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Benetton Apologizes for Ad: The international fashion retailer apologized for shocking Britons with an advertisement showing a newborn baby but said it was surprised by the reaction. Britain’s advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority, said it had received more than 800 complaints about the posters, displayed in London, showing a newborn baby girl covered in blood with the umbilical cord attached. “We are very astonished and we are sorry to have created such a big problem,” Laura Pollini, Benetton’s communications director, told a television interviewer from the company’s headquarters in Italy.