Laurie Penny gains an insight into the corporate mindset as she mingles with the crowd at the beach volleyball

Long before they even began, the London 2012 Games became - in the minds of many - deeply immersed in and reliant on corporate sponsorship. And there were many in Hackney's Haggerston Park, in east London, where thousands of locals not able to get their hands on tickets came to watch last night's Ceremony, who felt that the non-ticketed, non-sponsored party was more akin to the ideals of the original Olympics than the shindig going on just up the road in Stratford.

Burger King has reintroduced some of the food colours associated with possible hyperactivity in children in a small number of restaurants, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) said.

US Outlook The image of the sedentary, pop-swilling American is more than a stereotype; one in three people here is obese, and the numbers are going up, along with the incidences of chronic disease, such as diabetes, that disproportionately afflict the overweight. There are many causes, inevitably, but one villain in particular is in the sights of government: the fizzy drinks industry.

Drinks firm forced to change recipe in California after ingredient classed as health hazard

"I get the feeling sometimes that the staff want us to fail," said Stefan, one of three men who featured in Daddy Daycare, a Channel 4 reality series designed to address a social crisis that almost certainly doesn't exist. I don't mean for a moment, by the way, that there are no incompetent or deadbeat fathers out there. Or that it isn't useful for even the most well-intentioned man to learn some lessons about childcare. But the implication that today's men are unusually bad at fatherhood ("Modern British life has spawned a generation of dysfunctional dads") is surely not true. Even the horror statistic used to underwrite this exercise in mental re-education could be seen from another angle as a silver lining: "Almost half of all mothers feel fathers don't do their share," said the voiceover at the beginning of the show. Really? You mean that as many as 50 per cent of mothers now feel fathers do? The truth of it was that it wasn't the staff at the south London nursery Stefan had been sent to who wanted him to fail. It was the production company. And even they only wanted him to fail a bit comically in the first half so that he could recover in the second, make a public act of contrition, and score a modest triumph before the final credits.

Pepsi has promised to take the fight to its arch-rival Coca-Cola, with an extra $600m (£378m) marketing and advertising blitz.

The Cola Queen?

A new generation of web addresses is up for grabs. Will the big brands be tempted to splash out – and if so, will it just be to stop the labels falling into the wrong hands?

Workers who transport cans of Coca-Cola across the country are to stage a 24-hour strike next week in a row over pay, it was announced today.

Coca-Cola had to pay $300m (£180m) more for commodities, such as the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used to make plastic bottles, in the first quarter, crimping profits to the extent that they missed Wall Street forecasts. Disruption in Japan and unexpectedly high marketing costs also hit the figures.

The soft drinks group Coca-Cola Enterprises has announced plans to set up Europe's biggest plastic-bottle recycling plant in North Lincolnshire by entering into a new joint venture with ECO Plastics. The plant will double the amount of recycled plastic currently produced in the UK – from about 35,000 tonnes last year to more than 75,000 tonnes.