized high-powered conspiracy to “rig” the election. A more sophisticated understanding of what is happening is essential to combat the real threat to our elections.
Here are five ways that the integrity of elections are under attack:
Big money organizations fight against election integrity
Large brick-and-mortar organizations with multi-million dollar endowments are fighting to undermine the integrity of American elections. These organizations, such as Project Vote, Demos, the ACLU, Advancement Project, and the League of Women Voters have vast financial resources. They have used these resources in key states such as Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and elsewhere to attack election integrity measures. They bring attacks against Voter ID laws, but they also bring more important efforts, such as attacks against citizenship verification.
I’d wager that more votes are cast in American elections by ineligible aliens than by those impersonating voters.
Citizenship verification is essential. Naturally, groups like the NAACP and ACLU do absolutely nothing about alien voting, except whatever they can to ensure that barriers to illegal voting are struck down in court.
I am involved in litigation across the country to help election integrity. In one lawsuit in a swing state, we discovered that non-citizens were voting illegally in presidential elections. This is both a federal and state felony. When we asked the election supervisor for records showing referral to law enforcement officials, none existed — because no referral was ever made. Never mind that dozens and dozens of aliens were participating in the election process in just one county. Imagine how many participate statewide. Yet nothing was done to prosecute the illegal voting — so word spreads through the community that illegal voting is a hobby that goes unpunished.
Rigged?
These same big money organizations send swarms of lawyers to the smallest court hearings, so many that sometimes there isn’t enough room for them in the courtroom.
A comic scene unfolded in another case I was involved in — an attack on the Election Assistance Commission by a swarm of leftist groups. The federal agency issued rules allowing states to use a federal voter registration form that incorporated state citizenship verification requirements.
Don’t be mad dummie….Al Goreon is now advising Hillary and her agenda will be as green as her ill gotten cash…..rsk
Secretary of State John Kerry admitted “it pisses me off” that climate change wasn’t brought up in the presidential debates.
On a panel with Leonardo DiCaprio after a Thursday screening at UN headquarters in New York of the actor’s documentary “Before the Flood,” Kerry said that “maybe November 8th will produce a capacity for the entire Republican caucus” to see the global-warming film.
“It should be required for every single one of them,” he added, to applause from the audience.
Kerry emphasized that “we’re not sitting here chasing some pie-in-the-sky set of possible solutions somewhere down the road.”
“The solutions are here now. Every single one of them is staring us in the face. We know what we have to do. The solution to climate change is energy policy. And if we will make the right choices and everybody here exponentially grown around the planet starts to push the politicians, as the film said, then they won’t dare be against it as the populations begin to demand different sources of electricity, different sources of — of transportation, and so forth,” he said.
Kerry argued that climate-change activists “will be able to win the battle of sending a message to people about how we account for the true costs, about what our opportunities are for a new energy base for our nation, how we will be able to do transportation and meet all of our obligations.”
Robert Creamer, founder and partner of Democracy Partners, the group behind the organized violence at Trump rallies, as shown in the video by James O’Keefe and Project Veritas, is no ordinary agitator. Creamer, a convicted felon, is arguably the spiritual godfather of ObamaCarre and much of the current progressive left agenda.
Creamer, along with his wife, Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky is no stranger to agitation, violence, and expanding the progressive agenda. As Investor’s Business Daily pointed out in March 5, 2010 editorial regarding protests against House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski over the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988, which expanded Medicare benefits and funded the change with a supplemental tax:
An interesting historical footnote is that leading the protest against Rostenkowski was Jan Schakowsky — then Director of the Illinois State Council of Senior Citizens -– and currently Democratic representative from the Ninth Congressional District of Illinois, and chief deputy whip to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It was Schakowshy’s husband, Robert Creamer, a Huffington Post blogger, who wrote what is arguably the bible of current health care reform efforts, Stand-Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, while serving a prison term for check kiting.
As Breitbart has reported, Creamer, in addition to being the inspiration for ObamaCare, was also involved in heavily promoting the Iran nuclear deal, which effectively removed all impediments to Iran becoming a nuclear power and in providing $150 billion for this state sponsor of terror to foment revolution targeted against Israel and American interests:
Creamer, a political consultant who is intimately connected with Obama’s inner political circle, pleaded guilty in 2005 to tax violations and bank fraud. He served time in a federal prison and was under house arrest. After finishing his sentence, Creamer worked for Obama’s presidential campaign, training organizers.
As Breitbart News first exposed in 2009, Creamer used his prison time to work on a political manual: Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win. In it, he devised a strategy to guide a future “progressive” president. His plan included implementing “universal health care” as a first step to other radical reforms, including amnesty for illegal aliens. Obama strategist David Axelrod called the book “a blueprint for future victories.”…
The Wall Street Journal reports that Creamer advocated for the Iran deal with the help of the Ploughshares Fund, a pro-Iran organization.
According to a transcript of the [Ploughshares] call reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, participants stressed that the Iran agreement was the most important of the Obama administration’s second term, and they needed to prepare for battle with Republicans.
