Free Republic

On Sunday night, Melania Trump spoke at the Ford Theatre’s annual gala, where she served as honorary chairperson. It was her first major public appearance after her lengthy, and still unexplained, disappearance from the public eye this past month. The strangeness of this saga reminds us just how much the workings of this administration resemble classic Hollywood thrillers such as Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and Rebecca or George Cukor’s Gaslight—all mystery stories surrounding a dead or missing woman, and the desperate anxiety, even near-madness, experienced by another woman trying to solve the mystery, as she grapples with physical danger as...

Dutch scientists and engineers have taken a big step towards developing a bionic kidney that could one day potentially replace the need for dialysis or transplantation. They have tested a "living membrane" made with human cells that would be at the heart of a functional artificial kidney implant. The Device Filtered Out Waste, The Same Way As A Real Kidney The team presented the advancement at at ASN Kidney Week 2016 November 15-20 at McCormick Place in Chicago, IL. They demonstrated this activity by attaching human renal proximal tubular epithelial cells on the surfaces of artificial hollow structures. These cultured...

In Brief Japanese researchers have successfully grown kidneys from stem cells that worked as they were supposed to after being transplanted into rats and pigs. The Breakthrough With all the parts, grown, the kidney was placed inside a rat, then the pathway was added, followed by the bladder they’d grown—the new bladder was then connected to the rat’s native bladder. After sewing up the rat, they found the whole system worked. The team then repeated what they had done with a much larger animal, one much closer in size to humans—a pig—and found the same results. The paper was published...

A pro-life group that monitors the use of cells from babies victimized by abortions is today highlighting a biotech company, Senomyx, which it says produces artificial flavor enhancers using aborted fetal cell lines to test their products. The group Children of God for Life is calling for a public boycott of major food companies partnering with Senomyx. Debi Vinnedge, the director of the pro-life organization, tells LifeNews.com today that, in 2010, her group wrote to Senomyx CEO Kent Snyder and pointed out that moral options for testing their food additives could and should be used. But when Senomyx ignored her...

Dr. Leon R. Kass, the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago and former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics under former President George W. Bush, has written a report entitled “The Meaning of Life – In the Laboratory”. Kass discusses the morality surrounding the US government’s funding of “research on human embryonic stem cells, cells derived from early embryos produced by in vitro fertilization in assisted-reproduction clinics.” According to the report, the use of human embryos is justified by the advancements of science which demands that...

LARGO, Florida, July 15, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A biomedical firm that uses fetal cell lines in flavor technology has removed from its website the names of organizations that use their products, according to the pro-life group Children of God for Life (COGFL). Senomyx has been called out by the organization for using HEK-293 (human embryonic kidney) cells in the research and development of their artificial flavor enhancers, despite a pro-life consumer backlash. Among Senomyx’s partnering companies is PepsiCo, which has been targeted for boycott based on its use of the flavor technology. In a recent response to customer letters, PepsiCo...

I have received a few requests from pro-lifers like Vicki:Can you provide some clarity to the Pepsi/cells from aborted babies controversy.  I cannot sort out whether this is valid or not. Yes and NoBottom line: There are no aborted embryonic or fetal cells in any of PepsiCo’s final products.But: Aborted cells are used in the development of artificial flavor enhancers by biotech company Senomyx, with which PepsiCo signed a four-year, $30 million agreement in 2010 for research and development. No Pepsi products containing Senonymx flavor enhancers should be expected until 2013.Senomyx’s disputed cell line is HEK-293, derived from the kidney...

A technician worked for a company partnered with Planned Parenthood to harvest fetal tissue said there’s “incentive to try and get the hard stuff ‘cause you’re going to get more money,” in latest Planned Parenthood undercover video. “For whatever we could procure, they would get a certain percentage,” said Holly O’Donnell, ex-procurement technician for StemExpress, LLC. GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING: latest undercover Planned Parenthood video The new, graphic video from Center for Medical Progress appears shows technicians using tweezers to pick through aborted fetal tissue for baby parts. After one person in the video picks out a pair of intact kidneys...

Phosphates in food are an all too common occurrence these days. Phosphates, usually labelled under the generic term sodium phosphate, are added to food for a variety of reasons. Phosphates in food are used as texturizers to change the look or feel of a food and to increase the shelf life of a food. Phosphates are also used as an emulsifier to mix two foods together that would otherwise not mix. For example, a food product with added oil may contain an emulsifier to stop the oil from separating from the main food. Phosphates in foods are sometimes used as...

PARIS (Reuters) - The CIA rejected as fantasy claims in a new book that it tried to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Osama bin Laden just two months before the September 11, 2001 airliner attacks against the United States. Richard Labeviere, author of "The Corridors of Terror," released on Thursday, says the CIA's Dubai station chief approached bin Laden while the al Qaeda leader was being treated for a serious kidney complaint in the United Arab Emirates. He said the meeting took place in the American Hospital in Dubai on July 12, barely eight weeks before al Qaeda militants slammed...

<p>Europe's most poverty stricken residents, from the corners of countries like Belarus and the Ukraine,are being lured by easy money and empty promises to donate vital organs to smugglers.</p> <p>Bloomberg reports the practice is becoming a near epidemic in Israel where religious practices keep the organ donor pool at one of the lowest level in developed countries.</p>

The conflict that raged throughout the former Yugoslavia was met by a wall of silence when it came to important issues. These important issues apply to America and the United Kingdom supporting Islamists in a brutal civil war in Bosnia and then installing a new nation by ignoring international law in Kosovo. Also, is it credible to believe that the vast majority of major news agencies and national governments did not know about thousands of Islamists in Europe who were sent to slit the throats and behead Orthodox Christians? Shoeless Holbrooke sits with Muslim Albanian gunmen that ran the organ...

Two Jerusalem residents have been arrested on suspicion of organ trafficking in an affair cleared for publication on Thursday. The police know of at least 10 Israelis who agreed to donate a kidney, most of them due to financial difficulties. Jerusalem Police investigators waited for the two suspects, Sami Shem-Tov and Dmitry Orenstein, at the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem on Sunday. They are believed to have arrived there to perform a tissue analysis on two other people. According to the suspicions, the two published newspaper ads offering to mediate in kidney donations. They would then connect between a...

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum claimed to be in the business of buying and selling real estate, but he really bought and sold human kidneys for transplant, according to a federal complaint filed Thursday. The 58-year-old Brooklyn man was accused of trafficking in human organs, after a sting by an undercover FBI agent who agreed to pay $160,000 for a kidney from a live Israeli donor for her sick New Jersey "uncle." Investigators said Rosenbaum bragged about doing "quite a lot" of transplants over the last 10 years. "I am what you call a matchmaker," the complaint said the man, also known...

Such accusations give us a window into the mind of the accuser. It isn’t a pretty sight. Rather than hoping that conservatives develop kidney failure, liberals should worry about heart failure. Being heartless is an odd quality for those who claim to be “caring” and “tolerant.”

Sick

Doses of vitamin B1 (thiamine) can reverse early kidney disease in people with type 2 diabetes, research shows. The team from Warwick University tested the effect of vitamin B1, which is found in meat, yeast and grain, on 40 patients from Pakistan. The treatment stopped the loss of a key protein in the urine, the journal Diabetologia reports. Charity Diabetes UK called the results "very promising" - but said it was too early for any firm conclusions.

TEHRAN — Iranian students are offering rewards totaling a million dollars for the execution of three top Israeli military officers over the deadly strikes on Gaza, and they are encouraging fellow Iranians to donate their kidneys to raise the funds, the student news agency ISNA reported on Monday. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Mossad spy agency director Meir Dagan and military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin are the targets of the bounty. They are blamed for last month's assassination of Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mughniyeh. The rewards were announced by the Justice Seeking Students Group on Sunday at a ceremony in Tehran...

NEW DELHI: The world’s most common procedure for clearing blocked kidney arteries may actually end up severely damaging kidney function. For the first time ever, researchers from North Carolina’s Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Centre have shown that the debris of cholesterol and plaques, released during angioplasty and stenting of kidney arteries, get lodged in crucial blood vessels and impair kidney function. After analysing 28 angioplasty cases, researchers used a protection device to temporarily block the vessel at the site of the angioplasty and stenting. After the procedure, and while the protection system was still in place, researchers took a...

A controversial Dutch reality TV show featuring a contest to win a kidney was a hoax, producers Endemol have admitted. The Big Donor Show was supposed to have featured a terminally-ill woman choosing a recipient for her kidneys. However, at the last minute the programme's producers, who also make Big Brother, revealed on air that the woman starring on the reality show was a healthy actress. But the contestants trying to win the kidneys are genuine and are still in need of organs. All knew the programme was a hoax before they agreed to participate. Programme makers Endemol said their...