McD's New McCafe

McDonald’s wants to compete with local corner coffee shops, at least in Australia.

The fast-food giant remodeled a standalone McCafe in Sydney this month and named it The Corner. Sporting a simple, muted design for its logo and espresso machines, the rebranded café seems to be McDonald’s first attempt at breaking into the small but growing high-end coffee market. 

The eatery’s food options are a definite departure from McDonald’s usual fare. Served at a posh-looking salad and sandwich bar, the menu includes chipotle pulled pork over brown rice, assorted pastries, and panini made with ham and Colby cheese.

“The only association we have is that we are a McCafe, but what we are offering is totally different to what we offer in McCafe,” Kyle Jarvis, the manager of The Corner, told the Daily Telegraph newspaper. “If they’re looking for a Quarter Pounder, they’ll probably be sorely disappointed.” 

McCafes usually offer a variety of espresso and smoothie drinks, and are often attached to regular McDonald's, where the full fast-food menu is available. 

The fast-food behemoth has struggled lately with continually declining sales in stores open a year or more. It has scrambled to simplify its menu in recent months. Now it is experimenting with new concepts to attract younger diners, and it isn't alone.

Last year, KFC hatched a new, upmarket chicken eatery called KFC eleven. 

Taco Bell opened an upscale taqueria in California in August called U.S. Taco Co. A month later, it opened the first of two bánh mì sandwich shops in Dallas, in hopes of finding a market for Vietnamese food served with the sort of simple, streamlined menu pioneered by Chipotle.

Even Starbucks, facing increased competition from its less ritzy rival Dunkin’ Donuts, announced a new line of deluxe bean blends and high-end coffee houses earlier this month called Starbucks Reserve.

Currently worth $27.9 billion in annual sales, the U.S. coffee market is expected to grow to $33.7 billion by 2018, according to data from research firm IBISWorld cited by Reuters. The data do not separate revenues for high-end coffee sellers.

Dead Heart Transplanted

Surgeons in Australia say they have performed the first heart transplant using a "dead heart".

Donor hearts from adults usually come from people who are confirmed as brain dead but with a heart still beating.

A team at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney revived and then transplanted hearts that had stopped beating for up to 20 minutes.

The first patient who received a heart said she felt a decade younger and was now a "different person".

Hearts are the only organ that is not used after the heart has stopped beating - known as donation after circulatory death.

Beating hearts are normally taken from brain-dead people, kept on ice for around four hours and then transplanted to patients.

The novel technique used in Sydney involved taking a heart that had stopped beating and reviving it in a machine known as a "heart-in-a-box".

The heart is kept warm, the heartbeat is restored and a nourishing fluid helps reduce damage to the heart muscle.

The first person to have the surgery was Michelle Gribilas, 57, who was suffering from congenital heart failure. She had the surgery more than two months ago.

"Now I'm a different person altogether," she said. "I feel like I'm 40 years old - I'm very lucky."

There have since been a further two successful operations.

Prof Peter MacDonald, head of St Vincent's heart transplant unit, said: "This breakthrough represents a major inroad to reducing the shortage of donor organs."

It is thought the heart-in-a-box, which is being tested at sites around the world, could save up to 30% more lives by increasing the number of available organs.

The breakthrough has been welcomed around the world.

The British Heart Foundation described it as a "significant development".

Maureen Talbot, a senior cardiac nurse at the charity, told the BBC: "It is wonderful to see these people recovering so well from heart transplantation when, without this development, they may still be waiting for a donor heart."

Down Under Racism

…It’s All Over the World…

Police in Australia have charged a woman after a video was uploaded to YouTube showing her hurling racist abuse at passengers on a train near Sydney.

Racially offensive gestures, mocking of accents, referring to a woman as a "gook". The three-and-a-half minute video is packed with racist abuse. It was uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday by one of the passengers who filmed it on the train. 

The video begins with the woman expressing her anger that some children have not given up their seats to let her sit down.

She then starts abusing a woman she calls an "Asian", and a man she assumes is the woman's boyfriend. "Look at this bogan here," she says, using an Australian slang term similar to "white trash". "He can only get a gook, he can't even get a regular girlfriend. 

It's so sad." "Gook" is a derogatory term which came to prominence when used by American soldiers in the Vietnam war.

The video has been watched more than 280,000 times and prompted more than 1,000 comments on YouTube - as well as discussion on Twitter and Facebook. "Good on those train passengers for filming that incident,"tweeted Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane. 

"It's one way we can hold people accountable for racist abuse." In the video, several of the passengers are seen to challenge the woman directly for her behaviour.

Under Australia's Racial Discrimination Act, it is against the law to "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate" someone because of their ethnicity or race. But the government is currently debating whether to repeal this section of the act. The plan is controversial, and some made reference to the proposal while discussing the video.

On YouTube, some defended the woman. "Can't blame her... migrants come here and think they own the place," was one comment. But many Australians apologized for her actions. "This woman does not represent the views of MOST Australians," wrote one. "Sorry for anyone offended, she is an entire nation's shame."

Power and Purpose

Julia Gillard

Australia's former prime minister (above) breaks her silence, writing exclusively for Guardian Australia on her legacy, her hopes for a new Labor leader… and the pain of losing power.

During the election campaign, an elderly lady in Melbourne’s west grips my arm with surprising force. Next day I have light bruises to remind me of the moment. She looks at me with anxiety in her eyes and says that while she reads and watches all the news she just can’t understand what the election campaign is about. She wants to know, is this her fault or the fault of the campaign?

After a resounding Labor loss, that word “fault” is now everywhere. Exhaustion and emotion have been on sad display in the last few days. But though it is so painful and so hard, now is a time for cool analysis.

It is a time to carefully plan Labor’s future and its next contribution to the nation.

The purpose of power

Are election victories the only measure of political success? Inevitably this seems a silly, self-serving question to ask after a defeat.

But surely our national story is written in more than the statistics of election night. Our national story is shaped by what endures from a government as well as what is rejected.

It is impossible to imagine modern Australia without Medicare, our universal healthcare scheme, which was introduced by the Whitlam government, repealed by the Coalition and then introduced by Labor again. This reform has become so significant a part of our national story that the political contest which surrounded its birth is now over. 

No serious candidate for public office runs on a platform opposing Medicare. Today's Australia is not home to the kind of conservatives who would be ideological enough or dumb enough to contemplate such a political campaign. If anything, the national mood around Medicare is one of smug complacency. 

How much smarter are we than the Americans, still struggling with health reform, we think to ourselves.

Despite the shattering defeat of the Whitlam government, despite Bob Hawke being toppled as prime minister by his Labor colleagues, despite the savage loss of the Keating Government, Medicare is there. Labor shaped the national consensus and bettered our nation.

Even in the midst of today’s despair, Labor must not surrender its sense of self as defined by its dominance over so much of what is our national consensus. Indeed, a truly striking feature of Tony Abbott’s election campaign is how little he was prepared to challenge Labor’s hold over our national consensus.

Think first of that historic conservative touchstone, workplace relations.   Read entire article: