A kidney for an iPad
A Chinese teenager has sold his own kidney to buy an iPad. The 17-year-old, identified only as Little Zheng, says he was paid around $3,000 for his kidney, with all surgical expenses covered. He used the money to fulfill his dream of owning the popular Apple tablet computer as well as a laptop. Zheng’s mother says that when her son finally admitted what he’d done, lifting his T-shirt to show her the scar, “I felt like the sky was crashing down on our family.”
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Dental surgery triggers Foreign Accent Syndrome
An Oregon woman has acquired a strange foreign accent after undergoing dental surgery. Tax consultant Karen Butler was born in Illinois, and has never visited Europe, yet she came around from anesthetic, after a multiple-tooth extraction, sounding as if she had spent her childhood in Ireland, with a touch of eastern Europe. Neurologists have since diagnosed her with Foreign Accent Syndrome, a rare condition with only a hundred recorded cases. Butler says she likes her new European accent and has learned to “have fun with it.”