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Election results appear to have turbo-charged an already growing social, political and financial market rethink about AI

The blue wave, while a rebuke of Trump's policies, was also a referendum on the party's status quoOn election night I stood in a crowd at Harlem Tavern, a restaurant in New York City, at the electoral party for Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member and congresswoman-elect from New York's 13th congressional district. The crowd cheered as what came to be called the blunami" rolled in: Iowa blue, Kansas blue, Talarico in Texas, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, House, Senate, gubernatorial races overwhelmingly going for the Democratic party.The victories were a clear rebuke of Trump's politics, but also a referendum on the Democratic party's own centrism that is complicit in the violence of masked men hunting immigrants, the funding of a genocide and the denial of healthcare to citizens of the world's wealthiest country.Heba Gowayed is an associate professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center and author of the book Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential.

The once-bearded New York mayor has downsized his facial hair. Does it work?I've battled with facial hair almost my entire adult life.I started growing it early, turning me into a pubescent villain from a spaghetti western. I was told by my parents not to shave it off, lest it grow back more furious than before. I just had to walk around high school looking like a hungover bond trader, which did nothing for my popularity.Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist Continue reading...

President claimed to have ushered in a golden age' even as prices soared and war dragged on - and midterm voters did not buy his looking-glass narrativeA new golden age of America" is under way, Donald Trump repeatedly declared in his final pitch to voters before the US midterm elections.The war in Iran was not really a war, because we've done very little fighting", the US president stressed. The stock market had hit 88 all-time highs. They're saying," he said, that on his watch the US has become the hottest country anywhere in the world". Continue reading...

With the global tide turning against him, the US president's lame duck status could still aggravate old tensions and spark new explosionsIt was a victory for the world, too. People in the many countries that suffered pain, loss and cruel indignities at the hands of Donald Trump over the past two chaotic, fearful years celebrated a moment of glorious, shared redemption. The monster, like others of his kind, still lurks in his gilded White House lair; far-right authoritarianism still casts a dark shadow over many nations. But the power of this most destructive of presidents is shattered, his malignant spell broken. The triumphant roar of US midterm voters was a rallying cry of democratic defiance that, echoing the American revolution of 250 years ago, reverberated around the globe.For Iranians, Trump's electoral humiliation raised hopes, perhaps misplaced, that his murderous war of choice against Tehran's oppressive regime may soon cease. In Israel, many among the majority who voted for change last week will welcome the humbling of the foremost supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu's as-yet-unvanquished extremist coalition. Ukrainians voiced optimism that a Democratic-controlled Congress will curb the sickening appeasement of Vladimir Putin's Russia. In Europe, the beginning of the end of the Trump era brought a sense of relief - and hope that toxic transatlantic relations can be drained of Maga poison. Continue reading...

White says he has meeting with Trump in Washington DC on Monday, without saying whether he will accept the jobDonald Trump has offered the job of White House press secretary to Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the president said in a social media post on Saturday.Trump described White, who staged a cage-fighting spectacle at the White House to mark the president's 80th birthday in June, as a violent Fighter and Warrior", credentials unlike any ever used to describe previous press secretaries. Continue reading...

Carel Aaron Van Der Merwe immigrated to US at 14 and has been waiting seven years for asylum case to be heardA Wisconsin state patrol trooper, whom federal immigration agents detained on Thursday at an airport, has been released from their custody.Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents approached Carel Aaron Van Der Merwe, a South African national, as he waited to board a domestic flight, according to his law firm Christopher & De Leon. Continue reading...

Systems provide 360-degree view of airport operations, but concerns have been raised about the technologyThe Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced that the first digital air traffic control towers in the US are officially operational, bringing new technology first to smaller airports in Florida and Alaska as the Trump administration presses ahead with updating the country's ageing aviation infrastructure.The systems are now online at the Bartow executive airport (KBOW) in Florida and the Kenai municipal airport (PAEN) in Alaska, with five additional regional airports slated to receive the technology next. Continue reading...

Ana Reyes wants to know whether federal officials lied about extent of renovation plans at East Potomac golf courseA federal judge said on Saturday that she intended to appoint an ex-top federal prosecutor who served during Donald Trump's first term to investigate whether she was purposely misled by lawyers and administration officials over changes to a historic public golf course in Washington DC.Jessie Liu, a former US attorney for the District of Columbia, would examine whether officials with the interior department and the National Park Service and attorneys with the Department of Justice violated ethics or misled US district judge Ana Reyes during the course of the civil case that was initiated with a lawsuit in February by the DC Preservation League and two golfers. Continue reading...

After helping Trump to victory in 2024, young voters swung decisively toward Democrats, helping deliver a wave of midterm victoriesThe 2026 blue tsunami owes a lot to the youth vote.According to data from Tufts University's Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (Circle), which monitors youth civic engagement, early estimates show the second-highest youth turnout in a midterm election in 30 years, second only to 2018, when an estimated 31% of young voters turned out during Donald Trump's first presidency. Continue reading...

Voters approved two measures to save the region's financially distressed public transit agenciesVoters in the San Francisco Bay Area overwhelmingly approved two transit measures this week that advocates hope will save the region's financially distressed public transit agencies from a potential death spiral that could have had massive repercussions for the area's residents and its economy.The Regional Transit Measure (RTM), a 0.5% sales tax across four Bay Area counties and a 1% sales tax in San Francisco, will generate approximately $1bn annually to fund the region's four largest transit operators. It received a strong 62.2% support across all five counties that voted on the measure, winning with a landslide of 78.6% in San Francisco. Continue reading...

Hardline aide offers unwavering commitment' to president amid fears White House will double down on far-right immigration agendaStephen Miller, Donald Trump's most controversial aide and the architect of his sweeping immigration crackdown, has lavished praise on the president after his appointment as White House chief of staff.In his first public remarks since the move was announced, Miller - who begins the role on Monday - pledged total devotion" to Trump amid concern the administration is now poised to double down on its far-right, nativist immigration agenda. Continue reading...

Democratic socialists won the mayorship, a US House seat and powerful positions in Los Angeles - and a large network of volunteers helped them do itAs a blue tsunami overtook US politics this week, Los Angeles saw a major shake-up of its own with a wave of democratic socialists elected to key offices.Most notably, Nithya Raman, the first democratic socialist to serve on the Los Angeles city council, prevailed over incumbent Karen Bass to become the next mayor. Even in the deep blue city, Raman's victory was hardly a given, and marked a stunning win for the progressive wing of the party. With her election, America's two largest cities will now be run by democratic socialist mayors. Continue reading...

President spent weeks praising his favored candidates' physiques, from their jawlines to their shoulders - but most of his hot guys lostIt was either a last-ditch considered strategy to win votes, or the ramblings of an increasingly unhinged and increasingly amorous party leader.Either way, it didn't work. Continue reading...

The secretary of war' and his shameful history are facing bipartisan scrutinyCan you smell the schadenfreude in the air?Watching some of the worst people in the world get their comeuppance this week has been deeply satisfying. And the show isn't over yet. While the midterms have wrapped up, the blame game is only just getting started, with Republicans desperate to find scapegoats for their shellacking.Arwa Mahadwi is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Architect of Trump's far-right immigration agenda is now most powerful unelected figure in government - it suggests White House is moving to a war footingDonald Trump just gave the middle finger to millions of American voters.Any other president who suffered the kind of drubbing at the polls that Trump did this week might have felt at least a sliver of humility - and perhaps even an obligation to work with the new opposition in Congress. Continue reading...

Maga's regret voters were all-in for Trump's racism. Then they found out they couldn't afford itFor the first time in a decade, election predictions far exceeded public expectations. What pollsters anticipated as a blue wave billowed into a blue tsunami. Wins that held ground for already blue seats eased nerves, and the flips of swing states like Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio energized the blue base. But red-belt-busting wins in Republican strongholds like Texas, South Carolina and Kansas alongside pending races in Alaska and Mississippi left mouths agape. The explanation was that Democrats turned out far more supporters than their regulars, and that the regret voter" (both swing voters and partisan Republicans) expanded the wave across districts Trump previously won. Elation and sighs of relief rolled over consistently Democratic voters who suffered multiple sucker punches from recent years of Republican upsets. Regret voters, who run the gamut from gen Z men to Latinos, farmers and the white working class, hope a different party can deliver on the economy Trump promised them.Blue voters look at the dismantling of democracy, multiple wars, mass deportations and Trump's unchecked power in these last two years and see how it all could have been avoided. Regret voters, however, either co-signed or conceded to Trump's naked racism and brutish bullying of marginalized people, but switched their votes as soon as the consequences hit their pockets. While some of the president's backers may have been turned away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gunning down American citizens, the final straw for most wasn't ICE's brutality, but rather the price of eggs. Some may have been upset by the Tomahawk missile assault that killed 120 schoolgirls in Iran, but most fumed at the rocketing costs at the gas pump that followed. Few demanded answers for the nearly 60 deaths of innocent people detained in DHS detention centers since the start of 2024, but many felt scorned by lost immigrant labor that cut into owners' profit margins. Maga's regret voters were all-in for Trump's racism. Then they found out they couldn't afford it. Continue reading...

In a reversal of longstanding assumptions, strong criticism of Israel's actions may have helped put candidates over the topYou took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates," Abdul El-Sayed told a Detroit crowd on Wednesday, declaring victory in Michigan's hard-fought, often ugly, Senate race. In what was predicted to be a squeaker, the Democrat beat his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, by a healthy seven points.In some ways, El-Sayed was an unlikely candidate. At 34, in his first run for elected office, he set his sights almost cockily on a US Senate seat. He ran on what has become an uncontroversial affordability platform but also championed the socialist-adjacent Medicare for All. Continue reading...

From North Carolina to Arizona, Democrats with almost no public profile were stunned at their election triumphsOne candidate had dropped out in September. One had no campaign staff. One was a 19-year-old and halfway through the fall college semester.Across the US, Democratic candidates with almost no public profile and long odds of winning their midterm races were stunned to find they had outperformed their opponents on Tuesday. They were swept into Congress and statehouses in the blue wave that knocked out Republicans from seats considered untouchable in deep-red districts. Continue reading...

The GOP tried to dilute their power, but Black voters helped Democrats get elected in Alabama, Texas and FloridaBlack voter turnout surged across US southern states where Republicans were accused of redrawing electoral maps to diminish Black political power" in the wake of a seismic supreme court ruling.Democrats flipped or held seats in Alabama, Texas and Florida with the support of this voting bloc, building on a decades-long, dedicated movement to protect and build Black political power in the region. Continue reading...

Senior British politicians and officials highlight potential to end Iran war but warn US president is not yet a spent force'Andy Burnham was having dinner at the Commonwealth summit in Antigua when the results of the US midterm elections started rolling in.UK government officials in the Caribbean with the prime minister scrolled through their phones with growing incredulity as the scale of the Republicans' defeat became clear. Continue reading...

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US president confirms Susie Wiles, current chief of staff and first woman to serve in the role, will step down

US voters repudiated mass deportation campaign, but choice of new chief of staff is an ominous signal that Trump is driving ahead at full speedOn Tuesday, US midterm voters resoundingly rebuked Donald Trump and his brutal mass deportation campaign that sent military tanks and masked agents though residential streets.But on Friday, the president doubled down. He named Stephen Miller - the architect of the administration's most aggressive immigration policies - as his chief of staff. Continue reading...

Ronny Yordrix Guanipa Chrinos arrested by secret service after telling officers voices told him to kill Donald TrumpThe US secret service said a suspect has been taken into custody and charged after officers found him in a vehicle near the White House with multiple guns, claiming he heard voices in his head telling him to kill Donald Trump.The arrest Thursday night happened after secret service officers approached a man acting suspicious" in a parked car, according to a Homeland Security statement. US officials said the suspect - Ronny Yordrix Guanipa Chrinos - went on to describe voices in his head that were telling him to come to the nation's capital and kill the Republican president. Continue reading...

Tech stocks have lost trillions while voters have rejected the industry's political champions. The billionaire-led boom is facing a democratic reckoningThis week's midterms showed that the political bill for the AI boom is falling due. The Democratic sweep intensified fears over runaway spending, mounting debt and resistance to datacentres, sending tech shares tumbling. On Thursday Wall Street suffered its worst day since the pandemic as $3.2tn was wiped from markets. Anthropic, developer of the Claude chatbot, is hoping to float within the next fortnight for $1.5tn (1.1tn), but it may not now get even a trillion dollars. The dominant AI chipmaker Nvidia saw its value crash by more than $400bn. The world's richest man, ElonMusk, lost $113bn in two days.While a few very rich people may be a little less wealthy, the sell-off may not be a bad thing. It brings a needed dose of reality to an industry whose spending plans and valuations depend on heroic expectations of future profits. That is a view held by many influential figures - from Goldman Sachs' research boss to Nobel laureate Daron Acemolu. AI may transform the economy. That does not guarantee investors will earn back the sums being poured into it.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

Wiles thanks president for honor of a lifetime' as departure leaves behind overwhelmingly male leadership team

Faculty senate passed resolution expressing deep discontent with school's response to alleged fraternity rapeCornell University's faculty senate approved a resolution on Friday declaring no confidence" in the school's top leaders, a symbolic gesture reflecting deep discontent on campus in the wake of a former student's lawsuit saying she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2024.The resolution passed 75-50, with five faculty senators abstaining and five others not voting, according to an email sent to members of the faculty senate on Friday afternoon. Continue reading...

Democrat James Talarico won a Senate seat in Texas, breaking a 38-year drought for his party in the Republican stronghold and delivering a stunning blow to Donald Trump. The race became one of the most expensive Senate contests in US history, with advertising spending topping $500m, according to estimates. GOP-aligned groups poured hundreds of millions of dollars into efforts to elect Ken Paxton, including substantial funding linked to multibillionaire Elon Musk, whom Talarico accused of trying to buy a Senate seat.

Democratic and Republican lawyers and groups trade sharp legal letters about procedures for counting ballots in tight race

Jason Reding Quinones led investigation into whether Trump's rights were violated during 2020 election inquiryA US attorney overseeing the so-called grand conspiracy" investigation into Donald Trump's rivals announced on Friday he is leaving the Department of Justice, one of several officials to leave the department in recent days after sweeping Democratic wins in the midterm elections.Jason Reding Quinones, the US attorney for the southern district of Florida, and John Eisenberg, who led the justice department's national security division, are both leaving. Democrats have pledged to use their majorities in the US House and Senate to conduct aggressive oversight of the justice department, among other agencies. Continue reading...

Severe storms brought heavy rain across the border between Georgia and Tennessee on 4 November, flooding communities and forcing dozens of rescues Continue reading...

Global tech stocks have plunged after the Democrats' victory in the US midterm elections, with fears of a slowdown in AI development. Major tech corporations including Apple, Tesla and Nvidia shed about $1tn in a single trading session. Is this stock market jitters, or a sign the AI bubble might be about to burst? Lucy Hough speaks to senior economics correspondent Richard Partington Continue reading...

Historians and political scientists say that framing the wins as Ohio's working class has come home' is too simpleAt its peak, the Mahoning valley was once the beating heart of the US's steel economy - a hardscrabble, heavily unionized Democratic bastion in north-eastern Ohio. But de-industrialization, sparked by the mass closure of steel mills in the late 1970s, transformed the region.Tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs disappeared. Populations declined. And support for Democrats slowly, but surely, faded. In 2020, Mahoning county voted for its first Republican presidential candidate - Donald Trump - in a generation. Continue reading...

After two titles won as the lowest seed in the playoffs, the New Jersey club sought consistency in 2026. It's arrived, but what's next?By the time Gotham FC had won their second NWSL Championship in three seasons, Yael Averbuch West had already determined what was going to change.Some of that is the nature of her job; the general manager of a perennial contender can't rest on laurels. Before every postseason, Gotham finalize tough looming personnel decisions, assessing the roster and staff alike with clear eyes. Continue reading...

Jonathan Freedland hosts a live panel to look at what happens next -for Donald Trump, the Republicans who might want to succeed him, and for Democrats looking ahead to 2028. He is joined by the Guardian's Washington bureau chief, David Smith; Tara Setmayer, a co-founder and CEO of the Seneca project; the Guardian's global editor, Devika Bhat; Adam Smith, a professor of US politics and political history at the University of Oxford; and the clinical psychologist, author and political commentator Mary Trump Continue reading...

After years of outrage or numbness being the main options for dealing with politics, Tuesday's results were permission to be optimistic

The Warriors' freshman has spent his first weeks in the NBA antagonizing superstars, speaking his mind and emerging as one of the league's most compelling personalitiesIf a screen-addled pickup basketball player teleported into the body of a high-level athlete, they might resemble Yaxel Lendeborg. The most commonly cited fact about Lendeborg is that he used to spend 12 to 14 hours a day gaming, and didn't debut on his high school basketball team until he was an upperclassman. Professional athletes often have origin stories that resemble the superhero more than the mortal, but Lendeborg really was just like us at one point. Lendeborg has also said that prior to entering the NBA, he didn't really watch it, either. The Puerto Rican forward racked up more than enough accolades in college to qualify for the NBA, including helming Michigan to their first national championship in 37 years, but still. Any of you reading this could smoke the man who may be this season's rookie of the year in trivia about his profession.The 24-year-old Lendeborg is a forward on the Golden State Warriors, a team caught between the ancient, gleaming remnants of the most fearsome dynasty of the 2010s and its future. The balance didn't work out last season, as the Warriors produced flashes of old greatness to win one play-in game before flaming out in the next. Such results are a frustrating waste of Stephen Curry's wonderful form even at 38 years old. Lendeborg is the best hope in a while to help maximize it. But even more importantly, Lendeborg is the character of the season so far. He's spent its first two weeks antagonizing superstars, firing off unselfconscious takes in the press and vacuuming up the spotlight from his blander peers. What a joy to bear witness to an athlete who probably didn't even hear the words media training" until college. Continue reading...

In a Guardian article in 2010, the Oxford Rhodes scholar said UK democracy had the upper hand' over the US

Low-hire, low-fire' labor market shows sluggish growth but few layoffs, with an interest rate hike expected in DecemberThe US added 165,000 jobs to the economy in October, a sign of resilience in the labor market amid ongoing war in the Middle East and inflation, according to new data released on Friday.Economists had said the labor market has been stuck in a low-hire, low-fire" state, in which job growth is sluggish but layoffs also remain low, but October's data surpassed economist expectations. The unemployment rate went down slightly to 4.1%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported. Continue reading...

A decade of political misery does terrible things to the mind. Tuesday's wins came with a sense of unrealityLate on Tuesday night, the comedian Alex Edelman asked a poignant question on social media: I know we've never had to ask this before tonight, but what's the opposite of doomscrolling?"I don't have a definitive answer to that, though I did offer the term boomscrolling", accompanied by a gif of the social media sensation and Costco enthusiast Big Boom AJ. Continue reading...

The successful Democratic contender for a Michigan Senate seat parried the many insinuations lobbed by RepublicansAbdul El-Sayed said he did not expect to be a main character of this midterms", but the first Muslim elected to the US Senate in history will take his seat in January after a vitriolic campaign that cast him as the central villain of the president and his party.By October he told the Associated Press he was not shying away" from those rightwing fixations. What are you implying?" El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, replied when a town hall attender asked if he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, in a now-viral exchange. Continue reading...

Wildlife advocates incensed as documents show state paid out $2,000 per kill in effort to shrink state's wolf populationIdaho officials paid hunters thousands of dollars for killing a dozen newborn wolf pups this spring, including what appears to be at least one full litter killed in or near its den, according to state records shared with the Guardian and Public Domain.The wolf pup killings have incensed wildlife advocates in Idaho, where state wildlife officials have been ordered to take extraordinary measures to shrink the state's re-introduced wolf population amid complaints from the livestock industry and big game hunting outfitters. Continue reading...

Democrats won over rural voters from Maga in the midterms by focusing more on working people and less on culture warsLong before Jamie Ager entered politics, he was making a name for himself in a very different place: the meat counter of a grocery store in Boone, North Carolina.It was the early 2000s, and Ager owned and operated Hickory Nut Gap, a regenerative farm near Asheville. Over the next 20 years, he helped build a regional food system that delivered healthier food to thousands of people, improved land stewardship and made farming a bit more profitable. Continue reading...

Anticipation that Democrats' blue wave' will lead to tighter rules on AI and datacenters sends tech stock plunging. Plus a big eight-legged surprise for customs officials in Peru