A man who underwent the world’s first face and double-hand transplant in April after being disfigured in an accident has died, hospital officials said on Monday. The man, in his 30s, died of cardiac arrest while undergoing a follow-up operation on June 8, said Laurent Lantieri, the surgeon who performed the groundbreaking transplant near Paris. “He developed a facial infection a few weeks after his operation, and during an operation to try to tackle the infection he suffered cardiac arrest,” Lantieri told RTL radio. He said the man’s death was linked to a heart problem, not to the transplant itself. Surgeons had replaced the patient’s entire face above the lips, including the scalp, nose, ears and forehead, in a 30-hour operation involving a 40-person medical team of more than 40. Worldwide, there have been five other face transplants to date, three of them in France, but it was the first time a transplant of both hands and the face had been completed in one go.
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CIA chief criticizes Cheney
Former vice president Dick Cheney’s criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of security matters suggests he wants the US to be attacked, CIA Director Leon Panetta said. “I think he smells some blood in the water on the national security issue,” Panetta told The New Yorker magazine for next Monday’s edition. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.” Cheney has said that President Barack Obama is making the US less safe by banning the controversial methods and planning to close Guantanamo Bay. Asked whether he agreed with the intelligence chief, US Vice President Joe Biden told NBC’s Meet the Press that he would not question Cheney’s motives. However, he added: “Dick Cheney’s judgment about how to secure America is faulty. I think our judgment is correct.”
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Obama kin inks book deal
A memoir by George Obama, the president’s half brother and a resident of Huruma, Kenya, will be published by Simon & Schuster in January. George Obama, 27, shares the same father with his half sibling. He is the youngest of the senior Obama’s seven children and was born six months before his father died. The book will be written with author-journalist Damien Lewis and tell of George Obama’s fall into crime and poverty as a teenager and his eventual embrace of community organizing and of advocacy for the poor, an identification so strong that he chooses to live among them. “Even had George Obama not been our president’s half brother, his story is moving and inspirational,” David Rosenthal, Simon Schuster publisher and executive vice president, said in a statement on Sunday.
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Scouts receive Parton badge
Country singer Dolly Parton delighted hundreds of Tennessee Girl Scouts when she made a surprise entrance at a ceremony to present them with a patch created in her honor. Parton appeared on stage at the Pines Theater in Pigeon Forge, where 400 Girl Scouts were receiving the new “Coat of Many Colors” badge. It is named for Parton and her 1971 song of the same name. The badge requires Scouts to help others, then design a collage of what makes them special. “A person can make money, but money can’t make a person,” she told the girls. Parton is a lifetime member of the Girl Scouts.
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