Eva Manasieva

Less than 25 years ago you could leave your car unlocked overnight in Vienna and nothing would happen. The car would be right where you had left it, and whatever you had had inside would remain untouched. People say “Vienna is a village,” and in terms of personal safety and the security of property, it truly was.

A new era is dawning upon the International Atomic Energy Agency as it awaits its new Director General to replace Nobel Laureate Mohammed El Baradei who has been the face of the nuclear agency for nearly a decade.

El Baradei led the Agency through turbulent times, avoiding serious confrontations and managing – more or less – to maintain the balance of the powers within the Board of Governors, the Agency’s decision-making body.

Austria’s Roman Catholic Church is in trouble again. And, once more, the issue is sex. But while past scandals have sprung from allegations of carrying on among priests and priests-to-be – including the revelations in the mid 1990s that the Vienna Archbishop Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër himself may have been a pedophile – the focus this time is on heterosexual love and marriage. And all the mixed messages.

Taking its cue from the conservative leadership of German Pope Benedikt, the Austrian Church continues to insist on celibacy for the priesthood, and forbids birth control and abortion.

Only days after the end of the trial against Josef Fritzl, some of the international focus on Austria has shifted to two other incest cases that are capturing the world’s attention.

In Columbia, a man named Arcebio Alvarez, dubbed the “monster of Mariquita” by the local media, has allegedly abused his daughter, now in her 30s, since she was nine years old. The 59-year-old needed protection in court after a crowd mobbed him and threw things at him as he was being transported to court.

And in Italy, Michele Mongelli, 63, a scrap metal dealer in Turin, has been remanded in custody after being accused of abusing his daughter “Laura” from the age of nine – for 25 years.

At first glance, it didn’t look as if Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his presidential protégé, Dmitri Medvedev had anything to worry about as a wave of protests spread over the vast country reflecting economic discontent.