RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Barack Obama’s schizophrenic — and at times, contradictory — policy towards Syria has led us to this point where U.S. forces are serving in support of anti-ISIS elements, including Al-Qaeda. Not fourteen years after 9/11, is this what America signed up for?”

U.S. coalition aircraft struck ISIS positions in support of Syrian rebels, including Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s official Syria affiliate, along with another prominent jihadist group, Ahrar al-Sham. This is a dramatic shift from just a year and a half ago, when Obama administration officials said they would support Islamist groups as long as they weren’t allied with Al-Qaeda.

Agence France Presse reports:

US-led aircraft bombed Islamic State group fighters as they battled rival Syrian rebels, including Al-Qaeda loyalists, for the first time, a monitoring group said on Sunday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights described the overnight raids in northern Aleppo as an intervention on the side of the rival rebels, which include forces who have been targeted previously by US-led strikes.

“We, through democratic means, have brought an end to an era of oppression.” — Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition, Republican People’s Party (CHP).

Erdogan is now the lonely sultan in his $615 million, 1150-room presidential palace. For the first time since 2002, the opposition has more seats in the parliament than the AKP.

For the first time since his Islamist party won its first election victory in 2002, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was nowhere to be seen on the night of June 7. He did not make a victory speech. He did not, in fact, make any speech.

Not only failing to win the two-thirds majority they desired to change the constitution, the AKP lost its parliamentary majority and the ability to form a single-party government. It won 40.8% of the national vote and 258 seats, 19 short of the simple majority requirement of 276. Erdogan is now the lonely sultan at his $615 million, 1150-room presidential palace. For the first time since 2002, the opposition has more seats in parliament than the AKP: 292 seats to 258.

“My commitment is… to reject any oppression in the name of religion… a goal that we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.” — Raif Badawi.

In another example of Saudi “justice,” Badawi’s lawyer, Walid Abu’l-Khayr, was jailed. He was sentenced to 15 years in jail, to be followed by a 15-year travel ban.

What is happening to Badawi is a perfect reminder to anyone who claims to be “offended” by “Islamophobia” why it might exist, who is to blame for it, and that it is precisely behavior such as this that justifies it.

You may have seen the face of Raif Badawi, a young Saudi man, or a short article about him, or impressive efforts by The Independent, to bring attention to the cruel punishments inflicted on him by a series of deeply illiberal Saudi courts: 1000 lashes — “very harshly,” the flogging order read — to be administered 50 at time for 20 weeks, or five months.

Raif Badawi is a 31-year old author, blogger and social activist, who gently tried to introduce just the smallest traces of enlightened thinking to the government and the religious elite of Saudi Arabia from his home in Jeddah.

The U.S. government gives up personal data secrets with barely a fight.

U.S. government incompetence seems to grow by the month, and now we know it’s becoming a threat to national, and even individual American, security. The Obama Administration announced last week that Chinese hackers made off this year with personnel files that may have included those of all 2.1 million federal employees, plus former employees going back to the 1980s.

This is no routine hack. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) lost background-check data to the Chinese nine months before this breach and still hadn’t locked the cyber front door. OPM’s inspector general issued a damning report last November that parts of its network should be shut down because they were riddled with weaknesses that “could potentially have national security implications.” You can’t ring the alarm much louder than that, but the failure to take basic precautions continued.

In other words this isn’t a James Bond movie. It’s a Dilbert cartoon. Despite years of warnings, and after the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden debacles, the federal bureaucracy can’t protect its most basic data from hackers. Private companies like Target are pilloried, not least by politicians, for their data leaks. But the feds have $4 trillion to spend each year plus access to the most advanced encryption systems. Will anyone in government take responsibility for this fiasco?

A liberal Saudi reformer may not survive his Medieval sentence.

Saudi Arabia’s highest court on Sunday upheld a 1,000-lash flogging sentence against the country’s leading liberal dissident, Raif Badawi. The blogger and activist will also be jailed for 10 years and fined $266,000. Mr. Badawi has now exhausted the appellate process, and the ruling can’t be overturned save for a pardon by King Salman.

Mr. Badawi’s alleged crimes include founding the Saudi Liberal Network, an online-only forum promoting reform, individual rights and gender equality in the Kingdom, where women are still barred from driving cars and authorities behead people suspected of practicing witchcraft.

So the man who would be the next Ottoman sultan will have a harder road than he imagined. That’s the big news from Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Turkey, where voters denied President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, a majority for the first time in 13 years.

Mr. Erdogan had hoped to get 330 seats to be able to call a referendum to change the constitution to give himself more powers as chief executive. But preliminary results as we went to press suggested that the AKP would win about 41% of the vote, or some 258 seats, well short of the 276 for a majority.

The plan will ensure that energy plants operate like cars in stop-and-go traffic, cutting efficiency.
‘Flexibility” is the advertised hallmark of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan, which by 2030 would reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants by 30% from 2005 levels. The central feature of the plan is a forced shift away from inexpensive coal-fired power. Not to worry, says EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy: “With EPA’s flexible proposal, states choose the ways we cut carbon pollution, so we can still have affordable, reliable power to grow our economy.”

Under the plan, the EPA will set a carbon-dioxide-emissions target for every state, and give each state roughly a year to develop and implement a “state plan” to meet it. Of course, the EPA must approve the plan before it can go into effect. How is that flexible? The EPA allows states to choose any combination of four “building blocks” to reach its target—reducing coal, increasing natural-gas, more renewables and nuclear energy, and enhancing energy-efficiency standards.

A former security agent shows the leader lived large while preaching revolutionary sacrifice.

For 17 years Juan Reinaldo Sánchez was part of the elite team of Cuban security specialists charged with protecting the life and privacy of Fidel Castro. But in 1994 his loyalty came into question when, with a daughter already living abroad, a brother jumped on a raft for Florida. Castro fired him.

Sánchez was imprisoned for two years and tortured. In 2008 he defected to the U.S., making him the only member of el maximo lider’s personal escort ever to flee the island.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Bacteria test in minutes. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Pocared Diagnostics has developed a device that can identify the bacteria in a sample within minutes, rather than current tests that take several days. The P-1000 employs fluorescence, optical analysis and artificial intelligence. It can also test the bacteria’s resistance to antibiotics.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pocared-announces-real-time-identification-of-bacterial-species-and-antibiotic-resistance-markers-504239361.html http://www.pocared.com/products/p-1000/technology

A cure for addiction. In clinical tests, scientists at Israel’s Bar Ilan University working with Canada’s McGill University discovered DNA methylation changes occur during an addict’s withdrawal process. These changes increased cravings and by administering a DNA methylation inhibitor, the cravings ceased.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/study-going-cold-turkey-worsens-addiction/

10,000 operations for spinal surgery guidance system. (TY Atid-EDI) Spinal surgeons have now performed over 10,000 procedures using the Renaissance Guidance System (and its earlier Spine Assist version) developed by Israel’s Mazor Robotics. The system is now also being used to perform brain surgery.
http://mazorrobotics.com/mazor-robotics-guidance-system-successfully-completes-10000th-procedure/

$10 million to research genetic diseases. Canada’s Azrieli Foundation has donated $10 million to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for researching genetic disorders. The new Azrieli Center for Stem Cells and Genetic Research will focus on Down syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, diabetes, and Fragile X syndrome.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-azrieli-foundation-to-fund-hebrew-u-genetic-research-1001042110

And baby makes three. (TY Michelle) Israel’s Nuvo Group has developed the PregSense monitor for expectant mothers that need to keep a check on their fetus but do not require hospitalization. Sensors on an elastic harness transmit data via bluetooth to a smartphone for storage in the cloud that physicians can access.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/01/us-israel-mobile-foetus-monitor-idUSKBN0OH2NF20150601

Wristband stores medical profile. Israel’s MyMDband is a smart waterproof lifetime-guaranteed silicon band with a laser-engraved QR code on a stainless-steel buckle that displays all the data needed immediately after it’s scanned: prior medical conditions, current medications, allergies. Everything a paramedic needs to know.
http://www.israel21c.org/headlines/medics-create-smart-wearable-bands-with-complete-medical-profiles/

Triple treatment stops lung cancer returning. Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute discovered how lung cancer cells adapt to stop the effectiveness of treatment that block tumor growth. So they have found a solution that targets the adaptations. Applying three treatments together stops tumor growth permanently.
http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Health-and-Science/Weizmann-Institutes-triple-treatment-stops-lung-cancer-cells-in-lab-from-returning-404924

Annotating DNA to prevent cancer. Israel Prize laureate Dr. Haim (Howard) Cedar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem specializes in DNA annotation – the instructions that cells use to do their specific function. He is working to detect wrongly reproduced instructions in order to prevent, not merely cure, cancer.
http://www.yissum.co.il/media-center/news/27045

Hope for advanced cancer sufferers. Israel’s VBL Therapeutics reported good interim results from Phase 2 trials of its VB-111 cancer treatment. VB-111 reduced tumor size by at least 50% in most worst-case Mullerian (ovarian) cancer sufferers. It also extended the survival of patients with aggressive brain cancer (glioblastoma).
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/vbl-therapeutics-present-phase-1-181500462.html

UK cancer breakthrough – the Israeli connection. There was no mention of Israel in the international media reports about the recent cancer breakthrough at the Royal Marsden hospital in the UK. So I’d better tell you. Professor Jacob Schachter from Israel’s Sheba Medical Center was a key member of the UK’s research team. Please read my 4 Nov 2012 newsletter article and watch the youtube to see what Professor Schachter does.
http://nocamels.com/2015/06/drug-cocktail-immunotherapy-shrinks-cancerous-tumors/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UTGONr0GY4&feature=youtu.be

The doctor will see you now. Israel’s Teva is investing tens of millions of dollars in American Well – a telemedicine company founded by Israeli doctor brothers Ido and Roy Schoenberg. A patient can contact American Well who will summon a doctor to an immediate video call. It’s like an on-line house call.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-teva-invests-in-online-doctor-american-well-1001041616

At the end of May, a seemingly small news story made it to the headlines of the British Jewish Chronicle ‎and the American Algemeiner. The gist of it was that France was scaling back the security of its Jewish ‎communities, even though anti-Semitic incidents average three per day according to the French anti-‎Semitism watchdog the Bureau National de Vigilance Contre l’Antisémitisme (BNVCA).‎

According to the Jewish Chronicle, “Congregants at some synagogues, particularly those outside urban ‎centers, have recently noted that at some nonreligious evening events, soldiers are present at the ‎beginning as participants arrive, but leave soon afterwards, leaving the buildings and the people inside ‎unprotected. … Some small shuls [synagogues] have been told that they will not be guarded for an event ‎that has fewer than 10 participants — this particularly has an impact on Orthodox communities, where a ‎few congregants come regularly to pray every morning.” Similarly, according to the paper, the rabbi of a ‎small Orthodox community on the outskirts of Paris, who asked not to be named, says his synagogue is ‎now under fairly minimal protection. “Realistically, we knew that level of protection wouldn’t last. It ‎couldn’t. At some point we won’t have any state protection anymore, so I’m planning to put in bulletproof ‎windows and stronger locks on the front door. In fact I think that it’s more reassuring than otherwise — it ‎means that the immediate threat level has gone down.”‎