The United States accounted for over half of the total nuclear weapons spending in 2020. The $37.4 billion that went toward its nuclear arsenal beat the combined expenditure of the eight other nuclear powers, a new report says.

The majority of that whopping sum, roughly 5% of the country's total military spending last year, was disbursed as defense contracts to private corporations. Nearly a third, around $13.7 billion, was awarded to contractor Northrop Grumman, which is building a new intercontinental nuclear weapons system.

According to the report, titled 'Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Spending' and published on Monday by advocacy group International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), nuclear-armed countries collectively spent $72.6 billion on these weapons last year - an uptick of $1.4 billion on the previous year.

Reporters joke the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions and say "No comment' before heading to Happy Hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information about itself. They meanwhile choose to profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.

Leon Panetta, the Director CIA from 2009 to 2011 explained bluntly his CIA did influence foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to "change attitudes within the country." The method, Panetta said, was to "acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message."

The CIA has been running such information ops to influence foreign elections since the end of WWII. Richard Bissell, who ran the agency's operations during the Cold War, wrote of "exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the desired outcome in an election." A report on the CIA in Chile boasts the Agency portrayed its favored candidate in one election as a "wise, sincere and high-minded statesman" while painting his leftist opponent as a "calculating schemer." At one point in the 1980s foreign media insertions ran 80 a day.

The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, simply paying a reporter to run a story, or, as was done in Iraq, simply operating the media outlet yourself (known as the Orwellian Indigenous Media Project.) The problem is such direct action is easily exposed, destroying credibility.

The French president began a grand tour of France last week ahead of regional elections and next year's presidential vote, with the trip expected to include around a dozen stops over the next two months.

French President Emmanuel Macron received an unpleasant welcome during a tour of a village in the department of Drome, southeastern France on Tuesday, when an unidentified man slapped him in the face as he approached local residents to shake hands.

The incident was caught on camera as a bearded man wearing glasses and a face mask slapping the president hard on his left cheek. Macron's security detail immediately rushed in to detain the man, with local gendarmerie also stepping in to assist.

A Senate investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol found a broad intelligence breakdown across multiple agencies, along with widespread law enforcement and military failures that led to the violent attack.

There were clear warnings and tips that supporters of former President Donald Trump, including right-wing extremist groups, were planning to "storm the Capitol" with weapons and possibly infiltrate the tunnel system underneath the building. But that intelligence never made it up to top leadership.

The result was chaos. A Senate report released Tuesday details how officers on the front lines suffered chemical burns, brain injuries and broken bones, among other injuries, after fighting the attackers, who quickly overwhelmed them and broke into the building. Officers told the Senate investigators they were left with no leadership or direction when command systems broke down.

Another new scientific study has concluded that it is more likely than not that the COVID pandemic originated with a virus engineered inside a lab.

Dr. Stephen Quay and Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller revealed the findings in The Wall Street Journal Sunday, noting that The research points to the genome sequencing of the virus 'CGG-CGG', which is one of 36 sequencing patterns observed, but does not occur in nature.

"The most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science. COVID-19 has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus. The CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn't present in any other virus."

They also noted that the CGG-CGG combination IS commonly used in 'gain of function' research, which is known to have been used with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The scientists urge that those who believe COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans

"must explain why it happened to pick its least favorite combination: CGG-CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab's gain-of-function researchers would have made? Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact — that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers — implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape."

House progressives are getting fed up with efforts to accommodate Republican senators — and Joe Manchin. Look for them to start demanding swift action — and threatening payback.

Why it matters: The White House is under growing pressure to accede to the left's demand to bust the filibuster. That rule effectively requires the support of 10 Republicans for most measures in this 50-50 Senate, rather than the simple majority that most Democrats want.

What we're hearing: Democrats believe they have a narrow window to change voting rules at the national level, to ensure they don't get swept out of power due to Republican structural advantages.

• Many Dems believe that this moment — when they have total control of Washington — is extremely tenuous and fleeting.

One of the clearest signs of this coming confrontation is a tweet this morning by Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), a leading House progressive, who criticized Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) for announcing his opposition to a sweeping voting-rights bill passed by the House in March.

Fred Ryan, publisher of the Washington Post, contends, "Something appears to be 'simply, simply wrong' at the Biden Justice Department." Ryan objected to the methods used to gain reporters records during leak investigations, and in particular, that instead of reversing decisions of the previous administration that Ryan believes impeded upon reporters' First Amendment rights, the Biden Justice Department, under new attorney general Merrick Garland, accelerated them.

After Biden took office, the department continued to pursue subpoenas for reporters' email logs issued to Google, which operates the New York Times' email systems, and it obtained a gag order compelling a Times attorney to keep silent about the fact that federal authorities were seeking to seize his colleagues' records. Later, when the Justice Department broadened the number of those permitted to know about the effort, it barred Times executives from discussing the legal battle with the Times newsroom, including the paper's top editor.

This escalation, on Biden's watch, represents an unprecedented assault on American news organizations and their efforts to inform the public about government wrongdoing.

Last month, The Post learned of secret subpoenas authorized by President Donald Trump's outgoing attorney general to obtain email information and home, cell and office telephone records of three Post reporters over a 3½-month span in 2017. We immediately requested an explanation and answers to several questions from the Justice Department as well as a meeting with the attorney general.

To date, no answers have been provided and the meeting has yet to take place. This delay is troubling. When asked about how the president's assurances can be squared with his Justice Department's behavior, White House press secretary Jen Psaki could offer no explanation. She subsequently released a statement disavowing White House knowledge of the actions that appear to have continued for several months during Biden's presidency.

On June 1, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis became the latest governor to protect the rights of girls and women competing in athletics, by signing a bill into law — the "Fairness in Women's Sports Act" — which prohibits biological men from competing against female athletes.

Florida became the eighth state to protect female athletes from being forced to compete against biological men.

"We believe in the state of Florida, of protecting the fairness and the integrity of women's athletics," DeSantis said. "And I can tell you this in Florida, you know, girls are going to play girl's sports and boys are going play boy's sports, that's what we're doing. We're going to make sure that that's the reality. So the bill that we're doing today will ensure fairness for women athletes for years to come in the state of Florida. It says that athletic teams or sports that are designated for females are open to females. And we're going to go based off biology."

President Trump was also popular in Central America

Vice President Kamala Harris' much anticipated "foreign policy" trip to Guatemala to meet with leaders there about what can be done to stem the influx of illegal immigrants that are crossing into the U.S. from that country, got off to a bad start with Air Force 2 having to turn around because of "technical issue" and was then being greeted by pro-Trump, anti-Biden Guatemalan protestors.

"It is a technical issue. There are no major safety concerns," said Symone Sanders, spokeswoman for VP Harris.

Harris shook off the midair scare, telling reporters after she deplaned that "we all said a little prayer, but we're good."

The frustrated German foreign minister rages about being held 'hostage' by smaller, troublesome countries like Viktor Orban's. But he needs to remember why the veto exists: for democracy's sake.

The Germans, we must honestly believe, do try to rein in their exuberance for ensuring order, a treasured national characteristic that when exposed to wary foreigners can sometimes land the unfortunate Deutschlanders in die Scheiße.

But German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, speaking at this year's conference of Germany's ambassadors in Berlin (now there's a hot Zoom ticket), was clearly so incensed that any attempt to deploy such caution went out the window.