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Blaze Yau

Fries with your Mona Lisa? Big Macs move on Louvre - 0 views

  • The American burger chain McDonald's is to open a restaurant and McCafe in the Louvre museum next month
  • This is the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy and very unpleasant odours in the context of a museum
  • This is the last straw
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  • McDonald's is hardly the height of gastronomy
  • Starbucks was bad enough but McDonald's is worse
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    Such an interesting news which reminds me the news between the Imperial Palace of China and starbucks. Please google 'Starbucks in the Forbidden City' if you want to know further. Someone argue that Starbucks in the Imperial Palace is not embodying Westernization or Globalization but eroding the Chinese traditional culture. The issue of Mcdonald in Louvre gives me a similar feeling although they are not exactly the same. Should we remain our own traditional culture without any modern symbol ?
Christoph Zed

McCurry wins row with McDonald's - 0 views

  • The American fast-food giant McDonald's has lost an eight-year legal battle to prevent a Malaysian restaurant calling itself McCurry.
  • McDonald's argued that the use of the "Mc" prefix infringed its trademark. But the Federal Court in Kuala Lumpur ruled that there was no evidence to show McCurry was trying to pass itself off as part of the McDonald's empire.
  • The owner of McCurry insists its "Mc" prefix is an abbreviation for Malaysian Chicken Curry.
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    interesting outcome of this 8 year-long legal battle
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    This news is of particular interest to me because I am from Malaysia and when the news broke out in Malaysia, I thought it was hilarious (at the expense of the owner of McCurry and McDonalds). The funny thing thing is there are numerous of eateries or restaurants that sound similar to the American imports, and this not only happens in Malaysia but in other countries as well. For example, there was a fast food fried chicken joint similar to KFC, that is called McDota (I can't remember the exact spelling) in Malaysia quite some time ago. Anyways, I just thought this piece of news is interesting and funny!
Christoph Zed

Terrorists in the Making?: Egypt Pursues Europeans Taking Arabic Classes - SPIEGEL ONLI... - 0 views

  • Many deeply religious students from Europe come to Egypt to learn Arabic. The question is: are these European Salafists coming to study the language of the Koran or to prepare terrorist attacks?
  • Young men with downy beards, caps, kneelength a traditional Arab galabeyas and sandals sat chatting in a McDonalds' restaurant in Nasr City, a large middle class district in the eastern part of Cairo.
  • In the neighborhood Egyptians, the European Salafists - Sunni religious fundamentalists - are outsiders.
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  • Ashraf, a 26-year-old Dutchman of Moroccan descent, came to Cairo a year ago. "To learn Arabic," he says, "the language of my religion."
  • "We aren't hurting anyone," says Ashraf, whose apartment was recently searched. "We only come to study and pray."
  • "Religious fanatics want to be taken seriously," says Walid al-Gohari, founder and director of the Al-Fajr institute, one of the many language schools in Nasr City. "But Salafists who don't even know Arabic are not considered credible."
  • The Egyptian security service is concerned about the situation. It therefore keeps a close eye on fundamentalist visitors with a European passport.
  • As a precaution, the security service picked up hundreds of foreign students in a few days time, among them a few from the Netherlands.
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