FYI
WASHINGTON — Israel is greeting news of an oil discovery with a simple message to prospectors: The Dead Sea is open for business.[excerpt]That was the reaction this week from the Jewish state's infrastructure minister upon hearing the news that the Israeli company Ginko had struck black gold. "It is an encouraging sign," Benyamin Ben-Eliezer told the Jerusalem Post. "We are checking the entire area and we are opening the whole region for drilling. We will give our full support to any company that wants to try."
Compared with the oil fields of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, the discovery near the Dead Sea is quite small. But it marks a significant deposit of oil and natural gas for Israel, which has been lured in the past by the potential of oil deposits off the coast of Gaza and elsewhere, only to find relatively dry hole