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In 1965 Alan Stillman, who had no restaurant experience, used $5,000 of his savings and $5,000 borrowed from his mother to buy The Good Tavern, a bar near the Queensboro Bridge on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a neighborhood full of young singles and flight attendants. He renamed it with the Bucknell phrase Thank God It's Friday, painted it blue with red and white striped awnings, hired athletic bartenders in striped soccer shirts and popularized ladies night. Arriving alongside the birth control pill and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, it gave young women a place to go out without a date. Velvet ropes went up, Maxwell's Plum opened across the street, and patrons appear in Robert Downey Sr.'s 1968 film No More Excuses.

Daniel R. Scoggin took Midwest franchise rights and opened a 1972 Dallas prototype with multi-level dining, a raised central bar, scratch cooking, potato skins, frozen drinks and the Bartender Olympics; it doubled the sales and tripled the profits of any earlier location. Stillman merged into Scoggin's company, Carlson Companies bought the chain in 1975, and Stillman went on to found Smith & Wollensky. Fridays went public with Goldman Sachs in 1983, entered the U.K. with Whitbread and by 2008 had 601 U.S. restaurants and $2 billion in revenue. Sales fell to $728 million by 2023 as private equity owners, including Sentinel Capital and TriArtisan, loaded it with debt.

• Stillman claimed his showman bartenders inspired Tom Cruise's character in Cocktail, though the bar Malachy's is said to have predated Fridays.
• Classic stores display a propeller for the bar as engine and a rowing scull holding saddle shoes and champagne for teamwork, leadership and celebration.
• New Jersey's 2013 Operation Swill raided 17 franchise locations that were refilling top-shelf bottles with cheap liquor.
• In 2018 U.K. waiters struck over a policy sending 20 percent of their card tips to kitchen staff, and a 2022 suit over licensed mozzarella sticks with no mozzarella settled for $900,000.
• The U.K. operator entered administration in September 2024 after missing a bondholder filing, the U.S. company filed for Chapter 11 in November 2024, and the U.K. business collapsed again by early 2026.

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T-Mobile US traces back to VoiceStream Wireless, spun off from Western Wireless to win urban markets in the western U.S. using the GSM digital standard. That choice drew Deutsche Telekom, which bought VoiceStream for $35 billion in 2001, largely for its GSM spectrum licenses, and renamed it T-Mobile USA, with ads featuring Jamie Lee Curtis and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Purchases of Omnipoint, Aerial and SunCom followed. By 2011 the carrier was losing subscribers, and Deutsche Telekom agreed to sell it to AT&T for $39 billion until a Justice Department antitrust suit ended the deal in December 2011, leaving a network that had gone nine months without investment.

CEO John Legere launched the Un-carrier campaign in 2013, dropping two-year contracts, paying off rivals' early termination fees and adding Data Stash and Binge On, whose zero rating of Netflix and Hulu fed the net neutrality debate. A 2013 reverse takeover of MetroPCS put the company on the stock market. The Sprint merger, announced in 2018 and challenged in federal court by state attorneys general, closed in 2020 and brought Sprint's 2.5 GHz mid-band spectrum for 5G. T-Mobile then bought Mint Mobile and Ultra Mobile in a deal worth over $1 billion and moved to acquire U.S. Cellular's wireless operations and spectrum for over $4 billion.

• Its 3G launch was delayed because government agencies were still using frequencies T-Mobile had bought for over $4 billion at FCC auctions.
• The last original 2G towers were decommissioned in 2025 and 2026, while Sprint's incompatible CDMA network ran until customers were migrated.
• TVision, built on the Layer3 TV acquisition, was shut down after a few years in favor of partnering with YouTube TV.
• The Communications Workers of America and Germany's ver.di pushed for union rights, and lawmakers including John Kerry and Bob Casey wrote to Deutsche Telekom's CEO.
• Records list T-Mobile among corporate donors to the 2025 White House East Wing ballroom project, and it has partnered with SpaceX's Starlink on satellite-to-phone service.

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Sweden began studying a replacement for its Saab 35 Draken and 37 Viggen in 1979 under the Bas 90 doctrine, which dispersed fighters to road runways 800 meters long and 17 meters wide in case main air bases were destroyed. The JAS 39 Gripen was named for three roles in one airframe: Jakt for air-to-air combat, Attack for air-to-surface and Spaning for reconnaissance. The project passed the Riksdag 176 to 167 in 1982 over Social Democratic opposition and was locked into a fixed-price contract in 1983. Saab chose a delta wing with canards and relaxed stability, making the jet inherently unstable and dependent on fly-by-wire software written in Ada.

In February 1989 test pilot Lars Rådeström crashed the first prototype while landing at Linköping because of pilot-induced oscillation, breaking his elbow, and Saab and Calspan spent 15 months reworking the software. In August 1993 Rådeström ejected during a display at the Stockholm Water Festival and the jet came down on Långholmen island, a crash traced to the software amplifying quick stick commands. Once fixed, the design met its goals: a 10-minute air-to-air turnaround by one technician and five conscripts, and 20 minutes for air-to-ground. A 2012 Jane's study put the Gripen C at about $4,700 per flight hour against $25,000 to over $38,000 for the F-35.

• The Volvo RM12 engine is a license-built derivative of the General Electric F404, and a Health and Usage Monitoring System tells technicians what to service.
• The C and D models added NATO compatibility and air refueling; the E and F models carry 40 percent more internal fuel, an F414G engine and the Raven ES-05 AESA radar.
• A 1995 marketing venture with British Aerospace was followed by bribery investigations tied to sales in South Africa, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary; only one individual, in Austria, was successfully prosecuted.
• Brazil partnered with Embraer to assemble its Gripens locally, and more than 280 have been delivered worldwide.
• In May 2025 a Gripen E flew three sorties controlled by an AI model named Centaur, demonstrating beyond visual range combat.

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Sprint grew from two roots: the Brown Telephone Company, founded by Cleyson Brown in 1899 around Abilene, Kansas, which became United Telecommunications, and the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose trackside telegraph lines grew into a private microwave relay network. In the 1970s Southern Pacific's communications division fought AT&T in antitrust suits and at the FCC for the right to sell spare long-distance capacity, and an internal naming contest produced Sprint, an acronym built from the railroad's name. In the 1980s United Telecommunications acquired the long-distance business, and under Paul Henson it built the first major nationwide fiber optic network, which was highly profitable by 1989.

In 1995 Sprint launched the first commercial all-digital PCS network in the U.S., starting around Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and partnered with Comcast, Cox and TCI on bundled TV, phone and wireless service. The Justice Department and the European Union blocked a $129 billion merger with MCI WorldCom in 1999. In 2005 Sprint paid $35 billion for Nextel, whose iDEN push-to-talk network could not interoperate with Sprint's CDMA network, and in 2008 wrote down $29.7 billion of the deal. For 4G it bet on WiMAX through Clearwire, then abandoned it by 2011 to build an LTE network from scratch.

• Hybrid PowerSource phones packed both CDMA and iDEN radios and had poor battery life.
• Nextel executives left soon after the merger, and Sprint spent billions more buying out regional affiliates that threatened lawsuits.
• SoftBank bought 70 percent and then 80 percent of Sprint for over $20 billion in 2012 and 2013, largely for Clearwire's 2.5 GHz mid-band spectrum.
• Under CEO Marcelo Claure, Sprint opened stores in RadioShack locations, bought 33 percent of Jay-Z's Tidal, sold a windowsill Magic Box booster and hired Verizon's Can You Hear Me Now actor Paul Marcarelli.
• The $26.5 billion T-Mobile merger closed in April 2020, and the Sprint brand was discontinued by August 2020.

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In the 1970s Singapore's main airport at Paya Lebar, opened in 1955 to replace Kallang, grew from about 300,000 passengers to 4 million by 1975. A 1972 plan for a second runway there stalled after the 1973 oil crisis, and planners saw that expansion would trap the airport inside the city with jets over homes. In 1975 the government chose a former military air base at Changi on the island's eastern tip, sending flight paths over the sea. Changi opened on July 1, 1981, when Singapore Airlines Flight 101 from Kuala Lumpur landed at 7:10 a.m. with 140 passengers, and it handled over 12 million passengers in its first year. Terminals followed in 1990, 2008 and 2017, and ground was broken for Terminal 5 in May 2025.

Jewel, a 1.7 billion Singapore dollar complex built over Terminal 1's old parking lot in 2019, holds the 40-meter Rain Vortex, the world's tallest indoor waterfall, and is open to the public, not just passengers. In 2025 Changi handled nearly 70 million passengers and 2.08 million tons of air freight, much of it semiconductors and AI hardware, with FedEx Express using it as a principal hub. Traffic fell to 3 million in 2021; Terminals 2 and 4 closed, and Terminal 2 received a three-and-a-half-year rebuild with a 14-meter digital display called the Wonderfall before travel returned.

• In March 1991 four hijackers seized Singapore Airlines Flight 117, an Airbus A310; after a standoff of more than eight hours, commandos killed all four with no passenger or crew casualties.
• In November 2010 Qantas Flight 32, an A380 with 469 people aboard, suffered an uncontained engine failure after leaving Changi and returned with everyone surviving.
• Severed control cables left one QF32 engine running after landing, and crews poured water into it for three hours to shut it down.
• A May 2017 fire in the Terminal 2 departure hall forced an evacuation and the diversion of 40 flights to Terminal 3.
• Auxiliary police forces Certis and AETOS handle armed security, and three airside fire stations and a sea rescue base cover emergencies.

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Shake Shack began in 2001 as a hot dog cart supporting the I Heart Taxi art exhibit in a run-down Madison Square Park, set up by Randy Garutti, director of operations for Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group, and prepped in the kitchen of Eleven Madison Park. After three summers, Meyer won a city bid in 2004 for a permanent kiosk serving burgers, fries and frozen custard shakes. That one kiosk eventually averaged $4 million a year, roughly double a typical U.S. McDonald's. Expansion around 2010 went to places such as Lincoln Road in Miami Beach and a rundown Upper East Side block, and international stores opened in Dubai and Kuwait in 2011.

The 2015 IPO priced shares at $21; they jumped 123 percent on the first day to $47 and later hit $90, and the company set a goal of 450 stores. Culinary director Mark Rosati ran scarcity launches, testing the Chicken Shack only in Brooklyn in 2015 and selling tickets a week ahead for a 2018 burger collaboration with Brooklyn restaurant Emily. In 2020 Shake Shack received a $10 million Paycheck Protection Program loan through a per-location rule, and Garutti returned it. Union Square Hospitality Group kept between $11 million and $27 million, though Meyer had said on a podcast that it would be irresponsible for large, well-funded companies to take PPP money.

• A location in Sandy, Utah, was built inside a 90-year-old historic school building.
• A store in Israel, announced before October 7, 2023, opened in February 2024 and drew boycotts during the Gaza war.
• Shake Shack adopted the Better Chicken Commitment in 2016, and in 2025 reported zero percent compliance on its genetic and slaughter requirements.
• In June 2020 NYPD unions claimed officers' milkshakes had been poisoned with bleach; police found no criminality, and the cause was likely residual cleaning solution in the machine.
• Expansion has reached Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, with Brazil and Hawaii targeted by 2027.

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Kintaro Hattori began a clock shop apprenticeship in Tokyo at 13 in the 1870s, working at the Kobayashi, Kameda and Sakata shops. In 1881, at 21, he opened K. Hattori, and in 1885 he bypassed domestic wholesalers to buy directly from foreign trading firms in the Yokohama settlement, gaining imported watches and machinery few rivals could get. After moving to Ginza, he became director of the Tokyo Clockmaker and Watchmaker Association at 31 and in 1892 began making clocks as Seikosha, the House of Exquisite Workmanship. A 16-meter clock tower and the Timekeeper pocket watch followed in 1895, and the Laurel, Japan's first wristwatch, in 1913. In 1924 the company dropped the planned brand Glory because it sounded like gorori, a word for tumbling, and chose Seiko, a homophone for exquisite and for success.

Japanese government railways adopted Seiko pocket watches in 1929, and Seiko House Ginza was completed in 1932. After World War II, watchmaking was split between two rival factories, Daini Seikosha and Suwa Seikosha, which competed to out-engineer each other. Seiko entered the observatory chronometer competitions in Neuchâtel and Geneva and took first place overall in Geneva in 1968. On Christmas Day 1969 it released the Astron, the first commercially available quartz wristwatch, its crystal vibrating 32,768 times a second, setting off what Swiss watchmakers call the quartz crisis. The same year it launched an automatic chronograph with a vertical clutch.

• The Astron was priced like a midsize car when it launched.
• The vertical clutch starts the stopwatch by dropping one friction plate onto another, avoiding the jumping seconds hand of side-meshing gears.
• Seiko and Rolex are described as the only fully vertically integrated watchmakers; Seiko grows its own quartz crystals and smelts its own mainspring alloys.
• Spring Drive, introduced in 1999, uses a mainspring to spin a glide wheel that powers a quartz circuit, which brakes the wheel electromagnetically to eight revolutions per second.
• The Spring Drive caliber 9RB2 set a record of plus or minus 20 seconds a year, and Seiko times the World Athletics Championships.

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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.