In your briefing today:

📣 Stock markets are tumbling worldwide amid fears that the Democrats’ sweeping electoral victories this week will slow the AI boom, particularly the construction of new data centres, which were a key electoral issue.

US equities shed more than $3 trillion overnight, with the technology-heavy Nasdaq index down more than 5.5% at the close and losing $2.5 trillion. To place that in context, however, it’s only the worst drop since April 2025, and the turmoil that followed Donald Trump’s first wave of tariffs.

Japan’s Nikkei index slid 6% and South Korea’s market halted trading for 20 minutes after its index - the Kospi - fell 8.5%. European markets were, at send time, expected to open lower this morning.

Democrats in races across the US campaigned to slow both the building of new data centres and the expansion of AI, which many voters fear will cost them their jobs. (BBC)

📣 The actor and comedian Russell Brand is facing a “significant” prison term for raping a fan and sexually assaulting three other women, after a trial which leaves the entertainment industry asking how - again - a star was able to commit a string of crimes at the peak of his fame.

Brand, now 51, was described during his trial as a ruthless, calculated and manipulative predator. But he was also one who hid in plain sight, joking on stage about his attitudes towards women.

He is under investigation for two further rapes, and police have called for any other alleged victims to come forward. (Guardian)

📣 There was disorder across Scotland last night, Bonfire Night, with a police car set alight in Glasgow, fireworks thrown at emergency workers and seven arrests. A police officer and ambulance worker suffered minor injuries when they were attacked with fireworks while responding to a call in Glasgow.

Police said there had been a “reduction in serious incidents” compared with the same period last year, after a “complex and demanding” operation which had involved the largest number of officers being deployed since the visit of Donald Trump last year. (BBC)

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📣 Labour MPs have branded the party’s stance on North Sea drilling an “act of self-harm” which will put jobs at risk and lose the Treasury billions in tax revenue. The party is said to be planning to ban new oil and gas exploration. (Times)

📣 Economy Secretary Stephen Flynn has been urged to “get on top of his department” after saying allegations about conditions at the Dalzell steelworks were matters for the company, not ministers, despite millions in taxpayer support for the firm which owns the plant. (Herald)

📣 MSPs who chair Holyrood committees are to get a £15,500 salary increase. (STV)

📣 A Maine Coon cat called Maximus is being credited for saving another cat’s life through a last-minute blood transfusion. (Daily Record)

📣 Mystery surrounds a series of coordinated bomb hoaxes which have disrupted at least 34 flights across Europe this week, with some forced to make emergency landings. (Guardian)

📣 Companies are being urged to publish salaries in job adverts now, Prime Minister Andy Burnham says, ahead of a new law which will compel them to do so. (BBC)

📣 Donald Trump has signed an executive order that he claims will stop future presidents making changes to the Oval Office, which he has redecorated with the addition of a great deal of gold. (BBC)

📣 Marks and Spencer is taking on John Lewis in the Christmas ad battle with its own topless “shredded Santa”: James Norton. (Guardian)

⚽️ Celtic rallied to a much-needed win over Turkish giants Besiktas, their first Europa League win this season, and one that keeps qualification hopes alive. They did it the hard (exciting) way, though: coming back from a goal down before a late flurry of goals sealed the win. (BBC) (Highlights)

⚽️ There was no such joy for error-strewn Hearts, who went down 3-1 to Thun in Switzerland, with defender Jamie McCart opening the scoring with an inexplicable own goal, with another mistake from Stephen Kingsley setting up the home side’s second. The injury-ravaged Edinburgh side lie near the bottom of the Conference League table. (BBC) (Highlights)

🗣️ The New Statesman dives into the “new, new right” - what it calls “Nigel Farage’s bastards”. That said, the Reform leader - although he adorns the magazine’s cover - isn’t really the point of Emily Lawford’s piece: she's interested in the generation of far-right opponents he has spawned.

How has he made so many enemies? It was one interview, in September 2024, when Farage was discussing illegal immigration on GB News, says Lawford. It should have been “comfortable ground” for the Reform leader - until he was pressed on the matter of deporting up to one million illegal immigrants.

“Farage sighed. ‘It’s impossible,’ he said. ‘Literally impossible.’ He threw his hands up in the air and shrugged, and a thousand British nationalist hearts broke.”

For many, says Lawford, that confirmed Farage was simply “just another opportunist, a charlatan, not fully committed to the change required to save the country. He was not actually one of them.”

Many of those hearts now yearn for the harder-right Restore Britain party: Lawford profiles the young, hard-right, and apparently often miserable followers of Rupert Lowe’s party, drawn to the leader’s hardline rhetoric and ethno-nationalist agenda. It’s grimly fascinating. (The New Statesman (£))

🗣️ Marie Le Conte went to an election watch party at New York’s “pre-eminent membership organisation for conservatives of all stripes” and initially struggled to get a drink from the stingy barman.

That all changed as the results started to roll in. “By 9pm, the Metropolitan Republican Club’s makeshift bartender was practically serving Pinot Grigio by the barrel,” writes Le Conte. “At 9.30pm, when I asked for one last quick top-up, I was instead handed a cup so full that I couldn’t comfortably walk away without downing some of it first. ‘We’ve got to drown our sorrows, right?’ the guy told me, and obviously I had to nod and agree.”

She reports deep despair among the clientele. As Texas went to Democrat James Talarico, “the woman in front of me turned around, panicked, and screeched: ‘We lost Texas? We have to do something!’

“It wasn’t entirely clear who the ‘we’ was in this situation, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask her what she wanted that ‘something’ to be.” (The New World (£))

🗣️ Trump’s humiliation offers the United States an opportunity, the Economist says in a leader. This wasn’t a normal midterm swing against a sitting president.

There was an element of punishment for a president who promised lower prices and to stay out of war, and then launched a tariff crusade and attacked Iran.

“But politicians from both parties should also reflect on voters’ rejection of the ugly mechanics of modern partisanship,” the newspaper says. “Republicans gerrymandered seats, but failed to make gains. Elon Musk, a multi-billionaire, poured more than $150m into a race in Texas, but his candidate was trounced. Republican candidates stoked fears over Muslims and transgender people, and lost. One in Ohio backed an ad in which a mother damned his opponent: her own abused daughter. It sealed his defeat.

“The message from this is clear and it is hopeful. It has often seemed as if polarisation was stronger than the electoral feedback that ensures democratic accountability. Not this time. Voters demanded that politicians put the nation’s prosperity above the grubby pursuit of power.” (Economist (£))

🗣️ Poundland is in terrible trouble: the discount store teeters on the brink of insolvency with 12,000 jobs hanging in the balance. If it closes, it will be missed, writes Arabella Byrne, across Britain’s social classes.

“Like Brexit, horses and instant coffee, a bargain unites snob and mob. Poundland may not democratise, as the late Sir Terence Conran said of Habitat, but perhaps it unites in more subtle ways,” writes Arabella Byrne, a Poundland regular “even if I am called Arabella and wear a signet ring”.

“Once, finding me on all fours trying to wrench a giant chocolate Paw Patrol figurine out of a Poundland pallet, my husband begged me to stop on the grounds of decorum. But I can’t. I won’t.” (The Spectator (£))

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