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GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL: MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on December 21st, 2015

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/

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CAIR’s ‘Deputy Hamas’ Teaches Radical Mosque to Use Guns Will the next San Bernardino be in Florida? Joe Kaufman

Posted By on December 21st, 2015

Nezar Hamze is a leader in the Hamas-related Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He is also a Deputy Sheriff in the Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO), in Broward County, Florida. This background has given him the opportunity to exploit his position in law enforcement to assist his Islamist friends in their desire for weapons training. This month, he did so at a Tampa Bay, Florida mosque that partners with designated terrorist organizations.

CAIR was established in June 1994 as part of the American Palestine Committee, a terrorist umbrella group headed by then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. Marzook is currently residing in Egypt as second in command of Hamas. In 2007 and 2008, CAIR was named by the US Justice Department a co-conspirator for two federal trials dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. Since its founding, a number of CAIR representatives have served jail time and/or have been deported from the US for terrorist-related crimes.

Nezar Hamze is the CEO and Regional Operations Director for the Florida chapter of CAIR or CAIR-Florida. In July 2014, CAIR-Florida co-sponsored a pro-Hamas rally in Downtown Miami, where rally goers shouted, “We are Hamas” and “Let’s go Hamas.” Following the rally, the event organizer, Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, wrote, “Thank God, every day we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel!” In August 2014, CAIR-Florida Executive Director Hassan Shibly wrote, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of G-d…”

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No, We Don’t Need to Defeat ISIS on the Internet Keyboard warriors won’t stop Muslim beheaders. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 21st, 2015

The Democrats have a plan to crush ISIS. All you have to do is tweet #CrushISIS, make it a trending topic and then ISIS will be crushed. If not, we can always bring back #BringBackOurGirls.

A party that is hesitant to fight ISIS in real life has become a movement of keyboard warriors convinced that the key to defeating the Jihadists lies somewhere in cyberspace.

It doesn’t. The internet is a medium. Dead men can’t tweet. Corpses can’t create hashtags.

But the Democrats are convinced that they can’t defeat ISIS in real life, only on the internet. And they’re probably half-right. They can’t defeat ISIS in real life or on the internet.

Obama told the Pentagon, “In order for us to defeat terrorist groups like ISIL and al-Qaeda, we must discredit their ideology. This broader challenge of countering violent extremism. Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas. We will never be at war with Islam.”

When the USSR wanted excuses for allying with the Nazis, it claimed that an ideology couldn’t be defeated militarily, even though its entire existence was proof otherwise.

As Stalin’s Foreign Minister Molotov put it, “One may accept or reject the ideology of Hitlerism as well as any other ideological system; that is a matter of political views. But everybody should understand that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force, that it cannot be eliminated by war.”

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Terrorism on American Soil Is Finally Called Terrorism How our heroes at home have been denied recognition. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on December 21st, 2015

When Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in San Bernardino on December 2, the first response of the White House was to invoke “workplace violence.” Two days later, against pressure from the Justice Department, the FBI declared the attack a case of terrorism. Now another 2015 terrorist attack is being properly labeled, and the victims at last gaining recognition.

On July 16, Kuwaiti-born Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, 24, attacked a Navy Operational Support Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The attacker fired 35-40 shots from an AK-47, killing five members of the U.S. military: Carson Holmquist, Randall Smith, Thomas Sullivan, Squire Wells, and David Wyatt, 37. Abdulazeez also wounded Marine recruiter Demonte Cheely and police sergeant Dennis Pedigo.

Police killed Abdulazeez, who also deployed a 9mm handgun and attacked a second recruiting station. Despite the profile of the shooter, the nature of the target, and the multiple fatalities, federal authorities declined to call the attack terrorism. That changed on December 16, two weeks after the San Bernardino attacks.

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Saturday Night Leftist Lunacy Islam is our friend, gun owners and the rich are our enemies. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on December 21st, 2015

American television viewers were subjected to the usual smorgasbord of left-wing dhimmitude, foreign-policy impotence, bleeding-heart lunacy, lies about America, and ugly class-warfare rhetoric by the three radical leftists still standing in the Democrats’ presidential primary race in a debate that aired on the weekend.

The winner, of course, was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, because Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley refused to lay a glove on her over her deadly bungling of the Benghazi terrorist attack and its aftermath, her dangerous, illegal, email system, and the international clearinghouse for bribes and future presidential favors known as the irredeemably corrupt Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Foundation.

Americans were told in the debate Saturday night in Manchester, N.H., that GOP frontrunner Donald Trump is a racist and a fascist, taxes need to go up, gun control needs to be strengthened, America is a terrible, racist, Islamophobic country, and Muslims are our best hope for combating Muslim terrorism.

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Divas Sing for Despots, Round 15 By John Fund

Posted By on December 21st, 2015

Give rap superstar Nicki Minaj credit for having not a sliver of shame.

After human-rights activists begged her not to sing at a Christmas show in the brutal African dictatorship of Angola for a reported $2 million, she flaunted her dealings with its regime. She posted photos of herself boarding a Gulfstream jet for Angola, another of her arriving, one of her in a sheer bodysuit prepping for the show, and one of her in concert with the caption Angola has my heart. And, obviously, the fat paycheck has her heart as well.

Minaj claims an interest in bettering people’s lives, and she and her managers have joined up with the Black Lives Matter movement. She even spent time last year lamenting to Rolling Stone that black celebrities are slow to speak out against injustice.

But Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation, notes the hypocrisy in Minaj’s stance: “Minaj’s payday is all the more jarring given that she and her managers joined the chorus of the Black Lives Matter movement. It appears that when those black lives happen to be in Angola, their lives matter less than a paycheck from a dictator.”

Halvorssen’s watchdog group has been a singularly effective at tracking celebrities who cash in on dictator gigs. He has blown the whistle on Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Hilary Swank for cavorting with criminal regimes, whether it’s Qaddafi’s Libya (Beyoncé), Turkmenistan (Lopez), or Chechnya (Swank). When shamed by the Human Rights Foundation, all three singers apologized, and Beyoncé donated her fee to a charity in Haiti.

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Harry Gelber-The Sorcerer’s Apprenticeship A review of Niall Ferguson’s “Kissinger: Volume One 1923-1968: The Idealist”

Posted By on December 21st, 2015

The point — one of them — that Niall Ferguson raises in the first volume of his biography of Henry Kissinger is that any coherent arrangement for world order must give more freedom of action to the major powers which created that order in the first place
Kissinger: Volume One: 1923–1968: The Idealist

by Niall Ferguson
Penguin Press, 2015, 1008 pages, $79.99

Henry Kissinger’s career has unquestionably made him one of the leading statesmen not only of the United States but also of the Western world for much of the last third of the twentieth century. That fact alone ensures that he has been, and will continue to be, the subject of unstinted admiration as well as virulent hatred. Both kinds of comments have centered on the two decades from 1960 to around 1980, when Kissinger was effectively in charge of the foreign policy of the world’s greatest power.

To write his life story, he has commissioned Niall Ferguson, previously known for his major books—such as Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World—and for his lectures and television appearances. But this time he has written, with meticulous care, the first half of what may yet turn out to be his masterpiece. In writing it, he has been able to make full use of the huge Kissinger archive—it weighs several tons—at the Library of Congress.

The story begins with the experience of the Kissinger family in Fuerth, northern Bavaria, and in what became the Third Reich before they managed to emigrate. Ferguson has identified at least twenty-three close family members who perished in the Holocaust arranged by Adolf Hitler, who believed, quite literally, that Jews were sub-human. The Kissingers were lucky. They had a relative in the United States who could help with money, visas and passports, so they were able to leave in 1938 and settle in the Washington Heights section of New York.

At school young Henry was notably studious. After the Second World War began, he joined the army, which in turn slowly recognised him as uncommonly able. He served in the 84th Infantry Division and went through the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, where he escaped injury. He then joined the Counter-Intelligence Corps, where he became a most effective hunter of Nazis. He even came across a Nazi death camp, an experience he never forgot, and managed to find, and “take care of”, a group of ex-Gestapo officials trying to form a resistance group in post-war West Germany.

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Peter Smith: The Minaret’s Long, Dark Shadow

Posted By on December 21st, 2015

Let’s indulge optimism and hope for the sake of Western civilisation and, not least, for the wellbeing of coming generations of people born into Muslim societies that Islam can and does undergo a revolution. But I won’t hold my breath
Malcolm Turnbull, ASIO head Duncan Lewis, Sydney Mayor Clover Moore and Assistant Multiculturalism Minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, among others, apparently believe that it is discordant, dangerous even, to be too critical of Islam. So here we have a diseased ideology which we have to tiptoe around lest its adherents become upset. What the heck is happening to our civilisation?

OK, am I going too far in calling it a diseased ideology? Well there must something of the like at work. How else is it possible to explain so much symptomatic violence, hateful preaching and sheer intolerance wherever there are Muslim populations? Surely large numbers of Muslims were not born that way. Of course they were not. They have been infected.

The fault does not lie with Muslims as people. It lies fairly and squarely with Islam, and we have to say so unashamedly, loudly and often. But what about the moderate Muslims, the hand-wringers whine, don’t we need them onside? Hmm! First a question: What do moderate Muslims believe?

My concise OED defines “moderate” as “not radical or excessively right or left-wing.” I therefore buy the siren cry that most Muslims are “moderate”. It does not alter the fact that they are moderate Muslims, a qualifier we never hear in regard to “moderate Christians” or “moderate Hindus”. The evidence is that there a world of difference. That is why we don’t hear about ‘Hinduophobia’. The difference goes to their belief systems.

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Cyberhack of Juniper Networks Poses New Threat to U.S. National Security By Michael Walsh

Posted By on December 21st, 2015

This is getting to be old hat for the Obama administration and its utter disdain for American cybersecurity:

A major breach at computer network company Juniper Networks has U.S. officials worried that hackers working for a foreign government were able to spy on the encrypted communications of the U.S. government and private companies for the past three years.

The FBI is investigating the breach, which involved hackers installing a back door on computer equipment, U.S. officials told CNN. Juniper disclosed the issueThursday along with an emergency security patch that it urged customers to use to update their systems “with the highest priority.”

The concern, U.S. officials said, is that sophisticated hackers who compromised the equipment could use their access to get into any company or government agency that used it. One U.S. official described it as akin to “stealing a master key to get into any government building.”

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Transitioning to the Post-Obama Era By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 21st, 2015

How will the country wake up from its coma in 2016 to reality in 2017?

Next year the lame-duck, legacy-starved Obama administration will double down on its executive orders, bureaucratic fiats, and circumvention of the law. Obama will seek to fundamentally transform America, contrary to law, effecting change in ways he was not able to by adhering to the law.The media, as it has the past seven years, will not only ignore the illegality, but also rationalize and commend it.

Then comes 2017.

If a Republican is elected president, what will the media and its liberal sympathizers do should the next chief executive decide to follow the Obama modus operandi?

Consider a number of issues, starting with immigration.

Obama, when facing midterm and general elections, warned that executive-order amnesty and non-enforcement of immigration laws were simply out of bounds for a constitutionally elected president. Then he pursued both, and became exactly the constitutional monster that he had warned us about.