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Schumer says he has the votes before the caucus that holds them has voted

By ChipStaff Writer · the afternoon edition, 10 November 2026

Chuck Schumer told reporters on 4 November that the issue was not him, that he would be reelected majority leader next month no matter the dissent of a handful of newly elected senators. He said it with the flat certainty of a man reading a count that exists. The caucus had not voted. It still has not.

The next day, 5 November, the AFL-CIO released a different number: a record 639 union members had won office that week, the labor federation's own tally of an election it described as a rebuke to the corporate money spent trying to influence the vote. Troy Jackson in Maine, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico in Texas, Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania — union names, not Schumer names. Nobody at the federation was talking about caucus math. The senators-elect did that part themselves.

On 6 November, The Guardian collected what some of the incoming class had already said out loud. Annie Andrews, the senator-elect from South Carolina, told Fox News the party needs new leadership. Adam Hamilton and Abdul El-Sayed were named in the same piece as senators-elect who would not commit to Schumer either. The Guardian's own math, printed in the same breath as the dissent, said Schumer likely still had enough votes to keep the job. That is the shape of this particular week: the man counting and the man being counted are the same person, and the count keeps coming out the same.

By 10 November the dissent had a letterhead. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, 600,000 members, wrote to Schumer directly and told him to step aside; the union's international president called the election a message that working people are demanding change. The same day, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood outside the Capitol and was asked, plainly, whether she would back her home state's senator for the job. She did not say yes.

None of this is a vote. What moved this week is smaller than a count: the senators-elect from Guardian's own list, the 600,000-member union, and the congresswoman from his own state all answered the same question the same way, without saying yes. The caucus still has not voted. Keep counting.

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Tennessee, after failing to kill Christa Pike, warns that one drug label could halt its executions

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the afternoon edition, 10 November 2026

The label is the whole of it, and the label is what Tennessee will not surrender. You will have read that the execution failed. The statute did not. On September 30 the state gave Christa Pike, 50, two syringes of pentobarbital, and more than two hours later she was still breathing — critical condition, her lawyers told a court on October 2, the same day Governor Bill Lee suspended all executions in the state and ordered an inquiry. Its execution chief resigned. A judge ordered the syringes preserved. Preserved, mind you, not discarded. And now the filing: let her lawyers read the supplier's label and future executions in Tennessee could grind to a halt. Which is the arrangement stated outright. Secrecy is the consideration ... the thing the supplier is paid in, and the state cannot spend it twice. Pike paid two doses for the question. The answer stays sealed.

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Justice Department says man who plotted attack on British air base directed it from a New York jail

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the evening edition, 10 November 2026

Today we are making an indictment that names a man who never left his cell, which is not a dish you can get over here, so I shall go slowly. You will need three men the Justice Department calls Iranian operatives, a base called RAF Fairford, twelve B-1 bombers that were there and then were not, and a telephone line out of a jail in New York.

CLIVE: A line to a jail. I've sent verses from the box room that got a thinner reply than that.

GARY: Verses. The man moved aircraft out of the country from inside a cell; you can't get the landlord round from the sofa.

Begin with September: Iranian operatives are accused of directing people to drive vans toward RAF Fairford's gates, some carrying fuel barrels, at a base housing American aircraft and crew.

That Thursday a sixth man, a dual British-Iranian national, 25, was arrested in Westminster on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts; officers searched two properties. By Saturday he was out on bail — this part of the dish never finished cooking.

ROB: Let go again. That's the house rhythm — something breaks, someone's released, and we carry on as if the boiler's the crisis.

RAF Fairford itself may be taken by both ends and turned over: that same Saturday the Pentagon pulled all twelve B-1 bombers off it, back to their home stations in the United States, weeks after the threat was first identified.

Later in October, two men in London were charged under Britain's National Security Act 2023: Mohmed Abdulkarim, 24, with assisting a foreign intelligence service, and Nouman Essghir, 24, with entering a prohibited place for a purpose prejudicial to Britain, at RAF Fairford, on 22 August.

GARY: Prejudicial to the state. I'm prejudicial to that shed door, and I've still got a hammer waiting its turn.

Now the part people are afraid of: the architect never got near a van. The Justice Department names him as Mohammad Dawood al-Saadi, a dual Iranian and Iraqi national, who ran the plot from inside a jail in New York, passing instructions out as coded calls to his family, who passed them on to two co-conspirators to buy chemicals for it.

France 24 has the charge as 'Iranian operatives,' quotation marks left in. CBS has them at home as Iran-backed operatives; Fox News, Iran-backed suspects — no quotes either place.

You will be looking for the attack itself. There is none; the Guardian calls this a foiled attack, which is the only kind an indictment gets to describe.

This one is eaten by the Justice Department, which gets an indictment naming an architect it never has to extradite. Britain pays at Westminster Magistrates' Court, for a base the Americans had already emptied.

KEITH: Running the whole thing from a cell he never left. There's a format in that — no location needed, just a phone, same as this kitchen some mornings.

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Hegseth calls his own impeachment a 'farce.' The senator who may convict him isn't so sure.

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 10 November 2026

I want to say something nice first, because I don't do that often. On November 10th the Secretary of War stood up in front of the cameras and called the impeachment case against him by one word, clean and specific, no hedging: a farce. I respect a man who picks one word and uses it in public instead of hiding behind "no comment." I wrote that down.

Then I wrote down the number eight, because that's how many articles of impeachment are sitting inside the word he just used, and eight is a lot of weight for one word to carry by itself. I'll come back to the word. Let me get the rest of the notebook first — hang on, I know it's in here somewhere.

September 15th. Representative Thomas Massie files eight articles of impeachment against the Secretary of Defense, over the war with Iran, over what he calls the boat bombings. I wrote the date down because it's the date, not because I thought it mattered yet.

October 26th. Massie says, on the record, that the Secretary is on borrowed time — he'll reintroduce the articles if the Secretary is still at the Pentagon after the midterms. I wrote that one down too.

November 5th. Massie gives the Secretary a choice, resign or face the vote. Same day the Secretary posts a video calling the articles "sham," from, in his words, "a disgruntled, defeated congressman." I've got that one circled. I don't remember circling it. But there it is, circled.

Today, the House actually holds the vote. Massie says he's open to splitting his eight articles so members can vote on each one on its own instead of up-or-down on the whole thing at once. The Secretary, same day, uses the word. The President says the Secretary's work at the Pentagon deserves an A-plus-plus-plus. I wrote the grade down exactly the way he said it, three pluses, because I didn't want to shortchange him on the pluses.

Here's my car for a second. It doesn't start on the first turn most mornings, so a neighbor looks under the hood for me because I've stopped trusting my own eyes on an engine. Two weeks ago the gauge on the dash said full, and the receipt from the gas station in my glovebox said I'd bought twelve gallons two days before that. Two pieces of paper, same tank. I didn't get to pick the one I liked better. I read both.

So I read both on this too. Senator Thom Tillis says, same week, that he's leaning toward voting to convict if the articles reach the Senate floor. Senator Joni Ernst asks, out loud, whether the Secretary is being truthful about how the war is actually going. And Nancy Lacore, a three-star admiral the Secretary fired last year, won a House seat in South Carolina last week and is joining the push for his impeachment.

I was closing the notebook. Excuse me — one more thing, before you go. Of those three — the senator asking if he's lying, the senator leaning toward convicting him, and the admiral he fired — which one of them called this whole thing a farce?

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