Coca-Cola said it would have been “too provocative” to include Muhammad in a Swedish publicity campaign in which the US beverage giant replaced its curlicue logo with some of the most common names of young Swedes.
Why can’t the Advertisement agencies leave Islam alone?
As part of a Europe-wide campaign, Swedish consumers will get to buy 115 million Coca-Cola bottles that will be relabeled to be called Daniel, Emma, and Johan, among other names plucked from a list of most common names among young Swedes.
Yet despite being among the list of popular names among young men in Sweden, Muhammad isn’t among the names chosen for the Coca-Cola campaign
“Symbolically, Coca-Cola is very much associated with the US. We discussed this internally before launching the campaign, and also spoke with the Islamic Association in Sweden,” the company’s Swedish marketing manager Gustaf Wetterwik told the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.
“In the end, we came to the conclusion that it was less provocative not to include the name than to have it on such a US-associated product.”
Wetterwik added that they did not want to use the name of the Muslim prophet in a commercial context. The company also deselected the names Max and Felix due to trademark considerations – Max is a hamburger chain in Sweden while Felix is a line of frozen foods and condiments.
The “Share a Coca-Cola with” campaign chose a selection of names that were the most common among Swedes aged 12 to 29, using information from Statistics Sweden (Statistiska centralbyrån – SCB).
More than 2,000 men are called Muhammad in Sweden, while the alternative spellings Mohammed is used by almost 9,000 and Mohamed by more than 10,000. In comparison, there are 173,243 Johans in the country, while there are more than 71,000 Emmas.
Coca-Cola was launched in Sweden in 1953 and the company today employs 800 people in Sweden.
Investigative Journalism has its limits, Media Must realize.
Story:
The BBC risked the lives of students by using them as a ‘human shield’ for a controversial Panorama journalist and his film crew, it was claimed yesterday.
The undercover team travelled with ten students from the London School of Economics to North Korea last month. Had the journalists been discovered, the whole group would have faced arrest, interrogation and possible detention.
Parents and university officials claim the students – the youngest of whom was only 18 – were ‘deliberately misled’ by the BBC and have called on the broadcaster to apologise and drop the Panorama documentary, due to be aired tonight.
The students were invited on the trip via an LSE club, only to learn much later it had been organised by Panorama as a cover for its investigation.
Journalist John Sweeney insisted the students had all agreed to enter the rogue Communist state with him, but admitted he withheld some details of the trip on the advice of BBC risk assessors.
The LSE said its students were not given enough information to give their consent and accused the BBC of taking unacceptable risks at a time when sabre-rattling by North Korea had already raised tensions with the West.
Alex Peters-Day, general secretary of LSE Students’ Union said students and the university had been ‘manipulated’.
‘I think the trip was organised by the BBC as a ruse to get into North Korea and that’s disgraceful,’ she said. ‘They have used students essentially as a human shield in this situation.’
Three of the students have complained, the university says. One said they were not told about key details of the subterfuge until en route for Pyongyang.
Students have since received ‘threatening’ letters from North Korean authorities and one parent has complained in writing to new BBC director-general Lord Hall that their child was put in danger.
The parent wrote: ‘The methods adopted potentially endangered a number of students who believed they were participating in an organised student tour. I am outraged that in this case the BBC, without obtaining “informed consent”… deceived, used and endangered these students to obtain a story from North Korea.’
The row could prove embarrassing for Lord Hall, appointed after his predecessor George Entwistle quit in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal and the botched Newsnight report which led to Lord McAlpine being wrongly identified as a paedophile.
A producer for Panorama resigned earlier this month over claims the programme tried to bribe a security consultant to reveal information about a property developer.
The LSE said it was not given any warning about the BBC’s plans until last week, after the group returned. It said the deception had put the students in danger and had jeopardised the safety of its academics working in other high-risk countries.
The students volunteered for the trip through the Grimshaw Club, a student society linked to the LSE’s department of international relations. Sweeney’s wife Tomiko Newson, an LSE graduate, had organised a group tour of North Korea with the club in 2012 and students were told she was organising this year’s trip.
A senior BBC executive said that it was worth risking students’ lives by sending an undercover reporter with them on a trip to North Korea for a controversial documentary.
Ceri Thomas, the corporation’s head of news planning, said the decision to go ahead with the airing of tonight’s programme went ‘right to the top’ as he rejected claims that students from the London School of Economics had been forced in to taking unacceptable risks during the investigation.
Yesterday it was claimed that the corporation used the students as a ‘human shield’ for a Panorama journalist and his film crew.
The recent WikiLeaks expose of US Embassy Cables have disclosed that AK Antony , Defense Minister of India was the one ,apart from Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, Youth Congress Leader of the Emergency imposed Period in India,to oppose Sanjay Gandhi, the extra Constitutional Power Center at that time.
It is also credited with Jayalalithaa, the then Chief Minister, Tamil Nadu,India with flushing out the LTTE in the State.
These facts we know and why AK Antony is in a prime post in the dispensation of Sonia Gandhi-enemy of enemy is my friend!
The curious fact is not these facts themselves , but who revealed this information to US Embassy officials.
Architects of Emergency in India, 1975.
“The cable quoted a private assessment given by a Times of India correspondent who covered the session to his editors. The reporter noted, “that, unlike AICC sessions earlier this year in Chandigarh and Delhi where there was heavy rush by ministers and other politicians to pay respects to Sanjay, this time an attitude of sullenness prevailed and aside from handful of hangers-on, there were few “foot kissers”.
How come this information reached the US Embassy Officials?
Now on Jayalalithaa,
Rajiv Killed By LTTE.
“A bureaucrat, who held a key security portfolio at the time, told post (embassy officials) that Jayalalithaa ordered him to do ‘whatever it takes to finish off the LTTE’ in Tamil Nadu, even if it required extrajudicial killings of LTTE associates in the state,” said a dispatch sent by the then US consul general in Chennai, Andrew T Simkin. The cable further added that she is an “iron lady” and “even her fiercest critics acknowledge that Jayalalithaa’s aggressive approach went a long way towards pushing the LTTE out of Tamil Nadu”.
In this case the informer is a Senior Bureaucrat from the Government of Tamil Nadu who was handling the LTTE issue!
Media and Bureaucrats as Informers to Foreign Government?
Story:
Editor of Maharashtra Times told US diplomats that foreign minister Y B Chavan confided to him that he was hearing increasing murmurs of dissatisfaction from Congressmen at the treatment being accorded Sanjay and the disdain being displayed for traditional Congress politicians.
The cable said at one point in Youth Congress session in Guwahati, its president Ambika Sonicomplained that Congressmen sometimes “obstructed” Youth Congress work: “their fear is that if the Youth Congress workers forge ahead by dint of their work, their chairs will be threatened. We do not want their chairs.”
Soni was made the YC president after Sanjay ousted Das Munshi. The cable described Soni as “an attractive, well-educated, outspoken but intellectually weak personality who has been working in the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) bureaucracy since 1969.”
Meanwhile, in Kerala, the faction led by Antony and a large section of people were very critical of Sanjay’s growing importance. A cable from the US embassy said that their impression was that “Sanjay Gandhi is not very popular in that state”
“On the contrary, the US mission officials had written to their bosses in April 1990 that then chief minister M Karunanidhi was tilting towards the LTTE. The cable sent almost a year before his government was dismissed, said his pro-LTTE stand was generating widespread controversy and dismay in Tamil Nadu, particularly in the light of his strained relations with the Tigers in the past.
He was burning bridges with Delhi because of his hardliner pro-Tamil Eelam stand, the cable said and added that it may be at significant political cost. The US mission also raised suspicion as to whether Karunanidhi had put up with the LTTE activities in Tamil Nadu out of fear for the terrorist group.
One should not discount the role of the government of India in supporting the LTTE. It should not have permitted the LTTE to operate from Indian soil, said G Parthasarathy, former diplomat, who was in Rajiv Gandhi’s office from 1986 to 1989. “Karunanidhi was viciously critical of the LTTE in the past. But once he returned to power in 1989, he turned an LTTE supporter,” said Parthasarathy. His mistake was that he allowed the constitutional machinery to break down in Tamil Nadu as LTTE ran riot, he said. The 1991 electoral verdict was against the LTTE and terrorism and Jayalalithaa was just fulfilling her constitutional duty in flushing them out, Parthasarathy added.
India Today published a story calling it a spoof on the ban of Sri Lankan Players entering Tamil Nadu.
When the Central Government is sublimely indifferent and callous in not condemning The Genocide and bringing the Killers to book, is this the way a Magazine to hurt people’s sentiments?
You need not be a Tamil, being a Human being is enough, not to be moved by the Human Tragedy!
Have the Editors watched the show on The War Museum in Sri Lanka and the Videos of their sister Publications Headlines Today on Sri Lanka Genocide ,including the Killing Fields??
India Today on Ban on Sri Lankan Players by Jayalalithaa
The target of the protesters’ anger seems to be India’s archaic sexual violence laws and a culture of impunity for offenders, with even authorities demonstrating a blase attitude toward rape. In the wake of the Dec. 16 incident, officials have been criticized for belittling rape victims, and the son of India’s president apologized after calling the protesters “highly dented and painted” women, who go “from discos to demonstrations,” the AP reported.
Protesters have called for far worse fates for India’s rapists than online exposure — including execution and chemical castration. Some argue that the public database is far from an effective remedy for the epidemic of violence. Writing in First Post, Sandip Roy says the idea seems like the move of a government grasping for a quick fix to appease popular fury:
It’s always worrisome when policies are cooked up in an overheated chamber of righteous popular outrage. This proposed database seems prompted less by a concern for public safety than a belated attempt by a flatfooted government to give the appearance of swift action. If we cannot hang them in the public square, let’s hang them in a public database at least.
If groups of people are capable of gang-raping innocent women, he argues, they might be just as likely to target even suspect rapists for vigilante justice, as they already have following the gang-rape incident:
Soon after the Delhi gangrape, five men in a Jharkhand village, all “suspected eve teasers” were beaten to death by an angry mob.
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