London
Bimbo game for girls: British health-care professionals complained this week about a new Internet game aimed at young girls that promotes diet pills and breast-enhancement surgery. In the Miss Bimbo online game, aimed at girls ages 9 to 16, each player manipulates the weight and wardrobe of her character to try to make her “the coolest, richest, and most famous bimbo in the world.” In online competitions against other girls, players earn “bimbo dollars” to buy plastic surgery, diet pills, and clothes for their characters. “This is as lethal as pro-anorexia websites,” said Dee Dawson, a specialist in eating disorders. “A lot of children will get caught up with the extremely damaging and appalling messages.” The game originated in France, and an English version was launched last month.
Vienna
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The wrong job for convicts: Austrians were appalled last week when they learned that some call-center employees taking their personal data were prisoners serving time for fraud. Several Austrian prisons have set up call centers in prisons and hired them out to private companies as an alternative to outsourcing overseas. The inmates were instructed to give out fake names and to say they worked for a German phone company, said Christian Sikora, a lawyer who represents staff at Karlau prison and who exposed the program. Sikora said guards opposed the use of prisoners as telemarketers, but Austrian prison authorities overruled their objections because the inmates were making the prisons so much money. Austrian Justice Ministry spokesman Thomas Geiblinger defended the program. “Everything is under strict control and all calls are being monitored,” he said.
Vatican City
Controversial conversion: Muslim leaders are protesting Pope Benedict XVI’s baptism and conversion of a prominent Muslim journalist this week. Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born commentator for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, had frequently used his column to condemn what he called the “inherent” violence in Islam and to defend the existence of Israel. This week, in a full-page article, he defended his Easter conversion, saying that he was never really a practicing Muslim and that he rejected Islam’s “hate and intolerance.” Muslim scholars said Allam’s writings were themselves intolerant. Aref Ali Nayed, head of the Royal Islamic Center in Jordan and a supporter of Christian-Muslim dialogue, called the conversion a provocation. The pope’s participation in the ceremony, he said, raised “genuine questions about the motives, intentions, and plans of some of the pope’s advisors on Islam.”
Belgrade, Serbia
Call to partition Kosovo: Serbia this week formally proposed to the U.N. that Kosovo be split along ethnic lines so that the small, Serb-populated portion of the new country could join Serbia. The proposal was largely symbolic, as the U.S. has already said it would veto any resolution for partition, and the Kosovar government is vehemently opposed to such a move. “We want to help create cooperation between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo—not divisions,” said Kosovar Deputy Prime Minister Hajredin Kuqi. Serbia submitted the request on the ninth anniversary of NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which was prompted by Serbian attempts to drive the majority ethnic Albanians out of the Serbian province. Kosovo declared independence last month, but Serbia contends the split was illegal.
Jurmala, Latvia
American disappears: Leonid Rozhetskin, a Russian-born American citizen and prominent business tycoon, has been missing from his Latvian vacation home for more than a week, authorities reported. Rozhetskin, 41, is a Harvard Law graduate who held top management positions in Russia during the 1990s. Most recently a film producer in California, he was co-founder of the Renaissance Capital investment bank and served as deputy chairman of the mining company Norilsk Nickel. Latvian officials said they found bloodstains at Rozhetskin’s seaside villa.
Olympia, Greece
Protest at Olympic torch-lighting: Human-rights activists briefly disrupted the Olympic torch-lighting ceremony in Greece this week. Protesters from the media-rights group Reporters Without Borders broke through a cordon of 1,000 police officers while a Chinese Olympics official was speaking. Mounting the stage, they unfurled a banner depicting the Olympic rings as handcuffs, then were dragged away by police. The group is calling for a boycott of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Games as a way of protesting China’s recent crackdown in Tibet. The torch will now be passed from runner to runner on an 85,000-mile journey that’s slated to end at the Olympic stadium in Beijing on Aug. 8.
