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NAS president Peter Wood edited and wrote the introduction for a new book, Drilling through the Core: Why Common Core Is Bad for America. The book provides essays from nationally-recognized scholars who critique the Common Core K-12 State Standards.

Drilling through the Core analyzes Common Core from the standpoint of its deleterious effects on curriculum-language arts, mathematics, history, and more-as well as its questionable legality, its roots in the aggressive spending of a few wealthy donors, its often-underestimated costs, and the untold damage it will wreak on American higher education.

At a time when more and more people are questioning the wisdom of federally-mandated one-size-fits-all solutions, Drilling through the Core offers well-considered arguments for stopping Common Core in its tracks.

Now in one volume, get the research on Common Core’s quality, legality and cost that laid the groundwork for the ongoing national debate about how best to achieve higher academic standards.

With polls showing declining public support for Common Core, with its presence on the presidential campaign trail, and with more states backing out of PARCC and SBAC, Pioneer Institute is pleased to announce publication of a timely new book, Drilling through the Core: Why Common Core is Bad for American Education, edited and with an introduction by Peter W. Wood, and contributions by some of the country’s top education scholars, including Sandra Stotsky, R. James Milgram, Williamson Evers, Ze’ev Wurman, and more…

Amid the media’s elation over the United Nations climate deal reached in Paris on Dec. 12, one significant outcome has been overlooked. The European Union failed to achieve its main objective, namely that the agreement adopt carbon-dioxide mitigation commitments that are “legally binding on all parties.”

While this may appear to be a major setback, it liberates Europe from the restrictions of the Kyoto Protocol—which runs out in 2020—and opens the way for more flexible and less damaging policies.

During the Paris negotiations, European Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete warned that the EU “cannot make the mistake we made in Kyoto” where “all the big emitters were outside the legally binding agreement.” For Europe, the Kyoto Protocol has forced EU states to adopt unilateral, and disastrously costly, decarbonization policies. With their manufacturers rapidly losing ground to international competition, governments are increasingly concerned about the threat high energy prices pose to Europe’s industrial base.

The economic damage of unilateral climate policy is now widely acknowledged. In September 2014, then-EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger warned that “If there is no binding commitment from countries such as India, Russia, Brazil, the U.S., China, Japan and South Korea, whose governments are responsible for some 70% of global emissions,” it would be a mistake for EU states to bind only themselves. “If we are too ambitious and others do not follow us, we will have an export of production and more emissions outside the EU.”

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

Success in trials of arthritis treatment. Israeli biotech Kitov has announced that its KIT-302 treatment for osteoarthritis successfully reduced arthritic pain in UK trials on 152 patients, without risk of heart problems. In fact KIT-302 is the only treatment for both osteoarthritis and hypertension (high blood pressure).
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/12/16/kitov-pharmas-arthritis-drug-meets-main-goal-in-late-stage-study/

Functional human liver cells grown in the Lab. More news of the work of Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor Yaakov Nahmias (see here, here, here and here). Now he has been able to use the chemical Oncostatin to double the speed of liver cell production outside the body. http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/28143

Japan turns to Israeli tech to treat radiation disease. Japan’s Fukushima Medical University and Israel’s Pluristem Therapeutics are to develop Pluristem’s PLX-R18 cells to treat acute radiation syndrome (ARS). Radiation continues to spread following the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/japan-turns-to-israeli-tech-to-treat-radiation-disease/

Prize-winning voice technology. Israel’s VoiceITT (see Mar 2014 newsletter) won the 2015 Medica medical app competition in Dusseldorf with its Talkitt platform that translates the speech of people with communication disabilities. Medica is the world’s largest medical trade fair, attracting nearly 5,000 exhibitors from 70 nations.
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/12/10/4-israeli-startups-sweep-international-medical-app-contest/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwHYKmxwN4w

First implantation of groundbreaking heart device. Israel’s Enopace (see Mar 2013 newsletter) has seen the first operation to implant its new catheter-based neuro-stimulator to treat patients with congestive heart failure. The procedure was performed by Professor Davor Milicic, head of Cardiology at Zagreb Medical University.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/worlds-first-endovascular-neuromodulation-device-implanted-in-man-for-the-treatment-of-congestive-heart-failure-540696751.html

Breakthrough status for Tardive Dyskinesia treatment. (TY Atid-EDI) The US FDA has granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation status to Israel’s Teva for its SD-809 (deutetrabenazine) treatment of patients with tardive dyskinesia, a hyperkinetic movement disorder affecting about 500,000 people in the USA.
http://www.tevapharm.com/news/teva_announces_breakthrough_therapy_designation_for_sd_809_granted_by_fda_for_the_treatment_of_tardive_dyskinesia_11_15.aspx

Weizmann in joint research for brain therapies. Israel’s Weizmann Institute has entered into a research agreement with India’s Sun Pharma and Spain’s Health Research Institute of Santiago to develop products for treating neurological diseases such as brain stroke and brain cancer. (See also Apr 2015 newsletter)
http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/sun-pharma-inks-pact-for-brain-therapies/article7971997.ece

Micro-pancreas can cure diabetes. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Betalin has significantly increased the lifetime of pancreatic beta cells transplanted into diabetics in order to produce insulin. This has been achieved by simultaneously transplanting an Engineered Micro Pancreas (EMP) to sustain the cells.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-startup-aims-to-end-insulin-injections-1001086686
http://www.betalintherapeutics.com/

Gustavus Swift once said about his meat-packing operations that they used “everything but the squeal.”

We have just seen the world’s politicians meet in Paris to sign a worthless piece of paper aimed at reducing global emissions of carbon dioxide in a questionable belief that man-made global warming threatens our existence. There was endless promotion of wind and solar renewable power, and there were promises to end the use of fossil fuels.

What if the global nemesis, carbon dioxide, can play a role in providing clean, reliable, efficient electric power? A consortium of companies is currently building a 50-MWt (megawatt thermal) demonstration power plant in Texas to find out.

The plant is due to begin operations in 2016. Here is the gist from Power Engineering:

CB&I (NYSE: CBI), Exelon Generation (NYSE: EXC) and 8 Rivers Capital have teamed to build a $140 million demonstration power plant that produces zero emissions from natural gas.

The plant will be built in Texas using a supercritical carbon dioxide (CO2) turbine from Toshiba. The plant will demonstrate NET Power’s Allam Cycle technology, which uses CO2 as a working fluid to drive a combustion turbine and produces pipeline-quality CO2 that can be sequestered or used in various industrial processes such as enhanced oil recovery.

The project includes technology development, plant design and construction, and a full testing and operations program. CB&I will provide engineering, procurement and construction services, 8 Rivers, which invented the Allam Cycle, will provide the technology development and intellectual property for the cycle, and Exelon will operate and maintain the plant. Design activities have been ongoing since 2010, and commissioning is expected by 2016.

A Lebanese militant who led one of the most infamous attacks in Israel’s history was killed in a strike on a Damascus suburb that the Lebanese group Hezbollah blamed on Israel.

The attack on Saturday night, which Hezbollah said was an airstrike, killed Samir Kantar who led fighters from Lebanon into Israel in a 1979 attack that resulted in the deaths of two young children, their father and two policemen. After almost three decades in an Israeli prison, he was freed in 2008 as part of an exchange with Hezbollah and went on to lead an offshoot of the Shiite militant and political group.

The strike raised tensions along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon on Sunday. Unifil, the United Nations peacekeeping force along the border, said three rockets from southern Lebanon were fired at northern Israel on Sunday night. Two struck land while a third fell in the sea and Israel responded with mortar fire at Lebanon.

Shortly after that, Lebanon’s state-controlled news agency reported that Israeli warplanes had entered the country’s airspace and could be heard in Beirut. But there were no reports of further airstrikes. Israel said it held the Lebanese Army responsible for attacks from its territory.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/20/daniel-greenfield-moment-muslims-are-not-the-new-jews/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Daniel Greenfield Moment with Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discussed Muslims Are Not the New Jews, pointing out how Chanukah is not about Islamophobia.

Don’t miss it!

West Lafayette, Ind. — Although he is just 22, Andrew Zeller is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at Purdue University. He is one reason the school is a rare exception to the rule of unreason on American campuses, where freedom of speech is under siege. He and Purdue are evidence that freedom of speech, by which truth is winnowed from error, is most reliably defended by those in whose intellectual pursuits the truth is most rigorously tested by reality.

While in high school in Bowling Green, Ohio, Zeller completed three years of college undergraduate courses. He arrived at Purdue when its incoming president, Indiana’s former governor Mitch Daniels, wanted the university to receive the top “green light” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which combats campus restrictions on speech and rates institutions on their adherence to constitutional principles.

EPA officials gave $542 million to colleges and universities in grants to study everything from pollution caused by backyard grilling to hotel shower use, but those funds have never been audited by a government watchdog.

EPA awarded the funds to 341 schools in more than 3,100 grants from 2009 to 2014, according a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of more than 100,000 agency awards compiled by Open The Books.

The last audit by EPA’s inspector general of any of those grants, however, was 10 years ago, and then was only conducted in response to a specific complaint.

“The last time that the OIG did a review … was in December 2005 on a hotline complaint for the University of Nevada,” EPA IG spokesman Jeffrey Lagda told TheDCNF. “In the past 10 years, the OIG has not conducted any reviews of grants awarded to colleges and universities.”

Instead, the IG relies on single audits – audits of the each university as a whole – though Lagda did not say who conducts those inspections.

Officials with Open The Books – a non-profit government accountability group that is digitizing billions of dollars of spending at all levels of government – think change is needed.

“How is the EPA supposed to protect the environment when it can’t even protect its own grant-making system from mis-allocation of resources and taxpayer abuse,” Open The Books Founder Adam Andrzejewski told TheDCNF. “It’s time for a deep, line-by-line forensic audit of EPA disbursements.”

States and businesses are suing to stop the Obama Administration’s anticarbon Clean Power Plan, and now they have new evidence to seek a preliminary injunction.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute has obtained government emails that show the EPA secretly worked with environmental lobbyists to craft its Clean Power Plan regulating greenhouse gases. The emails show this secret alliance designed a standard that would be impossible or economically ruinous for existing coal plants to meet—in order to force their closure.

The New York Times first reported that in 2014 environmentalists Dan Lashof, David Doniger and David Hawkins—all with roots at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)—drafted a “blueprint” that “influenced” the greenhouse gas rules. That wasn’t the half of it.

The emails, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, show that this trio and other environmentalists essentially wrote the rule. Their inside man was Michael Goo, who worked at the NRDC before becoming the EPA’s Associate Administrator for the Office of Policy. The emails show intense 2011 communications between Mr. Goo and high-level officials at the NRDC, the Sierra Club and the Clean Air Task Force. Mr. Goo used a private Yahoo email account to send multiple drafts of his options memo to these outside groups, which returned them with draft instructions.

The Oberlin College Black Student Union has released a list of 50 “Institutional Demands” for the school, including one that orders it to pay black students who organize protests $8.20 per hour for doing so.

The 14-page (!) document opens with this nice buzzword salad:

Oberlin College and Conservatory is an unethical institution From capitalizing on massive labor exploitation across campus, to the Conservatory of Music treating Black and other students of color as less than through its everyday running, Oberlin College unapologetically acts as [sic] unethical institution, antithetical to its historical vision.

“This institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy,” it continues.