McDonald’s creates candles that smell like 6 Quarter Pounder ingredients
(WJW) – In the mood for McDonald’s? There’s a new way to indulge without all the calories.
GoldenArchesUnlimited.com, the Quarter Pounder Fan Club, has launched a new line of swag that includes candles that smell like the ingredients of a Quarter Pounder, according to a McDonald’s press release.
The six-pack of candles includes the following scents: sesame seed bun, ketchup, pickle, cheese, onion and 100 percent fresh beef.
The line also includes couples Quarter Pounder mittens, a 2020 Quarter Pounder calendar, a Quarter Pounder with Love locket, a Quarter Pounder Fan Club T-shirt, an “I’d rather be eating a Quarter Pounder” sticker and a Quarter Pounder Fan Club pin.
Photo Credit: fox2now.com
KFC launches fried chicken and doughnut sandwich nationwide
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WXIN) – KFC is offering a sweet alternative in the chicken sandwich war. The Colonel has cooked up a fried chicken and donut sandwich — a fried chicken fillet sandwiched between two glazed donuts.
The sandwich will appear at restaurants beginning Feb. 24 and will be available through March 16th, or while supplies last, according to KFC.
“Chicken & Donuts is the newest fried chicken trend we’re bringing to all of America,” said Andrea Zahumensky, chief marketing officer at KFC U.S. Zahumensky says the donuts will be glazed-to-order.
KFC and donut fans can experience this sweet and savory meal in a variety of options starting at $5.49:
- Kentucky Fried Chicken & Donuts Basket meal: chicken on the bone or Extra Crispy chicken tenders, paired with one donut. Also available as a big basket meal, which includes two donuts.
- Kentucky Fried Chicken & Donuts Sandwich: a juicy, hand-breaded Extra Crispy chicken filet sandwiched between two fully glazed donuts.
- Guests can satisfy their sweet tooth by adding a donut to any meal for an additional cost.
KFC will open a pop-up shop called “The Colonel’s (Chicken &) Donuts Shop” for one day only in Los Angeles.
The shop will open Feb. 22 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., serving only Kentucky Fried Chicken & Donuts. As a special treat, the first 50 customers in line will receive a free Colonel’s Dozen, a mix of six KFC Extra Crispy chicken tenders and six glazed-to-order donuts. Guests can RSVP here.
via: https://fox2now.com/2020/02/20/kfc-launches-fried-chicken-and-doughnut-sandwich-nationwide-tmw/
Photo Credit: fox2now.com
Man charged with sexually assaulting 3-year-old girl in Chicago restaurant bathroom
CHICAGO (WGN) — A Chicago man is charged with sexual assault against a 3-year-old girl at a restaurant in an Illinois neighborhood.
Christopher Puente, 34, is accused of pulling the girl into a bathroom stall of the restaurant around 8:20 p.m. Monday and touching her inappropriately.
He is charged with felony predatory criminal sexual assault of a victim under 13-years old.
Puente was arrested Wednesday morning at a Chicago business. He was identified by police as the suspect in the sexual assault.
Puente was also charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass after he refused to leave the business where he was arrested, police said.
Puente was due in bond court Thursday.
Photo Credit: fox2now.com
Larry Tesler, creator of copy, cut and paste function, dies at 74
New York (CNN Business)Larry Tesler, a pioneer of personal computing credited with creating the cut, copy and paste as well as the search and replace functions, has died. He was 74.Tesler was not nearly as well known as computing giants such as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But he played an early, central role in making computers accessible to people without computer engineering degrees, i.e. most of us.Xerox (XRX), the company for whom he developed the functions, tweeted out news of his death. “Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas,” the company’s tweet said.
Cut, copy and paste and search and replace functions are used millions of times a day without users thinking twice about how they were developed or by whom.
But before Tesler’s work, computer users had to interact with clunky programs in different “modes,” where the same commands meant different things depending on how they were used. Even an expert like Tesler found that to be a problem.”Most interactive programs had modes, which always tripped me up,” he wrote in a 2012 paper about the development of copy, cut and paste. Tesler became a champion of eliminating modes from computer programs. His personal web site was nomodes.com.The elimination of modes opened the door to how computer users have interacted with personal computers for the last 40 years. Much of that work was done not at one of today’s tech giants, but at a computer lab at Xerox.Today most people know Xerox only as a maker of copiers,but in its heyday the company developed much of the technology that led to the personal computer: the mouse, a graphical user interface that allowed for more than lines of text on a screen. The work was done at the company’s Silicon Valley-based Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC.Tesler was at the center of those efforts, and is credited with coining the terms “friendly user interface” and “browser” during his time at Xerox.When Jobs visited Xerox PARC in 1979, he met with Tesler. “You’re sitting on a gold mine!” Tesler later recalled Jobs telling him. “Why aren’t you doing something with this technology? You could change the world!”Jobs was right: Xerox was not taking advantage of the pivotal research being done at Xerox Parc. So Apple (AAPL) to became the first to make broad use of the graphic user interface, as well as the mouse and other features. Tesler left Xerox for Apple in 1980, where he rose to the position of vice president and chief scientist.While there he helped to design the Macintosh computer, QuickTime and the Lisa computer, one of the first personal computers to use a graphical user interface. It was the Lisa that popularized the now-familiar copy, paste and undo shortcuts. (That’s C to copy, V to paste and Z to undo).”I have been mistakenly identified as the ‘father of the graphical user interface for the Macintosh,'” Tesler wrote on his website. “I was not. However, a paternity test might expose me as one of its many grandparents.”Tesler stayed at Apple until in 1997. In 2001 he joined Amazon (AMZN), where he served as vice president of shopping experience.
He then went to Yahoo (YAHOF) in 2005, where he was vice president of user experience and design. He was issued numerous patents while working at those firms.Until his death, Tesler served as a consultant to companies like Western Union (WU) and note-taking app Evernote on how to improve their user experience on desktop and mobile. He was dedicated to innovating, simplifying, improving.”As is my personality, if I ever hear somebody say something’s impossible or extremely difficult, almost impossible, it’s a challenge and I always try to do it,” he said in an interview at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum in 2013.One thing he never overcame — his hatred of modes. He drove around California with the personalized license plate “NOMODES.”
via: https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/20/tech/larry-tesler-obituary-copy-paste-trnd/index.html
Photo Credit: communalnews.com
Mike Bloomberg Once Again Called Transgender People “It” And “Some Guy Wearing A Dress”
Bloomberg suggested transgender rights would sink Democratic campaigns in comments recorded last year in New York. He’s tried to distance himself from similar comments he made in 2016.
A newly uncovered video shows Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg in 2019 describing transgender people as “he, she, or it” and “some guy in a dress” who enters girls locker rooms — invoking a conservative cliché as he argued that transgender rights are toxic for presidential candidates trying to reach Middle America.
And yet, Bloomberg’s campaign published a new video on Tuesday that pledged the former New York City mayor believed in “inclusivity” for “LGBTQ+ youth,” featuring fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi declaring, “Mike is so incredibly sensitive to this issue.”
Bloomberg’s sensitivity was far less apparent at a forum hosted by the Bermuda Business Development Agency on March 21, 2019, in Manhattan, where Bloomberg derided Democratic candidates for talking about transgender protections.
“If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people,” he said.
Bloomberg made a similar remark about a “man wearing a dress” in 2016, but his comments uncovered Tuesday — remarks he made less than a year ago — came amid the early stages of the 2020 Democratic primary.
The video was posted to YouTube shortly after the March event, but has received few views. Bloomberg was not a candidate for president at the time, but announced his campaign just eight months after he made the remarks.
Bloomberg intoned that Democrats seeking the White House needed to walk a moderate path to appeal to inland states, specifically by avoiding talk of transgender people, and argued their liberal stances explained President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.
“And so you can understand where somebody like Trump comes from,” Bloomberg said at the forum last year. “You can understand when you look at the Democratic Party, they are so far left that two years ago there was nobody on their side who would take these positions, and today virtually all the candidates for president of the Democratic Party are so progressive. I don’t know what progressive means.”
A Bloomberg campaign spokesperson told BuzzFeed News on Tuesday, “Mike understands that the transgender community has been under attack for decades and the advance of rights has not been equal. In April 2002, during his first year as mayor, Mike signed a sweeping transgender civil rights bill into law. His company provides comprehensive health care coverage for his transgender employees. As president, he has a comprehensive plan to secure rights for transgender Americans, including passing the Equality Act, ensuring transgender people have access to affirming health care and working to end the crisis of violence against transgender women. Mike is running to defeat Donald Trump and reverse the many policies he has implemented that attack the rights of the transgender community.”
His company Bloomberg LP joined a court filing with several dozen other corporations to oppose a North Carolina law that banned transgender people from using restrooms that matched their gender identity in government buildings.
The spokesperson did not directly respond to BuzzFeed News’ questions about whether Bloomberg thinks a transgender woman is “a guy wearing a dress” or an “it,” if transgender rights are a liability for Democratic presidential candidates, or how his campaign video on LGBTQ+ rights squares with his comments less than a year ago.
When Bloomberg raised a similar talking point in 2016, he was discussing the fallout of the North Carolina anti–transgender rights law. According to reports that emerged earlier this month, Bloomberg said, “If you want to know if somebody is a good salesman, give him the job of going to the Midwest and picking a town and selling to that town the concept that some man wearing a dress should be in a locker room with their daughter.”
After those first comments were reported, a Bloomberg campaign spokesperson told NBC News that the billionaire signed a gender identity nondiscrimination bill in 2002 when he was the mayor of New York City.
“Mike is running to defeat Donald Trump and reverse the many policies he has implemented that attack the rights of the transgender community,” the spokesperson told the network.
But the latest video shows that he was still deploying this idea three years later, in 2019, as the primary started to unfold.
A former Republican, Bloomberg has emerged as contender in the Democratic primary after he doused the nation with a $400 million ad buy — enough to boost his poll numbers to 19% among Democrats in a national poll released Tuesday and to qualify for Wednesday’s debate in Nevada.
At the same time, he’s faced a lash of criticism for his past positions on race and gender. The Washington Post reported on several lawsuits that allege discrimination against women, including in one case in which he allegedly told a pregnant employee to “kill” her fetus.
Bloomberg also defended the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy — which targeted people of color for searches — in a 2015 speech at the Aspen Institute, saying, “We put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why’d we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you should get the guns out of the kids’ hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them.”
Bloomberg tried to distance himself from those comments this month, telling NPR, “I regret that and I have apologized.”
Bloomberg has also tried to reach LGBTQ progressives. In the campaign video released Tuesday, which features a “Mike Bloomberg 2020” emblem in the corner and was retweeted by his campaign, Mizrahi, a designer and entertainer, begins, “My thing is LGBTQ+ youth.”
“As a kid you feel completely ostracized, completely on the outside of everything, but then as an adult you see there is a whole bunch of inclusivity,” Mizrahi continues. “Mike is so incredibly sensitive to this issue. Having lived in New York for a number of years that Mike was mayor and seeing him enact these incredible programs that helped both the adult LGBTQ populations but also the kids, the thing I like about Mike is that he’s really proactive.”
“There is no one more perfect than Mike,” he concludes.
Back at the March 2019 forum, Bloomberg said he’d largely ruled out running for president this year due to his political views, saying in a video, “It’s just not going to happen on a national level for somebody like me starting where I am, unless I was going to change all my views and go on what CNN calls an apology tour.”
This is Bloomberg’s full quote from the forum:
“’Throw the bums out, they haven’t delivered, they didn’t listen to us.’ If you go to the middle of the country, people would say. If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people. They care about health care, they care about education, they care about safety, and all of those kinds of things. And some of these social issues — and not just the American government, the EU government does as well — we are focusing on a lot of things that have little relevance to people who are trying to live in a world that is changing because of technology and communications and things like that. And so you can understand where somebody like Trump comes from; you can understand when you look at the Democratic Party, they are so far left that two years ago there was nobody on their side who would take these positions, and today virtually all the candidates for president of the Democratic Party are so progressive. I don’t know what progressive means. They are in a place where some of the American public is, and it remains to be seen if the remainder of the electorate is.”
via: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/dominicholden/michael-bloomberg-2020-transgender-comments-video
Photo Credit: Brett Carlsen /buzzfeed news
Burger King features moldy Whopper in new ad to prove “no artificial preservatives”
(CNN/Meredith) – Burger King is re-“molding” the image of its signature Whopper in a nauseating new ad campaign that promotes efforts to eliminate artificial preservatives and other additives from the company’s menu.
The burger chain on Wednesday unveiled pictures of its new, preservative-free Whopper. In the campaign, the Whopper is covered in mold, decaying as it’s consumed by green fungus.
The unconventional marketing effort includes a TV commercial showing the all-natural Whopper slowly rotting over the course of 34 days as soul singer Dina Washington’s 1959 hit “What a Difference A Day Makes” plays in the background. Deliberately absent are food coloring and special effects commonly used to make restaurant meals and their ingredients look appetizing in commercials. By the end of the 45-second commercial, the Whopper has transformed into a green and blue mess.
“The beauty of no artificial preservatives,” the ad’s tagline reads.
The moldy Whopper may look revolting, but Restaurant Brands International, which owns Burger King, is betting customers are craving healthier, organic ingredients. Just over half of Millennials and 57% of Millennial parents said they are buying more organic products now than they did five years prior, according to a September YouGov analysis commissioned by Whole Foods. A 2018 Nielsen report also found young adults are more willing to pay higher prices for products made with natural, more environmentally-friendly ingredients.
Burger King restaurants throughout most of Europe have already done away with food preservatives amid an industry-wide shift toward healthier and organic ingredients.
“We believe that real food tastes better,” Restaurant Brands International Global Chief Marketing Officer Fernando Machado said in a statement. “That’s why we are working hard to remove preservatives, colors and flavors from artificial sources from the food we serve in all countries around the world.”
Whopper fans in the United States may have already tasted a preservative-free Whopper without realizing it, according to Christopher Finazzo, president if Burger King’s Americas division.
“The product is already available in more than 400 restaurants in the country and will reach all restaurants throughout the year,” Finazzo said in a statement.
McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s are the three largest burger chains in the United States. McDonald’s stopped using preservatives in its burgers in 2018, two years after removing antibiotics from its chicken supply chain. Wendy’s did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Photo Credit: Courtesy Burger King
Violinist plays her instrument as surgeons remove brain tumor to ensure that the violinist’s musical abilities were not damaged during removal
Dagmar Turner wasn’t just showing off when she played the violin during her brain surgery at King’s College Hospital in London.
Surgeons asked the 53-year-old to play her instrument to ensure that the professional violinist’s musical abilities were not damaged during a tumor removal.
The tumor, in her right frontal lobe, was dangerously close to areas of her brain that were responsible for coordinating delicate movements in her left hand. These regions are crucial for playing the violin, and in some spots, their distance from the tumor was as narrow as a credit card.
“The violin is my passion. I’ve been playing since I was 10 years old,” Turner said in a Feb. 18 news release. “The thought of losing my ability to play was heart-breaking.”
Dr. Keyoumars Ashkan, a neurosurgeon, came up with this creative solution.
“We perform around 400 resections (tumor removals) each year, which often involves rousing patients to carry out language tests, but this was the first time I’ve had a patient play an instrument,” he said in the news release.
Before the procedure, a team of medical experts spent two hours mapping Turner’s brain to figure out which areas were active when she played the violin.
Doctors managed to successfully remove over 90% of the tumor without damaging Turner’s fine motor skills. She went home to her husband and son three days after the procedure.
“I’m hoping to be back with my orchestra very soon,” Turner said after the surgery. She plays with the Isle of Wight Symphony Orchestra.
via: https://fox2now.com/2020/02/19/violinist-plays-her-instrument-as-surgeons-remove-brain-tumor/
Photo Credit: fox2now.com
Three charged after 11-year-old gives birth in bathtub
ST. CHARLES, Mo. – Three relatives of an 11-year-old girl who gave birth in the bathtub of her suburban St. Louis home are facing criminal charges.
An adult female and adult male are charged with child endangerment. And a 17-year-old male is charged with incest as well as statutory rape and statutory sodomy of a child younger than 12.
All three live in St. Charles.
Police started investigating after the adult male relative brought an infant to a hospital on Feb. 11.
Charging documents say the baby still had the umbilical cord and placenta attached and had a body temperature of just 90 degrees.
via: https://fox2now.com/2020/02/19/three-charged-after-st-charles-11-year-old-gives-birth-in-bathtub/
Photo Credit: fox2now.com
Woman steals nearly 150 Lego mini-figures from MO store
CHESTERFIELD, Mo. – The Chesterfield Police Department is asking for the public’s help in identifying a woman caught on camera stealing several dozen Lego figures from a local store.
According to a police spokesperson, the thefts took place at the Barnes & Noble on Clarkson Road.
The woman stole 126 Lego mini-figurines from the store on February 15. Two days later, the woman returned and stole 16 figurines.
The total value of the figurines is over $560.
Anyone with information on the thief’s identity or whereabouts is asked to contact the Chesterfield Police Department at 636-537-3000.
via: https://fox2now.com/2020/02/19/woman-steals-nearly-150-lego-mini-figures-from-chesterfield-store/
Photo Credit: fox2now.com
Brother and sister both drown during game to see who could swim farthest
A brother and sister in Britain drowned during a game to see who could swim the farthest out from shore — an incident ruled a “tragic accident” in an inquest this week, according to new reports.
Malika Shamas, 14, was swimming near Clacton Pier in Essex last Aug. 8, when she got to a point that she was still able to stand up, but panicked, the BBC reported.
Her brother Haider Shamas, 18, and two cousins rushed to her aid, but it was too late.
Malika was rushed to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead, and her brother died two days later of pneumonia, brain damage and drowning.
The siblings could both swim, the inquest heard, but they had been competing with their cousins to go deeper and deeper into the sea, The Mirror reported.
Their tearful mom Shagufta Shamas told the coroner she “entered the water to try to help some of the children,” according to the report.
“The sand underneath my feet was giving way and I was trying to reach this little girl,” she said. “This happened within minutes. Should there not have been signs in this particular area saying that you should not go in and that this is what can occur?”
Essex’s senior coroner Caroline Beasley-Murray said that warning signs near the water should be typed in a larger print and appear in a child-friendly format, according to the report.
Beasley-Murray told the grieving mom she “displayed the utmost dignity” during the probe into the incident.
“[Your children] were clearly very much-loved people with bright futures ahead of them,” she said, according to the BBC. “I do hope you will be able to look back on the happy memories you have of them both.”
via: https://nypost.com/2020/02/19/brother-and-sister-drown-during-game-to-see-who-could-swim-furthest/
Photo Credit: Majid Riaz /SWNS.COM