JD Vance, Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis all delivered competing postmortems on the Republicans' worst electoral drubbing in decades, and the diagnoses could not be more different. Vance published a roughly 600-word note blaming the Iran war outright — "The reason we lost is the war" — putting visible daylight between himself and the president, while Cruz called it a "blue tsunami" and DeSantis labeled it an "extinction-level event" that only Florida survived. Democrats now hold full control of Congress.
The Nasdaq composite dropped 1,421 points, or 5.5 percent, to 24,315 on Thursday — more than 10 percent off last month's record close and officially in correction territory. The trigger was the midterm blue wave: investors dumped anything with data-center exposure on fears of new regulation, with Nvidia, Broadcom and Oracle each falling about 9 percent. Consumer staples, energy, healthcare and utilities held steady, and Nasdaq futures ticked back up overnight.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro's Washington office is leading a criminal investigation into the 2022 leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, with federal prosecutors issuing grand jury subpoenas to people who worked at the Court at the time. The probe has reportedly been underway for at least a year — three years after the Court's own internal hunt interviewed nearly 100 employees and came up empty. Legal experts still question whether leaking a draft opinion is itself a federal crime.
State health officials announced Thursday that an infant in southwestern Wisconsin died of measles — the first such death there since 1990. Wisconsin has now logged 431 cases across 13 counties, the most in more than 35 years, with all but three in unvaccinated people and nine hospitalizations. The news comes just three days after New York reported its own first measles-related death in three decades.
The president met with his national security team Thursday to decide whether to restart major military operations against Iran, with senior officials saying a decision is coming soon. Central Command has finalized strike options but has not received a new directive, and the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group is steaming toward the region to join two carriers already deployed. Trump said he would "rather not destroy the rest of the country if possible, but maybe I'll have to."
Police in Denmark and the Czech Republic are investigating fresh threats to air traffic this morning, and a Romanian aircraft received a bomb threat as the hoax campaign rolls into day three. At least eleven flights were targeted across the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, with threats also aimed at Lisbon, Rome, Prague and Sofia. Every threat so far has turned out to be a hoax, with no explosive devices found in any inspection.
Negotiators met for a second day at NATO headquarters in Brussels on reconstruction funding for 2027 and Western-backed security guarantees, with the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, the EU, the World Bank and BlackRock all at the table. Meanwhile both sides pounded each other overnight, with Russia's defense ministry claiming it shot down nearly 500 Ukrainian drones. Trilateral U.S.-Russia-Ukraine talks are scheduled for November 10 and 11 in Abu Dhabi.
Tulane University students Dominic Roy and Cooper Bruce, working with anatomist Dr. Shane Tubbs, identified a pelvic muscle that had never been formally documented in anatomical literature. The team described the find as pure serendipity and is now exploring what it could mean for surgical practice and medical research. It's a reminder that after centuries of dissection, the human body still has a few secrets left.
Archaeologists have uncovered a complex of ritual purification baths adjacent to an ancient pilgrimage route by the Temple Mount, dating to the era of Jesus. The find reframes baptism — often thought of as exclusively Christian — as an outgrowth of broader ancient Jewish bathing and purification practice. The site sheds new light on how pilgrims prepared themselves before entering the Temple.
Customs officers at a Peruvian airport opened three suitcases and found more than 3,000 tarantulas hidden inside individual socks — fifteen to twenty-two socks per bag, each one holding spiders. The haul spanned multiple species at every life stage, from eggs to full adults. Two German nationals and one Polish citizen were detained.
