Archive | 2012 | March | 02
New blood test that detects cancer developed in Israel
In first trial, researchers able to detect cancer in some 90% of patients. Professor: We’re optimistic
Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center and Ben Gurion University are developing a unique method to detect various types of cancer through a simple blood test.
Researchers say that in a first trial conducted recently, they succeeded in detecting cancer in almost 90% of cancer patients tested.
“This is still a research in the early stages of clinical trials,” clarifies Prof. Joseph Kapelushnik, head of the Pediatric Hemato-Oncology department at the hospital.
“But the purpose is to develop an efficient, cheap and simple method to detect as many types of cancers as possible.”
Doctors say it is imperative to increase early detection of cancer in patients, before it gets to advanced stages that must be treated with a long and difficult treatment.
Scientists around the world are working to find new methods to detect cancer; artificial noses that can identify a certain substance in cancer; techniques for discovering cancer antibodies; mammography to detect breast cancer; colonoscopy and fecal occult blood testing to detect colorectal cancer, for example.
Prof. Kapelushnik and his research partners have developed a method that detects cancer with blood tests, using infrared light beams. The researchers take a small amount of blood and insert it into a device they developed. Using this device, a spectrum of infrared light is beamed through the blood, enabling the researchers to estimate whether the patient has cancer or not.
At this stage, the researchers are concentrating their efforts on the detection of common cancer types, such as lung cancer and ovarial cancer. Nevertheless, they also succeeded in detecting other cancers.
In the latest clinical trial, about 200 patients with various types of cancer were examined along with a control group.
“We succeeded to tell them apart with 90% accuracy,” says Prof. Kapelushnik. “This is still a small number patients and we need thousands of people before we can say the new method actually works. In the meantime, though, we are optimistic about the results.”
Source: ShalomLife.com
2 Israeli artists on display at Toronto’s ‘The Artist Project’
What is the ‘Artist Project’ ?
The Artist Project celebrates its 5th year with another exciting show featuring original works from over 200 carefully juried, independent contemporary artists. Artists from a variety of geographic and creative backgrounds will converge and connect with patrons looking to get a glimpse of tomorrow’s Art Stars. From seasoned collectors and first time art buyers, to gallerists and interior designers, visitors will find this art fair a rare opportunity to meet and purchase work directly from Canadian and International artists.
Discover all mediums, including installations and video art. Experience special features, Art Chats and docent led tours. Now in its fifth year, The Artist Project returns to the Queen Elizabeth Building, Exhibition Place in Toronto.
The Israeli Artists
NISSIM BEN ADERET
Nissim is an expressive artist who works using the action painting method: a painting that is created when rationality cannot contain emotion. According to this method, the attempt is to create an image that is free from the constraints of logic. Nissim’s modus operandi is a work of art in itself, because no work is identical to another and each work is made by drawing a single line that creates the world to which Nissim is drawn during his working moments. The works are innovative in the contemporary art scene, and have no counterpart in local or international art. Nissim’s works have garnered a growing response and interest amongst Israeli art collectors and art lovers, including galleries and local media, and have been sold at personal sales in studio.
Check out his website: NissimBenaderet.com
YAEL ERLICHMAN
Born in 1954 in Kibutz Givat Brener in Israel, Yael Erlichman finds great aesthetic value in the most common human form. Making use of extraordinary technical skills and an eye for vivid and expressive details, she imbues her inanimate bronze figures with deep emotion, humor and energy which serve as a tribute to human nature and human optimism. During 2011 two major works were ordered and created by Yael: one – “The Root” – by The Tel-Aviv University, The Root Research Laboratory in memory of Prof. Waisel – founder of the Laboratory; the second work – “Born on the road” (2.70 meters high) – by at the Beresheet Mizpe Ramon Boutique Hotel, overlooking the Mizpe Crater. Yael’s sculptures are a tribute to the joy of creation.
Check out her website: ErlichmanYael.com
Israeli Singer David D’Or to perform at London Olympics event
D’Or is to sing at ceremony held to commemorate 40th anniversary to Munich massacre
Singer David D’Or is set to perform at a national ceremony at the London Olympics this summer, Ynet has learned. D’Or will sing before several world leaders, as well as former UK premiers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.
President Shimon Peres is also expected to attend the event, held to mark the 40th anniversary of the Munich Olympics massacre. The ceremony is to be held on August 6, four days before the closing of the summer Olympics.
“It’s a very exciting and significant event, especially in light of Israel’s image in the world,” D’Or said upon learning he was selected to perform at the ceremony. “I’ll do my best to represent my beloved country well.”
D’Or’s song selection is yet to be finalized.
Source: Ynetnews.com
PICTURES: Heavy snow fall in Jerusalem for the first time in four years
3 centimeters of snow fell, with snowfall reported in Ramot, Givat Ze’ev and Har Gilo; Egged bus company halts all lines to the capital.
Heavy snow fell in the Jerusalem area on Friday, and for the first time in four years, parts of Jerusalem were white with snow.
Snow fell in Ramot, Givat Ze’ev and Har Gilo, and three centimeters of snow fall were reported.
The Jerusalem municipality, which had prepared for the weather conditions in recent days, was due to clear snow from the streets of Jerusalem on Friday.
Snow also fell in the Golan Heights in the early hours of Friday morning, and classes were canceled in the Golan and in the area around Safad because of the weather. Safad area residents were also asked not to drive by the municipality, and there was no public transport in the area.
Cold and stormy weather swept through Israel since Tuesday, and Friday was expected to be the coldest day of the year.
On Friday, a seven-year-old girl was seriously injured after being swept away by a stream that flooded in Modi’in Ilit, and a 96-year old woman from Sderot died as the ambulance that was taking her to hospital in Ashkelon slipped on an icy road.
Snow fell on Mount Hermon and at high elevations in the Golan Heights and the Galilee on Wednesday, as well as in the central mountains. In some locations, the winds exceeded 100 kilometers per hour.
A 70-year-old man in Netanya was lightly injured on Wednesday when he was struck in the head by a glass door that was blown off its hinges. Elsewhere in the city, on Yehuda Halevi Street, a tree fell on a car, but no injuries were caused.
On Tel Aviv’s King George Street, traffic was disrupted when a large tree was uprooted by strong winds, tearing down power lines, ripping a bench out of the ground and blocking the street. Traffic lights and signs were blown down around the city. In south Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Park, the city erected a new tent to provide shelter for the homeless.
Aviation traffic was also disrupted yesterday. A Dutch KLM jet scheduled to land at Ben-Gurion International Airport was forced to land in Cyprus instead. The Israel Airports Authority went on a state of alert for other possible disruptions in airplane traffic.
Both Safed and Jerusalem received some 40 millimeters of rain, according to the Meteo-Tech meteorology firm, while Netanya had 30 millimeters of rain. The Mediterranean was particularly rough, with waves reaching up to nine meters.
The level of Lake Kinneret rose three centimeters over the past two days. Air pollution levels in the south were higher than average.
Source: Haaretz.com
VIDEO: Gay characters in Israeli Films + Trailers
Israeli film has given more prominence to gay characters in recent years, and allowed for a more diverse, and less stereotypical portrayal of them, concludes a new scholarly survey of the topic.
Those who follow Israeli cinema have probably realized in recent years that local filmmakers, including quite a few who are heterosexual, are increasingly choosing to include gay characters in their movies – not rarely in principal roles.
Jonathan Sagall’s “Lipstikka,” Doron Eran’s “Melting Away,” Veronica Kedar’s “Joe + Belle,” Haim Tabakman’s “Eyes Wide Open,” Dan Wolman’s “Tied Hands” and Yair Hochner’s “Antarctica,” as well as Avi Nesher’s “The Secrets,” Eytan Fox’s “The Bubble,” and Yuval Shafferman’s “Things Behind the Sun” – all these films made in the past six years are joined by a respectable harvest of documentaries, shorts, student films and of course television series starring gay characters.
This is precisely the subject of Nir Cohen’s recently published book “Soldiers, Rebels and Drifters: Gay Representation in Israeli Cinema.” While this English-language book (published by Wayne State University Press ) largely deals with male homosexual characters and leaves the lesbians to other scholars, it offers several interesting observations concerning the history of homosexual representation in our local cinema, and the trends that have been prominent in it.
During the first decades of Israeli cinema, gay characters had no place whatsoever on the screen. Pride was the domain of the Zionist characters – warrior types, patriotic and straight. The infiltration of gay characters into local films began as a slow trickle. Cohen’s starting point for his study is the cinema of the 1970s, when the so-called bourekas films reigned. The introduction to his book mentions, for example, “The Bull Buster” (1973 ), directed by George Obadiah, and “Beautiful Troubles” (1976 ), directed by Assi Dayan – two of the first movies to feature gay characters.
Cohen emphasizes that “The Bull Buster” portrayed homosexuality stereotypically through minor characters, in a handful of scenes; in Dayan’s film the subject crops up in the form of an Italian hairdresser who speaks no Hebrew. In both cases these characters were secondary, Cohen notes, and as in other films from the same period, the homosexual community was depicted in a grotesque, marginalized and frivolous manner.
Avi Nesher’s film “The Troupe,” which was a critical and box-office success here in 1978, also gave us a problematic representation of gays. In one scene, Benny, the character played by Menahem Einy, comes out to his friends during a game of Truth or Dare, but Cohen argues that Benny’s character actually undercuts the claim that this was a liberal film for its time: Not only is the gay soldier the least developed character in the movie, but also in contrast to his fellow members in the army entertainment troupe, whom we see involved in all sorts of complex heterosexual relationships – we hardly know anything about Benny’s personal life.
Only in 1983, seven years after Amos Guttman’s short film “Drifting” (1976 ) was banned for broadcast on local television, did his first feature-length film of the same name appear. The feature-length “Drifting” (“Nagu’a” in Hebrew ), about a young gay man who works in his grandmother’s grocery store and dreams of making movies, became an important landmark in the history of local gay culture and of Israeli cinema in general.
Guttman, the first Israeli filmmaker to treat the gay subject matter seriously, is one of the two main directors that Cohen’s book discusses, the other being Eytan Fox; indeed, up until a few years ago, pride of place in this realm belonged to these two filmmakers. Like Guttman, Fox dared to place the gay experience at the center of his work, and to rebel against the traditional approach that preferred to ignore the existence of gays in Israeli society or to present them in a stereotypical and warped fashion.
Cohen devotes an entire chapter to each man. “I call them ‘the founding fathers of gay and lesbian cinema,’” he says in a telephone interview from London, where he teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies. “I find it quite interesting that Guttman and Fox are the ones who serve to anchor the book and are given this title, because really the filmmaking of each is very different from that of the other, and likewise the political statement that each makes, as I perceive it.”
Cohen, 35, left Israel for London 11 years ago. His book is an expansion of the doctoral dissertation he wrote at University College London. “My aspiration was to present a cultural history survey of the evolution of gay and lesbian cinema in Israel since the late ’70s, and to look at the connection formed between it and the gay community or movement in Israel,” he says.
“I grew up in the ’80s and personally experienced this movement’s changing status in Israel, the gay culture’s breakthrough, in film and generally, and the place that gays began occupying in the cultural-social sphere,” Cohen adds. “My study is based on cinematic representations of those same social-cultural changes.”
Trailers of some Israeli LGBTQ oriented films
7 Foot Star of David @ Mardi Gras in Sydney
2012 will be the twelfth time that Dayenu has marched in Sydney’s Mardi Gras Parade and this will be our largest float yet. As well as our 3 ton truck bedecked with a 2.2m high three-dimensional Magen David, we will have over 100 marchers participating. As Purim falls within four days of the Parade this year, we’ve chosen this as the theme for our float. Our marchers have been asked to dress up in costume as kings and queens and in the tradition of both Mardi Gras and Purim, many will be cross-dressing. Our float is listed in the Parade guide as “Party ’til you can’t tell king from queen”, a paraphrase of the tradition of drinking “until you can’t tell Haman from Mordechai”.
Source: Jwire.com.au