Election Free Zone

Oscar the Spanish farmer deserves an award for bravery. After spending five years in un-imaginable amounts of pain, unable to speak, eat or breathe normally before becoming the world’s first recipient of a full-face transplant.

He appeared in public for the first time since the operation with his sister and a doctor in Barcelona hospital yesterday afternoon. The Australian reports doctors took 24 hours to “lift the donor’s entire face, including jaw, nose, cheekbones, muscles, teeth and eyelids, and placed it mask-like onto the man.” 

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An unassuming bank manager who went missing in North Queensland is alleged to have made “full and frank admissions” to police about a missing $3 million from the community bank in which he worked.

The disappearance and subsequent arrest of bank manager Colin Carleton is a kind of crime story more fascinating than a heist pulled off by a gang of hardened criminals. The Courier Mail reports that Carelton is widely described as “quiet, down-to-earth, family man”.

Carleton’s alleged theft only came to light in the last few months, and is thought have taken place over a decade. He was due to meet with private investigators looking at financial irregularities at his Bendigo Community Bank when he disappeared on July 13, last seen going for a trail bike ride in the Herberton Ranges.

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Did you hand over $50 to watch the Danny Green fight last night? If you did - and watched all 29 uninteresting seconds of it - you might be feeling a bit of a mug. But so did Green, at least for a while.

Today’s red-hot story online is last night’s non-fight between Green and his overweight rival, Paul Briggs. Green was initially fuming, claiming there was “no way” his jab a matter of seconds into the fight could have knocked Briggs out. But Briggs went down and stayed down.

Adding massive insult to the apparently slight injury, bookies suspended betting on the fight hours before it started after Briggs suddenly firmed for a first round knockout. The Daily Telegraph has detailed coverage of the whole affair, including a video interview with a fuming Green. But today Green said he has watched the footage again and thinks it was a legitimate blow that knocked Briggs out. Maybe the chap doesn’t know his own strength?

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Fidel Castro is blogging. Prolifically. And it’s all being conveniently translated into English.

A hat-tip to Alex Beam of The Boston Globe, who has dug out some of the best nuggets from Fidel’s regular columns on Cuba’s state media service Granma. It includes regular rants about US imperialism. “Naturally, I am a politician and it pleases me to compare the virtues of a pirate with the highest circles of imperial leaders in Washington,” he says after quoting at length from a poem involving a pirate.

One column in particular contains an extraordinary segue from a detailed analysis of American foreign policy into World Cup segue. Behold:

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Poor old Alvin Quah got eliminated from Masterchef last night after mucking up a cake he said you’d need a PhD to know how to cook.

I’m not sure at the bottom of which cornflake box you’d find such a qualification, but as much as I liked Alvin, and was sorry to see him go, I have to say, don’t be such a baby. What Alvin (after all this time seeing him every night I feel I can call him Alvin) said was:

Short of them making the contestants cook under water next year, I really don’t know what they’re going to do. It’s mad - they put us through the ringer. Can you imagine anything more difficult than what we went through in this series? I can’t.

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There is a wall of federal election coverage out there today. This isn’t more of it.

A glance at the list of most popular stories on any major website shows Australians are talking about a bunch of other things aside from politics. So alongside our daily campaign coverage we’ll be bringing you a daily potted summary of the non-election issues grabbing voters’ attention, trying not to draw unnecessary parallels with federal politics unless it involves budgies, forward movement, or other parallels too obvious to resist. Today, let’s start with sporting WAGs.

What makes a good WAG?

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