Today: September 6, 2010

 

Good News Israel 20/11/09

Posted: Fri 20th November 2009 6.55 PM  | Author: GoodNews Israel

20/11/09

Quote for the Week
"If you’re looking for friends when you need them…it’s too late." –

(Mark Twain - American author) Obviously Israel has found there’s on time. See below

Just because we’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get us. But are they? We at GN suppose that if you read the newspapers, watch TV, listen to the radio you’ll probably get the impression that the whole world is working full-time on ways to do us irreparable bodily harm and all this without so much as taking a half an hour break for lunch. So we thought that we’d spend some time on brightening up the rather dismal picture that the world’s media are having fun painting:

• A delegation of government and corporate representatives from Wisconsin is in Israel, led by Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle. The trade delegation is focusing on water and life sciences technology. In addition to Governor Doyle and State Secretary of Commerce Richard J. Leinenkugel, there were businessmen galore.

• Scientists from several European countries including Ireland, Italy, Iceland and Denmark have cooperated with Israel in developing a prosthetic hand which functions like a real one: Amputees can write with it, type on a keyboard, play piano and perform other fine movements. Another amazing advantage is that the prosthesis has sensors which enable real feeling in its fingertips. It’s called the SmartHand  and you can understand why.

• October saw an all-time record high in incoming tourism, with some 330,000 tourists visiting Israel  during that month alone, and that’s an increase of 9% from October 2008. From the beginning of the year 2.3 million tourists visited Israel and they came from all over the world, so there we are. 

• More than eighty international experts from sixteen countries, including Jordan and Egypt were here for a conference devoted to the preservation of Archaeological sites threatened by natural disasters like earthquakes and flooding and vandalism which is very much a man made catastrophe. The meeting of like minds took place in Acre.

• Armed forces teams from Jordan, Israel and Turkey conducted combined exercises in land, sea and air rescue simulations throughout the week, most successfully from all reports. 

• The Navy will dispatch a missile ship in the coming months to participate in a NATO mission to patrol the Mediterranean Sea and prevent weapons smuggling, Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and NATO Military Commander Admiral Giampaolo Di Paoloa decided Wednesday night.

• Thirty physicians and medical personnel were at the Rambam Hospital in Haifa for a day long seminar on the treatment of cancer in children. This is part of ongoing in – service training provided by the Israeli staff for their Palestinian colleagues. Local hospitals are also treating a number of patients including 50 children from the Territories, on an ongoing basis where adequate treatment is not available in Palestinian Hospitals.

• The IDF and the US Armed Forces have just completed Operation Cobra, highly successful war games conducted here in Israel and concentrating on defensive warfare. One of the highlights of the maneuvers was the warm cooperation between the personnel from senior officers down through the ranks.

• A few academics from Norway’s second largest university tried to mount a boycott of Israeli institutes of higher learning [Haven’t these folk got anything better to do with their time?] but the University Council voted it down – unanimously.  

So there we have it a few examples from a couple of weeks of Israel and our friends around the world.

• Now here’s some really GN, the Israeli death rate from heart disease has dropped by 50 percent in the last nine years, according to Prof. Chaim Lotan, chief of cardiology at Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem 

• Israel ranks fourth in the world in scientific activity, according to data compiled for by the Council of Higher Education. The data puts Israel ahead of Finland the Netherlands and Canada. The United States placed 12th, and Germany, 15th in terms of the number of scientific publications per million citizens. Israel's role in global scientific activity is almost 10 times larger than its percentage of the world's population. Even more significant is the number of times Israel’s articles were cited by other scientists.

 

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