Coca-Cola chief executive Muhtar Kent said his company was not responsible for the rise in US obesity, despite New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent moves to limit the consumption of sugary drinks.
“This is an important, complicated societal issue that we all have to work together to provide a solution,” Kent told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published late on Monday. “That’s why we are working with government, business and civil society to have active lifestyle programs in every country we operate by 2015.”
His remarks came just weeks after the health-conscious Bloomberg proposed a ban on super-sized soft drinks that would restrict the sale to 470 milliliter servings, more than an average can, but far less than the bucket-sized beverages offered at cinemas, service stations and sporting events.
Kent said Coca-Cola has diversified from its namesake, offering a wide range of healthy teas, juices, sports drinks and other products.
“We’ve gone from being a single beverage, single brand company to now 500-plus brands, 3,000 products. Eight hundred of these products we’ve introduced in the last four or five years are calorie-free or low-calorie,” Kent said. “It is, I believe, incorrect and unjust to put the blame on any single ingredient, any single product, any single category of food.”
Bloomberg said the proposed ban was needed to confront the “epidemic” of obesity in the US, which adds to rising health costs.
Critics have derided the proposed ban as a “nanny state” overreach of government power.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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