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Remarks at the Israel Middle East Model United Nations Conference on “Building a More Model UN”POWER:

Before this speech, Power’s best line was “Hillary Clinton is a monster”and she has generally been perceived as hostile to Israel. Thanks to Tom Gross whose dispatches are essential reading we have this :….on a visit to Israel, she made very vocal remarks denouncing the UN for its anti-Israel bias. Power is, of course, now the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Remarks such as the ones below are rare not just from Power, but from any member of the Obama administration. –

“Thank you for the generous introduction, and for reading the book on Sergio. And a special thanks to all of the organizers who put this amazing conference together, particularly Aviva, who puts heart and soul and everything into this. [Applause.]

Before diving into the issues that have brought us here, let me start off by acknowledging the people without whom many of you would never have heard or thought about Model UN, much less known how to get a resolution through the Third Committee. And I’m speaking, of course, of your faculty advisors. One of the greatest diplomats my country has ever produced, Benjamin Franklin, once said: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Well, your faculty advisors have not only taught you, they have involved you in a way that will forever leave its mark on you and will make you engaged citizens of your communities and of the world. So please join me in giving those faculty advisors a huge round of applause. [Applause.]

Now, when I was your age, I never would have imagined that I would get to sit at the United Nations behind a placard that said “The United States of America”. I grew up in Ireland, and my mother brought me to the United States when I was nine years old. By the time I got to high school in Atlanta, Georgia, my dream was to play professional sports – preferably basketball. When it became abundantly clear that I was not going to play professional sports or break the gender barrier to the NBA, I decided to do the next best thing which was to try writing about sports.

That’s what I was doing the summer after my first year in college, when I took an internship at a local news station. And one day, I was sitting there at that news station taking notes on an Atlanta Braves game so I could help cut the sports highlights for the evening news, when footage from another screen caught my eye; and it was footage from Tiananmen Square, in China, where kids my age – and your age – were peacefully gathering to demand basic freedoms like the right to vote, and where they were being brutally beaten and mowed down as a result of having done so. It was raw and it was incredibly disturbing – and honestly, to this day I don’t know if I hadn’t been sitting where I was, when I was, that I would’ve seen it and focused on it in the way that I did. But once I did, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. And that was when it hit me that this was what I really wanted to be focused on. I wanted to focus on what was happening in the world to real people. I wanted to focus on those young people and the dreams that they had and the aspirations they had, even though I had huge doubts whether I could ever do anything that would be helpful or supportive. This propelled me first to become a war reporter, which I did in the Balkans in the 1990s. Then I became a human rights advocate, trying to raise my voice about atrocities like the ones I had witnessed in the former Yugoslavia. And ultimately, all of this led me to go and work for a young Senator from the city of Chicago named Barack Obama. Now if there is a lesson to be learned from the path that I took, I don’t think it is to go and work your first year in college at a sports station, necessarily. It is just to keep your eyes open. Whatever you do, just look up. Especially those of you who are on your gadgets and your smartphones the entire time – you have to look up, just to see what will catch your imagination – what will inspire you.

Hospitals facing Obamacare penalties for high readmission rates should heed the results of a new study, says EarlySense

One of the tenets of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, is that hospitals must reduce costs, by reducing their 30-day readmission rate — the theory being that a hospital ought to be able to do a good-enough job on patients deemed well enough to be released to keep them out of the hospital for at least a month.

As a result, hospitals are scrambling to find ways to reduce their exposure to the problem. Otherwise, thanks to the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program component of the ACA, they could find their Medicare payments cut by up to 3%. While it doesn’t sound like a lot overall, hospital administrators, armed with spreadsheets and horror stories, would disagree, claiming they need every penny, and then some.

A new study by Israeli medical technology start-up EarlySense could help allay the concerns of administrators — as well as patients, most of whom presumably would want to avoid going back to the hospital as well. In the first-ever test of the EarlySense system that followed heart-failure patients after hospital discharge, the start-up, working with two top US health institutes, discovered that monitoring the respiratory activity of the patients was “the most important risk-adjusted associate of readmission for heart failure,” according to Dalia Argaman, VP of clinical and regulatory affairs at EarlySense.

With “wearables” all the rage now in health monitoring, EarlySense has done things a bit differently: The company has developed the first “sleepable” in a device which, when placed under a mattress, keeps track of how a person sleeps, including whether they toss or turn, the different stages of sleep (REM, etc.), their breathing, and other important sleep data.

One recent morning, a Palestinian teenager stabbed a security guard at the light rail station minutes from my home in Jerusalem. About an hour later, I drove past the station and was astonished to see—nothing. No increased police presence, not even police barricades. The guard had managed to shoot his attacker, and ambulances had taken both away. Commuters were waiting for the next train. As if nothing unusual had happened.

The ability to instantly resume the pretense of normalcy is one of the ways that Israelis are coping with the latest wave of Palestinian terrorism. For the last six months, Palestinians—some as young as 13—have attacked Jews with knives and hatchets and even scissors, or else driven their cars into Israeli crowds, killing over two dozen people. (About 90 Palestinians have been killed carrying out the attacks.) The violence was provoked by the unsubstantiated Palestinian claim—strongly denied by the government—that Israel intended to permit Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a place sacred to both Muslims and Jews.
The almost daily attacks tend to blur together, though several have become emblematic—like the stabbing murder of a mother of six in her home while her teenage daughter ran to protect her siblings. Still, by Israeli standards, the violence so far has been manageable. Israelis recall that in the early 2000s, when suicide bombers were targeting buses and cafes, almost as many victims would die in a single attack as have been murdered in the current wave of terror.

Israelis have been here before. In 1992, a monthslong stabbing spree by Palestinian terrorists in Israel’s streets helped to catalyze one of the great upsets in Israeli politics, the election of Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister, ending over a decade of rule by the right-wing Likud Party. The stabbings were the culmination of a four-year Palestinian revolt against Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. This first intifada (“uprising” in Arabic), as it came to be known, forced the Israeli public to come to terms with Palestinian nationalism. It also convinced many Israelis that the Likud’s policy of incremental annexation of the West Bank and Gaza was simply not worth the price.

Until the first intifada, Israelis had tended to regard control of the territories won by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War as benign, bringing prosperity to the occupied as well as to the occupiers. As the intifada took hold, Israeli anger turned not only against the Palestinians but against the ruling Likud. There were antigovernment riots, and Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was widely ridiculed for his passivity and lack of vision. READ MORE AT SITE

Even months after the meltdown at the University of Missouri, who can forget Melissa Click, the professor caught on video calling for “muscle” to eject a student journalist photographing a sit-in on the quad? The university fired Ms. Click this week, and suddenly due process and free speech are back in vogue on campus.

On Thursday the University of Missouri system’s Board of Curators announced a 4-2 decision to terminate Ms. Click, a communications professor. Board chairman Pamela Henrickson told the press that Ms. Click’s conduct “was not compatible with university policies,” including interfering “with the rights of others.”

The Columbia campus faculty council chairman Ben Trachtenberg denounced the dismissal in a statement as “terrible,” saying Ms. Click was entitled to “a fair process.” Faculty council member Angela Speck told the Missourian newspaper that it was “ridiculous” that Ms. Click could be fired “without due process.” Both said at a Thursday meeting that the decision violated Ms. Click’s First Amendment rights, according to the Missourian. READ MORE AT SITE