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Ken and Linda Rosenthal opened the Saint Louis Bread Company in Kirkwood, Missouri in 1987, after Ken spent a year learning sourdough from Roger Brunello at La Boulange in San Francisco, using $150,000 of his own money and a matching SBA loan. Au Bon Pain bought it for $23 million in 1993, renamed it Panera in 1997 everywhere except the St. Louis area, and in 1999 sold its own Au Bon Pain chain for $78 million to focus on Panera's suburban bakery-cafe model. Panera 2.0 arrived in 2014 with Fast Lane kiosks and app ordering; digital orders passed $1 billion, 26 percent of sales, by 2017, and in 2018 Panera launched its own delivery network, creating 13,000 jobs.

CEO Ron Shaich launched the Panera Cares pay-what-you-can cafes in 2010 in cities including St. Louis, Chicago, Boston and Portland, but all had closed by 2019. JAB Holding Company took Panera private for $7.5 billion in 2017, merged it with Caribou Coffee and Einstein Bros. Bagels in 2021, and the company filed confidentially to go public in 2023. In 2024 and 2025 it dropped flatbreads and grain bowls, closed fresh dough facilities in favor of par-baked frozen bread, and, according to internal documents reported by Reuters, loosened ingredient and animal welfare standards ahead of the IPO. Its Charged Lemonade, about 390 milligrams of caffeine in the 30-ounce size, was at the center of wrongful death suits over Sarah Katz and Dennis Brown, and Panera announced its phaseout in May 2024.

• A 2017 pledge declared the food menu free of artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners and preservatives.
• Panera promised 100 percent cage-free eggs by 2020 but had reached 65 percent by 2021.
• A 2018 leak exposed up to 37 million customer records, eight months after researchers warned the company.
• The ShinyHunters hack in January 2026 leaked 14 million records and led to class action lawsuits.
• In 2016 a Massachusetts employee put peanut butter on a sandwich for a customer with a severe peanut allergy, leading to a hospital stay and assault and battery claims.

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Konosuke Matsushita founded the Matsushita Electric Housewares Manufacturing Works in 1918 with a duplex lamp socket that let a home with a single ceiling socket run a light and an appliance at once. In 1927 he sold battery-powered bicycle lamps under the brand National. During World War II the company built ships, aircraft components and vacuum tubes; the Allied occupation broke up the group, which rebuilt as a keiretsu of interlocking suppliers, distributors and a bank. Matsushita's brother-in-law Toshio Iue founded Sanyo, a rival Panasonic bought in 2009. The Panasonic name was coined in 1955 because National was already trademarked in the U.S., and the parent company took the name in 2008.

Panasonic co-introduced VHS and passed Philips as the world's largest consumer electronics maker. In November 1990 it paid $6.59 billion for MCA, owner of Universal Pictures and Universal Music Group, then sold 80 percent to Seagram for $7 billion in 1995. Its Viera plasma TVs, launched in 2003, led the world but lost to cheaper LCDs; shares hit a 37-year low in November 2012, plasma ended in 2014, and LCD panel production was phased out by 2021. In 2014 it also signed with Tesla on the Nevada Gigafactory, became the exclusive battery supplier for the Model 3 by 2016, and opened a $4 billion battery plant in Kansas in July 2025.

• Panasonic sold its Tesla stake in 2021 at a large profit while staying a major battery supplier.
• Panasonic Avionics dominates in-flight entertainment and connectivity on commercial jets.
• In 2021 Panasonic paid $6.45 billion for supply chain software company Blue Yonder.
• Panasonic partnered with Denver on smart city infrastructure linking energy, transportation and housing.
• In early 2026 Panasonic handed TV manufacturing, marketing and logistics for Europe and North America to Skyworth.

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In August 2011, Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee and the investigator who named Night Dragon and Operation Aurora, revealed Operation Shady RAT, an espionage campaign that had been running since mid-2006. RAT stands for remote access tool, software that gives an attacker administrative control over a computer, including its files and keystrokes. At least 71 organizations were compromised, among them defense contractors, the United Nations, ASEAN and the governments of Canada, India, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States and Vietnam.

The list also included the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency, targeted around the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, which pointed investigators toward intelligence gathering rather than profit; reports at the time widely assumed the People's Republic of China was responsible. The way in was not costly zero-day exploits but spear phishing: carefully crafted emails sent to specific people, with attachments that installed the RAT. From that foothold, the attackers mapped internal networks, harvested credentials, escalated privileges and moved laterally to the servers holding valuable data, posing as legitimate administrators.

• The roughly five-year dwell time ran from mid-2006 until McAfee's 2011 report.
• Stolen data left in small amounts disguised as ordinary encrypted web traffic to avoid bandwidth alarms.
• Attackers researched organizational charts through open sources to make their lures look like routine internal documents.
• Infected attachments could exploit unpatched word processors or PDF readers while a decoy document opened normally.
• The case pushed defenders from perimeter security toward continuous internal monitoring and zero trust.

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On January 12, 2010, Google disclosed that it had been attacked in mid-December 2009, though forensics traced the campaign back to mid-2009. More than 34 organizations were targeted, including Adobe, Akamai, Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley and Dow Chemical. Dmitri Alperovitch of McAfee said the attackers wanted source code repositories, not financial data. They also went after the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents including artist Ai Weiwei, but saw only subject lines and creation dates for two accounts. McAfee CTO George Kurtz named the operation after the word Aurora, found in a file path in the malware.

The attackers, called the Elderwood Group by Symantec and also known as APT17 or the Beijing Group, used watering hole sites, zero-day flaws in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, and weaknesses in the Perforce source control system, with backdoors disguised as SSL traffic reaching servers in Illinois, Texas and Taiwan. Google said it might stop censoring search in China even if that meant closing its offices there, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the attacks, and a guard in Beijing removed flowers left at Google's offices, calling them an illegal flower tribute. A WikiLeaks cable cited a Chinese source saying the Politburo ordered the intrusion, while Chinese officials called the account a U.S. fabrication. Germany, Australia and France told citizens to stop using Internet Explorer, and Microsoft, aware of the flaw since September 2009, patched it on January 21, 2010.

• The Guardian reported that a senior Politburo member had searched his own name on Google and found critical articles.
• The exploit was added to Metasploit, and Websense saw criminals using it in drive-by attacks on ordinary users.
• Traffic was traced to Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Lanxiang Vocational School, both of which denied involvement.
• Some command and control servers ran on stolen Rackspace customer accounts.
• In 2022 Google released Hacking Google, a six-part YouTube documentary series that revisits the attack.

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The Colonial Pipeline carries gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from Texas refineries through the Southeast to New York, about 45 percent of the fuel used on the East Coast. On May 6, 2021, the Russia-based group DarkSide stole 100 gigabytes of data, and on May 7 it deployed ransomware. The entry point was an inactive VPN account protected by a single password with no multi-factor authentication. The attack reached information technology systems such as billing, not the pumps, but Colonial shut down the physical pipeline out of fear the hackers could move into its operational technology.

Shortages spread through Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. By May 11, 71 percent of gas stations in Charlotte were empty, and by May 14, 87 percent in Washington were dry. The national average topped $3 a gallon, the highest since 2014, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission warned people not to fill plastic bags with gasoline. Within hours of the attack Colonial paid nearly 75 bitcoin, about $4.4 million; CEO Joseph Blount called it the right thing to do for the country. DarkSide's decryption tool was so slow that Colonial's own backups did more to restore systems. Operations restarted on May 12, and on June 7 the Justice Department and FBI announced the seizure of 63.7 bitcoin, worth about $2.3 million after a crypto crash.

• American Airlines added fuel stops to long-haul flights from Charlotte to Honolulu and London.
• DarkSide said in a statement that its goal was to make money and not to create problems for society.
• A blockchain analysis found DarkSide and its affiliates had collected $90 million in bitcoin from 47 victims, with developers taking about 17 percent.
• Senate hearings revealed Homeland Security was not alerted at first and the Justice Department was not told the ransomware type or payment.
• Regulators proposed a $986,400 penalty in 2022, and Executive Order 14028 tightened federal cybersecurity standards.

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In 1923, Danish Nobel laureate August Krogh and his wife Marie, on a U.S. lecture tour, went to Toronto to meet insulin's discoverers Frederick Banting, John Macleod, Charles Best and James Collip, and won permission to produce insulin in Denmark. With Hans Christian Hagedorn and backer August Kongsted, Krogh formed the Nordisk Insulin Laboratory in 1924 under a non-profit structure. In 1925 brothers Harald and Thorvald Pedersen left to found the rival Novo Terapeutisk Laboratorium, and the two companies competed until merging in 1989. Today Novo Holdings, owned by a charitable foundation, controls the voting shares. Semaglutide, sold as Ozempic and Rybelsus for diabetes and as Wegovy for obesity, made weight-loss drugs 55 percent of revenue, and in 2024 Novo's $604 billion market value exceeded Denmark's GDP.

To scale up, Novo Holdings bought Catalent for $16.5 billion, Novo took three of its sites for $11 billion, and it spent $4.1 billion on a North Carolina plant. A $1.3 billion hypertension drug bought from KBP Biosciences failed, and Novo sued in Singapore for up to $830 million, alleging hidden trial data. The UK's ABPI suspended Novo for two years in 2023 over marketing practices, and by 2025 Judge Karen Marston had consolidated more than 2,600 suits against Novo and Eli Lilly over gastroparesis and other harms. A Senate committee found Ozempic at about $969 a month in the U.S. versus $59 in Germany. In 2025 a Trump administration deal set $245 injectables and $149 pills for Medicare, Medicaid and TrumpRx, Novo cut 9,000 jobs, and Mike Doustdar became CEO.

• Novo's logo shows the Egyptian bull deity Apis with a sun disc between its horns.
• Corporate Knights named Novo the most sustainable company in the world in 2012.
• In 2022, two thirds of Denmark's economic growth came from the pharmaceutical industry.
• A late-2025 trial found semaglutide had no significant effect on Alzheimer's-related cognitive decline.
• Novo launched the NovoCare pharmacy selling Wegovy for $499 a month and, in 2026, sued Eli Lilly for false advertising.

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Norwegian Cruise Line began in 1966, when Norwegian shipping executive Knut Kloster and Israeli businessman Ted Arison launched the car ferry Sunward between Southampton and Gibraltar. When that route failed, they moved to the Caribbean as Norwegian Caribbean Lines, and Arison left to found Carnival. Kloster bought Great Stirrup Cay, the first private cruise island, bundled airfare with cruise tickets, and in 1979 spent more than $100 million converting the SS France into the 1,035-foot SS Norway, making the ship itself the destination. NCL later fell behind with secondhand ships until Star Cruises, part of Malaysia's Genting Group, bought it in 2000 and funded the Norwegian Sky and freestyle cruising, with no assigned dinner seating or formal dress codes.

NCL completed the Pride of America from a half-built hull towed from Mississippi to Germany; it is the only major U.S.-flagged cruise ship and can sail Hawaii without the foreign stop the Passenger Vessel Services Act requires. In 2017 NCL began weekly Miami to Havana sailings, which ended in 2019. A 2003 boiler explosion in Miami crippled the Norway, which was sold as Blue Lady, beached at Alang, India in 2006 and cleared for scrapping by India's Supreme Court in 2007. After the CDC's March 14, 2020 no-sail order, NCL raised $2.2 billion, including notes at 12.25 percent, lost $4 billion, furloughed 20 percent of its workforce and doubled CEO Frank Del Rio's pay to $36.4 million.

• Leaked March 2020 emails showed managers telling sales staff to say the coronavirus could only survive in cold weather.
• Del Rio retired in 2023 and sued NCL in 2026, claiming he was forced out and denied promised consulting pay.
• Four ships ordered from Fincantieri for 2030 to 2037 will measure 227,000 gross tons and carry 5,000 passengers each.
• A 2026 Consumer Reports survey of nearly 19,000 cruisers ranked NCL last of 19 lines for satisfaction.
• NCL holds roughly 8.6 percent of the global cruise market.

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On Monday, November 24, 2014, employees at Sony Pictures Entertainment found their computers frozen by a warning from a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace. Investigators later found the attackers had been inside for at least two months, and some claimed a year. The hackers said they took more than 100 terabytes, then used a variant of the Shamoon wiper to overwrite master boot records. A November 21 email to executives from a group called God'sApostles, demanding money, went unnoticed. The leaks that followed exposed 47,000 Social Security numbers, medical information and salaries, the script for Spectre, copies of Annie, Mr. Turner and Still Alice, and talks with Marvel over Spider-Man and with Nintendo over a Mario film.

On December 16 the hackers named The Interview, the Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg comedy about a plot to kill Kim Jong-un, invoked September 11 and threatened theaters. AMC, Regal and Cinemark declined to show it and Sony canceled the release; President Obama called that a mistake, and CEO Michael Lynton said the theaters had pulled out. The FBI and NSA attributed the attack to North Korea, citing malware overlap with attacks on South Korean banks and media and IP addresses hardcoded into the malware, and the U.S. imposed sanctions. Sony then released the film in about 300 independent theaters on Christmas Day and online. Skeptics including Norse and Hector Monsegur pointed to employees laid off in May 2014; the FBI rejected that, Novetta tied the attack to the Lazarus Group, and in 2018 the Justice Department charged North Korean citizen Park Jin Hyok.

• Emails between co-chair Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin, including jokes about President Obama's film tastes, led Pascal to step down in May 2015.
• Aaron Sorkin wrote that journalists publishing the stolen emails were doing the hackers' work for them.
• North Korea denied involvement, praised the hack as a righteous deed and offered a joint probe, which the U.S. refused.
• Sony spent $15 million on immediate damages in the first quarter of 2015.
• WikiLeaks later published a searchable archive of the stolen documents over Sony's objections.

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Nikon was founded in 1917 as Nippon Kogaku Kogyo, a merger of three Japanese optical makers producing microscopes, binoculars and telescopes, and later periscopes and bomb sights for the Japanese military. The Nikkor lens name arrived in 1932 and the Nikon camera name in 1946, and early Canon cameras relied on Nikon lenses. During the Korean War, Life photographer David Douglas Duncan, introduced to Nikkor lenses by Jun Miki in Tokyo, mounted them on his Leica bodies, and the sharp, high-contrast results made Nikon's name worldwide. The 1959 Nikon F single lens reflex began three decades of dominance among professionals, and a modified, motor-driven Nikon F flew on Apollo 15 in 1971.

Loyalty to the F-mount slowed Nikon's autofocus, and after Canon launched its all-electronic EF mount in 1987, Canon's white lenses took over the sidelines in the 1990s. Nikon's D1 arrived in 1999, its first full-frame digital body, the D3, in 2007, and the 2008 D90 became the first digital SLR to shoot video. After the Nikon 1 series and the DL compacts canceled in 2017, Nikon launched the Z-mount in 2018 and bought RED Digital Cinema in April 2024. EssilorLuxottica held 18.53 percent of Nikon by March 2026, and under new CEO Yasuhiro Omura the company reported a 112.4 billion yen operating loss for fiscal 2026, driven largely by impairments tied to its 2023 purchase of German metal 3D printer maker SLM Solutions.

• Early autofocus bodies such as the F3AF were compromised by the effort to keep old manual lenses working.
• Nikon introduced Japan's first commercial stepper for chipmaking in 1980 and led lithography until about 2002, before ASML took the high end.
• In 2015 Nikon bought Optos, a British maker of ultra-wide-field retinal imaging systems.
• Nikon formed a joint venture with Essilor in 1999.
• The Z9 flagship did away with the mechanical shutter entirely.

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In 1987, telecom lawyers Morgan O'Brien and Chris Rogers and investment bankers Brian McAuley and Peter Reinheimer founded Fleet Call. Rather than bid for costly cellular spectrum, they bought 800 MHz specialized mobile radio frequencies set aside for fleet dispatch such as taxis, delivery trucks and plumbers. With Motorola they built iDEN, a TDMA digital network, and renamed the company Nextel in 1993. Because the spectrum was licensed for dispatch, the FCC required a push-to-talk function; Nextel fought the mandate, lost, and sold the feature as Direct Connect, an instant half-duplex link with no ringing. Craig McCaw invested in 1995, alongside Mark Warner and Jack Markell.

Nextel's digital signals bled into police, fire and ambulance radios sharing the 851 to 861 MHz range, and in August 2004 the FCC approved rebanding: Nextel gave up channels below 862 MHz, moved to 862 to 869 MHz behind a guard band, and received 2 GHz spectrum as compensation. Strained by rebanding costs and 3G pressure, Nextel merged with Sprint in August 2005. Sprint's CDMA network could not merge with iDEN, and in October 2005 Sprint removed WiDEN data from Nextel towers. The NASCAR Nextel Cup, which replaced Winston as title sponsor in 2004, became the Sprint Cup in 2008, and the iDEN network went dark at 12:01 a.m. on June 30, 2013.

• Nextel had the first nationwide digital cellular footprint and was the first carrier to build GPS into its phones.
• Nextel sued Verizon over push-to-talk advertising in 2003 and settled the following year.
• Sprint's rival ReadyLink ran on SIP, which could take several seconds to connect a call.
• Direct Talk let Nextel phones work off-network using frequency hopping in the unlicensed 900 MHz ISM band.
• WiDEN, supported by the Motorola i850, i860, i870 and i880, raised packet data speeds to 90 kilobits per second.