Iran's Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults has reported a ban on the sales of dolls depicting characters from the animated U.S. comedy series "The Simpsons."

Western news agencies and the Iranian newspaper "Sharq" quote an official of that agency as saying the "Simpsons" dolls have joined Barbie and others on the Islamic republic's toys blacklist.

Adults aren't beyond Iranian authorities' cultural reach, either, particularly since hard-liner Mahmud Ahmadinejad assumed the presidency in 2005.

Since that time, officials have banned "Western" hairstyles (there's a list of "approved" haircuts) as well as books by internationally acclaimed authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (and plenty of their own acclaimed writers, too) -- including at their own international book fair. Wikipedia devotes a whole entry to "List of books banned in Iran."

Conservative Iranian authorities also heavily filter or otherwise censor music and Internet offerings where possible -- and threaten users of antifiltering tools with criminal prosecution.

There were no details in the report on why the "Simpsons" dolls were banned, or how Matt Groening's edgy sitcom about a dysfunctional family might offend Iranians any more than it does Americans.

But AP quoted the official, Mohammad Hossein Farjoo, as noting that dolls with distinguishable genitals are banned, as are dolls depicting adults.

He said dolls depicting U.S. superhero cartoon characters Superman and Spider-Man would not be banned because those characters "help oppressed people and have a positive stance."

-- Central Newsroom

The Week Ahead is a detailed listing of key events of the coming week affecting RFE/RL's broadcast region.
 
Now on Twitter! Daily updates at @The_Week_Ahead.


MONDAY, February 6:

Armenia: Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov visits Yerevan (to February 7).

Azerbaijan: EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus Philippe Lefort visits Azerbaijan as part of a trip to the region.

Georgia: Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association Maina Kiai visits Georgia (to February 13).

OSCE: Officials and experts from 56 OSCE participating states and international organizations meet in Vienna to discuss ways to prevent and suppress money laundering and financing of terrorism (to February 7).

Pakistan: Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani visits Qatar.

Serbia/IMF: An International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission visits Serbia to meet government officials.

Ukraine/U.S.: U.S. Assistant Secretary Philip Gordon visits Kyiv to meet with senior Ukrainian officials and opposition leaders.

UN: The World Youth Report to be launched on the theme of youth employment.


TUESDAY, February 7:

Azerbaijan/Turkey: Chief of General Staff of Turkish Armed Forces Necdet Ozel is scheduled to visit Azerbaijan.

Bosnia-Herzegovina: The International Festival Sarajevo Winter opens (to March 21).

Pakistan/Russia: Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar visits Russia for talks on bilateral relations and the regional situation.

Russia: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Foreign Intelligence Service head Mikhail Fradkov meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

World: Safer Internet Day 2012.

Wolrd: 200th birthday of British writer Charles Dickens.


WEDNESDAY, February 8:

Azerbaijan/Albania: Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha visits Baku (to February 10).

Kazakhstan/Germany: Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev pays an official visit to Berlin.

Kosovo/UN: UN Security Council holds a debate on Kosovo in New York.

Russia: Five-member delegation of the PACE to carry out a pre-election mission to Moscow to assess the electoral framework and campaign ahead of the Russian presidential election on March 4, 2012 (to February 11).

Russia/U.S.: The initial meeting of the Rule of Law Working Group co-chairmen Attorney General Eric Holder and Minister of Justice Aleksandr Konovalov to take place in Washington.

U.S./Russia: The Federal New York District Court is expected to announce the sentence for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.


THURSDAY, February 9:

EU/Azerbaijan: Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov attends conference titled "EU-Azerbaijan New Horizons for the Partnership" in Brussels.

Russia: The London School of Economics (LSE) hosts the Russian Business Week 2012.

World: The 62nd Berlin International Film Festival opens this year to focus on the Arab Spring (to February 19).


SUNDAY, February 12:

Turkmenistan: Presidential Election.

A Russian opposition group erected a huge banner reading "Putin, Go Away" on a rooftop facing the Kremlin today.

The black-and-yellow banner, placed on a building across the frozen Moscow River from the Kremlin, also showed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s face crossed out with an X.

​​Police later removed the banner -- which bore the logo of the opposition movement Solidarity -- and said they were investigating the incident.

A leader of the group said the banner faced the Kremlin because "Putin was and remains the master of the Kremlin."

"He is the constructor and ideologue of the political system that has destroyed competition in this country," Ilya Yashin wrote in his blog.

The incident follows December parliamentary elections that the opposition says were marred by fraud. It also comes ahead of a presidential election in March in which Putin is running for a third term.

-- Central Newsroom

Experts have authenticated what is believed to be the only existing recordings of the voice of 19th-century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

More than a century after Bismarck's death in 1898, a recording of his voice has been digitally restored by the American Thomas Edison National Park museum in New Jersey. 

The AFP news agency quoted Stephan Puille of the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin as saying that wax cylinder phonograph recordings of Bismarck were made in 1889 by Adelbert Wangemann, an associate of Thomas Edison.

Puille and other experts have examined the recordings and concluded that they are "genuine."

• Listen to the voice of 19th century German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck (Source: Thomas Edison National Historical Park museum)

The cylinders were found in Edison's laboratory in 1957 but research did not start on them until 2005.

In the recordings, Bismarck's barely audible voice can be heard reciting parts of songs and poetry in English, Latin, French, and German.

He is also heard advising his son Herbert to "live life in moderation."

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the recording is that the "Iron Chancellor," as Bismarck was known, at one point can be heard singing France's national anthem, "La Marseillaise."

It was an unusual choice of song given Bismarck's notoriously frosty relations with the French, not least because he had annexed the Alsace-Lorraine region in 1871.

Besides the late German chancellor's voice, Wangemann's recording cylinders also contain a number of musical pieces played by German and Hungarian musicians, including what is thought to be the first-ever recording of a piece by pioneering Polish pianist Frederic Chopin. 

-- RFE/RL Central Newsroom with agency reports

The Week Ahead is a detailed listing of key events of the coming week affecting RFE/RL's broadcast region.
 
Now on Twitter! Daily updates at @The_Week_Ahead.


MONDAY, January 30:

Armenia: EU Special Representative on South Caucasus and the Crisis in Georgia Phillip Lefort visits Yerevan.

EU: European leaders gather in Brussels for a summit focusing on the EU's financial troubles.

Georgia/U.S.: Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is scheduled to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington.

Iran: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts visit Iran (to January 31).

Iran/Oman: Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi visits Muscat to hold talks with senior officials of the Persian Gulf country.

Kazakhstan: Kazakh Foreign Minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov pays first official visit to the United States.

Russia: Moscow hosts the first APEC senior officials' meeting and more than 20 related meetings.


TUESDAY, January 31:

Azerbaijan: PACE co-rapporteurs for the monitoring of obligations and commitments by Azerbaijan make a fact-finding visit to Baku and Guba (to February 2).

EU: European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee to exchange views on Kosovo, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in Brussels.

Middle East: The 2012 Herzliya Conference, titled “In the Eye of Storms: Israel and the Middle East," opens in Israel (to February 2).

Kazakhstan: The Atlantic Council hosts a conference titled “Twenty Years of Kazakhstan's Independence and U.S.-Kazakhstan Relations” in Washington.


WEDNESDAY, February 1:

Azerbaijan: A European Parliament delegation visits Baku.

EU: The European Parliament to hold debates on Russia and Iran and is scheduled to pass a resolution on Iranian nuclear program (to February 2).

Iran: The 30th Fajr International Film Festival opens in Tehran (to February 11).

Pakistan/Afghanistan: Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar visits Kabul.

Russia: A website set up for live streaming from polling stations during the Match 4 presidential election to be officialy launched.

UN: The World Interfaith Harmony Week (to February 7).


THURSDAY, February 2:

NATO: NATO defense ministers hold a meeting in Brussels to discuss the situation in Afghanistan (to February 3).


FRIDAY, February 3:

Balkans: Croatian President Ivo Josipovic, Serbian President Boris Tadic, and the members of Bosnia's state Presidency meet on Mount Jahorina near Sarajevo.

World: Senior figures from around the world attend the 48th Munich Security Conference to discuss current and future security challenges (to February 5).


SATURDAY, February 4:

World: World Cancer Day.

Russia:  A mass opposition protest is planned to be held in Moscow and other Russian cities a month ahead of the presidential election.

An Armenian couple has named its firstborn child after French President Nicholas Sarkozy two days after the French Senate adopted a bill criminalizing any public denial of what is recognized in France as the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire.

The infant, Sarkozy Avetisian, was born in Armenia's second-largest city, Gyumri.

The father, Karapet Avetisian, told RFE/RL that "on behalf of the entire Armenian people and on my own behalf, I thank Sarkozy for taking this step."

WATCH: The Avetisians talk about their son

​​
The bill passed in the French lower house in December and now awaits Sarkozy's signature before coming into law.

Turkey is outraged at the legislation.

In 2001, when France first recognized the Ottoman-era mass killing of Armenians as genocide, another couple named its newborn twins "Jacques" and "Chirac" in honor of then-French President Jacques Chirac.

-- Satenik Vantsian

Putin's notion of a must-read book list for good Russian boys and girls (as well as other good children who may aspire to someday achieve Russianness themselves) has sparked a flurry of conversation in social media circles, including a #100книг Twitter thread.

Some seem like books Putin would choose. Others like books he should choose.

A poll on the Russian social-networking site vKontakte.ru based on reader suggestions shows a pronounced loyalty for national literature, although not necessarily the books that Putin himself might endorse. Leading the pack in early results was Mikhail Bulgakov's surrealist masterwork "The Master and Margarita."

​​It was followed closely by 19th-century writer Nikolai Karamzin's 12-volume "History of the Russian State" and Eduard Uspensky's "Prostokvashino" series of 1970s children's books about a young boy, called Uncle Fyodor, who runs away from home with his cat and dog to resettle in Prostokvashino, or Buttermilk Village. (The books were subsequently adapted into a popular animated series featuring talking birds, cats who sew, and Russian men who do the dishes.)

Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," Lermontov's "Hero of Our Time," and Gogol's "Dead Souls" also received a chorus of support on the vKontakte poll. More eclectic nominees like "The Dreamers," Soviet writer Nikolai Nosov's collection of humorous children's stories, and Vladimir Bogomolov's 1973 World War II novel, "Moment of Truth," had yet to receive any votes. To be fair, "War and Peace" was vote-free, as well.

Putin's proposal skirted the issue of whether a Russian cultural canon should venture beyond Russian writers. But a number of European works ranked among the most frequent suggestions, including Antoine de Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince," "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde, and "The Three Musketeers" by Alexandre Dumas.

​​Others were more pointed in their suggestions to Putin.

Some recommended historical works looking at the millions of deaths caused by Stalin's collectivization campaign in Ukraine, notably Robert Conquest's "Harvest of Sorrow" and Miron Dolot's "Execution by Hunger." (One commentor wrote: "The Germans do largely understand the horrors of their Nazi past. Russia remains in denial.") Another suggested "Imperium," Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's examination of the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. One member of the Russian Twitterati suggested a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

There were also hints that Putin -- focused as he is on the notion of a new, post-Soviet Eurasian Union -- would do well to read emigre scholars Nikolay Trubetskoy and Pyotr Savitsky's 1920 Eurasianist manifesto, "Exodus to the East." (Putin might agree with this one.) Finally, there was a nod to Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 dystopian novel "We," seen by many as the first literary skewering of industrial-age totalitarianism.

"As I understand it, we're not talking about all books, but about those that reveal something about the Russian character," one reader commented on Twitter. "That's why I prefer Zamyatin's 'We' to Orwell!"

-- Daisy Sindelar