Wednesday☕️🌎

Trending:

August 25, 2026 — U.S., Dominican, Colombian, and Dutch forces carried out a coordinated drug interdiction in the central Caribbean after a U.S. SOUTHCOM aircraft detected a suspected smuggling boat and allied aircraft continuously tracked it until Dominican forces intercepted it.

Authorities detained three suspects and seized 1,390 kilograms of cocaine and 50.12 pounds of marijuana, disrupting a major trafficking shipment through the Caribbean.

Economics & Markets:

Geopolitics & Military Activity:

August 25, 2026 — Today, the U.S. announced rewards of up to $8 million for information on ISIS-K leader Sanaullah Ghafari and $10 million for senior commander Obaidullah, who helps plan attacks and manage the group’s financing network.

The move targets both ISIS-K’s operational leadership and the money supporting its attacks, with Obaidullah also linked by U.S. authorities to ISIS-K plots against American, European, and Middle Eastern targets.

Science & Technology:

Space:

August 25, 2026 — SpaceX announced a $100 billion investment to build Starbase Louisiana, a massive Starship spaceport on roughly 125,000 acres near Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish.

Planned as the world’s largest spaceport, it will include 10 launch pads, on-site rocket fuel and power production, vehicle processing, deep-water shipping and employee housing, with at least 3,000 direct jobs, construction beginning in 2027 and the first Starship launch targeted for 2029.

Statistic:

Largest public companies by trailing twelve month (TTM) revenue:

🇺🇸 Amazon: $742.77B
🇺🇸 Walmart: $725.30B
🇸🇦 Saudi Aramco: $459.04B
🇺🇸 Apple: $451.44B
🇺🇸 UnitedHealth: $449.71B
🇨🇳 Sinopec: $444.74B
🇺🇸 Alphabet (Google): $422.49B
🇺🇸 CVS Health: $407.90B
🇨🇳 PetroChina: $407.25B
🇺🇸 McKesson: $403.43B
🇺🇸 Berkshire Hathaway: $385.68B
🇩🇪 Volkswagen: $364.51B
🇯🇵 Toyota: $334.31B
🇺🇸 Cencora: $328.68B
🇺🇸 Exxon Mobil: $326.00B
🇺🇸 Microsoft: $318.27B
🇨🇳 China State Construction Engineering: $302.86B
🇺🇸 Costco: $293.58B
🇺🇸 The Cigna Group: $276.88B
🇰🇷 Samsung: $270.94B
🇬🇧 Shell: $267.34B
🇹🇼 Foxconn: $261.93B
🇺🇸 NVIDIA: $253.49B
🇺🇸 Cardinal Health: $250.73B
🇨🇭 Glencore: $247.53B

History of CVS

CVS began in 1963 as a small health-and-beauty retailer in Lowell, Massachusetts. Brothers Stanley and Sidney Goldstein, together with Ralph Hoagland, opened the first Consumer Value Stores, selling cosmetics, toiletries, and personal-care products rather than operating primarily as a pharmacy. By 1964, CVS had 17 stores, and in 1967 it opened its first locations with pharmacy departments. The company joined Melville Corporation in 1969, giving it the capital and infrastructure to expand throughout the Northeast. CVS increasingly centered its business around prescription drugs as American healthcare spending grew. By 1985, it operated roughly 400 stores, reached about 1,000 stores by 1990, and became increasingly important as both a retailer and healthcare provider. In 1996, Melville reorganized and CVS became an independent public company under CVS Corporation, beginning an aggressive period of national expansion through acquisitions.
CVS then grew by buying competitors and moving deeper into the healthcare system. It acquired Revco in 1997, adding roughly 2,500 drugstores and transforming CVS into one of America’s largest pharmacy chains. It purchased 1,268 Eckerd stores from JCPenney in 2004, while MinuteClinic was acquired in 2006, bringing walk-in medical clinics directly into CVS stores. The biggest structural change came in 2007, when CVS merged with Caremark Rx in a deal worth roughly $26 billion, creating CVS Caremark. Caremark was a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), meaning CVS could now help manage prescription-drug benefits for employers and insurers while simultaneously operating the pharmacies dispensing many of those drugs. CVS made another major strategic decision in 2014, becoming the first major U.S. pharmacy chain to stop selling cigarettes and tobacco products, sacrificing billions in potential sales while repositioning itself as a healthcare company; that year it renamed itself CVS Health. In 2015, CVS acquired Omnicare for about $12.7 billion, expanding into pharmacy services for nursing homes and long-term-care facilities, and acquired Target’s pharmacy and clinic businesses for about $1.9 billion, converting Target pharmacies into CVS Pharmacy locations.
The modern CVS became much larger than the stores carrying its name. In 2018, CVS completed its approximately $69 billion acquisition of Aetna, one of America’s largest health insurers, creating an unusually integrated healthcare company containing insurance + pharmacy benefits + pharmacies + clinics + healthcare services. CVS later expanded primary and home-based care, including the roughly $8 billion acquisition of Signify Health in 2023 and approximately $10.6 billion acquisition of Oak Street Health, which operates primary-care centers focused heavily on Medicare patients. Today, CVS Health is one of America’s largest healthcare corporations, with more than 9,000 retail pharmacy locations, major insurance operations through Aetna, pharmacy-benefit management through Caremark, clinics and primary care, specialty pharmacy, long-term-care pharmacy, and extensive digital healthcare services. It competes across different parts of its business with Walgreens, Walmart, Amazon Pharmacy, UnitedHealth/Optum, Cigna/Evernorth, Humana, and other healthcare companies. Its evolution is essentially 1963 health-and-beauty store → 1967 pharmacies → 1996 independent CVS → 1997 Revco → 2006 MinuteClinic → 2007 Caremark → 2014 CVS Health → 2018 Aetna → 2023 Signify and Oak Street → today’s vertically integrated healthcare giant. The central story of CVS is that it progressively moved up the healthcare supply chain: instead of simply filling a prescription, it increasingly participates in the insurance, benefit management, clinical care, pharmacy, and delivery systems surrounding the patient.