Innholdsfortegnelse for 07/12/2019 i Newsweek International

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PUBLISHED IN MAY, KATHERINE EBAN’S EXPOSE SHINES NEW LIGHT ON THE mysterious generic drug manufacturing business. Almost 90 percent of America’s prescription drugs are generics, with the majority of them made overseas. Fraud is widespread, Eban writes, in order to circumvent inspections and maximize profits. FDA oversight has been, to be kind, uneven, she says. Over the past year alone, for example, there have been recalls of dozens of batches of blood pressure medication, including two last month. A number of problems—impure ingredients, infestations of birds and flies, faked sterility testing—can be traced to India, which manufactures 40 percent of generic drugs dispensed in the U.S. The following excerpt describes the successful FDA inspection pilot program that was instituted in India in 2014, and was…

Thirty years ago, an engineer began working at LION POWER, a specialized Japanese company that today makes printed circuit boards (PCB), automated systems and medical devices. This employee had a rare medical condition and had to undergo dialysis three times a week. During his dialysis sessions, Yamato-san had plenty of time to think. And on the recommendation of LION POWER’s then president, he used this time to contemplate the development of a revolutionary product. “After that, two engineers joined the company and they developed the HI-1001, which is the prototype of the HI-3000. This occurred 18 years after that man joined our company,” recalls current president Keishiro Takase. “While it is extremely difficult for SMEs to keep an R&D laboratory, we were able to continue our research because our founding…

If there were ever a good moment for a long-established company to take stock, look back at how far it has come and envision where it is going, it would be on its 100th year anniversary. And in 2019, Japanese construction engineering firm, Kurihara Kogyo, which over the past century has played an integral part in Japan’s industrialization story, is doing just that. Established in 1919, Kurihara Kogyo began as an electrical contracting services company in Osaka. By 1942, it had extended its operations to Tokyo, Nagoya and Hiroshima, before taking its first steps overseas in 1979 with the establishment of its branch in Singapore, where it has helped to support the city-state’s steadfast development during the past four decades. Today the company is one of the top ten Japanese…

The history of Hatsuta Seisakusho can be traced back to the 1880s and a fateful trip to Germany taken by the president of the Kyoto Chamber of Commerce. There, Bunpei Takagi, who had a background in engineering, attended a trade exhibition and was taken aback by a revolutionary new product that, he knew, could play an extremely important role in the protection of Kyoto’s sacred ancient temples against fire. As a result of that trip, Mr. Takagi was the first person to bring the concept of fire extinguishing technology to Japan. And the bright-minded engineer went on to invent his own dual-bottle fire extinguisher that began to be distributed and sold in Kyoto by Hatsuta at the beginning of the 20th century. “Hatsuta’s history began when we introduced the Dual…

03.04.1957 “Long obscured by a gigantic fog of secrecy, myth and conjecture, the hard outlines of this country’s space program are just beginning to become clear as the interplanetary itch is spreading like chicken pox.” 03.19.1962 “Once the question was ‘Why go to the moon?’ Now it is ‘How and when can we get there?’” The problems were many, the cost enormous, but “there was good reason to believe the first lunar explorer would be an American.” 06.14.1965 “Eyes glued to their television sets, millions waited tensely to hear from astronaut Edward White as he climbed out of his capsule high over the Pacific. Then came the verdict: ‘This is fun!’ said White,” of history’s first space walk. 02.06.1967 “The terrible irony of the Apollo tragedy was that death came…

EVERY YEAR IN LOS ANGELES, THE BIGGEST GAMING COMPANIES BRING their newest wares to E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo). The weeklong celebration of all things gaming attracts fans from all walks of life, including World Wrestling Entertainment champ Kofi Kingston. He’s been one of the WWE’s most consistent and charismatic performers for more than a decade; this year he finally captured the WWE Championship at WrestleMania 35. Now that he’s on top, he intends to make the most of it. And that includes a healthy dose of video games on the YouTube channel UpUpDownDown. Kingston says he’s “on top of the world” now that he holds both the UUDD championship and the WWE championship, and wants to use his platform as a star gamer for good. “A lot of people look…

How did you come up with the idea for your book? In 2008, Joe Graedon of the NPR program, The People’s Pharmacy, contacted me. Patients had been writing in with serious complaints about generic drugs that either didn’t work or caused devastating side effects. Top officials at the FDA had insisted to him that the patients’ reactions were psychosomatic. But Graedon felt something significant was wrong and urged me to look into the claims. My effort to answer a single question, what is wrong with the drugs, launched me into a decade-long reporting odyssey on four continents. Ultimately, I uncovered how generic-drug companies circumvented regulations and resorted to fraud. What obstacles did you face and how did you overcome them? As a journalist, exposing corruption in your own backyard is…

“Learning , becoming better and then excelling at what we do is the MTC way, or what we call: the metal solution”Kazuhiko Hasegawa, President Metal Technology Co. Ltd. The shift from the big, bulky cell phones of the 1990s to the sleek, slim touch-screen operated devices we carry around today would not have been possible without crucial advancements in core materials technology and a process called Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP). Describing the gravity of this breakthrough within the sphere of materials technology, Mr. Kazuhiko Hasegawa, president of MTC, who introduced HIP to MTC in 1984, says it is akin to having the ability to blend oil and water to form a homogeneous mixture. “This is what HIP allows us to do with dissimilar solid or powder materials,” he says. “And…

As the world races to lower carbon emissions in line with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, it is essential for power and manufacturing plant owners to adopt the latest technologies, parts and equipment in a bid to reduce the environmental impact of their operations. And Seo Koatsu Kogyo (SKK) – a Japanese firm which manufactures steel-forged products, heat exchangers and other heavy industry products – is supporting its customers in the energy and manufacturing industries in this endeavor. Established in 1926, SKK has been quite literally forging trust and its reputation among its customers for over 90 years. And over the coming years, this highly specialized Japanese SME will play a hidden, yet crucial role in reducing C02 emissions through the provision of high-quality and state-of-the-art products for…

“The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.” —RUSSIAN PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN “IF A FEMALE DALAI LAMA COMES, SHE SHOULD BE MORE ATTRACTIVE.” —THE DALAI LAMA “We obviously forbid any discussion or topics that would run counter to the major decisions made by the leaders.” —WANG GANG, VICE HEAD OF ACADEMIC AFFAIRS OF CHINA’S CENTRAL PARTY SCHOOL “I stand by the comments that I made about not wanting to go to the White House, with exception of the expletive. My mom would be very upset about that.” —MEGAN RAPINOE, U.S. WOMEN'S SOCCER TEAM CAPTAIN “I AIN’T GOING TO JAIL. ” —Cardi B “And that little girl was me.” —SEN. KAMALA HARRIS, AT THE FIRST DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL…

Every successful economy – and by extension every successful business – is customarily based on two fundamental characteristics: security and the ability to innovate. In recent years, we have seen international press criticize Japanese companies for struggling with the latter. However, statistics prove otherwise, as Japanese companies play a dominant role in smaller, niche sectors. Thanks to their high level of technological prowess, Japanese companies have become the undisputed market leaders in many B2B segments and are responsible for providing the quality required to make complex end-products or systems. PATLITE, an engineering and manufacturing company that specializes in safety and security solutions such as innovative LED status indicating lights, sound alarms, visual and audible communication networks, is a prime example of this. “About ten years ago, capital investment for Japanese…

While China has become the largest player in the Asian region in recent years, producing almost three times more vehicles than Japan in 2017, Japan’s automotive industry is still one of the most prominent, distinguished and technologically advanced industries in the world. Japan’s automotive industry is responsible for employing some 5.5 million people, representing 8.7 percent of the workforce, and represents around 21 percent of the total R&D spending of all of Japan’s manufacturing sectors, at around $18 billion dollars. Since the 1960s, when the industry began to really take off in the post-war years, Japan has been firmly placed in the top three largest producers in the world. Of the top ten selling car globally, three are Japanese companies: Toyota, Honda and Nissan. While Toyota, Honda and Nissan are…

“In order to effectively develop new products, one must always prioritize the bigger picture,” says Kazunari Shozen, President and CEO of Century Corporation, a company that helps its customer to see the bigger picture with its range of high-quality LCD monitors that are used for everything from airport check-ins to disaster prevention. Century’s story is one of innovation and adaptation: the company began as a semiconductor export and trading company and quickly evolved into a PC peripheral equipment manufacturer and trader. As society began to enter the smart-phone era, it expanded its business to mobile phone peripheral equipment manufacturing and sales. In 2008, it launched its best-selling product, the ‘plus one’ LCD sub-monitor. This series of small and portable monitors has a wide range of applications and is used by…

IN A PHOTO PROJECT THAT SPANNED OVER 10 years, French photographer Vincent Fournier, 49, set out to shoot images that represent our missions into outer space. His coffee-table-worthy book, Space Utopia, published this year by Rizzoli in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon–landing mission, is a collection of images he hopes will encourage us to think about the past, present and future of space. A world-renown photographer whose work from his “Brasilia” series is on permanent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the LVMH collection in Paris, Fournier has focused in his career almost entirely on space travel, robots and technology. His Space Utopia project began in 2006 while he was shooting the Maua Kea Observatory on the Big Island of…