Advertising and Donations - advertising-newsandtimes.comPolice officer gave evidence to Melbourne court hearing about feeling ‘highly anxious’ over his and his family’s safety after Sewell’s podcast comments
A neo-Nazi leader is facing jail time after he was found guilty of intimidating police by hurling insults and threatening to publicly release personal information about an officer and his wife.
Thomas Sewell, 32, self-represented himself in a contested hearing against the charges at Melbourne Magistrates Court, which ran for more than a week.
AP Photo/Hiro Komae, File
It looks like McDonald’s Japan is set on never repeating the Pokémon Happy Meal chaos.
The chain launched a Sanrio Happy Meal on Friday, featuring toys of Sanrio’s “My Melody & Kuromi” characters. The Happy Meal also includes a Plarail toy and a picture book with Sanrio’s “Cinnamoroll” character.
But the fast-food giant seemed to have learned its lesson from its Pokémon Happy Meal release in August.
On the weekend of August 9, Pokémon fans and resellers, eager to get their hands on limited edition McDonalds-Pokémon trading cards, formed snaking lines in stores. The Happy Meal launch unraveled into fights, massive food wastage, and scalpers cashing in.
For Friday’s Sanrio Happy Meal launch, McDonald’s added several guardrails “to prevent bulk purchases for resale purposes and food being left unattended,” the company said in a news release.
Customers can only buy the meals in-store at McDonald’s outlets, and not through mobile orders, drive-thru pickups, or delivery services.
The company also limited the maximum number of meals one group could buy to three meals. Multiple purchases by the same customer group are prohibited, the company said.
Last month, buyers told Business Insider that McDonald’s had allowed them to place unlimited orders for the Pokémon meals, and some had purchased as many as 20.
The meal was priced at 500 yen, or about $3.50. Following the launch, Business Insider saw dozens of Pokémon card listings on Mercari, Japan’s largest online resale marketplace, with some priced as high as 3,000 yen.
On Friday, after the Happy Meal sale started, at least two of the “My Melody & Kuromi” toys were listed on Mercari.
Friday’s release added that McDonald’s “does not tolerate the abandonment or disposal of food.”
“We strictly prohibit the purchase or resale of Happy Meals, purchases for other profit-making purposes, and customers who do not abide by the above rules and etiquette,” McDonald’s said.
The Pokémon Happy Meal chaos was not the first time McDonald’s promotions have gotten out of hand. Its BTS meals in 2021 and Hello Kitty plushies in Singapore in 2015 were wildly popular, leading to long queues and overcrowded stores.
Kieran Gibb, the founder of Monogic, a Hong Kong-based food and beverage marketing company, told Business Insider in August that the Pokémon Happy Meal chaos could leave “a sour taste” in the mouths of its Japanese consumer base, one that cares about social etiquette and reducing food waste.
McDonald’s stock is up about 6% in the past year.
Representatives for McDonald’s did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Director, marking new exhibition in LA, tells of chaotic filming – and says he’s ‘never seen so much vomit in my life’
Before Jaws became a cinematic classic, and the very first American “summer blockbuster”, director Steven Spielberg thought the 1975 film would be the last one he would be allowed to make.
Spielberg, who was just 26, had decided to shoot his second film, a thriller about a killer shark, on location on the east coast island of Martha’s Vineyard.
National Trust-owned painting will be exhibited with a meditation option for art lovers to take a long, lingering look
The impulse to race around a gallery and take in as many wonderful paintings as possible can be hard to resist.
But art enthusiasts are being urged to slow down and take a lingering, meditative look at one of the great self-portraits when it is taken on an unhurried tour of England.
Retailer’s owner has stake in Wagestream, which offers workers loans of up to £25,000
An influential group of MPs has sought assurances that Asda is not “squeezing staff” to drive profit after it emerged they are being offered high-interest loans by Wagestream, a company in which the retailer’s owner has a stake.
The business and trade select committee has written to Asda over its links to the “financial wellbeing app” that recently began offering the supermarket’s staff loans of up to £25,000. The default arrangements for Wagestream’s “workplace loans” involve debt repayments being directly deducted from workers’ pay packets.
Exclusive: Leachate is tankered to treatment works where it mixes with sewage and industrial effluent
More than 750,000 tonnes of liquid from landfills are mixed with sewage at water treatment works and spread on farmland across England each year, it can be revealed.
Generated by hundreds of landfills across the country, leachate – the liquid that drains through landfill waste carrying a cocktail of chemicals – is regularly tankered to sewage treatment works, where it mixes with domestic sewage and industrial effluent to create sludge, also described as “biosolids”.