THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† FBI Lacked Jaundiced Eye Before Cutting Deal With Gangster Needing Liver Transplant: Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) has written to the University of California, Los Angeles, requesting details about three alleged Japanese gangsters who received liver transplants – one of whom got a visa to enter the U.S. with the help of the FBI, reports The Associated Press. “While surgeons do not seek to pass moral judgment on the patients they treat, Americans hope at the very least that foreign criminal figures wait in line along with the rest of us,” wrote Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. He also requested that the FBI explain its role, as well as asked the Department of Health and Human Services, a private hospital accreditation group and the United Network for Organ Sharing about rules governing organ transplantation. Transplanting American organs into the bodies of foreign patients is not against U.S. transplant rules, even if it means American patients die while waiting for organs, and doctors argue it is unethical for them to make moral judgments about a recipient’s “worthiness.”
† Depends Whose Ox Is Gored (second item): Using stem cells from umbilical cord blood and bone marrow – sources of undifferentiated stem cells that do not require the destruction of human embryos or the creation of animal-human chimeras (third item) - University of Minnesota Medical School researchers say they have cured 2-year-old Nate Liao of Minneapolis of recessive epidermolysis bullosa, a rare and fatal genetic disorder, reports the Los Angeles Times:
For the first time in his life [he] is wearing normal clothes, eating food that has not been pureed, and playing with his siblings. …
The team later treated Nate's 5-year-old brother, Jacob, and is preparing to treat 9-month-old Sarah Rose Mooreland of Folsom, Calif. Hopes are high for them as well.
Previously, the only available treatment for the condition, which affects 1 in 100,000 children, was wrapping their ultra-fragile skin in bandages to prevent blistering.
† Judge Jails 14 Over Ringing Cell Phone: The NY Court of Appeals unanimously ruled to uphold the recommendation by the state Commission on Judicial Conduct to remove City Court Judge Robert M. Restaino of Niagara Falls from the bench for “indiscriminately” jailing 46 defendants on March 11, 2005 when none of them admitted to owning a cell phone that rang in his courtroom, reports New York Law Journal. In a per curiam ruling, the appellate court held that Restaino “deprived them of their liberty without due process, exhibited insensitivity, indifference and a callousness so reproachable that his continued presence on the Bench cannot be tolerated” and noted that he had “more than 46 chances to correct himself and failed to do so.”
† All The News That’s Fart To Print (third item): NZ scientists have mapped the genomes of sheep and cows, located the genes that cause belching and flatulence in these ruminant animals and developed an “inoculation” to cut down on these emissions, reports The Telegraph of London:
Sheep, cattle, goats and deer produce large quantities of gas through belching and flatulence, as their multiple stomachs digest grass. …
The 45 million sheep and 10 million cattle in New Zealand burped and farted about 90 percent of that country's methane emissions, according to government figures.
A signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, by 2012 NZ is obligated to reduce greenhouse gases 5.2 percent below 1990 levels.
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