Archive | 2011 | November | 23

Tel Aviv holds its first fashion week in more than 30 years. Alicia Powell reports.

JERUSALEM — Israel’s chief rabbi is bringing home the bacon.

Yona Metzger’s office says it is primed to allow import of an organic goose grown in Spain that tastes like pork. Metzger says three non-Jewish chefs confirm its swinish flavor. Jewish dietary law strictly forbids eating pork. Metzger’s office says there is no Jewish injunction against eating goose, no matter what it tastes like, as long as it is slaughtered according to Jewish ritual.

Secular Israelis have long enjoyed pork at non-kosher restaurants. “Kosher pork” would open new flavors to the observant.

Spokesman Avi Blumenthal said Metzger is eager to begin the importing as soon as the geese reach slaughtering weight. He said the rabbi would see that it passes “all the rabbinical kosher authorities to make sure it gets to Israel.”

Source: Washington Post

NEW YORK (AP) – Ryan Braun sat alone on a balcony in his Malibu home that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, uneasy about his chances of winning the NL Most Valuable Player award.

With the season Los Angeles’ Matt Kemp had, he wasn’t sure the call would come at all.

The phone rang all right, and Braun has been smiling ever since.

Braun was voted the NL MVP after helping the Milwaukee Brewers win their first division title in nearly 30 years.

“I’m not going to pretend like I wasn’t anxious or nervous because I was,” Braun said. “It’s honestly difficult to put into words how much this means to me.”

The left fielder received 20 of 32 first-place votes and 388 points in voting announced Tuesday by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

A nerve-racking morning that began with a solitary drive turned to elation in the California sun.

The 28-year-old Braun shared the news with his brother and girlfriend, who were at the house. He called his parents, then rang good friend Aaron Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers quarterback, and exchanged text messages with Kemp, the runner-up.

“This really is a dream,” Braun said. “This is beyond my wildest dreams to be in this position at this point in my career.”

Kemp earned 10 first-place votes and 332 points after coming close to winning the first Triple Crown since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. Braun’s teammate Prince Fielder finished third with 229 points, and Arizona’s Justin Upton finished fourth with 214 points. Fielder and Upton each received one first-place vote.

St. Louis’ Albert Pujols finished fifth. It was the 11th straight year the three-time MVP was in the top 10 in balloting.

NL Cy Young Award winner Los Angeles’ Clayton Kershaw was 12th in the voting a day after Detroit’s Justin Verlander added the AL MVP to his Cy Young.

“I think he was the single most dominant player in baseball this year,” Braun said of Verlander. “As a position player I’m biased to the fact that I think position players should be at the forefront of the award, but if you honestly look at what he accomplished, how much he meant to that team and how dominant he truly was you cannot make any argument against him winning that award.”

In his fifth year in the big leagues, Braun led the NL with a .597 slugging percentage and had a chance to overtake Jose Reyes for the batting title on the last day of the season but finished second with a .332 average. The four-time All-Star had 33 homers, 111 RBIs, 109 runs scored and stole 33 bases as Milwaukee won a franchise-best 96 games. His 77 extra-base hits was tops in the league.

Kemp led the NL with 39 homers, 126 RBIs and was third in average (.324), but played for the NL West’s third-place Dodgers. He also won a Gold Glove.

“Matt’s one of the best players in the game. No question about it. The season he had will go down as one of the greatest in Dodgers history,” said Braun, who grew up in California rooting for the Dodgers. “If he had won the MVP I certainly couldn’t have argued with him winning. He had a phenomenal year.”

Although Braun and Kemp had similar statistics, Kemp was hindered by the Dodgers’ 82-79 third-place finish in the NL West. The Brewers won the NL Central title, their first division crown since winning the AL East in 1982.

“Without a doubt I think it’s a drastically different experience playing meaningful games down the stretch,” said Braun, the 2007 NL Rookie of the Year.

Braun, in fact, was convinced the Brewers’ first-place finish is what put him over the top with voters.

“If you honestly assess both of our seasons individually I think his numbers are probably better than mine, and I just feel fortunate to have been on the better team,” Braun said. “It’s an individual award, but it’s a result of being part of a special team, a special organization.”

Braun is the first Brewers player to win the MVP award in the National League and first since Robin Yount won in 1989, when Milwaukee was in the AL East. Rollie Fingers (1981) and Yount in 1982 are the other Brewers to take home MVP honors.

“Robin’s the greatest player in Milwaukee Brewers history, so anytime you’re mentioned alongside him it’s a tremendous achievement,” Braun said.

Braun signed a $105 million, five-year contract extension in April, linking him to the Brewers through 2020. He received a $100,000 bonus for winning the MVP.

“This team has been so loyal to me. They believed in me. They drafted me. They helped to develop me, and there would be nothing more meaningful to me than to eventually win a world championship in Milwaukee,” he said. “It would mean a lot more to me than if I went to a large-market team, big-market-team and won two or three championships.”

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/baseball/mlb/11/22/nl.mvp.braun.kemp.ap/index.html#ixzz1eXgAyj4P

American retailer’s stores to be operated through franchisees. Two weeks ago, Sakal opened three Abercrombie & Fitch Brand Factory shops in Israel

Haim Sakal is planning to duplicate the concept of Abercrombie & Fitch stores in Israel – A&F Brand Factory Store – in Russia and India, Calcalist has learned.

Furthermore, he will operate the stores through franchisees rather than through the Sakal chain.

Sakal holds the franchise for Abercrombie & Fitch in Russia, South Africa and Eastern Europe, and currently distributes the company’s products in wholesale in these countries.

A new technique developed by Ben- Gurion University researchers in Israel has generated mouse sperm cells from testicular germ cells in a petri dish. While it will take time to jump to human experimentation, Prof. Mahmoud Huleihel and his research group call their in vitro work a “breakthrough” that could eventually help infertile men who cannot produce sperm, as well as boys before puberty who are at risk of infertility after undergoing aggressive therapies and, at a young age, cannot produce sperm for freezing for later use.

Germ cells give rise to the gametes, which are cells that fuse with other cells in an organism that reproduces sexually.

Huleihel, who is part of the Shraga Segal Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the Faculty of Health Sciences in Beersheba, published an article on the achievement in the Asian Journal of Andrology.

Huleihel and his team, which pioneered the technique, used a threedimensional culture system (SACS) on a bed of agar (processed seaweed) to generate the sperm.

The study was performed in cooperation with Prof. Eitan Lunenfeld at Soroka University Medical Center and Prof. Stefan Schlatt of the University of Münster in Germany.

The researchers said SACS has the capacity to induce testicular germ cells to reach the final stages of spermatogenesis and have a normal shape. The mice who were experimented on were only seven days old.

Huleihel said that most attempts to culture male germ cells have used twodimensionalcell culture systems. But their unique three-dimensional cell culture system using soft agar “is more representative” of natural conditions to which a cell is exposed in an organ. In the past, the three-dimensional SACS has been used to investigate proliferation and differentiation of bone marrow and blood cells in vitro.

Source: Ben Gurion University

Want to study at BGU, check this page out for information!

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