Two days after Democrats took back both the House and the Senate, the GOP is in full soul-searching mode, with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise warning committee chairmen to brace for a wave of investigations targeting President Trump and his allies come January. Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer's path back to majority leader isn't guaranteed — several newly elected Senate Democrats have declined to commit to him. The party that just won is already fighting over who gets to hold the gavel.
Investors dumped anything with data-center exposure today, sending the Nasdaq Composite down roughly four to five percent and more than ten percent below its October record. Nvidia, Broadcom and Oracle each shed about nine percent, while CoreWeave fell 14 percent, Nebius 17 percent and IREN 19 percent. The trigger: fears that the new Democratic majorities will throttle permitting for the AI infrastructure buildout.
Vice President JD Vance and a growing number of Republicans say the war with Iran is what cost the party its majorities, and Vance broke publicly with the White House on foreign policy and the US-Israel relationship. Trump isn't budging, insisting he's totally convinced the strike was the right call because he could not allow Tehran to get a nuclear weapon. It's the sharpest daylight between the president and his vice president yet.
California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Thursday he is converting every sentence on the nation's largest death row to life without parole, calling the state's capital punishment system fundamentally flawed and error-prone. The move effectively ends the death penalty in California years after his execution moratorium. Victims' advocates erupted, including Marc Klaas, whose daughter Polly's killer sat on that row.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard says two tankers and a tugboat caught fire in the Strait of Hormuz today, with at least one blaze triggered when a vessel struck an Iranian undersea mine. Separately, the British military reported a tanker hit by two projectiles off Qatar's coast on Wednesday. Tehran closed the waterway — about 20 percent of global oil in peacetime — back in February.
Both sides launched damaging strikes overnight even as negotiators reconvened in Brussels to hash out post-war reconstruction, 2027 funding and security guarantees. Ukraine's lead negotiator said the US, UK, France, Germany, the EU and NATO are all at the table, along with the World Bank and BlackRock. Peace talks and bombing runs, running on parallel tracks.
The US military has begun a new wave of drone strikes on cartel targets in rural Venezuela, hitting operations tied to the National Liberation Army in coordination with Venezuelan forces. It's a significant escalation of Washington's counter-cartel campaign in Latin America. Venezuela spent years as a safe haven for exactly these networks.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has spotted an object designated 2026 ED138, estimated between 370 and 930 miles across and sitting roughly 4.3 billion miles from the sun — well past Pluto. It escaped detection for so long because it was camouflaged against a dense star field near the Milky Way's plane. Follow-up observations will determine whether it formally qualifies as a dwarf planet.
The 3,200-pound gamma-ray hunting telescope reentered the atmosphere Wednesday, closing out a mission that ran more than two decades past its planned life. Swift logged over 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and some 1,400 exploding stars, plus comets, asteroids and black holes caught shredding nearby stars. Not a failure — a retirement.
A three-foot alligator strolled through an open back door at Bagel Dock Express, wandered the stockroom and kitchen, and turned up near the service counter while the owner was busy installing a new oven. Southport Police and Animal Protective Services removed it safely. The shop's Facebook verdict: "Apparently, word of our fresh bagels has made its way into the swamp."
