This woman had a face transplant. She had lost her own when, suicidal, she had overdosed and lay unconscious and unaware that her pet dog had eaten it. She was given a transplant from a woman that may have committed suicide.
Now, a celebrated writer has written her story of her feelings regarding the transplant. The story does not have a pretty face, but it is predictable.
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Meanwhile, Akerman is hauling ALP Golden Haired Child Lindsay Tanner over the coals for Tanners pathetic spray which slurred many eminent Australians, without apology, and, as it turns out, without any truth either. Lindsay had accused an education fund, which had been bipartisan, with being a shell used to send money to the conservative parties. The fund, instead, was doing as it was supposed to, educating Australians about the Constitution.
The accusation and investigation cost Australian taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not a pretty face for Tanner.
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Meanwhile, Gillard and Rudd have been raccously crying that they are being smeared. No one seems to have been able to establish how. Perhaps if they had a policy, one might examine it for smears. One understands that Rudd and Gillard are waiting for the end of the election campaign .. not a pretty face for either.
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Face patient tells of ‘the other woman’ inside her
Charles Bremner
The French woman who received the first partial face transplant has described her difficulty in “living” with the woman whose features she acquired in the pioneering operation.
Isabelle Dinoire, 40, has given her fullest account of her struggle to assume what feels like a new identity, including the difficulties she has in forming a kiss. “One day I said, ‘My nose is itching’. I looked at my daughter and said: ‘That’s nonsense. It’s not my nose. I have a nose that is itching’,” she said. Ms Dinoire has also noticed that a hair had sprouted from her chin. “I had never had one. You knew it’s yours but at the same time ‘she’ is there. I am making her live, but that hair is hers,” she says in Le baiser d’Isabelle (Isabelle’s Kiss), a book by Noëlle Châtelet
Surgeons replaced the nose, lips and chin of Ms Dinoire with those of a 47-year-old woman two years ago. The donor died after hanging herself, according to media reports that have been neither confirmed nor denied by the medical team.
In her only recent interview, last July, Ms Dinoire, from the northern town of Valenciennes, said that she felt she had lost part of her identity.
In the book, to be published this week, Ms Dinoire described the feeling of sharing her body. The book was quoted by the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche. Ms Châtelet, the sister of Lionel Jospin, the former Prime Minister, wrote: “She sometimes feels lost in her quest for an identity reshaped by the hands of experts.”
Ms Dinoire explained the disgust that she initially felt after the operation, carried out to restore features that had been mutilated when her dog mauled her as she slept under the influence of a high dose of sleeping pills.
“Having the inside of the mouth of someone else . . . It didn’t belong to me. It was atrocious,” she said.
Ms Dinoire’s mouth no longer hangs open and her speech has greatly improved. Making the motions of a kiss with her lips remains one of the toughest gestures. Her doctor, identified as Sylvie, told her: “No one is sure whether you will be able to kiss again.”
Rudd’s dirt-trackers
Piers Akerman
SINCE March, Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd and his deputy Julia Gillard have been trying to cow critics into silence by whining to anyone who will listen that they and the ALP are, or will be, victims of a terrible smear campaign orchestrated by secret dirt units within the Coalition.
So far they have been unable to produce any evidence of such a strategy, though they claim it to be the mainstay of the Government’s federal election campaign.
The best they have found is a file of old news clippings which had been shown to the Fairfax journalist Jason Koutsoukis, who reported that they only confirmed Ms Gillard’s “Marxist agenda”, a matter he thought not newsworthy.
If Rudd and Gillard thought those newspaper cuttings constitute a smear campaign they should consult Lindsay Tanner, the MP for Melbourne, who can show them what real mud-slinging looks like.
Tanner, who, frighteningly, would be finance minister to Wayne Swan’s treasurer and Gillard’s industrial relations minister in a Rudd government, on February 13, 2006, launched a spectacular attack under parliamentary privilege on a body named the Constitution Education Fund Australia which had gained deductible gift recipient status in June, 2003, the year it was set up as a bipartisan organisation to educate the public on the role of the Australian Constitution.
In his lengthy speech he made bold claims of a conspiratorial link between CEFA and Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, which shared the same Sydney address. He referred darkly to CEFA and the ACM’s accounts, and tried valiantly to paint a picture of collusion and worse before making the claim: “Only one conclusion can be drawn from these facts: The ACM is engaged in a brazen tax scam with the direct connivance of the Howard Government.
“CEFA is simply a front organisation which exists solely as a filter through which donations to the ACM can become tax deductible . . . it is little more than a shell.
“This is nothing less than a fraud on Australian taxpayers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax which would otherwise be payable by ACM donors has been evaded by the use of this elaborate sham.”
Acknowledging it was “theoretically possible that there is some innocent explanation”, he said, “I find it very hard to conceive of one”.
He demanded the immediate cancellation of CEFA’s tax deductibility and an explanation for “this outrageous scam”. When the Australian Tax Office obliged this ALP frontbencher and member of the potential Rudd gang of four with a confidential tax audit of CEFA, the story was leaked to that experienced investigator of dirt files - Koutsoukis.
Before revealing the outcome of that audit, it must be remembered that Tanner is held up as one of the most experienced and more responsible members of the Rudd team, a man of integrity, a man to be trusted.
When he accused CEFA of being a “shell”, and being a front for “a brazen tax scam”, he was attacking a number of highly respected and honourable Australians including the wounded war hero and RSL chief Major General W.B. “Digger” James, the noted historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey, the arts benefactor Kim Bonython, Justice Lloyd Waddy, a former chief justice of NSW, Sir Laurence Street, the highly successful mining executive Hugh Morgan, Sir David Smith, the widely-respected historian associate professor Greg Melleuish, and the matriarch of Australian philanthropy Dame Elisabeth Murdoch.
He was also attacking fellow Republicans Professor Greg Craven (vice chancellor of the Australian Catholic University), the widely-published historian Dr John Hirst, and the frequently-quoted professor of constitutional law Professor George Williams, who also sat on the CEFA Foundation council at the time, and such distinguished trustees as Sydney constitutional law professor George Winterton, the former Sydney University Chancellor Dame Leonie Kramer, the former Tasmanian governor Sir Guy Greene, and the Honourable Justice Barry O’Keefe.
Oh, and his blanket claims would also have covered CEFA’s patron-in-chief Governor-General Michael Jeffery and the former Australian Test captain Steve Waugh, who was the public face of civics promotion body.
Tanner certainly knew how to hit the biggest possible target when he launched his serious spray and, had any of it been accurate, criminal prosecutions would have followed.
Unfortunately, and I bet you guessed the sad end to this saga, when the ATO completed its comprehensive secret audit in June it found absolutely nothing awry. Not a single breach of the Tax Act.
Not that it wasn’t a thorough investigation, a number of tax officers were involved and CEFA had to divert its resources from providing charitable educational activities to assist them in their fruitless task.
Tanner’s witch hunt cost the Australian taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It sullied the reputations of people of principle who have earned nationwide admiration for their contributions to public life.
But has Tanner paid them the courtesy of an apology? Has he submitted a small mea culpa to Hansard? Has he expressed any shame for his disgraceful conduct? No.
He has not even replied to letter from the national convenor of the ACM, Professor David Flint, sent in June, in which Flint said: “(The) inescapable conclusion is that you made your allegations of criminal conspiracy without any evidence whatsoever, and without any inquiry.
“It seems these allegations were made with reckless indifference as to whether they were true or false. An apology would be gracious, your minimum obligation is to retract.”
And Kevin Rudd, who says he models his life on that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian executed by the Nazis for his role in the resistance against Adolf Hitler, believes the graceless dirt-merchant Tanner is fit for his front bench.
Spare us.
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