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Scottish Sun
7 hours ago
- Business
- Scottish Sun
McDonald's is giving away free food TOMORROW as it reveals new discounts
We reveal how to access the deals below DEAL STEAL McDonald's is giving away free food TOMORROW as it reveals new discounts Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) MCDONALD'S is giving away free food from tomorrow - and customers could save up to £2.49. The fast food chain is bringing back its Deal Drop offer and eaters can get 10% off orders worth £12 or more tomorrow (June 30). Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 1 McDonald's is launching three food and drinks deals from tomorrow Credit: Alamy Customers can also get a free Cheesy Bacon Flatbread, normally £2.49, when spending £10 or more between 5am and 11am from tomorrow until July 6. Spend £15 or more after 11am across the same time period and you can get a free Cheeseburger, which usually costs £1.79. All offers are available via home delivery while the 10% off deal is also available in restaurants. All three deals will drop in the McDonald's app which is free to download off the Apple App Store or Google Play. Bear in mind, all the offers are subject to availability of stock in restaurants and not all restaurants are included in the deal. If you are ordering via home delivery you'll have to pay a delivery charge from £1.99, a service fee and small order fee if your basket is under £10. For full terms and conditions, visit The latest shake-up comes after McDonald's switched up its main menu, launching a new Big Arch burger which costs from £7.99. Halloumi Fries, which first launched in 2022, are also back on menus. The Cheesy McCrispy, Toffee Apple Pie and Toffee Crisp McFlurry are also back in restaurants. McDonald's launches brand-new burger featuring never-before-seen sauce Four items came off menus at the end of June 17 to make way for the new ones: Cheesy Garlic Bread Dippers Lotus Biscoff McFlurry Steakhouse Stack McSpicy® x Frank's RedHot McDonald's also left customers fuming at the end of May when it confirmed it had axed its Chicken Bacon Caesar Wrap. The wrap, which combined chicken breast strips, crispy onions, rashers of bacon and lettuce, was first launched in summer 2023. New McDonald's menu Big Arch - £7.99 Big Arch medium meal - £9.99 Big Arch large meal - £10.79 Cheesy McCrispy - £6.69 Cheesy McCrispy medium meal - £8.49 Cheesy McCrispy large meal - £9.29 Toffee Crisp McFlurry - £2.39 Halloumi Fries (four-piece) - £2.99 Halloumi Fries Sharebox - £7.59 Toffee Apple Pie - £2.09 How to save money at McDonald's Research by The Sun found a Big Mac meal can be up to 30% cheaper at restaurants just two miles apart from each other. You can pick up a Big Mac and fries for just £2.99 at any time by filling in a feedback survey found on McDonald's receipts. The receipt should come with a 12-digit code which you can enter into the Food for Thought website alongside your submitted survey. You'll then receive a five-digit code which is your voucher for the £2.99 offer. There are some deals and offers you can only get if you have the My McDonald's app, so it's worth signing up to get money off your meals. The MyMcDonald's app can be downloaded on iPhone and Android phones and is quick to set up. You can also bag freebies and discounts on your birthday if you're a My McDonald's app user. Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@ Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Aussies ditch United States for new favourite holiday destination: 'Huge reversal'
I love America. Their cities are the world's brightest. Their mountains among the most beautiful. The deserts — spectacular. Live music in that country is incredible. The place is a giant smorgasbord of great destinations, coast to coast, Chicago to Austin. And let's not overlook Hawaii. But would I go there now? Noooo! No way! And most Aussies are like me. We are avoiding the Land of the Free. Hard pass. In fact, if you make a list of major destinations and check how much travel has changed since 2015, America is way down the bottom of our no-go list. As the next chart shows, the United States is down near Papua new Guinea and Cambodia. While at the top is Japan. Not only has America seen less growth in tourism from Australia since 2015, it has actually gone backwards. Fewer planes coming from Australia, with more empty seats. It's a huge reversal for a destination that was not only once popular, but literally our favourite place to go. RELATED Price hike warning for Aussies travelling to Europe as US-Iran tensions escalate Centrelink payment alert for 58,000 Aussies in caravans Inheritance warning ahead of $5.4 trillion transfer as 'avoidable' money 'traps' exposed As the next chart shows, America racked up 10 months where it was our most popular destination between 2013 and 2017. (It had more months in the number one spot during 2020-2021 but many of the world's borders were closed then so it doesn't count). It was, during this period, always in our top three, alongside New Zealand and Indonesia. But recently, nope. Since the world's borders re-opened, America has struggled to regain its desirability. It fell to third place, then fourth place, fifth and even as low as eighth in January this year. Why? Well there's the obvious. But we should not overlook the basic economics of it. America used to be cheap. That's a big reason. As the next chart shows, there were some glorious years where an Australian Dollar bought more than a US dollar. Those were the years where we planned and booked our trips to America, and when America first rose to the top of our list of favourites. It held on as a favourite for a few more years even as our dollar began its slide. But when we came out of our Covid reverie we had to admit America was expensive now. With our dollar under 65 cents (at time of writing) you can't just pretend the two currencies are equal and round up. You have to admit that while a US Big Mac looks cheap at US$5 that's actually A$7.50, which is basically the same as home. And over there they add tax and tip to everything. America's tipping culture has been subject to insane inflation. You are sneered at if you don't add 20 per cent now. Even though tipping is a percentage, right, so the tips are rising as the cost of goods rise! America is actually cheap for groceries and fuel, while it is expensive to stay in the big cities and eat at restaurants. It is not just the prices stopping us from hitting America in big numbers. It is the fact you can show up and have the border guards simply turn you round at the border and send you home. Which is a much better scenario than being strip-searched and then sent home. America's border police are mean at the best of times. I've travelled to America with someone who, long ago, had a work visa to work in the US. That reliably sets off a ping in the system and they would get dragged off for interrogation — we are there for a two-week holiday but the system presumably worries this person is back trying to work in America illegally. You wouldn't want to have a connecting flight. If America was weird about their border before, it is way worse now. The odds are still good, you'll get in — hundreds of Australians are still going to America every day. But if you have tattoos or have ever posted something mean about America on social media, you may feel better not going. If it's purely a leisure trip, Tokyo Disney seems like a much safer option than Disneyland LA. In Japan the populace is not rioting and the police are not arresting foreigners without due process. You can catch a subway instead of renting a Chevrolet Traverse the size of a semi-trailer, and your odds of being involved in a mass shooting are much lower. There's been 199 mass shootings in America so far this year and, it seems, none in Japan since 2023. I would really like to see the Grand Canyon one day and maybe spend some time in the Rocky Mountains. But I might wait for the Aussie dollar to rise and America's insecurities to fall, before I in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
From Real-Life Covert War Mission to Explosive On-Screen Adaptation in a Week: How AI Short ‘The Decisive Moment' Hopes to Become ‘Mission: Impossible' for the News
On June 1, Ukraine carried out Operation Spiderweb, an 18-months-in-the-making covert operation in which 117 drones — secretly built inside Russia and concealed in and launched from trucks driven by unsuspecting local drivers — carried out coordinated attacks on five air bases across the country. According to Ukrainian security services, the strikes damaged one-third of Russia's strategic cruise missile carriers causing billions of dollars of damage, and via drones worth around $400 each. The audacious secret mission sounds like something straight out of a spy novel and the perfect story to be adapted for screen. In fact, it already has been and is now available to watch. We are, at the time of publication, still in the month of June. More from Variety Google's Sanjay Gupta Sees AI as 'Magic Wand' for Asia's Storytellers at APOS Darren Aronofsky's AI-Driven Studio Primordial Soup Inks Google DeepMind Partnership, First Film Project to Premiere at Tribeca Festival YouTube Ad Revenue Bulks Up 10.3% to $8.9 Billion as Alphabet Q1 Net Profit Jumps 46% 'The Decisive Moment: Spiders in the Sky' — which has launched on YouTube less than four weeks after the event took place — is a five-minute short film telling its own version of the 'most incredible drone operation ever.' A narrator (a real-life British military drone operator known as Big Mac) explains the entire mission, from a fake company being set up in a Russian industrial city to 'killer drones' flying out the back of lorries and causing destructive havoc across air bases. It's all highly dramatic — there are huge explosions, irate Russian generals and even, for a splash of 007, men dressed as Rabbis secretly disposing of their belongings in airport trash cans. Even for those who knew about Operation Spiderweb, it's like an edge-of-the-seat thriller. As per its description, it's ''Mission: Impossible' for the news: fast, emotional, and unforgettable.' Of course, it's all AI. But it was also made in under a week, effectively serving as a proof-of-concept for U.K.-based director Samir Mallal and his company OneDay to showcase what can be achieved using AI when it comes to such non-fiction storytelling. 'I wanted to use these new tools to tell a cinematic version of the news,' he explains. 'I was thinking: what if Vice launched in 2025.' A documentary-maker and Cannes Lions-winning commercials director whose film 'Nollywood Babylon' premiered in Sundance in 2009, Mallal had spent the last two years 'dabbling in AI.' But it was only when Google launched its latest AI video generator Veo3 at the end of May that he thought he had the tools to 'make something that looked like a big budget Netflix documentary and turn it around as fast as possible.' 'Spiders in the Sky' was made using Veo3, OpenAI's Sora and MidJourney, with Mallal feeding in replicated images that had been put out in the press by Ukraine from the mission, plus details already available — such as those of the Russian bases — alongside the AI tools' own search and incredible specific prompt capabilities. 99% of the graphics in the film were AI created. There were efforts to keep as much to the facts as possible, with most of the details of Operation Spiderweb having already been reported on. Even the Ukrainian general in the film, says Mallal, 'looks like the general that met with Zelensky,' with a photo of him used to create a character. But then there are creative, fictional and even humorous elements too. In one moment, we see 'Halo' character Master Chief charging through an airbase, with the narrator suggesting that 117 drones were selected because of the video game (the character's full name is 'Master Chief Petter Officer John-117). 'These guys planning the operation grew up playing Halo,' he exclaims with a jovial tone in his voice. 'What I was very happy with about this process was the ability to take something in the news, dramatize it and add some humor. Normally it would take years to figure that out and have that level of detachment,' says Mallal. 'Now to do this with something newsworthy, to me, is really interesting.' In all, the entire production process took — from concept to completion— a week (and the idea itself came to Mallal a week after the Operation took place). While it's difficult to put a price on it all, Mallal says it's about as expensive as a high-end short film, in the region of $50,000. But it was a cost OneDay took on itself, with 'The Decisive Moment: Spiders in the Sky' set to be the first in a series to launch on YouTube in the hopes that studios or backers might be interested in funding more. A second is already in development, this time about the very recent bombing of Tehran by Israel. These films, of course, are dealing with very real and highly sensitive geo-political situations and, unlike documentaries or most narrative retellings, are being made and released while events are still actually unfolding and on-the-ground facts are still blurred. But Mallal insists that 'The Decisive Moment' films will clearly be labelled as an 'interpretation' of what happened, with viewers 'literate enough' to recognize that. 'We are telling a truth, regardless of whether it is factual, and there's a difference,' he says. 'As artists, our job is not to express facts. Our job is to tell a story and bring our point of view to it and let people interpret things on an emotional and immersive level.' And now, he says he's able to do this at speeds unheard of before, at a fraction of the price of traditional production methods and without any of the usual hurdles. 'As somebody who's been working in the industry for 30 years and always having had to go out and get permission to tell the story that I want to tell, I don't want to have to get permission anymore,' he says. 'I want to be the studio and make the work that I want to make and I don't want it watered down. I think we're entering this new era where one artist or a small team of artists, in this case, with the right tools, can do what used to take 100 people and a green light.' Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? 25 Hollywood Legends Who Deserve an Honorary Oscar
SoraNews24
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- SoraNews24
An elegant and hefty cheeseburger bento awaits at the 'Japanese Costco' Lopia
It's so classy, you'll want to eat it with a knife and fork. There's a supermarket in Japan nicknamed the 'Japanese Costco' because much like its namesake, it sells very large quantities of food at bulk-discount prices. Its real name is Lopia, and our writer Ikuna Kamezawa often enjoys going there even though many of the things for sale are way too big for her to ever eat on her own. But this time, a certain cheeseburger bento caught her eye. It was large, but not too large, and only cost 1,078 yen (US$7.40), so she decided to take the meaty plunge. It was so big that she could barely fit it into her shopping bag and things only got worse as it started to rain while she walked home. She had to carry it very carefully too, for reasons we'll see in a moment. After getting home, she unveiled her Manpuku Burger Double Cheese and confirmed its size at about 25 centimeters (10 inches) in length. Popping the lid off we can see that the very fancy arrangement was why Ikuna had to carry it so carefully, and the sheer volume of it all was the reason it was priced a little more than a Big Mac combo. She felt kind of bad disturbing the elegant layout of her bento, but she had to take stock of what was inside before eating it. There was a double cheeseburger with two patties and two slices of cheese, some seasoned fries, and two breaded chicken filets. That photo might not do the size justice so she took some shots alongside a pack of matches for scale. Sure, a matchbox might not be the most universally understood comparison, but she was just so excited to eat this thing. ▼ Fries ▼ Chicken Filets ▼ Double Cheese Burger Ikuna turned her attention back to the cheeseburger and tried to reassemble it in a normal way. That's when she noticed something was off with the proportions of the bun and patties. She thought this must be some chic designer cheeseburger arrangement she'd never seen before. That might give the illusion Lopia is being chintzy with the meat, but rest assured they were good-sized beef patties. For a more understandable comparison, Ikuna placed a Yamazaki Bakery convenience store cheeseburger next to it. This store-bought burger selling for about 99 yen is slightly smaller than a McDonald's cheeseburger and the Lopia burger blows it out of the water. ▼ Lopia's burger ▼ Yamazaki's burger There were definitely some structural integrity issues with it though, so our writer opted to eat the whole thing with a knife and fork. A fancy burger like this deserves fancy eating utensils anyway. The hamburger patty wasn't juicy at all, but it was very dense and meaty. This texture might turn some burger aficionados off, but she felt kids would really go for it. There was also a sweet ketchup on it, but really the flavor of the beef stood out so much that she barely even remembers eating the cheese and bun. While it might not be for everyone, the taste of this burger bento was right up Ikuna's alley. Her only complaint — if you could call it that — was that it was too much for her to eat in one sitting. But for the price she paid, that's the kind of problem you'd want to have. In conclusion, she definitely recommends the Manpuku Burger Double Cheese for big eaters. Lopia can be a little random with their offerings, especially in the bento section, but Fridays are known as 'Fry Days' there which is when they usually go all out in that department so your best chance is to find it then. Happy hunting! Photos © SoraNews24 ● Want to hear about SoraNews24's latest articles as soon as they're published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter! [ Read in Japanese ]
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The Fast Food Franchise That Was Once Owned By Queen Elizabeth
How do the rich stay rich? By diversifying their investments, of course. The British royal family, when not attending functions and waving elegantly at passersby, maintains a sprawling real estate and business empire that keeps the coffers full. When Queen Elizabeth II was still alive, she owned castles, along with, um, all the dolphins that dared enter British waters. But there were slightly more humble holdings as well — including, in a way, a McDonald's franchise in Oxfordshire. The Queen didn't exactly own the franchise herself. However, the Banbury Gateway Shopping Park, in which the eatery is located, sits on land owned by the Crown, which would have technically made Queen Elizabeth the restaurant's landlord. Talk about golden arches! This wasn't even the first time the Crown was involved with McDonald's. The Queen also purchased a retail park in 2008 called Bath Road Retail Park that included a McDonald's, along with a sporting goods store and a maternity store, though it was sold in 2016 for £120.25 million (the equivalent of just over $138 million) — a nice bit of profit, considering the park cost her £92 million (around $106 million) to acquire. The Banbury Gateway Shopping Park has now passed to King Charles III, who can boast an even wider array of fast food franchises, with his Crown Estate renting space to McDonalds, Starbucks, Subway locations. However, it would appear that none of those cuisines quite tickle his fancy, as his go-to take-out food is reportedly pizza. Read more: 14 Fast Food Burgers That Are Always Fresh And Never Frozen If you're picturing Ronald McDonald and the Queen of England sipping tea and nibbling on nuggets while gossiping about the Burger King, we're going to have to disappoint you. While Queen Elizabeth did have the occasional hankering for a kebab or a spot of fish and chips, she otherwise avoided fast food entirely — which makes sense, considering her army of royal chefs. While Princess Diana would often take Princes Harry and William to McDonald's as a weekend outing, the Queen kept to a rather strict diet when not entertaining. She eschewed both carbs and finger foods throughout the day, aside from her morning teatime biscuits and her afternoon teatime cucumber sandwiches. On the rare occasions she did yearn for a hamburger, it was never a Big Mac, but rather made from venison and served with knives and forks and no bun. Eggs were a special treat, but when she did have them, Queen Elizabeth enjoyed scrambled eggs with two special ingredients: nutmeg and lemon zest. Her real indulgence, though, was chocolate. As far as vices go, that's a pretty relatable one for royalty to have. Want more food knowledge? Sign up to our free newsletter where we're helping thousands of foodies, like you, become culinary masters, one email at a time. Read the original article on Food Republic.
