united states

Iranian state media report blasts in Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz and the cities of Jask, Sirik and Bandar Abbas.

Trump lashed out at them on Truth Social and called the Democratic lawmakers “extortionists”.

United States President Donald Trump has ordered the ⁠⁠Department of Justice (DOJ) to look into Democrats ‌‌for “threatening a lot of people” with impeachment and other ⁠⁠forms of ⁠⁠punishment, following their midterm election victory.

In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump said what Democrats had done amounted to a “criminal act”, without providing evidence.

The post comes days after Democrats won control of both chambers of the US Congress from Republicans in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Democratic lawmakers and newly elected candidates have said they would pursue probes into the Trump family’s financial dealings, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as investigations into Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“The Democrats are going around threatening a lot of people,” Trump wrote, adding that some of his cabinet have been threatened with impeachment. “This is extortion at the highest level, and they should be held accountable for this.”

Trump also said, without evidence, that some Democrats were threatening his donors, whom he called “some of the most respected people anywhere in the World”. He said Democrats were targeting them for their political views, specifically calling out Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin. He gave no evidence of her threatening people over their views.

When Democrats take control of Congress in January, they will be able to conduct a range of investigations, in which they can order access to documents, summon Trump officials to testify, and hold hearings.

Democratic Representative Robert Garcia of California, who is likely to chair the powerful House Oversight Committee, which serves as the investigative committee in the House and has broad jurisdiction and power, posted “LAWYER UP” on social media after it was clear Democrats would take the House.

During his second term, Trump has called for investigations into his political enemies, including the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), James Comey, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

IRGC says underground military complexes allow missile production to continue even under heavy bombardment.

Iran is building underground military complexes able to sustain weapons production and storage even under heavy bombardment, according to the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

IRGC spokesperson Hossein Mohebbi made a series of announcements on Saturday about the military’s capabilities during a news conference in Tehran, Iranian media reported.

Among the achievements listed were an “underground missile city” set to be unveiled, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.

Mohebbi said the IRGC had rapidly transferred its missile and drone production lines from the surface to underground facilities. This allows Iran to continue producing missiles while its adversaries assumed its stockpiles were dwindling, he explained.

The spokesperson also outlined advances in stealth technology. He maintained that such improvements had allowed Iran’s missiles and drones to pierce air defence systems and accurately strike targets during previous rounds of fighting with the United States and Israel.

“Today, every weapon used by the IRGC Aerospace Force is manufactured using homegrown knowledge and expertise. Moreover, our products are not even derived from reverse-engineering captured enemy war material,” Iran’s IRNA news agency quoted Mohebbi as saying.

A recent report by US newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, shows that Iran caused billions of dollars in damage to US bases throughout the Middle East during previous rounds of fighting.

Meanwhile, a separate report by the Reuters news agency found that Iran had successfully targeted Gulf infrastructure on at least 135 occasions during the same period, causing billions of dollars in damage and lost revenues.

Mohebbi also warned on Saturday that restrictions on the range of Iranian missiles had been lifted. The warning follows a statement from Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who said that there would be “no geographical limits” to Iran’s response if it were attacked again by the US and Israel.

The US-Israeli war on Iran was launched on February 28, prompting Tehran to close the Strait of Hormuz and triggering a global energy crisis. Mediation efforts have stepped up recently, as regional countries hope to bring the war to an end.

On Friday, President Donald Trump said the US military launched limited strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island, while also claiming Washington had made “a lot of progress” in talks with Iran.

Tehran has repeatedly warned that it will target Gulf energy infrastructure if the fighting resumes. Such attacks would likely push energy prices even higher.

Meanwhile, Washington has also imposed additional sanctions on Iran as it seeks to force Tehran to concede to its demands. The restrictions have further strained the country’s economy, forcing Iran to adopt new trade routes.

On Saturday, US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced it was establishing a new task force that will support ongoing US efforts to prevent Iran from using land routes to transport advanced weapons and other materials.

The US has also imposed a naval blockade on Iran to prevent it from exporting oil.

Iraqi foreign minister warns of potential regional war, says Baghdad seeking to resolve disagreements with Saudi Arabia.

Iraq has evidence that external parties have been using its territory to launch attacks on neighbouring countries, its foreign minister told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview on Saturday.

Baghdad is investigating attacks launched from Iraqi territory against Gulf states and is seeking to resolve disagreements with Saudi Arabia through dialogue, Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said.

Saudi Arabia has accused Iran-aligned groups operating in Iraq of attacking its oil infrastructure. In September, Baghdad confirmed that drone attacks on the kingdom’s East-West pipeline originated from Iraqi territory.

Hussein told Al Jazeera that Baghdad was negotiating with Iran-aligned armed factions to bring their weapons under state control and the process must be pursued through dialogue rather than force.

He also said they were in contact with Tehran regarding the issue of weapons held by Iraqi factions.

Hussein said Washington had formally requested the closure of all but two border crossings with Iran. He said that while Iraq welcomed friendship and an alliance with Tehran, it rejected interference in its internal affairs.

Hussein also said Iraq had lost about $60bn from the suspension of oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz, but that shipments have resumed after understandings were reached with Washington and Tehran.

On the issue of combatting ISIL (ISIS), Hussein said that Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Turkiye have formed a committee to fight the group’s presence in Syria.

The full interview will air at 18:00 GMT on Sunday on Al Jazeera.

With Democrats’ decisive victory in the United States’ midterm elections on Tuesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York is on the verge of making history as the first Black speaker of the US House of Representatives.

For the 56-year-old congressman, it would be the culmination of almost two decades in office, giving him a central role in Democrats’ efforts to rein in Republican US President Donald Trump in the final two years of his presidency.

But as Jeffries celebrated the “blue tsunami” that swept Democrats back into power the day after the election, some within the party were not convinced that the congressman, known for his cautious approach to politics and longstanding support for Israel, was the right man for the moment.

An online petition on Change.org calling on lawmakers to choose another speaker had collected more than 980,000 signatures by Saturday morning, while several newly elected progressive lawmakers have not said whether they will support him.

“We believe the Speaker should represent the Democratic voters, not just the Democratic establishment,” the petition reads.

“This is not a foregone conclusion,” it continues, urging others to run for the job.

Jeffries, who has spent years cultivating relationships within the Democratic caucus, now finds himself at the centre of a bigger fight within the party, as its growing progressive wing pushes for a more confrontational approach to Trump and a break with some of the ideas that have defined the Democrats for decades.

From Brooklyn to Democratic leader

Jeffries grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the 1970s and 1980s, as the neighbourhood was grappling with the crack cocaine epidemic.

“There was a lot of dysfunction and pain that surrounded the communities that I was raised in, but also a lot of love and compassion from family and friends, and community folks,” he told NYU Law in 2019.

The son of two social workers, Jeffries eventually became a lawyer, tracing his decision to pursue a career in law back to the 1992 riots that erupted in Los Angeles after four white police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, a Black man.

“It crystallized the fact that we still had a long way to go to eradicate social and racial injustice,” he said.

Jeffries went on to work as a corporate lawyer before entering politics, losing two runs for the New York State Assembly before winning a seat in 2006 and eventually being elected to Congress six years later.

In Washington, he helped broker a bipartisan criminal justice reform law signed by Trump in 2018. Two years later, during Trump’s first impeachment trial, he argued that Trump should be removed from office as one of seven House impeachment managers who presented the case to the US Senate.

Rising quickly through the Democratic ranks, Jeffries became caucus chair in 2019 before making history three years later, when he was unanimously chosen to succeed former Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the party’s House leader, becoming the first Black politician to lead a party in either chamber of Congress.

Can Jeffries unite his party?

Jeffries and Pelosi have been compared for their distinct leadership styles. While Pelosi was known for her commanding, top-down approach, Jeffries has built a reputation for quietly and deliberately building consensus among his colleagues.

That approach has frustrated some Democrats, who say Jeffries has been too reluctant to take firm positions and who question whether he is prepared to confront Trump and Republicans in Congress aggressively enough.

Those concerns were on display after Jeffries declared after the election that “the American people don’t want us to get even; they want us to get things done on their behalf.”

Among those who pushed back was left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker, who reposted a video of Jeffries’s comments, saying: “No, we definitely ARE looking for justice and accountability.”

Jeffries also faced criticism after reports emerged in August that he had privately met Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who does not have a formal role in the administration but has been involved in diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and in Russia.

Jeffries defended the meeting, saying Kushner had requested it and that he had used it to discuss the affordability crisis. But critics argued that rather than meeting privately with Kushner, Jeffries should have been preparing to investigate his business dealings.

Ahead of the election, Axios reported on a plan by some incoming progressive lawmakers – informally known as “The Bloc” and including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York and Melat Kiros of Colorado – to use the upcoming speaker vote to win concessions from Jeffries on issues such as Medicare for All, cutting funding for ICE, and weapons shipments to Israel.

That may be harder now that the Democrats have a comfortable majority, with Jeffries less dependent on progressive newcomers to secure the speakership. But the result also makes it harder for Jeffries to argue, as he has in the past, that Republican control of Congress is hindering the Democrats’ ability to advance their agenda and hold Trump accountable.

Jeffries’s Israel stance divides Democrats

Of all the sources of tension between Jeffries and his party’s progressive wing, the hardest divide to bridge may be over his longstanding support for Israel and ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

At a conference hosted by the group in 2020, Jeffries opposed putting conditions on US aid to Israel and described Jerusalem as New York City’s “sixth borough”.

He has also been one of the top recipients of financial support from AIPAC and its network of donors, earning the nickname “AIPAC Shakur” from New York radio host Charlamagne tha God.

In a celebratory post after the elections congratulating the candidates it had supported, AIPAC singled out Jeffries and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer by name.

But Jeffries’s steadfast support for Israel throughout its genocidal war on Gaza has put him increasingly at odds with his own party, and he recently signalled that his position may be changing.

In July, even as he voted against an amendment that would have cut $3.3bn in annual military aid to Israel, he acknowledged the need for a reset in US-Israel relations.

“A meaningful change in direction is needed,” he wrote in a letter to colleagues.

Jeffries appears to have the speakership all but secured, with no serious challenger emerging so far.

However, with Trump still in the White House, a party grappling with its own divisions, and voters expecting change on everything from the cost of living to the war on Iran, the bigger test for Jeffries will come once he is on the job.

People stopped for minor traffic violations will no longer be referred to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The mayor of Houston, the most populous city in the US state of Texas, has ordered the city’s police force to sharply limit its cooperation with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

John Whitmire’s executive order came on Friday, days after Democrats swept statewide offices in the traditionally Republican state.

According to the order, Houston police will contact ICE only when a person is being arrested for a jailable offence, according to the Reuters news agency.

Whitmire said he had consulted Texas’s newly elected governor, lieutenant governor and comptroller before acting, and that the move was meant to reduce fear and anxiety across the city.

“Elections matter,” Whitmire told reporters. “I do this to begin a healing process,” he said, adding he hoped his executive order would become a model for other Texas cities.

Joining Whitmire at the news conference, Houston Police ⁠Chief J Noe Diaz said he supported the change and that his department had already begun to implement the new policy.

Under the new rules, people stopped for minor traffic violations will no longer be referred to ICE simply because they have an administrative immigration warrant.

The decision reverses a policy Whitmire put in place in April under pressure from outgoing Republican Governor Greg Abbott.

Abbott had threatened to withdraw about $110m in state public safety grants, arguing that a city council ordinance limiting police contact with ICE breached Senate Bill 4, a 2017 state law that bars local police from restricting cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also sued the mayor, the city council and the police chief over the ordinance.

“We’re taking an interpretation of the law today, working with the newly elected members of the state leadership, in implementing this policy,” Whitmire told reporters. “We don’t want people to worry about ⁠their workers, their family members, their students.”

The issue has drawn intense scrutiny in Houston. The Houston Chronicle found that city police contacted ICE at least 107 times in the first eight months of 2025, compared with nine times in the whole of 2024.

In July, an ICE agent shot dead Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a longtime Houston resident.

FIEL Houston, an immigrant rights group, called the order a victory for the city but said it was long overdue. “Today Houston won. Today our community can breathe easier,” FIEL Executive Director Cesar Espinosa said in a statement to KPRC.

Whitmire said he expected Houston’s approach to become a model for other cities. In Austin, Mayor Kirk Watson asked city officials on Friday to revise their own policy on ICE warrants.

Luka Doncic poured in 53 points to propel the Los Angeles Lakers to a 124-118 NBA Cup group-stage victory over Portland on Friday as LeBron James’s latest return to Cleveland ended in defeat.

Doncic’s latest big game helped the Lakers shake off a sluggish start that saw them trailing by as many as 16 points in the second quarter.

Doncic closed the first half with an astonishing shot from well beyond the half-court line, pulling the Lakers within seven points and setting the tone for their second-half surge.

The Trail Blazers had pulled within four points in the final minute when he hit a floater, and the Lakers held on for their fourth straight win.

Doncic has scored at least 40 points in six of his last seven games and joined Elgin Baylor, Kobe Bryant and George Mikan as the only Lakers players to score 40 or more in four straight regular-season contests.

“I’m having a lot of fun,” said Doncic, who added five rebounds and five assists.

“Obviously playing basketball, it’s a lot of fun for me. It’s more [fun] when you play like this and when you win games.”

The 11th 50-point game of Doncic’s career was his fourth with the Lakers – passing LeBron James and tying Mikan for the fourth most for the franchise.

James, who left the Lakers for the Philadelphia 76ers in June, made his first trip as a Sixer to Cleveland, where the Cavs spoiled his latest homecoming with a 119-95 victory that snapped Philadelphia’s five-game winning streak.

James, expected by many to opt for a third stint in Cleveland before he chose Philadelphia, was greeted by warm cheers – and scattered boos – when he was introduced.

The four-time NBA champion, playing his 24th NBA season at the age of 41, was cheered again when he exited the game late in the fourth quarter.

LeBron: ‘I did not feel in good rhythm offensively’

In between, it was a rough night for James and his teammates.

The league’s all-time leading scorer finished with eight points on three-of-12 shooting with seven rebounds, three assists, two steals and six turnovers.

Star centre Joel Embiid missed all nine of his shots from the floor, making six free throws for six points.

Jaylen Brown, like James an off-season import, led the Sixers with 20 points, but the Cavaliers seized control early and repelled every Philadelphia surge.

Donovan Mitchell scored 10 of his 23 points in the first quarter. Evan Mobley added 22 points, and Cleveland out-rebounded Philadelphia 56-42 despite the injury absence of centre Jarrett Allen.

“I did not feel in a good rhythm offensively,” James said.

“We didn’t look like much offensively. We had a couple of spurts. We were able to cut [the deficit] to three in the third quarter. But too many turnovers on my behalf.”

Friday’s games were part of NBA Cup group-stage action, which will continue throughout November.

Quarterfinals of the in-season tournament will be played December 4-5 and semifinals December 8-9 before the final on December 11.

The Boston Celtics drained a whopping 24 three-pointers on 44 attempts in a 119-80 blowout of the Hornets in Charlotte.

Jayson Tatum drilled five three-pointers on the way to a game-high 34 points for Boston, who led by as many as 46 in the wire-to-wire win.

Wembanyama fuels Spurs

San Antonio star Victor Wembanyama, coming off a stunning 52-point, 24-rebound performance in a win over Dallas, scored 30 points and pulled down 14 rebounds to lead the Spurs to a 124-109 victory over the Kings in Sacramento.

The Oklahoma City Thunder continued their dominance of the Grizzlies with a 128-97 win in Memphis.

Ajay Mitchell scored a career-high 35 points, and two-time defending NBA Most Valuable Player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander added 28 for the Thunder, who notched a 13th straight regular-season win over the Grizzlies despite missing injured starters Jaylen Williams, Cason Wallace and Chet Holmgren.

The absences were irrelevant as the Thunder jumped to a 71-49 halftime lead.

In September, a poll found that 70 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans supported limiting the construction of new data centres in the United States.

But that opposition was tested in Tuesday’s midterm election, with analysts examining key races to see if the public backlash would translate into votes.

It did. There were 41 ballot measures related to data centres in Tuesday’s midterms, spread across the country.

According to Data Centers on the Ballot, an election-monitoring project run by Redbud Consulting, voters are on track to reject data centre development in all but one of the contests.

Two of the races continue to be counted but are expected to result in majorities to reject or limit data centres.

Only Harwood, North Dakota, a small town with a population of fewer than 800 people, voted to oppose such limits. The measure it defeated would have required independent reviews of large industrial projects like data centres before they could be built in the area.

Experts say Tuesday’s midterm elections indicate that the debate around data centres has become a bipartisan issue, intertwined with cost-of-living concerns and fears over job stability.

A construction boom

As of April, the Pew Research Center estimated that there were already 3,000 data centres in the country, with more than 1,500 others in progress.

The construction boom has been driven in large part by the growth in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. That industry, experts say, has fed concerns about a shifting economic landscape.

“The unchecked acceleration of AI development has been causing concern across the board,” Bhaskar Chakravorti, the dean of global business at Tufts University, told Al Jazeera.

“People worry about their jobs and what it might mean from a broader economic perspective. But closer to home, people could see the physical manifestations of AI in data centres being built in their back yards, or they were hearing about it from others.”

Not only are voters afraid that AI might replace human work, but they also fear the downstream costs of data centres, according to Chakravorti.

Data centres consume large amounts of water and energy, which critics say can drive up electricity costs for nearby communities.

“Whether higher energy costs were driven by broader factors, such as the Iran war or tariffs, AI competing for space on the electricity grid was certainly part of its unpopularity,” Chakravorti said.

Voters, he added, were seeing the results “in their energy bills”.

A 2026 working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimated that, as of last year, wholesale electricity prices had risen by 6.9 percent as a result of data centres.

James Mercer, founder of Metro Colo Advisory, an independent data centre advisory firm, told Al Jazeera that those anticipated costs mobilised voters in many areas.

“What they push back on is a building down the road that needs as much power as a small city, when they suspect their own electric bill will cover it,” Mercer said.

“That’s why local resistance has grown so fast: counties pausing new projects, zoning fights and data centres turning into a ballot issue.”

An election-season talking point

That popular resistance led several candidates in high-profile races to make AI and data-centre development central to their campaigns.

Among them is Democrat Sherrod Brown, who flipped a key Senate seat in Ohio, the state that accounted for the largest share of data-centre ballot initiatives this year.

Some 21 votes were taken on data centres in the state, out of a total of 47 referendums and measures that took place across the country in 2026.

Brown, a former senator, made Republican incumbent Jon Husted’s support for data-centre development a key point of attack.

“One guy has led the charge on these. That guy’s responsible, and that’s Jon Husted,” Brown told NBC News earlier this year.

In Texas, meanwhile, Democrat Gina Hinojosa called for a moratorium on new data-centre approvals until stronger protections for local communities were put in place.

Though her position worried tech investors keen on expansion in the Lone Star State, Hinojosa ultimately defeated incumbent Greg Abbott in the governor’s race.

“While Abbott had a moratorium on data centres in Texas currently, the overriding view is this would end once he got re-elected,” Dan Ives, managing director at the bank Yorkville Ives, said in an analyst note.

“Hinojosa is a known anti-data center politician and negative on the AI buildout, which makes worries around the future of the data center buildout in Texas a real issue for tech investors.”

Another successful Democratic candidate, Senator-elect James Talarico, also flipped a Republican-held seat with a pledge to increase data centre regulation.

Texas has been at the centre of growing concerns over the water demands of AI infrastructure.

The city of Corpus Christi, for example, has faced severe drought conditions, with its reservoir falling to just 8 percent of its total capacity earlier this year.

The city has been described as at risk of running out of drinking water. Talarico proposed adopting closed-loop water systems to reduce data centre consumption. He also advocated for data centre operators to fund local infrastructure improvements.

He won Corpus Christi by a 12-percentage-point margin.

In another key Senate race, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed called for the creation of a federal agency to oversee the AI industry. He bested his Republican opponent with more than 52 percent of the vote.

Looming pressures

With Democrats poised to control both chambers of Congress, the AI industry is likely to face increased scrutiny from lawmakers.

“[We are] more likely to get real regulation and oversight,” Alex Turner, a former researcher who resigned from Google DeepMind, told Al Jazeera.

“I look forward to advising any congressperson who wants to get serious about the risks from AI, no matter their party affiliation.”

Congressional leaders are increasingly treating AI as a national security and public safety threat, after a string of alarming security failures over the past six months.

In one incident, OpenAI autonomous agents escaped a controlled testing environment and infiltrated the tech start-up Hugging Face. In another, AI agents accessed bank accounts without authorisation, according to reporting from the publication Axios.

In late October, Anthropic’s Claude AI model also accessed voter data in Georgia.

Once the 120th Congress is sworn in on January 3, Democrats are expected to use the legislature’s oversight committees to conduct investigations into AI malfeasance.

On Tuesday night, as it became clear that Democrats would win majorities in Congress, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts pledged that new probes were on the way.

“They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing,” the Democrat wrote on the social media platform X.

Another congressmember, Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, posted on social media her support for more restrictions on AI growth.

“Top of the Democratic agenda on day one needs to be a pause on advanced AI development, regulation of this out-of-control industry, and a ban on artificial superintelligence,” Ansari said.

Tech companies themselves have responded to the midterm results with proposals for alleviating voter concerns.

After the election, OpenAI published a framework titled Setting a New Standard for Responsible AI Infrastructure. In it, the company pledged to “prioritize closed-loop or low-water cooling” and to “pay our own way on energy and infrastructure”.

Days before Tuesday’s contest, OpenAI also sought to rebrand its data centres as “compute campuses”.

The political shift is also hitting Wall Street. Investors increasingly see tighter oversight of AI on the horizon, and some of the sector’s biggest growth stocks have stumbled.

On Thursday, for example, chipmaker Nvidia lost $450bn in market value in a single trading day.

Despite Thursday’s losses, Nvidia rebounded on Friday, gaining 4 percent in early trading, although it remained down 6.8 percent over the previous five days.

Data-centre operators such as CoreWeave tumbled on Thursday before climbing 6.6 percent on Friday. The company remained down 16 percent over the previous five days.

It was the most expensive election in American history: nearly $12bn spent, much of it on advertisements, with the majority of that money going to Republican candidates. But most voters weren’t buying it. The result: a Democratic sweep on a scale not seen in half a century.

In the aftermath of the vote, United States President Donald Trump – who has long revelled in his ability to turn controversy and crisis into spectacle – appeared to lose control of the narrative. The scale of the Republican defeat amounts to a repudiation of Trump’s politics and the US-Israel war on Iran. Meenakshi Ravi and Richard Gizbert examine the political and media fallout.

Contributors: 
Alex Shephard – Senior editor, The New Republic
Rob Arlett – former Trump state campaign chair & Republican strategist
Maya Berry – Executive director, Arab American Institute

On our radar

Serbia’s new political leadership has yet to form a government, but the country’s media institutions are already being purged of voices who gave former president, Aleksandar Vucic, years of favourable coverage. Tariq Nafi looks at the news outlets being held to account.

Equator: a magazine for a post-American world

Equator magazine is the brainchild of a group of writers and editors – some of them ex-mainstream media – who came together during a “moment of moral despair” as they witnessed Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza unfold. One year after its launch, Equator has produced some quality stories and essays on global politics, culture and art – all presented with an eye for design. We speak to cofounder and former Guardian editor, Jonathan Shainin, about the magazine’s vision and how it’s going.

Featuring:
Jonathan Shainin – Founding Editor, Equator magazine

United States President Donald Trump has said he is making Stephen Miller his new White House chief of staff.

Trump made the announcement on his Truth Social account on Friday, calling Miller “one of my most trusted advisors”. He said Miller would become chief of staff starting Monday, replacing Susie Wiles.

“Susie Wiles, who has done an outstanding job, will be moving over to the Trump Political Operation. I want to thank her for her service as Chief of Staff — She has done a great job!”

Miller has been one of Trump’s closest confidants and advisers across both his presidential terms, after joining then-candidate Trump as a campaign adviser in 2016.

He has been the main architect behind the president’s hardline border and deportation policies, a rallying issue in the US midterm elections.

Democrats are widely expected to launch investigations into Miller upon taking control of the US House of Representatives and Senate in January.

Trump had been widely expected to shake up his staff following the midterm drubbing, which saw Democrats net seven US Senate seats, with two states, Alaska and Mississippi, still counting their results. Democrats have also won 253 seats in the 435-member US House, with 27 races still set to be counted.

Despite the vote largely seen as a referendum on Trump, Miller’s appointment largely represents a doubling down on his most controversial policies.

Miller has not yet commented on the election results, but in a post on X on election day, he urged Trump supporters to vote.

“Send a message to the corrupt media, corrupt Democrats and corrupt leftwing politicians who want to steal your future and destroy the inheritance of your children,” he wrote. “Get to the polls and protect the ones you love.”

For her part, Wiles, who has been credited with orchestrating Trump’s election comeback in the 2024 race, said serving as a chief of staff was “the honor of a lifetime”.

“I’m so proud to have been a part of what we’ve accomplished together from securing our border and cutting taxes to strengthening our economy and putting America First,” she said.

On the sidelines of this month’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, China, an unprecedented three-way meeting between United States President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin could take place.

“China is in communication with relevant parties regarding a meeting between the three heads of state,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters in Beijing on Wednesday.

“Work is under way to coordinate such a meeting,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday, adding: “We hope that it will be finalised in the coming days.”

Trump has said he is open to three-way talks focused on nuclear weapons. “If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it,” he told reporters last month.

The three leaders have met separately but have never held formal talks together.

So could the meeting, pencilled in for November 18-19, actually happen, and what would it mean for the rest of the world? Here’s what we know:

What would Russia get out of a three-way meeting with the US and China?

At the very least, a photo opportunity.

“It is a big event,” Alexander Bratersky, a Moscow-based journalist and political analyst, told Al Jazeera.

He pointed to Pyotr Tolstoy, chairman of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, who he said has described the meeting as a path towards a new Yalta – the 1945 conference where the leaders of the Soviet Union, the US and the United Kingdom shaped the post-war order in Europe.

That allows Moscow to “talk big”, Bratersky said, while putting Ukraine on the sidelines.

Simply being at the table would make Putin “first among equals”, he added, giving him a photo opportunity to show the world that he will be among those deciding the future of Europe’s security architecture after the war in Ukraine.

If the meeting produced results, he said, it would reflect China’s influence on Russia.

“We should take into account that we are dealing with a much weaker US leader after elections,” Bratersky said.

Trump remains in charge of foreign policy, he explained, but will have less leverage if Democrats, who won control of both chambers of Congress in this week’s midterm elections, start sending money to Kyiv.

“A meeting by itself will be a success,” he said. “Putin will be able to sell it at home”.

Whether anything comes of it should become clear within a month or so, Bratersky said, and the meeting could lead to another during the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Miami in December.

If nothing is produced before Christmas, he added, “it will be just a photo op.”

What does Trump want?

Optics and leverage.

Trump wants “a personal, high-drama encounter” that lets him claim he is “dealing with” the other two great powers on his own terms, Inderjeet Parmar, a professor of international politics at City St George’s, University of London, told Al Jazeera.

A three-way meeting would allow Trump to present himself as “the indispensable deal-maker”, Parmar said, talking up potential deals on Ukraine, trade, energy or arms control.

“After the midterms the domestic political need for a foreign policy ‘win’ is real,” he said.

Any image of Trump sitting with Xi and Putin could be spun as evidence that American power still commands the table, he said, “even if the substance is limited or largely symbolic”.

“The domestic audience, and his eroding MAGA base, matters at least as much as the diplomatic one,” Parmar said.

What does China want?

Not a summit on Ukraine.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he raised the idea of discussing Ukraine with Xi when they met in Beijing on October 30, and could see the “surprise” on his face, Germany’s DPA news agency reported.

Steinmeier told public broadcaster ARD that Xi said the three presidents would probably meet in Shenzhen, but not to discuss Ukraine.

He said Xi explicitly pointed out that the Russia-Ukraine war is a European conflict in which the “Europeans must sit at the table”.

Beijing is also likely to swat away Trump’s push for nuclear talks.

Last month, China’s Foreign Ministry said it would be “neither fair, reasonable nor realistic to ask China to join the so-called trilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage”.

What would a meeting mean for the rest of the world?

Allies could be sidelined.

Parmar said a three-way meeting would mark “a clear break from the post-1945 pattern”, in which Washington coordinated closely with its European and Asian allies before engaging with Moscow or Beijing.

“A free-standing trilateral [meeting] risks treating those allies as secondary players whose interests can be managed after the fact,” he said, adding that those interests could even be traded.

That would be a shift towards “personalised great-power diplomacy”, he said. But the Trump administration still has hopes to drive a wedge between Russia and China, Parmar added.

Fears of a “G3” are “understandable but overstated in institutional terms”, he said, because the three capitals’ interests diverge sharply on Ukraine, Taiwan, technology and the rules of the international economy.

“The real risk is not a formal G3 secretariat, but the normalisation of great-power deals struck with little consultation of those most affected,” he said.

“History offers many examples of such moments. They rarely produce stable order and often leave the excluded feeling the costs,” Parmar said.

As the United States midterm election results landed late on Tuesday night, United States President Donald Trump took a phone call from the news outlet Politico.

A wave for the Democratic Party had sunk Trump’s Republican Party. For the first time in his two stints as president, Trump’s Republican Party no longer controlled either chamber of Congress.

But in the phone interview, Trump put on a brave face — and offered an olive branch: He said that he would be willing to work with Democrats.

“They’ve already called, and they want to work with me. I have the right to veto everything, but I don’t want to be just sitting there for two years just vetoing everything,” he said.

While a handful of seats remain to be counted, the Democrats have won comfortable majorities in both the House of Representatives, where they have secured at least 253 seats out of 435, and in the Senate, where they have won at least 54 out of 100.

Trump has since posted a picture on his Truth Social account using the Make America Great Again red baseball hat to read “VETO”. Despite the Democrats’ success, as president, Trump holds broad executive authority, with Article 1, Section 7 of the US Constitution stipulating that the president has the power to reject legislation passed by Congress through a veto.

Congress can override the veto, but would need to have a two-thirds majority, something that the Democrats do not have in either chamber.

But Trump’s comments to Politico underscore an alternate possibility — the president may pick and choose when to veto, and when to work with Democrats.

Bipartisan negotiations

As it stands, Trump has three options: veto legislation, enforce executive orders or make deals.

Since Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, he has passed 292 executive orders: 67 this year and 225 last year, according to the Federal Register.

But now, according to Andrew Proctor, a lecturer in US politics at University College London, Trump has even less leverage than before with Congress.

“I think the biggest thing is we’re probably going to see a decent amount of gridlock. The Democrats are going to try to pass policies, but he’s got the power to veto them, and Democrats don’t have enough seats in either chamber to overcome any vetoes that he has,” Proctor said.

“So that raises questions about, will he try to work with the Democrats at all on passing legislation? I think recent history says that’s unlikely.”

Still, some Democrats have said that they would work with the president to advance programmes central to their campaign promises.

Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, the first Muslim elected to the US Senate, has already said he could work with Trump  — even though the US president had used racist and Islamophobic rhetoric to target El-Sayed during the campaign.

El-Sayed told MSNOW on Thursday that if Trump was interested in “getting money out of politics, putting money in pockets and passing Medicare for All, that’s what I ran to do, and I’m looking forward to working with anyone who is willing to do that”.

“He is the president of the United States,” he said. “I’m going to be one United States senator, and if he’s interested in working on issues that I want to work on – getting more people healthcare, ending the Medicare cuts, ending the stupid war, stopping these stupid tariffs with Canada – then let’s talk about doing that and go and deliver for the public.”

Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders has also said, in recent interviews, that he would not rule out Trump signing onto a Medicare for All bill if Democrats pass it in both chambers of Congress. He described Trump as a “politician” who was not “too ideological”.

Proctor argued that Trump could indeed make a deal with the Democrats based on how good it could make him look, but that getting Medicare for All passed in the next two years appeared unlikely.

“I do think that a place where common ground could emerge on healthcare is rolling back, specifically the sort of subsidies that were cut” under Trump’s earlier legislation, he said. “So that would make healthcare more affordable for millions of Americans.”

Proctor pointed out that some Republicans in 2025 had said they were willing to negotiate with Democrats on healthcare reforms.

“That didn’t end up happening, but I could imagine that might be a place for healthcare-specific policy where we could see something emerge,” he said. “I don’t think that a broader healthcare debate on passing Medicare for All, though, is really in the cards.”

Veto or filibuster

Though Trump has said he would be willing to use veto, he has historically not been among the most avid proponents of the practice.

He has so far used the veto twice in this term, and used it 10 times during his first term. Joe Biden used it 12 times in his single term, while Barack Obama used the veto a dozen times over two terms.

Overall, the presidential use of the veto has declined with time: Bill Clinton vetoed legislation 37 times between 1993 and 2001. His predecessor, George HW Bush, used it 44 times in his single term — almost once a month. Ronald Reagan used it 78 times over his two terms.

But Proctor said that Republicans also have a different tool to try and block legislation. That is the filibuster, a tactic that delays a vote on a specific piece of legislation by using an extended debate, which would impact the Democrats’ ability to get something passed.

“This is what they did to [former President Barack] Obama,” Proctor told Al Jazeera. “Senate Republicans will probably try to do the same thing, and it also means that we don’t even get to the point of Trump having the power to veto because the legislation never reaches him in the first place.”

Impeachment

Since the Democrats swept the midterms on Tuesday, calls for investigations against the administration have already emerged.

In his first term, Trump was impeached twice — first for the abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and the second time for “inciting” the US Capitol riots.

On Tuesday night, US Representative Robert Garcia, who is set to become chairman of the House Oversight Committee, wrote on X: “LAWYER UP.” Senator Ron Wyden, who is expected to lead the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in a post on X: “Subpoenas.”

However, the Trump administration has already denied any wrongdoing.

“If Democrats choose to pursue sham investigations and radical left policies, they are choosing to work against the American people,” said White House spokesperson Lauren Bis on Wednesday.

Reports also suggest that impeachment proceedings against Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth might be imminent, over the Iran war that Trump and other Republicans have blamed for the party’s losses.

As the clock ticks down for the Senate to pass the so-called Sunshine Protection Act to mandate year-round daylight saving time in most of the United States, President Trump on Wednesday said he planned to “keep fighting” for the change.

In July, the House, in a lopsided bipartisan vote, approved a measure to make year-round daylight saving time the default for most of the United States. But its companion bill remains stalled in the Senate.

“Too bad the Senate has not yet approved the Sunshine Protection Act or, the I Don’t Want to Change My Clocks Anymore Act,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

Daylight saving time ended on Sunday, Nov. 1, meaning clocks in most of the United States fell back one hour at 2 a.m. Daylight saving time will begin again on March 14, 2027, unless the bill passes both chambers and is signed by Trump before then.

In his post, Trump lamented that it was dark by 5:31 p.m. “Just a few days ago it was so nice and sunny at this same time,” he said.

“I didn’t want to make a big deal out of this prior to the Election because I didn’t want to have certain Senators lose their Race, in a landslide, but it is too bad they can’t get it done,” Trump said.

Trump continued: “We have far bigger priorities, but I will keep fighting for this!”

Although permanent daylight saving time would mean brighter winter evenings, it would also mean darker winter mornings.

If the legislation were to pass, Los Angeles would see its latest sunrise of the year at 8 a.m. Sacramento would see sunrise as late as 8:24 a.m., and San Francisco as late as 8:25 a.m.

The debate over timekeeping has pitted some golf course owners — who argue that later sunsets are good for business as it gives people more daylight to play golf after work — against doctors, who say the darker mornings and brighter evenings of permanent daylight saving time weaken the circadian clock for many people.

Trump owns golf courses across the United States, including in New Jersey, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

At times, the debate has turned ugly. In October, Trump appeared to share the cellphone number of a vocal critic of the legislation, Sen. Tom Cotton telling his supporters to contact the Arkansas Republican.

Cotton has long argued that the late sunrises in the winter would mean students would need to walk to school in the dark and risk being struck by drivers — as was the case in 1974 when the U.S. briefly adopted year-round daylight saving time to combat an energy crisis.

Arizona resident Jay Pea, a former software engineer and the founder of the nonprofit Save Standard Time, also wants to put an end to the twice-annual clock adjustments.

But he’s not a fan of permanent daylight saving time, which he said would particularly burden outdoor workers, such as construction crews, farmers and groundskeepers, who would probably have to start their days in the dark.

“It makes you get up one hour earlier. It makes you start work in school one hour earlier,” Pea told The Times on Thursday. “Nobody’s calling up his congressman and saying, ‘Hey, can you make me go to work an hour earlier? Can you make me set my alarm an hour earlier?’ But that’s what DST [daylight saving time] does.”

Pea favors year-round standard time. It keeps clocks aligned with the sun, he said. He supports an alternative proposal, the Sunshine for Our Kids Act, which was introduced in July by Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.).

The proposal would make standard time the default year-round but give states the ability to opt out. That legislation remains stalled in the House, according to Pea.

Times staff writer Rong-Gong Lin II contributed reporting.

“I think it’s safe to say that we are tired of being pitted against each other. We are tired of being told to hate each other. It has been 10 years of this kind of politics. Politics as blood sport. Politics as trolling and owning. Politics as professional wrestling. It tears families apart. It ends friendships, and it leaves us all feeling terrible all the time.”

So said Senator-elect James Talarico in his victory speech on election night after he won the first United States Senate seat in Texas for the Democratic Party in almost 40 years.

I don’t like Talarico or his policies, but I agree with him on one thing: The American people are tired of being pitted against one another. We need more uniters and fewer dividers in the Republican Party and US politics in general.

This is the conclusion many American voters seem to have reached after 10 years of Donald Trump dominating the right.

A decade ago, he forcefully entered the political scene with a radically different approach and provocative rhetoric. He won his first US presidential election by attacking his opponents with clever and cutting nicknames. Crooked Hillary. Low-energy Jeb. Pocahontas. Little Marco. Crazy Bernie. Lying Ted.

All were aimed at diminishing his rivals in ways that only a rapturous crowd of adoring MAGA fans could really appreciate. His attacks played well on social media and reflected an American culture that was far less deferential to the political establishment, far coarser in its language and far more interested in being entertained than being informed.

Trump’s attacks, performed live at his raucous rallies, had all the earmarks of a professional wrestling bout. It was blood sport at its most basic level. And Trump’s supporters ate it up, loving how he stood up to an elite that obviously despised them.

His opponent in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, called half of his supporters a “basket of deplorables”.

Seven years before Trump formally entered the race for the White House, Barack Obama in a speech in San Francisco had said that people like them “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”.

Trump gathered up these angry voters, many of whom had protested during the Tea Party movement, and created “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). They loved the visceral way Trump communicated. They loved that he promised to end illegal immigration and free-trade policies that destroyed manufacturing jobs.

Trump’s rhetoric, coarse as it was, seemed honest, authentic, unscripted, and totally real, not poll-tested, not AI-generated, not written by expensive speechwriters. Trump was talking to them, not at them. He had listened to their fears and promised to fight back with a vengeance.

When Trump claimed the political establishment had stolen his re-election, he didn’t sit idly by, accepting the results. He consulted his lawyers, came up with a dubious legal strategy and then unleashed his supporters on Capitol Hill, hoping upon hope that their pressure would bend the hallowed traditions of presidential succession to his will. It didn’t work, but it also didn’t disqualify him.

Over the four years of President Joe Biden’s administration, Trump survived legal attacks, threats of imprisonment and assassination attempts to become an invincible force who seized power again in 2024. His ascent seemed like destiny.

But as it often does, the fickle winds of the electorate changed direction. They used to love his unconventional approach to politics, but now they wanted him to deliver on his promises to lower inflation and gas prices. He had once promised to keep us out of foreign wars, but that promise was broken, too. Perhaps he had a good reason to attack Iran, but he failed to make a convincing case to the American public, and voters quickly grew disenchanted with another broken promise. The vice president himself said that the war is what cost the Republicans the election. But it was more than just the war. Voters were tired of the whole act.

When Trump told his voters to imagine that he was on the ballot, it wasn’t just his supporters who made this election a referendum on Trump. So too did angry Democrats, disgusted independents and more than a few former MAGA minions.

They said this election was about affordability, but it really was about an undisciplined president who refused to colour inside the lines, who blundered into a costly war, who didn’t stop his administration from detaining and deporting high school baseball coaches and Uber drivers and domestic employees, and harboured too many white supremacists within his ranks.

He alienated women, Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, African Americans and offended well-educated Midwesterners who couldn’t stomach his language or his antics any longer. The great MAGA coalition that he assembled for his historic 2024 victory dissipated in one election night, tired of the nonsense and wanting a change in direction.

Things are so bad for Republicans that they lost all kinds of members, from House leaders like Richard Hudson, to tremendously flawed MAGA warriors like Ken Paxton to seasoned and effective Appropriators like Susan Collins. Conservative Republicans lost. Traditional Republicans lost. Moderate Republicans lost. All kinds of Republicans lost. It is a total and complete rejection of the GOP, top to bottom. An unmitigated disaster.

There are two questions that remain. What will happen to the MAGA movement now? And can we ever return to the good old days before Trump made politics a blood sport more akin to Ultimate Fighting than to the World Wrestling Federation?

The answer is this: Unless Republicans fundamentally change how they communicate to voters and what they promise to do for them, they will not win another election. MAGA will be lost forever. Governing is about building coalitions, not about belittling potential allies with sophomoric attacks and needlessly partisan rhetoric.

Like Andrew Jackson, President Trump has forever changed American politics, and it is highly unlikely that we will ever completely return to the good old days of disagreeing without being disagreeable. But voters showed that they had grown tired of Mr. Trump’s brand of disagreeableness by delivering to the Democrats a huge political victory.

This election was not an endorsement of Democratic policies. It was a referendum on Trumpism and his caustic brand of politics. We will see if he got the message.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

A tech stock rout that began overnight in the United States has persisted in Asian trading.

Market authorities in South Korea paused trading on Friday as prices plunged across the region. Global markets have been rattled by a sharp fall in the trading price of tech stocks, which is driven by fears that the Democrats’ victory in the US midterm elections will increase regulatory scrutiny of AI and slow the country’s data centre build-out.

Japan’s Nikkei index slumped 6 percent, its deepest one-day drop since April 2025. Indices in South Korea and Taiwan plunged more than 8 percent after the opening bell, before cutting losses as authorities scrambled to stem the selling.

Wall Street’s volatility “fear gauge” soared overnight on Thursday and the tech-focused Nasdaq sank 5.5 percent, wiping $3 trillion off S&P 500 firms, as investors fretted that the Democrats could put the brakes on the AI boom being encouraged by President Donald Trump.

“It was a brutal morning for many investors here in Asia. We saw that the AI sell-off continues here across many countries,” Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu reported from Beijing.

“Some of those major markets have fortunately recovered some of those losses, but all of them are still clearly in the red,” she said.

Analysts say the political jitters are hitting an AI trade already on shaky footing due to worries about returns on massive spending on related infrastructure.

“The selloff shows that AI stock prices had been built on rosy illusions about the future, and now that illusion is gone,” Dong Baozhen, chairman of asset manager Lingtong Shengtai, told the Reuters news agency.

“The US stock market has been the standard-bearer and backbone of the global AI bull run. Now that backbone has snapped. Can AI bull markets elsewhere hold up on their own?”

Authorities step in

Markets cut some of their losses by the time Asian markets closed, as authorities worked to stem the panic.

Trading on South Korea’s Kospi market was temporarily halted amid the sharp slide. Finance Minister Lee Hyoung-il also eased rules on retail investors’ leveraged investments.

In China, state entities stepped in to buy up equities in a bid to stabilise the market, said Al Jazeera’s Yu.

The Taiwan stock market closed down 4.5 percent, recovering somewhat from its early morning slump. For the week, the index clocked a 12.2 percent decline, its biggest since 1991, LSEG data showed.

The government of the island state, a key producer of chips, sought to talk up the prospects for the sector.

Demand ⁠for emerging technologies like AI, ⁠high-performance computing and ⁠cloud services is expected to keep expanding, driving ‌demand for tech companies, the economy ministry said in a statement issued on Friday.

Korean AI chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix fell nearly 6 percent and 9.4 percent respectively, cutting steep losses from earlier. TSMC fell as much as 8.5 percent in Taiwan, before closing down 4.7 percent.

In Japan, Kioxia plunged 11 percent while AI investor SoftBank Group slid 11 percent.

New regulations

The selling indicates investors are starting to factor in increased opposition to data centres. Analysts say markets have yet to fully consider the cost such building work has imposed on communities.

Toby Walsh, the chief scientist for the AI Institute at Australia’s University of New South Wales, said he expected new regulations on data centres in many countries, including the US, Australia and the United Kingdom.

“The developers were building them in a way that wasn’t actually getting social licence,” Walsh told Al Jazeera.

“They were building them in places where they didn’t need to build. You don’t have to build data centres in urban areas. You can build them in the middle of nowhere.

“I think it’s actually for the good of the tech industry in the United States that this has happened,” he added. “We’re spending money a bit too quickly. And maybe this is the way to let that bubble deflate in a manageable way.”

Messages popped up on my WhatsApp account from New York, Gaza, Pakistan and Australia. Friends and colleagues were following Michigan’s Senate race, talking excitedly about Abdul El-Sayed. As the results from Wayne County sealed his victory on Tuesday, I felt something I had rarely felt before in American politics: not a muted relief that someone had lost but genuine joy and hope that someone had won.

El-Sayed, a physician and former Detroit health director, defeated Republican Mike Rogers. He will be the first Muslim ever elected to the United States Senate. As a Muslim American from Michigan, this hit home.

Like many in Michigan’s Muslim community, I knew of Abdul long before he became a fixture in national headlines, from his 2018 gubernatorial campaign to his Friday sermons in local mosques. As Ramadan began this year, I attended one of his town halls for Muslim constituents. Before a few dozen community members and leaders, Abdul pledged to fight for all Michiganders. His sincerity and commitment to that pledge remained evident even as the pressures of the campaign intensified. I have seen him attend funerals for community members near my home and watched him go from person to person, greeting people with kindness. Even in the final days of an exhausting campaign, he responded personally to messages from the community, including mine.

We attended the same university, the University of Michigan, where he once helped lead the Muslim Students’ Association. I later served as a college student body president there. Just days before the election, Muslim alumni (including me) invited him to a football tailgate party with students, parents and graduates. His former teachers and students have spoken to me with pride about the person they knew.

Muslim Americans are often asked to celebrate any politician who occasionally says “salaam” or appears in a mosque before Election Day. Abdul was not an outsider to our community coming to court us. He belonged to it.

During the campaign, I welcomed hundreds of local Muslim community members, out-of-state political candidates canvassing for him and members of his staff into my home. People heard from those closest to him what this race could mean for Muslim Americans. The enthusiasm felt different from the familiar, dispiriting bargain of voting mainly to stop someone worse.

Two years ago, I wrote about why I would vote against genocide in the 2024 presidential election. That decision was shaped by my work with Palestinian healthcare workers, by witnessing the realities in Palestine firsthand and by outrage at the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza. Neither I nor many of Michigan’s Muslims have forgotten. But this time, the ballot offered something other than just a protest vote: a candidate who had opposed Israel’s genocide against Palestinians from the outset while also caring about the range of issues affecting Michiganders.

His willingness to speak truth to power attracted immense hostility from Washington’s elites. President Donald Trump repeatedly mocked Abdul’s name, treating “Muhammad” – his middle name, meaning “the praised one” – as an insult. Political opponents and even some voters insinuated that his faith alone made him suspect, recycling unsubstantiated allegations tying him to groups and movements he did not belong to.

Abdul responded with dignity and directness. When critics made his name the issue, he spoke about groceries, housing, healthcare and affordability. When challenged over his opposition to genocide, he questioned the premise that wanting children to live free of bombs was somehow hateful. He did not accept the proposition that a Muslim must disown his community or Palestine to qualify for public office.

And most importantly, he fought back. Many Muslim voters I spoke to felt they had found someone willing to fight for them, to challenge the presumptions and racism of journalists, pundits and media outlets rather than accept their unjust framing.

His victory speech began with the words his opponents had tried to weaponise: “My name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.” He recalled having said “inshallah” – “God willing” – whenever he was asked about winning. Now, he said, it was time for “alhamdulillah”, or “Praise be to God.”

That moment was electric, not because Arabic phrases alone are a sign of solidarity – even former President Joe Biden said “inshallah” in a debate before proceeding to commit genocide against Palestinians and aid the bombing of mosques and burning of Qurans – but because his Muslim identity had survived a countrywide effort by special interest groups and racists to make it disqualifying. His faith, Islam, is a value system he actively chooses every day, a commitment he strives to live out in public life. His being Muslim mattered to me more than his Arab ethnicity or ancestral origins, a simple happenstance of birth.

There was money behind the attempt to stop him too. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC’s) affiliated super PAC spent roughly $30m in Michigan’s Democratic primary, an extraordinary investment to defeat someone who openly opposed US support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid. In his victory speech, Abdul thanked AIPAC for the chance to beat it twice. One loss will not dissolve the lobbying group’s power. But Michigan demonstrated that AIPAC spending need not amount to a veto over who can win.

After Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, sceptics suggested that a Muslim candidate outspoken about Palestine could only win in a liberal metropolis, not a state that Trump carried in 2024. El-Sayed travelled from small towns and villages to industrial cities and suburbs, visiting churches and mosques, and he won statewide.

Michigan has long been a centre of Muslim American life, from Dearborn’s famous Arab restaurants and coffee houses to Hamtramck, the first Muslim-majority city in the US. Generations have built mosques, schools, businesses and institutions while enduring suspicion and discrimination. There is irony in Michigan electing a Muslim alumnus of the University of Michigan, which has faced legal challenges over its treatment of antigenocide protesters. Some of the voices that were treated as dangerous on campus found a home at the ballot box for the first time.

Other Muslims across the country made history too. My mentor, friend and colleague Adam Hamawy, with whom I served on a medical mission in Palestine documenting harm to people’s health, won his congressional race in New Jersey and travelled to Michigan to support Abdul. Darializa Avila Chevalier, Aber Kawas, Nabeela Syed and so many others won seats in Congress and state legislatures across the country, refusing to accept that their silence on human rights abuses is the price of participation.

Yet our celebration does not mean we have suspended all judgement. Some Muslims I spoke with vehemently opposed Abdul’s decision to campaign alongside former Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama. Their administrations’ policies, from facilitating the genocide in Gaza to conducting drone strikes against civilians in multiple Muslim-majority countries, remain at the forefront of people’s minds. I understood their anger and shared their apprehensions about normalising the killers of children. Yet many of us still voted for Abdul because we believed in his sincerity and because he had repeatedly made clear that he did not agree with every policy of those backing his campaign. I am under no illusion that one senator alone will end the systems and structures of exploitation that fund war machines abroad and fail their own communities at home. Muslim representation risks becoming hollow if mistaken for the only tool for liberation.

And that is precisely why the substance of his campaign matters. Abdul connected the fight against endless war to the fight for healthcare, clean water and a liveable wage. He spoke of a mother trying to keep her children on lifesaving medication and a worker fighting for a union. He insisted that the money spent destroying someone else’s children has a cost for children in the US too. His politics asked whether Americans could both recognise their own self-interest and show humanity towards others.

His election does not make US government policies any more just overnight. It does not bring back a single Palestinian child. It does not absolve the Democrats, Washington or any of us of complicity. And it certainly does not entitle Abdul to six years in the Senate without scrutiny.

But it destroys one convenient lie: that Muslim Americans must choose between being unapologetically Muslim and belonging fully to American public life.

For years, we were told to lower our voices, soften our names and reconsider what we advocate for if we wanted to succeed. On Tuesday, Michigan delivered its verdict. The man they tried to make unelectable will now sit in the US Senate. Alhamdulillah, he does not need to become less Muslim to serve his state – and the rest of us do not need to police who we are to demand a better future for ourselves and the generations to come.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Call comes as Iraq’s foreign minister urges armed groups not to join any Iranian retaliation, warning it would be disastrous for Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has told the United States that Baghdad will not let its territory be used to attack neighbouring countries, as his foreign minister warned that a new war on Iran would be a “disaster” for Iraq.

Al-Zaidi spoke to US President Donald Trump over the phone on Thursday, according to his office, as diplomatic efforts intensify to avert renewed US attacks on Iran.

The two men “discussed the evolving situation in the region, security developments, and prospects for the next phase”, al-Zaidi’s office said.

The prime minister reaffirmed Iraq’s call “for respect for the sovereignty of states and for Iraqi territory not to be used as a launching point for attacks against neighbouring countries”, it added.

He also stressed the need for diplomacy and dialogue to safeguard the region’s security and stability, it said.

Iraq, which neighbours Iran, has struggled to maintain a balancing act between US and Iranian interests since Trump launched the war on Iran in February.

Since taking office in May, al-Zaidi has prioritised the disarmament of all fighter groups in the country, including several powerful pro-Iran groups that have launched attacks in support of Iran across the region during the war.

Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein told Dijlah TV on Thursday that the potential of renewed US military attacks against Iran is “not a secret” and warned Iraqi armed groups against joining in any Iranian retaliation.

“Pushing Iraqi society into the war will lead to a disaster,” he said. “We are not prepared for war. Neither Iraqi society nor the armed forces are prepared for war.”

Hussein said Iraq had been turned into a battlefield after the US struck Iran, with the country coming under attack from both the US and Iran, as well as from armed groups inside Iraq.

“We are not part of any axis, and we do not want to let the Iraqi arena be turned into a battlefield,” he said. “We have good relations with the US and with our neighbour Iran… We need a clear policy that we are not a part of the war, and we do not want to be a part of the war.”

Since the war began, Iraq has lost more than $60bn in oil revenues, as about 90 percent of its oil exports normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz and were largely cut off when Tehran closed the waterway.

Oil accounts for about 90 percent of Iraq’s federal budget.

Since then, Iraq has been one of the few countries that have been granted exemption by Iran to pass freely through the Strait of Hormuz.

Dallas, Texas – Tuesday’s midterms were bruising for Republicans in Texas, a longtime right-wing stronghold.

The state elected its first Democrats to statewide office in 32 years, and the left-wing party held onto four congressional districts that were recently redesigned to favour Republicans.

But Republicans had one redistricting bright spot in a sea of unexpected defeats in Texas this midterm election cycle.

Amid the so-called blue wave, Republican Jace Yarbrough defeated Dan Barrios in Texas’s 32nd congressional district near Dallas, taking control of a heavily redrawn seat previously held by a Democrat.

Yarbrough became the only Republican this year to flip a Texas congressional seat, despite a push under United States President Donald Trump to shake up the state’s map for the right-wing party’s benefit.

So how did Yarbrough buck the trend? He was successful for two reasons, according to Matthew Wilson, a professor at Southern Methodist University who lives in the 32nd district.

“I think he did effectively pivot from a primary strategy to a general election strategy,” Wilson told Al Jazeera.

A constitutional lawyer, Yarbrough had defined his career by litigating progressive policies. But Wilson explained that the cost of living and other economic concerns took an increasingly prominent role in the final months of Yarbrough’s bid.

“In the primaries, the social issues, cultural issues were really important,” Wilson said.

“But then he pivoted very quickly and realised that those were probably not going to have the same resonance in the fall campaign. And so he did talk a lot about lowering prices. He did talk a lot about things that were of concern more to voters in the centre of the electorate.”

Wilson added there was another important factor in Yarbrough’s victory. “It was just the fact that his district was drawn to be so heavily Republican.”

The 32nd district had previously been composed of left-leaning Dallas and its immediate suburbs, but in August 2025, the Texas state legislature voted to reconfigure the congressional boundaries, with the aim of helping Republicans win five extra seats in this year’s midterms.

That push came at the behest of Trump, who called on Republican-led states across the country to follow suit.

Yarbrough’s district was redrawn to include only a portion of Dallas. It now stretches east instead, to encompass several Republican-dominated counties.

The demographics of the district also shifted dramatically.

In 2024, the district encompassed sizeable Latino, Black and Asian communities, accounting for about 60 percent of the population. The new map lowered the share of those demographics, while including several predominantly white areas.

Still, Wilson pointed out that Yarbrough’s victory was far more muted than initially expected. He won 51.5 percent of the vote to Barrios’s 48.5 percent.

“Even in his case, the race was a lot closer than he would have expected,” Wilson said. “So there was a pretty uniform Democratic swing across congressional districts.”

Latino backlash

With the dust settling on the election, Republicans will start the next congressional term in January with 24 representatives from Texas, losing one seat to Democrats this midterm cycle.

Democrats, who will have commanding control of both chambers of Congress, will have 14 House seats filled by Texans.

The four other Democrat-held districts Texas Republicans hoped to gain via redistricting were swept up in the groundswell of opposition to Trump.

In those districts, the party’s redrawn maps largely miscalculated Latino voters, a demographic that makes up 40 percent of the state’s population and swung towards Trump in 2024, according to political experts.

This year, the demographic tilted back towards Democrats with force, fuelled both by affordability concerns and dismay over Trump’s hardline immigration policies, which disproportionately affect Latino communities.

“In political science, there’s a body of literature we call ‘group threat theory’,” Michael Adams, a professor at Texas Southern University, told Al Jazeera. “When a particular group feels that they are threatened, that mobilises them, and we normally see a higher increase in terms of voter turnout.”

One of the most resounding defeats came in the ninth congressional district in Houston, which for years encompassed an area with large Black and Latino populations. Texas’s newly redrawn map cut out some Black communities but left a large population of low-propensity Latino voters.

Democratic candidate Leticia Gutierrez ended up taking nearly 58 percent of the vote against Republican Alex Mealer.

Speaking to Al Jazeera before the election, Gutierrez said her strategy focused on reaching Latino voters through aggressive Spanish-language outreach focused on pocketbook issues.

“I always say that I have a big chunk of family that are citizens registered to vote, but if they don’t hear it in Spanish, they’re probably not going to show up,” said Gutierrez.

“I’m fortunate enough to be able to speak both languages fairly well, and so just again, doing a lot of that targeted getting out the vote, getting in front of voters, door-knocking.”

Latinos make up about 60 percent of the ninth congressional district. The demographic is even more pronounced in South Texas, where Republicans hoped to pick up the 28th, 34th and 35th districts in their redistricting push.

But in a district representing the suburbs of San Antonio, Democrat Johnny Garcia handily defeated Republican Carlos De La Cruz by more than 10 percentage points.

Along the US-Mexico border, incumbent Democrat Henry Cuellar carried his district with nearly 66 percent of the vote over Republican challenger Tano Tijerina, while in the 34th district, Representative Vicente Gonzalez skated to victory by more than 15 percentage points over Republican challenger Eric Flores.

In another border district, Tejano musician Bobby Pulido, a Democrat, unseated Republican incumbent Monica De La Cruz, whose 2022 victory presaged a wider conservative shift among Latinos in the state.

Two years later, Trump carried nearly every Latino-dominated border district in Texas, seizing on unrest over immigration policies under former President Joe Biden. He also leveraged the prevalence of conservative social views among the largely Catholic population.

The area had long been considered a Democratic stronghold.

“Democrats are very conservative here. So I’m not surprised that it went for Trump in 2024,” 37-year-old voter Donato Medina told Al Jazeera from the border city of McAllen before the vote.

“But now it’s like people are kind of waking up, because his policies are affecting them directly.”

Though the US president said a deal was ‘very close’, he gave no specifics and did not meet a visiting Ukrainian delegation.

US President Donald Trump has said that a deal between Russia and Ukraine may be imminent, following a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, at the White House.

“I think we’re going to be very close to settling Russia-Ukraine,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, while declining to disclose details of his conversation with Dmitriev.

“There’s going to be an agreement. It’s going to be a big agreement, and it’s going to involve more than Ukraine,” Trump said, adding that the effort could include “all of Europe”.

Trump has frequently predicted that an agreement to end Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II was close. Negotiations have, however, picked up in recent weeks.

Trump said he did not meet the Ukrainian delegation on Thursday.

The meeting between the US president and Dmitriev came after a diplomatic gathering hosted by First Lady Melania Trump, which brought Russian and Ukrainian representatives together to mark and build on the localised six-day truce she helped broker in the southern Ukrainian city of Oleshky in October. The US president did not attend the event.

The temporary ceasefire ran from October 27 to November 1 and allowed for the evacuation of nearly 800 civilians from the besieged, Russian-occupied city of Oleshky in Ukraine’s Kherson region, as well as the delivery of critical food and medical supplies.

Senior officials from both countries attended on Thursday, including Dmitriev; Yana Lantratova, Russia’s human rights commissioner; David Arakhamia, leader of the Servant of the People party in Ukraine’s parliament; and Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s parliamentary human rights commissioner.

Melania Trump also spoke at the event, which the White House described as “the first time in American history that a First Lady has personally brought representatives of two nations at war to the White House for diplomacy”.

“Together, we can create something more enduring than a temporary ceasefire,” she said, urging both sides to see the humanitarian truce in Oleshky “as a spark in a world of darkness”.

The first lady presented Putin’s and Zelenskyy’s representatives with large white envelopes and asked them to deliver her personal letters to each leader. Dmitriev presented her with a painting by an 11-year-old girl, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sent her the Order of Princess Olga, a Ukrainian award recognising her role in the ceasefire.