Category Archives: Profiteering

Half of mainland consumers no longer trust Western fast-food companies after scandal | South China Morning Post

Exactly half of all the Chinese consumers who took part in an online poll today say they no longer trust Western fast-food companies following the new scandal surrounding rotten meat.

The survey, carried out by Sina Shanghai, had attracted more than 1,800 respondents by 2.45pm today.

In a second Sina survey started yesterday, featuring 25,000 respondents up to 2.45pm today, 77 per cent believed the restaurant brands affected had been aware of Husi’s faulty practices, while 69 per cent said they would no longer dine at the restaurants run by the Western companies.

via Half of mainland consumers no longer trust Western fast-food companies after scandal | South China Morning Post.

Supplier Quality Control – non-existent! Shanghai supplier for McDonald’s, KFC under fire after using expired meat: Shanghaiist

This could mean it’s back to the food safety drawing board for both McDonald’s and “Colonel Scandals,” who have been desperately trying to resurrect their images/profits in the wake of last year’s health violations. Yeah, it’s probably going to take a lot more than Hoisin burgers and celebrity shilling to wipe this one from the public memory.

Couple this with Wal-Mart’s recent fox meat scandal, and it seems the reputation of Western companies in China as (comparatively) ‘squeaky clean’ is on a nosedive. The Chinese are already starting to go native for their fast food fix.

via Shanghai supplier for McDonald’s, KFC under fire after using expired meat: Shanghaiist.

Both Sides Report Deadliest Day in Gaza War – NYTimes.com

Taghreed Harazin, 34, sat under a gazebo with her six-month-old son, Diaa, in the car seat in which she had carried him on foot until finding a taxi. She said she had believed the evacuation order was only for the eastern part of the neighborhood, and mistakenly thought she would be safe at home. Moving was frightening, she said, because of airstrikes.

But during the night, as the family prepared their predawn Ramadan meal — only bread, since there was no electricity to cook with — heavy shelling started. They went to the basement for three hours, then ventured out at dawn.

As the family dashed through the streets to avoid crashing shells, Ms. Harazin, said, she saw the decapitated body of a boy who looked about 4, and a wounded woman in a black abaya nearby, both lying on the sidewalk. An ambulance came and took them both away.

“We are not Hamas, and we are not with the others,” Ms. Harazin said. “We just want to live in our homes. The people are not Hamas. Israel has a problem with Hamas. What’s the fault of the other people? We have nothing to do with it.”

Asked what she thought of Hamas’s handling of the current war, she said, “Sometimes it’s difficult to express your opinion.”

She faulted Israel for shelling civilian homes, but said of Hamas’s actions, “If you say any word, it’s held against you.” She said her husband had been beaten for complaining about Hamas.

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A lab technician, Ms. Harazin had brought a medical kit with her, along with her son’s diaper bag, in case anyone needed help. She had bandaged the foot of an elderly woman sitting next to her, who cut it on glass as she fled barefoot.

The woman, Wadha Abu Amr, said her family were refugees from what is now Beersheba. They fled from there in 1948 during the war over Israel’s founding.

“I’m afraid that this is another 1948,” she said, “God forbid. We were driven out in 1948 and we are being driven out again now.”

via Both Sides Report Deadliest Day in Gaza War – NYTimes.com.

Some good common sense! The Ebola Denial Starts from the Top: Sierra Leone News

One of the major reasons behind the unprecedented scale of the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone has been the aspect of denial. The denial is visible from top to bottom. Yesterday July 17th 2014, even as an ambulance raced through streets of Freetown with a dead Ebola patient to be hastily buried, it was interesting to see top government cadre is still in denial as to extent of catastrophe.

 

Minister of Tourism Peter Bayuku Conteh yesterday asked journalists to tell potential tourists that Ebola was only found “in one region” of Sierra Leone. He passionately urged journalists to report such false information as a means of making tourists comfortable to come and visit Sierra Leone.

 

The minister is in denial of what Ebola represents. We wonder if this minister knows the implication of just one tourist catching Ebola here? Is it not better for tourists to stay away until we stop active viral transmission in the country?

 

So, until top cadre in government develop the required maturity on this issue, every time these government officials point at denial amongst the ordinary citizens, four fingers will be pointing right back at them. We just hope Posterity will not harshly judge this government on how it managed this Ebola crisis.

via The Ebola Denial Starts from the Top: Sierra Leone News.

Religious groups want right to hate, fear, and discriminate against gay people and friends of gay people! Faith Groups Seek Exclusion From Bias Rule – NYTimes.com

Some religious folks (not) believe they have a right to hate who they want to hate! What’s next a claim of a right to discriminate according to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, national origin because of your corporate, family, or individually professed “religious” belief! Turn off the lights of democracy USA – we are done!

After a setback in the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case, President Obama is facing mounting pressure from religious groups demanding to be excluded from his long-promised executive order that would bar discrimination against gay men and lesbians by companies that do government work.

The president has yet to sign the executive order, but last week a group of major faith organizations, including some of Mr. Obama’s allies, said he should consider adding an exemption for groups whose religious beliefs oppose homosexuality. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the court ruled that family-run corporations with religious objections could be exempted from providing employees with insurance coverage for contraception.

via Faith Groups Seek Exclusion From Bias Rule – NYTimes.com.

Soylant Green is People! Consumer Reports survey ranks McDonald’s McGriddle above Taco Bell’s Waffle Taco – Louisville – Business First

Three out of three taste testers concurred: Taco Bell’s Waffle Taco doesn’t tickle taste buds like a McDonald’s McGriddle breakfast sandwich.

Consumer Reports, a Yonkers, N.Y.-based nonprofit that reviews consumer products, decided to have some fun this year while compiling stories and information related to its fast-food restaurant chain survey released this month. The survey ranked 65 fast-food chains using more than 96,000 of its subscribers’ dining experiences.

via Consumer Reports survey ranks McDonald’s McGriddle above Taco Bell’s Waffle Taco – Louisville – Business First.

Same Interest as Facebook – Manipulate Your Thoughts and Actions for Profit and maybe a Little Good! Participant Index Seeks to Determine Why One Film Spurs Activism, While Others Falter – NYTimes.com

Participant, created in 2004 by the eBay co-founder Jeffrey S. Skoll, is using that methodology to build a proprietary database. It will feature three echelons with 35 projects each, or about 100 distinct bits of media, annually.

The company will lean heavily toward films and television shows of its own, especially those carried on its activism-driven online and pay-television network, Pivot. But it will also index properties for partners, like the Gates and Kaiser Family foundations, and for companies or others who will pay a fee.

Participant was created in 2004 by the eBay co-founder Jeffrey S. Skoll, left, pictured here with James G. Berk, chief executive. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times

(Prices have not been set, Mr. Berk said, but he expects to serve nonprofits at cost. He declined to say how much Participant has invested in the index.)

In an inaugural general survey, which polled 1,055 of its viewers in March and April of this year, Chad Boettcher, Participant’s executive vice president for social action, and Caty Borum Chattoo, a researcher and communications professor at American University, found some perhaps surprising results.

Even among the presumably progressive Participant audience, crime ranked near the top of the list of 40 primary concerns. It was cited by 73 percent of respondents as an important social issue, placing it just behind human rights, health care and education.

Gay rights, female empowerment and prison sentencing reform, by contrast, ranked near the bottom of the list, while climate change was stuck in the middle, a concern among 59 percent of respondents. Digital intellectual property issues, at 38 percent, brought up the rear.

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Stories about animal rights and food production, it turned out, were the most likely to provoke individual action. But tales about economic inequality — not so much.

Over all, said Marc Karzen, a social media entrepreneur whose company, RelishMix, advises film and television marketers, Participant will most likely affirm what is becoming clear to conventional film studios: Impact can be less about persuasion than nudging an audience to go where it is already pointed.

“You have to embrace your fans, not shout at them,” Mr. Karzen said. “They need to be inspired to spread the word.”

One of the weirdest problems in measuring social impact, and one still unresolved, Mr. Boettcher said, is the paradox of “The Cove.”

That documentary, which looks closely at dolphin killing in Japan, had worldwide ticket sales of just $1.2 million after its release in 2009. Yet it has repeatedly led to campaigns to protect the Japanese dolphins, Mr. Boettcher notes, particularly among activists who are aware of the film but will not watch (and hence, would not be counted under the current methodology of the index) because of its gory content.

“They don’t want to see it,” Mr. Boettcher said, “but they will sign up.”

via Participant Index Seeks to Determine Why One Film Spurs Activism, While Others Falter – NYTimes.com.

 

Is it a documentary or propaganda – the folks who want to profit from your feelings don’t care – they just care about the money!

We Are Making Ebola Outbreaks Worse By Cutting Down Forests | Mother Jones

Human activity is driving bats to find new habitats amongst human populations. More than half of Liberia’s forests—home to 40 endangered species, including the western chimpanzee—have been sold off to industrial loggers during President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s post-war government, according to figures released by Global Witness. Logging, slash-and-burn agriculture, and chopping down trees for an increased demand for fire wood, are all driving deforestation in Sierra Leone, where total forest cover has now dropped to just 4 percent, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which says if deforestation continues at current levels, Sierra Leone’s forests could disappear altogether by 2018.

“We see deforestation or incursion into forests, whether it’s through hunting or just alteration of landscape, causing people and wildlife to have more contact,” says Epstein.

Mining

The 1994 outbreak of Ebola, which killed 31 people, occurred in gold mining camps deep in the rain forest.

The 1994 outbreak of Ebola, which killed 31 people, occurred in gold mining camps deep in the rain forest. Mining also appears to be a feature of this latest outbreak: Its epicenter is in the south east of Guinea, close to iron ore reserves, according to Reuters.

Mining “has become a big livelihood activity across the regions, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, as of the last couple of decades,” says Leach. And that means more mines in the forest, but also “immense movement: people going seasonally in and out of mines, coming in and out, young people coming from all over the country.” Guinea is the world’s top exporter of bauxite, the raw material used in aluminum production, according to Reuters.

“That whole sense of movement is something that means that a disease, an outbreak, once established in a place, is very likely not to stay in that place; it tends to move quite quickly,” Leach says.

via We Are Making Ebola Outbreaks Worse By Cutting Down Forests | Mother Jones.

 

(And it is not just Ebola that breaks out as a result of deforestation – malaria’s, and denge’s expansion is facilitated by deforestation which creates the perfect breed grounds for the mosquito that carries the deadly and more common diseases)

Avian Flu Diary: Despite Crackdown, `Wild Flavor’ Trade Continues In China

A similar concern has been raised in the Middle East, where the consumption of camel products (meat, milk, etc.) has been suggested as being a possible route of MERS-CoV infection in humans (see WHO Update On MERS-CoV Transmission Risks From Animals To Humans).

 

And just last Friday, Reuters reported on an illegal slaughtering operation with tragic results (see Five people hospitalized for suspected anthrax infection in Hungary).

 

Last month, in `Carrion’ Luggage & Other Ways To Import Exotic Diseases, we looked at the extensive international smuggling of bushmeat, and exotic animals, which are also potential routes of zoonotic disease introduction and spread.

 

Beyond SARS, and Ebola, and MERS, a few other zoonotic diseases of concern include Hendra, Nipah, Monkeypox, a variety of avian influenzas, other coronaviruses, various hemorrhagic fevers, many variations of SIV (Simian immunodeficiency virus), and of course . . .  Virus X.

 

The one we don’t know about.  Yet.

via Avian Flu Diary: Despite Crackdown, `Wild Flavor’ Trade Continues In China.

Indigenous Resistance: Paris Exclusive! Klee Benally challenges auction of sacred items in Paris

Then she called her boss, Master Alain Leroy, to inform him of the situation. In between, the protesters started to stick posters on the windows of the office. Then Master Leroy himself arrived, tore the posters, shouting that it was damaging his building (they were just stuck with tape and he could tear them without any effort).

Klee tried to explain to him that he just wanted to deliver a letter and discuss the matter peacefully. But Mr. Leroy started with denying the genocide of Native Americans, claimed that the artifacts had been sold by the Natives themselves, although he did not have a document proving it, but claimed that ‘everybody knew that Native Americans never had papers’! He claimed that nobody had any right to challenge his rights to sell sacred objects, as ‘all the courts have ruled for the 4th time that the sale was legal’. As a matter of fact, ‘all the courts’ are the court of the neighborhood, with that one Madame Judge who has no knowledge what so ever of Native Americans and just believes that Constitutions protect private property and the right to trade.

Mr. Leroy also referred abundantly to the right of private property, guaranteed by French and American Law. He also claimed that those artifacts were preserved thanks to white collectors (suggesting that Natives are not able to preserve their inheritance) and that they would not exist anymore if they had not been sold to while people.

Then, at a point, he claimed that the masks were not sacred but had been made specially for tourists, which amounts to admit that he is cheating on his customers, as they certainly don’t go to an auction to buy tourist junk.

via Indigenous Resistance: Paris Exclusive! Klee Benally challenges auction of sacred items in Paris.