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(Medical Xpress) -- Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a way to stimulate a rat’s stem cells after a liver transplant as a means of preventing rejection of the new organ without the need for lifelong immunosuppressant drugs. The need for anti-rejection medicines, which carry serious side effects, is a major obstacle to successful long-term transplant survival in people. With a combination of a very low, short-term dose of an immunosuppressive drug to prevent immediate rejection and four doses of a medication that frees the recipient’s stem cells from the bone marrow to seek out and populate the donor organ, the...

A Koreatown real estate developer faces nearly $184,000 in fines for allegedly making illegal contributions to the 2009 reelection campaign of L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The city Ethics Commission meets Tuesday to decide how large a fine to hand Alexander Hugh, who was indicted by a grand jury earlier this year on charges that he conspired to circumvent campaign contribution limits, procured false documents and committed forgery. Hugh has asked the five-member commission for leniency, saying he suffered major financial setbacks in recent years and has been "deeply" humiliated by reports in the Korean and mainstream media. ... Prosecutors said...

President Barack Obama will raise money in early October with a Missouri businessman whose company benefited from a $107 million federal tax credit to develop a wind power facility in his state. Tom Carnahan, a scion of Missouri’s most prominent Democratic political family, is listed on Obama’s campaign website as a host of a $25,000-per-person fundraiser to be held in St. Louis on October 4. His energy development firm, Wind Capital Group, was helped by a sizable credit authorized in the stimulus, for an energy project in northwest Missouri.

Billionaire Obama fundraiser George Kaiser visited the White House 16 times over the past 3 years, and is caught in the middle of the Solyndra scandal as the company’s chief investor and prime beneficiary of the debt restructuring approved by the Obama Administration earlier this year. This has lead to the obvious question of whether Kaiser leveraged his political connections to obtain federal stimulus funding, and preferential treatment, but surely there might be a less nefarious explanation for Kaiser’s White House visits, right? Nah…

Executives from solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, which received over a half a billion dollars in loan guarantees from the Obama administration before filing for bankruptcy last week, are in negotations with the House Energy and Commerce Committee to openly testify before Congress next week, according to Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., the chairman of the panel's subcomittee on oversight and investigations. The company's president and chief executive, Brian Harrison, and W.G. Stover, Jr., its chief financial officer, were asked to testify as part of tomorrow's committee hearing on the questionable loans, which have embroiled the Obama administration in what Stearns deemed...

Via Andrew Lawton at Landmark Report: One of Gibson’s leading competitors is C.F. Martin & Company. The C.E.O., Chris Martin IV, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400 in contributions to Democratic candidates and the DNC over the past couple of elections (though, to be fair, he did donate a whopping $750 to Republican Congressmen in the 90s.) According to C.F. Martin’s catalog, several of their guitars contain ''East Indian Rosewood.' In case you were wondering, that is the exact same wood in at least ten of Gibson’s guitars. If true, it adds another piece to an increasingly disturbing puzzle.

Full title: Panic In DC As Starbucks' Schultz Calls For CEO Boycott Of Campaign Donations, Urges Americans To Go On Strike Against Their Politicians In today's most underreported news of the day, which could potentially have the biggest impact on the future of America, none other than America's CEOs, or at least one of them: Starbucks' Howard Schultz, has mass blasted an email to fellow CEOs asking for a consensual boycott on donating to political campaigns in order to encourage the nation's muppets, elsewhere idiotically called "leaders", to solve America's budget and debt impasse. Bloomberg quotes from the CEO's e-mail...

LONDON – A small plane carrying a liver for transplant crashed and burst into flames at England's Birmingham Airport Friday. Two crew members were injured, but rescuers managed to salvage the donor organ and rush it to a nearby hospital West Midlands Police Chief Inspector Matt Markham said the privately owned Cessna made a "hard landing" and caught fire just after 3:30 p.m. (1530GMT, 10:30 a.m. EST). He said visibility in the area, 120 miles (195 kilometers) north of London, was "appalling" because of thick fog. An airport spokesman said the plane, flying from Belfast, clipped an antenna as it...

Some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors met Tuesday afternoon with influential party figures such as AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, organizer Joan Fitz-Gerald and former White House aide Van Jones to discuss the lessons and implications of the GOP’s landslide midterm election victory. The meeting – organized by a group of wealthy, politically active liberals called the Democracy Alliance – took place at Washington’s swank Mandarin Oriental hotel, where off-duty police officers and other security patrolled the halls looking for reporters and other uninvited guests, who were escorted from the premises. "The agreement is that everything that goes on here...

It might be a good idea for Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele to start screening his calls. Last week, the embattled GOP chairman took a call at his home from someone he thought was a prospective GOP donor and, during the conversation, dismissed the idea that former Sen. Norm Coleman might be after his job. "Norm is an old friend. Norm is not going to challenge me for RNC chairman," Steele said. "If he does, I'll put my record up against anyone who comes after me."

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has been a faithful Democratic donor over the past decade, lavishing nearly $15,000 on candidates from Barack Obama to Al Gore - a generous habit that may spark some fireworks at her confirmation hearings, experts said. “Other people whom Obama has tapped for other positions have given far more, but I think the question over potential conflicts could be raised by senators,” said Michael Beckle, a spokesman for Centers for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan watchdog organization that tracks campaign donations and lobbying.

Still tracking down that news but one thing is clear: he wasn't a Tea Partier!There are reports that Faisal Shahzad, the failed Time Square bomber was a registered Democrat in Connecticut and may be a donor to Obama's campaign. This comes after the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg openly speculated that the bomber might be “somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the health care bill or something." Coming on the heels of repeated warnings from Obama, Bill Clinton and others that Tea Parties might lead to violence it was only natural for libs to assume this attack...

The billionaire hedge fund manager at the center of an alleged fraud hatched at Goldman Sachs, a leading investment bank, has given tens of thousands of dollars to both parties. Campaign fundraising records show that John A. Paulson, founder and chairman of the hedge fund Paulson & Co., gave $30,400 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in June, qualifying him as a major Democratic donor. He also gave $2,300 to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) reelection campaign in February of last year and $4,800 to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) last April, according to records filed at...

Talk radio is no longer the only outlet for metro Atlanta commuters opposed to President Barack Obama's policies.

WASHINGTON – Former President Bill Clinton's charity released a donor list Friday under an agreement with President Barack Obama to prevent conflicts with Hillary Rodham Clinton's role as secretary of state, but it failed to identify who gave in 2009, her first year in the Cabinet post.

Gelbaum said in a statement. "My investments in alternative, clean energy companies have placed me in a highly illiquid position as a result of the general credit crisis in the American and world financial systems." (Click link above for column) Oh goodness, I hope that someone else steps in and fills the gap because we desperately need someone to continue the desecration of everything we hold dear. We need more people to spit on the graves of our veterans by removing crosses that have served as war memorials for the past 75 years. We need someone to remove Christian symbols...

A liver transplant recipient was given a public intoxication warning Monday afternoon after he registered a 0.39 percent blood-alcohol level, according to La Crosse police reports. The 34-year-old man was found on a curb at Springbrook Way and Cliffside Drive about 3 p.m., reports stated. He could not stand or walk unassisted when a family member took him home, police noted. He was taken to Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center for detoxification.

Scrambling to get 60 seconds out of every minute, Katie Meacham finally got the boyfriend to take her for a carriage ride in Central Park. He hated it, she reports. “He said, ‘You know this is a pity ride, don’t you?’ ” she said, laughing. Even though she is just 26, her days and time are at a premium. Ms. Meacham lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but she is also a citizen of another country: cancer land. She has a kind of aggressive lymphoma, a disease that ruins the blood.

China has inaugurated a voluntary organ donor program, hoping to overhaul a system that now harvests the vast majority of its organs from black-market sellers and executed prisoners and leaves millions of ailing people without hope of getting a transplant. The new program, run by the national Red Cross Society with help from China’s Health Ministry, was reported by the state-run English-language newspaper China Daily on Wednesday. The newspaper quoted the vice minister of health, Huang Jiefu, as saying the goal was to create an organ donation system that “will benefit patients regardless of social status and wealth.” At least...

WASHINGTON – A day after his White House meeting with President Barack Obama, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the United States a "deadbeat" donor to the world body while making the made the rounds on Capitol Hill. Ban's criticism Wednesday of the U.N.'s single biggest backer irked some members of the House Foreign Relations Committee. They were generally supportive of his leadership but voiced concern about U.N. efforts in areas from Sudan to Somalia. "He used the word 'deadbeat' when it came to characterizing the United States. I take great umbrage (over) that," Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the panel's senior Republican, said...