National / Federal News
A referendum at the pump, a raid at Hormuz
World & Security
The United States conducted what an official described as defensive strikes on Iranian targets in the Strait of Hormuz on the eve of the midterms, after President Donald Trump had said Washington would not launch new attacks before Election Day. Iranian state television reported explosions on Qeshm Island; later accounts placed blasts on Hengam and near Bandar Abbas as well. An anonymous official said the targets were Iranians using surface-to-air missiles against U.S. assets. It was a limited operation, not a return to full hostilities in a war now more than eight months old, even as a third aircraft carrier and extra troops headed for the blockade that has kept Iranian oil off the market. Vice President JD Vance, speaking before the strikes were confirmed, said he and Trump felt “pretty good” about a negotiated settlement. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, having lost his parliamentary majority last week, has been pressing for another wave of strikes after Americans vote. Trump, in a closing speech, wondered whether you could even call it a war, because “we haven’t been doing any fighting for months.” The conflict has still cost U.S. taxpayers at least $47 billion.
Hours before Americans voted, Russia fired 59 cruise missiles, ballistic and Zircon missiles, and 289 drones at Ukraine’s grid and a Kharkiv hospital, killing at least one person in Dnipro and injuring about 100 across four oblasts. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the timing “very telling,” arguing Moscow assumed Washington would be too busy counting House seats to notice. Three DTEK thermal plants stopped generating; emergency blackouts rolled through Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia and Cherkasy as winter approaches. The Kremlin confirmed three-way talks with Ukraine and the United States in Abu Dhabi on November 10–11, with Putin aide Vladimir Medinsky as Moscow’s chief negotiator. Special envoy Steve Witkoff said the agenda includes post-war security and de-escalation. The last U.S.-mediated round was in February, before the Iran war began.
Trade policy got the same mixed-message treatment. The U.S. Trade Representative said Trump will cut South Africa and Rwanda from AGOA on January 1, citing unspecified barriers and foreign-policy misalignment. South Africa is the program’s top exporter to the United States; the move follows last week’s exclusion from a G20 ministers’ meeting in Atlanta. On Election Day, Trump told Fox & Friends that annual military aid to Israel of about $4 billion would be “cut off at the end of the year”, calling it an “easy target” for Democrats such as Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Existing law funds Israel through 2028, and Israel’s Treasury reportedly had no knowledge of a joint agreement. Netanyahu has publicly mused about drawing financial aid to zero while keeping hardware sales. Trump said the quiet part at rally volume.
Markets & Economy
Voters faced the highest average gasoline price of any U.S. Election Day: $4.17 a gallon as of Monday, according to AAA, about 37 cents above the 2022 record. Diesel hit $6.28. A New York Times/Siena poll found 75 percent of likely voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of pump prices. AP-NORC polling put his overall approval at 35 percent and his economic approval at about one-quarter of adults; inflation is running at 3.7 percent annually, up from 3 percent when the second term began. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told Stephen A. Smith that blaming Joe Biden for today’s prices was “gaslighting.” Oil companies, The New York Times reported, have earned more than $130 billion in profit from the Iran war. Trump, ignoring aides, recently bragged that producers were “making a freaking fortune.”
Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted 153,074 announced U.S. job cuts in October, the worst October total since 2003 and up 175 percent from a year earlier. Cost-cutting still led at 50,437, but employers named AI-related restructuring for 31,039 cuts—the largest monthly AI total the firm has recorded this year. Technology alone shed 33,281 jobs in October, nearly six times September’s figure. Housing offered no consolation: Redfin’s median sales price slipped to $389,601 for the four weeks ending October 25, a 0.1 percent year-over-year dip, yet the typical mortgage payment rose to $2,786, up 10.7 percent, as 30-year rates sat at 7.24 percent after a three-year high of 7.4 percent. Pending sales fell 15.9 percent to the lowest level in Redfin records back to 2021. There are, the brokerage noted, hundreds of thousands more sellers than buyers.
Wall Street spent the morning pretending an earnings beat is optional. Apple posted fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $114.48 billion, up 11.7 percent, with iPhone sales of $57.58 billion, then watched the stock drop about 4 percent because CFO Kevan Parekh guided December-quarter gross margin to 45–46 percent, below estimates, blaming “unprecedented” memory-chip costs driven by the AI build-out. Tariff refunds had padded the September margin. Full-year revenue hit $478.83 billion. When every data center on Earth wants DRAM, even a 2.5 billion-device installed base has to wait in line.
Technology & Industry
If Apple is the hardware victim of the AI boom, Anthropic is the tenant writing 20-year checks for the building. A revised IPO prospectus reported nine-month revenue of $33.2 billion—up 1,206 percent year over year—and nearly $895 billion in compute commitments, with extra estimated payments that could push the tab past $1 trillion. Third-quarter revenue of nearly $17 billion rose 46 percent from the second quarter, while compute costs jumped 77 percent. An earlier read of the S-1 put first-half revenue at $16.3 billion against only $482 million of actual capital spending, beside about $321.4 billion of signed leases not yet started. Some power contracts run 20 years with uncapped fuel pass-throughs. The company warns it cannot assure investors that revenue will keep growing at all.
OpenAI hired former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll as senior counselor for national security modernization, two months after he left the Pentagon following clashes with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Sam Altman talked up “democratic AI”; Driscoll talked about cutting paperwork for people who keep the country safe. American University’s Gwanhoo Lee called it a continuation of OpenAI’s defense pivot, after a $200 million Pentagon contract and a board seat for retired Gen. Paul Nakasone. The revolving door is spinning fast enough to generate its own compute.
Google told K-12 schools that Search and AI are now a package deal. Administrators can keep Gemini and Search off unless they opt in—but they cannot turn off Gemini-powered features without losing Search entirely. Education vice president Chris Phillips told the New York Times that students at holdout schools “will not have access to search.” Districts that wanted results without AI Overviews have been informed that the 1998 internet is closed for renovation. Common Sense Media’s census found that 49 percent of U.S. children aged 9 to 12 have already used an AI chatbot or companion, including 36 percent of nine-year-olds. Only 15 percent of the younger users said they enjoyed the tools “a lot.”
Politics & Policy
Election Day arrived as a referendum on Trump’s second term that even he asked voters to treat as a personal ballot. Democrats needed a net gain of three House seats and four Senate seats to take both chambers. The map ran through Trump country: Senate fights in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas, plus House districts the president carried two years ago. AP-NORC found only 35 percent of adults approved of his handling of the presidency; about 8 in 10 voters named the economy or cost of living among their top issues. Latino adults, who helped return him in 2024, now disapprove by about 6 in 10.
The Supreme Court declined, with no noted dissent, to force California to sequester more than 20,000 mail ballots the Justice Department had flagged as possible noncitizen votes. District Judge David O. Carter had already called the demand historically unprecedented. UCLA researchers said 42 percent of the names were not on the current voter file. Prosecutors announced charges against another 12 noncitizens in California, after 28 earlier cases, in a state of 23 million registered voters. Attorney General Rob Bonta’s review: “Talk about a fizzle.” Judge Tanya Chutkan separately blocked the administration from sending more alleged-noncitizen lists to states during the midterms. The Justice Department still dispatched about 1,000 monitors to all 50 states; a judge allowed the program after the government promised plainclothes, unarmed observers with no arrest power.
Money did what money does. Federal midterm spending is projected at a record $11.9 billion, $1.7 billion above 2022 after inflation. Elon Musk led all donors with $445.6 million to Republican causes—about $483 million counting companies he controls—including more than $200 million behind Ken Paxton in Texas. California’s Proposition 40, a one-time 5 percent billionaire wealth tax, drew more than $379 million in opposition, $102 million of it from Sergey Brin. If voters wanted a cheaper election, they should have asked the people writing the checks.
Human Stories / Social Trends
The arid Southwest, which usually treats rain as a rumor, spent Election Day digging out. More than 20 trillion gallons fell on the Four Corners states and Nevada in two weeks, by a former NOAA scientist’s tally. Pagosa Springs, Colorado, watched the San Juan River hit 16.81 feet—shy of the 1911 crest that nearly erased the town—and the secretary of state arranged alternate voting for evacuated residents. Flagstaff recorded its wettest November 1 on record; Williams Singavarapu, 73, of New York, died after falling into a drainage tunnel. Tucson saw “two or three months of rain in a span of a couple of days.” On the Navajo Nation near Montezuma Creek, Utah, Ryan Benally built dirt berms around his parents’ ranch because access roads had washed out. The tribe altered five polling places. You can early-vote. You cannot early-evacuate a river.
Public health delivered two quieter tragedies. A Yakima County, Washington, resident with underlying conditions died after contracting H5N1 through exposure to infected dairy cattle—the country’s third bird-flu death, officials said, and the first this year—while a third local human case, also dairy-linked, was not severe. The CDC still puts general public risk as low. In Lewis County, New York, a child died of measles complications, the first measles-associated death in the state in more than 30 years, four weeks after Governor Kathy Hochul declared a disaster emergency. New York had 178 measles cases this year through October 24, 170 of them outside New York City. One MMR dose is 93 percent protective; two doses, 97 percent.
Between the floods, the farm, the clinic and the chatbot census, Tuesday’s America looked less like a single referendum than a stack of overdue maintenance tickets. Children who cannot yet sit for the SAT have already met the bots. Dairy workers are told to wear N95s around cows. And 75 percent of likely voters, staring at $4.17 gasoline, have already filled out the comment card on the war that was not supposed to be a war. Congress, whenever the count is certified, inherits the pile.
This daily edition uses stored reporting scoped by publication date, or arrival when publication was absent. Source collection can lag publication.