HAIFA, Israel, November 24 /PRNewswire/ --

- Break-even third quarter with 24% increase in EBITDA YoY

- Net income of $73.5 in 9 months 2008

- Improvement in all operating parameters and net refining margin

- Lower net income in Q3 due to sharp decrease in fuel prices

- Board of Directors declares NIS 200 million dividend

Oil Refineries Ltd. (TASE:ORL.TA) (Oil Refineries or the Company) announced today its financial results for three and nine month periods ending September 30, 2008.

Third Quarter HIGHLIGHTS (Compared to third quarter 2007)

MOSCOW, November 24 /PRNewswire/ --

Platts, a leading global provider of energy and commodities information and a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP), today announced it is joining forces with Interfax Information Services Group, a leading source of real-time business news from Russia and the CIS, to launch EnergoScan-Interfax Platts (http://www.energoscan.ru), a new Russian-language publication serving the needs of Russia's energy, business, and financial communities.

The Milagro collaboration, comprised of scientists from 16 institutions across the United States, has discovered two nearby regions with an unexpected excess of cosmic rays.   This is the second finding of a source of galactic cosmic rays relatively near Earth announced in the past week. In the November 20 issue of Nature, ATIC an international experiment led by LSU scientists announced finding an unexpected surplus of cosmic-ray electrons from an unidentified but relatively close source.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, November 24 /PRNewswire/ -- 'MegaFon-Moscow', a mobile communications operator, has presented the new 'Kaleidoscope' service to subscribers. It is based on the i-Cell solution supplied by Bercut Ltd. The first months of commercial operation revealed wide popularity of the service among subscribers.

'MegaFon' is the first mobile operator that introduces advanced technologies and services to Moscow citizens. In collaboration with Bercut Ltd., we managed to create an original and useful service that enables subscribers always to keep abreast of events, Denis Irz, the Director of the Department of New Technologies and Projects of the 'MegaFon-Moscow' network, said.

SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS, France and LUND, Sweden, November 24 /PRNewswire/ --

- The Open-Plug Software Suite for Mobile Phones Will be Rolled out in Large Numbers Across Europe and Asia

Open-Plug, the specialist in software development environments for mass-market mobile phones, announces today that its ELIPS application suite is embedded in Sony Ericsson's J132 mobile phone. The J132 is a talk and text phone with FM radio and stereo hands free kit.

We are very proud to be cooperating with Sony Ericsson, one of the top leaders in the mobile phone industry, said Eric Baissus, CEO of Open-Plug. This is an additional demonstration of the maturity and performance of our ELIPS solution.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, November 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Swedish researchers at Taurus Energy, SEKAB, Chalmers Technical University and the University of Lund have signed an agreement on development and large scale implementation of a new improved bio-technical process for production of ethanol from lignocellulose feedstocks. The development is based on Taurus' yeast technology for fermentation of both six- and five-carbon sugars.

Ethanol based on lignocellulose is a second generation bio-fuel. It is the most efficient fuel in terms of reducing dependence on fossil-fuels as well as the impact on environment without affecting food supplies.

LONDON, November 24 /PRNewswire/ --

- Managed Hosting can Boost in-Country Google Rankings by up to 30%, Helping Ensure ROI for International Search Marketing

- Local hosting boosts search results for international sites - .com domains without local hosting lose out on up to 30% of potential traffic - Local hosting, Virtual local hosting and CDN most effective for boosting search engine visibility - Full report available here (http://www.ntteuropeonline.com/fileadmin/media/PDF/reports/Effective_Dig... Host_Close_Report_Summary_-_12.11.08.pdf)

The global economic turmoil has started having an impact on the wind energy industry in Europe. Some companies are cutting down forecasts and production for 2009 and the market is showing the first signs of slowdown.

The current economic situation is slowly affecting the wind energy industry, remarks Frost Sullivan Research Analyst Gouri Nambudripad. "We are going to see a slowing down of the double-digit growth rates that were witnessed in the past few years.

Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute writing in Nature Structural&Molecular Biology say they have figured out how a macromolecular machine is able to unwind the long and twisted tangles of DNA within a cell's nucleus so that genetic information can be "read" and used to direct the synthesis of proteins, which have many specific functions in the body.

You've heard it before.   According to the laws of physics, bees can't fly.   Yet fly they do.   And British zoologist Sir James Gray noticed something strange about dolphins in 1936.  He had observed the sea mammals swimming at a swift rate of more than 20 miles per hour, but his studies had concluded that the muscles of dolphins simply weren't strong enough to support those kinds of speeds. The conundrum came to be known as "Gray's Paradox." 

For decades the puzzle prompted much attention, speculation, and conjecture in the scientific community. But now, armed with cutting-edge flow measurement technology, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have tackled the problem and conclusively solved Gray's Paradox.