Medical marijuana company predicts profits boom

Anticipating $84 million in sales in 2019, Israeli-founded Cannabics seeks investment as it touts treatment for cancer sufferers

By Sue Surkes for The Times of Israel
A company founded by Israelis that has developed a marijuana capsule for cancer sufferers predicts that the legal cannabis industry will outstrip both the US film and organic food industries within five years.

Cannabics Pharmaceuticals estimates that the medical marijuana market has the potential to reach $3.6 million in the US alone, the Globes newspaper reported Monday.

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Will Israel's Natural-Gas Fields Ever Get Developed?

By Arthur Herman for Mosaic

Tens of trillions of cubic feet of gas lie waiting offshore, with the potential to transform the world’s energy map and perhaps even stabilize the Middle East.

What a difference a year makes.

A year ago, the Israeli government was at complete loggerheads with an American company and its Israeli partner over the future of “Leviathan,” Israel’s massive offshore natural-gas reserve. The question was whether either of the two companies, Noble Energy of Houston and the Delek Group of Israel, would be allowed to participate in actually developing the field they had discovered five years earlier. And then, in August, with negotiations stalled, and no other candidates in sight, the Italian energy giant ENI announced the discovery, in Egyptian waters, of an even larger and more easily accessible gas field. Some energy experts were beginning to wonder if Leviathan would ever be developed at all.

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Get to the roots of Israel’s historic trees

By Aviva and Shmuel Bar-Am for The Times of Israel

When Russia took over Bukhara in 1868, it granted the Jewish population religious freedom as well as a monopoly in the silk and woven-goods trade. The more enterprising of them took excellent advantage of the opportunity and became wonderfully affluent. Indeed, when the first Bukharan immigrant reached Jerusalem in the early 1870s, he brought his wife, his children, and a servant to the Holy Land.

By the 1890’s about 200 Bukharan immigrants had reached Jerusalem and all of them lived inside the Old City. But they were crowded, and in 1891 they decided to put establish a neighborhood outside the Old City walls. Its design was unusual for Jerusalem: the plan called for spacious homes on tree-lined boulevards with main roads a generous width of 10.5 meters and side streets five meters wide. When it was complete, the Bukharim neighborhood boasted some of the grandest structures in the city.

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The Secret of Israel's Water Miracle and How It Can Help a Thirsty World

From holistic management to advanced toilets, Israel has pioneered ideas that can help the planet manage its increasingly threatened water sources.

Ruth Schuster for Haaretz


The world's problem with water isn't that it's disappearing. The water is there. The problem is that in many areas, growing populations have less and less water per capita because of crumbling infrastructure leading to massive leaking; short-sighted and self-interested water management, leading to egregious waste, and polluted groundwater. Can ideas from Israel really help solve these problems at a planetary level?

Yes, because in a process lasting decades, Israel achieved something unique. It largely separated its water consumption from Mother Nature. Israel doesn't have some one-stop-shop magic solution, neither desalination (which it didn't invent) nor some breakthrough dreamed up by geniuses in garages. What it has is holistic, centralized water management, designed over decades, from which thirsty areas from California to Egypt can cherry-pick ideas, argues Seth Siegel, author of the best-selling book "Let There Be Water". Why reinvent the wheel when one can emulate it?

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The country’s tastiest chicken will soon be kosher

By Victor Wishna for JTA
LINDSBORG, Kan. (JTA) – Thousands of birds strutted around like rambunctious kids at recess — six varieties of turkey and nearly 40 breeds of chicken, duck and geese.

As soon as a stranger stepped into their dominion, a dozen of the largest toms surrounded the visitor. “They’re just making sure you’re not here to take over the flock,” fourth-generation farmer Frank Reese Jr. explained.

Out on the open Kansas prairie, about 80 miles north of Wichita, Reese’s Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch has become an oasis of what’s known as heritage poultry — healthy and genetically pure breeds of fowl that meet the American Poultry Association’s Standard of Perfection, first codified in 1874.
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