“Testament of Youth,” the movie based on the memoir by Vera Britain who served as a volunteer nurse during World War I, might have been made in the ’50’s – so dated are its characters, its setting, its cinematography and its music which never fails to swell. In glorious Technicolor, there are more close-ups of the lovely Alicia Vikander than a family album – most with that same determined look that signals she is a person to be reckoned with. The dialogue is replete with such trenchant and insightful lines as ‘I want to write,” and “You must write!” uttered to our heroine after reading one of her youthful poems. The personal conflict consists of whether this feisty young Edwardian woman will get to go to Oxford and whether she will allow herself to fall in love after proclaiming that she has no wish to marry – ever. You will guess the answers to both without bothering to buy a ticket but in fairness, the movie draws us into the beautiful English countryside, the comfortable world of the affluent and the extremely photogenic actors with their perfectly clipped British accents. It then zeroes in on the newspaper headline of the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination and we know where we are headed.
This week Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz have posed a challenge for would-be presidents and all Americans: if the United Nations criminalizes Israel’s exercise of the right of self-defense it will pay a heavy price. The organization has no right to expect billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to be doled out every year when they are spent undercutting our deepest values and our national security.
Graham and Cruz’s comments come after learning that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is now weighing whether to sign off on a report emanating from an Algerian U.N. “human rights expert” that analogizes Israel to ISIS, Boko Haram and Al Qaeda. Leila Zerrougui’s rights expertise includes eight years (2000-2008) as legal advisor to Algeria’s President-for-life Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
Moreover, in the coming weeks, the U.N. will issue another report on Israel’s “criminal” response to Hamas genocidaires in Gaza, commissioned by UN Human Rights Council authorities like Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.
EMC, Oracle, Lockheed and others open offices near future home of cybersecurity command
BE’ER SHEVA, Israel—A global tech hub is sprouting in the Israeli desert.
Over the next decade, Israel’s army is moving a large portion of its offices—including those of many of its key technology commands—out of the greater Tel Aviv area and relocating them some 60 miles south, to this city in Israel’s rock-strewn Negev desert. Many of the world’s biggest tech companies are following, eager to stay close to the Israel Defense Forces’ tech-savvy workforce.
EMC Corp. , the U.S.-based data storage and cloud computing giant, set up shop in a new industrial park on the outskirts of town last year. It was one of the first big firms to open offices in Be’er Sheva, anticipating the long-planned army move.
“The main reason EMC wants to be in Be’er Sheva is for access to talent,” said Maya Hofman Levy, the company’s site manager here. “It’s a place the company looked at and thought it would be good to be at [for] the long run, seeing what is being formed here.”
Neighbors now include Deutsche Telekom AG , Lockheed Martin Corp. , Oracle Corp. , and International Business Machines Corp. In March, eBay Inc. ’s PayPal unit bought cybersecurity startup CyActive Ltd., which is based in Be’er Sheva.
Heart attacks are one of the most common and deadly human ailments, with a cardiovascular event striking once every 34 seconds in the United States. Yet few know that following a heart attack, a good portion of the heart muscles remain damaged, leaving patients at risk for future heart failure and other serious cardiovascular diseases. And despite the brevity of most cardiovascular events, human heart cells rarely regenerate (unlike blood, hair and skin cells), which led researchers at the Weizmann Institute in Israel to question whether heart cells can be programmed to reverse damage in the heart.
Prof. Eldad Tzahor and Dr. Gabriele D’Uva succeeded in both understanding why heart cells don’t regenerate in repairing damaged heart muscles in mice. These insights may be key in formulating a treatment for heart conditions related to and following heart attacks, that is if the researchers succeed in regenerating heart cells in human subjects as well.
Clinical trials of a new drug cocktail have been shown to cure 58 percent of terminally-ill patients by shrinking cancerous tumors or eliminating them altogether. The scientific community is hailing this discovery as a major breakthrough in cancer research.
The new cocktail is a form of immunotherapy, a relatively new class of drugs that harness the body’s immune system to extinguish fatal tumors. Israeli researcher Prof. Jacob Schachter, who took part in the development of the drug and in the recent clinical trials, told Israel’s Channel 10 that the newfound drug cocktail could serve as the basis of treatment for many types of cancer, potentially replacing chemotherapy. “It’s an explosion,” he said.
The flagship of the diplomatic war against Israel is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government is less than a month old, but it’s already apparent that it is different from its predecessors. And if it continues on its current diplomatic trajectory, it may do something that its six predecessors failed to accomplish. Netanyahu’s new government may improve Israel’s position internationally.
The stakes are high. Over the years, Israel has largely concentrated its efforts on developing the tools to contend with its military challenges. But as we have seen over the past decade and a half, Israel’s capacity to fight and defeat its enemies is not limited principally by the IDF’s war-fighting capabilities.
This is the first time in my life that I am cheering and hoping for a Pharaoh to win….rsk
Jockey Victor Espinoza prayed for success at the grave of the Grand Lubavitcher Rebbe in Queens, New York on Thursday as he hopes to ride the first Triple Crown-winning horse in 37 years, CBS News reported.
The Mexico native, who will compete in the 2015 Belmont Stakes on Saturday with his racehorse American Pharaoh, recited psalms at the Rebbe’s “Ohel” at the Old Montefiore Cemetery in Cambria Heights. He also wrote out his own prayer note in Spanish that he added to a pile of prayers left at the sacred site, the New York Post reported.
While at the grave site he carried the biographical book Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History, by Joseph Telushkin. Upon exiting the site, he followed instructions to walk backwards out of respect for the deceased.
The athlete was accompanied by Rabbi Efraim Zaltzman, Director of Chabad of Kingsborough in Brooklyn, Kabbalah teacher Rabbi Berel Lerman and Rabbi Motti Seligson, Director of Media Relations at Chabad.org.
“No matter what religion you are, or what temple you go, you always come out with a different energy, which is good,” he told the Post about visiting the grave site, adding that he is not superstitious.
The Islamists are especially interested in converts who have not yet taken on Muslim names and whose official IDs still have their Christian names, so they can purchase weapons without drawing the attention of police.
At least 50,000 Muslim converts are currently living in Spain. Police say that converts are especially susceptible to radicalization because they are facing increasing pressure from Islamists who are calling on them to carry out attacks to “demonstrate their commitment” to their new faith.
Spain has also become a key entry point for human trafficking mafias being used by jihadist veterans seeking to return to Europe after fighting in the Middle East.
“Turkey is the Seven-Eleven of false passports.” — Spanish agent working on a human trafficking case.
Spanish security forces have arrested a total of 568 jihadists over the past ten years in 124 separate operations against Islamic terrorism, Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz revealed at an African security conference in Niger on May 14.
Fernández Díaz said that “constant police and judicial actions” have helped Spanish authorities prevent another large-scale terrorist attack similar to the March 2004 Madrid train bombings, in which nearly 200 people were killed and more than 2,000 were injured.
Irrespective of the anti-Israel BDS movements (boycott, divestment and sanctions), independent of UN condemnations, and in defiance of criticism and pressure by Western policy makers – which should not be ignored nor hyperbolized – burgeoning foreign investments in Israel, and the upgraded scope and diversity of Israel’s global trade balance, constitute a most authentic measure of Israel’s global integration/standing and global confidence in Israel’s long-term viability. Once again, complex reality triumphs over superficial conventional “wisdom.”
Some 280 global high tech giants (mostly from the US) have given kudos to Israel’s economy, in general, and Israel’s brain power, in particular, by establishing research and development (R&D) centers in the Startup Nation. Thus, Intel operates four R&D centers, Microsoft – 2, IBM – 3 R&D centers, etc..
A few scores of these high tech giants are major bio-med companies, such as Johnson & Johnson, Philips, General Electric, Abbott Laboratories, Merck Serono, Foson Pharmaceuticals and Samsung, reflecting global appreciation of Israel’s unique capabilities and contribution in the areas of medical devices, pharmaceuticals and digital and mobile healthcare. In 2014, Israel’s bio-med sector raised an all-time record of $2bn, while the acquisition of Israeli bio-med companies during 2013-14 peaked at $2.9bn. Novartis, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, plans to expand its investments in Israel, following its 2014 investments in three Israeli companies. Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, Medtronic and Volcano (the world’s largest intravascular imaging company) participate in the $70mn Israeli bio-med venture capital fund, Tri Ventures, and Israel’s Shavit Capital raised $75mn from US investors, mostly from the bio-med sector.
According to Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, the international coalition forces against ISIS succeeded in the past nine months, mainly through the United States air-campaign, to kill more than 10,000 ISIS fighters. In addition, according to Blinken, ISIS lost control over 25 percent of the territory it had captured in Iraq. However, Blinken admited that ISIS appeal to foreign fighters has in fact increased: “They are on the march, they are succeeding, they’re moving forward, and we are not, and in fact it’s just the opposite,” he said. He attributed this to ISIS’s successful recruitment of “young…impressionable people around the world.”
Under growing criticism of handling the war against ISIS, the Obama administration decided to send more weapons to the Iraqi army and has already sent the first shipment of the 2,000 AT4 anti-tank missiles to be used against ISIS driven American tanks and armored vehicles that the withdrawing Iraqi army left behind. How long will it take before these missiles will join the more than an estimated $1 billion worth of mostly American made Iraqi weapons that have been already captured by ISIS? And how would anti-tank missiles stop ISIS’s most popular mass-attack weapon, the car-bomb? That, Blinken did not explain. Nor did he elaborate on what the U.S. and its allies are doing to counter ISIS’s most powerful weapon: radicalization and recruitment of foreign fighters from among Sunnis everywhere. While some new ISIS recruits need training, others who travel to fight in Iraq, Syria, and Libya (such as the Afghan Taliban and the Chechen jihadists) are battle-hardened and eager to die for the caliphate.
