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 Good news for anyone in the UK who wants to make a smooth transition to living in Israel . Anglo-Saxon Ra’anana will be in London from 8th – 12th November, to meet with Brits who want to join the wonderful, warm & welcoming Ra’anana community. Joe Cohen and his team are available for private meetings or you can visit them at the ZF Israel Expo in the property section on Sunday.
To find out more or arrange a meeting, call Joe on 0792 5545511 or email If you have British friends who might be interested in moving to Israel , tell them the good news! |
| Quote for the Week
" .....any modern man who has not learned to think as though he were a Jew can hardly be said to have learned to think at all"
William Rees Mogg (Author, Essayist and sometime Editor of The London Times. We don’t quite know what Rees Mogg had in mind but if he was thinking in terms of the sort of creative thinking that leads to achievement, well, we would have to agree.) |
- Let’s start with two items of GN from the Economy for the week:
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 The Treasury continues to enjoy its tax revenue bonanza initiated by ex Finance Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, probably the best we’ve ever had. Without raising taxes, the authorities collected 8% more in Q3 than they did in the same time last year, to reach a total of NIS48.9bn ($12.35bn) for the Quarter. - The TASE continues its northward trajectory with the TA25 rising by 2.6% for the week, bringing it way above the 1200 ‘psychological barrier’ that we spoke of last week.
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 Our tennis players are in the news again, one of them anyway. Dudi Sela, powered his way to a victory in the Seoul tournament, beating Konstantinos Ekonomides-could he be Greek?- in straight sets 6-4; 6-4. Besides pocketing $18 000, Israel’s #1 racquet jumped twenty places to no70 in the ATP rankings, he also had the distinction of beating the world’s #9, in Israel’s successful Davis Cup outing against Chile. -
- Another Israeli winner this week was Karen Sebag who beat out 800 other entrants to take the Kleinfeld Bridal Design Award in a competition held in New York . The judges commented on the originality and daring of her entry and designated her as a designer to be watched in the highly competitive shmatte business.
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 Yet another world beater from this tiny country was author, Amos Oz. No stranger to the world of prestigious prizes, he was a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature last year; he was winner of the Israel Prize for Literature in 1998 and the Ovidius Prize by the Romanian Writers Union in 2004. In 2005 he won the Goethe Prize that counts Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann among its illustrious awardees. And now to top it all he is the recipient, this week, of Spain’s Prince Asturias Award that numbers such literary glitterati as G?nter Grass, Arthur Miller and Doris Lessing, to name but a few among its honorees. On presenting the prize, Prince Felipe remarked, “You open his books and you are trapped.” Prof Oz’s works are translated into thirty languages and he is now $71 000 richer. - Yet another recipient of no less than two international honors on consecutive days last week was Yad VaShem, the Holocaust center in Jerusalem dedicated to Holocaust education, commemoration, research and remembrance. On Thursday the Chairman of the organization, Avner Shalev, received the Legion d’Honneur from President Sarkozy of France and the next day the Center’s representative was on stage alongside Amos Oz, Al Gore and others to receive the Prince Asturias Award having been proposed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and having been chosen as winner from among 47 contestants representing 28 countries.
- While on the subject of prizes and awards, Israeli film “The Band’s Visit” had a singular honor bestowed upon it when it received the Skira Grand Prix for the best film at The Tokyo International Film Festival. In addition to the prestige that comes with the award there was a cash prize of $50 000.
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 Catching terrorists "red-handed is the order of the day and a Hebrew University forensic chemist has developed a chemical spray able to detect recent contact with urea nitrate, urea nitrate? Sounds odd but it's actually an easy-to-obtain, powerful explosive frequently used by terrorists in Israel . A quick swab sample taken from objects or a suspect's hands will detect even the minutest quantity of the substance. It's cheap and it's effective and it's another weapon in the free world's armory against the forces of evil. - Palram, is an Israeli producer of thermoplastics that has just won a contract with United States company Trex Co to provide PVC materials to the US market. The agreement, worth millions of dollars is the company's first essay into the huge markets in Canada , the US and Mexico . Palram's world wide sales last year totaled $218 million.
- The Hiriya garbage dump is a landmark on the road south from Tel Aviv. But as one would expect from a hill of refuse it’s also a bit of an eyesore. All that is about to change with the establishment of the Ariel Sharon Park. The dump will form only ten percent of the entire area which will be two and a half times the size of New York ’s Central Park . Now that’s something to look forward to.
- Every now and again there is a welcome initiative designed to bring about a positive change in our preservation of the environment. Called the Ecological Footprint Survey and based on the principles of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle it encourages groups of children in the 5th and 6th grades of schools in New York and Jerusalem to become aware of the effect that they have on the environment as consumers, and has devised school projects that teach the kids how to limit the negative aspects of that effect.
- While the talk now is of peace conferences, and we at GN hope that they will bring, well, GN to the region, there have been a number of examples of cooperation between ordinary Palestinians and Israelis that might augur well for the future. Here are two of them:
- A team of doctors from Israel and the Palestinian territories performed open heart surgery on 2½ year-old Malik, a little girl from the West Bank village of Bidya . The doctors from the region were joined by colleagues from America , China and Moldova . A couple of days later the same team operated on a 1½ year-old boy, also from the West Bank . A truly International effort to save two children.
- Go-karts have brought the Palestinian champion of the sport, and the top Israeli single-seater racer together with the intention of entering the 2008 British Formula Vee Championship. Win or lose it will be a victory for cooperation.
- Researchers at Hadassah Medical School made a startling discovery; bacteria, yes, those microscopic unicellular little nasties that give us so much trouble, actually talk to one another,and these scientists have been able to decode the communication signals. The discovery may well lead to a new class of antibiotics that will trigger bacterial cell death. Does this mean that they will talk each other into dying, we ask? Certainly sounds like it.
- Something tasty to end with; “They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil ” or so the song goes. We’ve also got a lot of coffee shops in Israel and the coffee that they serve is anything but awful. In fact it’s so good that local chain, Aroma Espresso Bar that has 79 cafes across Israel , one in New York and the other in Toronto has been so successful that they are launching a chain of coffee shops in Europe . To be called Marrone Rosso, the five outlets will be operated by local franchisees.
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While Good News strives to report the news accurately and faithfully,we cannot accept responsibility for errors in, misinterpretations of, or omissions from the material printed in The Good News Digest above, nor are we responsible for the application of the information contained herein to your personal or business situation. |
