RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Greek Coast Guard recently arrested a “refugee” coming from Syria, who had 200,000 euros in cash. Apparently this Syrian “investor” did not think that Turkey, Jordan or Lebanon — countries that border Syria — were safe for his “investments.” He preferred to deposit his money in Greek “zombie banks.”

The network of Greek police officers and intelligence agents, cooperating with human traffickers from Turkey in transporting illegal migrants into Greek territory, had such access and influence that police officers and intelligence agents could be transferred from one city to another and from one department to another, to sideline honest officers who stood in the way.

When you visit Greece, the customs officers will put in your passport the stamp of the Greek Republic. You will see the Greek flag waving at Athens International Airport; taxis waiting for customers, gas stations still in operation and public infrastructure being kept at a mediocre level. This, however, is just an illusion. Greece is a collapsing country.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Israeli shrub treats diabetes. Israeli researchers at the Judea Research and Development Center have discovered that the Israeli shrub Chiliadenus iphionoides increases sugar absorption and reduces blood sugar levels. They are now trying to isolate the active ingredient in order to make an accessible diabetes treatment.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-researchers-discover-shrub-that-can-treat-diabetes/

Blocking receptor prevents diabetes. Professor Ofer Mandelboim of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has won the 2015 Kaye Innovation for discovering that blocking the NKp46 receptor on Natural Killer cells delays or prevents the onset of Type 1 (Juvenile) Diabetes. Israel’s BioLineRX developed BL-9020 to target NKp46.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/26933

Trials for dry-AMD treatment begin. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Cell Cure is commencing a Phase I/IIa study of its OpRegen treatment for geographic atrophy (GA), the severe stage of the dry form of age-related macular degeneration (dry-AMD). Cell Cure has received another NIS 6.24 million grant from Israel’s Chief Scientist.
http://investor.biotimeinc.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=83805&p=irol-newsArticle&id=2047497

Israeli & Irish scientists join up to fight cancer. (TY Margaret) The 2nd Joint Symposium took place last week between Dublin’s Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute and Israel’s Weizmann and Technion Institutes. See the pdf report on last year’s event and joint Israeli-Irish research into cancer and inflammatory diseases.
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/conferences/TBSI2015/
https://www.tcd.ie/biosciences/assets/pdf/IT_supple_tbsi_weiz.pdf

Study neuroscience for free online with the Hebrew U. Here’s another chance to take the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s free nine-week introductory course by Professor Idan Segev on neuroscience. Over 60,000 took the original “Synapses, Neurons and Brains” course, including many from Arab countries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5fd65aS7kA https://www.coursera.org/learn/synapses

Not for the first time. BBC and Sky TV headlines hailed a first for a baby born after ovarian tissue taken from the mother was transplanted back. Readers (see newsletter 31/5/15) will know that Israeli doctors also have done this, without any international media fanfare. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-33063838

The recent enhancement of strategic coordination between Israel and Saudi Arabia highlights Israel’s role in bolstering the national security of the House of Saud. This coordination has become particularly critical, for Riyadh, due to the erosion of the US’ posture of deterrence, while the clear and present lethal Iran-fueled threats to Saudi Arabia are dramatically exacerbated.

While the blossoming Jerusalem-Riyadh coordination is consistent with short-term, surgical Saudi national security interests, it is inconsistent with the long-term, inherently puritanical Islamic, Wahhabi worldview of the Saudi regime, which considers the Jewish State an illegal, infidel, usurper, provisional entity in “the abode of Islam,” as documented by Saudi school textbooks and religious sermons. Could the enemy (Saudi Arabia) of Israel’s enemy (Iran) become Israel’s friend?

Meretz is again sponsoring a bill to label all products made beyond the Green Line. This is geared to facilitate boycotts within Israel proper – inside the 1949 armistice line that reflected the situation at the end of the War of Independence and which has since been elevated to an internationally hallowed border demarcation.

This isn’t Meretz’s first effort to spawn a local boycott.

The initiative predated the second intifada and has been assiduously reintroduced ever since – most notably in 2003 and most recently in 2012.

The legislation’s aim is to clearly declare on all consumer goods packaging precisely where the manufacturing process took place and thereby foil any attempt at camouflage.

For more than a decade Israel has marked all products that it exports with a code that allows customs officials in Europe to know “the point of origin.” The marking allows the custom officials to know the geographic location where the product was produced, grown or manufactured.

The US president holds Israel to a standard of immaculate altruism, while holding the Palestinians to no standards at all.
The raucous ruckus that erupted at The Jerusalem Post’s 2015 Conference in New York on Sunday, when US Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew tried to persuade the skeptical audience of the merits of the emerging nuclear deal with Iran, and of the unmatched security benefits that the Obama administration has provided Israel, served to somewhat obfuscate the fact that there was harsh condemnation of White House policies from numerous other sources.

With the world going to hell in a hand-basket, ISIS spreading like a hideous pestilence across more and more areas of the globe, the United States fast descending into a soft tyranny with its Constitution laying in tatters, all thanks to the benighted presidency of one, Barack Hussein Obama, what does this resident of the Oval office choose to proclaim?

“Climate change is the biggest threat to the world.”

Even when Barack Obama was choosing members of his new administration back in 2008, he selected Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and Carol Browner to lead a White House council on energy and climate.

Ms. Browner had headed the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration. Mr. Chu was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases.

I have attended quite a number of graduations since 1977….and most speeches- from grade school, high school, college and graduate school- are pretty generic. Occasionally they are charming and funny. They are very seldom patriotic and mostly, they are boring pontifications……Be kind, be good, be true to yourself, save the planet, and above all “be all that you can be.”

Now that a big campus drive is to erase gender and Jenneralities are the talk of the media, popular culture and education “transgender counselors” will the speeches now say:

“Be anything you want to be?”

Last week, President Obama said that he is “the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat” in the Oval Office. Which means, he said, that when people say he’s “anti-Israel,” “it hurts.”

Since taking office, Mr. Obama has said many noxious things. Mostly overlooked was something he said at a meeting with Senate Democrats early this year: that he understood why the senators were opposing his deal with Iran, because (according to the New York Times) “he understood the pressures that senators face from donors and others.”

Needless to say, Obama was referring to the so-called Israel lobby, and to the general notion that support for Israel comes not from conviction, but from rich Jewish power-brokers. New Jersey senator Bob Menendez — who has opposed Obama over Cuba as well as Israel and Iran — stood up and told the president that he was out of line; Menendez said he took “personal offense” at Mr. Obama’s remark. (Menendez was later indicted by Eric Holder’s Justice Department.)

Several times, Obama has said he has “done more for Israel” — “more to ensure that Israel can protect itself” — than any previous president. This week, the Supreme Court ruled that only the president has the power to recognize nation-state sovereignty; despite congressional legislation, Mr. Obama’s State Department can choose — and has chosen — not to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The critics of self-identification as objective truth finally have their test case. Sky News reports:

A prominent civil rights campaigner is being investigated after it was claimed she had falsely portrayed herself as black for almost a decade.

President of the Spokane, Washington branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Rachel Dolezal reportedly identified herself as part African-American upon applying for her post on the city’s citizen police ombudsman commission.

But networks including KXLY say public records show her parents are white couple Ruthanne and Lawrence — who subsequently confirmed their daughter is also white.

Her mother told The Spokesman Review the family had Czech, Swedish and German roots, with “faint traces” of Native American heritage — adding that her daughter began to “disguise herself” in 2006 or 2007.

“Rachel is very good at using her artistic skills to transform herself,” she told the Coeur d’Alene Press.

Reacting on Twitter, the London Telegraph’s Timothy Stanley was quick to ask what many were thinking. “What,” Stanley inquired, “is the material difference between #RachelDolezal and Caitlyn Jenner?”

Please note:”Tim Hunt is a serious scientist. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research. In 2006 he was awarded the Royal Medal, whose past recipients include Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Francis Crick, and Paul Dirac. His topic at the conference where he made his offending remark was the public good of science, and why scientific research should be publicly supported. He was making, as the Royal Medal award says, “important contributions to the advancement of natural knowledge” — in this case, on the subject of cancer.”

Sir Tim Hunt has lab coats in a twist.

Addressing the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea on Monday, Hunt — at the time Honorary Professor with the University College London School of Life and Medical Sciences — reportedly said: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”

Sir Richard Timothy Hunt is — predictably — no longer Honorary Professor with the University College London School of Life and Medical Sciences. He also no longer sits on the Biological Sciences Awards Committee of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, the oldest learned society for science in existence today, whose members have included Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Stephen Hawking. He resigned from both positions when his comments provoked a media firestorm.