THE WEEK May 15: The bandit's back

The bandit's back
McDonald's character the Hamburglar is back, but he's had a bit of a makeover. Instead of the cartoonish convict generations of children have grown up with, the new incarnation of the character has been given a modern, hipster edge. He looks like he'd eat at McDonalds, but, like, only as a performance art piece and if he could travel there on an up-cycled vintage bicycle.
Social media users have not been kind, suggesting that there is no way anyone could eat that much McDonalds food and still fit into skinny jeans.
It's yet another misstep for McDonalds. The fast food giant is struggling, with sales falling a further 2.3 percent during the first three months of this year. Even in China, one of the US chain's strongest markets, a food safety scandal in 2014 was damaging for the brand. So if the Hamburgular really wants a decent bounty he needs to stop swiping fries and start hanging out at Starbucks, that's where all the big money is.

Best boss ever
Chinese company Tiens has celebrated its 20th anniversary in business by taking 6400 of it's employees on a four day holiday to France, which depending on how much of a sadist you are sounds like a lot of fun, or just everything you ever hated about school camp, but in France. The logistics were massive, with CEO Li Jinyuan booking thousands of hotel rooms and hundreds of buses to transport the group. While the Tiens tourists did get a private viewing at the Lourve, they had scant time to stroll the Boulevards of Paris, in fact the whole trip was decidedly less Hemingway and more "How much did you pay" with department store Galeries Lafayette opening exclusively for the Tien's group. The employees did get to do some fun holiday things like forming a human chain that read "Tiens dream is nice in the Cote d’Azur". Because nothing says holiday in France like standing in a sweaty crowd of your co-workers for hours while someone takes aerial photographs.

What's up there?
A man in England who had long suffered a blocked nose has finally discovered the cause - the plastic tip of a toy dart. Steve Easton of Camberley in the UK lodged the dart up his nose when he was 7 years old, he is now 51. That’s 44 years a plastic dart has been up his nose, that’s longer than the Berlin wall stood, longer than Nelson Mandela spent on Robben Island, A Kardashian could have married and divorced the men of entire continents in 44 years.
The incident has left Mr Easton pondering what I think we can all agree is the eternal question of life:"I wonder if there is anything else up there?"

（編輯 王偉）