RUTHFULLY YOURS

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Liver cells produced from stem cells. Scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have successfully engineered large amounts of functioning liver cells from stem cells. It is a major breakthrough as currently, biotechs testing new liver treatments have to rely on donated or purchased organs.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=155111&CultureCode=en

Simple test for smoke inhalation damage. Researchers at Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center have devised a simple blood test to determine the extent of damage done to the lungs of smoke inhalation victims. High levels of free DNA in the blood indicates greater damage and will determine resuscitation and treatment requirements.
http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Health-and-Science/Simple-blood-test-can-predict-how-much-damage-is-suffered-by-victims-of-smoke-inhalation-410315

Award for 3D denture scanning. Israel’s HoloDent produces a 3D holographic image of the mouth, reducing the time taken to produce dentures to just 30 minutes. (see Sep 2013 newsletter) The students on the BioDesign program that designed HoloDent at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have won Startup Open Israel award.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/27308

Successful trials for novel treatment. Israeli biotech Peritech announced successful results in its pivotal trials for PP-110 – an advanced treatment for hemorrhoids. Worth reading here about how PP-110 works.
http://www.peritech-p.com/?p=183

One device to check them all – anywhere. (TY Michelle) Israeli startup Tytocare is developing a handheld diagnostic device that enables a local nurse to check a patient’s ears, throat, heart and lungs, skin, temperature etc. and then send data and photos electronically to a medical specialist. Tytocare has just raised $11 million.
http://www.imedicalapps.com/2015/07/tytocare-smartphone-stethoscope-otoscope/
http://www.geektime.com/2015/07/14/israeli-tyto-care-raises-11-million-with-an-astounding-solution-for-parents/ http://tytocare.com/

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

A green park on top of Tel Aviv’s highway. Tel Aviv’s congested Ayalon highway is to be transformed into an oasis of greenery. The Ayalon Roofing Project will create a 593-acre public space for recreation, while enabling traffic to continue flowing below. It will be Israel’s largest municipal project, costing over NIS 2bn.
http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Environment/Tel-Aviv-approves-mega-project-for-green-oasis-above-Ayalon-Highway-409868

Keeping your computer healthy. Israeli startup Fixico has been chosen by IBM to export its remote Endpoint Management product to the private market. Now you can download Fixico to check your computer’s functions, disk and programs upon startup. Fixico has free basic features or paid-for advanced service.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/automatic-pc-repair-uses-ibms-tech-to-keep-computers-clean/

Chickenhawk is a political term used in the United States to describe a person who strongly supports war or other military action (i.e., a war hawk), yet who actively avoids or avoided military service when of age. Trump’s accounts of serial deferments and why he did not serve in Vietnam are a tad vague….rsk

Janet Levy writes:

I’ve been confounded by the so-called “conservative” electorate’s infatuation with this bloviating buffoon. There’s almost nothing conservative or even moderate about his views. If Trump is clueless enough to vilify Pam Geller’s Draw Mohammed contest as
“disgusting” and “insulting,” how will he fight the global jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of America?

For all of you conservatives out there, did you know that the Donald was pro-abortion, has supported and donated to Hillary Clinton, has been pro-illegal immigration, is good buddies with Chuck Schumer, has favored a single-payer health care system (Obamacare) and is unopposed to the Kelo decision, which enables the state to confiscate private property?

Trump is hardly a trailblazing conservative who will scale back the “fundamental transformation of America.”

“There are districts where immigrant gangs are taking over entire metro trains for themselves. Native residents and business people are being intimidated and silenced… The reasons for this: the high rate of unemployment, the lack of job prospects for immigrants without qualifications for the German labor market and ethnic tensions among migrants.” — Der Spiegel.

“Every police commissioner and interior minister will deny it. But of course we know where we can go with the police car….[O]ur colleagues can no longer feel safe there in twos, and have to fear becoming the victim of a crime themselves. We know that these areas exist. Even worse: in these areas, crimes no longer result in charges. They are left to themselves. Only in the worst cases do we in the police learn anything about it. The power of the state is completely out of the picture.” — Bernhard Witthaut, Chief Police Commissioner of Germany.

“The gangs traffic in heroin and cocaine, run brothels or are active in the contraband smuggling business. The brutality with which they carry out their activities has made them very powerful, the police are afraid of them. The state is passive with respect to these clans, the politicians ignore the phenomenon… This negligence has, over the years, enabled the emergence of a criminal parallel society. This would not have happened if the authorities had acted early and decisively.” — Der Spiegel.

President Obama’s refusal to allow Congress to review the newly-discovered “side deals” with Iran has Republican lawmakers steaming, even pushing to halt the larger deal’s review process, on the argument that the White House isn’t complying with the law.

Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.,) and Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), who discovered the side deals during a meeting with IAEA officials two weeks ago, argue that the fact that Secretary of State John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz were “briefed” on the side deals undermines the claim that they’re too confidential to be revealed to Congress. “Secretary Kerry, Secretary Moniz, and others in the Administration indicate that they were ‘briefed on the contents’ of the arrangements,” they wrote in a Thursday letter to Moniz and State Department undersecretary Wendy Sherman, a key player in the negotiations. “Who provided these briefings? Were they IAEA officials? Iranian officials? U.S. government officials?”

Senator Mike Lee has just introduced a bill to defund President Obama’s federal takeover of local government via the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation. Lee’s bill is called the “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act” (it’s too new to have a number). In addition to defunding AFFH, Lee’s bill defunds Obama’s creepy and controlling housing “Assessment Tool,” which could be used as a basis for “disparate impact” suits against your locality. Lee’s bill has a number of co-sponsors, most notably including presidential candidate Marco Rubio. Other co-sponsors are Tom Cotton, Mike Enzi, Jeff Sessions, and David Vitter.

Rubio joining Lee on this bill is, to my knowledge, the first time a presidential candidate has weighed in on AFFH. We’re still waiting for Hillary to declare her position on a battle whose epicenter is now her home town. (Hillary’s Scooby Van was last seen headed as far away from the controversy as possible.)

A new GAO report on last year’s surge of “unaccompanied” “minors” from Central America listed some of the reasons that U.S. government officials had identified for the flow. Among them:

Honduran youth and coordinators of community centers who were interviewed as part of a USAID focus group indicated they believed the United States would allow migrant minors, mothers traveling with minors, and pregnant women to stay for a period of time upon arrival in the United States.

As if to confirm the portion I emphasized above in bold, a federal judge ruled recently that the handful of “mothers traveling with minors” who weren’t released immediately after turning themselves in – i.e., those few held in family detention centers pending the resolution of their cases – must be let go. The judge said the accommodations weren’t up to snuff.

Last week, the New York Times ignited a firestorm when it reported that 2016 Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton was under criminal investigation for sending classified information over the private e-mail server she used as secretary of state. That turned out not to be true. The inspector general (IG) for the intelligence community had indeed referred the case to the FBI and other investigators, but as a “security referral” rather than a “criminal referral.” The candidate, it seemed, could breathe a sigh of relief. According to Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, Hillary’s e-mail “isn’t . . . even close” to being a criminal matter.

Did Hillary break the law? Maybe, but it’s too soon to say.

The federal statute on mishandling classified information makes it a crime to “knowingly remove[] [classified] documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location.”

Levin concedes that the odds are against him. But Plunder and Deceit, his arresting new book, takes its shot. It is a clarion call to young people: “an appeal to reason and audacity”; an appeal that they “find the personal strength and will to break through the cycle of statist propaganda and manipulation, unrelenting emotional overtures, and the pressure of groupthink” that has atrophied their generation’s capacity to oppose a rapacious government that leaves too many of them broke, unsafe, and ignorant of who and what most threatens them.

In the interest of full disclosure, Mark is a longtime friend of mine. We are both conservative lawyers with fond remembrances of time served in the government, in particular, the Justice Department. Does that make me biased in his favor? Sure it does. But it also gives me an unusual familiarity with his work, which is copious: Though a renowned talk-radio host, Mark is the author of several bestselling books that are as serious and scholarly as they are accessible and popular.

At Connecticut College, the outrage machine claims another victim.

Academics like to think of themselves as autonomous thinkers, and academia—meaning literally the protected realm of free speech—gives professors not only the right to speak their minds but also, via the institution of tenure, protection against losing their livelihoods by displeasing those more powerful than themselves. The fact that civil polities treasure safe spaces for free speech attests to their progressive bona fides. Especially in our times, when new social networks can turn ominously feral, one would hope that academics and their institutions, especially small, face-to-face college communities, could return that investment and resist anonymous, predatory, crowd behavior.

Yet mob rule is precisely what happened this past semester at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, along the Thames River. Over the course of the past spring semester, philosophy professor Andrew Pessin was driven from campus based on a malevolent reading of a Facebook post in which he depicted “the situation” in Gaza as one in which the Israelis had confined a “rabid pit bull” to a cage, while animal rights activists protested for the poor beast’s release. Although Pessin didn’t specify in the text, he and a commenter did make clear that this metaphor referred to Hamas terrorists, not to the population generally. But in an attack spearheaded by a Muslim student who in high school had begun a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and a Muslim professor, recently appointed head of the new Global Islamic Studies Program, a small group of activists, given the run of the school paper by its editors, accused Pessin of comparing all Palestinians to rabid dogs and calling for them to be “put down.” Pessin, they claimed, “directly condoned the extermination of a people. A member of our community has called for the systematic abuse, killing, and hate of another people.” The editor who arranged for the publication of all three letters did not ask Pessin for a response in the same issue. Shock and horror spread through the community, triggering among many traumatic memories of verbal, racial, dehumanizing abuse, and arousing heretofore silenced “marginal voices.” A great cry went up against racists and hate-speakers of all kinds.

Take ‘refugee advocates’ at their word and it is all so very simple: Australia must admit and support indefinitely all who turn up. As to the cost of those opened borders, not a word. When it comes to actions and consequences, preachy prattle is where their case starts and stops
Do-gooders congregated in the inner cities feel that Australia must house large, unstated, numbers of the world’s dispossessed. Where do they think these refugees will live? Well certainly not in their backyards. One hundred refugees dumped in each of their streets might be salutary.

Competing with the inner-city do-gooders in the bleeding-heart stakes are many conservative commentators. Desperate to establish their empathetic credentials, they use the avoidance of deaths at sea as their moral rationale for stopping boats. It is disingenuous. It won’t do.

Sarah Hanson-Young was exactly right some years ago when she said ‘accidents happen’ after a refugee boat foundered and sank. If refugees are willing to risk their lives on rickety boats, that is up to them.

It is up to them! Clearly, they think the risks are worthwhile.

The rationale for stopping boats has nothing at all to with protecting refugees from their own folly. It is to uphold our national right to control our borders. “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” John Howard rightly said. He didn’t add, “in case they drown”. He placed Australia’s interests ahead of refugees; as he should. Putting Australia first appears to be remote from the thinking of the Labor-Greens left.