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December 2016

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israel smart tracker aims to keep tabs on insulin shots Device snaps on to disposable insulin pens, helps patients monitor dosage times and quantities By Shoshanna Solomon

By on December 9th, 2016

Israeli startup Insulog, which has created a device that helps diabetes patients keep track of their insulin doses, on Wednesday started a campaign to raise $50,000 via the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo.

The funds, said CEO and founder of the Ramat Gan-based firm Menash Michael, will help the company get the necessary US Food and Drug Administration and European permits to market the product. Contributors to the campaign will be able to get the product for $119, delivery of which will take place in summer 2017 when the approvals are in place, he said.

Diabetes patients who use an insulin pen to inject the hormone must remember to take the right dose at the right time, to help maintain stable sugar levels in the blood and to avoid over- or under-dosing, which could lead to life-threatening situations.

Even the most conscientious of patients can have a tough time managing the condition: they need to remember what they ate along with when they took their last dose of insulin and how many units they injected.

Indeed, Michael, who has suffered from Type 1 diabetes for over 30 years, ended up in the emergency room after he accidentally over-injected himself with insulin. After that experience, he came up with the idea for the smart, connected insulin tracker, the Insulog, to help diabetic patients like himself keep track of their medication regimen.

Smart sensors

The device, which snaps on to most types of disposable insulin pens, is equipped with smart sensors follow the pen vibrations and that reset each time a new dose of insulin is administered. An algorithm analyzes the clicks of the insulin pen, record the amounts taken and sends the information to a smartphone app. The pairing with the app enables users to view their entire injection history and share the information with their physician.

When the Insulog device is turned on for reuse, it displays data from the user’s most recent dose, showing when the last injection was administered and the quantity taken.

After his overdose, “now, I am hyper-alert of my insulin intake, and Insulog helps me to never make that mistake again,” said Michael, who founded the company in 2014. “There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who could greatly benefit” from the device, he said.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Castro’s Torture of American POWs in Vietnam: An Untold Story by Jamie Glazov

By on December 9th, 2016

The death of communist tyrant Fidel Castro has yielded much-deserved coverage of the monstrous nature of his tyrannical rule.

What has gone virtually unreported, however, is the direct and instrumental role Castro played in the torture and murder of American POWs in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The story of Castro’s atrocities against American soldiers in this conflict is rarely ever told, least of all by our mainstream media.

During the Vietnam War, Castro sent a gang of his henchmen to run the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as “the Zoo.” As Stuart Rochester and Frederick Kiley have documented in their book Honor Bound in a chapter entitled “The Zoo, 1967–1969: The Cuban Program and Other Atrocities,” one of the primary objectives of this “program” was to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human being could withstand.

Castro selected American POWs as his guinea pigs. A Cuban nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer at the Zoo, initiated his own personal reign of terror. He was described in documents based on POW debriefings as “a professional who was trained in psychology and prison control in Russia or Europe.”

Among Fidel’s torture techniques were beatings and whippings over every part of his victims’ bodies, without remission.

Former POW John Hubbell describes the horrifying ordeal of Lt. Col. Earl Cobeil, an F-105 pilot, as Fidel forced him into the cell of fellow POW Col. Jack Bomar:

The man [Cobeil] could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe. The man’s head was down; he made no attempt to look at anyone. . . . He stood unmoving, his head down. Fidel smashed a fist into the man’s face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of black rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the man’s face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. His failure to react seemed to fuel Fidel’s rage and again he whipped the rubber hose across the man’s face. . . . Again and again and again, a dozen times, Fidel smashed the man’s face with the hose. Not once did the fearsome abuse elicit the slightest response from the prisoner. . . . His body was ripped and torn everywhere; hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed the wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins and there were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back, and legs.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

OUR RELATIONS WITH ISRAEL WILL IMPROVE UNDER TRUMP: CAL THOMAS

By on December 9th, 2016

The consensus in Israel is that the relationship between the Jewish state and the United States is going to improve in a Trump administration, says former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Zalman Shoval.

On a recent visit to Washington, D.C., Shoval told me that he believes Donald Trump and his cabinet picks so far have a more “realistic” view of the Middle East than President Obama, who from his first days in office, “perhaps before, believed it was his calling to fix once and for all, all matters between the U.S. and the Arab and Muslim worlds, as expressed in his Cairo speech. … This gives Trump in the hearts and minds of more than a few Israelis a head-start.”

Shoval said he believes the issue of a Palestinian state — the objective of U.S. foreign policy over several administrations — has become less concerning than the regional and international threat posed by a nuclear Iran. He likes recent statements by secretary of defense-designate Gen. James Mattis about the way forward in dealing with an unstable Iran, believing Mattis recognizes that as important as it is to defeat ISIS, the real threat in the Middle East is Iran.

It’s not only the nuclear deal that bothers Shoval, though he believes Iran will eventually have a bomb, unless it is stopped. It is also bothersome that Iran continues with its terrorist activities, subsidizing anti-American and anti-Israel groups around the world because radical mullahs think their god has ordered them to do so. That makes any kind of diplomatic agreement with nations Iran regards as “infidels” impossible.

Even when the battle for Mosul is over and victory has been declared over that ISIS stronghold, Shoval believes, “what it really will mean is that the Iranians and the Shia are going to be the real victors. They will continue their attempts to build a territorial corridor all the way to the Mediterranean along with Hezbollah, which is not only a threat to Israel, but also something the so-called moderate Arab states look at with a great deal of concern.”

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