Hapoel Tel Aviv FC, the national champion and holder of the State Cup in soccer that is currently preparing for to contend for the first time in its history in the European Champions’ League, plucked another first place award Monday in Europe.

The European Club Association (ECA), with 197 member clubs including the star-studded teams of Barcelona, Milan, and Chelsea, chose Hapoel Tel Aviv as the social action club of the year.

In doing so, Hapoel overcame some of the continent’s club darlings. Hapoel Tel Aviv was ranked ahead of the English clubs Arsenal and Manchester United.

The Israeli club was awarded the honorable distinction for its Mifalot project – for education, development and peace. The project leaders view soccer as an educational tool and a means to expose its participants to a number of different topics. Staff help them advance and achieve their goals.

The Mifalot project was formed 13 years ago. Some 20,000 children have taken part in the project over the years. The project is in operation throughout the country, as well as in the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, and other locations in the world.

In a ceremony held in Geneva that included a number of categories, Inter Milan was awarded the title of Club of the Year.

The ceremony was attended by senior soccer officials, including UEFA President Michel Platini and ECA Chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, who lauded Mifalot as a project changing the face of the Middle East and bringing about peace between children through football. “It brings hope for a better future for our children,” he said.

Source: Ynetnews.com

Israeli Arab singer Mira Awad has been invited to sing before former US President Bill Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Florida on Monday as part of a special ceremony in which Blair will be awarded the Liberty Medal for his efforts to promote peace in Northern Ireland.

Awad’s musical partner Noa, with whom she performed in 2009′s Eurovision Song Contest, was also invited to perform but will not be able to attend.

Among Liberty Medal recipients in past years are former UN chief Kofi Annan, President Shimon Peres, King Hussein of Jordan, former South African President Nelson Mandela, U2 lead singer Bono, American director Steven Spielberg, former Polish President Lech Walesa and former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev.

“It’s really cool being invited to an event of this scale,” Awad says. “I come with the hope that we achieve progress in peace in our own region, as Tony Blair achieved with the Irish. I feel that we are at the same point as Ireland. There are acts for peace and I wish they would succeed. Too much optimism is not a sickness, but a blessing,” she says.

Focusing on music

The singer is currently busy writing and recording her next album, produced by Sony. Awad says most of the songs will be sung in English and others in Arabic and Spanish.

Will you continue performing with Noa?

“Absolutely. We both enjoy it immensly. We are two entirely different artists, with separate careers, but on the other hand there is a very deep connection. In many ways we have turned into one being.”

What about your acting career?

“I want to keep pursuing it, but it’s not easy. I’m going to shoot a new Israeli film soon but I’m putting all my time into music, and that’s why doing theater work is not easy for me.”

You’re hardly recognized as just an Arab artist these days.

“If that’s really true, it brings me great joy. That’s all an artist really wants – not to have people mess with all the outside stuff, but in them as artists with a message.”

Source: Ynetnews.com

A team of researchers from the Hebrew University has developed a treatment that completely destroys HIV-infected human cells in laboratory cultures, according to an article published last month in the scientific journal AIDS Research and Therapy.

The therapy, developed by scientists from the university’s Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences and the Institute of Chemistry, destroys cells infected with HIV without damaging adjacent healthy cells.

There has so far been no therapy that completely destroys HIV-infected cells.

Current treatments involve inhibiting the replication of the virus, which delays the development of AIDS, making AIDS a chronic, yet managed disease. But if treatment with the so-called AIDS “cocktail” is halted or the virus develops immunity to the cocktail, it can begin infecting other cells again.

The new treatment is based on the fact that when the virus infects a cell, its DNA penetrates the cell, which then manufactures new HIV viruses that infect neighboring cells.

“In the usual process the HIV virus injects a maximum of two replications of its genetic material into healthy cells,” said Dr. Abraham Loyter, of the life sciences institute. Loyter, who carried out the research together with Prof. Assaf Friedler, Dr. Aviad Levin and Dr. Zvi Hayouka, explained that peptides, or segments of short proteins, which they developed, interfere with replication and transmit a massive number of replications of the genetic material into the infected cell, triggering the cell’s self-destruction.

“The usual medications kill the virus that has entered the body during infection, and the [peptide] treatment allows cells infected with the genetic load of the virus to be killed,” Loyter said.

When the treatment was applied to human cell cultures, in the laboratories of the Hebrew University campus in Givat Ram in Jerusalem, it caused the infected human cells to disappear within two weeks. The cells did not reappear in the culture for another two weeks, “so it can be concluded that they were destroyed,” Loyter said.

The study examined the effectiveness of the new treatment on the HIV-1 virus, which is the predominant cause of AIDS in developing nations.

The researchers registered a patent this year on their therapy through Yissum, the Hebrew University’s technology transfer body. Yissum is now seeking a commercial partner to continue developing the treatment ahead of the next phase of experimentation, on animals, and later, if its efficacy is proven, on humans.

An estimated 33.4 million people worldwide are carriers of HIV. In Israel, in 2008, 390 new cases were reported, the highest figure in a decade.

The current breakthrough joins other new therapies to fight AIDS. Last year, health authorities in Thailand reported encouraging preliminary results of a U.S.-funded study on humans of a vaccination against AIDS that reduced the chances of infection by a third.

Six weeks ago, researchers in South Africa reported the development of a vaginal gel that prevents replication of the virus and reduces the risk of HIV infection by 54 percent.

Source: Haaretz.com