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The M777 began in 1987 as the Ultralight Field Howitzer developed by Vickers in the United Kingdom and was later taken over and largely Americanized by BAE Systems. About 70 percent of its parts are now U.S. built, with barrels made at Watervliet Arsenal in New York and final assembly in Mississippi. Extensive use of titanium brings the 155mm gun to 9,800 pounds, against 16,000 pounds for the M198 it replaced, a 41 percent cut, while a hydraulic recoil system absorbs the blast. Emplacement takes 2 minutes 10 seconds compared with over six and a half minutes for the M198, displacement 2 minutes 23 seconds, a C-130 carries two instead of one, and a helicopter can lift it by sling. Digital fire control using GPS and ring laser gyroscopes lets the gun aim as soon as it lands, and the GPS-guided M982 Excalibur round stretches range to 40 kilometers, with a 5-meter circular error probable in testing from 24 kilometers.

Canada took it into combat first, during Operation Archer in Afghanistan in 2006, where two Canadian guns hit retreating Taliban forces in the Battle of Panjwai. In 2012 Marines of the 11th Marine Regiment in Helmand fired an Excalibur 36 kilometers, the longest operational barrel artillery shot in Marine Corps history. At Firebase Bell near Makhmour, Iraq, Marines fired more than 2,000 rounds in 60 days in 2016 to support the Mosul offensive. In Ukraine, after the U.S. donated over 140 units, crews report firing up to 6,000 rounds through barrels meant to be replaced at about 2,500, and roughly a third of some 350 Western howitzers are reported offline for maintenance at any time. BAE Systems is opening plants in Sheffield and Louisville, Kentucky to build new units, titanium castings and M776 replacement barrels.

• The normal crew is eight, the minimum is five, and in an emergency three people can fire it.
• The Bofors BONUS round releases two winged submunitions that scan for vehicle engine heat and fire shaped charges into tank roofs.
• Fatal accidents occurred in training at Fort Bragg in 2011 and 2014, and a 2017 explosion in Iraq killed two soldiers.
• The Oryx blog recorded more than 100 M777s destroyed, damaged or captured in Ukraine; each gun costs $2 million to $3.7 million.
• India bought 145 for its mountain border with China, with 120 assembled locally by Mahindra Defence Systems under Make in India.

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The Titan rocket family flew 368 missions between 1959 and 2005, and it began as a weapon. The Martin Company built Titan I as a costly backup to the slow Atlas ICBM program. It burned RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen, which boiled off and could not be kept in a sealed silo, and it was steered by an underground Univac Athena computer that tracked the missile by radar and radioed commands to it. Titan II switched to hypergolic propellants, Aerozine 50 and nitrogen tetroxide, which ignite on contact and stay liquid at room temperature, so missiles could sit fueled for years. The toll came in the silos: in August 1965 a welding fire in a silo near Searcy, Arkansas killed 53 construction workers, and in 1978 a ruptured oxidizer line near Rock, Kansas forced 200 residents to evacuate and killed an Air Force staff sergeant.

In September 1980, at Titan II silo 374-7 near Damascus, Arkansas, a technician dropped an 8-pound wrench socket that fell 70 feet and punctured the missile's thin aluminum skin. Hours later the silo exploded, throwing the 740-ton launch door 200 feet into the air and ejecting a 9-megaton warhead into a ditch without detonating it. One airman died and 21 were injured. The Air Force retired all 54 Titan IIs by 1987 in favor of the solid-fuel MX Peacekeeper. By then NASA had flown 12 Titan II GLVs for the Gemini program from 1964 to 1966, every one successful. Program 624A turned the core into the Titan III for spy satellites, the Titan IIIE with a Centaur upper stage launched the Viking and Voyager missions, a Titan IV carried Cassini-Huygens in 1997, and the last Titan IVB left Vandenberg on October 19, 2005.

• Titan II's fuel tank walls were the missile's outer skin, an aluminum alloy less than a tenth of an inch thick in places.
• For Gemini, engineers removed the missile's retro rockets and swapped its inertial targeting guidance for radio ground guidance to track the astronauts' ascent.
• The Titan 23G program pulled deactivated Titan II missiles from storage, cleaned and recertified them, and launched government satellites from Vandenberg with a perfect record.
• The Titan IIIC steered its solid boosters by injecting nitrogen tetroxide into one side of the exhaust to deflect the thrust.
• The Titan IIIB with an Agena upper stage placed KH-8 Gambit reconnaissance satellites in polar orbit, and Titan rockets also launched the Vela Hotel nuclear detection satellites.

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TiVo began in 1997 as Teleworld, founded by Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay to build a home network device before pivoting to a machine that digitized, compressed and stored television on a hard drive. After Ramsay promised a first-quarter release, engineers hit March 31, 1999, a blue moon, and code-named the first DVR Blue Moon. Designer Michael Cronin and the firm Pittard Sullivan created the smiling TV-set mascot. Because the drive kept a rolling 30-minute buffer, Trick Play let viewers pause, rewind and skip ahead in live TV, Season Pass recorded whole series, and TiVo Suggestions used thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings to record shows automatically.

TiVo logged every remote key press, and the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake moment at the February 1, 2004 Super Bowl became its most replayed ever, with a spike a company representative compared to an electrocardiogram. Users were opted in to data collection by default, and TiVo worked with Nielsen to sell commercial-viewing data. It tested pop-up ads during fast-forward in 2005 and added pre-roll ads in 2019. Broadcasters' copy-once flags blocked transfers, and TiVo's lockdown of its Linux-based boxes led Richard Stallman to coin Tivoization and the Free Software Foundation to bar the practice in GPLv3.

• Rival ReplayTV offered automatic commercial skipping and internet sharing, was sued by the TV industry, and its parent company went bankrupt.
• Comcast, Verizon and Dish built basic DVRs into the set-top boxes they rented to customers.
• TiVo ended U.K. unit sales in 2003 after BSkyB's integrated decoder, returned through Virgin Media in 2010, and in late 2017 shut off its Australian service server-side.
• Bought by Rovi for $1.1 billion in 2016 and merged with Xperi in 2020, TiVo lost ground when the FCC dropped the CableCARD requirement in 2020; a 2015 redesign had turned the mascot into Blank Man.
• On October 1, 2025, TiVo was reported to have exited hardware entirely to license TiVo OS and collect fees from legacy boxes.

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In 1883 Warren S. Johnson, a professor at the Whitewater Normal School in Wisconsin, patented the first electric room thermostat, a bimetallic strip that rang a bell for the janitor in the boiler room, and later used compressed air to open valves automatically. Backed by Milwaukee investors, he formed a company in 1885. After his death in 1911 it focused on large non-residential buildings, then diversified into clocks, automotive seating, lead-acid batteries and, in 1989, a Pan Am facilities management division serving airports, military bases and government space centers.

In 1982 the company adopted a fetal protection policy that barred women from lead-exposed battery jobs unless they could prove they could not have children. The United Automobile Workers sued in 1984. Mary Craig chose surgical sterilization to keep her job, Elsie Nason was transferred to lower-paying work, and Donald Penney was denied leave to let his blood lead fall before becoming a father. In 1991 the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the policy, rejecting the company's bona fide occupational qualification defense under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

• The 2016 merger with Tyco International moved the legal headquarters to Cork, Ireland, a tax inversion projected to avoid about $150 million a year in U.S. taxes, which Hillary Clinton publicly condemned.
• Tyco's former CEO Dennis Kozlowski was convicted on more than 30 counts after using forgiven company loans, with a $6,000 shower curtain and a $2 million party in Sardinia among the spending.
• After a nine-month trial over the 1986 DuPont Plaza Hotel fire in San Juan, which killed 98, a judge issued a directed verdict clearing its energy management system.
• In 2016 it paid $14.4 million to settle SEC Foreign Corrupt Practices Act charges over a Chinese marine subsidiary that routed about $5 million through sham vendors.
• It cut its workforce 52 percent in six years after the Tyco deal, spun off automotive seating, agreed in 2024 to sell HVAC units to Bosch for $6.7 billion and was hit by ransomware in 2023.

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Berlin's Tempelhof stands on land once held by the Knights Templar and later used as a Prussian army parade ground, where French aviator Armand Zipfel and Orville Wright gave flight demonstrations in 1909. It became an airport in the 1920s, around the founding of Lufthansa. From 1934 architect Ernst Sagebiel designed a new terminal as the gateway to Albert Speer's planned Germania: an eagle-shaped limestone structure 1.2 kilometers long with a canopy roof built as a grandstand, which Norman Foster called the mother of all airports. During World War II, Weser Flugzeugbau used its halls to assemble Stuka dive bombers and Focke-Wulf fighters. In 1945 a Soviet charge ignited stored film in a three-level bunker, and the fire burned until the Soviets flooded it with the airport's own water.

In the American sector after the war, Tempelhof became the center of the 1948 Berlin Airlift. C-54 Skymasters landing every 90 seconds wrecked the Marston matting, so between July and October 1948 engineers and German volunteers built two 6,000-foot runways between landings, while pilot Gail Halvorsen dropped candy on handkerchief parachutes. By 1954 it was Europe's third busiest airport. Subsidized West Berlin flights set off a contest between BEA's 53-seat Super Silver Star Vickers Viscounts with hot meals and Pan Am's 128-seat Boeing 727s, and Pan Am took nearly 68 percent of the market within two years.

• Air France's Sud Aviation Caravelles lacked thrust reversers and could not reliably stop on the short runways, forcing a move to Tegel.
• After the 1973 oil crisis, Pan Am and British Airways followed to Tegel by 1975.
• A 2008 referendum to keep the airport open won 60.2 percent of votes cast but only about 21.7 percent of eligible voters, short of the 25 percent quorum.
• Flights ended on October 30, 2008, and three Antonov An-2 biplanes grounded by weather were allowed out weeks later.
• A 2014 referendum banned development on Tempelhofer Feld, a park that protects skylark nesting areas, and its hangars sheltered about 2,500 refugees from late 2015 to 2017.

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On June 27, 2017, radiation monitoring screens at Chernobyl went dark, Maersk's global shipping operations froze, and a chocolate factory in Tasmania stopped. The weapon descended from Petya, ransomware discovered in March 2016 that overwrote the master boot record, showed a fake CHKDSK repair screen while encrypting the master file table, and demanded Bitcoin; a May 2016 version added a fallback payload called Mischa for machines without admin rights. Its authors borrowed from the 1995 Bond film GoldenEye, selling it as Janus Cybercrime Solutions and using an avatar of the hacker Boris Grishenko.

The 2017 attack arrived through a compromised update to M.E.Doc, the standard Ukrainian tax software, whose backdoor ESET says sat dormant for at least six weeks before firing on the eve of Ukraine's Constitution Day. Police who raided M.E.Doc found servers not updated since 2013. The malware spread with EternalBlue, an exploit attributed to the NSA and leaked by the Shadow Brokers in April 2017, plus a modified Mimikatz and PsExec. Kaspersky named it NotPetya: its encryption could not be reversed, and its $300 ransom went to one fixed Bitcoin wallet with a Posteo email account that was quickly suspended.

• About 80 percent of infections were in Ukraine, hitting the National Bank, government ministries and the metro.
• Maersk reported $200 million to $300 million in lost revenue and FedEx a $400 million hit, India's JNPT port stopped, and Princeton Community Hospital in West Virginia replaced its entire network.
• The White House put global damages above $10 billion.
• Zurich American Insurance refused Mondelez's claim under an act of war exclusion; Mondelez sued for $100 million in 2018 and settled in 2022.
• The U.S., U.K. and Australia blamed the GRU's Sandworm group, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied it, and NATO's Jens Stoltenberg warned such an attack could trigger Article 5.

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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.