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The MGM-31 Pershing was a two-stage, solid-fueled theater ballistic missile, and solid fuel posed a hard problem: once lit, the motor cannot be shut off. Before engineers could solve that, the Army had to get past a memo from Defense Secretary Charles Wilson limiting it to missiles under 200 miles, a cap lifted in 1958. Army Secretary Wilber Brucker, a former Michigan governor, pushed to give the contract to Chrysler, but General John Medaris and Dr. Arthur Rudolph defended an engineering-based choice, and the Martin Company won. First called Redstone S, the missile was renamed for General John J. Pershing. Martin quality manager Phil Crosby applied a zero defects standard to a weapon carrying the W50 warhead, selectable at 60, 200 or 400 kilotons.

To end powered flight on time, the guidance computer fired explosive bolts to release the warhead while charges blew open thrust reversal ports at the front of the second stage, pushing the motor backward. Flight tests showed the empty casing still drafting behind the warhead and bumping it, so engineers added charges to blow a hole in its side. Pershing 1 replaced the Redstone's 20-vehicle convoy with a four-vehicle tracked "land train" that 14 Chinook helicopters could airlift. The 1969 Pershing 1a moved to wheeled tractors and digital computers, and 1976 upgrades let crews launch from unsurveyed sites in minutes.

• Each firing platoon used four M474 tracked vehicles: launcher, warhead carrier, computer and power unit, and a communications vehicle with an inflatable dish antenna.
• A 1961 Pegasus proposal suggested adding a third stage to put a 60-pound payload into orbit from mobile launchers in Europe.
• Pershing 1a battalions grew from 8 launchers to 36 and could use West German highways on Ford M757 tractors.
• The Automatic Reference System used north-seeking gyroscopes to find true north, and a sequential launch adapter let one station fire three missiles.
• After the 1988 INF Treaty, the last motors were static-fired at Texas's Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant in May 1991 and crushed, and West Germany destroyed its own.

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San Francisco International Airport is not in San Francisco: it sits in unincorporated San Mateo County, on what began in 1927 as Mills Field, a 150-acre experimental pasture leased from the Mills estate. The city bought the land in 1930, expanded it to about 1,100 acres, and renamed it San Francisco Airport in 1931. In 1944, with the Navy holding Treasure Island, Pan Am moved its Pacific flying boat service there, and overseas growth added "International" to the name. SFO installed one of the first U.S. jetway bridges in July 1959 and opened a 450-foot moving walkway in May 1964, then the longest in the world. Its defining problem is its parallel runways 28L and 28R, only 750 feet apart.

In the late 1990s planners proposed filling up to two square miles of the bay for runways 4,300 feet apart, offering to restore 29,000 acres of Cargill salt ponds in exchange. Environmental groups led by the Sierra Club fought the plan and it was shelved. On March 31, 2026 the FAA permanently banned side-by-side visual landings there, cutting peak arrivals from 54 an hour to 36, a 33 percent drop, with officials expecting a quarter of arrivals to run at least 30 minutes late. Unable to grow outward, SFO has rebuilt inward, from a quake-isolated international terminal to an accredited museum and therapy animals.

• The International Terminal, opened in December 2000, was built as the world's largest building on base isolators.
• Terminal 2 opened in 1954, became the international terminal in 1983, sat as offices for over a decade, and reopened as a domestic hub in 2011.
• SFO Museum began in 1980 and in 1999 became the first museum in an international airport accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
• The Wag Brigade of therapy dogs started in December 2013, joined in 2016 by LiLou, a pig with painted nails.
• Terminal 1 became the Harvey Milk Terminal, and a Terminal 3 West overhaul is slated to finish in 2029.

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Royal Caribbean was founded in Norway in 1969 by three shipping companies tied to the Skaugen, Wilhelmsen and Gotaas-Larsen names. Its key decision came in 1997, when it bought Celebrity Cruises, founded in 1988 by Greece's Chandris Group, and kept the brands separate under a holding company instead of merging them. Today the Miami-based, Liberia-incorporated group is the world's second largest cruise operator behind Carnival, with 71 ships and three brands: Royal Caribbean International, with about 27 percent of global cruise passengers in 2025; premium Celebrity Cruises, which plans at least 20 European river ships by 2031; and ultra-luxury Silversea, bought in stages in 2018 and 2020.

The group also bought into the infrastructure under its fleet. Its Holistica Destinations venture develops ports in Costa Maya, Roatán and Puerto Plata, though the Bahamas withdrew support for its Grand Lucayan resort plan in Freeport. It holds 40 percent of the Grand Bahama Shipyard, as does rival Carnival, and the two announced a joint $350 million rebuild in 2021. The pandemic brought net losses of $5.8 billion in 2020 and $5.2 billion in 2021, with revenue down to $1.5 billion. The group was back to $1.7 billion in profit by 2023, and in 2025 reported records of $17.9 billion in revenue and $4.3 billion in net income.

• The company dropped "Cruises" from its corporate name in 2020, becoming Royal Caribbean Group.
• In 2022 it bought the former Crystal Cruises ship Endeavor out of bankruptcy for $275 million and renamed it Silver Endeavor.
• In 2019 two cranes collapsed onto Oasis of the Seas in dry dock at Grand Bahama, and Hurricane Dorian later damaged the yard.
• A 2022 deal with Icon Infrastructure covered port projects including Terminal A in Miami, plus sites in Spain, Italy and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
• Celebrity's first river ships, Celebrity Compass and Celebrity Seeker, are planned for 2027 on the Rhine and the Danube.

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Qwest began in 1996 when Philip Anschutz, owner of the Southern Pacific railroad, laid an all-digital fiber optic network along his existing track, sidestepping years of right-of-way fights. When Southern Pacific merged with Union Pacific in 1997, he kept the telecom unit separate and took it public as Qwest. It bought the internet provider SuperNet, the long-distance carrier LCI and Europe's EUnet, then in 2000 completed a $48 billion hostile takeover of the Baby Bell US West, paying largely in its own stock. Its sales culture brought slamming, the practice of switching customers' long-distance service without consent: a $1.5 million FCC fine in July 2000 and a $350,000 Pennsylvania fine in 2001.

The SEC alleged that from 1999 to 2002 Qwest fraudulently recognized $3.8 billion in revenue, largely by booking one-time sales of unused dark fiber as recurring service revenue. The stock fell from over $60 in 2000 to about $1 by 2002, and market value dropped from roughly $91 billion to $1.9 billion. Former CEO Joseph Nacchio was convicted in April 2007 on 19 counts of insider trading and received a 70-month sentence. Yet in 2006, when USA Today reported that AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth had handed calling records to the NSA, Qwest was the only major carrier that had refused without a FISA warrant.

• One telemarketing tactic treated a customer's yes to a mailed brochure as authorization to switch their phone provider.
• Needing cash in 2002, Qwest sold its QwestDex Yellow Pages business to the Carlyle Group and Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe for $7 billion.
• Investors received $695 million in combined settlements, and the Justice Department later returned Nacchio's $44 million forfeiture to more than 112,000 investors.
• Nacchio claimed the NSA first approached Qwest on February 27, 2001, before 9/11, and that the company lost a government contract for refusing.
• CenturyLink agreed to buy Qwest in April 2010 for $22.4 billion including $11.8 billion of debt, and the Qwest name disappeared in 2011.

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North Korea's Lazarus Group, which defector accounts say is known internally as the 414 Liaison Office, grew from crude website attacks into a state-run operation that steals money to fund the country's missile and nuclear programs. Gifted students are tracked from childhood into a six-year pipeline at schools such as Kim Chaek University of Technology, then often sent abroad to places like Shenyang, China, where they can work on the open internet. The group splits into units: Bluenoroff, about 1,700 members focused on financial crime, and Andariel, about 1,600 focused on espionage against South Korean government, defense and economic targets. Its record runs from the 2009 Operation Troy DDoS attacks through the 2013 DarkSeoul wiper attacks on South Korean broadcasters and banks to the 2014 Sony Pictures breach.

In 2016 the group used the Bangladesh Bank's SWIFT terminal to send 35 fraudulent transfer requests to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for nearly $1 billion. About $81 million reached casinos in the Philippines and $20 million reached Sri Lanka, but the remaining $850 million was blocked because a word in one instruction was misspelled. The WannaCry ransomware worm followed in May 2017, built on the leaked NSA exploit EternalBlue. Then the group turned to cryptocurrency, draining $620 million from the Ronin network, $100 million from the Horizon Bridge, nearly $235 million from the Indian exchange WazirX, and $1.5 billion in Ethereum from Bybit in 2025.

• Researchers in Operation Blockbuster tied the Sony and Bangladesh Bank attacks together through reused code and a rare encryption algorithm.
• WannaCry infected about 200,000 computers in 150 countries in just over seven hours, yet collected only around $160,000 in ransom.
• Marcus Hutchins stopped WannaCry by registering a nonsense domain name for about $10, which flipped the malware's built-in kill switch.
• In 2023 blockchain security firms attributed 17.6 percent of all global crypto hacking losses to Lazarus, and the Bybit theft pushed Ethereum's price down more than 20 percent.
• Stolen funds are laundered through peel chains, cross-chain bridges, money mules, platforms such as Huione Pay and over-the-counter brokers.

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In 2013 a three-year-old biotech called Moderna accepted a $25 million DARPA grant to develop technology that could suppress a pandemic within 60 days. Founded in 2010 by a group including Derrick Rossi, Robert Langer and Noubar Afeyan, its name blends "modified RNA" and "modern." The idea was a platform: instead of injecting a weakened virus, inject messenger RNA that tells the body's own cells to build a harmless target protein. Under CEO Stéphane Bancel, who arrived in 2011, the company quietly raised $2 billion in venture capital by 2017. Its rare disease work stalled when Alexion ended a partnership after lipid nanoparticles built up in the liver and caused toxicity with repeated dosing. Moderna still went public on Nasdaq in 2018 at a $7.5 billion valuation, then the largest biotech IPO in history.

COVID-19 tested the platform. Moderna had FDA-approved trials by March 2020 and an emergency use authorization that December, backed by nearly $1 billion from Operation Warp Speed and a federal commitment of almost $5 billion for 300 million doses. Revenue went from $60 million in 2019 to more than $18.4 billion in 2021, then fell to just over $3.2 billion in 2024 as demand faded. Arbutus Biopharma and GSK have sued over the lipid nanoparticle delivery technology, while Moderna is suing Pfizer and BioNTech over its own mRNA patents. Its bet now is a personalized cancer vaccine built from each patient's tumor mutations.

• Moderna's first clinical COVID-19 batch arrived roughly 60 days after the virus's genetic sequence was published, matching the old DARPA target.
• 2021 brought more than $12 billion in net income for a company that had never sold a product before the pandemic.
• The FDA approved its RSV vaccine for older adults, mRESVIA, in 2024 and an mRNA flu vaccine in 2026.
• In August 2026, phase 3 results with Merck's Keytruda showed a significantly reduced risk of melanoma recurrence, and the stock jumped more than 177 percent in one day.
• The personalized vaccine sequences a patient's tumor to find neoantigens, then prints mRNA instructions so the immune system learns to hunt those mutations.

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Johnson & Johnson trademarked a red cross design for its medicinal plasters in 1905, years before Congress protected the emblem for the American Red Cross, and later sued the Red Cross in federal court over it before the two settled. The company traces to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where Robert Wood Johnson heard Joseph Lister make the case for antiseptic surgery. In 1886 he and his brothers James and Edward opened in a former wallpaper factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with 14 employees, eight of them women, making sterile surgical dressings. Pharmacist Fred Kilmer, hired in 1889, built an autoclave-based steam sterilization process, and the company mailed 85,000 copies of an antiseptic wound care manual to doctors and pharmacists. Earl Dixon invented the Band-Aid in 1920 for his wife, and Robert Wood Johnson II wrote Our Credo in 1943, ranking stockholders last among the company's responsibilities.

In 1982 seven people in the Chicago area died after taking cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules; CEO James E. Burke ordered a nationwide recall of 31 million bottles and relaunched the brand with tamper-evident seals. Later decades brought more than 40,000 lawsuits alleging its talc baby powder caused ovarian cancer and mesothelioma, internal documents suggesting the company knew of possible asbestos contamination as early as 1971, and a 2018 St. Louis verdict of $4.7 billion for 22 women and their families. J&J moved the talc claims into a subsidiary, LTL Management, and put it into Chapter 11, a Texas two-step that federal courts dismissed as a bad faith filing. In 2023 it ended talc powder sales worldwide and spun off its consumer brands as Kenvue.

• Lawsuits revealed that J&J funded studies at Holmesburg Prison in Pennsylvania, run by dermatologist Albert Kligman, in which inmates were injected with asbestos to compare its skin effects with talc.
• The induction-sealed foil under modern medicine caps is a direct result of the 1982 Tylenol poisonings, which remain unsolved.
• J&J agreed to pay up to $5 billion in opioid settlements and paid $70 million in 2011 over bribery allegations in Greece, Poland, Romania and Iraq.
• Secondary patent filings on the tuberculosis drug bedaquiline held back generics in high-burden countries until a 2023 agreement.
• The slimmed-down company now focuses on medicines such as Darzalex and medtech, buying Shockwave Medical for $13.1 billion and Abiomed for $16.6 billion.

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Titan Rain was the U.S. government's designation for a coordinated series of cyberattacks first detected in 2003 and known to have continued for at least three years. Intruders reached defense contractor networks, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Unlike the noisy malware of the time, such as the ILOVEYOU virus, the Blaster worm and SQL Slammer, the campaign was an advanced persistent threat built to stay hidden: entry through spear phishing and unpatched edge servers, data moved during business hours wrapped in ordinary HTTP traffic, lateral movement between machines and spare back doors. The U.S. government traced the attacks to Guangdong, China, and attributed them to People's Liberation Army Unit 61398. The Chinese government has consistently denied any involvement.

Alan Paller, research director of the SANS Institute, said the attackers showed "intense discipline" and that no other organization could do it if it were not a military. No classified information was reported stolen. Instead the attackers collected large volumes of unclassified data, including from the home computers of employees and contractors, which under the intelligence concept known as mosaic theory can be combined to reveal supply chains, hierarchies and human weak points. The campaign spread to the United Kingdom, where the Ministry of Defence was targeted and, in 2006, part of the House of Commons computer system was shut down; the UK said Chinese hackers had attacked its government offices. The scale of the intrusions led other nations, including Russia, to assume their own networks might be compromised.

• Network security of the era followed a castle-and-moat model that trusted traffic once it was inside the firewall.
• The attackers never encrypted drives, demanded ransom or sold stolen data, which pointed away from a criminal motive.
• Knowing who was on vacation and how a department was organized could tell attackers exactly whom to impersonate in a spear phishing email.
• The intrusions pushed governments toward internal network segmentation instead of perimeter-only defense.
• Two-factor authentication, VPN rules and zero trust architecture trace back to the lessons of Titan Rain.

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Orbitz incorporated in 2000 and launched in June 2001, built by airlines that together controlled 75 percent of the U.S. air travel market, and Nielsen NetRatings called it the biggest e-commerce launch in history. Competitors raised antitrust alarms, but the Department of Transportation and, in 2003, the Department of Justice found no evidence of price fixing, reasoning that showing fares side by side made the market more transparent. Orbitz went public in December 2003 at $26 a share, with airlines still holding 70 percent of the stock and over 90 percent of the voting power. Cendant bought it for $1.25 billion in September 2004, Blackstone bought Cendant's Travelport unit, including Orbitz, for $4.3 billion in cash in 2006, Travelport spun Orbitz off in a 2007 IPO, and Expedia bought it for $1.6 billion in 2015, days after buying Travelocity.

Behind the search box, Orbitz ran clustered servers on Red Hat Linux, Solaris and JBoss, and licensed ITA Software's QPX fare engine, written in Lisp, while pioneering complex event processing and releasing some of that code as open source. In December 2010 American Airlines, pushing its AA Direct Connect system, pulled its fares from Orbitz and posted a YouTube video mocking the site, until an Illinois court ordered the fares restored. A 2009 Senate Commerce Committee inquiry examined Orbitz passing card data to post-transaction marketers, and New Jersey sued over tickets for a Bruce Springsteen concert that did not exist; Orbitz won summary judgment under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In 2014 Orbitz and United Airlines sued 22-year-old Aktarer Zaman, founder of Skiplagged, over hidden-city ticketing, and the suit was dismissed.

• Airlines created Orbitz to bypass the fees they paid travel agents and existing computer reservation systems.
• QPX's Lisp code handled recursive algorithms well, letting Orbitz weigh millions of routing and price combinations in a fraction of a second.
• Orbitz moved its international brands onto one common technology platform handling different languages, markets and currencies.
• Hidden-city ticketing means buying a cheaper connecting fare and leaving at the layover city, carrying only a backpack.
• In 2011 Orbitz called a Media Matters boycott campaign tied to its advertising placement a smear campaign.

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The PGM-17 Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile became the core of one of the most important space launch families, whose Delta descendants retired only in 2024. Its first space work tested reentry vehicles for the Atlas missile: the Thor-Able topped the Thor core with an Able stage built around the Aerojet AJ10-40 engine taken from the Vanguard program. The first Thor-Able, flight 116 on April 23, 1958, was lost to a main engine turbopump failure, and the next two flights also failed to recover their reentry vehicles; each of the three carried a mouse, and all three died. A third stage, the Altair X-248 solid motor, was added, but in August 1958 another turbopump failure doomed the 84-pound Pioneer 0 lunar probe 73.6 seconds after launch. On August 7, 1959, a Thor-Able launched Explorer 6, the first satellite to send back pictures of Earth from orbit.

The restartable Able-Star stage, burning hypergolic propellants fed from gas-pressurized tanks, launched Transit 1B on April 13, 1960, the forerunner of satellite navigation, and GRAB-1 on June 22, 1960. Publicly a solar radiation satellite, GRAB-1 carried a classified package to detect Soviet air defense radars, making it the first successful electronic intelligence satellite. The Thor-Agena launched early Corona reconnaissance satellites from Vandenberg between June 1959 and May 1963, and to lift heavier spy satellites engineers created the Thrust Augmented Thor, with three Castor solid boosters of 53,000 pounds each, then a long-tank version holding 49,000 more pounds of propellant, which led to the Thorad-Agena and the Delta family. On June 29, 1961, an Able-Star stage that had delivered a Transit satellite exploded in orbit, the first object to unintentionally explode in space, creating at least 294 trackable pieces of debris.

• Turbopump cavitation, vapor bubbles collapsing in the liquid oxygen flow, could strip impeller blades and starve the engine of fuel.
• Hypergolic fuels ignite on contact, so the Able-Star needed no turbopumps or spark igniter to restart in orbit.
• GRAB, for Galactic Radiation and Background, flew weeks after Francis Gary Powers' U-2 was shot down and almost two months before Corona first returned film.
• The Agena's horizon sensors and cold gas thrusters held Corona cameras steady enough for high-resolution photos.
• Strapped-on solid boosters let the proven Thor core place 1,400 to 2,800 pounds into 100-nautical-mile polar orbits.