Scott Colom, Russia-Ukraine Talks, Fed Inflation and CFP Expansion | November 12, 2026

Transcript

Good morning. This is Artificially Intelligent News for Thursday, November twelfth, twenty twenty-six. I’m Mark Ellison. This program is created with AI and independently fact-checked using current reporting and official records.

We begin in Mississippi, where Democrat Scott Colom has won the state’s closely watched U.S. Senate race over Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith. The Associated Press called the race Wednesday after county updates and review of provisional ballots expanded Colom’s margin.

Colom’s lead was 4,669 votes out of more than 962,000 counted when the race was called. Hyde-Smith has conceded. Colom will become Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, a milestone in a state with a long and consequential civil-rights history.

That total underscores both the closeness of the contest and why the call followed updates and provisional-ballot review rather than election-night returns alone. The concession removes any immediate question about the result’s political direction.

The result also adds to Democrats’ midterm gains in the Senate. But it is worth keeping the timing clear: Colom is senator-elect, and the incoming Congress does not take office until January. Election administrators still have their normal certification work to complete. The political consequence is already clear, though. A seat Republicans had held has changed hands in one of the country’s closest statewide contests.

In the House, Republicans have selected Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan to lead their caucus in the minority next year. Jordan defeated Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise by a 106 to 73 secret-ballot vote.

Jordan currently chairs the House Judiciary Committee and is a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus. He will take over as Republicans prepare to operate from the minority after the midterm losses, while Democrats prepare a wide-ranging oversight agenda for the next Congress. Jordan said Republicans would focus on what he described as fighting for American families. The selection tells listeners something important about the party’s immediate direction: members chose a combative, well-known conservative figure to lead a smaller conference through its transition out of power.

A secret ballot is the internal vote House Republicans use to choose their leader. It does not determine House control, which voters settled in the midterms, but it determines who will speak for the party in organizing and floor fights.

That transition is also exposing disagreement inside the Republican Senate conference over judicial nominations. Several Republican senators are pushing back on the White House’s effort to fill federal court vacancies before the Senate changes hands.

The dispute is centered on senators’ traditional influence over nominees from their home states. In Arkansas, the White House withdrew an appeals-court nomination after opposition from Republican senators. In Texas and Oklahoma, Republican senators have raised objections to other prospective judges. Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis have emphasized that the administration must consult members rather than treat confirmation as an assembly line.

The immediate practical effect is that some nominations may not move before the current Senate majority ends. More broadly, it is a reminder that even within a president’s party, lifetime judicial appointments require cooperation among the White House, home-state senators and the Judiciary Committee.

Another Washington vote involved Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The House voted 211 to 204 to send articles of impeachment filed by Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie to the Judiciary Committee rather than proceed directly with an impeachment trial process.

The referral stops the measure from advancing during this session unless lawmakers take it up again. Massie filed eight articles tied to Hegseth’s conduct at the Pentagon and the administration’s handling of the war with Iran. Hegseth called the move political theater, while President Trump criticized Massie. Democrats will control the House in January, when they could decide whether to revive or broaden oversight of the Pentagon. For now, the vote is a procedural defeat for the impeachment push, not a finding on the allegations themselves.

Sending articles to committee gives members a forum to examine them, but it does not itself impeach an official. The House has not made a final judgment on the merits.

A proposed change to food-assistance rules could have broad effects if it is finalized. The Agriculture Department wants to narrow so-called categorical eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Under the proposal, households would qualify through this pathway only if they receive cash assistance as defined under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Current rules can also recognize certain non-cash or in-kind TANF-funded benefits and services. USDA says the change would align eligibility more closely with the statute and target benefits to households receiving TANF assistance.

Critics and anti-hunger advocates are expected to argue that the change could make food assistance and automatic school-meal eligibility harder to obtain for some families. The department acknowledges the proposal could raise administrative burdens for states, reduce SNAP spending and affect school-meal eligibility. It is a proposed rule, not a change already in force. Public comments are due December tenth.

Categorical eligibility is a link between eligibility for one assistance program and eligibility for SNAP. The proposal would change that link, so the potential impact reaches beyond a single application form and could require states to adjust their processes.

Federal safety regulators are taking a closer look at Waymo’s robotaxis after reports that some vehicles continued to pass stopped school buses even after a software recall intended to address that behavior.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened what is called a recall query on November sixth. That is an investigation into whether the earlier remedy adequately solved the problem. The agency’s filing says a majority of the reported incidents happened after the software update. The underlying concern is straightforward: a vehicle must stop when a school bus has flashing red lights and its stop arm extended.

Waymo says it has made significant improvements around school buses and says it has received no citations since March. The inquiry is not a conclusion that the company violated the law in every reported case, and it is not a new recall. But it is a consequential test for a company expanding driverless service: regulators are examining not simply whether automated systems can be deployed, but whether safety fixes work reliably in the most sensitive real-world situations.

A recall query is a step after an earlier recall when regulators seek to evaluate the adequacy of the corrective action. The focus is whether the remedy produces the intended behavior, rather than simply whether an update was issued.

In New York City, rescue crews continued work after a three-story building collapsed beside a construction site in Brooklyn Wednesday afternoon. At least two people were killed, and at least 17 were hospitalized. Four were listed in critical condition at the time of the city’s briefing.

Roughly 250 firefighters were involved as crews used saws and hand tools to search unstable debris. Officials said the building contained apartments above ground-floor commercial space. Much of the wreckage fell into an excavation pit at the adjacent site. The city’s buildings commissioner said workers had been excavating the empty lot next door when the collapse occurred, though the precise cause remains under investigation.

That investigation will have to determine whether excavation, structural conditions or other factors contributed. The immediate focus remains accounting for everyone who may have been inside and protecting responders working in dangerous voids beneath the rubble.

And a significant weather system is moving across much of the country. The National Weather Service says a strengthening coastal storm will bring soaking rain and gusty winds to the Northeast through Friday, with minor coastal flooding possible near high tide in parts of the New York City area. Higher elevations in New York and northern New England could see accumulating snow and slick travel.

Farther west, colder air behind a strong front will bring lake-effect snow to parts of the Great Lakes, including potentially significant accumulations in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The same pattern brings a widespread freeze risk to parts of the South and Southeast this weekend. A separate Pacific system is forecast to bring heavy rain, strong winds and blizzard conditions in the Sierra Nevada beginning Friday. Check local warnings before travel.

Overseas, Russia and Ukraine have agreed in principle to a large exchange of prisoners of war after two days of U.S.-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi. Both sides confirmed the plan, but the final number of prisoners had not been announced as of early Thursday.

The agreement is a humanitarian step, not a peace agreement. The talks produced no visible breakthrough on the central issues that have kept the war going for nearly five years: Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory, security guarantees for Ukraine and Europe’s role in a settlement. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, welcomed the prospective exchange but again said Kyiv would not surrender occupied territory in return for peace.

The diplomacy is continuing. U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Moscow Thursday to meet Vladimir Putin, and they are expected to meet Zelenskyy in Dublin afterward. Those meetings make the prisoner agreement meaningful as a channel of contact, but they do not change the fact that fighting continues across a front line roughly 750 miles long.

Prisoner exchanges can return captured service members but leave territorial and security questions untouched. The absence of final numbers means the arrangement still requires further implementation by both sides.

In Paris, the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven issued a joint declaration expressing concern about China’s increasingly assertive activities in waters east of Taiwan. The G7 said those actions threaten regional stability, freedom of navigation and the safety of international shipping.

The statement did not announce new military measures. It reiterated opposition to unilateral changes to the status quo by force, coercion or threat, and called for cross-strait issues to be resolved peacefully through dialogue. The wording matters because it was endorsed by the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the European Union. Taiwan sits beside one of the world’s most important shipping corridors, so heightened tensions there carry implications for trade, technology supply chains and regional security far beyond East Asia.

Freedom of navigation refers to the ability of vessels to move through international waters without coercion. The declaration frames that concern as a matter of international shipping safety as well as diplomacy.

Now to the economy and markets. These are final closing figures from Wednesday’s completed U.S. stock-market session, not futures or intraday prices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 254.60 points, or one-half of one percent, to close at 52,486.49. The S&P 500 rose 98.45 points, or 1.3 percent, to 7,619.38. The Nasdaq Composite added 400.31 points, or 1.6 percent, to 25,466.19.

Technology stocks led the rebound. CoreWeave, a company that rents access to AI computing capacity, rose sharply after reporting a smaller summer loss than analysts expected. Its results eased some investor concern over debt-heavy spending on AI data centers. The U.S. bond market was closed for Veterans Day.

The larger economic issue remains inflation. Tuesday’s consumer-price report showed annual inflation rising to 4 percent in October from 3.7 percent in September. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.3 percent for the month. Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller had said that a reading of 0.3 percent or higher would make a half-point rate increase worth considering at the December meeting.

That is not a commitment by the Fed, and monetary policy is decided by the full committee. But it illustrates why inflation now matters beyond the grocery aisle and gas pump. Higher rates can feed into borrowing costs for mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and business investment. Investors will be watching incoming prices, employment and consumer-spending data closely before the December decision.

The month-over-month core reading is watched because it can indicate whether price pressures are easing or staying persistent. The October figure is one data point, which is why subsequent reports will matter.

In sports, college football has approved a major expansion of its postseason. Beginning next season, the College Football Playoff will grow to 24 teams, and conference championship games will be eliminated.

The top eight seeds will receive first-round byes. The first two rounds will be played on campus beginning on the second weekend in December. The four Power Four conference champions will receive automatic places, along with the highest-ranked Group of Six champion. The remaining 19 places will be selected by the committee.

ESPN’s expanded agreement is reported to add 1.7 billion dollars over five years to the existing television contract. Supporters say more teams will remain in contention later in the season. Critics will ask whether a larger bracket reduces the importance of the regular season and places too much authority in the selection committee. The first national championship under the new format is scheduled for January of twenty twenty-eight in New Orleans.

Eliminating the conference title games also changes the route teams take to the bracket. The format combines automatic access for champions with a larger role for the committee in filling the field.

Baseball’s awards season continued with honors for standout relievers and performers. San Diego Padres closer Mason Miller received the National League Reliever of the Year award after recording 38 saves, a 1.67 earned-run average and 129 strikeouts. Toronto’s Louis Varland was recognized as the American League winner in the Baseball Writers’ Association’s first relief-pitcher awards.

Separate Major League Baseball reliever honors went to Miller and Bryan Baker. Yordan Alvarez won the Hank Aaron Award and the Edgar Martinez Outstanding Designated Hitter Award. The Cy Young Awards went to Yankees right-hander Cam Schlittler in the American League and Brewers right-hander Jacob Misiorowski in the National League.

Awards are based on regular-season performance, and they offer a useful marker of the season just completed before free agency and winter roster decisions become the center of baseball attention.

A quick scoreboard from Wednesday night. In the NBA, Luka Dončić scored 32 points as the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Milwaukee Bucks 123 to 112. The Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the New York Knicks 115 to 107. The Boston Celtics held off the Toronto Raptors 98 to 93.

In the NHL, Evan Bouchard scored 47 seconds into overtime to give the Edmonton Oilers a 3 to 2 win over the Philadelphia Flyers, their third straight victory. And the Tampa Bay Lightning beat the Buffalo Sabres 8 to 3.

Finally, in entertainment, Jordan Fisher will lead the upcoming Broadway musical adaptation of Purple Rain. Fisher has been cast as The Kid, the role made famous by Prince in the 1984 film.

The production is scheduled to begin previews in March at the Majestic Theatre, with a spring opening planned. Purple Rain follows a rising Minneapolis musician navigating a difficult home life, a new relationship and the demands of performance. Its soundtrack produced songs including Let’s Go Crazy and When Doves Cry and won two Grammys.

Fisher is known to Broadway audiences from Dear Evan Hansen, Hadestown and Sweeney Todd. This will be his first originating role on Broadway. The announcement is notable because it moves a beloved, music-driven film into a live-theater setting while placing a new performer at the center of material deeply associated with Prince. Additional casting has not yet been announced.

Prince’s place in the original film and soundtrack makes casting central to any stage adaptation.

That is the briefing for this Thursday: a changing Congress, a major safety review, difficult diplomacy, renewed inflation pressure and big changes ahead in college football. Follow Artificially Intelligent News, and share this briefing with one person who would value a calm morning news summary.

I’m Mark Ellison. Thanks for listening, and take good care.