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In October 2006 NBC's Heroes showed cheerleader Claire Bennet regenerating a hand mangled in a garbage disposal, and Emerson Electric, then parent of InSinkErator, sued the network, settling by early 2007. The company began in St. Louis in 1890, when Civil War Union veteran John Wesley Emerson built the Emerson Electric Manufacturing Company around an alternating current motor patented by Scottish-born brothers Charles and Alexander Meston. By 1892 it was the first company to sell electric fans commercially in the United States, then motorized sewing machines, power tools and dental drills. In World War II, under Stuart Symington, it became the world's largest maker of airplane armaments and ranked 52nd among U.S. firms in wartime production contracts.

After the war, W.R. Persons diversified the company and Charles Knight, CEO from 1973 to 2000, ran a global acquisition program: U.S. Electrical Motors in 1962, InSinkErator in 1968, and later Textron's tool and test businesses, including Greenlee, for over $800 million in 2018. Under David Farr, Emerson reversed course and sold its legacy hardware, from U.S. Motors in 2010 to InSinkErator and the Copeland climate business, to fund a move into process automation software for refineries, chemical plants and water systems.

• The NBC suit argued the scene cast the disposal in an unsavory light by implying a hand in the unit would be badly injured.
• Emerson's precision motor expertise let it drive bomber defensive turrets that had to work under extreme cold and combat vibration.
• Its network power division was spun off as Vertiv in 2016 for over $4 billion, and InSinkErator was sold to Whirlpool for $3 billion in 2022.
• Copeland went to Blackstone between 2022 and 2024 in a multi-stage deal valued in the tens of billions.
• In 2023 Emerson bought National Instruments for over $8 billion to own testing and measurement technology.

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Colonel Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical chemist and Union artillery officer in the Civil War, went through failed partnerships with James W. Binford in Paris, Illinois, and John F. Johnston in Indianapolis before opening Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis in 1876 under a sign that read simply "Eli Lilly, Chemist." He started with three employees, including his teenage son Josiah, known as J.K., and focused on practical medicines such as quinine for malaria. To make medicine bearable, he coated pills in gelatin and sugar and added fruit flavorings to liquids. Sales reached $48,000 by 1879, and the 1883 blood purifier Succus Alterans became a hit for syphilis, rheumatism and skin disease.

In 1890 the Colonel handed daily control to J.K., who ran the company for 34 years, and turned to civic work and to lobbying for federal regulation that would drive patent medicine hucksters out of business. He died in 1898 leaving over 2,000 products. In 1919 J.K. hired biochemist George Henry Alexander Clowes, whose academic ties led to a 1922 agreement with the University of Toronto team of Banting, Best and Macleod. By 1923 Lilly sold the first commercially available insulin in the United States as Iletin. Grandsons Eli Jr. and Joe industrialized production, and in 1953 Eugene N. Beesley became the first president from outside the family.

• Brother James Lilly joined in 1878 as the company's first full-time national traveling salesman.
• J.K. studied at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and took over the laboratory in 1882.
• Eli Jr. introduced photographically reproduced manufacturing tickets in 1909 to eliminate transcription errors, then straight-line production in the 1920s.
• Lilly's insulin purification gave it an effective U.S. commercial monopoly for nearly two years.
• In World War II Lilly dried over two million pints of blood plasma for the Red Cross, roughly 20 percent of the U.S. supply, and mass-produced penicillin and Merthiolate.

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Novartis grew from three Basel dye makers: Alexander Clavel, who produced the purple-red dye fuchsine for silk in the 1850s, Johann Rudolf Geigy's dyewood mill, and the Kern and Sandoz chemistry firm, founded around 1886. Mastering coal tar chemistry for fabric led them into medicine. Sandoz made a fever reducer by 1895 and opened a pharmaceutical department under Arthur Stoll in 1917, isolating ergotamine for migraines. In 1943 Stoll and Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD, which Sandoz sold as Delysid from 1947 to 1965, suggesting psychiatrists take it themselves to understand psychosis. The CIA bought LSD from Sandoz for its MKUltra experiments.

Ciba and Geigy merged in 1970, and in 1996 Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz combined in what was then the largest corporate merger in history, forming Novartis, from the Latin for new skills. The company then shed volume businesses: Syngenta was spun off in 2000, Gerber went to Nestlé, Alcon was bought for about $60 billion in 2010 and spun off in 2019, and the revived Sandoz generics unit was spun off in 2023. Controversies followed, from a Ciba-Geigy plant at Toms River, New Jersey, that became an EPA Superfund site, to a 2020 agreement to pay $678 million over doctor speaker programs held at expensive restaurants, fishing trips and sporting events.

• In 2013 India's Supreme Court rejected a Novartis patent on a modified form of the leukemia drug Gleevec, finding no significantly enhanced therapeutic efficacy.
• State health agencies found a statistically significant increase in childhood cancers at Toms River during the plant's 1970 to 1995 operation.
• After the 2017 inauguration, Novartis paid $1.2 million to Michael Cohen's consulting firm, just under $100,000 a month.
• A Senate committee report showed CEO Joseph Jimenez emailed Cohen multiple times in 2017 about drug pricing ideas.
• Novartis reported over $50 billion in 2024 revenue, employs nearly 76,000 people, and has given free leprosy treatment to over 7.5 million people since 2000.

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In April 2011 Iran announced its systems had been hit by a new attack it called the Stars virus, but released no code. On September 1, 2011, the CrySyS Lab at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics named a new piece of malware Duqu, after the ~DQ prefix on the temporary files it created, and published a 60-page report. Researchers found a keylogger hidden after the end-of-file marker of a JPEG of colliding galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope, and Symantec and Kaspersky concluded that Stars and Duqu were the same. Duqu was built on the same Tilde-D platform as Stuxnet, and F-Secure's Mikko Hyppönen noted its kernel driver, jminet7.sys, was so close to Stuxnet's that F-Secure's systems first classified it as a Stuxnet variant.

Duqu entered machines through a Word document that exploited a zero-day flaw in the Win32k TrueType font parsing engine, and its driver carried a valid digital signature stolen from Taiwanese hardware maker C-Media, revoked in October 2011. Much of the code was written in a custom object-oriented C framework compiled in Visual Studio 2008 to slow reverse engineering. Unlike Stuxnet, which sabotaged centrifuges, Duqu gathered reconnaissance on a small number of industrial control system manufacturers, smuggled data out in tiny JPEGs, and erased itself after 36 days. Researchers attribute it to a well-funded state operation, with some reports pointing to Israel's Unit 8200.

• Microsoft's interim workaround disabled TrueType font parsing in Windows until patch MS11-087 shipped in December 2011.
• Stolen data was encrypted and appended to 54-by-54-pixel JPEG images to blend into normal traffic.
• On some personal computers Duqu deleted recent data or wiped the entire hard drive.
• Command servers were found in Germany, Belgium, the Philippines, India and China, mostly running CentOS 5.
• Researchers suspect the attackers used a second zero-day to compromise those CentOS servers.

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Bill Rosenberg ran industrial catering trucks around Boston and noticed that workers mostly bought coffee and donuts, so in 1948 he opened Open Kettle in Quincy, Massachusetts, renaming it Dunkin' Donuts in 1950. Its signature item was a donut with a handle baked in for dunking, and a mascot named Dunkie arrived in 1954. Franchising began in 1955, and some franchisees ran full diners with bacon and eggs. In 1963 Bill's son Bob Rosenberg became CEO at 25, standardized the menu and moved stores toward self-service counters and paper cups. The hand-cut handle donut was discontinued in 2003 as too labor-intensive.

After buying Mister Donut and Dawn Donuts locations in the 1990s, the chain ran Hill Holliday's Fritalian ads mocking coffeehouse jargon around 2006, dropped Donuts from its name in 2018 and 2019, and was bought by Inspire Brands for $11.3 billion in late 2020. Fred the Baker's "Time to make the donuts" ran for 16 years, and Ben Affleck became the face of the brand in 2023, joined by Matt Damon and Tom Brady, with a 2026 Super Bowl parody of Good Will Hunting. Overseas results swung widely: Israel sold 3 million donuts in eight months after a 1996 Tel Aviv launch but closed by 2001, China had zero stores by 2025, and Canada is getting a second attempt.

• Michael Vale played Fred the Baker, who stumbled out before dawn in the 1980s ads.
• A 2013 ad by a franchisee in Thailand showing a woman in blackface for a charcoal donut drew international outrage.
• South Korea once made up nearly 40 percent of international sales and sold a donut shaped like a chicken leg.
• The Philippines opened its 900th store in June 2026.
• In May 2026 Inspire Brands signed with Montreal-based Foodtastic to return to Quebec and Ontario after leaving Canada in 2018.

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In 1958 President Eisenhower chose a site 26 miles west of Washington for a second airport, and aviation adviser Pete Quesada named it for Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The 13,000-acre site, larger than Manhattan, required condemning land from 87 owners and demolishing Willard, a largely African American community. Architect Eero Saarinen hung a catenary concrete roof from leaning exterior pillars to create a column-free terminal, and replaced concourses with mobile lounges, raised vehicles on stilts that drove passengers across the apron and docked with the aircraft door. John F. Kennedy and Eisenhower dedicated the airport in November 1962, but by 1965 it averaged only 89 daily flights against 600 at National.

Slot and perimeter limits at National, plus the growth of the Dulles Technology Corridor, eventually filled the airport. Its 11,500-foot runways hosted the first commercial Boeing 747 christening in 1970, a nose-to-nose Concorde arrival in 1976, and a 1990 SR-71 Blackbird flight from Palmdale that took 64 minutes. Deregulation and United's 1986 hub made Dulles a transfer point the lounges could not handle, so midfield concourses, the 2010 AeroTrain and the 2022 Silver Line followed, while lounges still serve international arrivals. American Airlines Flight 77 departed from gate D26 on September 11, 2001, and a flag flies there today.

• Pat Nixon christened the first commercial 747 by spraying it with red, white and blue water.
• The original code DIA was changed to IAD because handwritten tags were confused with DCA.
• Saarinen's terminal later inspired the original terminal at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport.
• Senator Bob Dole proposed renaming it Washington Eisenhower International in 1990, and bills in 2024 and 2025 proposed naming it for Donald J. Trump.
• A 100-megawatt solar facility with battery storage is being built on airport land.

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The 1948 Key West Agreement gave fixed-wing strike aircraft to the new Air Force, leaving the U.S. Army facing Soviet tank armies without its own attack jets. After the AH-56 Cheyenne was canceled, the Army launched the Advanced Attack Helicopter program in 1972, and in 1976 Hughes beat Bell with the YAH-64, partly on a four-blade rotor and tailwheel landing gear suited to low-level flight and rough forward bases. The Apache carried about 2,500 pounds of armor, self-sealing fuel tanks and a blast shield between its tandem crew. Its integrated helmet and display sighting system slaved the 30mm M230 chain gun to the gunner's head movements, and laser-guided Hellfire missiles could hit tanks from about 6,500 meters.

The Apache first fought in Panama in 1989, and on January 17, 1991, Task Force Normandy's eight Apaches destroyed Iraqi early warning radar sites before the air campaign began. In Desert Storm Apaches destroyed 278 tanks, but maintenance demands forced the Army to strip parts from fleets elsewhere, and in 1999 Task Force Hawk needed 26,000 tons of equipment and 550 C-17 flights to deploy 24 helicopters to Albania. In the 2026 Iran War an Apache was shot down over the Strait of Hormuz by an Iranian drone, and its two crew were recovered by a U.S. Navy Task Force 59 autonomous sea drone. After a 2025 order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Army stopped buying new AH-64s.

• General Carl Stiner said an Apache crew could put a Hellfire through a chosen window from four miles away at night.
• In 2007 insurgents in Iraq destroyed four parked Apaches with mortars aimed using GPS data embedded in soldiers' online photos.
• In 2009 an Apache crew mistook a British patrol base in Afghanistan for an insurgent position, resulting in a fatal strike.
• By 2026 the Tata-Boeing plant in Hyderabad, India had built over 400 Apache fuselages.
• Over 90 percent of those fuselage components came from small and medium Indian suppliers.

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Disney first went to sea in 1985 by licensing its characters to Premier Cruise Line, which ran the ships while Mickey walked the dining room. In 1993 Premier dropped Disney for Warner Bros. and the Looney Tunes. Talks with Carnival and Royal Caribbean broke down over control of brand standards, so in 1994 Disney announced its own line under president Arthur Rodney. It ordered the Disney Magic and Disney Wonder from Fincantieri in Italy, styled as early 20th century liners with black hulls and lifeboats painted yellow to match Mickey's shoes under a special maritime waiver. In the Bahamas it took a 99-year lease on Gorda Cay for about $25 million, renamed it Castaway Cay and dredged a channel so ships could dock directly instead of tendering.

After the 2020 to 2021 shutdown, Disney launched its largest expansion: the Wish class running on liquefied natural gas, with the Wish in 2022, Treasure in 2024, Destiny in 2025 and Believe slated for 2027. It bought an unfinished Global-class hull from bankrupt MV Werften and is home-porting it as the Disney Adventure in Singapore from 2026. The Disney Imagination, due in 2029, will be owned and operated by Tokyo Disney Resort operator Oriental Land Company and registered in Tokyo. The episode also covers an April 2026 CBP operation in San Diego involving crew members across several cruise lines, after which Disney said its crew members involved had been terminated.

• Disney Magic entered service in July 1998, and Disney Wonder followed in late 1999.
• Castaway Cay was the first private cruise destination designed for direct docking.
• By 2024 Disney claimed 4.2 percent of worldwide cruise revenue.
• LNG must be stored at minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, forcing a redesign of the Wish class interior around insulated tanks.
• The Adventure was designed for methanol, but Disney adapted it for lower-emission fuels such as hydrotreated vegetable oil.

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When Denny's decided to close for Christmas in 1988 for the first time, managers found that many restaurants had no locks on the front doors, and others had lost the keys long before. The chain began in 1953 as Danny's Donuts in Lakewood, California, opened by Richard Jezak and Harold Butler. After Jezak left in 1956, Butler turned the concept into a coffee shop and hired Los Angeles architects Armét & Davis, whose Googie buildings with boomerang and zigzag roofs stood beside freeway off-ramps under towering signs. The name changed to Denny's in 1959 to avoid confusion with the rival Coffee Dan's, franchise agreements required 24-hour operation, and by 1981 there were over 1,000 restaurants in all 50 states.

In the 1990s the chain faced racial discrimination lawsuits, including Black teenagers in San Jose made to prepay in 1991 and six Black Secret Service agents kept waiting an hour in Annapolis in 1993. The 1994 settlement of $54.4 million was the largest ever under federal public accommodations law, and by 2001 Fortune named Denny's the best company for minorities. Its parent filed for Chapter 11 in 1997, a $300 Grand Cru Slam with Dom Pérignon came and went in Manhattan, and virtual brands such as The Meltdown charged more on delivery apps. After announcing 150 closures in 2025, Denny's was taken private for $620 million in January 2026.

• In 1997 near Syracuse University, six Asian American students said they were ejected and then beaten by a group of white men outside.
• A 2004 Dateline NBC review found Denny's had the fewest critical health violations among the 10 most popular family and casual chains, credited to HACCP protocols.
• A brisket melt cost $16.69 in the dining room but $18.72 as The Meltdown's Giddy Up Melt on delivery apps.
• The Humane Society filed a 2024 shareholder proposal over gestation crates in the pork supply chain, which the company denied.
• An Oakland location closed in early 2024 after 54 years, with the company citing crime and safety.

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Samuel Cunard, a Halifax ship owner with coal, whaling and timber interests, won a British Admiralty contract for transatlantic steam mail even though he missed the bid deadline and owned no steamships. His old acquaintance Admiral William Edward Parry, controller of steam machinery, brought him to the table, and with engine designer Robert Napier, George Burns and David MacIver he secured £55,000 a year. On July 4, 1840, the Britannia left Liverpool and reached Halifax in 12 days and 10 hours. Cunard told his captains that speed was nothing and safety was everything, a record that held while the American Collins Line lost the Pacific in 1856.

When J.P. Morgan's International Mercantile Marine bought White Star in 1902, Britain lent Cunard £2.5 million to build the Lusitania and Mauretania; the Lusitania was torpedoed in 1915 with over a thousand dead. During the Depression the unfinished Hull 534 sat idle for two and a half years until a government bailout required a 1934 merger with White Star, and the ship became the Queen Mary. Jets overtook ships by 1960, Cunard's airline ventures failed by 1966, and Carnival bought control in 1998 after the film Titanic revived interest in classic liners. In 2011 Cunard moved its registry to Bermuda so captains could marry couples at sea.

• In 1917 Cunard's facilities built aircraft for the Royal Flying Corps.
• The Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth carried over two million servicemen in World War II, and Churchill credited them with shortening the war by a year.
• The cargo ship Atlantic Conveyor was sunk by an Exocet missile in the 1982 Falklands War.
• A 1994 QE2 voyage with unfinished renovations led to $13 million in passenger compensation claims.
• In October 2026 Cunard announced the Queen Anne will move to P&O Cruises in 2029, and its ships still fly the White Star flag every April 15.