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The T-90 came out of a post-Soviet crisis. In 1992 Russia was fielding three incompatible tank families, the T-64, T-72 and T-80, on a collapsing budget. The T-80's gas turbine burned fuel at an unsustainable rate and the tank had suffered heavy losses in the First Chechen War, while the T-72 carried the image of televised losses in Middle Eastern wars. The Kartsev-Venediktov Design Bureau put the T-80's 1A45 fire control system into a T-72B hull, a hybrid called Object 188, and named it the T-90 to escape the T-72's reputation. Protection came in three layers: composite armor, Kontakt-5 or Relikt explosive reactive armor, and the Shtora-1 system, whose glowing infrared dazzlers confuse older guided missiles and which fires smoke when a targeting laser is detected. A three-person crew sits above a 22-round autoloader carousel, keeping the tank just 2.22 meters tall.

India kept the program alive. After Pakistan bought T-80UD tanks from Ukraine, India ordered hundreds of T-90s in 2001 and built them in Avadi as the Bhishma, stripping out the Shtora dazzlers and adding French Thales thermal imagers; it now operates more than 1,200 and has introduced the Bhishma Mark III with DRDO electronics. In Dagestan in 1999 one T-90 reportedly stayed in action after seven RPG hits, and in Syria in 2016 one survived a frontal TOW hit. In Ukraine after 2022, open source trackers documented more than 213 T-90s lost, over 150 of them the T-90M Proryv. Top-attack Javelin and NLAW missiles and roughly $500 FPV drones hit the thin roof above the ammunition carousel, producing the jack-in-the-box effect.

• In April 2023 a T-90A captured in the Kharkiv counteroffensive sat on a flatbed at a Louisiana truck stop, bound for a U.S. proving ground.
• Western tanks keep ammunition behind blast doors with blowout panels, a safety feature the T-90 traded for a lower silhouette.
• The Bhishma is named for an invincible guardian warrior of the Mahabharata.
• Crews report a "disco head" failure in which the turret spins uncontrollably.
• In late 2024 a destroyed T-90M was found with clay construction bricks in its reactive armor slots.

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Reader's Digest began with DeWitt and Lila Bell Wallace, who married in 1920 in Pleasantville, New York, and launched the magazine in 1922 from a Greenwich Village basement beneath an illegal speakeasy. With scissors and glue they condensed articles from other monthlies, and DeWitt persuaded publishers that the shorter versions were free advertising for the originals. The digest was about half the size of standard American magazines so it could slip into a coat pocket. The Wallaces hoped to net a few thousand dollars a year; by the end of the 1920s they had nearly 300,000 subscribers. A UK edition followed in the late 1930s, then dozens of editions in more than 20 languages, plus Braille and large print. A vocabulary feature began in 1945, and a 1952 article linking cigarettes to lung illness caused a temporary nationwide dip in cigarette sales.

The company turned its readers' trust into a mail-order business selling record collections and hardbound condensed books. Sweepstakes mailings in official-looking envelopes suggested recipients were already finalists and that buying might help them win. In the early 2000s dozens of U.S. state attorneys general alleged that elderly and vulnerable consumers were misled, and a settlement required do-not-contact lists and plain statements that purchases did not improve the odds. British regulators later reprimanded similar mailings. The parent company had gone public in 1990, and a 2007 leveraged buyout tripled annual interest payments to $148 million just as print was losing readers to the internet. It filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and again in 2013, the UK branch was sold to a venture capitalist for one pound, and the UK and Canadian editions ceased publication in 2024.

• By the mid-2000s the magazine reached more households earning over $100,000 than several major business and financial magazines combined.
• Its German publishing arm produced a 50-volume hardbound anthology of classic science fiction.
• Throughout the 20th century the magazine promoted a conservative, anti-communist editorial worldview.
• The original private equity investors were wiped out, and lenders took over the brand.
• The U.S. edition survives with reduced frequency and marketing built on nostalgia and shared family reading.

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Paytm was founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma in August 2010 with an initial investment of $2 million, starting as a platform for prepaid mobile and satellite TV recharges in a cash-heavy India where topping up meant paying cash at a kiosk. The Paytm wallet launched in January 2014, and adoption by Uber and Indian Railways made it everyday infrastructure: it let a cash economy pay for rides without credit cards and let travelers skip the IRCTC site's timing-out bank gateway. Alibaba Group and Ant Financial took a 40 percent stake in 2015, and Berkshire Hathaway invested $356 million in 2018. Paytm added Paytm Money for wealth management, bought Insider.in and TicketNew, launched Paytm First Games and pushed QR codes onto tea stalls and storefronts. In 2019 it introduced the Paytm Soundbox, a speaker that announces each payment aloud so vendors do not have to check their phones.

The November 2021 IPO raised roughly $1.9 billion at a $20 billion valuation, the largest in Indian history at the time, but shares opened 9.3 percent below target and fell more than 27 percent by the end of the first day. Regulators then closed in. In March 2022 the Reserve Bank of India barred Paytm Payments Bank from signing up new customers, citing data leaks to Chinese entities with indirect stakes in the company. In January 2024 the RBI halted bulk activities over failures in background checks on the source of funds. In August 2024 Paytm sold its entertainment ticketing business to Zomato for about $244 million, and on April 24, 2026, the RBI canceled the license of Paytm Payments Bank Limited.

• Uber needed a way to keep its cashless model in a market with low credit card penetration, and the Paytm wallet filled that gap.
• Paytm's fraud detection system originated in its R&D lab in Canada.
• By 2026 its AI router redirected payment traffic away from overloaded bank servers in milliseconds.
• A 2018 Cobrapost undercover video showed a Paytm vice president claiming Jammu and Kashmir user data had been shared with the government at the prime minister's office's request.
• Paytm denied the Cobrapost claim, saying no data was shared with third parties or law enforcement without proper authorization.

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Motorola began in 1928 in Chicago as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin. Its first product was a battery eliminator that let radios built for direct current run from new household AC outlets instead of leaky acid batteries. In 1930 it sold its first car radio for $30 to a customer in Indiana and began equipping police cars in Evanston and Cook County. Paul Galvin coined the brand by adding "ola" to "motor," and the company became Motorola Inc. in 1947. World War II brought the SCR-536 handheld radio and research director Dan Noble, and in 1969 a Motorola transceiver carried Neil Armstrong's voice from the Moon. In 1974 it sold its television business to Panasonic's parent to focus on chips, and its 32-bit MC68000 processor powered machines from Apple, Commodore, Atari, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile phone call in New York in 1973, and the DynaTAC 8000X won FCC approval in 1983. By 1998 phones were two-thirds of revenue, yet Motorola clung to analog while Europe moved to digital GSM, falling behind Ericsson in 1996 and Nokia in 1998. Its StarMax Mac clone died when Steve Jobs released Mac OS 8, sidestepping licenses written for System 7, and the 66-satellite Iridium project drained billions. The RAZR and the "Hello Moto" campaign brought a mid-2000s revival, but after the iPhone Motorola lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009 as engineers left for Apple. On January 4, 2011, it split into Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility, which Google bought in 2012 and sold to Lenovo in 2014.

• A heated call between Steve Jobs and CEO Christopher Galvin ended the clone contract, and Apple demoted Motorola from favored processor supplier.
• Apple and IBM pushed Motorola out of a major processor manufacturing alliance for a time after the clone fight.
• The 1955 batwing M logo is built from a sine wave and a triangle wave, a drawing of a radio signal.
• In Scottsdale, Arizona, Motorola and a local water company were identified as sources of TCE contamination that brought a three-day water ban for almost 5,000 people.
• By 2010 Greenpeace ranked Motorola highly for cutting PVC, and it made phone housings from recycled water cooler bottles.

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Michael Milken's rise ran through Drexel Burnham Lambert, a firm that began in 1935 when I.W. "Tubby" Burnham opened a small New York retail brokerage with $100,000 in capital, $96,000 of it borrowed from his grandfather, a Kentucky distillery founder. Classed as a "sub major" firm and shut out of Wall Street's elite underwriting syndicates, Burnham bought pedigree in 1973 by merging with Drexel Firestone of Philadelphia, a house dating to 1838, and put the Drexel name first. Fred Joseph, the son of a Boston cab driver, promised to make the firm as powerful as Goldman Sachs, and the engine was Milken in Beverly Hills. He built the high yield, or junk bond, market from scratch, cultivated a loyal network of insurers, savings and loans and mutual funds, and armed raiders such as T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn with "highly confident" letters. In 1986 Drexel earned $545.5 million, then the most profitable year in Wall Street history, and in 1987 Milken was paid $550 million.

The fall began when Drexel M&A banker Dennis Levine was caught insider trading and pointed to arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, who pointed to Milken. U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani threatened Drexel with a RICO indictment and a $1 billion performance bond at a firm whose capital was 96 percent borrowed. Days before a grand jury vote, Drexel's lawyers found MacPherson Partners, a secret partnership holding Storer Broadcasting warrants whose partners included Milken's children and outside mutual fund managers. Drexel took an Alford plea to six felonies, agreed to a $650 million fine and forced Milken out. As the junk market contracted and Drexel posted its first operating loss in 54 years, Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady refused a bailout, and on February 13, 1990, Drexel filed for Chapter 11, the first Wall Street firm forced into bankruptcy since the Great Depression.

• The government alleged that a $5.3 million payment from Boesky to Drexel, labeled a consulting fee, was Milken's cut of disguised trading profits.
• Milken refused to cooperate with Drexel's internal investigators and communicated only through his defense lawyers.
• Drexel had no firmwide bonus pool, so its divisions competed with one another like rival companies.
• Brady had chaired Dillon Read, which advised Unocal when it was attacked by a Drexel-financed raider.
• Milken served nearly two years in federal prison for securities fraud, turned to medical research philanthropy and received a presidential pardon in 2020.

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Merrill Lynch began on January 6, 1914, when Charles E. Merrill opened his firm on Wall Street; his friend Edmund C. Lynch joined months later, and by 1915 it was Merrill, Lynch & Co., a comma kept until 1938. Merrill believed in everyday consumer commerce: the firm bought Pathé, later RKO Pictures, in 1921 and took control of Safeway in 1926, building it into the third largest U.S. grocery chain. In 1930 it spun its retail brokerage off to E.A. Pierce & Co., which by 1938 ran a private network of over 23,000 miles of telegraph wire. Mergers in 1940 and 1941 reunited Pierce, Cassatt & Co. and Fenner & Beane with Merrill Lynch, and in 1941 it became the first Wall Street firm to publish an annual report.

Renamed Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith in 1958, it became the world's largest securities firm, selling through thousands of salaried advisors nicknamed the thundering herd. Scandals followed its push into institutional finance: a $400 million Orange County bankruptcy settlement in 1998, a $100 million settlement over analyst Henry Blodget, and the Enron Nigerian barge case, in which executives' convictions were overturned on appeal. From 2003, under Christopher Ricciardi, it pushed into CDOs, bought subprime lender First Franklin for $1.3 billion in 2006, and underwrote $93 billion of CDOs in 2006 and 2007 while holding toxic tranches itself. After an $8.4 billion write-down in November 2007 and $19.2 billion in losses over a year, Bank of America agreed to buy it for $50 billion on September 14, 2008.

• Merrill Lynch was known as the Catholic firm of Wall Street, run largely by Irish Catholic executives.
• It became the second largest shareholder in Japanese anime studio TMS Entertainment.
• The Enron barge deal let Enron book $12 million in pre-tax profit through an alleged secret buyback guarantee.
• A 2013 settlement of $160 million resolved a 2005 class action by Black brokers, filed while Stanley O'Neal was CEO.
• Executives set aside $3.6 billion in bonuses just before the sale, and in 2019 several businesses were rebranded simply as Merrill.

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Morgan Stanley exists because of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which forced banks to choose between commercial and investment banking. J.P. Morgan & Co. kept commercial banking, and Henry Sturgis Morgan, J.P. Morgan's grandson, and Harold Stanley opened Morgan Stanley at 2 Wall Street on September 16, 1935. It took a 24 percent market share in its first year, with $1.1 billion in public offerings and private placements, and in 1938 led a $100 million debenture distribution for U.S. Steel. In 1962 Dick Fisher, later chairman, helped create the first viable computer model for financial analysis. In 1997 it merged with Dean Witter Discover, the retail business spun off from Sears, with Dean Witter's Philip Purcell as CEO and John Mack as COO.

On September 11, 2001, Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant of the World Trade Center; security director Rick Rescorla's evacuation plan got 2,687 employees out, and 13, including Rescorla, died. In 2005 former partners ousted Purcell, who had resisted subprime mortgages, and the firm moved into that market as it began to collapse. It took $5 billion from China Investment Corporation in December 2007, lost over 80 percent of its market value, became a bank holding company on September 22, 2008, and borrowed over $107 billion from the Fed. Over Columbus Day weekend, with U.S. wire systems shut, Japan's MUFG delivered a $9 billion investment as a paper check handed to Robert A. Kindler at Wachtell Lipton.

• Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson offered Morgan Stanley to JPMorgan Chase for free, and Jamie Dimon turned it down.
• Employee donations helped build the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital at New York Presbyterian, opened in 2003.
• After 2008 it built wealth management through Smith Barney, the $13 billion E-Trade deal in 2020 and Eaton Vance, reaching $5.4 trillion in client assets.
• It paid $3.2 billion in 2016 over subprime mortgage bonds and agreed to a $249 million settlement in 2024 over block trade disclosures.
• Fines of over $41 million in 2022 and 2023 followed its failure to wipe decommissioned servers holding data on 15 million customers.

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The Littoral Combat Ship began with the Street Fighter, a concept from Navy strategists Wayne Hughes and Arthur Cebrowski for a 1,000-ton, heavily armed coastal ship costing about $90 million in 2001 dollars, cheap enough that its crew could abandon it if badly hit. After the Cold War, threats had moved into shallow coastal waters crowded with quiet submarines, cheap mines and fast attack boats. When Donald Rumsfeld became Defense Secretary in 2001 and pushed transformational approaches, the DD-21 was canceled, and by 2003 the LCS was the top budget priority. The Navy rejected an expendable crewed ship, and the push for survivability and a 40-knot top speed grew the design to 3,000 to 3,500 tons and $220 million per ship.

The Navy kept two designs in production: the steel monohull Freedom class from Lockheed Martin and Marinette Marine, and the aluminum trimaran Independence class from General Dynamics and Austal USA. Each was meant to swap mission modules for anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures and surface warfare, but a 2012 report found a swap could take weeks, and a core crew of 50 to 70 left sailors exhausted and reliant on contractors. A 2010 Pentagon test report said neither design was expected to survive a hostile combat environment. In 2016 the Navy assigned each ship a single mission and cut the program from its original 55 ships, later turning to the FREMM-based Constellation-class frigate, while USS Independence, USS Freedom and USS Coronado retired early.

• The LCS was rated at survivability Level 1+, below the Level 2 of the frigates it replaced.
• The official plan for a badly hit ship was an orderly abandon ship or a limp away from the fight.
• After the NLOS-LS missile was canceled, the Navy bolted on Army Hellfire missiles and later the Norwegian Naval Strike Missile.
• In 2012 Rear Admiral Samuel Perez reported the ships lacked the manpower and firepower commanders needed.
• The 3-2-1 crew rotation was replaced by blue and gold crews, the model used on nuclear submarines.

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RJR Nabisco was formed when R.J. Reynolds, a tobacco company rooted in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, since 1875, bought Nabisco Brands in 1985 for $4.9 billion in cash and a $1.9 billion stock swap; the combined company took its name in April 1986. It sold KFC to PepsiCo, Canada Dry and Sunkist to Cadbury Schweppes, and Heublein to Grand Metropolitan. F. Ross Johnson took charge in early 1987, judged Winston-Salem too bucolic, and moved headquarters to Cobb County, Georgia, handing the old building to Wake Forest University. In 1988 Johnson and Shearson Lehman Hutton offered $75 a share to take the company private, setting off a bidding war that drew Henry Kravis and KKR.

KKR made a $90 tender offer directly to shareholders, and the final round pitted KKR's $109 a share against management's $112. The board took the lower bid because KKR's was firmly financed, while Johnson's mix of cash and securities lacked a reset provision to protect its value. A Time cover in December 1988 called the contest "a game of greed," and Johnson still left in February 1989 with over $60 million. The roughly $25 billion leveraged buyout forced new chief Louis V. Gerstner to move headquarters to the New York area and sell assets, and a 1994 Labor Department report counted over 2,000 jobs lost. In 1999 the tobacco businesses were split off, and Philip Morris bought Nabisco Holdings in 2000.

• In April 1988 RJR Nabisco fired Saatchi & Saatchi, which handled only its food brands, after the agency made a Northwest Airlines ad promoting an in-flight smoking ban.
• Bidders in the frenzy included Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers, First Boston and Merrill Lynch.
• To pay down debt the company sold the Walkers and Smiths snack brands, Chun King, Fresh Del Monte Produce and a 20 percent ESPN stake to Hearst.
• Laid-off workers took an average of 5.6 months to find new jobs, and those who did earned less than half their old pay.
• In 2021 the Pandora Papers linked pre-split RJR Nabisco to shell companies set up in Cyprus.

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The Gerald R. Ford class of aircraft carriers exists because the Nimitz class ran out of room. A 2005 RAND report concluded the 1960s-era design had hit its limits: the A4W reactors lacked spare electrical capacity, and decades of added topside equipment had eroded the center of gravity margin. The CVN-21 program produced USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), a roughly $13 billion ship in a class that cost over $37 billion to develop. Two new Bechtel A1B reactors are smaller and simpler yet deliver at least 25 percent more power, and the ship uses only about half its electrical capacity, a reserve held for future weapons across a service life expected to run to 2105.

The Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System replaced steam catapults with linear induction motors that launch more smoothly and need no fresh water, but it suffered reliability problems, and in August 2026 President Donald Trump ordered a return to steam catapults starting with the future USS Doris Miller. The Navy forecasts 160 sorties a day and 270 in a surge, figures former test director Michael Gilmore called unrealistic. Narrow vacuum sewage pipes clog with scale, and each acid flush to clear them costs $400,000, according to the GAO. The Ford made its combat debut in the 2026 Iran War, Operation Epic Fury, leading Carrier Strike Group 12 in the eastern Mediterranean against drones launched from Lebanon.

• The island was shrunk and moved aft, and linear-motor weapons elevators keep ordnance out of the path of taxiing aircraft.
• Automation cuts the crew by about 700 sailors compared with a Nimitz carrier, and sailors sleep in 40-rack rooms.
• The Plasma Arc Waste Destruction System vaporizes combustible trash at about 10,000 degrees.
• Starting with USS John F. Kennedy, the $500 million Dual Band Radar gave way to the roughly $180 million Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar.
• A laundry fire in March 2026 paused flight operations and later sent the ship to Croatia for repairs.