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AbbVie was born in 2012 as a spinoff from Abbott Laboratories, its name joining Abbott with "vie," from the Latin for life. Its fortune rested on Humira, an injectable biologic for rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease and plaque psoriasis that was for years the best-selling prescription drug in the world and still brought in $9 billion, 16 percent of company revenue, in 2024. Because biologics are grown from living cells, rivals can only make biosimilars, and those arrived in January 2023. AbbVie prepared with in-house successors Skyrizi ($11.7 billion in 2024) and Rinvoq ($6 billion in 2023), then bought what it could not invent: Allergan and Botox for about $63 billion in 2019, ImmunoGen for $10.1 billion, Cerevel for $8.7 billion, Aliada Therapeutics for $1.4 billion, and a psychedelic depression candidate from Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals in a deal worth up to $1.2 billion.

A House Oversight and Reform Committee report accused AbbVie of building a patent thicket of overlapping patents around Humira and leaning on Orphan Drug Act protections to delay competition. The company paid $25 million in 2018 over kickback allegations involving the cholesterol drug Tricor and $24 million in 2020 over Humira nurse ambassadors, and in 2022 agreed to pay up to $2.37 billion to settle opioid marketing lawsuits tied to Allergan while denying wrongdoing. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, the Medicare price of its cancer drug Imbruvica was cut 38 percent by 2026. That January, AbbVie struck a direct deal with the Trump administration: $100 billion in U.S. investment over ten years and lower Medicaid prices, in exchange for exemptions from future tariffs and pricing mandates.

• A 2014 bid for Shire, structured as a tax inversion, died after the U.S. Treasury changed its rules, costing AbbVie a $1.6 billion breakup fee.
• Botox, acquired with Allergan, earned AbbVie $6 billion in 2024 and is used for chronic migraines and muscle spasms as well as wrinkles.
• A 2021 Senate Finance Committee inquiry found Humira patents housed in Bermuda: 75 percent of Humira sales were in the U.S., but only 1 percent of that income was reported for U.S. taxes.
• AbbVie and biosimilar maker Alvotech sued each other over Humira and settled out of court in 2022.
• The ImmunoGen purchase brought Elahere, an ovarian cancer drug that had already cleared the riskiest stages of clinical trials.

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The 4.2-mile Las Vegas Strip, home to the Bellagio and Caesars Palace, lies outside the city of Las Vegas in the unincorporated towns of Paradise and Winchester. In the early 1930s Las Vegas Boulevard South was Highway 91, the Arrowhead Highway, leading to downtown and Fremont Street. The Paradise Club opened on it in 1931, and in April 1941 the El Rancho Vegas, with 63 bungalow rooms, began catching Los Angeles drivers before they reached town. Former Los Angeles police officer Guy McAfee named the road after the Sunset Strip, and Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo opened in 1946. In 1950 Mayor Ernie Cragin, facing rising municipal debt, moved to annex the casinos. A group led by Gus Greenbaum of the Flamingo persuaded Clark County commissioners to grant town status, and because a city could not annex a town without its residents' consent, the Strip stayed under county control.

County rule left developers free to build big. Kirk Kerkorian opened the International Hotel in 1969 with over 1,500 rooms, and Steve Wynn's Mirage, built for about $630 million in 1989, needed over a million dollars a day to break even, so its volcano, gardens and restaurants all had to earn money. The themed 1990s of the Luxor and Excalibur gave way to the Bellagio, the Wynn and the $8.5 billion CityCenter. The Mirage closed in July 2024 to become a Hard Rock, and the 67-year-old Tropicana was imploded in October 2024, its site set for the Athletics' ballpark in 2028. UNLV data shows blackjack fell from 77 percent of tables in 1985 to 50 percent in 2019 and from half of table revenue to 11 percent, while baccarat rose from 13 to 37 percent.

• Big Strip casinos took in more than $6 billion in gaming revenue in 2019.
• The Golden Knights, Raiders, Aces and a Formula One race on Las Vegas Boulevard reflect a shift toward sports as younger visitors play fewer slots.
• A planned bypass called Diamond Arena Drive near Russell Road would be the Strip's first new intersection in 60 years, built to serve a proposed NBA arena.
• Nearly all indoor water on the Strip is treated and returned to Lake Mead, and the Bellagio fountains run on a private well.
• MGM Resorts put more than 26,000 solar panels across 28 acres on the Mandalay Bay Convention Center roof.

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The Merkava, Hebrew for chariot, is the main battle tank of the Israeli Armored Corps, and it exists because of a broken deal. In the late 1960s Israel worked with Britain on the Chieftain and trialed prototypes for years, expecting to buy it and produce it locally, until Britain canceled and offered the tank to Arab nations instead. After heavy armor losses in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel Tal pushed for a domestic tank, and the Merkava Mark 1 entered service in 1979. Its engine sits at the front, so a shell that gets through the front armor must chew through the transmission and engine block before reaching the four-person crew. The empty rear holds clamshell doors for loading ammunition under fire, carrying troops or evacuating wounded, and the chassis led to the Namer infantry fighting vehicle.

The design accepts more mobility kills to keep trained crews alive. In the 1982 Lebanon War the Mark 1 beat Syrian T-62s, and the Mark 2 moved its 60 mm mortar inside and added rear chain netting against RPGs. The 1989 Mark 3 brought a 1,200 hp engine, a 120 mm smoothbore able to fire guided missiles, and bolt-on modular armor that crews can replace in hours. In 2006 Kornet and RPG-29 tandem warheads destroyed five Merkavas, and the Mark 4 removed the loader's roof hatch, stored rounds in fireproof canisters and added the Windbreaker system, known abroad as Trophy, which proved itself in Operation Protective Edge in 2014. In the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, fighters fired from inside 50 yards, salvoed RPGs and dropped grenades from commercial drones, and the IDF welded slat armor onto turret roofs that October.

• Trophy uses radar to track incoming rockets and fires a directed blast of fragments to destroy them, so nearby infantry must keep a standoff distance.
• Hamas distributed flyers explaining how to defeat Trophy by firing at close range and overwhelming its reload.
• The Merkava IV Barak gives its commander Elbit's Iron Vision helmet, which stitches outside camera feeds into a 360-degree view through the armor.
• The Carmel successor program aims to cut weight from 65 to 35 tons with a two-person crew and a hybrid electric drive for quiet movement.
• Carmel test vehicles run their defense systems and weapons with standard Xbox controllers.

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The Leopard 1 was West Germany's answer to a 1956 problem. The new Bundeswehr relied on aging American M47 and M48 Pattons, and designers believed HEAT warheads made heavy armor pointless, so the requirement capped weight at 30 tons and stressed mobility and firepower. After the joint Europa Panzer effort with France and Italy stalled, Porsche's prototype won in 1963. It had an 820 hp MTU diesel packaged with the transmission in a single power pack that crews could swap in about 20 minutes, important for fighting on a nuclear, biological and chemical battlefield, plus the British 105 mm Royal Ordnance L7 rifled gun. The light design left spare capacity for later upgrades.

The 1A1 added Cadillac Gage gun stabilization and a deep-wading snorkel, the 1A3 and 1A4 brought welded turrets with spaced armor and a commander's panoramic sight, and the 1A5 refit of over 1,200 tanks added the Leopard 2's EMES-18 laser fire control and thermal imaging. The tank's first combat came in 1994 in Bosnia, when seven white-painted Danish UN Leopard 1A5s relieved a Swedish-manned post under Bosnian Serb fire and took no casualties in Operation Bøllebank. Canada's up-armored Leopard C2s fought in Afghanistan in 2006, the first Canadian tank gunfire since Korea, but turret heat pushed Canada toward the Leopard 2. After 2022, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands funded refurbishing over 100 Leopard 1A5s for Ukraine.

• Exporters included Australia, Belgium, Canada, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey and Denmark.
• Rheinmetall bought back 50 tanks that OIP Land Systems had acquired from Belgium in 2014 for about 37,000 euros each, and stripped 20 for parts.
• Switzerland blocked RUAG from selling 96 former Italian Leopard 1s stored in Italy, then approved 71 for Germany in mid-2025 on condition they never reach Ukraine.
• Ukraine's 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade fields a Leopard 1A5 variant covered in explosive reactive armor and anti-drone cages.
• A company called Ram Europe turned a Leopard 1 into a 15,000-liter off-road fire engine called the Jumbo.

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The Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer was designed in the 1980s, commissioned its lead ship in 1991, and as of April 2026 has 75 ships in service, the longest production run of any U.S. Navy surface combatant. The design came out of fire. Earlier cruisers used aluminum superstructures to save top weight, and in 1975 USS Belknap collided with the carrier USS John F. Kennedy in the Mediterranean, after which its aluminum superstructure burned and collapsed. British losses in the 1982 Falklands War reinforced the lesson. Gibbs and Cox and Bath Iron Works returned to all-steel construction, added about 130 tons of Kevlar around vital spaces, and kept within an 8,300-ton congressional cap on a hull 50 feet shorter than the cruisers, using a wide flared bow for seakeeping and four GE LM2500 gas turbines raised from 80,000 to 100,000 shaft horsepower for over 31 knots.

The ship is built around the Aegis combat system and fixed SPY radar panels, SPY-1 on early flights and SPY-6 on Flight III, which track hundreds of targets at once with no rotating blind spot. Its Mark 41 vertical launch system has 90 to 96 cells that can hold Tomahawks, SM-2, SM-3 and SM-6 missiles, ASROC and quad-packed Evolved Sea Sparrows. In the mid-2000s the Navy planned to end production with USS Michael Murphy, DDG-112, and shift to the stealthy Zumwalt, designed for coastal gunfire support. Around 2008 the rise of anti-ship ballistic missiles made ballistic missile defense the priority, and the Zumwalt was not optimized for it. The Navy cut the Zumwalt from 32 ships to three and restarted Burke production.

• Flight I ships had no helicopter hangars, and Flight IIA added hangars for two MH-60 Seahawks.
• Flight III ships carry 4,000-kilowatt generators to power SPY-6 and directed energy weapons.
• The ODIN laser dazzler blinds drone cameras, and USS Preble received the HELIOS high-energy laser.
• USS Bainbridge carries Raytheon Coyote launchers that send interceptor drones after enemy drones.
• Burkes fired Tomahawks in Operation Desert Strike in 1996 and the opening of Iraqi Freedom in 2003, and have spent months intercepting Houthi drones and missiles in the Red Sea.

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The Virginia-class attack submarine, the SSN-774 class, came out of the cost shock of the Seawolf, a $2.8 billion boat built to hunt Soviet submarines and canceled after three hulls once the Cold War ended. The Navy's Two for Four goal sought two boats for $4 billion by fiscal 2012. Only two U.S. yards are certified to build nuclear submarines, General Dynamics Electric Boat in Connecticut and Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, and each Virginia is split between them: one builds the bow, sail and torpedo room, the other the reactor plant and engine room, and the sections travel by barge for final assembly. Each boat takes about 9 million labor hours and parts from over 4,000 suppliers, and the split keeps both yards' welders and nuclear pipe fitters employed.

The traditional periscope is gone. Photonics masts outside the pressure hull carry cameras, infrared sensors and laser rangefinders, and the control room moved down to a roomier deck, where crews steer the masts with a standard Xbox 360 controller that can be swapped for a new one at about $30. An open architecture brings hardware refreshes every four years and software every two. The S9G reactor produces 40,000 shaft horsepower and its core is designed to last the boat's full 33 years. Block 5 adds the Virginia Payload Module, a 70-foot section that stretches the boat from 377 to 460 feet and over 10,000 tons, raising Tomahawk capacity from 12 to 40 to replace retiring Ohio-class SSGNs. Under AUKUS, Australia is buying three used Block 4 boats, with an option on two more.

• A BAE Systems pump jet in a shrouded duct delays cavitation, the popping vapor bubbles that passive sonar listens for.
• Block 3 swapped the air-backed spherical sonar for a water-backed Large Aperture Bow array with fewer hull penetrations.
• Early boats had 12 vertical launch tubes, and Block 3 moved to two large Virginia Payload Tubes.
• The stretched Block 5 hull trades some agility for firepower, and later boats are slated for Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles.
• The Australian boats are a stopgap to replace diesel Collins-class submarines until the new SSN-AUKUS design arrives.

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GlobalFoundries, or GF, is the world's third-largest semiconductor foundry by revenue and the only major one with large plants in the United States, the European Union and Singapore. It began in 2008, when AMD decided to go fabless and spin off its manufacturing. Mubadala, the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund, paid $700 million for a majority stake and absorbed $1.2 billion of AMD debt, and the company took its name in March 2009. Mubadala still held 82 percent after the 2021 IPO. GF bought Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor, and in 2014 and 2015 took over IBM's microelectronics business, with IBM paying GF $1.5 billion, plus plants in East Fishkill, New York, and Essex Junction, Vermont, and a 10-year deal to supply IBM server chips.

In 2018 GF canceled 7-nanometer development rather than outfit Fab 8 in New York with costly EUV lithography machines. It moved to specialty processes such as FD-SOI for cars, sensors and connected devices. A 2019 patent fight with TSMC, 16 patents claimed against 25 in the countersuit, ended within months in a cross-license deal. GF holds Trusted Foundry Category 1A status with the Pentagon and won a 10-year, $3.1 billion Defense Department contract in 2023, the same year General Motors signed an exclusive supply deal with its New York fab. In early 2024 it was the first major CHIPS Act recipient, with $1.5 billion planned, and in November 2024 it paid a $500,000 Commerce Department fine for about $17 million in shipments to an SMIC-affiliated entity.

• GF licensed Samsung technology to move from 14 to 12 nanometers before dropping out of the leading-edge race.
• Project Sprint, announced in 2025, is a 1.1 billion euro expansion in Dresden backed by the European Chips Act.
• Its 2025 and 2026 deals included Tagore Technology for gallium nitride, MIPS for RISC-V, and Synopsys' ARC processor business.
• It bought Advanced Micro Foundry in Singapore and InfiniLink to build silicon photonics and optical links between AI chips.
• In May 2026 GF received a $375 million U.S. grant to build a secure domestic quantum foundry.

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The AMX-30 was France's Cold War main battle tank, and it grew out of failure and a diplomatic split. The postwar ARL 44 heavy tank was obsolete after about 60 were built, and the 50-ton AMX-50, with an oscillating two-piece turret, could not be sealed against fallout while the U.S. supplied free M47 Pattons. In 1956 France, West Germany, Italy and others pursued a common 30-ton Europa Panzer. Then Charles de Gaulle refused to share French nuclear technology, moved France out of NATO's integrated command, and West Germany chose the British L7 gun over France's 105 mm. By 1963 the German prototypes became the Leopard 1 and the French ones the AMX-30.

French engineers judged that HEAT rounds, whose copper jets could cut 400 mm of steel, made thick armor dead weight. The production tank weighed 36 tons against 54 for the Chieftain and about 47 for the M60, stood 2.28 meters tall, carried no more than 80 mm of armor, and reached 65 km/h on a 720 hp Hispano-Suiza multi-fuel diesel. Its weak point was a manual-clutch gearbox, fixed only by the 1979 AMX-30B2 with a semi-automatic transmission, laser rangefinder and low-light TV. In 1973 a Greek junta AMX-30 smashed the gates of the Athens Polytechnic. In January 1991 Qatari AMX-30s at Khafji knocked out three Iraqi T-55s and captured four, and 44 French AMX-30B2s of the 4th Dragoons swept the far left flank of the coalition line to As-Salman air base, firing 270 rounds.

• The Obus G round spun its outer shell for accuracy while the shaped charge rode inside on ball bearings, so the jet formed without spin.
• That round carried 780 grams of hexolite and could penetrate 400 mm of steel at 3,000 meters.
• The same chassis carried the Pluton tactical nuclear missile, a 2.4-ton weapon with a 120 km range.
• Variants included a recovery vehicle, a bridge layer for a 22-meter span, twin 30 mm anti-aircraft guns and the Roland missile system.
• In the 1990s a turretless test vehicle wore angled radar-absorbent plates and blew cool air over its hull to cut its thermal signature.

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FICO is a publicly traded data analytics company, not a government agency or a utility. Engineer William R. "Bill" Fair and mathematician Earl Judson Isaac met at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park and founded Fair, Isaac and Company in 1956 to replace a loan officer's gut feeling with a statistical model weighing payment history, debt and length of credit. It took two years and pitches to 50 American lenders before they sold their first credit scoring system in 1958. For three decades the firm mostly built custom scoring systems for individual lenders. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in July 1987, and in 1989 it released the general-purpose FICO score with its 300 to 850 range.

The turning point came in 1995, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began using FICO scores to decide which mortgages they would buy, making the score effectively mandatory for lenders who sell loans. By 2013 lenders bought more than 10 billion FICO scores a year. The company moved from San Rafael to Minneapolis and San Jose before opening a global headquarters in Bozeman, Montana, in 2016, and under CEO William Lansing it reports about $1.99 billion in revenue and over 3,800 employees. The Justice Department opened an antitrust probe in March 2020 and reportedly closed it by the end of that year. At least 10 class actions followed from credit unions, auto dealers, brokerages and mortgage lenders, and in September 2023 Judge Edmund Chang allowed them to proceed.

• Between 1992 and 2019 FICO acquired more than 20 companies, mostly enterprise software, security and business rules firms rather than credit bureaus.
• The 2002 purchase of HNC Software brought neural network fraud detection into the real-time approval of card transactions.
• In the early 2000s the company shortened its name to Fair Isaac Corporation and leaned on the FICO acronym.
• In March 2024 Senator Josh Hawley urged the Justice Department to investigate FICO over alleged pricing power in mortgage lending.
• FICO's defense is that the market demanded one standard and that wide adoption is not the same as an illegal monopoly.

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Union Pacific runs over 32,000 miles of track and about 8,300 locomotives across 23 states, and in 2025 it proposed an $85 billion merger with Norfolk Southern billed as the first transcontinental railroad under one company. The 1869 line met that description only as a partnership: Union Pacific built west from Council Bluffs, Iowa, largely with Irish laborers, and met the Central Pacific at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, under the Pacific Railroad Act that Abraham Lincoln signed in 1862 to bind the West to the Union. Executive Thomas C. Durant set up Crédit Mobilier of America, which billed Union Pacific inflated construction costs that were passed on to the government, and its discounted shares went to influential congressmen. Exposure in 1872, followed by the panics of 1873 and 1893, pushed the railroad into bankruptcy.

To create traffic, Union Pacific co-founded the Pacific Fruit Express refrigerated car fleet in 1906, and chairman W. Averell Harriman added the M-10000 streamliner and in 1936 built the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho. It still took new steam engines such as No. 844 as late as 1944. Later it absorbed the Missouri Pacific, Western Pacific, Chicago and North Western and, in 1996, the Southern Pacific, sharing the West with BNSF. Under Precision Scheduled Railroading it replaced hump yards with flat yards, closing major ones in Kansas, Oregon and Arkansas in 2019. The Federal Railroad Administration reprimanded the company in 2023 over defect rates and warned its CEO in 2024 that layoffs were compromising inspections.

• A 2004 chlorine release in Macdonough, Texas, killed three people, and investigators cited crew fatigue and hazardous cars placed too close to the front of the train.
• In 2019 a remotely operated train ran over a broken rail in Portland, Oregon, derailed and destroyed an overpass's support columns.
• In 2025 an EF3 tornado in Kansas blew more than 100 double-stacked cars off a train that had stopped to wait out the storm.
• Texas identified cancer clusters, including childhood leukemia, near a Houston rail yard where creosote was used on ties for decades.
• Its presidential locomotives include the Bush 4141, which pulled his funeral train, the Lincoln 1616 and the Trump 4547, which first hauled Artemis rocket parts.