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food / travel

Streaking To New Heights: Machu Picchu, Nude Backpackers Edition

So serene...
So serene...

Proud of its more than 4,000-year history and heritage, Peru is starting to take exception to certain tourist pranks at venerable sites — most notably, the new fad of posing nude atop Machu Picchu, and sharing the photos online.

The cases of in-the-buff visitors at the 15th Century Inca citadel, a UNESCO World Heritage site, has been happening "with increasing" frequency since 2013, local police have reported. At least 12 tourists have been held since December and had their cameras or smartphones confiscated before they could share their lewdness on the Internet, according to El Espectador, citing EFE and agency reports.

The most recent detentions were of an Australian and Canadian caught flashing last week. An Israeli tourist was quoted as telling the BBC last year that yes, he did run naked through the citadel but "when there was nobody around and knowing this is a sacred site for the Peruvians, and above all, he did it with a lot of respect."

Peru's Deputy-Heritage Minister Luis Jaime Castillo called such antics "crimes against culture." Peruvian sociologist Liuba Koban cautioned that such reactions were excessive, reminding authorities protagonists were often from countries where nudity was nothing deplorable.

Pictures have been posted on the Desnudos en Monumentos account on Facebook, and the antics have been fuelling nudist trends in other neighboring conservative countries.

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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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