Beauty queen puts down arms to save legs

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Miss Israel has been given permission not to carry her assault rifle during service in the Israeli army because she says it bruises her legs.

Reigning beauty queen Yael Nezri, a private who recently completed basic training, said the bruises were making it difficult for her to model in photo shoots.

The Jerusalem Post reported that Nezri, 18, had been granted an exemption by her commanders during her two-year army stint.

Beautiful Death

GUBEN, Germany, Nov 16 (Reuters Life!) - A disused factory in an economically depressed east German town has been turned into a "beauty salon for the dead" by anatomist Gunther von Hagens.

He has opened a production line for his so-called plastination process in which the bodies of donors are preserved in hard resin and dissected in slices, often for sale as anatomy teaching aides.

Von Hagens's "Body Worlds" exhibition of "plastinated" human bodies has caused controversy in several European cities where it has toured.

Visitors to his factory in Guben, on the border with Poland, are also treated to a display of anatomical models, like the ones used in "Body Worlds," together with a ghoulish show of malformed organs and diseased tissues.

Once named Dr. Death by Germany's Spiegel magazine, he defended his unconventional business on Thursday.

"I am a dresser of corpses who takes corpses and turns them into useful objects. This is an extension beyond death of the trend for beauty treatments," he said.

The eccentric man, invariably seen sporting a wide-brimmed hat, told reporters at the opening of his new center that the slices of bodies which he sells to schools and universities were no different than a slice of meat sold on a slab.

Named the Plastinarium after his unique resin-based process, the new center will create around 200 jobs for a town hit by high unemployment since the collapse of communism.

Aided by Chinese scientists, the workers will coat the bodies of donors in hard resins before slicing them into cross-sections to be sold around the world.

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