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U.S. President Donald Trump awarded Boeing on Friday the contract to build the U.S. Air Force’s most sophisticated fighter jet yet, dubbed the F-47, handing the company a much-needed win. The Next Generation Air Dominance program will replace Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor with a crewed aircraft built to enter combat alongside drones. Trump, the 47th president, announced the new jet’s name, the F-47. “We’ve given an order for a lot. We can’t tell you the price,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Our allies are calling constantly,” Trump added, saying foreign sales could be an option. “They want to buy them also.” For Boeing, the win marks a reversal of fortune for a company that has struggled on both the commercial and defense sides of its business. It is a major boost for its St. Louis, Missouri, fighter jet production business. The engineering and manufacturing development contract is worth more than $20 billion. The winner will eventually receive hundreds of billions of dollars in orders over the contract’s multi-decade lifetime. Shares of Boeing rose 4% after the news. The U.S. company beat out Lockheed Martin for the deal. Lockheed’s shares fell nearly 7%. Reuters reported Boeing’s victory before the official announcement. The plane’s design remains a closely held secret, but would likely include stealth, advanced sensors, and cutting-edge engines. “Compared to the F-22, the F-47 will cost less and be more adaptable to future threatsand we will have more of the F-47s in our inventory,” said Chief of Staff of the Air Force General David Allvin. Boeing and Lockheed did not immediately respond to requests for comment. NGAD was conceived as a “family of systems” centered around a sixth-generation fighter to counter adversaries such as China and Russia. Allvin added the F-47 will have significantly longer range, more advanced stealth, and will be more sustainable and more easily supported than the F-22. Major win Boeing’s commercial operations have struggled as it attempts to get its best-selling 737 MAX jet production back up to full speed, while its defense operation has been weighed down by underperforming contracts for midair refueling tankers, drones, and training jets. “The win is a major boost for the company, which has struggled with cost overruns, schedule delays and execution on other DoD programs,” said Roman Schweizer, an analyst at TD Cowen. Cost overruns at the KC-46 mid-air refueling tanker program have surpassed $7 billion in recent years, while another fixed-price contract to upgrade two Air Force One planes has created a $2-billion loss for the top 5 U.S. defense contractor. Boeing has faced ongoing scrutiny since a series of crises including a mid-air emergency in January 2024 involving a new Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 missing four key bolts. In January, Boeing reported an $11.8-billion annual lossits largest since 2020due to problems at its major units, along with fallout from a crippling strike that shuttered production of most of its jets. Boeing has ceded ground to rival Airbus in the delivery race and entered the crosshairs of regulators and customers following a series of missteps. The Federal Aviation Administration in early 2024 imposed a production cap of 38 MAX planes per month. Lockheed, which was recently eliminated from the competition to build the Navy’s next-generation carrier-based stealth fighter, faces an uncertain future in the high-end fighter market after the loss. Billionaire and presidential adviser Elon Musk has voiced skepticism about the effectiveness of crewed high-end fighters, saying cheaper drones were a better option. While Lockheed could still protest the award to Boeing, the fact Trump announced the deal in a high-profile Oval Office press conference could reduce the possibility of a public airing of arguments against the agreement from the Bethesda, Maryland-based defense firm. Mike Stone, Reuters Additional reporting by David Shepardson.
Category:
E-Commerce
Market manipulation in the cryptocurrency world is rampantand fewer than 500 people are responsible for as much as $250 million a year in profits and over $3.2 trillion in artificial trading, according to a new study published on Cornell Universitys preprint server arXiv. Honglin Fu and colleagues at University College London have developed a tool that can track the coordination of pump-and-dump schemes, where crypto coin holders artificially inflate the price of a cryptocurrency by touting fake recommendations and generating nonexistent hype, making ordinary people intrigued enough to buy into a cryptocurrency before the owners then pull their stake and crash the price. Telegram, a popular encrypted messaging platform widely used by cryptocurrency investors, has become a favored tool for coordinating these schemes. Perseus, the tool Fu and his colleagues developed, identified more than 400 so-called masterminds that helped seed fake hype for crypto coins through millions of Telegram messages. By eavesdropping on Telegram chats where pump-and-dump schemes are discussed, then training Perseus on what happens, the team were able to identify nearly 750,000 messages organizing such scams. There is one kind of bad actor, we call a mastermind in the paper. Theyre the main distributor, you can think of them as, of the pump-and-dump method, says Fu. Then they have followers: what they do is the mastermind will distribute messages to the others, and theyll spread the message further to attract as many investors as possible. The accomplices are crucial to carrying out the scam, Fu says, because theyre the ones that convince people at scale that a cryptocurrency is worth investing in. The ease with which the scammers are able to organize their activities and bank profits is a concern to Fu, who hopes that more awareness of the way the scams work, thanks to Perseus, will help raise awareness and push an impetus to action. The crypto market is not really regulated, and it should be regulated to ensure that there are at least some safety measures for the public, Fu says. Right now, the crypto market has so many scams out there. Its like a Wild West.”
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E-Commerce
Severance is a set design wonderland. From a massive mirrored corporate monolith in New Jersey to a classical train station in upstate New York, the show’s distinctive visual languagewhich has captivated audiences and critics alikerelies on actual places that have been carefully chosen to mess with your head. These aren’t just random pretty buildings. They’re psychological weapons that connect the dots in the same way the writers weave the tapestry of the tale. Severance follows a group of humans that go through a procedure to separate their (outie) real lives from their (innie) corporate bees working for a mysterious industrial conglomerate call Lumon, effectively turning four people (Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan) into eight, each with distinct personalities and circumstances. In the same way, the show divides its architecture, confronting an inner corporate hellscape to an outside world that, in its own way, is also its own hellscape. In its second season, Severance has expanded way beyond the creepy white corridors in the severed underground floor of Lumon Industries’s of the first season. The show ventures into a more diverse architectural playground that deepens its exploration of corporate control and our fractured modern psyche. The show’s filming locations now span from New Jersey to upstate New York to Newfoundland, each chosen not just because they look cool on camera, but because of the subliminal messages their architectural features convey. [Image: Apple TV+] The Lumon headquarters The most iconic location in Severance is Lumon Industries’s headquartersa massive, imposing structure that looms over the landscape like some corporate Death Star. In reality, this architectural marvel is the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex (now known as Bell Works) in New Jersey, a building whose real-world significance perfectly aligns with its fictional role. [Image: Apple TV+] All those companies in the ’50s and ’60s, they had so much style, they had the most beautiful spaces, and they were proud of what they were doing, explains Jeremy Hindle, Severances production designer, in an interview with Variety. These corporate spaces are designed to dominate you and make sure that you know the rules. No kidding. That’s exactly what makes Severance so viscerally disturbingand so visually compelling. The architecture isn’t just pretty. It’s predatory. [Photo: Lee Beaumont/Flickr] Designed by renowned architect Eero Saarinen in 1958 and completed in the early 1960s, the Bell Labs complex stands as one of the most significant examples of mid-century corporate modernism in America. Its vast mirrored glass façade earned it the nickname “The World’s Largest Mirror” in architectural circlesa fitting metaphor for a show about reflection and duality. The building spans 2 million square feet with a central open-atrium scheme extending a quarter-mile. ca. 1987 [Photo: Gerard Garcia/Getty Images] When Saarinen designed the complex for Bell Telephone/AT&T researchers, it was conceived as a utopian workplace meant to foster community and collaboration. The central atrium was designed to encourage chance encounters between researchers from different departmentsa physical manifestation of the cross-pollination of ideas, a concept that has been reproduced in many other corporate buildings, like Pixars and, most recently, Legos new HQs.
Category:
E-Commerce
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