For 25 years, Robert Bonner was committed to working under McDonald’s iconic Golden Arches. But by the time the native Floridian had severed ties with the franchise founded in Des Plaines by Ray Kroc in 1955, he burned everything that was related to the restaurant chain — awards, shirts, valuable collectibles — in his backyard.

Bonner was the owner-operator of six McDonald’s stores in Illinois and the St. Louis region. But he left the chain after enduring numerous alleged racist actions from McDonald’s that he says impeded his opportunity for entrepreneurial growth and generational wealth.

“Those Golden Arches … you have the belief that at some point this is going to go the way you were promised it would go,” he said. “The day you get the keys, it becomes an us and them mentality, corporate versus the people who run the store.”

Bonner is among dozens of Black McDonald’s store owners around the nation demanding a jury trial in a racial discrimination and breach of contract lawsuit against McDonald’s Corp. and McDonald’s USA, LLC. This June, Bonner was among more than 40 plaintiffs who called for a boycott of the franchise. The Chicago-based civil rights law firm of Loevy + Loevy filed the federal suit in 2023, stating Black owner and operators were forced out of the company over internal practices and policies that include, among others, forcing Black owners into low-profit stores in areas with high crime rates and denying Black franchisees the ability to buy stores in white communities.

Bonner endured the alleged racist tactics from McDonald’s after becoming an owner-operator in 1990 with an East St. Louis location. Despite recognition for his leadership in the local communities where he operated for over two decades — including investing nearly $1 million into community programs — Bonner severed ties with McDonald’s in 2013.

According to the lawsuit, McDonald’s thwarted Bonner’s attempts to sell his stores at a worthy price and buy new locations on multiple occasions between 2005 and 2013. One such deal was approximately $800,000 for a store, but when the regional manager spoke to the potential buyer, he revealed he planned to buy Bonner’s store for much less, saying “I’ll be damned if I let a Black operator be much richer than me.”

Bonner said he had to sell the store for around 25% less than the deal he had lined up. Bonner even had plans to purchase McDonald’s stores in other states, but the same regional manager got in the way of that potential deal and encouraged the seller not to sell to Bonner.

“They didn’t want to see people of color pass them … we heard that so many times,” Bonner said. “McDonald’s did change my life, but they took so much in so many years. I won’t even go into one of the stores now.”

The lawsuit details the history of racial discrimination against Black franchisees — from its founding in 1955, when McDonald’s installed its restaurants only in white neighborhoods and barred Black individuals from becoming franchisees, to McDonald’s approving Black owner-operators to take over urban stores solely in scenarios where Black franchisees had to partner with a white owner-operator to purchase a location in the 1960s and ’70s. From 1998 to 2020, the number of Black franchisees fell from 377 to 186, while the number of total McDonald’s stores went from 15,086 to 38,999. Stores owned by Black franchisees earn about two-thirds of the average McDonald’s store.

The suit says equitable measures and initiatives to rectify the racial discrimination in the company were never followed through on, increasing the annual cash flow gap between Black and non-Black franchisees. Roughly half of Black franchisees were forced out of the McDonald’s system by 2020, compared with 10% of white owner-operators in the same time frame. Then, in January 2025, McDonald’s announced it was scaling back its commitment to diversity initiatives, which prompted the boycott by the People’s Union USA.

A statement from McDonald’s Corp. denied the allegations in the lawsuit and defended its history with Black franchisees, saying plaintiffs’ allegations are false, a deliberate distortion of facts and a desperate publicity stunt by the lawyers that stand to benefit. “The claims were previously dismissed, and make no sense given McDonald’s record of investment in its franchisees’ success. We look forward to the day these plaintiffs set aside their falsehoods and acknowledge McDonald’s steadfast commitment to the success of our Black franchisees and increasing access to opportunity for all.”

Loevy + Loevy attorney Quinn Rallins said most of the effort to sue in response to McDonald’s practices came about when two former Black vice presidents at McDonald’s — Vicki Guster-Hines and Domineca Neal — blew the whistle. That is when nearly 77 clients in total, approximately 40 he represents, “decided enough was enough,” he said.

The late Sherman Claypool invested in McDonald’s in 1971 and would go on to own five locations in Milwaukee. He was one of the founding members of the National Black McDonald’s Operators Association to advocate for Black franchisees — his work with the association was recognized in a May 2022 resolution passed by the Illinois House of Representatives for laying the foundation for “African American entrepreneurs in the United States today.” Claypool died in October 2020 from stress-induced Parkinson’s, according to his daughter Talyia. From downstate Grand Chain, Illinois, Claypool was a mechanic. He owned two service stations in Wisconsin before he segued to McDonald’s ownership. His widow, Glenda, a native of Milwaukee, is part of the lawsuit on behalf of her late husband.

“I remember he came home one day, he sat outside in the car, and he was like, ‘I can’t do it no more. I can’t do this anymore,’” recalled Glenda Claypool.

According to Talyia Claypool, before the family sold their properties in 2014, she and her sister, Mila, who had worked with her father in their stores since 2010, watched their dad suffer for a decade due to the alleged discrimination McDonald’s posed on his business. They said he was sick for that time, and given the stress, his condition progressively got worse over the last three years he owned the franchise. Sherman Claypool had managed to hang on to the business for 45 years.

“The last announced visit that we had (from corporate), he had a medical episode that morning, and he never had that … that was a routine thing for him, but it had gotten so bad at the end that he had to be seen by a medic before he went to work,” Mila Claypool said. She felt so traumatized by the McDonald’s experience that she left fast-food altogether. She said she wants this lawsuit to be taken seriously, in order to feel heard, seen and, to some extent, get the healing started.

“There were forcible price increases, and the neighborhoods that we were in were in low-income neighborhoods, and it wouldn’t be affordable to the community or to our customers,” Mila Claypool said.

Talyia Claypool remembers McDonald’s forcing her family down to one store, she said. A complete revamp of the computer system in their last store was the one thing the family couldn’t come back from.

“Finances had gotten so bad that we were robbing Peter to pay Paul at one point,” Talyia Claypool said. “We own a store and our lights are cut off, not because we mismanaged money. It’s that we can’t make any because (they) are taking more than we could survive on. There were some good years, but there was a lot of bad. We felt that they tried to hurt us,” she said.

Sherman Claypool faced a series of security issues at his stores with employees frequently being robbed. According to the lawsuit, around 2014 a reckless driver drove into Claypool’s store, which suspended operations for weeks, and another incident prevented customers access to the store for about eight months. Claypool sought financial assistance from McDonald’s for those incidents, but was denied.

When Claypool was offering scholarships to the Black community in Milwaukee from the 1970s to the early 2000s, McDonald’s allegedly forced them to stop the giving. The Claypools said a white McDonald’s field consultant didn’t want to go to that side of town anymore for such events because she was scared, so they think McDonald’s did what they could to stop the scholarship program, despite the hundreds of scholarships Sherman Claypool funded.

“Our experience with McDonald’s is what introduced us to hardcore racism — not where we lived, not the schools we went to,” she said. “If you put us all in a room together, we all have similar stories, and a lot of us don’t even know each other. I was crying going through the stories of the other Black owner-operators. McDonald’s knew what they were doing. They figured out a way to get money off Black people, put some Black faces behind these McDonald’s, and get their money, and at the same token, we’re going to make sure that these people don’t get more than us, don’t get what we have.”

drockett@chicagotribune.com

By LORNE COOK

BRUSSELS (AP) — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivers a major state of the union speech on Wednesday addressing the challenges facing the world’s biggest trading bloc and laying out her vision for tackling them.

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The commission has enthusiastically billed her speech — modeled on the annual State of the Union addresses to Congress by U.S. presidents — as “a milestone event for European democracy.”

During her address, to be delivered to lawmakers during a session that could run for around three hours at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, von der Leyen is expected to announce new spending targets and policies for the years ahead. Few details have been released about what she might say.

Fabian Zuleeg, Chief Executive at the European Policy Centre think-tank, said that he expects the speech to be significant and closely watched in Europe.

“A lot has happened over the last year. A lot of things which are more on the negative side rather than on the positive side. So people will be looking at how will she react to that,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

“People want to know not only what are the policy initiatives, but what is the mood, what is the feeling, where Europe is going to go in the next years,” he said.

An increasingly powerful EU executive

The commission is the European Union’s executive arm. It proposes laws that impact the lives of around 450 million people across 27 countries, and monitors whether those rules are respected.

Under von der Leyen’s stewardship, the commission has pushed hard in trade talks with the United States to try to secure favorable terms and limit the economic damage inflicted by President Donald Trump’s global tariff war.

Her department has driven efforts to support Ukraine – now in the fourth year of a war seen as an existential threat to Europe – and to help the EU arm itself against an aggressive Russia whose president shows little interest in peace talks.

The commission is also Europe’s top antitrust regulator and has angered tech companies — and Trump — by imposing massive fines on firms over competition concerns. Last week, it slapped a $3.5 billion fine on Google for breaching the rules.

“Very unfair, and the American Taxpayer will not stand for it!” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social on Friday. “As I have said before, my Administration will NOT allow these discriminatory actions to stand.”

At the same time, Trump has heaped praised on von der Leyen, and the 66-year-old former German defense minister has become a regular feature at summits with leaders around the world, despite her role as a political appointee not elected to office.

The commission has gained power as the strength of governments in Europe’s traditional driving forces France and Germany have waned. Her speech in Strasbourg takes place just two days after yet another French government fell.

Criticism likely after a no confidence vote

But the EU’s most influential official is also likely to hear fresh criticism from lawmakers, two months after surviving a rare no confidence vote against a commission president in the parliament.

A nebulous mix of claims were raised against her, including over her private text messaging with the chief executive of vaccine maker Pfizer during the COVID-19 pandemic, and allegations of misuse of EU funds and election interference.

She won comfortably but didn’t turn up for the vote. Taking to social media, von der Leyen posted: “As external forces seek to destabilize and divide us, it is our duty to respond in line with our values. Thank you, and long live Europe.”

On the eve of her speech, European public interest groups and trade unions criticized her over plans for “an unprecedented wave of drastic cuts to regulations protecting labor, social, and human rights, as well as digital rights, and the environment.”

They claim the commission is rolling back protections under the guise of cutting bureaucratic red tape.

Mark Carlson in Brussels contributed.

By Kate Wells, Michigan Public, KFF Health News

It was March 2020, and Robert Gordon was about to kick some 80,000 people off health insurance.

As the Michigan state health director, he had spent the past year, and some $30 million in state tax dollars, trying to avoid that very thing.

Gordon was a Democrat, a veteran of the Obama administration, and he did not want people to lose the Medicaid coverage they had recently gained through the Affordable Care Act.

But Gordon and his boss, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, had reluctantly inherited a law passed two years earlier, when Republicans led the state. And that law mandated that Michigan institute a work requirement for Medicaid on Jan. 1, 2020.

Gordon and his team determined that most enrollees were already meeting the law’s requirements, either because they were already working or had an exemption. Thousands more reported their status through the newly built phone and online systems.

But even so, estimates suggested 80,000 to 100,000 Michiganders were going to be booted off the rolls within the year.

“That’s the population of the city of Flint who were on track to lose their insurance,” said Gordon, who led the state health department until 2021. “We’re implementing this about as well as this thing can be implemented, and it is still going to be pretty catastrophic.”

The new tax-and-spending law signed by President Donald Trump in July mandates a vast expansion of Medicaid work requirements to most states.

These systems will lead to 5.3 million more people being uninsured in 2034, according to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

The law applies to 40 states and Washington, D.C., because they expanded Medicaid in recent years to cover more working-age adults.

About 18 million people will be affected once the work mandate is fully implemented nationally, according to the CBO. Unless their state gets an exemption till 2028, by 2027, these enrollees will need to prove they’re working, volunteering, getting job training, or doing other qualifying activities at least 80 hours a month to keep their coverage.

Republicans say this is a commonsense way to weed out “freeloaders.” Democrats argue that’s just political cover for slashing a program that saved some 27,000 lives starting in 2010, when the Affordable Care Act was signed, through 2022.

The number of people who lose coverage, either temporarily or permanently, could vary widely by state, depending on how each state implements and maintains its reporting system.

Michigan’s experience illustrates how challenging it can be to stop large numbers of people from inadvertently losing coverage, even when leaders try their best to prevent that.

“We were very committed to implementing a law that we didn’t agree with, in a way that reduced the number of people who lost insurance just because the government screwed something up,” Gordon said.

A Year of High-Stakes Work

In 2013, then-Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, waged a fierce battle within his own party to expand Michigan’s Medicaid program.

To Snyder, it was an opportunity to simultaneously save money and expand access: By slashing the rate of uninsured Michiganders by almost half, the state could reduce the burden of uncompensated care on the health system and boost the economy by improving the physical health of the workforce.

But opponents saw it as an expansion of “Obamacare” that would shift massive new costs onto state and federal taxpayers. A work requirement became a point of compromise and a way for Snyder to mollify some of that opposition.

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From a coverage perspective, Michigan’s expansion of Medicaid was a success. Low-income adults signed up, ballooning new enrollment beyond what even supporters had initially estimated.

By 2019, there were nearly 700,000 new Medicaid recipients in Michigan, and the state was responsible for an increasing share of their health care costs. (Medicaid is paid for jointly by states and the federal government.)

Fiscal hawks were worried. “It’s now become the largest budget problem in Michigan,” said Jarrett Skorup of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank

Snyder signed the bill creating the 80-hour-a-month work requirement in 2018, but it wouldn’t go into effect until 2020, after he left office.

That left newly elected Democratic governor Whitmer’s administration holding the bag. She tapped Gordon, who’d held senior roles in the federal Office of Management and Budget and Department of Education during the Obama administration, to lead the sprawling state health department.

Gordon was terrified that Michigan would become another Arkansas, which was the first state to implement a work requirement, in 2018. The change led more than 18,000 Arkansas residents to lose their coverage.

People in Arkansas were disenrolled “because computers went down, because forms weren’t clear, because they just never heard about it,” Gordon said. “Maybe they got sicker, maybe they died because of this decision.”

If Michiganders lost coverage at the same rate as Arkansans, as many as 160,000 people would have lost their health insurance within a year, according to one estimate.

Trying To Make Medicaid Work Requirements … Work

In some ways, Michigan was better positioned than other states to implement a work requirement, Gordon said: The unemployment rate was the lowest it had been in two decades and the state was already pretty good at collecting and tracking employment and wage data.

“If the state can figure out on its own, without having to ask you if you’re working, that’s great, because then you don’t have to do anything,” Gordon said. “You’re just exempted.”

Michigan eventually changed its law to allow people more time to report their work activities and to automatically determine their compliance or exemption by cross-checking data from other assistance programs, like food benefits.

To see if recipients were students or had health-related exemptions, Gordon and his team also tried to capture data from community college enrollment and medical insurance claims.

Dozens of staffers reprogrammed the state’s outdated benefits enrollment portal, created full-time call centers, set up audit and appeals processes, hired compliance review teams, and trained hundreds of local organizers to provide tech and enrollment assistance.

Forms and letters alerting hundreds of thousands of enrollees to the new policy were redesigned to be attention-grabbing and easier to understand.

The sheer amount of effort and time required meant other public health efforts had to take a back seat, Gordon said. “Your first job is going to suffer, and that is a consequence of work requirements.”

In Michigan, Black infant mortality rates were some of the highest in the nation. Thousands of people were still dying from overdoses.

Yet at the state health department, “all of the oxygen in the room was dedicated — almost all, I should say — to the work requirement implementation,” said Renuka Tipirneni, an internal medicine physician at the University of Michigan who studies Michigan’s Medicaid expansion.

Even after all that work, Gordon and his team had no illusions the system they’d spent $30 million creating was flawless.

“There was a real sense that everyone was doing everything they could,” he said. But they still worried that “huge numbers of people were going to fall through the cracks. Because that’s just what happens with systems like this.”

A “Waste” of $30 Million

By the time the work requirement went into effect on Jan. 1, 2020, the state had been able to determine that the vast majority of the nearly 700,000 Medicaid expansion recipients already met the work requirement or were exempt.

That left about 100,000 people whose status was unknown and who therefore still had to go through the reporting process. By March, around 80,000 of those had failed to report and were on track to lose coverage.

On the one hand, it was a lower rate of coverage loss than Arkansas had. But it was still “an enormous number of people” set to lose coverage, Gordon said.

Before that could happen, a federal judge issued a ruling on March 4, 2020, blocking Michigan’s policies from going forward. That same day, Gordon was scheduled to testify before a Republican-led subcommittee about how the rollout was going.

Instead, he found himself explaining to legislators that the state’s work requirement was essentially dead in the water, and that “we had, on the demand of the people holding the hearing, spent tens of millions of dollars for no purpose.”

Given how brief Michigan’s experiment with a Medicaid work requirement was — only about two months of the policy’s being in effect, with no one losing coverage in the end — the Mackinac Center’s Skorup doesn’t see a lot of takeaways about the real-life impacts of work requirements.

“If you have an administration that is not sold on these being necessary at all, then I think they’re more likely to drag their feet on implementing this, which is what I think they did,” Skorup said, referring to the Whitmer administration.

Skorup is concerned because Medicaid costs keep rising, with 2.6 million Michiganders (1 in 4 residents) now covered by the program or the related Children’s Health Insurance Program. Skorup believes Medicaid spending is “crowding out” teacher pay, pensions, and roads in the state budget.

Supporters of Medicaid expansion say the program’s growth has benefited Michigan, pointing to research that Medicaid expansion helped boost employment and school enrollment and was a net positive for the state financially.

Court Ruling Comes Days Before COVID Hits

Only days after the court ruling stopped the work requirement in Michigan, officials announced the state’s first cases of COVID-19. The 80,000 Michiganders who might have lost Medicaid were spared, so their health coverage continued as the pandemic unfolded. Gordon continued as health director until 2021, when he resigned over “differences of opinion” with Whitmer about some pandemic restrictions.

These days, Gordon is experiencing a sense of déjà vu, with new predictions showing as many as 500,000 Michiganders could lose coverage within the first year of federally mandated work requirements, according to state estimates.

“We would have a more honest and more efficient policy if Republicans just kick people off Medicaid,” he said.

That would be “incredibly harmful,” he said. “But this thing they’re doing isn’t any less harmful. It’s just more wasteful administratively, and more confusing to everyone.”

This article is from a partnership that includes Michigan Public, NPR, and KFF Health News.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

TOKYO (AP) — Nearly all female athletes have completed sex testing ahead of the athletics world championships this month in Japan.

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World Athletics said Tuesday that more than 95% percent of tests — a genetic screening to determine the athlete’s sex at birth — have been completed in the lead up the world championships that will take place in Tokyo beginning this weekend.

The governing body for track and field said the remainder of the tests — for the French and Norwegian teams and some athletes based in France, both being countries where genetic testing for non-medical reasons is banned — will be done in Tokyo before the start of the competition.

“This has been a whole sport response to a principle that we all fundamentally believe in, which is to protect the female category,” World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said.

World Athletics was the first Olympic sport to reintroduce chromosome testing — previously discontinued in the 1990s — which requires athletes who compete in the women’s events to submit to the test once in their careers. It announced in March that it approved the introduction of cheek swabs and dry blood-spot tests for female athletes in order to maintain “the integrity of competition.”

World Athletics had set a deadline of Sept. 1 for athletes to submit to the gene tests in advance of the world championships.

Last month, the governing body for Olympic-style boxing announced it would require sex testing for all fighters wishing to compete in the women’s division at its world championships this month in Liverpool, England.

AP Sports: https://apnews.com/sports