briefs

Sydney, Australia

(MCT) After failing to scare young men into driving more slowly,… Sydney, Australia

(MCT) After failing to scare young men into driving more slowly, Australian authorities have hit on a new tactic: questioning their virility.

A witty advertising campaign features passengers and passersby waving their pinkie fingers, a gesture suggesting a certain lack of physical endowment, at show-off male drivers.

“For a long time, nothing has challenged the fast car/big man image that car sellers sell,” added Russell Watsford, a road safety marketing manager working for the New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority. “This does.”

The $1.6 million state campaign, launched in late June, aims to cut a stubbornly high road death toll in the Sydney region by trying to slow down some of the main speed offenders, young men age 17 to 25.

According to one of the Authority’s business directors, John Whelan, previous efforts to scare youths into slowing down, with ads showing bloody car crashes, failed.

Within days of the ad campaign’s start, the road authority’s website,s which also carried the ad, registered more than 100,000 downloads and crashed three times.

– Laurie Goering, Chicago Tribune

Sultanpur More, Pakistan

(MCT) Mehtab Ashraf knows the risks. Her neighbor died, her cousin’s husband died, her husband and cousin are sick. But she has five children to raise. So, like hundreds of others in this farming village in Punjab province, Ashraf plans to sell her only possession of value: a kidney.

Here, everyone knows someone who has sold a kidney, often for less than $1,700. And even though most people, including Ashraf’s husband, say they regret their decisions, she said she has no choice.

“I have sent my blood for tests,” said Ashraf, 35. “I will sell off my kidney, and then, maybe, one or two of my children can be free.”

Pakistan is now called the Kidney Bazaar by doctors and the nation’s media. Here, poor people sell their kidneys through agents and doctors to rich Pakistanis and foreigners, a trade that has increased since neighboring India banned organ sales in 1994 and China banned them last year.

“When you have nothing, when you live like slaves, you want some kind of life, even at the cost of a kidney,” said Manzoor Ahmad, Ashraf’s cousin.

But in reality, studies show, the money does little to improve donors’ lives, and the surgeries are often hatchet jobs with little follow-up care.

– Kim Barker, Chicago Tribune

Beijing, China

(MCT) Poisoned pet food and lead-tainted children’s toys have created jitters worldwide about the safety of Chinese exports, but lost in the media storm is this fact: Consumers in China face an even more daunting challenge from misleading labels and unscrupulous manufacturers.

Take, for example, wine. Some inexpensive “wines” may not even be wine at all. The state broadcaster, China Radio International, said investigators earlier this year found that “many wines consist of little more than water, pigment and alcohol, with trace amounts of grape juice.”

But, more importantly, the same toxic toothpastes and anti-freeze-tainted cough syrups that killed dozens of people in Panama and Haiti were on store shelves in China until last month. Other items recalled overseas – including seafood tainted with antibiotics, flammable baby clothes, unsafe extension cords and exploding batteries – generally remain in stores in China.

Senior officials have gone on the offensive against the foreign recalls, claiming they have less to do with safety and more to do with trade protectionism.

Authorities say they investigated 68,000 cases of counterfeit and substandard food products last year and destroyed 5,900 kitchens and laboratories “used to produce and sell shoddy food products.”

– Tim Johnson, McClatchy Newspapers

Barcelona, Spain

(MCT) When the world-renowned Frankfurt Book Fair asked to highlight the cultural influences of Barcelona, and specifically the Catalan culture, it was widely expected that literary stars across the region would embrace the distinction.

Instead, writers, politicians and publishing houses are wrestling over the honor in a peculiarly fierce, some might say Catalan, way. A culture war is brewing in this contrary, independent-minded slice of Spain, with writers of Spanish-language and Catalan-language works sparring over just who is Catalan enough to be invited to Frankfurt, and Catalan politicians maneuvering to keep Spanish-language writers out of the limelight.

The war of words is now playing out on a much larger stage in Germany.

Catalonia’s regional government took an upper hand, choosing authors for the five-day event in Frankfurt, the world’s largest trade fair for books. Minister Josep Bargallo, a Catalan nationalist, compiled a list of more than 100 writers, all of which write in Catalan, to be invited to the fair.

Bargallo noted that he informed authors that they were welcome if they toed the regional government line: to push “Catalan culture written in Catalan.”

– Christine Spolar, Chicago Tribune