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The Center for Science in the Public Interest says Happy Meals are responsible for overweight children. The Washington-based consumer advocacy group threatened to file a lawsuit against McDonald’s, charging that the fast food chain “unfairly and deceptively” markets the toys to children.

“McDonald’s marketing has the effect of conscripting America’s children into an unpaid drone army of word-of-mouth marketers, causing them to nag their parents to bring them to McDonald’s,” CSPI’s Stephen Gardner wrote to the heads of the chain in a letter announcing the lawsuit.

The center, which has filed dozens of lawsuits against food companies in recent years, is hoping the publicity and the threat of a lawsuit will force McDonald’s to negotiate with them on the issue. The group announced the lawsuit in the letter to McDonald’s 30 days before filing it in hopes that the company will agree to stop selling the toys before a suit is filed.

Read more here: Parents sue McDonalds over Happy Meals

A new commercial for McDonald’s in France is generating a tremendous amount of Buzz online.

In the spot, a teenage boy sits in a McDonald’s booth, looking at his class picture, when his phone rings. “I was just thinking about you,” he says, with obvious affection. “I miss you, too” he replies, and then says that he has to go. His dad is coming to the booth with their food. Father sits across from son and comments that he was “quite the ladies’ man” when he was his son’s age. Dad then looks at the class picture and remarks that “it’s too bad” that his son’s class is all boys. The son can only smile.

Read more here: Gay-friendly McDonald’s commercial goes viral

• Gay McDonald’s ad in France:

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – A California county is stopping restaurants from using toys to lure children to high-calorie, salt-laden food such as popular “Happy Meals” hawked by fast-food giant McDonald’s.

Elected officials in the county of Santa Clara, in the heart of technology center Silicon Valley south of San Francisco, voted Tuesday to enact the ban to fight an “obesity epidemic” sweeping California and the United States.

Read more here: California county bans fast-food toys to stem child obesity

• Click here for the video

CHICAGO – The chief executive of McDonald’s Corp., the world’s largest hamburger chain, received compensation valued at US$17.6 million for 2009, an increase of 29 per cent, according to a regulatory filing Friday.

Jim Skinner, who is also the vice chairman at McDonald’s, got the biggest boost from a large increase in a performance-based cash bonus.

In 2008, his compensation was valued at $13.6 million.

Read more: McDonald’s CEO takes home US$17.6 million in compensation in 2009

SHANGHAI — U.S. fast-food giant McDonald’s Corp. plans to nearly double its presence in the world’s fastest developing economy over the next few years, senior officials from the company said Tuesday after they launched the first McDonald’s Hamburger University in China.

McDonald’s outlined its ambitious China plans at a time when relations between foreign businesses and Beijing are souring, with a growing number of Western companies complaining of a deteriorating operating environment in the country.

Read more: McDonald’s to Double Restaurants in China

Twenty Years Later: What McDonald’s In Russia Says About The Brand’s Future-

The lettuce magnate of Russia is named Mr. Semenov. He began as a modest lettuce grower outside of Moscow in 1990. Today he sells 150 different types of lettuce, is a wealthy man, and has subsequently transitioned into politics, serving in the Russian Parliament with the powerful United Russia party. Who does he have to thank for his success?

Ronald McDonald. And the McDonald’s brand.

This is the story of a brand that will to do McWhatever-It-Takes. When McDonald’s first moved into Russia, it had to start from scratch. There was no infrastructure. Nothing. For a company that typically purchases ingredients – lettuce, pickles, etc. – from local, privately-owned farms, McDonald’s found itself in a foreign country run by a complex government that didn’t encourage private businesses. So McDonald’s built its own facility: the McComplex, right outside of Moscow. Since then, McDonald’s has inspired enough private ventures to provide almost every ingredient the company needs to accommodate its menu.

For the complete article, read Twenty Years Later: What McDonald’s In Russia Says About The Brand’s Future

By Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press

ROME – Italy’s agriculture minister is defending his sponsorship of McDonald’s new all-Italian burger amid criticism that he is selling out to a multinational corporation and sacrificing Italy’s culinary reputation in the process.

Minister Luca Zaia has argued that McDonald’s new McItaly burger – using all Italian beef, Asiago cheese and artichoke spread – will pump C3.5 million ($4.8 million) more a month into the pockets of Italian farmers grappling with tough economic times.

But for a country that gave birth to the Slow Food movement a quarter-century ago and prides itself on its varied, delicious and healthy cuisine, Zaia’s enthusiastic support of McDonald’s has been hard to swallow.

It didn’t help that Zaia and McDonald’s executives launched the new burger last month at McDonald’s flagship restaurant in Rome’s historic centre near the Spanish Steps, the chain’s first Italian outpost.

The opening of those Golden Arches in 1986 famously inspired a relatively unknown Turin foodie, Carlo Petrini, to launch what became Slow Food – the international movement that embraces local, organic food and home cooking over fast food and the industrialized food chain.

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THE HAGUE (AFP) – A Dutch branch of McDonald’s was wrong to fire a worker for giving a colleague an extra piece of cheese on a hamburger, a court ruled on Tuesday.

“The dismissal was too severe a measure,” the district court in Leeuwarden in the north of the Netherlands said in a written judgment.

“It is just a slice of cheese.”

(more…)