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In a $16 billion deal this week, Japanese beverage giant Suntory announced it plans to purchase Beam Inc., the maker of Jim Beam bourbon and the owner of other popular bourbon brands like Maker's Mark.

Those and most other bourbons are made in Kentucky, and the deal has some hoping the drink's growth in the global market won't come at the expense of its uniquely Kentucky heritage.

For more than a century, Suntory has been in the beer and spirits industry in Japan, but what many Americans think of when they hear the name is the scene from the 2003 film Lost in Translation, in which Bill Murray plays an actor who goes to Tokyo to shoot a whiskey commercial.

"For relaxing times, make it Suntory time," Murray's character says coolly into the camera.

If the deal is approved by shareholders as expected, the name Suntory is likely to become more familiar in the U.S. in the months ahead.

The popularity of bourbon has exploded in recent years, especially in Japan and other Asian markets. The Kentucky Distillers Association calls the Suntory purchase of Beam exciting news, and evidence that the bourbon renaissance is strong. Carla Carlton agrees, and believes any qualms about the new owners will be put to rest.

"I know some people were talking about how, 'this is terrible, we're being taken over by a Japanese company,'" Carlton says. "I guess I see it as an investment in Kentucky."

Carlton is a contributing writer for The Bourbon Review and blogs under the name The Bourbon Babe. She predicts Suntory will embrace bourbon's colorful history and its appeal to tourists who flock to Kentucky's distilleries.

"Bourbon is very much an American product and it must be by law, so it will still be made here in Kentucky," she says. "I don't see them making huge changes. I think they're buying the product for what it is now and will try to maintain that as much as possible."

Suntory officials say they don't plan any management changes at Beam's American headquarters in Illinois.

In Kentucky, the bourbon celebration continues.

Coincidentally, on the day of the sale announcement, industry and government leaders gathered in Louisville to announce the Kentucky Bourbon Affair this spring.

It's a fantasy camp of sorts for bourbon connoisseurs to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Congress declaring bourbon "America's only native spirit."

Eight distilleries, including Jim Beam and Maker's Mark, are participating in bourbon-making demonstrations, behind-the-scenes tours, and of course, tastings.

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer says an important element of bourbon's success has been the willingness of its producers to work together on events such as this.

"They're smart competitors," Fischer says. "They realize by working together we can make the whole industry a lot bigger and you can see that in the numbers right now."

Fischer predicts more heady times are ahead for the bourbon industry, and says if this were a football game, "we're in the first quarter."

Reports of white smoke from a battery compartment have temporarily grounded a Boeing 787 Dreamliner in Japan, nearly a year after all the new airliners were grounded due to a problem with batteries overheating. Today's incident happened on an airliner at Tokyo's Narita Airport that had no passengers aboard.

It was during a preflight checkout that a mechanic saw smoke emerging from the underside of a Japan Airlines Dreamliner, according to Japan's NHK TV News

From the broadcaster:

"The smoke quickly stopped. Airline officials found that an electrolytic solution had leaked from an open safety valve of one of the 8 cells in a battery box at the front.

"The carrier says the battery may have overheated for an unknown reason. It says the safety valve was activated and smoke was generated when the solution evaporated."

The recent disclosure that large troves of customer information has been stolen from Target, and now Neiman Marcus, points to growing vulnerabilities in cybersecurity. And experts say the problem is becoming more difficult to combat.

Avivah Litan, a security analyst at Gartner, says she's hearing from sources at retailers that the data breaches last holiday season were not limited to the 70 million-plus Target customers and untold number of Neiman Marcus shoppers.

"It's clear that there is a new bout of attacks," Litan says. She says data thieves struck several years ago at TJ Maxx, JC Penney and Target and that they could be back, though it might be a different gang of thieves.

Litan blames, in large part, the magnetic payment strip system, which she says is more vulnerable than systems used by other countries around the world, which have smart chips embedded in credit cards.

David Burg, leader of cybersecurity at PricewaterhouseCoopers, adds that part of the problem is rapid innovation.

"As we use more and more technologies to collaborate among businesses, or to connect with consumers using mobile devices and other kinds of applications that allow consumers to interface with various corporations, what you have is an attack surface that keeps increasing in size and complexity, making it very hard to secure," Burg says.

Burg says while there is a lot of pressure on retailers to alert consumers, regulatory and law enforcement authorities quickly, often there are delays because criminals work hard to cover their tracks.

"It's very hard to figure out what happened, how it happened and what the impact was," he says.

Tom Kellermann, a managing director at Alvarez & Marsal, a professional services firm, says the latest round of attacks indicate that even companies that invest heavily in sophisticated security systems are seeing new vulnerabilities from new sources; namely, rogue hackers who are buying readily available software tools on the black market.

"There's a massive consulting and software-based industry that supports the shadow economy that makes it far easier for people who are not sophisticated to leverage these types of attacks," Kellermann says.

Kellermann says organized crime syndicates — especially in Eastern Europe — not only make money selling the malware, they also then use the hackers' channels to their own ends. They prod at a company's network, often hanging out for months undetected, and then plan their attack.

"From someone who has investigated major breaches in the past, I am suggesting that this campaign in particular definitely went on for months," he says.

The loss to the consumer is often time, getting reimbursement from their credit card company. But for the retailer, Kellermann says it is "incalculable."

It costs about $200 per lost record to cover legal expenses and fines. In addition, as Target recently saw, a retailer's reputation takes a hit, and its stock can fall.

Doug Johnson oversees risk management policy for the American Bankers Association, and he says banks sustain losses as well. He says forensic investigations — as the FBI and Secret Service is conducting now on the Target and Neiman Marcus breaches — take a lot of time. At the end of it, it's often difficult to prove where the data leaked, and so banks often end up holding the bag.

"[Because] it's the financial institution that reimburses the customer for that fraud," Johnson says.

Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel apologized to customers on CNBC on Monday, saying Target would pay for credit monitoring and vowed to make things right for the consumers.

A new class of restrictive abortion laws, passed in recent years in a swath of states, hinges on the argument that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks of gestation.

But the fetal pain assertion, viewed skeptically by many scientists, hit a bump Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower court ruling striking down an Arizona law that criminalized abortions at 20 weeks.

The state's ban asserted that "unborn children feel pain during an abortion at that gestational age." Federal courts last year also blocked similar "fetal pain" laws in Idaho and Georgia.

Abortion rights advocates hailed the Supreme Court's move as a signal that justices aren't inclined to take on the 40-year precedent of Roe v. Wade, which established viability at around 24 weeks (the point when a fetus is considered "viable" outside the mother's womb) and as the cutoff for most legal abortions.

"It would appear that the court is not ready or willing to deal with moving the viability line at this time," says John Robertson, chairman of the Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Rights.

"The science is weak, and it would be a major change," Robertson, a University of Texas law professor, said.

But anti-abortion activists assert that while the court's decision, offered without comment, is not the one they'd hoped for, they expect it to fuel efforts to limit abortion based on the fetal pain argument — including a federal bill passed last year by the U.S. House.

"This is a disappointment, but not a major setback," says Marjorie Dannenfelser of the Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect female candidates who oppose abortion.

She compared efforts to pass fetal pain restrictions to the "crooked path" it took to get the 2003 ban on late-term abortions.

"Every single time there was a rejection, it actually built momentum toward the final goal of passage," she said.

The question of how soon fetuses can feel pain has been debated for more than three decades. Scientists, with some exceptions, have consistently argued that fetuses are not developed enough to experience pain until around the third trimester.

A 2005 analysis of numerous studies that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that for a fetus to feel pain its neural connections into the cortex have to be developed — and that doesn't occur until sometime after the 26th week of gestation.

Robertson, the Texas bioethicist, says that the science has not changed in the past decade and there is "overwhelming consensus" around the fetal pain issue.

But Dannenfelser and other anti-abortion activists argue that support for such laws is proved by the fact that challenges have not emerged in most of the states that in recent years have criminalized abortion at 20 weeks — from Alabama and Indiana to Louisiana and Oklahoma.

At the Center for Reproductive Rights, however, Director Nancy Northup has another explanation: "Some places where they've passed [fetal pain laws] there aren't even any providers in those states that do abortions after 20 weeks, so there's no way to challenge them."

You can't challenge a law, she notes, when there's no one with legal standing to mount the effort.

"It's a whole strategy to keep moving the timeline backwards," Northup says.

The fetal pain strategy has changed conversations that doctors are having with their patients, says Dr. Anne Davis, consulting medical director for Physicians for Reproductive Health and an associate professor for obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University.

"Ten years ago, patients never asked about this," says Davis, an abortion provider. "Now we have questions from some very distraught people — it's a very emotional subject, and most people aren't experts on pain physiology."

Her explanation to patients is that the science of fetal development has not changed. "The brain and the rest of the nervous system where the pain is coming from are not connected until the third trimester," she says.

But, as Davis attests, the fetal pain argument has taken root.

And Northup, at the Center for Reproductive Rights, says that there are dozens of abortion-related cases in legal pipeline, including those involving the fetal pain argument.

"The Supreme Court," she says, "is going to have the opportunity again and again and again this year and next year to see if they want to take a look again at their jurisprudence on abortion rights."