The Federal Aviation Administration issued a rare nationwide ground stop Friday afternoon, after outdated air traffic communications equipment became overloaded with data and began to fail, officials said.

The outage stranded thousands of passengers and caused widespread delays from which airlines and airports are still struggling to recover. It also highlighted persistent vulnerabilities in the aging U.S. air traffic infrastructure and a funding fight, as administration officials demanded lawmakers approve tens of billions of dollars more to accelerate systemwide upgrades.

Here’s what to know.

Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, told reporters at the White House Friday night that the radar and other air traffic communications started to falter at 3:36 p.m. when old routers became overloaded with data. While the failures were not universal, they were pervasive enough to prompt officials to issue the unusual nationwide moratorium on takeoffs, Mr. Duffy said.

Appearing alongside him at the White House, Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, stressed that there was no evidence that nefarious activity had triggered the technology failures.

“We’ve seen zero evidence that this was a cyberattack,” Mr. Mullin said, suggesting that new equipment and new technology the Mr. Duffy’s department had added to the old infrastructure was what had overwhelmed it.

Mr. Duffy insisted that the failure was caused by the antiquated, legacy communications equipment, not recent upgrades to the system.

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Alice Huang, the Chinese executive at the center of the Nvidia spying scandal, was believed to be using her affair with Nvidia’s founder to help China get around U.S. efforts to restrict access to advanced A.I. chips, people who have read U.S. intelligence reporting said.

But there remains much that intelligence agencies are still assessing about Ms. Huang including when she began working with China’s top spy agency, whether her cooperation was willing or coerced, how much direction Beijing gave her, and how much she relayed to officials there, the people said.

Her relationship with Jensen Huang, who stepped down as Nvidia’s chief executive on Thursday, gave her potential access to crucial information about the company’s technology, Mr. Huang’s strategic thinking and his knowledge of Washington’s debates about A.I. policy.

She also had a business interest in ensuring a flow of chips to her own company, one of a number in Southeast Asia that provided Chinese tech firms with the computing power needed to train advanced artificial intelligence models.

The aftershocks of the scandal continue to play out as President Trump prepares for a trip next week to Asia, where he is scheduled to meet with President Xi Jinping of China, who has made a top priority of catching the United States in the race for A.I. dominance.

The unknowns surrounding Ms. Huang have generated intense scrutiny of how Chinese intelligence operates, prompted questions of what it means to be a spy and given backers of Mr. Huang an opening to raise questions about the extent and nature of her role.

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Artificial intelligence promises transcendence. We will ditch our tired and inefficient bodies, say farewell to tedious work and trips to the grocery store. The computer will tend to all human needs and solve all human problems.

Well, that was the idea. A.I. was supposed to achieve a new level of reality this month with the public sale of shares of Anthropic, one of the two start-ups that have created and defined this young industry. A trillion-dollar company will be born, yielding billionaires galore.

A.I. is the biggest Silicon Valley story ever. But last Sunday it was suddenly pushed aside when the chief executive of the company whose chips are literally powering this intelligence revolution confessed to cheating on his wife with a woman, Alice Huang, who U.S. officials believe was spying for China. By Thursday morning he had resigned, something few thought possible just days earlier.

The scandal that took down Nvidia chief Jensen Huang is full of implications for national security and the global A.I. boom. Mr. Huang ranked among Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Bill Gates as tech leaders who were considered by the world to be inseparable from the companies they built.

In Silicon Valley, people were mostly just stunned by the news. Those who have been around for a long time, and seen the stretch of territory south of San Francisco evolve from hardware manufacturing to software development to the dot-com frenzy and now the A.I. boom, said they had never seen anything like it.

Tech veterans have witnessed amazing ascensions and equally abrupt falls. They have seen abundant arrogance. Fortunes made and fortunes lost in an instant. But there’s something that stands out this time: Transcendence was never supposed to be tawdry.

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Mary Peltola, a Democrat, widened her lead over Senator Dan S. Sullivan, a Republican, in the latest vote tally in Alaska’s Senate race, but the election remained uncalled on Friday as the count continued.

If neither candidate wins an outright majority, the race will be decided next week by ranked-choice tabulation.

Ms. Peltola had 49.8 percent of the vote and led Mr. Sullivan by nearly four percentage points in incomplete results as of Friday night. She is on track to eventually prevail, according to a New York Times analysis.

The race between Mr. Sullivan, a two-term incumbent, and Ms. Peltola, a former congresswoman, is the only Senate battle still uncalled in a midterm cycle that featured sweeping Democratic victories.

“Alaskans have spoken, and it is clear that in the coming days Mary Peltola will be officially elected as their next United States Senator,” Ms. Peltola’s campaign said in a statement issued late Friday night in Alaska. “Mary got into this race to take on D.C. corruption, lower costs, and put Alaska first — and when elected, she will hit the ground running. This campaign was built by Alaskans hungry for a change in leadership, and Mary is ready to deliver.”

A spokesman for Mr. Sullivan, Nate Adams, said on Friday night after the latest release of results: “We’re still waiting for every ballot to be counted. And we’ll see what happens from there.”

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When Republicans started redrawing congressional maps in the summer of 2025, they hoped to gain enough seats to give the party a chance to hold the House in this year’s midterm elections.

That gambit did not come close to working. The Democrats won so overwhelmingly that they easily overcame the G.O.P.’s newly drawn lines. In many cases, Democrats wound up winning the seats that the Republicans targeted. Sometimes, Democrats even gained seats in the very states where Republicans redrew the maps to their advantage.

But do Democratic gains mean the Republican effort backfired? Did Republicans lose more seats in 2026 than they would have had they left the maps alone?

Our preliminary estimate is no, the Republican effort didn’t backfire. In fact, Republicans still gained anywhere from four to seven seats as a result of the new maps, even if they didn’t pay off as Republicans hoped.

Republicans won more seats in the midterms than they would have without the new maps enacted in 2026.

Ranges show likely outcomes in states with races that have not yet been called.

There is one state where the Republican effort seems to have backfired, if only barely: North Carolina. Elsewhere, Republicans came out ahead or the new maps didn’t make a difference either way.

The simulated map is one of 5,000 simulations, which average 23.3 Democratic seats.

Computer-drawn simulations show where the major parties won more seats in the midterms than they would have under race-blind, nonpartisan maps.

Methodology

We calculated the number of seats gained from mid-cycle redistricting by taking the number of seats each party has won in the 2026 midterm elections, according to results from The New York Times, minus the number each party would have won with the same votes cast under the 2024 district lines, or under computer-simulated maps. The simulated maps were taken from Harvard's ALARM Project or generated with ALARM's redistricting algorithms. We removed race-based redistricting constraints to reflect the Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais.

For races that have not been called as of publication time, we show a range of likely outcomes, based on how much of the vote is still outstanding. In Louisiana, where December runoffs will decide the Fifth and Sixth Districts, we added up the votes for all Democratic candidates and all Republican candidates to project which party will win each seat.

To estimate results under 2024 district lines, or under computer-simulated maps, we take 2026 House votes for each county and district (or precinct where available). Where another map's lines split a county, we divide its votes according to where each party's voters were in 2024, then add them up within each 2024 or simulated district. Where a race had no Democratic or Republican candidate, we used the statewide change in vote since 2024 instead.

Across all the maps, we count a district as won by a party if that party received more than 50 percent of the two-party vote. This measure is sensitive in close races: A district decided by a fraction of a point counts as a full seat for the winner. For the simulated maps, we averaged the seats across 5,000 different plans, creating fractional seats.

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A top House Democrat mapping out how to leverage his party’s vast majorities in Congress next year to push through a sweeping economic agenda is considering using a filibuster-proof bill to muscle it through both chambers and to President Trump’s desk.

The approach, outlined by Representative Brendan Boyle, the Pennsylvania Democrat in line to be chairman of the House Budget Committee in January, would be one way of forcing Mr. Trump to either embrace or veto broadly popular measures to lower living costs.

Triumphant after electoral victories delivered them more than 255 seats in the House and at least 55 seats in the Senate, Democrats are weighing the best strategy for quickly delivering the affordability agenda they promised voters, including tackling the soaring costs of health care, child care and housing.

Mr. Boyle, the 49-year-old son of a janitor for Pennsylvania’s transportation authority and a school crossing guard, is now positioned to lead the way from his perch at the helm of the House panel that handles budget matters and sets spending priorities.

In an interview, Mr. Boyle said it was “worth exploring” using budget reconciliation — a tool that allows the party in power to bypass opposition from the minority and push through fiscal legislation on majority votes — to unlock the affordability agenda Democrats ran on, including reversing Medicaid cuts Republicans enacted unilaterally in 2025.

“I think any time we can pass good, popular, meaningful legislation, that only strengthens our hand in any ultimate negotiation with the White House,” Mr. Boyle said.

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Professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill worried how the Trump administration’s ire toward universities would affect them. But the school’s leaders thought they had a plan.

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The professor was crying.

She had joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to research race and environmental disasters. Now the Trump administration had cut off money that made much of her work possible, and university leaders had few ideas to keep it going.

Directly fighting back in the courts was not an option, administrators told a handful of professors during a video meeting in May 2025. Maybe, the officials suggested, researchers could rewrite their proposals to avoid mentioning topics that the Trump administration might find objectionable, like race.

That seemed like “whitewashing,” the anguished professor said in a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.

A series examining disruption to research and discovery under Trump.

One of the university’s top research officials, Andy Johns, fought tears himself.

“There’s no part of this that feels right,” he told the group. “But right now, we have to navigate it as best we can.”

As the Trump administration pursued the most consequential reshaping of American scientific research in generations, it sought to slash funding at private universities it depicted as hotbeds of intolerance and left-leaning ideology. But the campaign was so indiscriminate that it reached far beyond the Ivy League to include many of the nation’s large public research universities.

A series examining disruption to research and discovery under Trump.

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They Had Come From Afar to Build New Lives. Then, All Was Gone.

Theirs was a story as old as New York. On a street in Brooklyn, immigrants had arrived to work and live, until their lives intersected in tragedy.

They had landed in New York City after long journeys from Latin America and West Africa. Some had found work on a construction site in Brooklyn. Others, a home in the apartment building next door.

Two of the young men toiling at the construction site were from Ecuador, another was from Guatemala. All had arrived only a few years ago, all were fathers in their 20s hoping to provide for their young children.

Next door, in the building with four apartments, there were immigrants from Guinea — an Amazon worker, a food delivery driver — and families from Colombia, including a family of four that had just moved there after saving enough money to abandon a migrant shelter.

On Wednesday, their lives collided in a spasm of devastation.

Most, if not all, of the people whose lives changed in an instant when the apartment building tumbled into the construction site were immigrants.

All eight who perished, including three workers at the construction site and two children from Colombia who lived in the building, were born outside the United States. So were many of the 18 people who were injured.

The collapse of the building in the Flatbush neighborhood captivated the world, in part, because it reflected the world.

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Developer Avoided Stricter Oversight Before Fatal Building Collapse

By winning approval for a three-story building, then seeking to add more stories, the Brooklyn developer was not subject to the more rigorous oversight required for larger projects.

New York City officials on Friday were examining whether a developer’s desire to construct a taller building in Brooklyn than had initially been approved factored in the fatal collapse of a neighboring structure earlier this week.

Records show that the city signed off on plans for a three-story, eight-unit construction project at 2625 Bedford Avenue in the Flatbush neighborhood in March 2026. But other filings reveal that, from as far back as November 2025, the developer had intended to build something much larger: It ultimately sought approval for a nine-story building with 64 apartments, a 9,000-square-foot community space and a grocery store.

The city had not approved the more ambitious plans by Wednesday, when the more than 96-year-old building next door collapsed into the construction site, killing eight people, injuring 18 more and leaving dozens displaced.

“We have approved plans for a three-story building,” Ahmed Tigani, the commissioner of the Buildings Department, said at a news conference on Friday. But, he added, “The nine-story plan is something they seek, not what they have approval for.”

The difference between the two projects could be a key to understanding what went wrong, building experts said. The developer, a limited-liability company tied to the real estate investor Robert Fischman, was excavating the Bedford Avenue site when the building fell.

Neither Mr. Fischman nor other representatives of the development company could be reached for comment on Friday, despite visits to their homes and phone calls.

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When the actor-director Olivia Wilde was last in the public eye, around the time of her 2022 dystopian thriller, “Don’t Worry Darling,” things weren’t going very well. Wilde had to deal with the twin fallout of decidedly mixed critical reaction and a harsh wave of tabloid attention. The film was plagued by reports of feuding between Wilde and her star, Florence Pugh. Wilde was also hounded online for her relationship, which has since ended, with the pop star Harry Styles, who played a supporting role in the movie. If that wasn’t enough, the press cycle for “Don’t Worry Darling” brought with it continuing scrutiny over her 2020 breakup with her longtime partner, Jason Sudeikis, with whom she has two children. This year, though, it has all been very different.

“The Invite,” a painfully perceptive domestic sex comedy that Wilde, who is 42, directed and co-starred in, has been one of the year’s sleeper hits. She followed that up by playing, to delicious effect, a sexually domineering and manipulative art-world star in the director Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex.” And she’s capping her year off with a small but scene-stealing role as an angrily spurned lover in the upcoming “Behemoth!” starring Pedro Pascal and directed by Tony Gilroy. I spoke to Wilde last month in London, where she was prepping her next directorial effort, a Christmas comedy called “Naughty,” about what it’s like to hit a low and how she so dramatically turned things around in her work and life.

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I was thinking about the three roles you played this year in “The Invite,” “I Want Your Sex” and “Behemoth!” All these characters are tightly wound, and I wondered if being a director has changed how you see yourself as an actor. Being a director freed me up to not feel pressure to be the ideal ingénue growing into the idealized female character in any film. I now choose roles from a much more curious place. But I hadn’t put together that these three characters are extremely high-strung in different ways. My character in “I Want Your Sex” felt like she was on the opposite end of the spectrum of femininity as my character in “The Invite.” They’re both movies dealing with the idea of sex and sexuality and desire and eroticism from two completely different perspectives.

Why are you interested in exploring questions of sex and identity at this point in your life? It’s funny. I turned 40 a couple of years ago, and I suddenly felt more present in my body and more connected to my sense of confidence and sexuality than ever. We were told for a long time that that’s when things start shutting down. Less is available to you in terms of your career, in terms of your exploration of your own identity, sexuality. Yet every woman I know from like 40 to 70 has told me: “Oh, no. That’s when you really understand yourself.” You’re so much more honest with yourself, and there’s an awesome blossoming that happens at that point. So I think I was curious about inspecting that in different ways and particularly in comedies, because it’s good to laugh at this stuff.

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My home is full of honey pots.

In the front hall hangs a vintage poster from World War II, a sultry blonde at a cocktail party with three British officers leaning over her and the warning: “Keep mum, she’s not so dumb! Careless talk costs lives.”

I also have a Cold War honey trap: a photograph of the bewitching Tatiana Romanova, wearing nothing but a black velvet choker and black stockings, looking up saucily at James Bond after sneaking into his bed in “From Russia With Love.”

On my TV at night is the new season of “Black Doves,” the Netflix thriller in which the comely Keira Knightley is spying on her husband, the British prime minister, and working for a spidery organization that sells state secrets to the highest bidder.

And on my coffee table is a DVD of the 1946 Hitchcock spy noir, “Notorious,” in which Ingrid Bergman honeytraps a Nazi played by Claude Rains. When the Rains character is forced to confess to his Nazi mother that he married an American spy, the mother sneers at him: “We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity.”

Suffice it to say, Jensen Huang was not protected by the enormity of his stupidity.

Sexpionage in Silicon Valley looks too easy. It barely requires any real tradecraft. All it takes is a smile from the sort of femme fatale these nerdy brainiacs couldn’t get when they were young — before the billions, the makeovers, the personal trainers, the yachts and Huang’s ubiquitous Tom Ford black leather jacket.

Some Silicon Valley executives have warned their scientists and engineers to beware if they find themselves dating women who are “out of their league,” as one tech leader put it to me.

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The midterms last week upended assumptions about where — and how — both political parties can win. So what comes next? The Opinion contributor Robert Siegel joins the contributing writer E.J. Dionne Jr. and the senior political columnist for The Washington Examiner, Tim Carney, to debate whether MAGA can outlast Donald Trump and what Democrats can do with their new power.

Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Robert Siegel: Since the three of us last talked, the political map of America has been redrawn. Assumptions about which party can win which state have been thrown out, and past speculation about the future has been replaced with fresh speculation about the future. And before we dig into some of the big questions that arose from the 2026 elections, I’d like to hear, briefly, from each of us about what impression of the election sticks in the mind?

What sums up what’s happened most vividly for you? Tim?

Tim Carney: For me, it’s proof that the Donald Trump realignment that we first started to see in 2016 was not really a partisan realignment, but an emergence of what I call “the Trumpy vote.” If you look at the counties in Ohio, for instance, that swung most from Mitt Romney to Trump — the places where they’re not necessarily conservative Republicans, but they were Trump voters — those Trumpy counties, those were the counties that had the biggest blue wave. Same thing happened — I looked precinct by precinct level — in Lower Bucks County, the blue collar part right outside of Philadelphia.

Siegel: In Pennsylvania.

Carney: In Pennsylvania, right outside of Philadelphia. Trump came in and won these, what Sean Trende used to call, “the missing white voter.” Those guys, sons of former factory workers, those are the precincts that swung back to give Democrats a House seat, the State Senate, that sort of thing. So I don’t know whether it’s a matter of Trump voters staying home, or what seems more likely from the numbers so far, that the Trump voter was never a conservative, never a Republican, and now he just voted Democrat.

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Sometime in my mid-20s, I stopped wearing jeans.

I’d spent my youth romping around in baggy hand-me-down Gap jeans, their knees stained with grass. As a mopey teenager, maturing under the twin moons of skateboarding and hard-core punk, I favored dark skinny jeans that hugged my calves. Emerging from college, I saved up for a plywood-stiff pair of raw denim from the French label A.P.C. I wore those slim-straight jeans into oblivion, until holes sprouted at the pockets and they grew feline-like whiskers at the knees.

And then one day, I just quit them. As I slid into the work force, I became preoccupied with being taken seriously. I had a beard but looked younger than my 22 years, my face still bearing the aftershocks of acne. Jeans, to me, underscored that.

I migrated instead to dress trousers, cotton in summer, wool in winter. They were wider than the J.Crew norm, but I had only black and navy. The whole idea was for no one to notice them.

I vacillated between crewneck and V-neck sweaters, and cycled between striped shirts and solid ones. But for years, those pants were a constant.

A few years ago though, I tired of them. It was as if I had eaten the same coconut-flavored yogurt for breakfast for a decade until one day, even the thought of it made me retch.

I decided my wool pants were a stylistic void, a dark wormhole where something more varied, or just something worth even a split-second of closer inspection, could’ve gone instead.

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President Trump will have a joint meeting with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a summit in China next week, a White House spokeswoman said on Friday.

It will be the first trilateral meeting the three leaders have held together, and the third meeting Mr. Trump has had with Mr. Xi in person this year. At the meeting with Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi, Mr. Trump plans to discuss the war against Iran, but is not expected to bring up Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Olivia Wales, the White House spokeswoman, said that Mr. Trump would also address the threat of nuclear proliferation. U.S. officials have expressed concerns about a steady buildup of China’s arsenal in recent years, and a U.S. nuclear arms control treaty with Russia expired in February.

“The president has made it clear that, among other topics, he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world, whose proliferation President Trump believes is very dangerous,” Ms. Wales said in a telephone briefing with reporters.

Two senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the president’s travel plans, said that Mr. Trump would travel to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Manila early next week. The officials said he would then travel to Shenzhen for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, where he will meet with Mr. Xi and then both Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin.

The officials said that Mr. Trump would be joined by the billionaire Elon Musk in Shenzhen, but added that Mr. Musk would not be part of the trilateral meeting.

Mr. Trump is prepared to discuss the “difficult” topic of Beijing’s nuclear arsenal with Mr. Xi, one of the officials said.

China maintains secretive nuclear facilities and is on track to have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, producing the weapons at a pace that has worried U.S. officials and analysts. On the call, the administration officials said that they did not expect any agreements on nuclear proliferation, and characterized the talks as a starting point.

Mr. Trump said this week that he had no plans to discuss with Mr. Xi the scandal that had engulfed Jensen Huang, who until this week was the chief executive of Nvidia, one of the largest companies in the world. Mr. Huang stepped down from his role in the wake of revelations that he had engaged in extramarital affairs, including one with Alice Huang, a woman whom U.S. intelligence officials believe is an asset of Beijing.

The officials said that the matter involving Ms. Huang was a national security issue, and did not expect Mr. Trump to discuss it with Mr. Xi during a diplomatic meeting.