Week covered: Sunday, November 1 – Saturday, November 7, 2026
Digital edition — the detailed companion to the print edition, with full stories, sources cited, and puzzle solutions. Updated to match the final print edition.
Lead Story · Page 1 of the print edition
Democrats take the House and the Senate in Tuesday's midterms, flipping seven Republican seats and ending the GOP trifecta.
Democrats won control of Congress in Tuesday's midterm elections, the Associated Press reported, calling the Senate for Democrats at 11:36 p.m. ET on election night and the House at 1:24 a.m. Wednesday. Democrats flipped seven Republican-held Senate seats — in Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and Maine — and lost none of their own. They will hold at least 54 Senate seats when the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, with two races, in Alaska and Mississippi, still uncalled. In the House, Democrats passed the 218-seat majority mark. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries is in line to become the first Black speaker in American history. The result ends two years of unified Republican control in Washington. President Trump, who was not on the ballot, said the party would have won 'in a landslide' had he been, and vowed to veto Democratic bills, telling Fox News the veto is 'one of the stronger powers that a President has.' Speaker Mike Johnson said he will not run for House Republican leader.
A Learjet 60 bound from Austin to the Bahamas crashed near Greenacres, Fla., on Sunday, killing all nine people aboard, including two small children. The victims included Adam Robinson, 45, and Helen Sharp, 40, and their children Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2. The NTSB is investigating; the crew had reported ice, and part of the jet's tail was found miles from the site.
New Zealand's general election on Saturday ended in a knife-edge: the governing coalition holds 67 of 131 seats on the provisional count, with about 399,000 special votes still to be counted. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon remains in office as caretaker while the count finishes. Final results are due November 27.
Employers added 165,000 jobs in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, far above the 48,000 average monthly gain of the past year. Unemployment was 4.1 percent. Wages rose 14 cents an hour to $38.00, up 3.1 percent over the year, and the BLS revised August's gain sharply upward, to 186,000. The unemployment rate has sat between 4.1 and 4.3 percent since March.
The flu season has started about a month early, the CDC reports, with the H1N1 strain behind nearly 99 percent of subtyped viruses. Flu activity is already higher than usual for this time of year. This season's vaccines were updated to match the circulating strains, and the CDC still recommends a shot for most people six months and older.
Washington, D.C. — The mood: It was the cost of living that did it. Voters went to the polls sour on the economy, and an AP-NORC poll found 84 percent called the cost of living one of the most important issues in deciding their vote. The war with Iran loomed almost as large: an NBC News exit poll found 74 percent said it was a crucial or major factor in theirs. Democrats took both chambers of Congress in Tuesday's midterms — the Associated Press called the Senate at 11:36 p.m. ET on election night and the House at 1:24 a.m. Wednesday — ending two years of unified Republican control in Washington. President Trump, who was not on the ballot, said the party would have won 'in a landslide' had he been, and vowed to veto Democratic legislation, telling Fox News the veto is 'one of the stronger powers that a President has.' Speaker Mike Johnson said he will not run for House Republican leader. The message from the electorate was a kitchen-table one: prices first, the war second, and a Congress now set against a president who has promised to meet its bills with his pen. Democrats campaigned on the cost of groceries, rent and health care, and on Tuesday voters handed them the gavels to do something about it.
Austin, Texas — Lone Star flip: Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated three-term Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, becoming the first Democratic governor of Texas since Ann Richards in 1990 and the first Latina to hold the office. Her win ends 31 years of Republican governors in Texas. Hinojosa, 52, had vowed to halt new data-center construction until the state passes protections for residents. In the Senate race, Democrat James Talarico defeated Attorney General Ken Paxton — the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate seat since 1988.
Greenacres, Fla. — Nine lost: A Learjet 60 bound from Austin to the Bahamas crashed about 12:50 p.m. Sunday near Greenacres, killing all nine people aboard, federal officials said. The dead included a family of four, their nanny and another couple, plus two pilots. No one on the ground was killed, though about 600 people were displaced. The NTSB, which is leading the inquiry, said the crew had reported ice and sub-zero temperatures, and that most of the jet's left elevator was recovered in pieces up to four miles from the crash site. Flightradar24 data showed the jet descending at more than 32,000 feet per minute.
Washington, D.C. — Hiring beats forecasts: Employers added 165,000 jobs in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, well above the 48,000 average monthly gain of the past year. The unemployment rate was 4.1 percent, with 7.1 million people unemployed. Average hourly earnings rose 14 cents to $38.00. The BLS also revised August's gain up to 186,000 and September's to 60,000. Part-time work for economic reasons rose by 339,000 to 4.8 million.
United Nations — Mission ends: The UN's 35-year-old peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara, MINURSO, began winding down on Sunday after the Security Council failed to renew its mandate. Russia vetoed a U.S.-backed resolution, and a rival Russian proposal was voted down. The mission, in place since a 1991 ceasefire, was set up to monitor a referendum on self-determination that never happened. Twenty mission personnel lost their lives over its 35 years. Its 2026-27 budget was over $62 million, with 534 authorized personnel.
Wellington, N.Z. — No winner yet: New Zealand's general election on Saturday produced no clear winner. On the provisional count, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon's National Party won 42 seats, with coalition partners ACT on 13 and New Zealand First on 12 — 67 seats in a 131-seat Parliament, where 66 are needed for a majority. Labour won 36 seats, the Greens 16, Te Pāti Māori five, and the centrist newcomer Opportunity seven. About 399,000 special votes, nearly 14 percent of the total, remain to be counted; final results are due November 27. Parliament must meet by January 14, and Luxon remains caretaker prime minister.
Washington, D.C. — Clocks fall back: Daylight saving time ended on Sunday, November 1, as clocks across most of the United States fell back one hour. The twice-yearly switch is back in the spotlight: the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight time permanent, has stalled in Congress. The debate returns every year, and the clocks go forward again in March.
"Victory for America!"
In his victory speech, Jeffries also declared: "Today begins the great American comeback."
"The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night."
"If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so."
NASA's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes have found 27 previously unknown objects beyond Neptune, in the deepest survey yet of the distant, icy bodies known as trans-Neptunian objects. Webb spotted objects as small as about five kilometers across, and the two telescopes together measured their sizes, colors and orbits. The haul offers fresh clues to how the solar system formed more than four billion years ago — and a surprise: there are fewer small bodies out there than some models predicted. The findings appear in two studies in The Astronomical Journal.
The 2026-27 flu season has started about a month early, the CDC reports. In its FluView report for the week ending October 24, the agency said activity 'remains low nationally' but is 'higher than typically observed at this time of year.' The H1N1 strain is doing almost all the damage, accounting for 98.9 percent of subtyped viruses. The CDC's positivity rate was 3.6 percent in early October, six times the 0.6 percent of a year earlier. This season's vaccines were updated to match the circulating strains, including H1N1, and the CDC still recommends an annual flu shot for most people six months and older.
Innovation of the week. OpenAI announced GPT-6 Cyber on Thursday, a model built to help security researchers find software vulnerabilities, develop working exploits and write fixes. In a mid-October test run, an automated pipeline using the model examined 2,308 candidate flaws in the Linux kernel, reproduced 1,724 of them and produced 948 working exploits that gain administrator access — all for about $1.2 million in computing costs. The point, OpenAI says, is defense: find the holes before the attackers do. The same capability in the wrong hands is the obvious worry, which is why the model itself is unreleased.
Siri, open to all: Apple released a developer preview letting any app work with Siri AI, with the first iOS 27.3 betas. The same week, its annual filing warned that AI agents may act without authorization.
Meta buys Conductor: Meta acquired Conductor, a startup whose Mac app runs several AI coding agents at once, Axios reported. Conductor Cloud goes read-only on November 13 and shuts down November 20.
Pictures that move: OpenAI shipped Images 2.6, adding animated GIFs and two new image models to ChatGPT, Codex and its API.
Apple tightens its belt: Apple cut some engineers' daily AI spending limit from $300 to $200, Bloomberg reported, with deeper cuts to $100 under consideration.
The kernel is the core of an operating system — the part that talks directly to a computer's hardware and decides which programs get to do what. A 'privilege escalation' flaw in the kernel lets an attacker jump from an ordinary user account to full administrator control, which is why security researchers prize them — and why finding 948 of them in one automated run is such a striking result.
November 6, 1860: Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. He took 180 electoral votes with just 39.7 percent of the popular vote, beating three rivals in a nation split over slavery. Within weeks, South Carolina seceded; by his inauguration in March 1861, seven Southern states had left the Union.
Poster: Toho
Rotten Tomatoes: 90% (162 reviews) · Audience: 96% · CinemaScore: A
"It is the most thrilling blockbuster set-piece of the year."
The rare sequel that earns its existence. Takashi Yamazaki returns to 1949, two years after the first film, as Japan rebuilds and Godzilla returns — this time with King Ghidorah in tow for a third act that has to be seen on the biggest screen available. It is the first Godzilla film rated R, and the first Japanese production shot entirely for IMAX, and both choices show: the monster sequences are heavier, louder and more frightening than before, and the human story, following the Shikishima family as catastrophe strikes just as life returns to normal, holds its own against the spectacle. The R rating lets Yamazaki linger on destruction the earlier film only implied. Minus One won the Oscar for visual effects and holds 99 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, so expectations were sky-high; Zero mostly meets them. Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe return from Minus One, older and wearier, and the film is better for it. It is not quite as tight as Minus One — Godzilla himself goes missing for long stretches, and the middle sags — but when the big lizard and the three-headed king finally meet, it is the most thrilling blockbuster set-piece of the year. See it in IMAX, or don't bother.
Poster: Warner Bros. Pictures
Rotten Tomatoes: 46% (56 critics) · Metacritic: 46/100
Bill Hader is the best thing in it, and the film knows it — which is the problem. Warner Bros.' first animated take on Dr. Seuss sends the Cat, an employee of the Institute for the Institution of Imagination and Inspiration, on an epic adventure that keeps raising the stakes until the fate of the universe is on the line. The animation is bright and busy, the gags come thick and fast, and Hader's easy playfulness sells jokes that have no business working. But the film never trusts the book's small, strange magic — a rainy day, two kids, a cat who makes a mess and cleans it up. Instead it buries that magic under universe-ending stakes: it is cluttered, frantic and overplotted, with too many characters and too little Seuss. Hader's Cat is all grin and no menace, which is the problem in miniature: the film wants the character's chaos without any of its danger. Kids will laugh; adults will check their watches. It is miles better than the 2003 live-action version, which sits at 10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes — which is to say it clears a very low bar.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Opened Nov. 2, through Dec. 12, 2027. Thirteen works of bark cloth — tapa — from Fiji, Samoa, Futuna and Niue, including nineteenth-century panels and an exceptional hiapo on loan from Te Papa, New Zealand's national museum. Tapa was gifted, worn and displayed to mark births, marriages and alliances; the show treats the cloth as diplomacy, not decoration. Small, quiet and beautifully installed in Gallery 359. Elsewhere: MoMA PS1's Hard Art and Masao Gozu's Windows and Bars both opened November 5.
Saturday Night Live's cold open skewered President Trump over the midterm results, with James Austin Johnson as Trump — and a cameo from the night's breakout star, Texas Senator-elect James Talarico, days after his upset win over Attorney General Ken Paxton. The episode aired November 7, four days after the midterms.
John Scalzi's Monsters of Ohio (Tor) leads the week's new books, alongside Judi Dench's memoir Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? (St. Martin's) and Natalie Livingstone's The Nuremberg Women, about the eight women who brought the Nazis to justice.
Also opening: Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine, the Revolutionary War musical Drummer Boy, the Jimmy Stewart biopic Jimmy and the three-hour Indian epic Ramayana.
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ACROSS
1 EVEREST · 8 EVEN · 9 HIT · 12 IDEA · 14 ANDES · 16 ASIA · 20 ICE · 23 HAPPY · 25 FUJI · 26 USE
DOWN
2 VERB · 5 END · 7 ATLAS · 10 DENALI · 17 ALPS · 19 EYE
Theme: MOUNTAINS — the starred answers are EVEREST, ATLAS, DENALI, ANDES, ALPS and FUJI.
9 × 9 · Theme answers are starred (★) in the clues.
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The Cartoon
Trump can veto legislation, but using that power to block the new Congress could deepen the political rebuke voters delivered. The cartoon itself isn't reproduced on this public page — view it on the artist's site.
Not in the issue: Kraków shooting, Nov 7; reported Iran strikes, Nov 7 (attribution unverified); Dhillon resignation / Rubio future; California statewide props final calls; VA/NJ 2026 governor results and Prop 50 / Mamdani as 2026 items (all 2025); Komyshuvakha final consolidated toll (only "at least 26" verified); any "255 seats" House projection; any other claim not verifiable from a primary source.