Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Saturday, 17 October 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 16 Oct 2015 03:53 PM PDT

An ill-thought scheme intended to retain the last of McDonald’s’ customers has blown up in franchise owners’ faces, showing how little can be done to save the fast food giant from imminent collapse.
After seven straight quarters of declining sales, McDonald’s decided to implement an all day breakfast menu earlier this month in hopes to revive their bottom line.
The president of the company’s US division called the launch a “success,” but that statement is at odds with franchise owners’ sentiments, one of whom says the new policy is driving customers away “in droves.”
In a survey conducted by Nomura, franchise owners revealed how the launch of all-day breakfast is costing their businesses money and time, and is overall a disaster.
“In small stores, the problems are vast with people falling over each other and equipment jammed in everywhere,” one franchise owner said, according to Business Insider.
Another franchisee called the gimmick “a non-starter” and said it’s causing his or her store to lose money, as cheaper foods on the breakfast menu produce lower average ticket costs.
“We are trading customers down from regular menu to lower-priced breakfast items. Not generating new traffic,” they said.
Yet another owner described the sudden change as an “erratic, distorted, disorganized direction from McDonald’s,” while another revealed that “Customers are abandoning us in droves because we are either too slow, or sub-par quality.”
“Unfortunately, with the current labor pool in our area, we are struggling to have enough people to run the shift, much less add an extra person,” another franchise owner wrote.
One franchise operator also expressed McDonald’s is in the “throes of a deep depression,” and another added the restaurant could be “facing its final days.”
“The CEO is sowing the seeds of our demise,” the franchise owner wrote. “We are a quick-serve fast-food restaurant, not a fast casual like Five Guys or Chipotle. The system may be facing its final days.”
The company did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
The massive fail of 24-hour breakfast is just the latest indication of McDonald’s demise after numerous attempts by the company to bring it back into the public’s favor.
In May, the company announced they would no longer report monthly same-store sales, instead switching to quarterly data following “11 straight months of declining global comparable-store sales,” according to Bloomberg Business.
That followed the closure of 350 stores by April of this year, and an announcement that they would close an additional 350 by 2016.
Some analysts attribute the company’s decline to consumers who are growing more conscious of unhealthy food choices and rejecting the industry altogether in favor of gmo-free, healthier fresh foods.
“McDonald’s is a huge company, a huge supply chain spread everywhere, and it’s kind of getting nibbled at the margins by all these upscale burger chains, organic places [and] locally sourced food,” Yahoo finance columnist Rick Newman wrote in April.
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Posted: 16 Oct 2015 03:37 PM PDT

New photos from NASA’s Cassini satellite orbiting Saturn has sent back the best-ever photos of its subterranean sea-harboring moon Enceladus.
Cassini came within 1142 miles of the Enceladean surface Wednesday on its 20th flyby of the moon since it began to orbit Saturn in 2004.
The most recent images sent back were captured during the Enceladean summer in the Northern hemisphere, showing heretofore unknown moonscapes of the moon’s northern polar regions.
“The northern regions are crisscrossed by a spidery network of gossamer-thin cracks that slice through the craters,” said Cornell University’s Paul Helfenstein, a member of the Cassini imaging team. “These thin cracks are ubiquitous on Enceladus, and now we see that they extend across the northern terrains as well.”

Wednesday’s flyby is a prologue to the next close encounter: on October 28th, Cassini will come within 30 miles of Enceladus’s south pole. The satellite is set to dive through a plume of icy spray to sample the chemistry of the subterranean ocean shooting up out of large geysers.
“Mission scientists are hopeful data from that flyby will provide evidence of how much hydrothermal activity is occurring in the moon’s ocean, along with more detailed insights about the ocean’s chemistry — both of which relate to the potential habitability of Enceladus,” a statement from NASA statement reads.

Earlier this year, researchers announced the chemical makeup of the subsurface water on Enceladus — and a process called serpentization, in which metallic rocks are transformed into other minerals when they come in contact with water — could make Enceladus one of the Solar System’s best bets for hosting extraterrestrial life.
“Molecular hydrogen can both drive the formation of organic compounds like amino acids that may lead to the origin of life, and serve as food for microbial life such as methane-producing organisms,” Christopher Glein, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, said in a statement in May.
“As such, serpentinization provides a link between geological processes and biological processes,” he added. “The discovery of serpentinization makes Enceladus an even more promising candidate for a separate genesis of life.”
Cassini will also fly by Enceladus on December 19, when it will come within 3,106 miles of the moon to gauge how much heat is coming from the satellite’s interior. The generated heat comes from friction, primarily the result of tides from Saturn’s powerful gravitational pull.

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Posted: 16 Oct 2015 03:24 PM PDT

Researchers from the University of York have used magnetic energy to suppress humans’ ‘threat-response’ functions and dramatically change people’s attitudes to immigration.
Psychologists used magnetic force to safely shut down the region of the brain associated with “threat-response functions” and conducted a series of tests where volunteers were asked questions about their beliefs.
Scientists found the people were less likely to have negative views when the magnetic force was applied to the posterior medial frontal cortex, positioned a few inches up from the forehead.
In the study, half of participants were given a low-level placebo-like level of magnetic energy that did not affect their brain, while the other half received enough energy to lower activity in the target area.
Volunteers were then asked to think about death, after which they were asked questions about their religious beliefs and attitudes on immigration.
Researchers from the University of York and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), discovered those whose frontal cortex was temporarily shut down reported 32.8 percent less belief in God, angels or heaven.
Volunteers were screened prior to the investigation to ensure they held religious beliefs.
The participants were also 28.5 percent more positive in their feelings toward an immigrant who criticized their country.
Dr. Keise Izuma said volunteers were reminded about death because people are more likely to turn to ideologies when they think of dying.
“We decided to remind people of death because previous research has shown that people turn to religion for comfort in the face of death. As expected, we found that when we experimentally turned down the posterior medial frontal cortex, people were less inclined to reach for comforting religious ideas despite having been reminded of death,” he said.
Volunteers were asked to respond to negative and positive emotional aspects of religion, in particular to rate their belief in the Devil, demons and Hell, in addition to God, angels and heaven.
Participants were also given two essays to read, both supposedly written by immigrants. One essay was extremely complimentary to the host country, while the other was extremely critical.
Scientists found that when the magnetic force temporarily shut down the ‘threat-response’ part of the brain, people were more likely to have positive feelings towards the immigrant who was critical.
We think that hearing criticisms of your group’s values, perhaps especially from a person you perceive as an outsider, is processed as an ideological sort of threat,” said Izuma.
“One way to respond to such threats is to ‘double down’ on your group values, increasing your investment in them and reacting more negatively to the critic.”
“When we disrupted the brain region that usually helps detect and respond to threats, we saw a less negative, less ideologically motivated reaction to the critical author and his opinions,” he said.
UCLA’s Dr. Colin Holbrook, who was lead author of the report, said the findings were “striking.”
“These findings are very striking, and consistent with the idea that brain mechanisms that evolved for relatively basic threat-response functions are repurposed to also produce ideological reactions,” he said.
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Posted: 16 Oct 2015 03:08 PM PDT

Leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says the United States should not blame Russia or anti-Kiev fighters for last year’s downing of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine.
Trump made the remarks in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday while commenting on a new report from Dutch investigators which claims Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by a Russian-made rocket and warhead.
Trump was asked what he would do if he becomes president to hold Russia accountable for this deadly incident.
“They say it wasn’t them,” he replied. “It may have been their weapon, but they didn’t use it, they didn’t fire it, they even said the other side fired it to blame them. I mean to be honest with you, you’ll probably never know for sure.”
Trump went on to say that the United States should focus on its own problems and advised it not to “get involved” in conflicts abroad.
“I think it is horrible,” Trump said of the crash. “But they’re saying it wasn’t them. The other side says it is them. And we’re going to go through that arguing for probably for 50 years and nobody is ever going to know. Probably was Russia.”
“It’s a long ways away. We have to get back to making America great again,” he said. “It’s terrible, but we really probably won’t know for sure. And you’ll probably never find out.”
On July 17, 2014, the Boeing 777-200 passenger plane crashed in Ukraine’s conflict zone, killing all 298 people aboard. The plane was travelling to Kuala Lumpur from the Dutch capital Amsterdam.
According to US intelligence and military officials, the aircraft was hit by a Russian SA-series missile launched from eastern Ukraine.
Russian state media, however, released satellite images purportedly showing a Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter jet firing a missile at the MH17.
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Posted: 16 Oct 2015 02:54 PM PDT


Hillary Clinton said it’s “worth considering” a nationwide gun ban and a “buyback” program to eradicate private gun ownership.
The presidential candidate attacked the Second Amendment during an Oct. 16 town hall meeting in which she was asked if it were feasible for the U.S. to confiscate millions of firearms in a year.
Hillary said:
You know, Australia’s a good example, Canada’s a good example, the UK’s a good example. Why? Because each of them had mass killings, Australia had a huge mass killing about 20 or 25 years ago. Canada did as well, so did the UK. In reaction, they passed much stricter gun laws.
In the Australian example, as I recall, that was a buyback program. The Australian government as part of trying to clamp down on the availability of … weapons offered a good price for buying hundreds of thousands of guns and basically clamped down going forward, in terms of having more of a background check approach, more of a permitting approach.
But they believed, and I think the evidence supports them, that by offering to buy back those guns, they were able to, you know, curtail the supply and set a different standard for gun purchases in the future.
Clinton also mentioned that several U.S. cities have done gun buyback programs and it would be “worth considering on a national level.”
But she failed to mention that she supported shipping guns to Syrian rebels, the majority of whom are either ISIS militants or affiliated with the Islamic State.
“In fact she was the biggest cheerleader for redistributing these arms to Syrian rebels,” presidential candidate Rand Paul told Fox News in July. “The reason this is an important issue is many of these people who received the arms are not friends of America.”
“Many of them are linked to al Qaeda and al-Nusra and some of these weapons may well have ended up in the hands of people who became ISIS.”
Virtually all of the rebels in Syria have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
“The Free Syrian Army and the Syrian National Council, the vaunted bulwarks of the moderate opposition, only really exist in hotel lobbies and the minds of Western diplomats,” journalist Ben Reynolds wrote in November. “There is simply no real separation between ‘moderate’ rebel groups and hardline Salafists allied with al-Qaeda.”
The New York Times made a similar statement.
“Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of,” the newspaper reported in 2013.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 11:28