VIENNA (AFP) – US pop star Beyonce has angered a high-brow art museum in Vienna by sending a look-a-like to her own special personal tour of the museum, while she went shopping, according to newspaper reports here Wednesday.
Tabloid dailies Oesterreich and Heute said the R&B diva had been due to visit the Albertina, one of the Austrian capital’s most famous museums which attracts around one million visitors each year.
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But Beyonce, who gave a concert in Vienna on Tuesday, decided to skive off and do some shopping instead, sending a look-a-like to the museum and be photographed with Albertina director, Klaus Albrecht Schroeder, according to the reports.
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“We were a little doubtful yesterday, but weren’t really sure. It could have been her,” Dahlitz said, adding that fans were apparently duped, too.
For Ma Cheng and millions of others, Chinese parents’ desire to give their children a spark of individuality is colliding head-on with the Chinese bureaucracy’s desire for order. Seeking to modernize its vast database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with color photos and embedded microchips. The new cards are harder to forge and can be scanned at places like airports where security is a priority.
The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report. The result is that Miss Ma and at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards — unless they change their names to something more common.
“Taking a boss hostage is becoming an increasingly common protest gesture in France. Last year, the English boss of a car-parts factory in eastern France was held for 48 hours in his office, sleeping on a massage table and being provided with blankets and sandwiches. He said he felt like “a prisoner in Alcatraz”.
In another incident last year, police stormed an ice-cream factory in Saint-Dizier to free a manager who had been held hostage by workers angry over job cuts. At least 14 staff were injured trying to stop police releasing him.
The mood of French factory workers seeking justice and revenge has spawned France’s cult film of the year, Louise-Michel, a gothic comedy in which a group of women laid off from their factory in northern France hire a hit man to kill their boss.”
“On Sunday the depth of the crisis and the level of social discontent in Madagascar directly affected a group of soldiers of the Army Corps of Personnel and Administrative and Technical Services who had been ordered to move against protestors on the streets. The soldiers refused to obey orders to fire on the people and repress anti-government demonstrators. Following this, they then declared they would not obey government orders either.”