Israel’s dubious meat industry gets more sickening: we’ve already covered exposes of poultry fed with feces and pumped with toxic contaminants. Now it’s all about beef and how it’s frozen, treated laundry style and then resold as fresh.
Massive solar panel factory opens in Qatar, long overdue
Qatar Solar Energy has unveiled a massive factory that will produce high quality solar panels that make the most of the desert sun, a boon not just for the emirate, but potentially for the entire Middle East.
Asbestos fire survival guide
An important business community in Bnei Brak (Ramat Gan) outside of Tel Aviv has been made toxic by an asbestos fire that broke out last Wednesday. The asbestos fire, which ended up smouldering for days, took place in a one-story building with an asbestos roof that was used to store tires, clothing and electric bicycles.
Dual gender creatures in nature makes us think twice about gender bending
Listen up class. There’s a mind-blowing biological anomaly called bilateral gynandromorphism, a condition where an animal or insect contains both male and female characteristics, evenly split smack down the middle. The end result is a creature that is literally half male and half female. It’s rare and most frequently spotted in birds, insects and crustaceans.
Gorgeous geodesic dome burned down for Las Fallas festival in Spain
The Castielfabib community of Valencia put on an especially exciting show during this year’s Las Fallas festival in Spain. An annual celebration that culminates on St. Joseph’s Day – (the patron saint of carpenters, of course), “The Fires” involves an entire community working together. And fire. Check out the geodesic dome that went up in flames.
Students tackle ‘space elevator’ design challenge in Israel
In 1895, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky proposed to build a space elevator that could reach from Earth into space; it never got off the ground, but in 1957 another Russian – Yuri Artsutanov – came up with a more plausible idea. It wasn’t built either, but now he has a chance to judge a team of Israeli students who are tackling the concept anew.
Related: Ride on Japan’s space elevator
Artsutanov proposed to build the space elevator from a geostationary satellite base. His would have been anchored to Earth with a cable and a counterweight that would have kept the cable’s center of gravity in sync with the satellite base. A simulation video is created by a Japanese company, Obayashi, below.
The engineer never did see his idea come to fruition, but now, more than half a century later, Artsutanov has the opportunity to judge a team of students at Israeli’s Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, where the 12th annual Technobrain competition is taking place.
Tasked with building a device that will stand at an 80 degree angle to the ground and climb to a height of 82 feet, the students are not permitted to use any kind of open flame or combustible energy.
Related: Polluting the final frontier with space junk
“The challenge requires contestants to also slide down from this height while lifting a “space elevator” carrying practical cargo from the other side of the pulley,” according to Israel 21C.
The pulley represents the Space Station’s location, while the mission course is said to emulate the space elevator’s movement.
Taking place on 18 June, 2014, the competition will see three father and son teams – all graduates of Technion – try their hand at perfecting a concept that first originated over a century ago.
We look forward to learning about Artsutanov’s response to the student designs. Hopefully they will make him proud. At the very least, $1,440 and $865 in prizes for the winning designs are up for grabs.
Spiraling Plantagon vertical farms grow more food on a small urban footprint
Food insecurity is daunting, particularly in cities. And while industrial vertical farming offers a solution, the absence of chickens and may and other signs of farm life casts suspicion on this method of tech-based food production. Plantagon aims to bridge that divide with a solution that can be implemented on just about any building, anywhere.
Tunisia’s phosphate town is dying over our addiction to phosphorus
Today Redeyef, Tunisia, is quite a scene: it’s a decrepit French colonial houses are surrounded by mountains of black phosphate sand, radioactive water lakes and its inhabitants, the vast majority unemployed, walk around with yellowish brown toothy smiles.
Holoscenes incites flood of reaction to climate change
Holoscenes is a public art and performance installation that is a visual response to climate change. It’s centered around three people-sized aquariums that flood and drain and re-flood using powerful hydraulics that move 12 tons of water per minute.
Phinergy tests range-extending aluminum-air battery for EVs in Montreal
The world’s third largest producer of aluminum has teamed up with Israel’s Phinergy to produce a new battery that would make electric vehicles as cost effective as gas- or diesel-fueled vehicles and significantly extends vehicle range.
Original Unverpackt: zero plastic, zero packaging at new Berlin supermarket
We’re accustomed to seeing food in bulk at souqs throughout the Middle East, but shoppers always leave with a legion of plastic bags to carry their goods. There is an alternative though, and Berlin’s first waste-free supermarket, the Original Unverpackt, shows how it’s done.
Opus Tower: Zaha Hadid’s latest luxury composition in Dubai
We’d love to tell you that the Middle East’s most famous contemporary architect is doing great green things for the region, but we can’t. Instead, Zaha Hadid’s latest project in Dubai, the Opus Hotel and Office Tower designed in collaboration with Meliá Hotels International, may well be among her most extravagant.
China buys Israel’s largest food producer putting Zionists on edge
Sensational food production issues in Israel are covered by Green Prophet. These issues have included exposure of cruelty in the meat industry; frozen fish from China that are pumped with water and Chemicals, and meat being fed with feces and pumped with toxic contaminants.
It now appears that the Chinese are not only adding chemicals to food products being sold in Israel.
The controlling interest in the country’s largest food producing company, Tnuva, has just been bought by China’s Bright Food Consortium. The Chinese company has agreed to purchase 56 percent of dairy firm Tnuva from the
private equity house Apax.
The Chinese food giant will now have control of an Israeli food company that has been an iconic household word since even before the founding of the state in 1948.
Former Mossad head, Ephraim HaLevy, voiced his reservations of the sale to a local newspaper YNet, saying: “the company buying Tnuva is owned by the Chinese government. This is not a company owned by a private Chinese businessman. This allows the Chinese government to do make immediate decisions as it sees fit.”
How this Chinese acquisition may affect Israel’s largest dairy and food producer still remains to be seen. It could result in a virtual flooding of the Israel food market by Chinese food products, some of which are of dubious quality.
This brings to mind the case of the previously mentioned frozen fish products that are “pumped with water and chemicals” to make the fish appear fresher and of better quality. Everyone knows that China’s lax laws create products that smart consumers will not want to eat. Or perhaps they will export Israel’s high quality milk products to a growing appetite for such things in China. Either way when a foreign entity has control over a local food source we think that it cannot be good for local consumers.
Consider just local issues like this: Tnuva’s Adom Adom slaughterhouse in Beit Shean (photo) is still under scrutiny following adverse publicity it received for excessive animal cruelty following the Kolboteck TV exposure.
A large food producing icon company like Tnuva has a responsibility to the public it sells its products too. This should be even more important than the profit motives on behalf of company directors. But we guess this is why Israeli activists were protesting the issues of food and housing in the summer of 2011.
Some commenters like David Rosenberg on Haaretz says that the public unwelcome of the Chinese buy out smacks of racism. They point out:
“But then again, the peanut-flavored snack Bamba is just as Israeli, and its maker, Osem, has been controlled by Switzerland’s Nestle since 2000. Telma Corn Flakes and Blue-Band margarine have been made by the Anglo-Dutch firm Unilever since it bought their Israeli manufacturer, also in 2000.”
We wonder how activists will respond to Tnuva products now.
Read more about Israel’s food issues:
Israel’s Cruel Meat Industry Exposed by Watchdog TV Show
Israeli Meat Fed With Feces and Pumped With Toxic Contaminants
Israel’s Frozen Fish Processed in China and Pumped With Water and Chemicals
Photo of Tnuva’s Adom Adom meat packing house by Yaron Kaminsky/Haaretz