Photo by Mark de Jong on Unsplash A myriad of brands get caught in a crossfire, sometimes warranted, sometimes unwarranted. Some brands’ campaigns trigger dissent in a particular group or community, while others’ logos seem vulgar in the eyes of the beholder. A case in point is the recent controversy around the Flipkart-backed brand – Myntra’s – logo. To many, the logo represented the ‘M’ from the brand’s name, until NGO activist Naaz Patel said that it resembled female genitalia and deemed it offensive to women. Myntra ended up changing the logo. Unsurprisingly, Patel’s petition sparked several conversations about when a brand should undergo the trouble to right the wrong of a single individual’s perception.
Italy: An all-party government against the working class
President Sergio Mattarella swore in Italy’s new Prime Minister Mario Draghi and his cabinet on Saturday. In the record time of one-and-a-half weeks, the former head of the European Central Bank has put together a government that includes all parties of national importance, in addition to eight so-called experts or technocrats, making a total of 15 ministers.
Handover of government from Giuseppe Conte to Mario Draghi (Image: governo.it/CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 IT)
Beppe Grillo’s Five-Star-Movement (M5S), Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the social democratic Democrats (PD) and their offshoots Liberi e Uguali and Italia Viva, which had been bitterly at loggerheads in recent years, are now united at the cabinet table.
February 14, 2021
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Today is Monday, Feb. 15, the 46th day of 2021. There are 319 days left in the year. This is Presidents Day.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Feb. 15, 1989, the Soviet Union announced that the last of its troops had left Afghanistan, after more than nine years of military intervention.
On this date:
In 1564, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa.
In 1764, the site of present-day St. Louis was established by Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau.
In 1798, a feud between two members of the U.S. House of Representatives (meeting in Philadelphia) boiled over as Roger Griswold of Connecticut used a cane to attack Vermont’s Matthew Lyon, who defended himself with a set of tongs. (Griswold was enraged over the House’s refusal to expel Lyon for spitting tobacco juice in his face two weeks earlier; after the two men were separated, a motion to expel them both was defeated.)