Good News, Israel

Compliments of Anglo Saxon Raannana Real Estate

Quote for the Week

    This is the day that the Lord made, Let us rejoice and be glad on it (From the liturgy for the Festival of Sukkot [See the first item below])

· A huge influx of visitors is expected to be with us over the Sukkot Festival and amongst them will be seven thousand members of Evangelical Christian communities. These are the folk who give a new meaning to the term true friendship, who stand by us in fair weather and in foul [and we’re not talking about sunshine and rain] and who serve as our ambassadors worldwide, 24/7. They will be participating in the Christian Feast of Tabernacles sponsored by the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. Rev Hedding, in an interview on IBA English news said that participants come from more than a hundred countries including Brazil, Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Austria, India, Italy, Nigeria, Finland and Norway and will join in the traditional and colorful Jerusalem March on 28 September which according to Rev Hedding enhances the feeling of a true pilgrimage. GN bids them the warmest of welcomes and wishes them an enjoyable and spiritually fulfilling stay.

· While we’d all welcome a silent world from time to time, being destined to live in one constantly is anything but GN and yet there are thousands of Israelis who are deprived of what we all take for granted and that is the ability to communicate with others. So for the past 70 years a unique and elegant Israeli sign language has been developed to aid those who are hearing handicapped and a number of signs have just been added to express Jewish terminology to make Judaism more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing in Israel and the rest of the world. Interesting to note that Israeli TV networks are obliged by law to provide a sign language ‘translation’ for all their news services.

· “We didn’t expect it or even dream of it.” Said Dr. Yitzhak Makovsky of Haifa University’s Leon Charney School of Marine Sciences. “It was like finding Ein Gedi, a beautiful oasis, in the middle of the desert.” So what was it that elicited this somewhat unscientific hyperbole from these staid scientists? The first-of-a-kind voyage to study the Mediterranean Sea floor 30 kms off the coast and discovering vast fields of coral and other marine life at as yet unplumbed depths of 2 kms [1.25 miles]. GN indeed. The Red has lost its coral monopoly to the Med, who would have thought. In the meantime we at GN Israel have a new motto for our amazing scientists; ‘If it’s there we’ll find it and if it isn’t we’ll create it.’ God bless them.

· Ness Technologies of Tel Aviv would like you to know, and so we dutifully pass it on, that it has been ranked as a top IT service provider on the Global Services 100 List for the sixth consecutive year. The company, an Israeli software house and outsourcing services provider, says it was ranked, as a Top Enterprise Applications Vendor, a Top ADM Vendor, and a Top IT Outsourcing Vendor which all sounds pretty good to us. What is left to say but Mazal Tov and well done.

· We’ve said it before and it’s worth repeating: Nanotechnology is in. We’ll just remind you; a nanometer is one billionth of a meter – where do they get these figures from?!- And now researchers have created a Jewish nanoparticle. Well, not quite but it’s in the shape of a Star of David which is as close as we’re going to get. These clever boffins then coated an electron with the particles and….we’ll take their word for the rest… it will improve diagnostics for diabetes and will possibly change light to chemical energy and last but best of all they might be able to extract the hydrogen from water. Whatever next? Just fill the tank with water and off you go with a pollutionless fuel?

· ‘In 2020 virtual and augmented realities will blend into the physical world, making our global village more connected and unified so people and businesses will be able to collaborate from great distances overcoming cultural and geographical barriers, thus entering the greatest golden age of all times.’ That vision won top prize in the prestigious Your Business Tomorrow competition where participants attempt to predict the next big idea that will change the world in the coming decade. And the winner, who beat hundreds of competitors from all over the world, is an Israeli consultant to cellular companies, Ofir Leitner. The UK organizers were impressed by the number of Israelis who submitted predictions and participated in the competition. Obviously our confidence in the future is still pretty high.

· At about this time of the year Israel virtually shuts down so we thought that business GN would be a little hard to come by. We were wrong and here’s a rapid run-down of recent reports all of them from the past week:

    ü Wireless backhaul equipment maker Ceragon Networks Ltd. it has acquired Elxys Innovations, of Athens, Greece adding a group of proficient engineers to its present highly professional team.

    ü The TASE closed for the holiday on Tuesday with the TA25 index just under 1% off its previous record high.

    ü Lextran Ltd. will install its innovative technology at a power station in the Beijing region and will complete preparatory works for cleaner operations of the power station in the coming months.

    ü The Bank of Israel’s state of the economy index rose 0.2% in August and together with changes in recent months, the index figure points to continued growth in the economy. Well we said so didn’t we?

    ü Mobilicity, a new provider of mobile pay-in-advance services in Canada, has chosen Amdocs’ managed services model to establish its entire management and business support systems operations.

    ü Israel ran a surplus of $4 billion in its balance of payments for the first half of 2010, according to figures from the CBS. We made $4bn more than we spent. Now that’s GN.

    ü Researchers from IBM’s Haifa lab will set up an R&D Center with local scientists in Lithuania. Projects will aim at improving diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease, blood disorders and others.

    ü A group of French businessmen bought a building in Tel Aviv for NIS20m and a French property developer bought 3 flats for NIS4.5m. Time to buy folks. 50 million Frenchmen, not quite, can’t be wrong.

    ü The world’s first Israeli cultural institute has opened in Budapest. The aim of the institute is to show the variety of Israel’s “cultural mosaic.” There are 100,000 Jews living in Hungary, most of them in Budapest.

    ü And the best news of all? Unemployment dropped again in August, so we have a definite downward trend and we at GN just couldn’t be happier.

And so it goes holiday or not.

    · You may or may not of heard of MATAT but it’s a voluntary organization that sends Israeli professionals to remote parts of the world on aid missions and that is how Dr Amnon Amit, a prominent oncologist, found himself in Xhingua in NE China, which is as far-flung as you’re likely to get and where the locals had never heard of Jews let alone Israel. Not only did the good doctor remove cancerous ovaries and uteruses, he also trained the local surgical staff in laparoscopic [‘keyhole’] surgical techniques. He saved eighteen lives in the short time that he was there and he also achieved a diplomatic coup for Israel.
September 28, 2010 | Comments »

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