Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/298092987?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Thursday, April 11, 2013
Massive meth bust in Australia worth $200M
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Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Insight: Insurers see promise in pay-for-performance health plans
By Caroline Humer
(Reuters) - Insurers and doctors are testing a way to pay for healthcare that has been more common in the corporate suite than the emergency room - paying for better performance, betting it is the key to controlling runaway costs.
Both private insurance plans and Medicare plans in hundreds of locations around the country are using incentives to try to cut healthcare spending and still keep Americans healthy.
After a few years of pilot programs and studies, companies as large as Intel Corp. are offering these plans to employees this year. They believe the programs' tenets - eliminating unneeded tests and following best practices for prescriptions and care - will work.
UnitedHealth Group Inc, Humana Group, Cigna Corp. and others are compensating medical providers if they meet targets in areas such as cancer screening or managing diabetics' cholesterol levels. While robust data is still scant, a study published last year in the Journal of American Medical Association showed these plans - called Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) - can produce savings of 5 percent to 10 percent, which are typically shared between the provider and insurer.
Much of the Affordable Care Act kicks in next year, which has increased the pressure on insurers and providers to provide more services while cutting healthcare costs, which are now 17 percent of the U.S. economy, up from 13 percent in 2000.
Insurers say they will double the number of members in plans based on incentives for care in the next few years.
PRIVATE AND GOVERNMENT PLANS
Large employers, which provide about half of Americans with healthcare plans, are adding these accountable care organizations and other coordinated care initiatives on top of other benefits that focus on prevention. For instance, they are charging smokers more and monitoring employees' health.
About 13 percent of them will have ACOs or similar quality-based contracts with providers by the end of 2014, and 29 percent expect to in the next five years, according to a recent Towers Watson/National Business Group On Health survey.
The U.S. government has several standardized models for ACOs for Medicare, which provides benefits for 50 million Americans, and has so far approved more than 250 ACOs.
In addition to trying to lower costs for individual and small group customers, insurers are creating the plans to hold onto large company business. Healthcare spending cuts and the Affordable Care Act have hit insurers with new taxes and mandatory services while also limiting profits.
"For many of them, that's how they see themselves surviving this transition. They'll have a major role in helping systems improve their care as one of their business lines in addition to insurance, or just paying claims," said Dr. Elliott Fisher, a health policy expert at Dartmouth University's medical school who worked on the study and with the Brookings Institute designed several ACO pilot programs in the private sector.
The plans are just starting, so it is not clear whether all the different designs set up by companies, hospitals and private insurers will produce the savings seen in the more regimented JAMA study, which was based on preset parameters.
"Everyone is rushing to change to a different model, but the results aren't in yet. So when you say what's the success of ACOs to date, the real honest answer is premature," said Dr. Phil Polakoff, a senior managing director in FTI Consulting's corporate finance group.
"TRENDING IN RIGHT DIRECTION"
One of the new programs is in Kentucky. Norton Healthcare, the state's largest hospital system, and Humana Inc., also based there, started an ACO several years ago for their employees as a pilot that it decided to renew this year. Norton aimed to cut what it spent sending its employees to other caregivers.
While neither company provided data on savings to them, saying it was too early for a full analysis of the claims, Humana said its program was "trending in the right direction."
Intel Corp. started its first ACO in January for employees and their families at its Rio Rancho, New Mexico, semiconductor plant. After savings from wellness and prevention initiatives slowed, it wanted to control spending, particularly for its sickest members, who account for about 20 percent of the company's $500 million annual healthcare spending.
Intel's plan includes full coverage of drugs for chronic conditions such as asthma and hypertension and preventive services. Beyond that, it pays more or less depending on how the plan provider, Presbyterian Healthcare Services, meets targets for providing same-day access to care, low cost and patient satisfaction, among other criteria.
Consumer advocates say the focus on quality and improved care is good for patients, but if ACOs limit access to care they could backfire.
"What we would want to ensure is happening is that people have access to the care they need and that all of the appropriate providers are engaged," said Kim Bailey, research director for Families USA in Washington, D.C.
CUTTING COSTS
The JAMA study was based on eight years of data at 10 institutions that took part in the Medicare Physician Group Practice Demonstration pilot and showed that coordinated care cut medical spending by 5 percent to 10 percent. The biggest savings were in lower hospital readmissions and in acute care among people eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid.
The federal government says its Medicare ACO plans could save up to $940 million over four years. It set 33 measures related to patient safety, preventive health services, at-risk populations and patient experience.
Insurers say they are seeing financial benefits. Aetna Inc, for instance, said hospital admissions have dropped by up to 45 percent in a small Medicare Advantage program - private insurance for seniors - it ran in Maine.
UnitedHealth aims to more than double by 2017 its pay-for-performance medicine, to $50 billion, from $20 billion now.
"Measuring the impact on patients of the commercials ACOs is something we are all interested in doing," Fisher said. "The plans themselves are pretty confident they are doing both - improving care and lowering costs."
(Editing by Ed Tobin, Jilian Mincer and Douglas Royalty; Reporting By Caroline Humer)
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NY gambling nun admits taking $128K from churches
ALBION, N.Y. (AP) ? A Roman Catholic nun with a gambling addiction has pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $130,000 from two rural western New York parishes.
The Daily News of Batavia reports (http://bit.ly/10ODYyX ) that 68-year-old Sister Mary Anne Rapp pleaded guilty Monday in Orleans County Court to grand larceny. She admits she stole the money from St. Mary's Church in Holley and St. Mark's Church in Kendall from March 2006 to April 2011.
Rapp faces up to six months in jail when she's sentenced July 1. She'll also be required to pay restitution that would be worked out at a later date.
Rapp was arrested in November after discrepancies were found during an audit.
Investigators said she stole the money to feed a gambling addiction and spent the money at western New York casinos.
___
Information from: The Daily News, http://www.batavianews.com
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ny-gambling-nun-admits-taking-128k-churches-151613312.html
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Tuesday, April 9, 2013
New mouse viruses could aid hepatitis research
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 9-Apr-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Jim Sliwa
jsliwa@asmusa.org
202-942-9297
American Society for Microbiology
Newly discovered mouse viruses could pave the way for future progress in hepatitis research, enabling scientists to study human disease and vaccines in the ultimate lab animal. In a study to be published in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, scientists describe their search for viruses related to the human hepatitis C virus (HCV) and human pegiviruses (HPgV) in frozen stocks of wild mice. The discovery of several new species of hepaciviruses and pegiviruses that are closely related to human viruses suggests they might be used to study these diseases and potential vaccines in mice, without the need for human volunteers.
About 2% of the population is infected with the hepatitis C virus and 5% is infected with human pegiviruses, but it's been difficult to study new drugs or develop vaccines against these infections because the human strains do not infect animals that can be studied in the lab. Lead author Amit Kapoor of Columbia University says it surprised him to find similar viruses in mice.
"People have been waiting for decades to find something like this. It was shocking for me to see that the viruses are there and there are so many of them," says Kapoor.
Kapoor and his colleagues screened an archive of more than 400 frozen rodents, mostly deer mice, for viruses related to the human hepatitis C virus and human pegiviruses. The search turned up a number of candidates, and they selected two for complete genome sequencing: a rodent hepacivirus (RHV) found in deer mice and a rodent pegivirus (RPgV) found in a white-throated woodrat. Sequencing confirmed that the viruses are very closely related to human strains but they represent several novel species in the Hepacivirus and Pegivirus genera within the family Flaviviridae.
These rodent viruses have genes, proteins, and translational elements that closely mirror those found in human hepaciviruses and pegiviruses, suggesting they have great potential for use in the lab. Animal models of hepatitis would help scientists explore the ways these viruses causes disease and aid in the design of treatments and vaccines. Human pegiviruses, on the other hand, have unknown effects, so studying how they work in rodents could well point the way to what they might do in the human body and why so many people are infected.
Kapoor's lab is now focused on exploring the biology of these viruses. "We are trying to infect deer mice, to study biological properties of these hepatitis C-like viruses," says Kapoor. "And if we find one of these viruses is hepatotrophic [having an attraction to the liver] and causes disease similar to hepatitis C, that would be a big step forward in understanding hepatitis C-induced pathology in humans."
###
mBio is an open access online journal published by the American Society for Microbiology to make microbiology research broadly accessible. The focus of the journal is on rapid publication of cutting-edge research spanning the entire spectrum of microbiology and related fields. It can be found online at http://mbio.asm.org.
The American Society for Microbiology is the largest single life science society, composed of over 39,000 scientists and health professionals. ASM's mission is to advance the microbiological sciences as a vehicle for understanding life processes and to apply and communicate this knowledge for the improvement of health and environmental and economic well-being worldwide.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 9-Apr-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Jim Sliwa
jsliwa@asmusa.org
202-942-9297
American Society for Microbiology
Newly discovered mouse viruses could pave the way for future progress in hepatitis research, enabling scientists to study human disease and vaccines in the ultimate lab animal. In a study to be published in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, scientists describe their search for viruses related to the human hepatitis C virus (HCV) and human pegiviruses (HPgV) in frozen stocks of wild mice. The discovery of several new species of hepaciviruses and pegiviruses that are closely related to human viruses suggests they might be used to study these diseases and potential vaccines in mice, without the need for human volunteers.
About 2% of the population is infected with the hepatitis C virus and 5% is infected with human pegiviruses, but it's been difficult to study new drugs or develop vaccines against these infections because the human strains do not infect animals that can be studied in the lab. Lead author Amit Kapoor of Columbia University says it surprised him to find similar viruses in mice.
"People have been waiting for decades to find something like this. It was shocking for me to see that the viruses are there and there are so many of them," says Kapoor.
Kapoor and his colleagues screened an archive of more than 400 frozen rodents, mostly deer mice, for viruses related to the human hepatitis C virus and human pegiviruses. The search turned up a number of candidates, and they selected two for complete genome sequencing: a rodent hepacivirus (RHV) found in deer mice and a rodent pegivirus (RPgV) found in a white-throated woodrat. Sequencing confirmed that the viruses are very closely related to human strains but they represent several novel species in the Hepacivirus and Pegivirus genera within the family Flaviviridae.
These rodent viruses have genes, proteins, and translational elements that closely mirror those found in human hepaciviruses and pegiviruses, suggesting they have great potential for use in the lab. Animal models of hepatitis would help scientists explore the ways these viruses causes disease and aid in the design of treatments and vaccines. Human pegiviruses, on the other hand, have unknown effects, so studying how they work in rodents could well point the way to what they might do in the human body and why so many people are infected.
Kapoor's lab is now focused on exploring the biology of these viruses. "We are trying to infect deer mice, to study biological properties of these hepatitis C-like viruses," says Kapoor. "And if we find one of these viruses is hepatotrophic [having an attraction to the liver] and causes disease similar to hepatitis C, that would be a big step forward in understanding hepatitis C-induced pathology in humans."
###
mBio is an open access online journal published by the American Society for Microbiology to make microbiology research broadly accessible. The focus of the journal is on rapid publication of cutting-edge research spanning the entire spectrum of microbiology and related fields. It can be found online at http://mbio.asm.org.
The American Society for Microbiology is the largest single life science society, composed of over 39,000 scientists and health professionals. ASM's mission is to advance the microbiological sciences as a vehicle for understanding life processes and to apply and communicate this knowledge for the improvement of health and environmental and economic well-being worldwide.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/asfm-nmv040513.php
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AppGratis pulled for violating App Store guidelines
AppGratis, the popular app discovery platform for finding new apps, has been pulled from the App Store for violating the App Store guideline that says apps that promote others for purchase or promotion in a simliar manner to the actual App Store will be rejected. Basically, AppGratis duplicates a lot of the functionality of the App Store, gets paid to do it, and Apple is saying no.
According to AllThingsD, AppGratis mysteriously disappeared from the App Store and word is that it was because it violated App Store guidelines pertaining to the promotion of apps for financial benefit. Particular, clause 2.25:
Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.
AppGratis is definitely not the only app available in the App Store that provides recommendations for apps on a paid basis. Apple's other clause in question is 5.6 which states that apps can not send out push notifications to users in the form of advertisements. I could name a few that currently do this. According to AllThingsD, Apple is taking a look at others that may violate these terms as well. AppGratis just received a large round of funding so this is no doubt a huge issue for them going forward.
Do you use app recommendation apps to find suggestions or does the native App Store suit your needs just fine?
Source: AllThingsD
     |
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/hxHnTX6ZQUo/story01.htm
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Monday, April 8, 2013
Red Epic Dragon sensor updates start tomorrow for $8,500
Red has announced that Dragon sensor updates will start tomorrow for Epic-M and Epic-X owners and, interestingly, is letting owners (and the public) see the operation for themselves at its NAB booth. The new sensor will bring 6K resolution, 120 fps at 5K and 15+ stops of dynamic range in a slightly larger format, according to Red. Early adopters will be able to pre-order now for $8,500, while Epic owners who wait until Thursday or later will be able to grab the update for $9,500. Filmmakers hoping for a new Epic-M with the Dragon instead of the Mysterium-X sensor will be able to pre-order tomorrow for $29,000 or so. Meanwhile, there's good news for those with the more budget-minded Scarlet -- they'll be able to upgrade to the Epic directly or get a 6k Dragon sensor and ASICs, with pricing details coming tomorrow and pre-orders launching on Thursday. Red may have a tough row to hoe with recent NAB news from the likes of BlackMagic Design and Vision Systems, but how many companies will actually let you watch your camera get operated on? Check the source for more.
Filed under: Cameras
Source: Red
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/08/red-epic-dragon-sensor-updates-start-tomorrow-for-8-500/
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Microalgae produce more oil faster for energy, food or products
Public release date: 7-Apr-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Michael Bernstein
m_bernstein@acs.org
504-670-4707 (New Orleans Press Center, April 5-10)
202-872-6042
Michael Woods
m_woods@acs.org
504-670-4707 (New Orleans Press Center, April 5-10)
202-872-6293
American Chemical Society
NEW ORLEANS, April 7, 2013 Scientists today described technology that accelerates microalgae's ability to produce many different types of renewable oils for fuels, chemicals, foods and personal-care products within days using standard industrial fermentation. The presentation was part of the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. The meeting, with 12,000 presentations on advances in science and other topics, continues here through Thursday.
Walter Rakitsky, Ph.D, explained that microalgae are the original oil producers on earth, and that all of the oil-producing machinery present in higher plants resides within these single-cell organisms. Solazyme's breakthrough biotechnology platform unlocks the power of microalgae, achieving over 80 percent oil within each individual cell at commercial scale while changing the triglyceride oil paradigm by their ability to tailor the oil profiles by carbon chain and saturation. The ability to produce multiple oils in a matter of days out of one plant location using standard industrial fermentation is a game-changer. Solazyme's patented microalgae strains have become the workhorses of a growing industry focused on producing commercial quantities of microalgal oil for energy and food applications. Rakitsky is with Solazyme, Inc., of South San Francisco, Calif., one of the largest and most successful of those companies, which in 2011 supplied 100 percent microalgal-derived advanced biofuel for the first U.S. passenger jetliner flight powered by advanced biofuel.
In a keynote talk at the ACS meeting, Rakitsky described Solazyme's technology platform that enables the company to produce multiple oils from heart-healthy high-oleic oils for food to oils that are tailored to have specific performance and functionality benefits in industry, such as safer dielectric fluids and oils that are the highest-value cuts of the barrel for advanced fuels. The benefits of these oils far surpass those of other oils that are currently available today.
"For the first time in history, we have unlocked the ability to completely design and tailor oils," he said. "This breakthrough allows us to create oils optimized for everything from high-performance jet and diesel fuel to renewable chemicals to skin-care products and heart-healthy food oils. These oils could replace or enhance the properties of oils derived from the world's three dominant sources: petroleum, plants and animals."
Producing custom-tailored oils starts with optimizing the algae to produce the right kind of oil, and from there, the flexibility of the fermentation platform really comes into play. Solazyme is able to produce all of these oils in one location simply by switching out the strain of microalgae they use, Rakitsky explained. Unlike other algal oil production processes, in which algae grow in open ponds, Solazyme grows microalgae in total darkness in the same kind of fermentation vats used to produce vinegar, medicines and scores of other products. Instead of sunlight, energy for the microalgae's growth comes from low-cost, plant-based sugars. This gives the company a completely consistent, repeatable industrial process to produce tailored oil at scale.
Sugar from traditional sources such as sugarcane and corn has advantages for growing microalgae, especially their abundance and relatively low cost, Rakitsky said. The company's first fit-for-purpose commercial-scale production plant is under construction with their partner Bunge next to a sugarcane mill in Brazil. Initial production capacity will be 110,000 tons of microalgal oil annually, expanding up to 330,700 tons. In addition, the company has a production agreement with ADM in Clinton, Iowa, for 22,000 tons of oil, expandable to 110,000 tons. Ultimately, cellulosic sources of sugars from non-food plants or plant waste materials, like grasses or corn stover, may take over as those technologies reach the right scale and cost structures.
###
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 163,000 members, ACS is the world's largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.
Note to journalists: Please report that this research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.
Follow us: Twitter | Facebook
Abstract
Solazyme, Inc. is a renewable oil and bioproducts company that transforms a range of low-cost plant-based sugars into high-value tailored triglyceride oils. Headquartered in South San Francisco, Solazyme's renewable products can replace or enhance the properties of oils derived from the world's three dominant sources: petroleum, plants, and animals.
Harnessing the oil-producing capabilities of microalgae, Solazyme's biotechnology platform utilizes standard industrial fermentation equipment to efficiently scale and accelerate natural oil development cycle time from years to merely a few days. By feeding simple plant sugars to proprietary strains of microalgae in industrial fermentation vessels, Solazyme takes advantage of "indirect photosynthesis", in contrast to the traditional open-pond approaches most often associated with microalgae.
Today, Solazyme's biotechnology platform is pioneering the expanded the use of renewable, resources by producing oils that are tailored to meet specific industry demands, impacting end-use applications ranging from fuels to chemicals to foods. These unique oil profiles have performance and functionality benefits that far surpass what's currently available.
Throughout this presentation, Solazyme will highlight the versatility of the technology platform by discussing the properties and applications of a new source of renewable oils derived from microalgae.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 7-Apr-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Michael Bernstein
m_bernstein@acs.org
504-670-4707 (New Orleans Press Center, April 5-10)
202-872-6042
Michael Woods
m_woods@acs.org
504-670-4707 (New Orleans Press Center, April 5-10)
202-872-6293
American Chemical Society
NEW ORLEANS, April 7, 2013 Scientists today described technology that accelerates microalgae's ability to produce many different types of renewable oils for fuels, chemicals, foods and personal-care products within days using standard industrial fermentation. The presentation was part of the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. The meeting, with 12,000 presentations on advances in science and other topics, continues here through Thursday.
Walter Rakitsky, Ph.D, explained that microalgae are the original oil producers on earth, and that all of the oil-producing machinery present in higher plants resides within these single-cell organisms. Solazyme's breakthrough biotechnology platform unlocks the power of microalgae, achieving over 80 percent oil within each individual cell at commercial scale while changing the triglyceride oil paradigm by their ability to tailor the oil profiles by carbon chain and saturation. The ability to produce multiple oils in a matter of days out of one plant location using standard industrial fermentation is a game-changer. Solazyme's patented microalgae strains have become the workhorses of a growing industry focused on producing commercial quantities of microalgal oil for energy and food applications. Rakitsky is with Solazyme, Inc., of South San Francisco, Calif., one of the largest and most successful of those companies, which in 2011 supplied 100 percent microalgal-derived advanced biofuel for the first U.S. passenger jetliner flight powered by advanced biofuel.
In a keynote talk at the ACS meeting, Rakitsky described Solazyme's technology platform that enables the company to produce multiple oils from heart-healthy high-oleic oils for food to oils that are tailored to have specific performance and functionality benefits in industry, such as safer dielectric fluids and oils that are the highest-value cuts of the barrel for advanced fuels. The benefits of these oils far surpass those of other oils that are currently available today.
"For the first time in history, we have unlocked the ability to completely design and tailor oils," he said. "This breakthrough allows us to create oils optimized for everything from high-performance jet and diesel fuel to renewable chemicals to skin-care products and heart-healthy food oils. These oils could replace or enhance the properties of oils derived from the world's three dominant sources: petroleum, plants and animals."
Producing custom-tailored oils starts with optimizing the algae to produce the right kind of oil, and from there, the flexibility of the fermentation platform really comes into play. Solazyme is able to produce all of these oils in one location simply by switching out the strain of microalgae they use, Rakitsky explained. Unlike other algal oil production processes, in which algae grow in open ponds, Solazyme grows microalgae in total darkness in the same kind of fermentation vats used to produce vinegar, medicines and scores of other products. Instead of sunlight, energy for the microalgae's growth comes from low-cost, plant-based sugars. This gives the company a completely consistent, repeatable industrial process to produce tailored oil at scale.
Sugar from traditional sources such as sugarcane and corn has advantages for growing microalgae, especially their abundance and relatively low cost, Rakitsky said. The company's first fit-for-purpose commercial-scale production plant is under construction with their partner Bunge next to a sugarcane mill in Brazil. Initial production capacity will be 110,000 tons of microalgal oil annually, expanding up to 330,700 tons. In addition, the company has a production agreement with ADM in Clinton, Iowa, for 22,000 tons of oil, expandable to 110,000 tons. Ultimately, cellulosic sources of sugars from non-food plants or plant waste materials, like grasses or corn stover, may take over as those technologies reach the right scale and cost structures.
###
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 163,000 members, ACS is the world's largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.
Note to journalists: Please report that this research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.
Follow us: Twitter | Facebook
Abstract
Solazyme, Inc. is a renewable oil and bioproducts company that transforms a range of low-cost plant-based sugars into high-value tailored triglyceride oils. Headquartered in South San Francisco, Solazyme's renewable products can replace or enhance the properties of oils derived from the world's three dominant sources: petroleum, plants, and animals.
Harnessing the oil-producing capabilities of microalgae, Solazyme's biotechnology platform utilizes standard industrial fermentation equipment to efficiently scale and accelerate natural oil development cycle time from years to merely a few days. By feeding simple plant sugars to proprietary strains of microalgae in industrial fermentation vessels, Solazyme takes advantage of "indirect photosynthesis", in contrast to the traditional open-pond approaches most often associated with microalgae.
Today, Solazyme's biotechnology platform is pioneering the expanded the use of renewable, resources by producing oils that are tailored to meet specific industry demands, impacting end-use applications ranging from fuels to chemicals to foods. These unique oil profiles have performance and functionality benefits that far surpass what's currently available.
Throughout this presentation, Solazyme will highlight the versatility of the technology platform by discussing the properties and applications of a new source of renewable oils derived from microalgae.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/acs-mpm032213.php
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Amina Tyler, Topless Tunisian Protester, Fears For Her Life
TUNIS, Tunisia -- A 19-year-old Tunisian who bared her breasts and taunted Muslim hard-liners said this weekend that she now fears for her life and wants to take refuge abroad.
The woman known only as Amina appeared in photos on Facebook last month with the words "My body belongs to me" scrawled on her bare chest, a particularly bold act in a Muslim country led by a moderate Islamist party, Ennahda.
Amina's act was inspired by the Ukraine-based group Femen, which stages bare-breasted protests for women's and gay rights. The group held an International Topless Jihad day last Thursday in support of Muslim women, including Amina.
Amina went into hiding after reportedly receiving death threats, prompting wild rumors over her whereabouts, including that she had been interned in a psychiatric hospital. But she reappeared in an interview broadcast Saturday with the French cable TV station Canal Plus in a village hours from the Tunisian capital where she's been hiding.
She told Canal Plus that she "must leave Tunisia."
"I'm afraid for my life and the lives of my family," she said, adding that she doesn't think it possible to return to school in Tunisia and wants to study journalism abroad.
Amina made an earlier TV appearance with a private Tunisian channel, in mid-March, her face blurred. She insisted her action had not aimed to provoke. "We Femen, we have the courage to cry out our demands to liberate women," she said at the time.
Amina told Canal Plus that though she fears for her life in her homeland, she will keep her Femen principles "until I'm 80."
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Sunday, April 7, 2013
Guns and garden gnomes: 3-D printer revolution is now
Addressing a packed auditorium at Austin?s South by Southwest festival last March, Bre Pettis, keynote speaker and co-founder of MakerBot, one of the leaders in desktop 3-D printers, described the increased interest and affordability of his company?s product as heralding the ?the next Industrial Revolution.?
"Revolution" is often used even when the result doesn't match the definition ? a complete change from the way things were before. Add "Industrial," and the comparison implies not just a change in manufacturing, but society as well, from improved living standards to changes in social class structure. Whether ? and how ? desktop 3-D printing can bring such changes is much debated, and remains to be seen.
Thanks to companies such as MakerBot, the bulk, expense and technical inefficiency that kept the 30-year-old technology known as Additive Manufacturing ? or 3-D printing ? confined to major laboratories and factories, is a thing of the past. Now, for less than $3,000, anyone with basic computer skills and an interest in learning more can download and personalize or create a computer-assisted design (CAD) that a printer will fabricate, layer by layer of filament.
Pettis is not the first to make the ?next Industrial Revolution? comparison. For some within the maker community ? subculture of tech-based do-it-yourself-ers ? the increased accessibility of 3-D printer technology means "the end of consumerism.? Conversely, tech analysis firms Gartner predicts that 3-D printing could create opportunities for new product lines created in-house by local retailers. And Daniel Suarez, who spent a decade developing logistics and production planning software for major multinational corporations (and is also a best-selling novelist who writes about near-future technologies) predicts that "3-D printing will be a disruptive economic force in the next two decades ? but I also think this disruption will benefit average Americans by causing a resurgence in local manufacturing."
Fervor over 3-D printing?s potential has only increased since SXSW, when Pettis introduced a prototype for the MakerBot Digitizer, which will scan small objects with the end goal of 3-D fabrication. He illustrated the Digitizer?s potential with a projection of a garden gnome, scanned to create ? another garden gnome.
For those who don?t so much see an endless supply of home-printed garden gnomes as ?revolution,? so much as a shot at getting on A&E?s ?Hoarders,? there?s Cody Wilson, the notorious public face of Defense Distributed. Wilson is a University of Texas law student recently licensed to manufacture guns by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In March, Defense Distributed, much to the consternation of gun control advocates, printed the plastic lower receiver for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle ? the portion of a firearm that carries the serial number ? which that can fire more than 600 rounds.
Scary, legal and ? as Wilson points out ? a 3-D printed result that actually does something.
Wilson latched on to Pettis?s garden gnome to express his frustration with the maker community to make something more than geegaws during his riveting yet sparsely attended SXSW presentation about Defense Distributed and DefCAD, an open-source CAD design website he launched after MakerBot?s Thingiverse CAD site dumped all the gun designs from the site following the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn.
A cursory scan on Thingiverse finds a sea of files to create iPhone cases, and myriad holders and stands, but other than clock components, parts to complete a cigar box ukulele, and a theoretical design for a working camera, there isn?t a lot on the open source data base that does stuff.
Wilson is using the platform of 3-D printing to make a political statement about? and push the boundaries of ? liberty and the freedom to share information. ?I think this isn't a project about firearms, it?s a project about political equality,? Wilson recently told NBC?s Nightly News.
The potential Wilson sees for for 3-D printers isn't just about guns, but prosthetics and other medical devices, even drugs, putting the means of production in the hands of the people.
Pettis and Wilson are often portrayed as polar opposites in the 3-D printer movement, but they both face the inevitable roadblock of all new digital technology ? intellectual copyright law.
"When it comes to 3-D printers, groups producing tools, weapons, and reproducing patented or copyrighted objects will be where all the debate and legal fireworks will occur," Suarez told NBC News.
"Sure, a copyright holder might get upset when individuals reproduce their trademarked cartoon character as little plastic tchotchkes, but I suspect this will follow the same path as digital music and torrented video ? namely, there will be several high profile legal cases against perceived infringers until big companies realize technological advances have made this an unstoppable tide."
And so begins the revolution.
Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her she doesn't know what she's talking about on Twitter and/or Facebook.
cujo karen handel hangout todd haley kareem abdul jabbar miramonte elementary school mark jenkins
Army trains our own troops that Christians and Jews are prohibited 'extremists'
The Jews ( ISO 259-3 Israeli pronunciation ), also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and an ethnoreligious group, originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation. Converts to Judaism, whose status as Jews within the Jewish ethnos is equal to those born into it, have been absorbed into the Jewish people throughout the millennia.
According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics there were 13,421,000 Jews worldwide in 2009, roughly 0.19% of the world's population at the time. The Holocaust Israel Jewish culture Jewish identity Jewish studies Baron, Salo Wittmayer (1952). A Social and Religious History of the Jews, Volume II, Ancient Times, Part II. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. Lewis, Bernard (1984). The Jews of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00807-8 Lewis, Bernard (1999). Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-31839-7 Poliakov, Leon (1974). The History of Anti-semitism. New York: The Vanguard Press. Ruderman, David B. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton University Press; 2010) 326 pages. Examines print culture, religion, and other realms in a history emphasizing the links among early modern Jewish communities from Venice and Krak?w to Amsterdam and Smyrna. Stillman, Norman (1979). The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. ISBN 0-8276-0198-0 Homepage of the Jewish Virtual Library Archives of the Jewish Encyclopedia Judaism 101 ;Organizations Official website of the World Jewish Congress Official website of the Jewish Agency for Israel ;Miscellaneous Maps related to Jewish history
In Jewish tradition, Jewish ancestry is traced to the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the second millennium BCE. The modern State of Israel was established as a Jewish nation-state, and defines itself as such in its Basic Laws. Its Law of Return grants the right of citizenship to any Jew who requests it. Israel is the only country where Jews are a majority of the population. Jews also enjoyed political autonomy twice before in ancient history. The first of these periods lasted from 1350 to 586 BCE, and encompassed the periods of the Judges, the United Monarchy, and the Divided Monarchy of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, ending with the destruction of the First Temple. The second was the period of the Hasmonean Kingdom spanning from 140 to 37 BCE. Since the destruction of the First Temple, most Jews have lived in diaspora. A minority in every country in which they live (except Israel), they have frequently experienced persecution throughout history, resulting in a population that has fluctuated both in numbers and distribution over the centuries.
, the world Jewish population was estimated at 13.4 million by the North American Jewish Data Bank, or less than 0.2% of the total world population (roughly one in every 514 people). According to this report, about 42.5% of all Jews reside in Israel (5.7 million), and 39.3% in the United States (5.3 million), with most of the remainder living in Europe (1.5 million) and Canada (0.4 million). These numbers include all those who consider themselves Jews, whether or not they are affiliated with a Jewish organization. The total world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure. In addition to issues with census methodology, there are halakhic disputes regarding who is a Jew and secular, political, and ancestral identification factors that may affect the figure considerably.
Name and etymology
The English word Jew continues Middle English , a loan from Old French , earlier , ultimately from Latin . The Latin simply means Judaean, "from the land of Judaea". The Latin term itself, like the corresponding Greek , is a loan from Aramaic , corresponding to , Yehudi (sg.); , Yehudim (pl.), in origin the term for a member of the tribe of Judah or the people of the kingdom of Judah. The name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob.The Hebrew word for Jew, ISO 259-3 Yhudi, is pronounced , with the stress on the final syllable, in Israeli Hebrew, in its basic form.
The Ladino name is , Djudio (sg.); , Djudios (pl.); Yiddish: Yid (sg.); , Yidn (pl.).
The etymological equivalent is in use in other languages, e.g., "Yahoud"/"Yahoudi" () in Arabic language, "Jude" in German, "judeu" in Portuguese, "juif" in French, "j?de" in Danish and Norwegian, "jud?o" in Spanish, "jood" in Dutch, etc., but derivations of the word "Hebrew" are also in use to describe a Jew, e.g., in Italian (Ebreo), in Persian ("Ebri/Ebrani" ()) and Russian (?????, Yevrey). The German word "Jude" is pronounced , the corresponding adjective "j?disch" (Jewish) is the origin of the word "Yiddish". (See Jewish ethnonyms for a full overview.)
According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (2000):
It is widely recognized that the attributive use of the noun Jew, in phrases such as Jew lawyer or Jew ethics, is both vulgar and highly offensive. In such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a practice that carries risks of its own. In a sentence such as There are now several Jews on the council, which is unobjectionable, the substitution of a circumlocution like Jewish people or persons of Jewish background may in itself cause offense for seeming to imply that Jew has a negative connotation when used as a noun.
Origins
According to the Hebrew Bible, all Israelites descend from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Abraham was born in the Sumerian city of Ur Ka?dim, and migrated to Canaan (commonly known as the Land of Israel) with his family. Aristotle believed that the Jews came from India, where he said that they were known as the Kalani. Genetic studies on Jews show that most Jews worldwide bear a common genetic heritage which originates in the Middle East, and that they bear their strongest resemblance to the peoples of the Fertile Crescent. According to archaeologists, however, Israelite culture did not overtake the region, but rather grew out of Canaanite culture.
Judaism
Judaism guides its adherents in both practice and belief, and has been called not only a religion, but also a "way of life," which has made drawing a clear distinction between Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish identity rather difficult. Throughout history, in eras and places as diverse as the ancient Hellenic world, in Europe before and after The Age of Enlightenment (see Haskalah), in Islamic Spain and Portugal, in North Africa and the Middle East, India, and China, or the contemporary United States and Israel, cultural phenomena have developed that are in some sense characteristically Jewish without being at all specifically religious. Some factors in this come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews or specific communities of Jews with their surroundings, others from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community, as opposed to from the religion itself. This phenomenon has led to considerably different Jewish cultures unique to their own communities, each as authentically Jewish as the next.Who is a Jew?
Judaism shares some of the characteristics of a nation, an ethnicity, a religion, and a culture, making the definition of who is a Jew vary slightly depending on whether a religious or national approach to identity is used. Generally, in modern secular usage, Jews include three groups: people who were born to a Jewish family regardless of whether or not they follow the religion; those who have some Jewish ancestral background or lineage (sometimes including those who do not have strictly matrilineal descent); and people without any Jewish ancestral background or lineage who have formally converted to Judaism and therefore are followers of the religion.Historical definitions of Jewish identity have traditionally been based on halakhic definitions of matrilineal descent, and halakhic conversions. Historical definitions of who is a Jew date back to the codification of the Oral Torah into the Babylonian Talmud, around 200 CE. Interpretations of sections of the Tanakh, such as Deuteronomy 7:1?5, by learned Jewish sages, are used as a warning against intermarriage between Jews and Canaanites because "[the non-Jewish husband] will cause your child to turn away from Me and they will worship the gods (i.e., idols) of others." Leviticus 24:10 says that the son in a marriage between a Hebrew woman and an Egyptian man is "of the community of Israel." This is complemented by Ezra 10:2?3, where Israelites returning from Babylon vow to put aside their gentile wives and their children. Since the Haskalah, these halakhic interpretations of Jewish identity have been challenged.
According to historian Shaye J. D. Cohen, in the Bible, the status of the offspring of mixed marriages was determined patrilineally. He brings two likely explanations for the change in Mishnaic times: first, the Mishnah may have been applying the same logic to mixed marriages as it had applied to other mixtures (kilayim). Thus, a mixed marriage is forbidden as is the union of a horse and a donkey, and in both unions the offspring are judged matrilineally.
Second, the Tannaim may have been influenced by Roman law, which dictated that when a parent could not contract a legal marriage, offspring would follow the mother.
At times, conversion has accounted for a substantial part of Jewish population growth. In the first century of the Christian era, for example, the population more than doubled, from four to 8?10 million within the confines of the Roman Empire, in good part as a result of a wave of conversion.
Ethnic divisions
Within the world's Jewish population there are distinct ethnic divisions, most of which are primarily the result of geographic branching from an originating Israelite population, and subsequent independent evolutions. An array of Jewish communities were established by Jewish settlers in various places around the Old World, often at great distances from one another resulting in effective and often long-term isolation from each other. During the millennia of the Jewish diaspora the communities would develop under the influence of their local environments; political, cultural, natural, and populational. Today, manifestation of these differences among the Jews can be observed in Jewish cultural expressions of each community, including Jewish linguistic diversity, culinary preferences, liturgical practices, religious interpretations, as well as degrees and sources of genetic admixture.Jews are often identified as belonging to one of two major groups: the Ashkenazim, or "Germanics" (Ashkenaz meaning "Germany" in Medieval Hebrew, denoting their Central European base), and the Sephardim, or "Hispanics" (Sefarad meaning "Spain/Hispania" or "Iberia" in Hebrew, denoting their Spanish, and Portuguese, base). The Mizrahim, or "Easterners" (Mizrach being "East" in Hebrew), that is, the diverse collection of Middle Eastern and North African Jews, constitute a third major group, although they are sometimes termed Sephardi for liturgical reasons.
Smaller groups include, but are not restricted to, Indian Jews such as the Bene Israel, Bnei Menashe, Cochin Jews, and Bene Ephraim; the Romaniotes of Greece; the Italian Jews ("Italkim" or "Ben? Roma"); the Teimanim from Yemen and Oman; various African Jews, including most numerously the Beta Israel of Ethiopia; and Chinese Jews, most notably the Kaifeng Jews, as well as various other distinct but now almost extinct communities.
The divisions between all these groups are approximate and their boundaries are not always clear. The Mizrahim for example, are a heterogeneous collection of North African, Central Asian, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern Jewish communities that are often as unrelated to each other as they are to any of the earlier mentioned Jewish groups. In modern usage, however, the Mizrahim are sometimes termed Sephardi due to similar styles of liturgy, despite independent development from Sephardim proper. Thus, among Mizrahim there are Egyptian Jews, Iraqi Jews, Lebanese Jews, Kurdish Jews, Libyan Jews, Syrian Jews, Bukharian Jews, Mountain Jews, Georgian Jews, Iranian Jews and various others. The Teimanim from Yemen and Oman are sometimes included, although their style of liturgy is unique and they differ in respect to the admixture found among them to that found in Mizrahim. In addition, there is a differentiation made between Sephardi migrants who established themselves in the Middle East and North Africa after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s and the pre-existing Jewish communities in those regions.
Despite this diversity, Ashkenazi Jews represent the bulk of modern Jewry, with at least 70% of Jews worldwide (and up to 90% prior to World War II and the Holocaust). As a result of their emigration from Europe, Ashkenazim also represent the overwhelming majority of Jews in the New World continents, in countries such as the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and Brazil. In France, emigration of Jews from North Africa has led them to outnumber the Ashkenazim . Only in Israel is the Jewish population representative of all groups, a melting pot independent of each group's proportion within the overall world Jewish population.
Languages
Hebrew is the liturgical language of Judaism (termed l'shon ha-kodesh, "the holy tongue"), the language in which the Hebrew scriptures (Tanakh) were composed, and the daily speech of the Jewish people for centuries. By the 5th century BCE, Aramaic, a closely related tongue, joined Hebrew as the spoken language in Judea. By the third century BCE, Jews of the diaspora were speaking Greek.For centuries, Jews worldwide have spoken the local or dominant languages of the regions they migrated to, often developing distinctive dialectal forms or branches that became independent languages. Yiddish is the Jud?o-German language developed by Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to Central Europe. Ladino is the Jud?o-Spanish language developed by Sephardic Jews who migrated to the Iberian peninsula. Due to many factors, including the impact of the Holocaust on European Jewry, the Jewish exodus from Arab lands, and widespread emigration from other Jewish communities around the world, ancient and distinct Jewish languages of several communities, including Jud?o-Georgian, Jud?o-Arabic, Jud?o-Berber, Krymchak, Jud?o-Malayalam and many others, have largely fallen out of use.
For over sixteen centuries Hebrew was used almost exclusively as a liturgical language, and as the language in which most books had been written on Judaism, with a few speaking only Hebrew on the Sabbath. Hebrew was revived as a spoken language by Eliezer ben Yehuda, who arrived in Palestine in 1881. It had not been used as a mother tongue since Tannaic times. Modern Hebrew is now one of the two official languages of the State of Israel along with Arabic.
The three most commonly spoken languages among Jews today are Hebrew, English and Russian. Some Romance languages, such as French and Spanish, are also widely used. Yiddish has been spoken by more Jews in history than any other language, but it is far less used today, after the Holocaust and the adoption of Hebrew, first by the Zionist movement, and then by Israel.
Genetic studies
Y DNA studies tend to imply a small number of founders in an old population whose members parted and followed different migration paths. In most Jewish populations, these male line ancestors appear to have been mainly Middle Eastern. For example, Ashkenazi Jews share more common paternal lineages with other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than with non-Jewish populations in areas where Jews lived in Eastern Europe, Germany and the French Rhine Valley. This is consistent with Jewish traditions in placing most Jewish paternal origins in the region of the Middle East.
The maternal lineages of Jewish populations, studied by looking at mitochondrial DNA, are generally more heterogeneous. Scholars such as Harry Ostrer and Raphael Falk believe this indicates that many Jewish males found new mates from European and other communities in the places where they migrated in the diaspora after fleeing ancient Israel. Behar has found evidence that about 40% of Ashkenazi Jews originate maternally from just four female founders, who were of Middle Eastern origin. The populations of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish communities "showed no evidence for a narrow founder effect." Subsequent studies carried out by Feder and al confirmed the huge portion of non-local maternal origin among Ashkenazi Jews. Reflecting on their findings related to the maternal origin of Ashkenazi Jews, the authors concludes "Clearly, the differences between Jews and non-Jews are far larger than those observed among the Jewish communities. Hence, differences between the Jewish communities can be overlooked when non-Jews are included in the comparisons." Beside Ashkenazi Jews, evidence for founder females of Middle Eastern origin has been found in all other major Jewish groups
Studies of autosomal DNA, which look at the entire DNA mixture, have become increasingly important as the technology develops. They show that Jewish populations have tended to form relatively closely related groups in independent communities, with most in a community sharing significant ancestry in common. For Jewish populations of the diaspora, the genetic composition of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jewish populations show a predominant amount of shared Middle Eastern ancestry. According to Behar, the most parsimonious explanation for this shared Middle Eastern ancestry is that it is "consistent with the historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelite residents of the Levant" and "the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout the Old World" North African, Italian and others of Iberian origin show variable frequencies of admixture with non-Jewish historical host populations among the maternal lines. In the case of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews (in particular Moroccan Jews), who are apparently closely related, the non-Jewish component is mainly southern European. Behar et al. have remarked on an especially close relationship to modern Italians. The studies show that the Bene Israel and Cochin Jews of India, Beta Israel of Ethiopia, and a portion of the Lemba people of southern Africa, while more closely resembling the local populations of their native countries, have some ancient Jewish descent.
Demographics
Population centers
| ! Country | ! Jews, ? | ! Jews, % |
| ! World | 13,558,300 | 0.21% |
According to the estimates for 2007 of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, the world's Jewish population is 13.2 million. Adherents.com cites figures ranging from 12 to 18 million. These statistics incorporate both practicing Jews affiliated with synagogues and the Jewish community, and approximately 4.5 million unaffiliated and secular Jews.
Israel
Israel, the Jewish nation-state, is the only country in which Jews make up a majority of the citizens. Israel was established as an independent democratic and Jewish state on May 14, 1948. Of the 120 members in its parliament, the Knesset, currently, 12 members of the Knesset are Arab citizens of Israel, most representing Arab political parties and one of Israel's Supreme Court judges is a Palestinian Arab.Between 1948 and 1958, the Jewish population rose from 800,000 to two million. Currently, Jews account for 75.4% of the Israeli population, or 5.9 million people. The early years of the State of Israel were marked by the mass immigration of Holocaust survivors and Jews fleeing Arab lands. Israel also has a large population of Ethiopian Jews, many of whom were airlifted to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Between 1974 and 1979 nearly 227,258 immigrants arrived in Israel, about half being from the Soviet Union. This period also saw an increase in immigration to Israel from Western Europe, Latin America, and North America.
A trickle of immigrants from other communities has also arrived, including Indian Jews and others, as well as some descendants of Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors who had settled in countries such as the United States, Argentina, Australia, Chile, and South Africa. Some Jews have emigrated from Israel elsewhere, because of economic problems or disillusionment with political conditions and the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict. Jewish Israeli emigrants are known as yordim.
Diaspora (outside Israel)
The waves of immigration to the United States and elsewhere at the turn of the 19th century, the founding of Zionism and later events, including pogroms in Russia, the massacre of European Jewry during the Holocaust, and the founding of the state of Israel, with the subsequent Jewish exodus from Arab lands, all resulted in substantial shifts in the population centers of world Jewry by the end of the 20th century.Currently, the largest Jewish community outside Israel, and either the largest or second-largest Jewish community in the world is located in the United States, with 5.2 million to 6.4 million Jews by various estimates. Elsewhere in the Americas, there are also large Jewish populations in Canada (315,000), Argentina (180,000-300,000), and Brazil (196,000-600,000), and smaller populations in Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and several other countries (see History of the Jews in Latin America).
Western Europe's largest Jewish community, and the third-largest Jewish community in the world, can be found in France, home to between 483,000 and 500,000 Jews, the majority of whom are immigrants or refugees from North African Arab countries such as Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (or their descendants). The United Kingdom has a Jewish community of 292,000. In Eastern Europe, there are anywhere from 350,000 to one million Jews living in the former Soviet Union, but exact figures are difficult to establish. Germany, with 119,000 Jews, has the fastest-growing Jewish community outside Israel, especially in Berlin. Tens of thousands of Jews from the former Eastern Bloc have settled in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and thousands of Israelis live in Germany, either permanently or temporarily, for economic reasons.
The Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East were home to around 900,000 Jews in 1945. Fueled by anti-Zionism after the founding of Israel, systematic persecution caused almost all of these Jews to flee to Israel, North America, and Europe in the 1950s (see Jewish exodus from Arab lands). Today, around 8,000 Jews remain in all Arab nations combined.
Iran is home to almost 9,000 Jews, and has the second-largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel. From 1948 to 1953, about one-third of Iranian Jews, most of them poor, emigrated to Israel. Before the 1979 revolution, there were 100,000 Jews living in the country. After the revolution, most of them left Iran for Israel, Europe, or the United States. Most Iranian-Jewish emigres, along with many non-Jewish Iranians, went to the US, especially Los Angeles, where the principal Iranian community is called "Tehrangeles".
Outside Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and the rest of Asia, there are significant Jewish populations in Australia (120,000) and South Africa (70,000). There is also a 7,000-strong community in New Zealand.
Demographic changes
Assimilation
Since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, a proportion of Jews have assimilated into the wider non-Jewish society around them, by either choice or force, ceasing to practice Judaism and losing their Jewish identity. Assimilation took place in all areas, and during all time periods, with some Jewish communities, for example the Kaifeng Jews of China, disappearing entirely. The advent of the Jewish Enlightenment of the 18th century (see Haskalah) and the subsequent emancipation of the Jewish populations of Europe and America in the 19th century, accelerated the situation, encouraging Jews to increasingly participate in, and become part of, secular society. The result has been a growing trend of assimilation, as Jews marry non-Jewish spouses and stop participating in the Jewish community.Rates of interreligious marriage vary widely: In the United States, they are just under 50%, in the United Kingdom, around 53%, in France, around 30%, and in Australia and Mexico, as low as 10%. In the United States, only about a third of children from intermarriages affiliate themselves with Jewish religious practice. The result is that most countries in the Diaspora have steady or slightly declining religiously Jewish populations as Jews continue to assimilate into the countries in which they live.
War and persecution
The Jewish people and Judaism have experienced various persecutions throughout Jewish history. During late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages the Roman Empire (in its later phases known as the Byzantine Empire) repeatedly repressed the Jewish population, first by ejecting them from their homelands during the pagan Roman era and later by officially establishing them as second-class citizens during the Christian Roman era.According to James Carroll, "Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million."
Later in medieval Western Europe, further persecutions of Jews in the name of Christianity occurred, notably during the Crusades?when Jews all over Germany were massacred?and a series of expulsions from England, Germany, France, and, in the largest expulsion of all, Spain and Portugal after the Reconquista (the Catholic Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula), where both unbaptized Sephardic Jews and the ruling Muslim Moors were expelled.
In the Papal States, which existed until 1870, Jews were required to live only in specified neighborhoods called ghettos. In the 19th and (before the end of World War II) 20th centuries, the Roman Catholic Church adhered to a distinction between "good antisemitism" and "bad antisemitism". The "bad" kind promoted hatred of Jews because of their descent. This was considered un-Christian because the Christian message was intended for all of humanity regardless of ethnicity; anyone could become a Christian. The "good" kind criticized alleged Jewish conspiracies to control newspapers, banks, and other institutions, to care only about accumulation of wealth, etc.
Islam and Judaism have a complex relationship. Traditionally Jews and Christians living in Muslim lands, known as dhimmis, were allowed to practice their religions and to administer their internal affairs, but subject to certain conditions. They had to pay the jizya (a per capita tax imposed on free adult non-Muslim males) to the Islamic state. Dhimmis had an inferior status under Islamic rule. They had several social and legal disabilities such as prohibitions against bearing arms or giving testimony in courts in cases involving Muslims. Many of the disabilities were highly symbolic. The one described by Bernard Lewis as "most degrading" was the requirement of distinctive clothing, not found in the Qur'an or hadith but invented in early medieval Baghdad; its enforcement was highly erratic. On the other hand, Jews rarely faced martyrdom or exile, or forced compulsion to change their religion, and they were mostly free in their choice of residence and profession.
Notable exceptions include the massacre of Jews and/or forcible conversion of some Jews by the rulers of the Almohad dynasty in Al-Andalus in the 12th century, as well as in Islamic Persia, and the forced confinement of Moroccan Jews to walled quarters known as mellahs beginning from the 15th century and especially in the early 19th century. In modern times, it has become commonplace for standard antisemitic themes to be conflated with anti-Zionist publications and pronouncements of Islamic movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas, in the pronouncements of various agencies of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and even in the newspapers and other publications of Turkish Refah Partisi."
Throughout history, many rulers, empires and nations have oppressed their Jewish populations or sought to eliminate them entirely. Methods employed ranged from expulsion to outright genocide; within nations, often the threat of these extreme methods was sufficient to silence dissent. The history of antisemitism includes the First Crusade which resulted in the massacre of Jews; the Spanish Inquisition (led by Torquemada) and the Portuguese Inquisition, with their persecution and autos-da-f? against the New Christians and Marrano Jews; the Bohdan Chmielnicki Cossack massacres in Ukraine; the Pogroms backed by the Russian Tsars; as well as expulsions from Spain, Portugal, England, France, Germany, and other countries in which the Jews had settled. According to a recent study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics 19.8% of the modern Iberian population has Sephardic Jewish ancestry, indicating that the number of conversos may have been much higher than originally thought.
The persecution reached a peak in Nazi Germany's Final Solution, which led to the Holocaust and the slaughter of approximately 6 million Jews. Of the world's 15 million Jews in 1939, more than a third were killed in the Holocaust. The Holocaust?? the state-led systematic persecution and genocide of European Jews (and certain communities of North African Jews in European controlled North Africa) and other minority groups of Europe during World War II by Germany and its collaborators remains the most notable modern day persecution of Jews. The persecution and genocide were accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Roma were crammed into ghettos before being transported hundreds of miles by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Virtually every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal nation."
Migrations
Throughout Jewish history, Jews have repeatedly been directly or indirectly expelled from both their original homeland and the areas in which they have resided. This experience as refugees has shaped Jewish identity and religious practice in many ways, and is thus a major element of Jewish history. The incomplete list of major and other noteworthy migrations that follows includes numerous instances of expulsion or departure under duress: The patriarch Abraham was a migrant to the land of Canaan from Ur of the Chaldees after an attempt on his life by King Nimrod. The Children of Israel experienced the Exodus (meaning "departure" or "exit" in Greek) from ancient Egypt, as recorded in the Book of Exodus. The Kingdom of Israel was sent into permanent exile by Assyria, initially to the Upper Mesopotamian provinces of the Assyrian Empire, from whence they scattered all over the world (or at least to unknown locations). The Kingdom of Judah was exiled by Babylonia, then returned to Judea by Cyrus the Great of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, and then many were exiled again by the Roman Empire. The 2,000 year dispersion of the Jewish diaspora beginning under the Roman Empire, as Jews were spread throughout the Roman world and, driven from land to land, and settled wherever they could live freely enough to practice their religion. Over the course of the diaspora the center of Jewish life moved from Babylonia to the Iberian Peninsula to Poland to the United States and, as a result of Zionism, back to Israel. Many expulsions during the Middle Ages and Enlightenment in Europe, including: 1290, 16,000 Jews were expelled from England, see the (Statute of Jewry); in 1396, 100,000 from France; in 1421 thousands were expelled from Austria. Many of these Jews settled in Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Following the Spanish Inquisition in 1492, the Spanish population of around 200,000 Sephardic Jews were expelled by the Spanish crown and Catholic church, followed by expulsions in 1493 in Sicily (37,000 Jews) and Portugal in 1496. The expelled Jews fled mainly to the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, and North Africa, others migrating to Southern Europe and the Middle East. During the 19th century, France's policies of equal citizenship regardless of religion led to the immigration of Jews (especially from Eastern and Central Europe). The arrival of millions of Jews in the New World, including immigration of over two million Eastern European Jews to the United States from 1880?1925, see History of the Jews in the United States and History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union. The Pogroms in Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, and the rise of Arab nationalism all served to fuel the movements and migrations of huge segments of Jewry from land to land and continent to continent, until they arrived back in large numbers at their original historical homeland in Israel. The Islamic Revolution of Iran caused many Iranian Jews to flee Iran. Most found refuge in the US (particularly Los Angeles, CA) and Israel. Smaller communities of Persian Jews exist in Canada and Western Europe. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of the Jews in the affected territory (who had been refuseniks) were suddenly allowed to leave. This produced a wave of migration to Israel in the early 1990s.Orthodox and Conservative Judaism discourage proselytism to non-Jews, but many Jewish groups have tried to reach out to the assimilated Jewish communities of the Diaspora in order for them to reconnect to their Jewish roots. Additionally, while in principle Reform Judaism favors seeking new members for the faith, this position has not translated into active proselytism, instead taking the form of an effort to reach out to non-Jewish spouses of intermarried couples.
There is also a trend of Orthodox movements pursuing secular Jews in order to give them a stronger Jewish identity so there is less chance of intermarriage. As a result of the efforts by these and other Jewish groups over the past 25 years, there has been a trend (known as the Baal Teshuva movement) for secular Jews to become more religiously observant, though the demographic implications of the trend are unknown. Additionally, there is also a growing rate of conversion to Jews by Choice of gentiles who make the decision to head in the direction of becoming Jews.
Leadership
There is no single governing body for the Jewish community, nor a single authority with responsibility for religious doctrine. Instead, a variety of secular and religious institutions at the local, national, and international levels lead various parts of the Jewish community on a variety of issues.Notable individuals
Jews have made contributions in a broad range of human endeavors, including the sciences, arts, politics, and business. Although Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world's population, over 20% of Nobel Prize laureates have been Jewish, with multiple winners in each field.See also
Notes
References
External links
;InformationCategory:Ancient peoples Category:Ethnic groups in the Middle East Category:Ethno-cultural designations Category:Ethnoreligious groups Category:Religious identity Category:Semitic peoples
Source: http://article.wn.com/view/2013/04/06/Army_trains_our_own_troops_that_Christians_and_Jews_are_proh/
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