WORLD
AMIENS, France — The Frenchwoman who made medical history as the recipient of a partial face transplant gave the world its first look at the results today.
"I now have a face like everyone else," Isabelle Dinoire said at her first news conference since the groundbreaking surgery in November.
In speech that was heavily slurred, she explained how she was mauled by a dog last year and thanked the family of the donor who gave her new lips, a chin and nose.
A circular scar was still visible where the face tissue was attached in the 15-hour operation in Amiens.
Dinoire appeared to still have great difficulty moving or even closing her mouth, which often hung open. But she said that she was regaining sensation.
"I can open my mouth and eat. I feel my lips, my nose and my mouth," she said. During the news conference, while one of her surgeons was speaking, she lifted a cup to her lips and appeared to drink.
"I expect to resume a normal life ... I pay homage to the donor's family," she said. "My operation could help others to live again."
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Lebanon apologized today to Denmark after thousands of rampaging Muslim demonstrators set fire to the building housing the Danish mission in Beirut — the most violent in a growing string of worldwide protests over caricatures of Islam's Prophet Muhammad. In Afghanistan hundreds of demonstrators clashed with police and soldiers, leaving one dead and four injured.The prime ministers of Spain and Turkey issued a Christian-Muslim appeal for calm, saying "we shall all be the losers if we fail to immediately defuse this situation."In southern Iraq, several thousand Iraqis rallied to demand severing all ties with countries in which the caricatures were published.The protest witnessed the burning of Danish, German and Israeli flags and an effigy of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Protesters called for the death of anyone who insults Muhammad and demanded withdrawal of 530-member Danish military contingent operating under British control.
SAFAGA, Egypt — Hundreds of relatives of passengers on a ferry that sank in the Red Sea attacked the offices of the ship's owners today, throwing furniture into the street and burning the company's sign. Riot police fired tear gas to restore order.Family members also tried to storm a hospital in another port town after it displayed photographs of bodies retrieved from the sea. They told authorities they wanted inside to identify the bodies in the hospital morgue.The relatives are desperate to know whether their loved ones were among the more than 1,000 who drowned and they say El Salam Maritime still has not released the victims' names. They also accuse Egypt's government of mishandling the rescue.The Al-Salaam Boccaccio 98 sank in the Red Sea early Friday on its way from Saudi Arabia to the Egyptian port of Safaga.
