Realty TV star and newly cast MILF Kim Kardashian orders extra-crispy chicken wings with a biscuit at KFC, while “just lets loose and gets both a soft and hard beef taco” at Taco Bell, according to Australia’s News.
“Fast food is def one of my guilty pleasures,” Kardashian wrote on her website, pointing out she’s on the Atkins diet but still has cravings. “I go very rarely, but OMG I love it so much when I decide to indulge.”
And yet! Kardashian, 35, and all of 5’3″ tall, has lost 7 lbs. in the last two weeks, and she’s not stopping there, says E Online. She’s aiming to lose even more in order to get down to at least 120 lbs.
She was fit enough to appear in singer Fergie‘s new barely-safe-for-work “M.I.L.F 4” video, an appearance that sparked a controversy over her too-tiny-to-believe waist. “It’s called ‘styling,'” Kardashian harrumphed on Instagram, “not Photoshop.”
Produced with KFC itself, the newest comic in the series is “The Crisis of Infinite Colonels,” wherein the KFC founder we know must defeat the evil Col. Sunder from Earth-3.
Sanders
“To pull it off, he teams up with a whole host of Colonels from across the DC multiverse, like Bizarro Colonel, Steampunk Colonel, and the one and only Col. Arla Sanders from Earth-11,” says The Verge.
Sanders launched his iconic Kentucky Fried Chicken chain in 1930 from his roadside restaurant in Corbin, Ky., during the Great Depression. He died in 1980 at 90 years old. Read more about KFC and corporate parent Yum.
AMAZON customers in more than 25 U.S. metro areas will be able to get near-immediate delivery of more than 500 items during the e-commerce giant’s second annual Prime Day, a 24-hour extravaganza of extra savings over the retailer’s usual discounts set for July 12. Louisville isn’t one of the eligible cities; the closest is Cincinnati. 😦 Amazon also announced yesterday that first-time Prime Now customers will get $10 off their order when they use the 10PRIMENOW promotional code on orders placed between today and July 12. They will also receive another code later for another $10 off Prime Orders placed later in the month (Cnet and press release).
Prime Day is a big deal in Louisville. The retailer employs 6,000 workers in the Louisville area at mammoth distribution centers in Jeffersonville, and in Bullitt County’s Shepherdsville. Plus, one of Amazon’s biggest shippers is UPS; with 22,000 workers at its Louisville International Airport hub, it’s the city’s single-biggest private employer.
FORD family scion and director Edsel Ford II won’t face criminal charges after being arrested for suspected misdemeanor domestic violence involving his wife Monday night at their Grosse Point Farms home, according to several news media reports this morning.
Edsel Ford
Ford, 67, great-grandson of founder Henry Ford, spent the night in jail after his arrest, but was released yesterday after the city prosecutor’s decision to not bring charges, according to the Detroit Free Press. He was arrested at about 11:30 p.m. Monday after police were called to the suburban Detroit home he shares with wife Cynthia Ford; alcohol was involved.
Late last night, Cynthia Ford issued a statement denying the incident amounted to domestic violence. “I stand behind true victims of domestic violence and I am not one of them,” she said, the Free Press said in a separate story. “My husband and I ask that you respect our privacy and that of our family. We are working in the right direction to heal from this experience and move forward.”
Winning robot in an Amazon competition picked items off a shelf at a speed of about 100 per hour, much worse than the average 400 by humans.
AMAZON awarded a robotics prize to a team from the TU Delft Robotics Institute in the Netherlands and the company Delft Robotics in the retailer’s second-annual competition to find robots that will someday work alongside humans — or in place of them — in Amazon’s massive distribution centers. At the contest in Germany’s Leipzig, Delft’s robot picked items from a mock warehouse shelf at a speed of around 100 an hour with a failure rate of 16.7%. That’s slow compared to what a human can manage (around 400 items an hour), but a big improvement over last year’s winner, which managed just 30 items an hour. This was the second year for the competition (The Verge). Amazon employs 6,000 workers in the Louisville area at mammoth distribution centers in Jeffersonville, and in Bullitt County’s Shepherdsville.
PIZZA HUT: In South Korea today, another 25 franchisees filed a lawsuit seeking repayment of $657,553 the restaurant chain’s Korean national headquarters charged them for marketing and other services — fees the franchise owners said were unjustified. Their suit came a week after the Seoul Central District Court ruled in favor of 88 other owners who had asserted the came claim. The dispute dates to March 2007, when the headquarters demanded franchises remit 0.55% of their profits on grounds they’d benefited from marketing, operational, and customer-service counseling provided by the head office. In April 2012, headquarters boosted the fee again, to 0.8%, and required owners sign another contract agreeing to pay the charges. It also unilaterally nullified contracts with owners that either failed to pay the fee or delayed payment (Korea JoongAng Daily).
HAIER‘s appliances, electronics and ductless air conditioners were incorporated into one of Cocoon9’s container homes at last week’s Dwell on Design residential trade show in Los Angeles. The prefab “plug-and-play houses” contain smart technology, energy efficiencies and versatile spaces, delivered fully assembled with quality construction and high-end finishes within four months (Twice). Haier bought GE Appliances last month for $5.6 billion and its 6,000-employee Appliance Park in Louisville’s southend.
PAPA JOHN’S: In the U.K.’s Hull, Papa John’s is opening as many as four restaurants over the next year in the Kingdom’s next “City of Culture,” according to a shy franchise owner (the local newspaper says he “asked not to be named at this time”) who says the eateries could create as many as 25 jobs per location. They would be the city’s first Papa John’s (Daily Mail). All about the U.K.’s cities-of-culture program.
HUMANA is moving more than 120 employees in downtown Jacksonville, Fla., to two new separate locations as part of a broader effort to put sales and service workers in retail settings closer to members (Daily Record).
Rae
In New Zealand, a reformed “KFC queen” has gone public about her efforts to lose weight in a newspaper series the paper very awkwardly describes as being about a group “taking responsibility for their own health within a family-based, non-judgmental environment that supports all levels, sizes and ages.” Rachel Rae told the Taranaki Daily News: “I loved junk food, I loved fish and chips, and I was known as the KFC queen. I would go there about three times a week. Whatever was quick, filling and fattening — sounds gross eh?” (Daily Star).
In Japan, KFC is offering all-can-eat-in-45-minutes meals every Wednesday night between July 13 and Aug. 31, further expanding a special promotion once only offered on founder Colonel Harland Sanders‘s Sept. 9 birthday (Rocket News 24).
And in Australia’s Brisbane, KFC told diner Eden Hoffschildt that what she thought was a chicken’s brain cooked into in a recent meal was actually a kidney. “There is no health risk associated,” the fast-food chain said, in a reply to Hoffschildt’s Facebook posting about the incident. “The kidney is actually present in the thigh piece of chicken supplied by most leading Aussie chicken suppliers and can actually be found in cooked chicken bought from most leading supermarket” (Courier Mail). It was the second case in the past week of the wrong chicken part found in a Brisbane restaurant meal, and one of a series in recent years at other KFCs in Australia, the U.K., and the United States.
Australia’s nickname is Oz, which is another reason why this scene from the 1939 classic is so apropos:
In other and less gross news, tonight’s Mega Millions lottery jackpot is now an estimated $449 million. That would be the seventh biggest jackpot of all time, including the even better-known Powerball (WDRB). Blaming the Obama Administration’s energy policies, Murray Energy of Clairsville, Ohio, says it could lay off up to 4,400 coal miners by September in Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Illinois, Utah and Pennsylvania (WDRB, too). In the year’s first three months, statewide coal employment plunged 18%, to 6,900 — lowest in 118 years (Herald-Leader). A 26-year-history of coal losses, county-by-county (WFPL).
HUMANA: Aetna has launched an auction to sell about $1 billion worth of Medicare Advantage assets as it seeks antitrust approval for its planned $37 billion acquisition of Humana. The Hartford insurer will accept bids as soon as next week, according to Reuters, which cited sources it didn’t identify. Wall Street has been less concerned about Aetna making it past antitrust regulators; on Thursday, Leerink Partners analyst Ana Gupte said she believed there was an 80% chance of Aetna closing on its acquisition (Reuters).
UPS is installing another 300 lockers nationwide to make it easier for people to pick up packages. “UPS Access Point” lockers are usually outside of convenience stores and accessible 24 hours a day. The lockers, which began a staggered rollout last month, will initially be in Washington, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia (Seattle Times). AMAZON has had a similar locker program since 2011, where customers can select any location as their delivery address, and retrieve orders by entering a unique pick-up code on the Locker touch screen (Wikipedia).
KFC: In Corpus Christi, Texas, two KFC employees were hospitalized with second-degree burns after a fryer malfunctioned and hot oil spilled out and burned them from the waist up (KRIS). French news media company STP Productions is working on a story about KFC to be aired in September. Reporter Clementine Mazoyer and a cameraman recently visited founder Harland Sanders’ first restaurant at Corbin, Ky., then traveled to Kingston, N.Y., to interview franchise owner Darlene Pfeiffer, who says she personally new Sanders (Kingston Times).
HAIER: China’s largest home appliances maker will continue to be the company where different cultures thrive and innovate, an approach it will use at its newly bought GE Appliances business. Instead of sending employees to manage acquired foreign firms, Chairman Zhang Ruimin said Haier relies on local staff and focuses on how to effectively motivate them. Over the past decade, Haier has downsized by eliminating more than 10,000 middle-level manager jobs, aiming to transform itself into an incubator of innovators. “So far, we have 3,000 small teams that are working on innovative projects, and about 200 of them have raised funds from venture capital firms,” Zhang told the 2016 Tianjin Summer Davos meeting last week. Haier completed its $5.6 billion purchase of GE last month (China Post).
TEXAS ROADHOUSE is building one of its next Bubba’s 33 chicken and burger restaurants at the Midland Park Mall in Texas. The Louisville company had seven of the restaurants at the end of last year and plans as many as five more this year (Reporter-Telegram and Nation’s Restaurant News).
Another day, another animal part mistakenly cooked into a KFC meal. In the latest reported case, this morning, an Australian woman in Brisbane says she bit into something that “looked like a brain,” possibly deep-fried into some chicken at a southeast Queensland restaurant, according to the local Courier-Mail.
“I called up the store because we’d already had issues with other parts of the meal,” said the woman, who didn’t want to be identified by the newspaper. “The potato and gravy smelt like a cigarette tray and tasted like cigarettes.”
A KFC spokeswoman said the fast-food chain was sorry for the woman’s experience, according to the paper, but assured it was not a health issue: “Our chicken is hand-prepared and cooked fresh, but occasionally mistakes happen and organs are not removed when they should have been.”
This isn’t the first time a KFC customer has claimed a brain or other body part in a meal, and produced what they said were photos as evidence. That’s hardly surprising for a company as far-flung as the Louisville-based Yum Brands division, which has nearly 15,000 restaurants in more than 125 countries. If each one served only 500 meals daily — a very conservative figure — that would be 7.5 million a day, and 2.7 billion a year.
What’s more, several of the news accounts come from British and Australian newspapers, which are famous for sensationalized reporting. Still, like rubbernecking past an especially gruesome roadside wreck, we can’t help gawking at:
and still another brain in October 2010 in the U.K.’s Swindon.
Well, you get the picture. Except, wait: maybe you don’t. The news story photos are too disgusting for Boulevard to publish here, so we’ll link to the most recent one in Australia, which we’ll term NSFW — or home.
In many of the stories, KFC officials have offered the same explanation as the one in today’s story out of Australia: food is hand-prepared and mistakes happen.
To be sure, there have been false reports of foul parts that were later debunked, including one about an entire rat last month in Los Angeles. “A third-party independent lab tested the suspicious meal,” the Los Angeles Times said last Wednesday, “and determined it was undoubtedly a piece of hand-breaded chicken–an assertion KFC stood firm on.”
TEXAS ROADHOUSE is building one of its next Bubba’s 33 chicken and burger restaurants at the Midland Park Mall in Texas. The Louisville company had seven of the restaurants at the end of last year and plans as many as five more this year (
“I called up the store because we’d already had issues with other parts of the meal,” said the woman, who didn’t want to be identified by the newspaper. “The potato and gravy smelt like a cigarette tray and tasted like cigarettes.”
In many of the stories, KFC officials have offered the same explanation as the one in today’s story out of Australia: food is hand-prepared and mistakes happen.
Boulevard 