BRITAIN’S “strictest landlord” has defended his decision to charge customers extra for not finishing their meals.

Mark Graham, 62, has owned and run The Star Inn pub in the tiny hamlet of Vogue, Cornwall, for the last 27 years.

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He hit back at a customer who tried to shame him online after they were charged an extra £2.40 because they piled their plates high at the £12 all-you-can-eat carvery – but ate barely any.

Verity Farmer, who shared her experience on Facebook, said: “Just been for a Sunday carvery at The Star Inn, Vogue, St Day.

“We paid for our meal at £12 each, and when we got our bill it had got an extra £4.80 added.

“When questioned about it they said it was a charge for not eating all our meal. I’ve never heard anything like that before.”

Her post prompted nearly 400 comments in less than 24 hours, with The Star Inn’s social media page among those replying.

It said: “We just try and make sure there is enough food for everyone.

“I’m sure if you were a customer later on in the day and I had to tell you I had no food left for your booking because it had all been wasted and gone in the bin you would not be very happy and would have made another social media post too.”

Now Mark – a former tin miner who also served in the Royal Navy – has defended the policy, which is outlined in notices inside the eatery.

He says it is the first time in 20 years he has enforced the rule – and only did so after the two diners told him they had enjoyed the meal.

Mark shared a photo of the leftover food on social media and insisted the nominal charge would only cover the raw ingredients they left but not the equipment, staff or energy.

He said: “I’m not strict but I’m a straight talking Cornish landlord. Ask anybody who comes in for a meal, I’m an easy-going Cornish boy. I tell people ‘fill your boots, have as much as you like, as long as you eat it’.

“When young children come in with their parents we say don’t buy them a meal, we give them an empty plate and say share some of yours and come up if you want more, as long as you eat it.

“We keep it at £12 for a large or £8 for a small because we are a local village pub trying to help the community, we use a local butcher and greengrocer.

“We do as much as we can to keep our prices down but if everybody behaved like these ladies I’d have to put the prices up.

“I think the ladies wanted to shame me because they have been charged, to be honest I think they are just entitled people who believed they would get all the support.

“They tried to say they had only left a few potatoes so they weren’t completely truthful.

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“People on Facebook were saying why not just put the prices up and let people leave what they want, well I keep the price down low for everybody and I’m not going to change that for a few idiots.”

Mark said the pub has deep ties with the local area, hosting the community library, installing floodlights in his field so the village football team can train for free, and hosting 20 different groups from a knitting circle to a motorcycle club.

He said: “We’re a little family run village pub and we want to keep everybody happy, the pub is the hub of this community.

“It’s hugely frustrating because it’s all you can eat, with a normal meal we’ll give you boxes and doggy bags because it’s your food, you’ve paid for it and you can take it away.

“With all you can eat the margins are very fine, if everybody piled two meals on a plate and threw one away by the time the later people came in all the food is in the bin because it’s been wasted, it all goes downhill from there.”

Mark was also backed by locals including pensioner John Tozer, 79, who has been a regular at the pub for 40 years.

He said: “He’s a brilliant landlord, I think he was absolutely in the right to charge those ladies.

“You see people pile up their plates like Mount Everest then they can’t eat it, then at the end of the day people come in and there isn’t any left because of other people’s greed. It bloody annoys me.”

Mark and his pub have previously hit the headlines after fashion giant Vogue threatened to sue him.

Condé Nast, the owner of Vogue magazine, sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter ordering him to stop using the name ‘Vogue’ as it is their name – even though the pub is more than 200 years old and the village is older still.

The publishing giant later backed down and apologised, admitting it didn’t do its homework.

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Corporate profits rose to an “all-time high” in 2022, producing an explosion in income for the very wealthy, Jake Johnson reported for Common Dreams in a series of 2022 articles. In August 2022, Johnson explained that non-financial corporate profits in the second quarter of 2022 hit two trillion dollars, an increase of 8.1 percent from the same period in 2021 and their highest level since 1950. In December 2022, Johnson reported on research by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) that showed the earnings of the wealthiest 0.1 percent in the United States grew by 465 percent between 1979 and 2021 while the income of the bottom 90 percent grew less than 29 percent.

One reason profits are booming is that companies have been using inflation as cover to raise prices and gouge consumers. In late 2022, inflation in the United States was the highest it had been in forty years. According to Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, “Astronomical corporate profits confirm what corporate executives have been telling us on earning calls over and over again: They’re making a lot of money by charging people more, and they don’t plan on bringing prices down anytime soon.”

The fossil fuel industry has enjoyed especially lavish profits. As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams in July 2022, the eight largest oil companies’ profits spiked 235 percent between the second quarter of 2021 and the second quarter of 2022, resulting in a combined $52 billion profit, according to an analysis by Accountable.US. ExxonMobil profited $17.85 billion; Chevron, $11.62 billion; and Shell, $11.47 billion. Notably, in 2021-2022, the oil and gas industry spent more than $200 million lobbying Congress to oppose climate action.

As Johnson reported in December 2022, the main beneficiaries of big corporations’ windfall profits have been the ultrarich. He cited EPI data showing that the average income of someone in the bottom 90 percent of the workforce in 2021 was $36,571, while the average income of the wealthiest 0.1 percent that same year was $3,312,693, or more than ninety times as much. In 1979, this discrepancy was not nearly so great, with someone in the bottom 90 percent earning $28,415, while the average individual in the top 0.1 percent earned $586,222, or 20.6 times as much. As of 2021, the share of wealth earned by the 0.1 percent had hit a historic high, while the wealth of the bottom 90 percent had sunk to a record low.

The very rich—billionaires and multimillionaires—are getting wealthier at a faster rate than even the merely wealthy. The top 0.1 percent made about 1.6 percent of all annual earnings in 1979, but by 2021, that share had increased to 5.9 percent, more than tripling the slice of the total national income captured by the ultrarich.

Bloated bonuses for Wall Street bankers and stockbrokers added to the enormous sums being raked in by the rich in 2020 and 2021. In March 2022, Johnson reported on an analysis by Inequality.org of New York State Comptroller data that found the average bonus for Wall Street employees rose an astounding 1,743 percent between 1985 and 2021. In 2021 alone, Wall Street bonuses grew 20 percent, far outpacing inflation at 7 percent, and nominal private sector earnings at 4.2 percent. That year Wall Street bonuses, in aggregate, amounted to $45 billion, the highest since 2006 [Note: Wall Street bonuses fell by 26 percent in 2022, partly due to rising interest rates and growing recession fears; see, for example, Jeanne Sahadi, “The Average Wall Street Bonus Fell By 26% Last Year,” CNN, March 30, 2023]. Had the minimum wage increased at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses, it would now be $61.75 per hour.]

The establishment media have reported intermittently on record corporate profits, but this coverage has tended to downplay corporate use of inflation as a pretext for hiking prices. In August 2022, for example, Bloomberg observed that “a measure of US profit margins has reached its widest since 1950,” but its report did not mention the two trillion dollar figure. In June 2022, ABC News aired a rare package examining the debate among economists over whether “elevated corporate profits” might be contributing to inflation. The same month the New York Times published a lengthy article on the disagreement among economists about the relationship of corporate profits to “greedflation.” The Times quoted experts from EPI and Groundwork Collaborative but refused to draw any firm conclusions.

The EPI study on the accelerating incomes of the ultrarich was virtually ignored by the corporate media, although Insider referenced it in a story about how a coming recession might hurt the wealthy most.

Establishment press coverage of the massive bonuses awarded to Wall Street employees in 2021 has been scant. Reuters ran a story on it, as did the New York Post. CNN Business noted that “high bonuses are also good news for Gotham’s tax coffers.”

Jake Johnson, “‘All of Us Are Paying the Price’ as Corporate Profits Surge to Record-High $2 Trillion,” Common Dreams, August 26, 2022; republished as “Corporate Profits Surge to an All-Time High of $2 Trillion,” Truthout, August 26, 2022.

Jake Johnson, “Fueling Inequality, Earnings of Top 0.1% in US Have Soared by 465% Since 1979: Analysis,” Common Dreams, December 21, 2022

Jessica Corbett, “Price Gouging at the Pump Results in 235% Profit Jump for Big Oil: Analysis,” Common Dreams, July 29, 2022.

Jake Johnson, “‘Jaw-Dropping’: Wall Street Bonuses Have Soared 1,743% Since 1985,” Common Dreams, March 23, 2022.

Student Researcher: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College)

Faculty Evaluator: Robin Takahashi (Ohlone College)

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Russian spies are on a “mission to generate mayhem on British . . . streets” while Iran has been fomenting lethal plots against the UK at “an unprecedented pace and scale”, the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service has warned.

Instances of spying against the UK by other states rose by half over the past year, MI5 director-general Ken McCallum said on Tuesday, with the range of threats facing the UK “the most complex and interconnected . . . we’ve ever seen”.

The number of aggressive state actions investigated by MI5 had “shot up” by 48 per cent in the previous 12 months, he said, and the agency had responded to 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots since January 2022.

“MI5 has one hell of a job on its hands,” McCallum said in his annual threat assessment. Alongside its counterterrorism work, which has continued at a more or less steady level for the past five years, MI5 was having to confront “state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, against the backdrop of a major European war”, he added.

McCallum said MI5 had so far not seen the rising conflict in the Middle East lead directly to increased terrorism incidents in the UK.

“We are powerfully alive to the risk that events in the Middle East trigger terrorist action in the UK,” but “we haven’t — yet — seen this translate at scale into terrorist violence”, he said.

Nonetheless, radicalisation stemming from recent events in the Middle East was a “slow burn” process, McCallum cautioned, adding that established groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda had “resumed efforts to export terrorism”.

McCallum said the return of these groups was the “terrorist trend that concerns me most”. Over the past month, more than a third of MI5’s highest-priority investigations were linked to organised overseas terrorist groups.

Another development is that one in eight terrorists now being investigated in the UK are minors recruited online. MI5 had seen a “threefold increase” in investigations of under-18s in the past three years, driven by far-right terrorism that skews “heavily towards young people, driven by propaganda that shows a canny understanding of online culture”.

However, it is state threats that have undergone the biggest rise, not least by Russia. Britain’s decision to expel 750 Russian diplomats had “put a big dent” in the Kremlin’s ability to cause damage in the west, as “the great majority of them” were “spies”.

Denying diplomatic visas to new Russian agents by the UK and its western allies was “not flashy, but it works”, he added.

The expulsions forced Russian spies such as its GRU military intelligence unit to use proxies, including private intelligence operatives and criminals.

McCallum said this had reduced the usual professionalism of Russia’s spy services and increased MI5’s “disruptive options”, as the proxies were not covered by diplomatic immunity.

Nevertheless, the UK’s “leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the fevered imagination of Putin’s regime”, McCallum said, adding that “we should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home”.

“The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets . . . arson, sabotage and . . . dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness,” he said.

Iran has also stepped up its recruitment of criminals — from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks — to serve as proxies for Tehran’s espionage operations in the UK, mostly against dissidents.

Since January 2022, “we’ve seen plot after plot here in the UK, at unprecedented pace and scale”, said McCallum.

He described the counter-intelligence work of detecting criminals who are recruited online by hostile states, such as Russia or Iran, as being similar to spotting would-be terrorists recruited online by overseas radicalisers.

“It’s a familiar challenge,” he said, and “we’ll keep finding them.”

Nevertheless, the rise in threats facing the UK, which includes confronting technological theft and high-level espionage by China, means that “things are absolutely stretched”, said McCallum.

The decisions MI5 now had to take on how to prioritise its finite resources “are harder than I can recall in my career”, he said. It had also meant that “our lower-level bar has had to rise” — a tacit warning that some potential threats might go uninvestigated.

“We can’t always draw the right conclusions from tiny clues,” said McCallum. 

MCDONALD’S is launching a new lunch and dinnertime meal deal offering customers four menu items for just £5.

Fast food fans will be able to save almost £2.50 when the deal is unveiled in restaurants tomorrow (October 9).

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Customers can choose from two different burgers, a medium drink, fries and four chicken McNuggets normally costing £7.46.

The offer will be available in restaurants from 11am, after the breakfast menu is switched for the main one.

However, fast food fans won’t be able to order from the comfort of their home as the new deal isn’t available for delivery.

Plus, not all restaurants are running the offer so there is no guarantee you’ll be able to snap up the discounted items.

This is the full list of items included in the meal deal and how much they cost individually:

• Cheeseburger – £1.39
• Mayo Chicken – £1.39
• Medium Carbonated Soft Drink – £1.59
• Medium Fries – £1.69
• Four Chicken McNuggets – £2.79 (based on a pro-rata of the price for six Chicken McNuggets)

Bear in mind, the price of all the above items may vary from restaurant to restaurant.

We have also asked McDonald’s if the £5 meal deal is a permanent offer and for the list of restaurants not offering it and will update this story when we have heard back.

How does the £5 meal deal compare to other chains?

McDonald’s latest offer might seem like the perfect way to save a bit of money on your lunch break, but is it the cheapest?

We’ve listed off a few other retailers and fast food chains’ offerings which are actually cheaper.

The below offers aren’t offering the same options as McDonald’s, but do offer some alternatives if you’re looking to spend a bit less.

Tesco‘s meal deal comes with a main, including sandwiches and pasta pots, snack and drink for £4 for regular customers and £3.60 for Clubcard holders.

Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s meal deal costs £3.50 and comes with the same trio of items.

Pharmacy chain Boots‘ meal deal also comes with a main, snack and drink and costs from £3.99. Londoners have to pay £4.99.

In terms of fast food chains, Domino’s launched a £4 lunchtime meal deal in April that’s available seven days a week.

The offer lets customers choose from small pizzas, hot and cheesy wraps and chicken strips.

Greggs also has a meal deal where customers can snap up a pizza slice and regular hot or cold drink for £3.50 before 4pm seven days a week.

After 4pm and the price drops to £2.85 – nearly 20% cheaper.

OTHER MCDONALD’S NEWS

McDonald’s customers are in for a busy October, with the fast food chain already having confirmed a new breakfast item is making its way onto menus.

From October 16, foodies will be able to get their hands on mini hashbrowns in a portion of five or 15, with prices starting from £1.49.

McDonald’s already sells regular-sized hashbrowns for £1.19 but these are bitesized.

Many customers have already taken to social media saying the product reminds them of Tater Tots – a popular side dish in America.

It is still unclear whether or not the morning snack will become a permanent menu item or will only be available for a limited period.

Meanwhile, the iconic McRib burger is back on menus from the same date after a nearly 10-year hiatus, with reporter Sam Walker getting a try before its launch.

Anyone looking to snap up the returning pork-based burger will have to be quick though as it is back for a limited time only.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

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There are many potential starting points in Kamala Harris’s origin story, but perhaps the most relatable begins in India with two parents huddled together deciding whether to send their daughter far off for college. Like any good Indian parents, Harris’s grandparents certainly would have asked, “Will our girl be safe in the United States?”

A federal lawsuit filed by an Indian student against the elite Carleton College in Minnesota suggests the answer is “no.” India is the largest single source of international students in the United States, sending 269,000 to American universities in the 2022/2023 academic year. Yet they are so frequently attacked, harassed or returned in body bags that the American ambassador needed to issue a rare public assurance that the US is a safe destination for higher studies.

A close examination of the lawsuit produces a surprising conclusion: If Harris’s mother were choosing colleges today, she might find greater protection for women in India than she would in Minnesota, where Harris’s running mate Tim Walz serves as governor.

Related Reading

Indian society has significantly expanded legal protections for women during the past decade, replacing colonial-era laws. In contrast, until 2018, Minnesota did not classify grabbing a woman’s buttocks as sexual assault. The state has a deplorable track record of botched prosecutions and non-investigation of thousands of reported sexual assaults. There is little to suggest that this situation has improved during Walz’s term as governor, and he has not made student safety a priority in his current campaign.

What does the lawsuit say about Carleton?

The lawsuit against Carleton College shows how little Minnesota protects students against sexual assault by teachers. It alleges that Don Smith, a class of 2009 alumnus who served as Carleton’s assistant director for institutional research and assessment, used his position to comb through confidential student data to identify multiple students to prey on, including Doe.

While the college possesses a distinguished faculty ranked number one for undergraduate teaching nationally, Carleton promoted Smith as an award-winning competitive dancer and teacher even though he had no dance credentials. Smith was, however, a self-proclaimed sex worker and BDSM practitioner in an open marriage, allegedly with multiple partners amongst other Carleton employees.

Smith used dance classes as a pretext to beat, drug and choke Doe and pressure her for sex over many months. Although the dance department head witnessed one of the assaults and reported her concerns to the college, the college fired Smith only after Doe supplied multiple text messages where Smith admitted to the assaults. Rather than open a Title IX investigation as required by federal law, Carleton quietly let Smith go.

In a court filing, Carleton admits that Doe told a dean that she had been assaulted by a faculty member at his house. Carleton argues in court filings that it has no legal responsibility to investigate or support students in such circumstances.

Doe alleges that Carleton even attempted to force her out by failing to provide reasonable accommodations. Instead, the college stripped her of her academic major, placed her on multiple probations and then continued to harass her even after she met the college’s performance standards. Against these odds, Doe graduated.

Carleton has no record of the assault against Doe in any of the federally mandated records that are the primary source for students and parents to assess the safety of a college campus.

US higher education institutions are in trouble

Such safety concerns are critical to international students and their parents. Maintaining the flow of Indian students is increasingly vital to the survival of many US educational institutions, which are staring at a demographic dip in the domestic pool of college-bound students.

Carleton’s coverup and harassment of Doe follow a shockingly routine pattern that has played out at other elite institutions like Harvard and Stanford. Although as many as one out of four female college students in the US reports facing sexual assault, colleges have significant financial, reputational and legal incentives to underreport attacks that might impact enrolment or jeopardize alumni donations. In March, Liberty University paid an unprecedented $14-million fine for doctoring its campus crime log in a manner like Carleton. Despite its progressive posturing, Carleton College has decades of legal troubles and alumni complaints about mishandling sexual assaults.

In Doe’s case, Carleton does not dispute that Smith stalked and assaulted her. The college says that Minnesota law and public policy shield colleges and schools from liability for sexual assaults committed by a teacher. According to Carleton, Doe’s assault is not Carleton’s problem.

Carleton’s legal stance and its abusive treatment of Doe offer a sobering perspective on the realities of a US collegiate landscape that, despite Title IX and the #MeToo movement, remains unsafe for students. 

Doe is represented by Tamara Holder, a nationally renowned attorney specializing in sexual assault cases, and Paul Dworak, who represented the family of George Floyd, whose 2020 murder by police in Minnesota sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.

Holder, who is also a survivor of a famous #MeToo case, has expressed shock that a leading college such as Carleton would have hired and promoted a sexual predator, hushed up an assault and silenced the victim. “I think that in this day and age, post-Larry Nassar, Boy Scouts, that this school should have done something and they didn’t,” Holder told a local reporter.

Carleton’s cover-up and failure to report the assaults alleged by Doe mean that prospective students would not have the means to discover the college’s safety problems.

India’s streets are regularly filled with cries for justice for sexual assault victims. But in Tim Walz’s Minnesota, there is only the silence of the snow-covered prairie.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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“The woman who walked into doors” was first introduced in a mid-90s TV show created by the Booker Prize-winning Roddy Doyle, whose subsequent novels developed that woman’s story and the second of which, Paula Spencer, bore her name. The initial response was relentless and polarised, with some critics outraged by his representation of domestic abuse and sceptical that such a grim phenomenon could exist in modern-day Ireland.

The Woman Behind the Door, Doyle’s latest novel, begins in 2021. Paula is 66, many years sober, a widow and mother to adult children. She’s “elated” to receive her first dose of the coronavirus vaccination, though if the person administering it saw “the state of her skin, years ago — but never that long ago — when she was her husband’s beloved punchbag, he wouldn’t have mentioned the sting the needle might give her.”

Paula’s current stability, her close friendships, her part-time job, her sobriety and her chosen solitude have been hard-fought. Now she has a life all her own; it has been decades since her husband Charlo was “shot dead by the Guards”. When she returns from that initial vaccination appointment, though — the first tentative steps towards liberty — there is another woman behind the door, the last person Paula would expect to arrive unannounced. It’s Nicola, her most capable child, Nicola who “had been Paula’s mother for years”, seemingly happily married and a mother herself; “the safest thing in Paula’s life”. Nicola says she isn’t going home or back to her job and the question, then, is why? “Will you let me in?” she asks.

Segments of fleeting narratives show tragic, poverty-stricken lives colliding

Of course Paula does, but Nicola’s presence is both balm and blight: she’s a “teenager in a menopausal body” and this blend of humour and sympathy, the unlikely pairing of the two women under one roof, provides a great deal of comedy. “No one should have to have middle-aged children,” Paula thinks. “Job done, good or bad. Leave your ma alone.” And how, she wonders, “is she supposed to mother the woman who’s been mothering her for thirty years?” When Paula contracts Covid, “breathing like the Irish Sea”, the isolation period sees the pair barricade themselves from the world: it’s within this enforced space that a conversation begins, the first of its kind.

Doyle has long been praised for his use of vernacular, dialect and slang: talk is at the heart of his work and this book is no exception, whether via the interiority of thought or the audible babble of jokes, jeers, recrimination, fury. Paula and Nicola’s quick-fire exchanges become sparring matches that once started can only escalate: Paula is “all set for round two or three”. These cycles mirror the hourglass structure of the plot, from Nicola’s initial arrival in 2021 to 2023 and back again. “The Covid” seems the least frightening virus of all, and the pair’s discussions focus intermittently on such contagions, the dark legacy of misogyny, the guilt and self-hatred that Paula believed, mistakenly, “had skipped a generation”. For Nicola, her mother’s suffering has precluded her own ability to describe the trench-like depth of its impact: “You’ve already more or less told me,” she says, “that you had it worse — because I never bled on top of one of my children.”

This latest instalment forms a trilogy, though a follow-up hasn’t been ruled out. Doyle’s other three-parter is The Last Roundup, where the history of his protagonist, Henry, was charted from the 1916 Easter Rising to life in the US and back to Ireland. In the first of that series, Henry reflects on his surroundings: “It was my world and it could be as big and as small as I wanted it to be. There was a corner and, beyond that, more corners. There were doorways, and more doors inside.”

There is a strong sense in this novel, too, that for each interaction, each passing glance, there are similar portals waiting to be opened. Segments of fleeting narratives show tragic, poverty-stricken lives colliding briefly, from a minor accident with a delivery cyclist to a woman who picks something up in the supermarket before, on seeing its €1.79 price tag, returning it to the shelf.

As with Doyle’s other work, Dublin is the urban life force outside the door. Paula observes the homelessness crisis manifested through tents erected across Henry Street “like two different cities, two different times of the day”. The precariousness of, and danger inherent to that life is subtly compared to Paula and Nicola’s own situation, were Charlo still alive: in Ireland, gardaí reported an increase of 25 per cent in domestic-abuse calls during the pandemic. Paula realises that despite being the site of such brutality, where her husband “battered the mother out of her”, her home and her patient listening can provide the “sanctuary” required.

The Woman Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle Jonathan Cape, £20, 272 pages