RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000885898

162 Israeli start-ups raised $660 million from local and foreign investors in the third quarter of 2013, the highest quarterly amount since 2000, IVC announced today. Investment was up 34% from the $493 million raised in the preceding quarter and $35% from the $488 million raised in the corresponding quarter of 2012. Investment in start-ups rose 12% to $1.63 billion, raised by 474 companies, in January-September from the $1.45 billion raised by 413 companies in the corresponding period last year.

During the third quarter, five companies each raised more than $20 million, accounting for 25% of the total amount, and nine companies each raised $10-20 million each. The average financing round rose to $4.07 million in the third quarter from $3.45 million in the preceding quarter.

“There has been a continuing rise in the number of seed and first round financing transactions in recent years, resulting in a dramatic increase in the overall number of VC-backed high-tech companies in Israel. We see this trend continuing, leading to record number of deals in 2013 at both stages,” said KPMG Somekh Chaikin’s Technology Group partner Ofer Sela. “Another encouraging trend reflected in year-to-date results is the growing number of mature companies that are already generating substantial revenue and are focusing their efforts on global expansion through building sales and marketing infrastructure. This trend is going to continue to increase the size and volume of M&As in the Israeli market, as we have recently seen. We are likewise hopeful that some of these firms will continue to expand independently, raising capital through the IPO route.”

Israeli venture capital funds invested $151 million in start-ups in the third quarter, 23% of the total, the lowest proportion in ten years. Although Israeli funds’ investment rose from $130 million in the corresponding quarter, their proportion of total investment fell from 27%.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Israelis saving African lives. A team of 20 Israeli doctors and medical staff from Save a Child’s Heart (SACH) has just flown to Tanzania to provide free heart surgeries. With them was Tanzanian Dr Godwin Godfrey who returned home following five years of training in Israel. Elsewhere, a team of 11 cardiac surgeons and nurses from Israel’s Sheba Medical Center performed 10 complex heart operations over 4 days in Nigeria.
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/NewsItem/tabid/178/nid/24195/Default.aspx
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/173177#.UmlwJVMy1pE

A wristband to monitor your health. (Thanks to NoCamels.com) Tel Aviv-based startup Seraphim Sense is behind the Angel monitor, a biofeedback wristband that senses motion, acceleration, skin temperature, blood oxygen saturation and heart rate. The health band is synced to your smartphone and computer to display results.
http://nocamels.com/2013/10/seraphim-sense-creates-guardian-angel-wristband-to-monitor-health/

Israeli trial is good news for IBD sufferers. Results of early clinical trials using bertilimumab at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek medical center have indicated that it could be effective in treating Inflammatory Bowel Disease.
http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20131016-900024.html

Israel awards $1 million prize to US BrainGate. In a reversal to the norm, an Israeli non-profit organization presented a US company with a large sum to help it develop its innovations. BrainGate’s million-dollar prize from Israel’s BrainTech will advance its brain sensors that allow paralyzed patients to move a robotic arm.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/10/15/world/middleeast/ap-ml-israel-brain-prize.html

Israel gives sight to Romanian baby. 10-month old Dennis lost his vision shortly after birth in Romania. When he arrived at Save A Child’s Heart, the Israeli doctors checked out his heart and his eyes. They prescribed special glasses and there wasn’t a dry eye in the ward when Dennis saw his mother for the first time.
http://www.saveachildsheart.org/265-6483-en/News.aspx?pos=2

MDA’s new hi-tech mobile command center. Israel’s emergency service Magen David Adom unveiled a multi-million dollar command vehicle designed to direct rescue operations on the most difficult terrain and during cellular network failure. It has over two-dozen computers and TVs and can accommodate 23 staff.
http://www.jpost.com/National-News/New-MDA-command-truck-is-most-hi-tech-in-world-329280

Medicine for the wild blue yonder. A comprehensive write-up of the 61st International Congress of Aviation and Space Medicine (ICASM) in Jerusalem. 250 overseas delegates from 36 countries plus Israelis discussed everything from pregnant women pilots to space travel to psychological problems of controlling UAVs.
http://www.jpost.com/Health-and-Science/Medicine-for-the-wild-blue-yonder-329167

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ THE BETA ELEPHANT The GOP would like to win without fighting. It wants to wait for the voters to come around and recognize that it’s the better choice because it compromises. Like the nerd waiting for the pretty girl to recognize his niceness, the Republican Party is futilely courting an American voter who barely […]

When one calls, instead of the usual waiting and waste of time, the recorded voice should say:” You have reached a non working number of Healthcare.gov. If this is an emergency, call 911.

And for seniors, we should be directed to the newly formed department of Senicide- Senicide is the abandonment to death, suicide or killing of the elderly.

But it’s not just oldies that have problems. How do you like this explanation:

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/10/24/surprise-obamacares-1800-number-doesnt-work-either-n1731097 Surprise: Obamacare’s 1-800 Number Doesn’t Work Either

“Government has to fix the back end before the front end…if they fix the front end for consumers and thousands of people or hundreds of thousands of people being enrolled before they fix the back end, we’ll have a catastrophic mess. When insurers are getting 10 or 20 or 50 enrollments a day they can clean the errors up manually. But they can’t do that for thousands of enrollments a day. They have to automate at some point. So I think the Obama administration doesn’t want to cross the red line to shut the system down, but I think this is effectively a shutdown in which they don’t say they’ve shut it down but it basically is shut down.”

When I was a medical student in Africa, “Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine” was my bible. A multi-authored text, it was wildly popular all over the world. To us readers, the editors of “Harrison’s,” with their exotic titles (“Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic,” for example), were like rock stars. “Harrison’s” separated itself from other textbooks of its day by the weight it gave to basic science and to the understanding of fundamental biological mechanisms, which the editors believed was key to understanding disease. Eugene Braunwald’s name was familiar to so many of us, not just because he was an editor of “Harrison’s” but also because many of the advances in cardiology described in the book came directly from his own research.In writing about Dr. Braunwald, Thomas Lee, a professor of medicine at Harvard, attempts to capture both the life of this remarkable man, now 84, and the explosive scientific progress that fundamentally altered medicine in the second half of the 20th century. “Evidence from research began to matter to doctors and to patients. . . ,” Dr. Lee writes. “In 1950, heart attacks were ‘bolts from the blue’—unpredictable, unpreventable, and untreatable—but in the decades that followed, mortality from myocardial infarction fell from 30-40 percent to 5-8 percent. Throughout cardiology and the rest of medicine, unbeatable diseases became treatable, and some even became curable. Progress helped to drive fatalism out of medicine.”

Did you know that the UN human rights council appointed the country with the world’s worst slavery record as Rapporteur and one of its vice-presidents? Are you really surprised? http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4281/modern_slavery_and_the_un_s_shameful_response An astonishing document, the Global Slavery Index 2013, has been published this month. It disposes of the generally accepted view that slavery was abolished throughout […]

Islamists in Egypt are responsible for destroying nearly 100 Christian churches. Western policy is all over the place, and the media is largely ignoring it http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4280/ignoring_egypt_s_brutalised_christians Who is more deserving of punishment by the United States? Millions of Egyptians, for ousting the Muslim Brotherhood?  Or the Muslim Brotherhood, for habitually terrorizing and murdering Christians, among […]

Continued impotence and incompetence in the (mis)conduct of Israel’s public diplomacy is becoming not only strategic threat to the country but is beginning to imperil Jewish communities abroad.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-The-Fray-Dereliction-of-duty-329723

Today I saw the Israeli [consul] to Canada being interviewed. I cringed. He was trying to explain how Israel could counter the negative propaganda. He not only was clueless, but almost incomprehensible. He said that Israel should ignore negative criticism because that would make the general public seem that Israel is too combative.

When asked by the interviewers why shouldn’t Israel assert its rights, like referring to the San Remo Convention, he demurred and said that would damage Israel’s image. I was aghast at his utter incompetence. This an official representative of Israel. This is who Israel sends to fight the propaganda war.
– Walter44, an exasperated Jerusalem Post talkbacker, October 1.

Sad but true; witnessed similar incompetence in Australia
– Rafi, a dismayed Post talkbacker, responding to exasperated Walter44

What good is having Apache helicopter gunships, or Merkava tanks, to defend your citizens against attack if you can’t even use them because the world thinks you’re always the aggressor?
– Shmuley Boteach, “Why Jews are so bad at PR,” The Jerusalem Post, January 7.

The ongoing debacle of the (mis)conduct of Israeli public diplomacy (PD) is emerging as one of the country’s greatest strategic failures and gravest strategic dangers.

It is not only endangering the nation’s security, it is imperiling the safety of Jewish communities across the globe.

Pervasive and pernicious

It is difficult to understate how pernicious and pervasive the consequences of this inexplicable fiasco of impotence and incompetence are. They permeate all walks of national life, corroding the very fabric that binds the Zionist enterprise together.

While I do not wish to downplay in any way the danger of the Iranian nuclear program, the dangers inherent in Israel’s abysmal PD performance outstrip virtually any of the other threats that confront the Jewish state as a Jewish state.

While the former is more tangibly kinetic, the latter, although admittedly less cataclysmic, is no less lethal. As will be seen a little later, it intensifies the menace emanating from Iran.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/362259/print Charles Krauthammer has come to my rescue. You see, I’ve been on the receiving end of some spirited reaction since asserting in last weekend’s column that what we commonly call the Republican establishment — i.e., not all individual Republicans but GOP leadership — “is more sympathetic to Obama’s case for the welfare state than […]

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php Not even the coolest president ever can conjure up a national medical regime for 300 million people. If you’re looking for an epitaph for the republic (and these days who isn’t?) try this — from August 2010 and TechCrunch’s delirious preview of Healthcare.gov: “We were working in a very very nimble hyper-consumer-focused way,” explained […]