McDonald’s will buy back all of its Israeli restaurants after sales suffered from a boycott of the brand over its perceived support for Israel.
Alonyal, which is led and owned by chief executive Omri Padan, has operated McDonald’s restaurants in Israel for more than 30 years.
The boycott of McDonald’s was sparked after Muslim-majority countries such as Kuwait, Malaysia and Pakistan issued statements distancing themselves from the firm.
The company will be hoping that by taking the Israeli business back “in house” it can restore its reputation in the Middle East and meet its key sales targets once more.
Much of the Gaza Strip has been devastated during the Israeli military operations that began after Hamas-led gunmen attacked southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people and seizing 253 hostages.
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Usually in the US more by making it illegal to sign government contracts with any boycotters of Israel, or by preventing public funds from investing into any entities perceived as boycotting Israel. These things could be devastating to any businesses or non profits that work with the government, or any publicly traded companies (due to decreased investment). Technically boycotting Israel in general can’t be made illegal in the US, as that would be a free speech violation.
Okay. I keep seeing things that clearly point to something. But whenever anyone brings it up they are mentioned as a crazy racist conspiracy theorist. But sometimes conspiracy theories are true.
I’m not American. Is America (the goverment/ media/ Hollywood whatever) over represented by Jews that favour their own interest and the interest if Israel?
Is so what evidence is there and why does no one care?
Just to be clear I don’t think this is a some illuminati style super government. More like how in the past America was super racist and a lot of people would give a white person beneficial treatment over blacks. Like that but more hidden.
Israel is really against free speech. This law might in the future be used to make BDS a hate crime or some equally perverse analogy like that. Israel will gladly throw away other people’s rights for their own benefit (not least their neighbors’ rights), and they are completely throwing Jews in general under the bus, as it has been from the beginning:
Herzl described [Jewish] opponents of the Zionism he was proposing as “Jewish vermin”
In fact, the more anti-semitism rises in the world, the more Jews will believe they should move to Israel, thus serving the Zionist agenda. Israel might throw America under the bus too, just to get their way.
The current struggle is not Israel vs. Palestine or Israel vs. Hamas but Israel vs. human rights and freedom, and we do have to pick a side.
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
But to expound on that, some US states make people sign a pledge to not participate in BDS if they have a job or even just contract with the state.
It’s incredibly fucked up and few people talk about it.
Inside every major contract Missouri signs with a business sits a clause about boycotting Israel.
All but the smallest companies have to agree not to participate in any movement that aims to boycott, divest from or sanction companies in Israel.
Missouri isn’t alone. At least 36 other states have anti-BDS (boycott, divest or sanction) measures that bar state contractors from refusing to do business in Israel, or otherwise boycotting or divesting from the country or its occupied territories.
I know and I always thought that is bullshit, but making it (for all intends and purposes) illegal to boycot companies from another country is next level. That’s giving away freedoms of your own citizens purely to the advantage of another country. That is insane.
Isn’t it? And it has been going on since long before you and me heard about it. The best we can do for justice is to just spread truths like this, because the only reason injustices like that find so much success is that they are hidden and done in secret.
The company will be hoping that by taking the Israeli business back “in house” it can restore its reputation in the Middle East and meet its key sales targets once more.
How is this clearly signalling the they’re against Israel in order to appease the boycotters?
Doesn’t seem to matter who owns them technically, if they’re still McDonalds and still there…
In some cases, yes. We should do the same here in the USA once the value of a person’s theft exceeds a limit based on the value of a human life. There is a number for that based on earning potential and some other factors. Give it a multiplier (maybe ten times the value of a life but that’s for bean counters to figure out) and also consider mitigating factors like we do in homicide cases. Somebody who steals enough to wipe out many lifetimes of hard, honest work may not be directly killing anyone but theft at that scale has destructive and deadly consequences.
I almost agree, as there are only very few crimes, and in absolutely certain circumstances, where I think a death sentence would be appropriate. As an example, cases like Anders Breivik.
The system in Japan is… Let’s say “interesting”. You get sentenced to death, but you might still sit in prison for years or even decades until one morning they carry it out with no warning, so you’ll live the rest of your life not knowing if each day is your last or not.
Often it is, but the death penalty isn’t the only thing affecting it - if it did, USA would not be at such a high of a spot for intentional homicides (#55) as most states have the death penalty as well.
Not trying to excuse his actions but read the _Early life and reports of abuse _section.
This guy is a product of a mentally ill mother who abused him. Imagine being 4 years old and your caregiver keeps telling you she wished you were dead. Not a recipe for a well balanced individual.
My point is yes, his place is in prison. But if you want to prevent other acts of this kind, social and mental services need to get better. They clearly failed in this case, more than once.
It’s a bank not a hedge fund. The investors would be the regular people that made deposits- you know, the victims of the fraud. So your knee jerk reaction is “investors bad” without thinking about anything?
You can’t be certain 100% of the time, so one has to accept there will be instances of injustice.
Or perserve it for instances where it is 100% certain only (video evidence, tons of eyewitnesses). I don’t care which personally, but latter is preferred.
What I don’t want is a drawn out affair where it costs more to execute them than to keep them alive.
When people deserve to die, they should be killed with haste, so we can forget they ever existed and move on. I’m not a fan of the slow torturous rot of keeping them alive until they die of natural causes part of the justice system we have come to embrace in western society.
To be fair, I’m focused more on other crimes than the one this article is about. But anything that would end up being the rest of a person’s life, I’m okay with just ending prematurely. I’m morally flexible in this regard.
She didn’t get there by paying the employees of her business empire the share they deserve of the profits they generated for her. If she had, she wouldn’t be a billionaire.
That doesn’t even touch on the issues of constant private jets around the world, owning multiple homes, etc.
Billionaires cause infinitely more problems than death sentences.
I think, though, that it is a simple enough affair for a billionaire to stop being a billionaire, if they are sufficiently motivated to do so.
If we make “acquiring and retaining a billion dollars” a capital offense, the billionaires will get rid of themselves; we won’t actually have to execute anyone.
I don’t really think we need to compare them. Death sentences shouldn’t be a thing. Neither should billionaires. Billionaires are human beings, their wealth is a systemic issue we should do something about.
I disagree. It is not a systemic issue. It is a personal failing. They lack the self control, discipline, empathy, and compassion of fully-functional people. They have no internal sense of the harm that they are causing to all of society, and the only external feedback they get is from sycophants hyping them up to commit ever increasing atrocities.
If there is a systemic failure, it is that we treat them as ordinary decent criminals, protecting them from oppression and discrimination, while ignoring that the only oppression they have ever seen has been the oppression they have perpetrated.
They should be treated as hostile nations, not criminal defendants.
I bet that’s part of why she’s in this situation, rich people lost money. Lots of corrupt government officials also want the spotlight to stay on her. I mean of course in addition to the fact that she did ruin many people’s lives…
“I sentence to you ten years, with 9 years 360 days credit for time served, and a $25 fine. Your incarceration shall consist of checking in once weekly via Zoom.”
Redistribute their wealth, then set their parole parameters: hold an average job in food service or retail; live in an average apartment off those wages; keep that up for a set number of years, without external assistance from any third parties.
I’m not for the death penalty. She should be in prison for the rest of her life without a chance of getting out. Can’t say I don’t understand why they’re opting for the death penalty though. 44 billion is a fuckload of money. Like more than the gdp of 84 countries.
It’s been widely reported that the death sentence may be a plot to get her to return the money. If she does this she may have her sentence commuted on appeal.
She can appeal still, and they are doing it as an incentive for her to return 27b. I imagine she will attempt to return a large portion, appeal and then just be given life in prison.
Uh… either the scale of fraud is huge, at the level of a crime syndicate, or they are convicting some innocent people. Usually the government overcharges people to encourage confessions, leading to some people being found innocent.
Do we really think the Vietnamese prosecutors are the best in the world? Maybe the jury really hated these people.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending.
I read in a separate article that basically that’s how she got to where she is. A bunch of people that took bribes over the years are also going to jail. This is supposedly the Vietnamese government trying to fight that corruption. !remindme 5years to see how it works out…
I am all for billionaires facing consequences for their actions. The death penalty is still deeply immoral though. Locking financial criminals up like for example the American state did with Martin Shkreli or Sam Bankman-Fried though is completely o.K. and should happen more often.
I agree. Truong My Lan could just as well, lose her assets and spend her days repaying her debts to society. You know, on a normal person’s wage, trying to make up for billions upon billions. Should be enough time.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
It appears to be a method the courts are employing to encourage her to surrender overseas assets.
In this particular situation, that $27bn is over 5% of Vietnam’s GDP. This is a very significant hit to the nation’s financial stability and one that will likely result in substantial number of excess deaths entirely due to increased poverty. I can see the threat of execution as a method to compel repayment as necessary.
In a better world, foreign banks complicit in Truong’s 11 year long theft would cooperate to return the stolen money, thereby making this threat unnecessary. But so long as foreign financial institutions can hold a nation’s wealth hostage, all the Vietnamese state leadership can manage is to respond in kind.
But surely someone can’t commit such a huge fraud alone. Nobody at Saigon Commercial Bank is involved or culpable for loaning that amount to a fraudster?
I mean, when you stop and think about it, you’ll realize that it’s probably all a giant mafia, and she crossed the wrong people the wrong way. There’s no way on earth that someone can disappear 10% of a country’s GDP without anyone knowing.
There’s certainly corruption all the way to the top. Everything is controlled by one party, including the banks. Everyone knew for certain
Yes the case involves over 2700 witnesses. The law in Vietnam forbid her from owning more than 5% of the bank shares. Through shell companies and other people, she owned about 90% of the bank. She then hired her own people as managers, and got them to approve loans for the shell companies she had. About 93% of the loans this bank approved were for her/her shell companies. She also had her driver withdraw the equivalent of $4billion usd, which she kept in her house (it weighed 2 tons).
as someone opposed to prison-culture, I would suggest instead forcing them to contribute to society meaningfully through acts of service while losing privileges such as running businesses, sitting on boards, and reducing their ill-gotten gains to something akin to the average income and redistributing their stolen wealth to benefit communities.
Them sitting in a cube doesn’t help society, but if they were forced to solve homelessness or else face The Cube, that would be better.
So you are telling me that we should give them housing, a stable and guaranteed job and a secure income in line with the nation average? Man, I might start thinking about stealing millions, worst it can happen, I’m better off than now. /s
40k a year is very much a different amount in various parts of the world, and even of the US. Regardless, if accommodation is already taken care of, it’s not a bad amount in lots of places (just maybe not NYC or SF)
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