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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.

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USS Wisconsin, BB-64, was an Iowa-class battleship authorized in 1938 and commissioned in April 1944, the highest-numbered U.S. battleship ever built. She was 887 feet long, displaced over 57,000 tons fully loaded, carried nine 16-inch guns and made 32.5 knots from eight boilers and four geared turbines producing 212,000 shaft horsepower. That speed let her escort fast carriers, and in late 1944 she screened Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet. Typhoon Cobra in December 1944 sank three destroyers, while Wisconsin reported no structural damage and two injured sailors. In July 1945 she shelled Japan's home islands, and one raid of over 1,000 shells cut a copper plant's output from 40,000 to 1,500 tons a month. Mothballed in 1948, she was recommissioned in 1951 for Korea, where she served for a time as Seventh Fleet flagship.

Off Songjin in March 1952 a North Korean 155 mm battery scored her first combat hit, injuring three sailors, and she answered with a full nine-gun salvo. In May 1956 she collided with the destroyer USS Eaton in fog off the Virginia Capes, and a 68-foot, 120-ton bow from the unfinished USS Kentucky was grafted on in 16 days. Decommissioned in 1958, she returned in the 1980s with Tomahawk and Harpoon launchers, Phalanx guns and RQ-2 Pioneer drones. In Desert Storm she served as Tomahawk strike commander and fired 24 Tomahawks in the first two days. Off Faylaka Island in February 1991, Iraqi troops waved white flags at her spotter drone, the first recorded surrender to an unmanned aircraft. She was decommissioned that September and now sits at Nauticus in Norfolk.

• Her propellers were each roughly the size of a two-story house, and the Bureau of Ships thought she might reach 34 knots running light.
• After her nine-gun reply off Songjin, the escorting destroyer USS Buck signaled two words: temper, temper.
• Her 1958 decommissioning left the U.S. Navy with no active battleship for the first time since 1895.
• The Pioneer drones, loud like a two-stroke engine, were flown low on purpose so Iraqi troops would hear them after the Missouri's bombardment.
• The 2006 National Defense Authorization Act required her to be kept ready for reactivation even as a museum, until the Navy fully transferred her to Norfolk in 2009.

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The A12 Matilda II was a British infantry tank built for a doctrine shaped by the First World War. Thinkers such as Percy Hobart and Basil Liddell Hart split British tanks into fast cruiser tanks and slow infantry tanks that would walk alongside foot soldiers, crush wire and take enemy fire. Specified in 1936 after the two-man Matilda I proved too small, the Matilda II carried frontal armor up to 78 mm, roughly double that of early Panzer IIIs and IVs, and a 40 mm two-pounder gun in a three-man cast turret. To move 27 tons, designers bolted in two six-cylinder AEC or Leyland London bus diesels linked to one shaft, feeding a Wilson epicyclic gearbox shifted by compressed air. It managed about 15 mph on roads and 6 mph off them. When war began in September 1939, Britain had only two in service, partly because the cast nose came out too thick and had to be ground down by hand.

In May 1940 at Arras, 16 Matilda IIs broke into the rear of the German 7th Panzer Division as 37 mm shells bounced off, and Erwin Rommel had 88 mm anti-aircraft guns lowered to fire at them. In Operation Compass in 1940 and 1941 the tank earned the name Queen of the Desert against Italian tankettes and M11/39s. Then the Afrika Korps arrived with 88s, PaK 38s and PaK 40s, the twin engines and hidden springs choked on sand, and the two-pounder had no useful high-explosive round. A 54-inch turret ring left no room for a bigger gun, and by El Alamein in October 1942 the Valentine had replaced it. Australia received more than 400 and fought them in New Guinea, Bougainville and Borneo, where slow speed mattered little and armor mattered most.

• The bell crank suspension tucked its springs inside the hull behind armored skirts, which later trapped desert sand.
• Australian close support versions carried a 3-inch howitzer to fire high-explosive shells at Japanese bunkers.
• The Matilda Frog replaced the gun with a flamethrower fed by an 80-gallon fuel tank inside the turret and could reach 90 yards.
• The Matilda Hedgehog mounted a seven-tube naval anti-submarine mortar firing 65-pound bombs, aimed by pointing the whole tank, and the turret had to turn before the fifth tube fired.
• It was the only British tank in service from the first day of World War II to the last.

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The USS Enterprise, hull number CVN-65, was the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Its keel was laid at Newport News in 1958 and it was commissioned in 1961: 1,123 feet long and driven by eight Westinghouse A2W reactors, because the Navy scaled up smaller submarine reactors for a ship no one had powered before. The final cost of $451.3 million forced the Navy to cancel the five sister ships it had planned, and the carrier went to sea without its Terrier surface-to-air missile launchers. It relied instead on speed above 33 knots, unlimited range and up to 90 aircraft. In October 1962 it joined the Cuban Missile Crisis blockade, in 1964 it led Operation Sea Orbit, the first all-nuclear task force to sail around the world without refueling, and in December 1965 it became the first nuclear-powered ship in combat, launching a record 165 strike sorties in one day.

On January 14, 1969, near Hawaii, exhaust from a jet-starting Huffer cooked off a Zuni rocket on an F-4 Phantom, setting off a fire that killed 27 sailors, injured more than 300 and destroyed 15 aircraft; the armored flight deck pushed the blasts up and out, away from the reactors. On September 11, 2001, the homeward-bound carrier turned around without waiting for orders, and its aircraft later dropped 800,000 pounds of ordnance in Afghanistan. In 2011 executive officer Captain Owen Honors was relieved over crew videos with profanity and anti-gay slurs made in 2006 and 2007. The ship was deactivated in 2012 and decommissioned in 2017. Museum requests were denied, and dismantling its neutron-activated structure is expected to cost over a billion dollars and run to about 2030.

• The SCANFAR phased array radar gave the island its boxy look, but its vacuum tubes ran hot, drew heavy power and kept burning out.
• In 1983 Captain Robert J. Kelly ran the carrier aground on a San Francisco Bay sandbar with actor George Takei on the bridge, and Kelly later became a four-star admiral.
• In 1985 the ship hit Bishop Rock on Cortez Bank, tearing a 100-foot gash and wrecking a propeller for $17 million in damage, and that captain was relieved of command.
• In early 2026 a glitch on a government website forced the reopening of a $536 million dismantling contract in Mobile, Alabama.
• More than 35,000 pounds of uncontaminated CVN-65 steel is going into the new Ford-class carrier that will be named USS Enterprise, CVN-80.

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The British Centurion was drafted in 1943 as a heavy cruiser tank able to take hits from German 88mm guns, and it reached Europe in May 1945, just after the war there ended. The Directorate of Tank Design under Sir Claude Gibb was first bound by the 10-foot-8-inch British railway loading gauge until the War Office lifted the width limit and let weight rise to 50 long tons. Designers replaced Christie suspension with Horstmann bogies bolted outside the hull, which crews could swap after mine damage, and added a fully automatic gun stabilizer so gunners could fire accurately on the move. The gun grew from a 17-pounder to a 20-pounder and then the 105mm L7, driven by a 650-horsepower Rolls-Royce Meteor. A Centurion cost about £35,000 in 1950 and £38,000 by 1952, and the stabilizer's gyroscope accounted for only about £100.

In Korea, the 8th King's Royal Irish Hussars parked their Mark IIIs on straw and ran the engines every half hour through freezing nights, then covered the 29th Brigade's withdrawal at the Imjin River in 1951. U.S. General John O'Daniel concluded that anywhere a tank could go was now tank country. In 1973 about 125 Israeli Centurions, rebuilt as the diesel-powered Sho't, held the Valley of Tears on the Golan Heights against roughly 500 Syrian T-55s and T-62s. The strangest record belongs to Australian Army hull 169041. In 1953, during Operation Totem One at Emu Field, it sat fueled, loaded and idling 500 yards from a 9.1-kiloton nuclear blast that shoved it back five feet, sandblasted its optics and blew off its side plates. The engine ran until the fuel was gone, and three days later the tank was driven away.

• The atomic tank was decontaminated, returned to service and later fought in Vietnam, where an RPG hit injured its crew but left it battle-worthy.
• Australian crews in Vietnam from 1968 removed the armored side skirts so mud and vines would not jam the tracks, and fought at Coral-Balmoral.
• Australian logbooks show Meteor engines rebuilt and moved between hulls, one engine serving several tanks for over eight years.
• Diesel's higher flash point made the Sho't less likely to burn after a hit than petrol-engined Centurions.
• South Africa's Olifant tanks and Israeli heavy armored personnel carriers are built on the Centurion chassis.

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USS Missouri, BB-63, was an Iowa-class fast battleship ordered in 1940 and commissioned in 1944, the last battleship commissioned by the United States. More than 887 feet long and over 57,000 tons fully loaded, she had more than 200,000 shaft horsepower, up to 19.5 inches of armor on her turret faces, a 32.5-knot top speed and a narrow beam to fit the Panama Canal locks. Her nine 16-inch guns fired 2,000-pound shells. She screened carriers as an anti-aircraft platform and bombarded Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On April 11, 1945, a kamikaze hit just below her main deck and caused only superficial damage. On September 2, 1945, Japan signed the instrument of surrender aboard her in Tokyo Bay, anchored near where Commodore Matthew Perry anchored in 1853, with Perry's flag displayed under glass.

President Harry Truman, a Missourian whose daughter Margaret christened the ship, kept her active while her sisters went to reserve. In 1946 she carried a Turkish ambassador's remains to Istanbul amid Soviet pressure on the Turkish Straits. On January 17, 1950, Captain William Brown ran her aground in Chesapeake Bay, and freeing her took two weeks. Five months later the Korean War began; she was the first U.S. battleship in Korean waters and earned five battle stars before going to the mothball fleet in Bremerton, Washington, in 1955. Reactivated in 1984 with Tomahawk, Harpoon and Phalanx systems, she fired nearly 30 Tomahawks and her 16-inch guns in the 1991 Gulf War, then was decommissioned in 1992 and moved to Pearl Harbor as a museum in 1998.

• In Korea she fired on trains as they left coastal tunnels and shelled Samchok as a diversion from the Inchon landings.
• In 1989 Cher filmed the video for If I Could Turn Back Time on her deck, a public relations problem for the Navy.
• In the Gulf, HMS Gloucester shot down an Iraqi Silkworm missile tracking toward her with a Sea Dart.
• A Phalanx on a nearby U.S. frigate locked onto her chaff and hit her with depleted uranium rounds; no one was killed.
• At Pearl Harbor her bow points toward the USS Arizona, and her superstructure blocks the Arizona from view on the surrender deck.

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Project 1144 Orlan, known by NATO as the Kirov class, are the largest surface combatants in service apart from aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships, displacing about 28,000 tons fully loaded. First conceived to hunt submarines, the design shifted to attacking U.S. carrier strike groups with 20 P-700 Granit anti-ship missiles in silos below deck. Air defense came in layers: 96 S-300F long-range missiles, Osa-MA or Kinzhal point defense systems, and AK-630 Gatling guns or Kortik gun and missile mounts. Propulsion paired two nuclear reactors with two oil-fired steam boilers as a backup, producing up to 140,000 shaft horsepower and 32 knots. The transcript credits these ships with prompting the U.S. Navy to bring its World War II Iowa-class battleships out of retirement in the 1980s.

Five were planned and four finished; the fifth, to be named Kuznetsov, was canceled in 1990. Kirov, Frunze, Kalinin and Yuri Andropov were renamed in 1992 as Admiral Ushakov, Admiral Lazarev, Admiral Nakhimov and Pyotr Velikiy. Admiral Ushakov suffered a reactor accident in the Mediterranean in 1990 and was placed in reserve for lack of repair money. In March 2004 navy commander Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov said Pyotr Velikiy's reactor could explode "at any moment," and the ship spent a month in port while its crew lost a third of their pay. Scrapping of Ushakov and Lazarev began in 2021 because removing their spent fuel was costly and dangerous. Admiral Nakhimov, mothballed in 1999, went to the Sevmash shipyard for a long, delayed rebuild.

• The lead ship was laid down in 1974 and commissioned in 1980.
• Nakhimov's refit adds 174 vertical launch tubes, 80 for anti-surface and 94 for anti-air weapons.
• Its new weapons include S-400 missiles and up to 60 Zircon hypersonic anti-ship missiles with a range of at least 620 miles.
• At hypersonic speed a plasma sheath forms around the missile and can absorb radar waves, making it hard to track.
• Delivery slipped from 2022 to 2023 and 2024, and Pyotr Velikiy is slated for the same refit once Nakhimov is done.

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The Mall of America sits on the 78-acre site of Metropolitan Stadium, the old home of the Minnesota Vikings and Twins, demolished in 1985. Its original pitch included an indoor lake with six-foot surfing waves and submarines. Today it covers 5.6 million square feet and draws about 32 million visitors a year. A red seat high on a wall marks Harmon Killebrew's 520-foot home run of 1967, and floor plaques mark the old home plate and 50-yard line. Architect Jon Jerde split the building into neighborhoods, East Broadway, West Market, North Garden and South Avenue. The retail corridors have no central heating: skylights, lighting, equipment and people keep them near 70 degrees. Ownership began as a venture of the Ghermezian family's Triple Five Group, Simon Property Group and TIAA, which held 55 percent. In 1999 Simon secretly bought TIAA's 27.5 percent stake.

In 2003 U.S. District Judge Paul A. Magnuson heard recordings showing Simon hid the talks, called its conduct "boorish" and "the worst kind of self-dealing and subterfuge," and ordered the stake sold to Triple Five for $81.4 million; by 2006 Triple Five bought out Simon for $1 billion. After the 2000 Mardi Gras event, Fat Tuesday lost its liquor license, and in 2002 three Gators patrons were hospitalized after taking GHB. Triple Five banned smoking in 2004, and Knott's Camp Snoopy became Nickelodeon Universe in 2008. COVID-19 closed the mall for 12 weeks, the mall sued Hard Rock Cafe for over half a million dollars and locked out its staff, and Transformco held the shuttered Sears space on a lease of $10 a year, a fight that reached the U.S. Supreme Court twice.

• The mall employs behavior detection officers trained in Israel and in summer 2024 added facial recognition at its entrances.
• During Black Lives Matter protests in 2014 and 2015, thousands filled the rotunda and the mall sought restraining orders against organizers.
• In April 2019 a 24-year-old man threw a five-year-old boy from a third-floor balcony; the boy survived and the attacker got 19 years.
• In October 2026 the FBI arrested an 18-year-old from Richfield accused of plotting a shooting at a Hmong arts celebration in the mall.
• The indoor theme park floor rises and falls 15 feet between its high and low points.