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Reporting on the Middle East, Science, and Education for July 30, 2007 - ט"ו אב תשס"ז
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By Leora Eren Frucht. Israel 21C, July 29, 2007
Mohammed Faheli is a man of dualities, a pragmatist who dares to dream. But a man who uses his street smarts to turn those dreams into well-funded programs that are changing the face of the Israeli city of Acre and making “coexistence” in this mixed Jewish-Arab town more than a slogan.
Faheli is the founder and director of the Sir Charles Clore Jewish-Arab Community Center in Acre, a refurbished bomb shelter that has become a cultural and educational jewel in this city of 58,000.
On any given day you’ll find Arab and Jewish teenagers playing ping pong in the youth club; new immigrants from the Caucasus - whose parents speak no Hebrew and have little money - getting private violin lessons; Arab girls who dropped out of school learning to become hairdressers; and a boisterous group of children producing a play based on the summer they spent huddled together in this bomb shelter, Arab and Jew, dodging katyusha rockets from Lebanon. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East Report, News Articles, Recent Posts on July 30, 2007 - ט"ו אב תשס"ז at 3:07 pm
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Scholar is pioneer in advancing Jewish-Christian dialogue
Press Release from:
Jim Fletcher, Hebraic Heritage Press jimfletcher@hebraiccenter.org
ATLANTA, GA, July 26, 2007 — An experienced and sometimes controversial Christian scholar says that if the current sea of political, religious, and social change is not navigated properly, the world community is headed for dangerous, even calamitous tempest.
Isaac Rottenberg’s new book, Judaism, Christianity, Paganism: A Judeo-Christian Worldview and its Cultural Implications (Hebraic Heritage Press), explores the challenges that are being mounted against today’s societies by rising tides of neopaganism and New Age philosophy. It also offers suggestions as to how Christians and Jews can explore their commonalities and differences and find ways in which they can stand together to counter these challenges to the very fabric of Western society.
As moral relativism becomes more prevalent — especially among intellectual elites and media persons — Rottenberg says that “worldview matters, culture matters, and the revelation of the living God of the Bible matters most of all.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Christianity, Judaism, Monotheistic Religions, Recent Posts on July 27, 2007 - י"ב אב תשס"ז at 9:20 am
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New Model for Autism Suggests Women Carry the Disorder and Explains Age as a Risk Factor
Press Release, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, July 23, 2007
A new model for understanding how autism is acquired has been developed by a team of researchers led by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Autism is a developmental disorder, characterized by language impairments, social deficits, and repetitive behaviors. The researchers analyzed data on autism incidence and found a previously unrecognized pattern. The pattern can be explained by assuming that spontaneous germ-line mutation is a significant cause of the disorder. Parents, especially women, who acquire the mutation – but do not exhibit severe symptoms of the disorder – have a 50% chance of passing the mutation on to their children. Sons often show the most severe symptoms. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Health Sciences, Mental Health, Recent Posts, Special Education on July 26, 2007 - י"א אב תשס"ז at 3:24 pm
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Source:
Inderscience Publishers
Date:
July 25, 2007
Keywords:
Energy and the Environment, Renewable Energy, Environmental Science, Wind Energy, Nuclear Energy, Energy Technology
Science Daily — Renewable does not mean green. That is the claim of Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller University in New York. Writing in Inderscience’s International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology, Ausubel explains that building enough wind farms, damming enough rivers, and growing enough biomass to meet global energy demands will wreck the environment.
Ausubel has analyzed the amount of energy that each so-called renewable source can produce in terms of Watts of power output per square meter of land disturbed. He also compares the destruction of nature by renewables with the demand for space of nuclear power. “Nuclear energy is green,” he claims, “Considered in Watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Alternative Energy, Nuclear Energy, Recent Posts on July 25, 2007 - י' אב תשס"ז at 9:22 am
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By Israel Zwick. CN Publications, Tisha B’Av 5767
See Also: JTA, Laments for Israel
Today, Jews throughout the world are commemorating Tisha B’Av with fasting and prayer. On that day in 70 C.E., the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and exiled the Jews from the city. Jews had to wait until 1949 to regain control of part of Jerusalem. Then in 1967, the Israeli Defense Forces captured the remaining portion of Jerusalem containing the Temple Mount with the historic and religious sites of the Old City. Yet 40 years later, the “international community” still refuses to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel, or even belonging to the State of Israel. Most of the word still designates the Old City as “occupied Palestinian territory,” though it never belonged to the Palestinian Arabs. The Muslim Waqf that was given control of the Temple Mount is systematically attempting to destroy any evidence of a Jewish presence in Jerusalem by destroying valuable artifacts on the Temple Mount and building more mosques.
While the Waqf poses a threat to Jewish history and religion, other Arabs are posing a more existential threat to the Jewish people. Hamas to the west, Hizbullah to the north, and Iran to the east, have all vowed to destroy Israel and are developing their military capabilities to do so. While rockets are launched daily at the civilian population of Sderot, Jews are told that they should “show restraint” against the Hamas terrorists and continue to provide them with basic “humanitarian” services. In contrast, the peaceful Jewish communities of Judea are vilified as “occupiers of Palestinian territory” and told that their communities should be dismantled to make way for an independent sovereign Palestinian state. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Judaism, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts, Zwick's Picks on July 23, 2007 - ח' אב תשס"ז at 8:18 pm
by Hana Levi Julian, Israel National News, July 23, 2007
(IsraelNN.com) “My children have become forlorn, because the enemy has prevailed.” Lamentations 1:16
Prayers marking the fast day of the Ninth of Av, known as Tisha B’av, are being held in a tent erected opposite the Knesset in Jerusalem.
Farmers who once worked the fields in the destroyed region of Gaza known as Gush Katif are sitting in their tent to protest the government’s failure to compensate them for their lost businesses.The Book of Lamentations as well as other holy texts will be read in the tent, as elsewhere in the Jewish world, to mark the destruction of the First and Second Holy Temples in Jerusalem, as well as a number of other tragedies in Jewish history.
The fast lasts from Monday, 18 minutes before sundown, until approximately one hour after sundown Tuesday night, and special prayers are said, mourning the destruction and looking ahead to the time when the Temple will once again be rebuilt. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East Report, News Articles, Recent Posts on July 23, 2007 - ח' אב תשס"ז at 10:37 am
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By David Frankfurter, July 23, 2007
Difficulties faced by Palestinian Arabs have been a focus of world attention for decades. But oppression of Palestinians by fellow Arabs barely rates a mention.
Often subject to political racism, Palestinian Arabs have been forced into refugee camp ghettos in many Arab states. Identical to the racist laws against Jews in those places, they are also unable to hold citizenship, own land, get jobs or otherwise integrate into their host states. And despite Palestinian Authority or Hamas control of Gaza, there have been no steps toward dismantling the camps there. This is a situation condoned and maintained by the UN and its institutions. If the Arab states were truly interested in helping the Palestinians, they would give them full social and economic rights.
The world appears oblivious to this apartheid policy; both East and West politically and financially encourage it. Taxpayers support it with hundreds of millions channeled annually through UNRWA to pay for basic education, housing and medical services. All of which could probably be paid for by the welfare recipients themselves, if they were only allowed to work freely and integrate into the society around. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on July 23, 2007 - ח' אב תשס"ז at 10:06 am
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See also: Cry Out For Answers
(MENAFN) Houston-based Halliburton Co., the world’s second largest oilfield contractor, said that its second-quarter net income has more than doubled on a gain from selling its government services, engineering and construction subsidiary, KBR Inc., Bloomberg reported.
The company’s profits climbed to $1.5 billion from $591 million a year earlier, the Houston-based company said in a statement, while revenues rose to $3.7 billion.
Halliburton, a supplier of equipment and services to oil and natural-gas producers, also benefited from an increase in the number of drilling rigs active in the quarter. The pace of drilling in the second quarter in the U.S., Halliburton’s biggest market, was 7.5 percent higher than a year ago on average.
Source: http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story_s.asp?StoryId=1093160625#top
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Alternative Energy, Business and Commerce, Middle East Report, Recent Posts on July 23, 2007 - ח' אב תשס"ז at 8:00 am
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By Walaa Hawari, Arab News, July 22, 2007
RIYADH, 22 July 2007 — The problem of domestic workers fleeing their sponsors is a two-way street: On one side is the worker who all-too-often is abused or the victim of other types of exploitation. But there’s the other side, too: The people who hire these workers, paying thousands of riyals, who then disappear in a matter of months.
Hala, a 35-year-old schoolteacher who didn’t want to use her family name, describes a situation that is frequently faced by Saudi families. She and her husband acquired a driver through legal channels. Later they discovered he was harboring an illegal worker in his quarters, a women he claimed was his wife. They told him he couldn’t keep an illegal resident in his quarters. He disappeared shortly afterward.
“We felt we had to inform the authorities, but now we have to wait for three months to recruit another driver,” she said. “Meanwhile we have been interviewing drivers locally as a temporary solution, and when we ask about their current sponsor we discover that they’re runaway workers themselves.”
“Who helps the Saudi employer who gets stranded between the hammer of the runaway employees and the anvil of the large amounts of money paid to recruit these workers?” she asks. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East Report, News Articles, Recent Posts on July 22, 2007 - ז' אב תשס"ז at 6:54 pm
By Ozzie Nogg, United Jewish Communities
The eve of the 9th of Av — Tisha B’Av — is the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. The day the rabbis called “a day set for misfortune.” The Midrash says that God, from the beginning, had marked Tisha B’Av as a day of grief because of the Spies-in-the-Desert episode.
You remember.
We’re in the the wilderness. Moses sends spies to Canaan. They return on the 9th of Av and the majority reports that the land cannot be conquered because the people who live there are GIANTS!
So the Israelites rebel and cry, “Better we should have stayed in Egypt!”
This makes God really mad. “You weep now without cause,” He says. “But surely you will have good reason to weep on this day.”
And then — because of their cowardice, ingratitude and lack of trust — God condemns the people to die in the desert without seeing the Promised Land and ordains the destruction of the Temple in some future year on Tisha B’Av. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Judaism, Monotheistic Religions, Recent Posts on July 22, 2007 - ז' אב תשס"ז at 6:40 pm
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