Emma Tucker
1. FROM MY DESK
Two years after handing Republicans control of Washington, voters flipped Congress blue, resetting the balance of power for President Trump's final years in office.
The sweep gives Democrats decisive leverage over everything from Trump's nominees to government spending. While party leaders have pledged swift action on healthcare and household costs, turning that agenda into law will run straight into Trump's veto pen. This morning, we look at what a Democratic-controlled Congress changes-and what it doesn't.
Got questions about the results? Washington Coverage Chief Damian Paletta will be available for a real-time written chat from 2-3 p.m. ET today. Submit your questions at any time here.
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2. TODAY'S HEADLINES
-- Trump said the conflict in Iran was partially to blame for widespread Republican losses in the midterm elections. In an interview with the Journal on Tuesday night, he maintained that he didn't regret launching the war.
-- Stock futures rebounded as investors weighed the Democrats' election sweep.
-- Hackers are cranking the heat on Europe's supermarket freezers to above 120 degrees.
-- North Korea accelerated a spree of missile tests, signaling it would stick to its guns as it spurned U.S. diplomatic overtures with a growing list of demands.
-- Pieces of the tail of the Bahamas-bound business jet that crashed in Florida have been found miles away from the impact site, indicating that part of the aircraft separated before the plane hit the ground.
-- 3M has agreed to pay $7.35 billion over nine years to people who have made personal-injury claims related to firefighting foam that contained so-called forever chemicals known as PFAS.
3. LIVE FROM THE MARKETS
Follow our live financial coverage all day.
-- Stocks Spencer Jakab is watching: E-commerce platform Shopify looked more like Dropify earlier this year when fears arose that artificial intelligence would make its services obsolete. Its shares fell by more than 40% at one point, but they clawed it all back by last month. The calm didn't last. On Tuesday, third-quarter results that weren't quite rosy enough sent the stock down by almost 9%. Get Spencer's Markets A.M. newsletter in your inbox.
-- CVS Health will split into two companies, dividing its retail pharmacies from its insurance and pharmacy-benefit operations in a move that will reverse one of its signature deals.
-- The canned-cocktail trend that liquor companies steered clear of in recent years isn't going away and they are scrambling to catch up, writes Carol Ryan.
4. READ IT HERE FIRST
Iran turns to guerrilla tactics to reassert its grip on the Strait of Hormuz.
Tehran is using everything in its arsenal to try to disrupt the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf as it tries to shore up the regime's fast-eroding position in the conflict and pressure the Trump administration in deadlocked negotiations. Over recent weeks, Tehran has launched bomb-laden undersea drones, fired rocket-propelled grenades and deployed crews to attach limpet mines to ships, targeting vessels that shuttle oil to waiting tankers, report Summer Said, Benoit Faucon and Georgi Kantchev. The Islamic Republic's battle to block that escape route has become a shadow war inside the wider U.S.-Iran conflict, with a direct impact on global energy prices as American forces have struck back.
5.
Silicon Valley promises AI will cure disease. Drugmaker CEOs aren't buying it.
Anthropic's chief executive said AI could cure most human diseases within a decade. Another tech exec joked that AI researchers have started smoking cigarettes because they are so confident AI will cure lung cancer. Drugmakers are certainly using AI-even to come up with new drugs. Yet in the race to integrate AI into medicine, a sharp divide has emerged between Silicon Valley's promises and what pharma execs say are the harsh realities of drugmaking, reports Xavier Martinez. There are still many unknowns with biology that data analysis can't fix.
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6. SEE THE STORY
Biologists are pulling graveyard shifts to save America's rarest predator.
Black-footed ferrets in South Dakota's Conata Basin.
To the nocturnal creatures of South Dakota's prairie, Travis Livieri fancies himself an alien abductor. On a recent night just past 2 a.m., the field biologist scooped up a wire trap containing a furious, hissing carnivore-part of an urgent mission across the Great Plains to save the black-footed ferret from extinction. Drought, plague and dwindling numbers of prairie dogs, ferrets' main food source, have battered the population. Amira McKee spent a night out with the biologists racing to pull America's rarest predator back from the brink.
7. HAPPENING TODAY
-- Economic Data: ADP releases its October private-sector employment report, and the ISM releases its services index.
-- Earnings: Uber, McDonald's, Kraft Heinz, DoorDash, Snap, Qualcomm, CVS Health, Novo Nordisk
-- Today's paper
8. THE NUMBER
$7,100
The rough price of seats right behind courtside for the New York Knicks' home opener on SeatGeek. For C-suiters conscious of bottom lines, the seating behind Celebrity Row is often a steal. Those comparatively lower prices are a reason why purchases of second-row Knicks seats on StubHub are roughly three times as high as sales of those courtside.
9. AND FINALLY...
Our columnist went on a Hallmark cruise with fans who can't get enough of Christmas.
It's hard to imagine a more rabid fan base than Hallmark holiday movie devotees. To see what happens when you put thousands of them on a ship together, our travel columnist Dawn Gilbertson went on the annual Hallmark Christmas Cruise. A sold-out, four-night extravaganza, it is a passion project that begins long before the suitcases come out with holiday merch, the tackier the better. One cruiser put it perfectly: "It's almost like summer camp for people that love Christmas movies."
10. BEYOND THE NEWSROOM
-- Opinion: A Rhode Island indictment illustrates how many state Medicaid programs all but invite fraud in order to draw more federal funds.
-- WSJ | Buy Side: Our picks for the best high-yield savings accounts offer some of the highest APYs while keeping fees and account requirements low.
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Today's newsletter was curated and edited by Morgan Smith and Bryony Watson in collaboration with Editor in Chief Emma Tucker. Got a tip for us? Here's how to submit.
This article is a text version of a Wall Street Journal newsletter published earlier today.