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Saudi Arabia

Spot The Difference: IKEA Photoshops Women Out Of Saudi Arabia Catalogue

METRO (Sweden), SPIEGELONLINE (Germany)

STOCKHOLM – Need more space in the room? IKEA may have found a new solution.

Sweden’s free newspaper Metro noticed that women had been airbrushed out of the Saudi edition of the Swedish home furnishings store’s 2013 catalogue.

Sweden's Minister for Trade Ewa Björling told Metro: "You cannot erase women from reality," adding that the images were "yet another sad example of how much remains to be done concerning gender equality in Saudi Arabia."

Saudi Arabia, a country where women must be covered in public, has particularly strict rules when it comes to the amount of skin women can show in advertising.

IKEA, known for its provocative publicity stunts, had already sparked controversy on its Russian website earlier this year, by featuring a picture showing four people sporting colorful balaclavas, in the style of Russian political punk rock band Pussy Riot, Spiegel Online reports.

The picture, part of an online contest to select the cover for IKEA Russia’s next catalogue, was quickly replaced by a statement saying that, “Ikea is a commercial organization that operates independently of politics and religion. We cannot allow our advertising project to be used as a means of propaganda," according to The Moscow Times.

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Society

Big Brother For The People: India's CCTV Strategy For Cracking Down On Police Abuse

"There is nothing fashionable about installing so many cameras in and outside one’s house," says a lawyer from a Muslim community. And yet, doing this has helped members of the community prove unfair police action against them.

A woman is walking in the distance while a person holds a military-style gun close up

Survellance and tight security at the Lal Chowk area in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India on October 4, 2022

Sukanya Shantha

MUMBAI — When sleuths of the National Investigating Agency suddenly descended on human rights defender and school teacher Abdul Wahid Shaikh’s house on October 11, he knew exactly what he needed to do next.

He had been monitoring the three CCTVs that are installed on the front and the rear of his house — a chawl in Vikhroli, a densely populated area in suburban Mumbai. The cameras told him that a group of men and women — some dressed in Mumbai police’s uniform and a few in civil clothes — had converged outside his house. Some of them were armed and few others with batons were aggressively banging at the door asking him to immediately let them in.

This was not the first time that the police had landed at his place at 5 am.

When the policemen discovered the CCTV cameras outside his house, they began hitting it with their batons, destroying one of them mounted right over the door. This action was captured by the adjacent CCTV camera. Shaikh, holed up in his house with his wife and two children, kept pleading with the police to stop destroying his property and simply show them an official notice.

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