Girl born with 8 limbs undergoes surgery

Revered by some in her village as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, a 2-year-old girl born with four arms and four legs was undergoing surgery Tuesday to leave her with a normal body. The girl named Lakshmi is joined to a "parasitic twin" that stopped developing in the mother's womb. The surviving fetus absorbed the limbs, kidneys and other body parts of the undeveloped fetus. A team of 30 doctors was removing the extra limbs and organs, surgery that if successful would give her a good chance to live past adolescence. They have already separated the fused spines and the next step will be to remove the extra limbs and the rest of the "parasite," said Dr. Sharan Patil, the orthopedic surgeon leading the operation. "As of now, the child has been responding very well," Patil said several hours into the operation. Children born with deformities in deeply traditional rural parts of India, like the remote village in the northern state of Bihar that Lakshmi hails from, are often viewed as reincarnated gods. The young girl is no different — she is named after the four-armed Hindu goddess of wealth and her parents say she is revered in her village. "Everybody considers her a goddess at our village," said her father, Shambhu, who goes by one name. "All this expenditure has happened to make her normal. So far, everything is fine." Others sought to make money from Lakshmi. Her parents kept her in hiding after a circus apparently tried to buy the girl, they said. The complications for Lakshmi's surgery are myriad: The two spines are merged, she has four kidneys, entangled nerves, two stomach cavities and two chest cavities. She cannot stand up or walk. "It's a big team effort of a lot of skilled surgeons who will be putting their heart and soul into solving the problem of Lakshmi," Patil said earlier in the day. "It's going to take many, many hours on a continuous basis to operate on the baby. So, these issues definitely make it complex." Patil put the risk of losing Lakshmi between 20 and 25 percent. Doctors have said the best case scenario after the surgery is that she will walk and function as a normal child. Doctors at Sparsh Hospital in Bangalore, where the girl is undergoing surgery, said she is popular among the staff and patients. The hospital's foundation is paying for the operation because the girl's family could not afford the medical bills. "She's a very cute girl," Dr. Patil Mamatha said. "She's very playful and gets along well with others."

China's version of "Eye's Wide Shut"?

Twenty Chinese men, including several on the country's richest list, paid $8,000 a head to attend a matchmaking party with 30 "single young beauties," state media said Monday. Saturday's controversial party was held at a luxury European-style villa in Shanghai, the birthplace of China's Communist Party in 1921, with guests arriving in stretch limousines and getting the full red-carpet treatment. "To disguise their identities from photographers' cameras, all guests scurried into the venue wearing a face mask, some even using a paper bag," the China Daily said. Market reforms in the past three decades have lifted China out of dire poverty, but they have also fostered a culture of quick wealth and money worship and as the income gap widens, resentment of the rich grows. Each male guest paid a 58,800 yuan ($8,000) entrance fee, while the women, chosen for their "looks, kindness, thought and taste," were selected from tens of thousands of candidates, according to the social network Web site (www.915915.com.cn) which organized the event. The site, which boasts a membership of 100,000, held a similar party on a boat in Shanghai last year, drawing criticism from many observers for treating women as objects. Tan Chao, the site's marketing director, said the company provided different services, including dating arrangements. "For those who pay most, we will try different means, not within our own club, until we find them the right one," he was quoted as saying.

"Cremated son" turns up alive

A mother cremated a body she thought was that of her dead son, only for him to turn up alive later, police said on Friday. Gina Partington's 37-year-old son Thomas Dennison was reported missing last month and a body was found in Rusholme, Manchester, three days later. The 58-year-old mother, from Urmston, Greater Manchester, formally identified the body as that of her son and, following an inquest, the body was cremated on October 30. But police had actually found Dennison, living rough in Nottingham, four days earlier. The case has been referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission to discover why Partington was not told of her son's discovery in the days before she attended the cremation. Inquiries are continuing to formally establish the identity of the body, but Greater Manchester police said they believe they know who he is. Next of kin have been informed. Police said in a statement: "This set of circumstances is clearly distressing and urgent inquiries are ongoing to establish how this happened."