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In the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein fired modified Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia and at Israel, which was not in the coalition, hoping an Israeli response would split off the Arab members of the U.S.-led alliance. The Great Scud Hunt followed: A-10s by day, F-15E Strike Eagles with LANTIRN pods and synthetic aperture radar by night, and British SAS teams, including the Bravo Two Zero patrol, searching wadis on the ground. Iraqi crews cut the Soviet manual's 90-minute launch routine to 30 minutes, firing from culverts and highway overpasses and driving off. After the ceasefire, UN inspectors found dozens of working missiles and launchers, and a Pentagon study could not confirm that coalition aircraft destroyed a single mobile launcher.

Scud is a NATO reporting name; the Soviets built the R-11 Zemlya and the R-17 Elbrus to deliver tactical nuclear strikes from mobile launchers that could survive a preemptive attack. Carried flat on the eight-wheeled MAZ-543 transporter erector launcher, the liquid-fuelled missile risked engine chugging from sloshing kerosene and nitric acid until engineers Viktor Makeyev and A.M. Isaev simplified the V-2 derived engine and added an anti-oscillation baffle. Egypt passed Scud-Bs to North Korea in the late 1970s; North Korea was producing clones by 1984 and then the Hwasong-5 and Hwasong-6, which Iran bought during the Iran-Iraq War and developed into its Shahab series.

• Iran's Qiam-1, developed before 2010, dropped the tail fins for active thrust vector control and used a blunt baby bottle warhead for stability on reentry.
• The original Scud-B had a circular error probable of about 450 meters, and Iraq's stretched Al Hussein variant traded accuracy for range.
• In the 1988 War of the Cities, Iraq launched nearly 190 missiles, 135 at Tehran, and about a quarter of the city's 10 million residents fled.
• Descending at around Mach 5, the warhead arrives before the sound of its approach.
• Afghanistan's communist government fired 1,700 to 2,000 Scuds between late 1988 and early 1992, more than 400 around Jalalabad, and a 1991 strike on a market in Asadabad killed 300 people.

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Amsterdam Airport Schiphol moves nearly 69 million people a year on ground 11 to 15 feet below sea level, the bed of the Haarlemmermeer lake that the Dutch pumped dry in the mid-1800s to create a polder. Records of the name date to 1447; the legend that it means ship hell has been debunked, and it likely describes low, marshy ground. A military airfield opened beside Fort Schiphol in 1916, French pilots mocked its mud as a bathing resort, and KLM began scheduled service from London in 1920. By 1940 it had four hard runways, but German forces captured it, Allied bombing damaged it, and the Germans destroyed what remained in 1944. The rebuilt airport adopted a single terminal concept in 1967, with one roof and one basement baggage system serving a hub where 36.6 percent of passengers are transferring.

Designer Benno Wissing created the yellow and green signage and barred other signs, shops and ads from using those shades. The Polderbaan, completed in 2003, sits five kilometers from the terminal, requires a 10 to 20 minute taxi over a bridge across the A5 motorway, needed its own control tower, and handles only northbound takeoffs and southbound landings to keep noise from homes. In 1992 El Al Flight 1862 suffered an engine separation after takeoff and crashed into flats in the Bijlmermeer. In 2005 armed thieves in a stolen KLM van took an estimated 75 million euros in uncut diamonds. After pandemic layoffs, 2022 staff shortages caused queues into the street, passenger caps and the September 2022 resignation of CEO Dick Benschop.

• The Rijksmuseum ran an annex inside Schiphol from 2002 to 2024, the world's first airport art museum.
• From 2006 to 2019 couples could get married at the airport, which also has its own mortuary and a library of translated Dutch works.
• A Maarten Baas clock shows a man behind translucent glass painting and erasing the hands minute by minute.
• In May 2024 an airport worker died after intentionally entering the running engine of an Embraer 190 during pushback.
• A 6 billion euro plan announced in 2024 includes Pier A, now expected in April 2027 at nearly 1.4 billion euros, and a new baggage basement dug beneath the working terminal.

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Gennaro and Carmela Sbarro emigrated from Naples, Italy, in 1956 with their sons Joseph, Mario and Anthony, opening an Italian grocery in Brooklyn that became a restaurant selling New York style pizza by the slice. In 1970 they opened their first mall location at Brooklyn's Kings Plaza shopping center and from then on built only where foot traffic already existed: malls, department stores, college campuses, airports, turnpike service areas, casinos, the Pentagon and naval bases. Premium rent to mall developers and airport authorities took the place of advertising. That reach carried risk. In August 2001 a suicide bombing at a Sbarro in Jerusalem killed 16 people and wounded 130, and weeks later the September 11 attacks destroyed both of its World Trade Center restaurants, one in the underground mall and one on the South Tower observation deck.

Private equity firm MidOcean Partners acquired Sbarro in early 2007 in a leveraged buyout. With debt payments due just as mall traffic fell to online shopping, Sbarro filed for Chapter 11 in April 2011, when it was the fifth largest pizza chain in the country, and again in March 2014. It closed 182 locations, moved its headquarters from New York City to Columbus, Ohio, and was down to 318 U.S. restaurants by 2016, less than half its count 12 years earlier. Ten-year mall leases and tiny kitchens built to reheat slices for walk-up customers left little room to pivot to delivery. Abroad, the brand grew past 600 locations in 28 countries.

• In 2012 CEO James J. Greco pushed a new pizza recipe, and in 2015 the Italian flag logo gave way to a pizza slice outline reading NYC 1956.
• The fast casual spinoff Pizza Cucinova, launched in October 2013 with made-to-order Neapolitan pizzas baked in under three minutes, closed in 2020.
• Sbarro was the third pizza chain to declare bankruptcy in less than a year, after Round Table Pizza and Uno Chicago Grill.
• Its first Philippines store opened in 1990 and the country had 56 by 2023; a 2012 franchise deal targeted India and a 2020 partnership entered the U.K. through service stations.
• After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Yale researchers gave Sbarro their lowest grade, digging in, for continuing business in Russia.

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Regeneron Pharmaceuticals was founded in 1988 in Tarrytown, New York, by Leonard Schleifer, a former Weill Cornell professor of medicine, and George Yancopoulos, an MD and PhD student from Columbia; both came from Queens. The name comes from its first goal, regenerating neurons with neurotrophic factors. When that work produced no marketable therapies, the company turned to cytokine receptors and tyrosine kinase receptors and built a VEGF trap, a decoy that captures the protein driving abnormal blood vessel growth in age-related macular degeneration. Yancopoulos holds more than 1,000 patents and has worked on every drug the company makes, which grew almost entirely from internal research rather than acquisitions. By 2025 Regeneron reported $14.3 billion in revenue, $4.5 billion in net income and more than 15,000 employees, selling Eylea at about $11,000 a year per eye, Dupixent for severe eczema at about $37,000 a year and the cholesterol drug Praluent.

In July 2020, under Operation Warp Speed, Regeneron won a $450 million contract from BARDA and the Department of Defense to manufacture its antibody cocktail REGN-COV2. The New York Times criticized the deal because taxpayers covered 80 percent of costs while the company kept the intellectual property and pricing. That October, President Donald Trump received the unapproved drug at Walter Reed through compassionate use and then called it a cure; Regeneron filed for emergency use authorization the same day with 50,000 doses ready, and the FDA granted it in November 2020. The speed came from platforms built over a decade: trap fusion proteins stabilized with part of a human IgG antibody, and the VelociSuite tools, including VelocImmune, that rapidly generate fully human monoclonal antibodies.

• A 2015 immuno-oncology collaboration brought more than $2 billion from Sanofi, and in May 2020 Regeneron bought back about $5 billion of its own shares held by Sanofi.
• Regeneron was ranked the seventh-best publicly listed company of the 2010s, with a total return of 1,457 percent.
• The Regeneron Genetics Center has sequenced more than 3 million human exomes and pairs them with de-identified health records to find protective mutations.
• In May 2025 a federal court in Delaware awarded Regeneron $135.6 million in compensatory and $271.2 million in punitive damages against Amgen in an antitrust case over the PCSK9 drugs Praluent and Repatha.
• Schleifer and Yancopoulos reportedly hold more than $2 billion in combined company stock.

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Procter & Gamble began in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1837, when English candle maker William Procter and Irish soap maker James Gamble, who had married sisters Olivia and Elizabeth Norris, were pushed into partnership by their father-in-law Alexander Norris so they would stop competing for the same animal fats and wood ashes. Sales reached $1 million by the late 1850s, and Civil War contracts to supply the Union Army with soap and candles sent soldiers home with a national brand preference. Ivory soap, which floated in murky rivers and tubs, arrived in the 1880s, and in 1887 grandson William Arnett Procter introduced profit sharing for workers. In the 1930s Ivory's sponsorship of radio serials gave the soap opera its name, and the company went on to produce shows such as Guiding Light and As the World Turns. Tide, the first heavy-duty synthetic detergent, launched in 1946, and Pampers disposable diapers followed in 1961.

The $57 billion purchase of Gillette in 2005 made P&G larger than Unilever. Later decades brought the 1980 recall of Rely tampons after a CDC report linked them to toxic shock syndrome, years of PETA campaigns that ended in a 1999 pledge to limit animal testing and $275 million for alternatives, a 2011 EU fine of more than 211 million euros for a washing powder cartel with Unilever, and a 2016 Amnesty International report linking a palm oil supplier to child labor and forced labor. Its 2017 ad The Talk won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix and an Emmy while police groups called it anti-cop, and Gillette's 2019 ad The Best Men Can Be became one of the most disliked videos on YouTube. In 2014 the company dropped or sold about 100 brands to focus on its 65 most profitable lines.

• In 2022 Ukraine's National Agency for Prevention of Corruption labeled P&G an international sponsor of war for keeping a Gillette plant and a toiletries plant running in Russia.
• Gillette took an $8 billion write-down in 2019, which the company attributed to currency swings, shaving clubs and men growing beards rather than the ad.
• P&G stopped producing soap operas in 2010 and is returning to television in 2025 with Beyond the Gates, plus a vertical video drama called The Golden Pear Affair for its Native brand.
• Pringles went to Kellogg's and dozens of beauty brands to Coty, and in 2023 the company began cutting the bottom 25 percent of its product variations, or SKUs.
• Under incoming CEO Shailesh Jejurikar, P&G is moving toward premium goods such as Pampers made with silk fibers in China as birth rates decline.

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The Phalanx Close-In Weapon System pairs a six-barrel 20mm M61 Vulcan cannon, firing 4,500 rounds a minute, or 75 a second, at over Mach 3, with two Ku-band radars under its white dome. It usually opens fire about one nautical mile out, leaving two to three seconds per engagement, and fires dense tungsten or depleted uranium APDS rounds, about $30 each, to shred a missile's airframe instead of blowing it into a cloud of fragments. The 12,000-pound mount carries 1,550 rounds and needs only 440-volt power and cooling water from the ship. It ignores identification friend or foe, engaging anything that is closing in range, on a collision course and within set speed limits, and its track radar follows its own bullets to walk the stream onto the target.

That logic has hit friendly targets. In 1991 the frigate USS Jarrett's Phalanx locked onto chaff fired by the battleship USS Missouri and struck the Missouri, injuring no one. In 1996 the Japanese destroyer Yugiri's system followed a tow cable up to a U.S. A-6 Intruder and shot it down; both crew ejected. Hesitation has cost more: in 1987 the USS Stark's Phalanx sat on standby when an Iraqi fighter's two Exocet missiles hit the frigate, killing 37 sailors. In January 2024, a Houthi anti-ship cruise missile got within a mile of the destroyer USS Gravely before its Phalanx destroyed it.

• The track radar locks on at about four and a half nautical miles after the search radar hands off a contact.
• The Block 1B upgrade added a forward-looking infrared sensor to engage small boats and drones.
• The Army's trailer-mounted Centurion C-RAM adapted the gun to stop rockets, artillery and mortars.
• C-RAM protected Baghdad's Green Zone and was the primary defense during the 2021 Kabul withdrawal.
• Its HEIT-SD rounds self-destruct after about four seconds, roughly 2,000 meters, if they miss.

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In 1973 the U.S. Army set out to replace the Pershing 1A and its 400-kiloton warhead, and in 1975 Martin Marietta won the contract for the Pershing II, built for precision over raw yield. It carried the W85 warhead, adjustable from 5 to 80 kilotons; the earth-penetrating W86 was canceled in 1980. After the Soviets fielded the SS-20 Saber in 1976, NATO's 1979 double-track decision planned 464 ground-launched cruise missiles and 108 Pershing II launchers, and the missile's range grew to about 1,770 kilometers with a 30-meter circular error probable. Hercules wound the motors from Kevlar, and the maneuvering reentry vehicle paired a Singer Kearfott inertial system with a Goodyear Aerospace radar that matched live 128 by 128 pixel images against a stored 256 by 256 map.

Soviet planners believed the missile could fly 2,500 kilometers and still carried the W86, and feared a six-minute decapitation strike on Moscow that a Pershing II launched from West Germany could not actually reach. Launchers began arriving in late 1983, converted from Pershing 1A M790s into M1103s to stay within SALT II. Up to 500,000 protesters formed a human chain from the U.S. Army headquarters in Stuttgart to Wiley Barracks in Neu-Ulm. In January 1985 near Heilbronn, static electricity built up as a Kevlar motor was lifted off silicone foam pads, igniting the propellant and killing three soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 84th Field Artillery. The 1987 INF Treaty eliminated the missiles by 1991, with motors burned out and crushed at the Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant in Texas.

• In October 1981, 300,000 demonstrators assembled in Bonn.
• Plowshares activists poured their own blood on missile components at a Martin Marietta facility in Florida.
• After Heilbronn, a moratorium lasted more than a year until new grounding procedures and ballistic covers were added.
• Scrap from Pershing IIs and SS-20s became Parker pens for five U.S. presidents in 1991 and Zurab Tsereteli's Good Defeats Evil sculpture at the UN.
• The W85 warheads were removed before destruction and rebuilt into B61 nuclear bombs.

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Ken and Linda Rosenthal opened the Saint Louis Bread Company in Kirkwood, Missouri in 1987, after Ken spent a year learning sourdough from Roger Brunello at La Boulange in San Francisco, using $150,000 of his own money and a matching SBA loan. Au Bon Pain bought it for $23 million in 1993, renamed it Panera in 1997 everywhere except the St. Louis area, and in 1999 sold its own Au Bon Pain chain for $78 million to focus on Panera's suburban bakery-cafe model. Panera 2.0 arrived in 2014 with Fast Lane kiosks and app ordering; digital orders passed $1 billion, 26 percent of sales, by 2017, and in 2018 Panera launched its own delivery network, creating 13,000 jobs.

CEO Ron Shaich launched the Panera Cares pay-what-you-can cafes in 2010 in cities including St. Louis, Chicago, Boston and Portland, but all had closed by 2019. JAB Holding Company took Panera private for $7.5 billion in 2017, merged it with Caribou Coffee and Einstein Bros. Bagels in 2021, and the company filed confidentially to go public in 2023. In 2024 and 2025 it dropped flatbreads and grain bowls, closed fresh dough facilities in favor of par-baked frozen bread, and, according to internal documents reported by Reuters, loosened ingredient and animal welfare standards ahead of the IPO. Its Charged Lemonade, about 390 milligrams of caffeine in the 30-ounce size, was at the center of wrongful death suits over Sarah Katz and Dennis Brown, and Panera announced its phaseout in May 2024.

• A 2017 pledge declared the food menu free of artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners and preservatives.
• Panera promised 100 percent cage-free eggs by 2020 but had reached 65 percent by 2021.
• A 2018 leak exposed up to 37 million customer records, eight months after researchers warned the company.
• The ShinyHunters hack in January 2026 leaked 14 million records and led to class action lawsuits.
• In 2016 a Massachusetts employee put peanut butter on a sandwich for a customer with a severe peanut allergy, leading to a hospital stay and assault and battery claims.

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Konosuke Matsushita founded the Matsushita Electric Housewares Manufacturing Works in 1918 with a duplex lamp socket that let a home with a single ceiling socket run a light and an appliance at once. In 1927 he sold battery-powered bicycle lamps under the brand National. During World War II the company built ships, aircraft components and vacuum tubes; the Allied occupation broke up the group, which rebuilt as a keiretsu of interlocking suppliers, distributors and a bank. Matsushita's brother-in-law Toshio Iue founded Sanyo, a rival Panasonic bought in 2009. The Panasonic name was coined in 1955 because National was already trademarked in the U.S., and the parent company took the name in 2008.

Panasonic co-introduced VHS and passed Philips as the world's largest consumer electronics maker. In November 1990 it paid $6.59 billion for MCA, owner of Universal Pictures and Universal Music Group, then sold 80 percent to Seagram for $7 billion in 1995. Its Viera plasma TVs, launched in 2003, led the world but lost to cheaper LCDs; shares hit a 37-year low in November 2012, plasma ended in 2014, and LCD panel production was phased out by 2021. In 2014 it also signed with Tesla on the Nevada Gigafactory, became the exclusive battery supplier for the Model 3 by 2016, and opened a $4 billion battery plant in Kansas in July 2025.

• Panasonic sold its Tesla stake in 2021 at a large profit while staying a major battery supplier.
• Panasonic Avionics dominates in-flight entertainment and connectivity on commercial jets.
• In 2021 Panasonic paid $6.45 billion for supply chain software company Blue Yonder.
• Panasonic partnered with Denver on smart city infrastructure linking energy, transportation and housing.
• In early 2026 Panasonic handed TV manufacturing, marketing and logistics for Europe and North America to Skyworth.

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In August 2011, Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee and the investigator who named Night Dragon and Operation Aurora, revealed Operation Shady RAT, an espionage campaign that had been running since mid-2006. RAT stands for remote access tool, software that gives an attacker administrative control over a computer, including its files and keystrokes. At least 71 organizations were compromised, among them defense contractors, the United Nations, ASEAN and the governments of Canada, India, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States and Vietnam.

The list also included the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency, targeted around the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, which pointed investigators toward intelligence gathering rather than profit; reports at the time widely assumed the People's Republic of China was responsible. The way in was not costly zero-day exploits but spear phishing: carefully crafted emails sent to specific people, with attachments that installed the RAT. From that foothold, the attackers mapped internal networks, harvested credentials, escalated privileges and moved laterally to the servers holding valuable data, posing as legitimate administrators.

• The roughly five-year dwell time ran from mid-2006 until McAfee's 2011 report.
• Stolen data left in small amounts disguised as ordinary encrypted web traffic to avoid bandwidth alarms.
• Attackers researched organizational charts through open sources to make their lures look like routine internal documents.
• Infected attachments could exploit unpatched word processors or PDF readers while a decoy document opened normally.
• The case pushed defenders from perimeter security toward continuous internal monitoring and zero trust.