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The Deutsche Presse Agentur news agency reported in March that German cemetery operators are worried because embalmed bodies aren’t decaying fast enough. The country has a land shortage, so burial plots are often only rented out for 15 years, in the hope that by the end of that period the bodies will have decomposed and the families won’t object to their disposal. Cemetery owners are now avoiding burying bodies in soils that retard air and moisture circulation, because they restrict the growth of bacteria that eat the bodies.
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In January the health insurance board in Quebec finally approved the payment of about $2,400 to Renee Durand, 20, for breast-enhancement surgery that also made her breasts symmetrical. The board had at first declined to pay, calling the surgery merely cosmetic, but Durand fought back, sending a flood of nude photographs showing her previously asymmetrical breasts to the board’s doctors, to retired Quebec premier Robert Bourassa, to a former health minister, and to several other Quebec and federal officials.
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Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Shawn Belschwender.
