The sauce for a spicy Italian sandwich was apparently a must have for one Florida man.
The man, Reginald Peterson, 42, called police emergency hot line number 911 twice after staff at the Subway sandwich shop left out the sauce.
Peterson initially called so that officers could have his sandwiches made correctly, according to a police report. The second call was to complain that police officers weren’t arriving fast enough.
That guy deserves his own reality show, in my humble opinion.
What do a deaf woman in Los Angeles, a first-century Jewish sandal maker and a red-cockaded woodpecker have in common? Read it in the new Freakonomics column in the NY Times: Unintended Consequences.
One year from today, a new president moves into the White House. This president will be eager to carry out any number of plans — including, surely, plans to help the segments of society that most need help. Extending a helping hand, after all, is one of the great privileges and responsibilities of the presidency.
But before charging ahead with such plans, the new president might do well to first ask him- or herself the following question: What do a deaf woman in Los Angeles, a first-century Jewish sandal maker and a red-cockaded woodpecker have in common?
LOUISVILLE, KY - Yum! Brands (NYSE:YUM), parent of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, today launched the world’s largest hunger relief effort in an attempt to help stop world hunger. Called “World Hunger Relief Week,” the program supports the United Nations World Food Programme, the frontline agency in the fight against global hunger. During October 14-20, 35,000 company and franchised restaurants located in 112 countries will be participating in some way, including KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Long John Silver’s and A&W All-American Food.
More than 850 million people know what it is like to go to bed hungry in all corners of the globe. More people die from hunger each year than from war, tuberculosis and AIDS combined. In fact, every five seconds, a child somewhere dies from hunger.
The company partnered with the U.N. World Food Programme, the world’s leading humanitarian agency feeding 90 million poor people, including 58 million hungry children, in 80 of the world’s poorest communities.
Yum! hopes to raise awareness of the hunger problem, mobilize nearly 1,000,000 employees across its company and franchise system to volunteer their efforts, and raise funds from the more than 125 million customers that visit its restaurants each week. Yum! Brands Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, David C. Novak, will lead a massive volunteerism movement by dedicating volunteer service at a food bank in Louisville, Kentucky. All other above restaurant leaders are being given a day of community service during the week to volunteer their time, and restaurant employees are encouraged to hold fund raising drives and food collections as well.
The Yum! Foundation also will be donating to the cause by covering the WFP’s low administrative fee so that all funds collected from customers and employees will go directly toward purchasing a nutritious school meal or food for the world’s hungry. It costs the WFP just $.19 per day on average to feed a hungry child a nutritious school lunch meal. With funds raised, the company hopes to save hundreds of thousands of people from starvation.
During World Hunger Relief Week, Yum! plans to generate the equivalent of nearly $50 million worth of awareness through television and print advertising, public service announcements, public relations, web-based communications and in-restaurant posters and signage. The integrated marketing materials will be available in English and translated into nine different languages, including English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.
“World hunger is a problem of epic proportions, and unfortunately it is increasing each day. As the world’s largest restaurant company, we believe it is our privilege and responsibility to use our clout and make a difference in the lives of others less fortunate who are starving around the globe,” said David C. Novak, Yum! Brands Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “Our World Hunger Relief efforts will continue year after year. Our goal is to create a global movement to help stop the dying, and start the living. We believe we can truly make a difference in the lives of others by helping them move from hunger to hope.”
Yum! and its brands have been committed to fighting hunger for more than a decade by donating $50 million of prepared food annually to the underprivileged in the United States. The company also has been the primary sponsor of the Dare To Care Food Bank based in Louisville, Kentucky for seven years. Its employees donate thousands of hours each year to the food bank. The company is now expanding these efforts on a global scale through the creation of World Hunger Relief Week. The initiative coincides with the company’s 10th anniversary as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. It was spun-off from PepsiCo in October, 1997.
World Hunger Relief Week addresses the harsh reality that there are 850 million people suffering from hunger every day. The situation has become worse than ever due to the convergence of: rising commodities and higher global food prices; increased competition for products that produce energy; severe droughts and flood due to climate change; a surge in conflict and wars as well as a growing population. At the rate things are going, food prices are expected to jump 35% over the next two years, thereby decreasing the number of people fed.
“This campaign will raise awareness among tens of millions of people around the world,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Programme, who added that the world’s largest humanitarian organization will use any funds raised to fund its greatest needs. “With demographic trends, climate change and soaring commodity prices — the challenges of feeding the hungry are increasing,” she said, adding that innovative approaches to public awareness and fundraising are critical.
The efforts of Yum! and its five brands are making it possible for funds to go directly to feeding people in WFP’s areas of greatest need - such as expanding school feeding programs to serve more children and families; providing essential food assistance to new mothers and their infants and increasing school attendance among girls by providing take-home food rations.
The company is leveraging the power of the internet to reach millions of people through the www.fromhungertohope.com website and other on-line activity. The interactive web site includes information about hunger, the WFP, how to donate to World Hunger Relief Week, updates on WFP outreach activities, Google mashup map highlighting volunteer updates from around the world and much more.
“I’m incredibly proud of the passion that our global team has for this critical initiative,” said Novak who has visited poverty-stricken areas in Guatemala and seen the needs firsthand. Novak is donating all proceeds from his newly released book, The Education of an Accidental CEO - Lessons Learned from the Trailer Park to the Corner Office (Crown Publishing) to the World Food Programme.
Chuck Feeney, co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, may be one of the greatest philanthropists in American history.
He wears a $15 watch, flies economy class and does not own a house or car. For years. few guessed that Chuck Feeney was one of the world’s biggest philanthropists, secretly giving away his billionaire fortune.
(…)
Witty, self-deprecating, frugal and astute, Feeney was listed by Forbes Magazine in 1988 as the 23rd richest American alive and worth $1.3 billion, richer than Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump. He wasn’t.
Four years earlier, Feeney had placed most of his money in charitable foundations.
Inspired by the great 19th century philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, Feeney helped fund schools, hospitals, universities, medical research and human rights from the United States and Ireland to South Africa and Vietnam.
Supermarket staff at Morrisons refused to sell alcohol to a white-haired 72-year-old man - because he would not confirm he was over 21.
Check-out staff at Morrisons in West Kirby, Wirral, demanded Tony Ralls prove he was old enough to buy his two bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Mr Ralls asked to see the manager who put the wine back on the shelf.
The grandfather-of-three said he had refused to confirm he was over 21 as it was a “stupid question.”
Mr Ralls, a retired insurance firm regional manager, said he expected the store manager to resolve the situation but he was disappointed.
Watch his walk to find out the answer! A new study says that body movements reveal your sexual orientation.
As the gay men walked, they slightly swayed their hips. The observers were accurate in assessing the men’s sexual orientation a little more than 60 percent of the time.
I’ve been a supporter of this theory for a long time. People usually tend to ignore the good they could do to larger number of people when they find themselves confronted with the bad luck of an individual, and in most cases they decide to help the individual. Paradox there, of course. Yet, that’s how people act and it is what they say is noble, too.
In this month’s Wired magazine, columnist Clive Thompson makes a thought-provoking claim: Geeks like Bill Gates are better suited to understand the world’s problems than non-geeks.
I couldn’t agree more. While most people would help a single stranger who has been hit by a bad blow of fate, they’re just as good at ignoring the equally bad or worse situations of millions. People who can think in giant numbers, on the other hand, are more likely to see the misery of the masses in Africa, for example.
“The problem isn’t a moral failing: It’s a cognitive one. We’re very good at processing the plight of tiny groups of people but horrible at conceptualizing the suffering of large ones,” says Thompson. “The guy [Bill Gates] is practically a social cripple, and at times he has seemed to lack human empathy. But he’s also a geek, and geeks are incredibly good at thinking concretely about giant numbers. Their imagination can scale up and down the powers of 10 — mega, giga, tera, peta — because their jobs demand it. So maybe that’s why he is able to truly understand mass disease in Africa. We look at the huge numbers and go numb. Gates looks at them and runs the moral algorithm: Preventable death = bad; preventable death x 1 million people = 1 million times as bad.“
George Phillips of Meridian, Mississippi, was going up to bed when his wife told him that he’d left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window. George opened the back door to go turn off the light but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things. He phoned the police, who asked “Is someone in your house?” and he said “no”. Then they said that all patrols were busy, and that he should simply lock his door and an officer would be along when available. George said, “Okay,” hung up, counted to 30 , and phoned the police again “Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people stealing things from my shed. Well, you don’t have to worry about them now because I’ve just shot them.” Then he hung up. Within five minutes three police cars, an Armed Response Unit, and an ambulance showed up at the Phillips’ residence and caught the burglars red-handed. One of the Policemen said to George: “I thought you said that you’d shot them!” George said, “I thought you said there was nobody available!”
