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America Spends More On Defense R&D Than Any Other OECD Country – By A Mile

On the OECD’s yardstick – defense R&D budget allocations per $1,000 of GDP – the United States spends $3.64. The next country on the list, South Korea, spends $2.06, and nobody else clears a dollar.

Britain is third at $0.97, Germany fourth at $0.79, France fifth at $0.50. The average across the 20 countries ranked is $0.58; the median is $0.27. Greece, at the bottom, spends nine cents.

The gap is about to get wider: the Department of War’s request for fiscal 2027 is $1.5 trillion, 42% above this year’s funding.

As Visual Capitalist explains further, defense research and development is one way countries invest in future military capabilities, from advanced weapons systems to emerging technologies.

This visualization ranks selected OECD countries by defense research and development (R&D) budget allocations per $1,000 of GDP. The data comes from the OECD Economic Outlook, Volume 2026 Issue 1, with figures covering 2024 or the latest available year as of August 2026.

Defense R&D has also historically played an important role in shaping civilian technologies. Research tied to national security has helped support breakthroughs in fields such as computing, aerospace, satellites, medicine, and advanced materials. However, the link between military spending and innovation is not automatic, as secrecy can impede knowledge diffusion, among other factors.

The U.S. Leads by a Wide Margin

The United States ranked first, with defense R&D budget allocations equal to $3.64 per $1,000 of GDP. In absolute terms, the U.S. is also the world’s highest military-spending country by a wide margin, with 2025 spending totaling $954 billion and accounting for one-third of global military spending that year.

The U.S. allocation was nearly 1.8 times South Korea’s and more than 3.7 times the United Kingdom’s, which ranked second and third, respectively.

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Trump Expands His Plan to Have Data Centers Take Over Public Lands

President Trump is looking to potentially build 12 new data centers on federal public lands—something the vast majority of Americans are against, regardless of political affiliation.

The Washington Sun reported Friday that the Bureau of Land Management is considering placing centers on 17,600 acres of public land in six states: Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. Local leaders told the publication they weren’t aware of the proposal. Valar Atomics, Copia Power, Rhea Data, and Arevia Power are the companies behind the push. It’s unclear how the nearly 18,000 acres will be divvied up among the 12 proposed centers.

The BLM argues that the plans are for the greater good, brushing off environmental and aesthetic concerns while claiming that its review process will “protect natural resources while enabling responsible infrastructure development that can deliver benefits to the American people” like “expanded broadband capacity, improved electrical reliability, and support for growing technology-driven economies.”

Trump has spent months defending AI and data centers, becoming even more vocal over the last week. Others aren’t convinced.

“If there are places where communities think it is appropriate to build data centers, focus on those,” Center for Western Priorities conservation group director Aaron Weiss said. “The Trump administration needs to stop cutting the public out of public land management. The solution is more public notice and more opportunities for stakeholders to shape projects on the front end.”

This move comes as backlash against data centers hits a fever pitch.

Over 500 counties or municipalities have either restricted or entirely banned data center development this year. And according to Data Center Watch, at least 75 projects worth a collective $130 billion were interrupted in the first quarter of 2026.

“Ongoing data center build-out represents a culmination of everything that has made the U.S. economy so harshly unequal moving in right next door,” wrote The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff. “Inside its proverbial walls are local entrepreneurs, offshore middlemen, and multinational corporations that can exploit state-sanctioned tax shelters, financial engineering schemes, and regulatory arbitrage to rapidly accumulate wealth on the basis of having started off with a decent amount of it.”

Now, in the face of this obvious opposition, with midterms drawing closer by the day, Trump wants to put 12 more on public lands.

“If there were to be more [data centers], I honestly don’t know what that would even look like,” Idaho Sierra Club Director Lisa Young told the Sun. “Would that mean even more gas plants? Would that mean turning back on coal plants longer? What does that mean for our water resources? It’s honestly kind of apocalyptic to think about.”

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Since 2025, Trump Made More Stock Trades Than All 535 Congress Members Combined

President Donald Trump made nearly 30,000 stock trades since his return to office, marking a far higher volume of trades than all 535 members of Congress combined, a new Bloomberg analysis finds.

Between his inauguration in January 2025 and the end of June, Trump and his team made nearly 28,700 trades, his financial disclosures show. That amounts to roughly 80 trades per market day for nearly a year and a half.

In that period, House lawmakers reported making 19,400 stock trades, while senators reported 2,900, for a total of 22,300 transactions. A few lawmakers were responsible for a large portion of the trades, like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), who reported 8,000 transactions in that time.

Trump’s trades have been a major boon for him, as the only modern president who’s ever disclosed trading individual stocks. Previous reports have found that Trump’s 2025 trades alone were worth as much as $1.8 billion, and his trades in the first three months of 2026 were worth as much as $750 million.

These trades have come as he’s driven policy for and outright publicized companies that he has bought stock in; a recent report by Democrats on Congress’s Joint Economic Committee found that Trump has made up to $15.5 million in profits on his oil and gas holdings as the companies’ stocks have risen due to his war on Iran.

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Pentagon Releases Sixth Batch of UFO Files

The Pentagon has released a sixth batch of UFO files that includes several videos of unusual aerial anomalies, along with multiple documents featuring studies on exotic concepts like wormholes and invisibility cloaking. Posted Friday morning on the government’s new dedicated UAP transparency website, the tranche of materials follows the release of 158 records on May 8th, 64 records on May 22nd, 53 records on June 2nd, 40 records on July 10th, and 41 records on August 7th. The latest batch features 72 records containing 15 videos, 56 documents, and one audio file.

Among the videos (collected and showcased above) featured in the latest tranche are four pieces of footage, filmed by Colorado law enforcement back in 2023, showing what the witness described as a silent object that sported “red, blue, and green flashing lights.” As with previous Pentagon releases, there are also several clips captured by various military operations between the years 2022 and 2025. Much like other pieces of footage that have come to light over the summer, the videos show various difficult-to-decipher objects cruising through the sky at what appear to be significant speed. Additionally, Friday’s release includes a film of a 1952 UFO sighting in Utah that was studied by Project Blue Book.

Also contained in the new Pentagon release are a bevy of files concerning the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) aimed at researching “potential aerospace threats over a time horizon of more than 40 years.” Among them are dozens of Defense Intelligence Reference Documents, or DIRDs, produced by the program and covering such fantastic topics as invisibility cloaking, warp drive, and traversable wormholes. The audio file featured in the release is that of a 1952 presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt wherein he details “the U.S. Air Force’s reorganized investigation into unidentified flying objects.”

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The $6.7 Billion DOGE Headline Is True. It Also Leaves Out Half the Story.

Washington has discovered a government program that costs billions of dollars, and naturally, everyone is shocked.

The Government Accountability Office says federal agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in 2025. Roughly $6.7 billion of that was tied to the Trump administration’s Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed workers who agreed to leave government to remain on salary while generally no longer working.

From the GAO:

OPM does not know the actual costs of the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts, including the deferred resignation program. One of the administration’s stated principles for current workforce reduction efforts is to trim the budget topline by reducing full-time equivalent positions. To support these efforts, federal agencies used millions of workdays of paid administrative leave. To calculate long-term savings, OPM needs to know short-term costs of paid administrative leave used for these efforts. However, OPM cannot easily and accurately do this because the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts is reported with other types of general paid administrative leave. Without a mechanism to track paid administrative leave for workforce reduction efforts, federal leaders may not have the data needed to understand whether government-wide cost saving goals are being met.

You can understand why the headlines wrote themselves. Federal workers got paid billions not to work during a program associated with DOGE, which was created to cut waste and shrink government.

One national headline simply announced that the government paid workers $9.5 billion “not to work.” Another framed the program as DOGE causing the government to spend billions while supposedly saving money.

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How We Destroyed Community College Education for Generations of Students – and Why We Need a Reset

I went to an opportune lunch to talk about the 2018 disappearance of Arizona Junior College (JUCO) football for financial and funding reasons. Three hours later, I found the real story was Never Just About Football! We were talking about second chances, education, jobs, the minority students that community colleges are trying to reach – and what it might take to bring them back.

Sitting around the table were three candidates for the Maricopa County Community College District Governing Board: John Crow, running At-Large; Ryan Caracciolo, running in District 4; and Susan Winder, running in District 3. They are seeking three separate seats, but they have chosen to campaign together.

On paper, their explanation is fairly simple. Crow brings the business side, as the CEO focused on budgets, efficiency and accountability. Caracciolo brings the professional marketing side, focused on attracting students and growing enrollment. Winder brings the professional education side, with more than three decades as a longtime educator and administrator focused on what happens in the classroom and what students need to succeed.

But that is the résumé version. The lunch told a much more Human Story. We talked – a lot – about bringing back junior-college football and WHY. We talked about its cost, who should pay for it, whether private money should be involved, whether it could increase enrollment, and what measurable results would justify restoring it.

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DSA Democrats Praise This ‘Socialist Model’ – Communist Cuba’s Power Grid Collapses

The power grid in Cuba has once more failed, leaving residents of the Caribbean island in darkness.

Reuters reported on Friday that the electrical grid sustained a “total collapse” as millions were left entirely without power.

The outlet noted that the collapse of the power grid was driven by high-voltage transmission lines failing in central Cuba around 2 p.m.

Felix Estrada, an ⁠official with Cuba’s National Electrical Union, said in a statement that “protocols are now in place to begin ​the gradual restoration of the system.”

Some neighborhoods in Havana — especially those near hospitals — had their power restored by Friday evening.

But the rest of Cuba’s capital and largest city remained dark even as clouds and rain gathered.

Reuters reported that there have been at least six partial or total blackouts so far this year in Cuba.

There were three collapses in July alone.

The outlet added that many in Havana are accustomed to the grid failing, and are used to enduring many hours or even days without power.

“Yesterday I’d gone without ‌power ⁠for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed,” Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident, told Reuters.

Reuters noted that the power grid has been placed under additional strain by the U.S. oil blockade that started in January.

The Council on Foreign Relations said in a 2023 analysis that the nation’s communist regime was at its weakest point in decades — even before the most recent woes.

“Cuba’s centrally planned economy has been mired by stagnation for decades. But over the past five years, the pillars propping up the island’s already feeble economy collapsed one by one, sending it into a tailspin,” the think tank noted.

Among other factors, oil production from Venezuela declined, while Brazil and Colombia nixed arrangements under which Cuba sent medical professionals to work abroad and took most of their pay.

Cuban tourism also plummeted with COVID lockdowns.

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The Court Lets Trump Keep Third-Country Deportations, but Adds a Big Condition

Six months ago, we checked in on President Donald Trump’s fight over third-country deportations after the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave his administration breathing room while the case continued.

Trump won that round.

Friday, the judges finally ruled on the substance, and the answer is more complicated.

Related: Trump Scores Court Win as Biden-Appointed Judge’s Deportation Block Stalls

The First Circuit ruled that the government may continue removing illegal aliens to third countries, meaning countries other than their own, but DHS can’t simply put someone on a plane without meaningful notice and an opportunity to raise a fear of persecution or torture.

From Bloomberg Law:

DHS issued the guidance permitting the removals in early 2025 as part of a broader immigration enforcement push and arranged deals with third countries to accept deportees who aren’t their citizens.

“An individual’s right to contest removal to a country based on a fear of persecution in that country means little if one does not receive prior notice of the intended removal destination and a meaningful opportunity to contest that destination,” Judge Seth Aframe wrote for the unanimous panel.

The dispute matters because third-party removals have become an important tool for Trump‘s immigration enforcement program. Some countries refuse to take their own nationals back. In other cases, the administration has reached agreements allowing migrants to be sent elsewhere.

More than 25,000 people have been sent to at least 29 third countries under the policy.

The legal problem begins when the destination was never part of the migrant’s original removal proceeding.

Federal law prohibits sending someone to a country where he is likely to be tortured. Existing regulations also provide procedures for people raising fear-based claims. The First Circuit concluded that DHS’s streamlined policy didn’t provide enough opportunity to use those protections.

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Absolutely Damning Details Emerge About South Carolina Jail Where Mentally Ill White Inmate was Starved to Death, While These Questions Remain Unanswered

Damning new information has emerged about the Chesterfield County Detention Center in South Carolina where mentally ill White inmate who was in there on charges of impersonating a police officer, while several questions remain unanswered.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, a South Carolina inmate who told his family he was being intentionally starved inside the Chesterfield County Detention Center has now been ruled a homicide victim, nearly two months after jailers found his dehydrated, emaciated body on the floor of a feces-covered cell with the water shut off.

Gary Donald “Bubba” Blair, 43, was found lifeless on the floor of his E Pod cell at the Chesterfield County Detention Center on July 24. The cell was covered in inches-deep feces.

Blair also had no mattress and was completely naked. Even worse, he went from nearly 300 pounds at booking to 185 pounds at autopsy.

Blair’s official cause of death was revealed to be “profound dehydration…due to deprivation of water.” Pneumonia, a pressure ulcer on his heel consistent with lying on the floor for days, evidence he ingested toilet water, and profound weight loss were named as contributing factors.

At the center of it all was Jail Administrator Troy Ellerbe, who was accused of racist treatment toward White inmates.

Ellerbe had led the facility since early 2023 before Sheriff Cambo Streater fired him five days after Blair’s body was found. No explanation was given why.

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