George Orwell's Great Legacy
David Lebedoff
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
The Night Boeing's 747 Secrets Walked Out Of A Paris Restaurant Tucked In Napkins
Picture this: Paris, late 1960s. The Cold War is anything but cold, and the air is thick with smoke from a cool, weird Citroën DS and Chanel No. 5. Joe Sutter, chief engineer of the now nearly vanished Boeing 747, is heading to a dinner meeting that feels more like a scene from a Bond movie than a business trip. His dining companions aren't airline execs or aluminum suppliers; they're a delegation of aeronautical engineers from the Soviet Union. This wasn't some back-alley deal, either. The U.S. Department of State itself had asked Boeing to trade technical information with its primary global nemesis of the time. The whole thing was a government-sanctioned summit held on the neutral ground of a Parisian restaurant. It begs the question, why on Earth would Uncle Sam ask one of its most important companies to hand over tech to the competition? The answer, it turns out, involved a high-stakes exchange, a desperate need for a rare metal, and a whole lot of vodka. Read more: These Are The Cars You'd Buy If They Were $20,000 Cheaper A Calculated Gambit The dinner in Paris wasn't about fostering international goodwill; it was born from mutual nail-biting desperation. In the late '60s, Boeing was juggling two gargantuan projects threatening to bankrupt the company. First was the 747, a moonshot-level gamble to build the world's largest passenger jet in a 28-month timeframe. The other was the doomed supersonic Boeing 2707, the United States' planned answer to the French-British Concorde and the Soviet Tu-144 transport. America's supersonic transport (SST) program had hit a massive issue with the 2707. To fly at its target speed of Mach 2.7, its airframe needed to be made of titanium to withstand the intense heat from air friction. The problem? Boeing didn't have the expertise to fabricate titanium on that scale, but guess who did? Yup, the Soviet Union. Thanks to its vast reserves and advanced space program, it was the world leader in titanium manufacturing at the time. Meanwhile, the Soviets had their own jumbo-jet-sized problem. Their initial designs of a 747-dupe were conservative, but they were particularly stumped by one thing: why Boeing mounted its engines on pylons under the wings while Soviet designs favored putting them on the rear fuselage. This was the question they brought to Paris. The stage was set for a classic quid pro quo, with Boeing's president, Thornton "T" Wilson, orchestrating the trade. Quid Pro Quo And Some Linens The dinner began with a targeted intelligence operation, as Boeing's SST expert Bob Withington grilled the Soviet engineers on the intricate art of titanium fabrication. The Soviets enthusiastically answered every question openly and in detail. With Boeing's team getting what it needed, Wilson gave Sutter a direct order to not hold anything back. What followed was an impromptu masterclass in airliner design, sketched out on cloth napkins and the tablecloth itself because no paper was handy. A critical oversight if we're being honest, but perhaps both parties thought it too on the nose to bring notebooks. Sutter explained the genius of the wing-mounted pylon design: it provided bending relief and made the engines safer and easier to maintain. As the dinner ended, the Soviet delegation carefully rolled up the inked linens, taking home a paradigm shift in aviation philosophy. The impact was obvious. The Ilyushin Il-86, the Soviets' jumbo jet, underwent a radical redesign shortly after, ditching its rear-engine layout for a four-engine underwing configuration. It did look suspiciously like a 747. It wasn't a direct copy, though — the Il-86 was ultimately ruined by its horribly inefficient, outdated engines, showing that all the know-how in the room doesn't guarantee success. However, its fundamental design was a direct result of the secrets that walked out of a Paris restaurant, tucked away in a handful of napkins. Want more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox... Read the original article on Jalopnik.
New York Times
5 hours ago
- New York Times
Zelensky Calls for ‘Lasting' Peace, and Warns of Russia's Intentions
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Sunday called for a 'lasting' peace to end the war there, and warned that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had previously seized Ukrainian land as 'a springboard for a new attack.' Mr. Zelensky made the comments on social media after he arrived in Washington ahead of planned high-stakes meetings at the White House on Monday with President Trump and several European leaders. Mr. Trump met Mr. Putin in Alaska on Friday for talks on Ukraine that ended without the cease-fire Mr. Trump had been insisting was necessary to secure a peace deal. Instead, he backed Mr. Putin's plan for a sweeping peace agreement based on Ukraine ceding territory it controls to Russia. Russia already occupies almost a fifth of Ukraine, including the entire Crimean Peninsula and large portions of an eastern region known as the Donbas. Mr. Trump told European leaders after his Alaska meeting that a peace deal could be struck quickly if Mr. Zelensky agreed to give up the rest of the Donbas. In his comments on Sunday, Mr. Zelensky appeared to subtly push back against that idea — not directly, but by describing Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine as a cautionary tale. 'We all share a strong desire to end this war quickly and reliably,' he wrote. 'And peace must be lasting. Not like it was years ago, when Ukraine was forced to give up Crimea and part of our East — part of Donbas — and Putin simply used it as a springboard for a new attack.' Mr. Zelensky said the 'so called' security guarantees that Ukraine received from Russia, the United States and Britain under a 1994 accord — in exchange for giving old Soviet nuclear weapons back to Russia — also had not worked. 'Of course, Crimea should not have been given up then, just as Ukrainians did not give up Kyiv, Odesa, or Kharkiv after 2022,' he wrote, referring to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine that year. Mr. Zelensky will meet Mr. Trump at the White House early Monday afternoon. Later in the day, they will be joined by the leaders of France, Germany, Britain and Italy, as well as the secretary general of NATO and the president of the European Union's executive arm. Mr. Trump's recent reversal on a critical negotiating point for Ukraine and Europe — obtaining a cease-fire before negotiating land or security guarantees — has left many European officials wondering whether Mr. Trump was swayed by Mr. Putin in Alaska.
Boston Globe
10 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Ukrainians fleeing Russia's attacks say the Alaska summit was an insult
'This is insane,' she said. 'Here there is war, rivers of blood, and they are making some kind of deal.' Advertisement While the much-ballyhooed summit appeared to be more a show of amiable backslapping than tough negotiating, by Saturday it had become clear that Putin and Trump had discussed proposals that would be very hard for Ukraine to swallow. In a post on social media, Trump reversed his support of Ukraine's position that a cease-fire must precede any peace negotiations. And in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, he said that he and Putin had largely agreed to a territorial swap and security guarantees to end the war. European officials said that Putin was demanding all of the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, including land still held by Ukrainian forces. Half a world away, people who had recently fled the fighting in that region for a shelter near the city of Pavlohrad said the whole summit felt like an insult. The fact that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was not invited. That Trump had treated Putin like a friend instead of a man under US sanctions, who is a wanted war criminal in Europe. That the world was now talking about Ukraine permanently giving up land to Russia for peace. Advertisement It was all too much. 'I hate Putin,' said Kateryna Chernenko, 65, who has been bedridden since a stroke about four years ago paralyzed her left side. She had been rescued Thursday, carried down from her second-floor apartment in the city of Dobropillia, which had been battered by the new Russian offensive, and brought to the shelter with her son and family friends. 'How can he do this for so long?' she said. 'Killing civilians while they sleep. This isn't war — it's murder. Trump doesn't understand — it hasn't touched him. If he had lived through this, he wouldn't say what he says.' Any land swap could involve the homes of both Chernenko and Shevchenko, who, like most people at the shelter, had fled from the Donetsk region, which makes up a large part of the Donbas. Russia now occupies almost 20 percent of Ukraine, including about three-quarters of Donetsk, almost all of the adjacent Luhansk region, and the entire Crimean Peninsula. Chernenko moved to Dobropillia when she was about 22. She was given an apartment there under the Soviet regime because of her work at a sparkling-water factory. She learned to do basic home repairs and repeatedly revamped her apartment, which stands in the shadow of a large walnut tree, most recently putting up pink wallpaper dotted with blue flowers. Advertisement She raised three sons there. Her oldest died of a brain tumor. She rarely talks to her youngest son, who moved to Russia to be near her former husband. Her middle son, Serhii Khalturin, 40, came home to care for his mother after her stroke. He bought her a modern stove, a washing machine, a TV, and a refrigerator as tall as the ceiling. Both said they would never give up their land. When asked how it felt to leave home, Khalturin gestured as if tears were rolling down his face. 'That's where my childhood was, that's where my school is. I don't want to leave,' he said. 'Everything's still there — my mother's photos, my brother's photos — old ones from the 1980s, with my mother young and beautiful.' Shevchenko had seen her life whittled away. She used to be an accountant, before moving to a village called Oleksandrivka in Donetsk. She lived in the servants' quarters of a rich professor's weekend home, taking care of the garden and the house and writing children's books. Her boyfriend — he refused to marry her, because he said she was too troublesome — owned his own ramshackle house nearby. Often, they stayed together. The professor died of natural causes. His family moved to France. The main house was bombed. Her boyfriend's house was split in two. The servants' house was destroyed. The couple moved into the summer terrace of the ruined main house, basically a covered porch, patching up holes from shrapnel. A missile hit nearby last fall, setting the forest and a nearby village aflame. The village once had 300 people. After she and her boyfriend fled, Shevchenko said, nine people remained. Advertisement If Putin wanted this land so much, and other regions such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, why did he destroy everything in his path, Shevchenko wondered. Maybe for mineral resources. Maybe to prove a point. Regardless, she said, Putin did not want peace. 'This is our land,' Shevchenko said. 'Not an inch of it can be given away. Give him just a slice and he'll say, 'I want Kharkiv, I'll take the Zaporizhzhia region.' He wants all of Ukraine and won't stop. We must not agree. We will fight to the end, because we are Ukrainians. That's the only way. We have no other choice.' This article originally appeared in
