Israel Active

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Indian Communication and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal met in New Delhi on Wednesday, and agreed to establish a joint program to bring 100 Indian post-doctoral students to Israeli universities.

Israeli and Italian Air Forces held a large-scale exercise in Southern Israel. In last week’s exercise Italy’s (and Europe’s) most advanced fighter jet the Eurofighter Typhoon participated in sorties alongside Israeli F-15 and F-16 fighters from bases all over the country.

“For the very first time you heard an agreement between an Israeli and a Palestinian minister,” Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of Friends of the Earth Middle East, told The Jerusalem Post after the opening session of the first-ever Ashdod Sustainability Conference

The IDF is issuing thousands of entry permits to allow Palestinian Christians to travel between Israel, Gaza, Judea and Samaria for the entire holiday season.

Israel’s Alpine soldiers this year again took Palestinian Arab children suffering with cancer on a trip to Mount Hermon.

The Negev and Galilee Regional Development Ministry will contribute NIS 6 million to the total NIS 22m cost of project Project Wadi Attir – a future ecological community that combines Bedouin values with modern renewable technology and farming expertise.

Representatives from both countries plus Indonesia, Bangladesh and Tunisia visited the KKL-JNF booth at UN’s Climate Change conference in Durban. Others included Brazil, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Peru, Togo and eleven African states.

Google has launched its voice search for Apple's iPhones and Android in Hebrew and Arabic. The upgrade is significant; until now voice identification software could not handle Hebrew, and had to cope with Hebrew-accented English. Users will be able to search the internet by talking directly into their phones.

A delegation of Israeli mohels (ritual circumcisors) has just returned from a two-week trip to Africa. They prepared the UN medical team UNAIDS for their five-year program to circumcise an estimated 20 million African men in order to prevent the spread of the AIDS virus.

Hideo Sato first came to Israel in 1977 as a student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. He addressed Israeli President Shimon Peres in fluent, flawless Hebrew, correctly pronouncing the letter “resh,” which many Japanese find difficult. New envoys from South Korea, Myanmar (Burma), Macedonia and Paraguay also presented their credentials. Korea’s Kim Il Soo said his predecessor had impressed upon him that he was going to a very important nation.