Japanese giant buys Orangina Schweppes

Orangina Schweppes, the French soft drink maker, has been sold to its Japanese rival Suntory.

The $3.8 billion sale to Suntory, the privately owned maker of beer, whisky and soft drinks, is particularly interesting in that Suntory announced on July 14 that it is in talks to merge with Japan's Kirin.

Suntory is the Tokyo-based brewing and distilling company group established in 1899. It is one of the country's oldest distributors of alcoholic beverages in Japan, from soft drinks to whiskies, and also owns a chain of sandwich shops.

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US Airways bulks up its beverage menu

US Airways may not be the most service-oriented passenger transportation company around, but it is looking to one aspect of creature comforts.

The airline has just introduced a variety of new offerings to its in-flight drinks menu.

The additional non-alcoholic beverages include Red Bull, Starbucks Frappuccinos and AriZona Arnold Palmer Lite Half & Halfs, an iced tea and lemonade concoction, priced at $3 each.

They additional alcoholic cocktails are a pomegranate martini, a margarita and a mai tai, priced at $8 each. They are made with real fruit juice, triple-filtered water and cane sugar.

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Did you ever notice ... ?

Columnist Andy Rooney, a fixture on "60 Minutes" and author of tghousands of newspaper columns and numerous books, sometimes waxes almost poetic about the most commonplace and mundane of topics.

If you missed it in print, you might enjoy reading his take on the one drink necessary to humanity everywhere: water.

Says Andy:

"If I had to limit myself to drinking just one thing for the rest of my life, there's no doubt my choice would be water. A glass of cool, clear water is unquestionably the best drink, although I start every day with a cup of coffee. One of the great things about life on earth is that we've devised ways to bring clear, cool water to the people who live almost anywhere. It's one good sign for our civilization."

Go here for the rest of the column.

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'Water, water everywhere ...

... and not a drop to drink."

That line from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) came to mind on Sunday afternoon when I stopped to gaze at the Cohoes Falls in the little Albany County city of Cohoes and found someone with a much better view.

A lone bicyclist left his wheels close to shore (see background when you double-click on the image to enlarge it) and somehow managed to make his way to the edge of the falls where he sat down and looked around. He also outwaited me. I presume he got back safely.


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