Blog

With a broad mandate to mop up the corrosive graft seeping out of Washington DC under Donald Trump’s second administration, Democrats are reportedly preparing to bring the legislative hammer down on prediction markets — tech moneymakers era with deep ties to the White House.

That’s according to Politico, which reports that Democrats are preparing to curb what California representative Maxine Waters called “predatory lending and predatory platforms, including prediction markets, so that our constituents keep more of their hard-earned dollars in their pockets.”

As Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley told Politico, “we need to rein in this gambling, and with Democrats taking back control of Congress, now is the time for long-overdue legislative action.”

Beyond protecting consumers from predatory gambling companies, the agenda has the added effect of targeting a key source of income for the Trump family dynasty. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, has emerged as a strong supporter of prediction markets, earning him advisory roles on the boards of Polymarket and Kalshi at the same time that inside traders cashed in on advanced knowledge of Trump administration moves.

And while prediction markets are still going strong currently, the looming crackdown has the attention of financial experts, one of whom said the regulatory regime could get “pretty intense.”

“These guys don’t have an ally in Congress,” a former Wall Street regulator, who was granted anonymity, told Politico. “To a certain extent, they might even be the new crypto as far as congressional attention from Democrats,” they said, referring to the broadly antagonistic stance Democrats held toward the crypto industry under the Biden administration.

But when it comes to fighting hard for any regulatory regime, the proof will be in the pudding. Democrats have reportedly begun preparation for a similar crackdown on the AI industry — an effort which is broadly popular with voters, but which poses a major challenge for the party’s pro-business leadership.

More on politics: Americans Just Resoundingly Rejected AI Data Centers

Here’s your NYT Strands hint for today, plus the spangram and all of today’s Strands answers for puzzle No. 983 on Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026.

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is “Work it out.”

And here’s a hint: Pumping iron.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints, but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• SCUM, LOSE, LOSER, CLOSE, CART, CARTS, SALT, SLAT, SLOB

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight, but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• LATS, PECS, BICEPS, OBLIQUES, QUADS, HAMSTRINGS

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is MUSCLEGROUP. To find it, look for the M that’s two letters down on far left, and wind across.

CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the ’70s and ’80s,” as well as “The Totally Sweet ’90s.” She’s been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She’s Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she’ll be first in line.

See full bio

More than 1,000 vulnerabilities were disclosed by Microsoft in the latest Patch Tuesday release as federal cybersecurity officials ordered civilian agencies to patch exploited bugs from Google, Barracuda and Cisco. 

Among the 1,093 bugs disclosed on Tuesday, Microsoft said one is being exploited in the wild: CVE-2026-124194. The company said it has a severity score of 6.5 and impacts Microsoft Outlook. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and gave federal agencies until the end of the month to patch it. 

Microsoft said the bug was discovered by Benoît Sevens using Anthropic’s Claude, writing that an attacker “could send a specially crafted message file and convince a user to open it in an affected version of Microsoft Outlook.” 

“Opening the file could cause Outlook to connect to an attacker-controlled network location without displaying the usual external-content warning, potentially disclosing authentication information that could be used to impersonate the user,” the company said. 

Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said an attack using the vulnerability may allow someone to sign in as the exploited user. 

Several experts said CVE-2026-124194 was the only exploited bug outlined in Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday release but there were 63 vulnerabilities rated critical. Narang noted that Tuesday’s release brings Microsoft to more than 5,160 vulnerabilities disclosed this year, which would far surpass any previous year. 

Last month, more than 1,400 vulnerabilities were disclosed by Microsoft after about 900 in September. 

In addition to Microsoft’s disclosures, Google, Cisco, Adobe, Barracuda, Ivanti and several other companies released patches for dozens of bugs, several of which were spotlighted by CISA as being exploited. 

CISA gave federal agencies until Friday to patch CVE-2026-116606 and CVE-2026-111560 — two bugs affecting Barracuda’s email security product. They also ordered all federal agencies to investigate potential compromises related to both vulnerabilities.

Response to N-able vulnerabilities 

A researcher also uncovered more than 30 serious vulnerabilities in N-Central, a popular remote management tool that IT teams use to monitor and run networks remotely. 

The company behind it, N-able, took all hosted N-central environments offline and ordered customers to turn off their servers. 

“As expected, we are observing scanning activity associated with the published proof-of-concept code. At this time, we have no evidence that any customer environment has been successfully exploited,” the company said on Tuesday. 

“During this time, customers will be unable to access their Hosted N-central classic environment, and associated services may be unavailable.”

Should Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang be exonerated of any wrongdoing after his affair with an alleged spy? Maybe now that he has a morally upstanding character witness like president Donald Trump on his side.

During a presser Monday night, Trump defended Huang as an “honorable guy” after revealing that Huang had personally told him that he didn’t know that the Chinese businesswoman he was cheating on his wife with with was allegedly a Beijing operative.

“I asked him that question: ‘Did you have any idea that she was a spy?’” Trump told reporters at the White House, per the New York Times. “He said, ‘I had no idea that she was a spy,’ and I really believe him.”

The geopolitical gravity of the situation appeared a distant concern to Trump, who expressed a greater concern for Huang’s wellbeing.

“I did speak to him today just to see if he’s feeling all right,” Trump continued. “I believe he’s suffering greatly. I read his statement, and I believe he’s suffering greatly. More so because of his family, his wife who he loves and his family, but he is definitely suffering.”

When Trump was asked whether he intended to bring up the matter with president Xi Jinping during his visit to Shenzhen, China, next week, he instinctively began defending Huang yet again.

“I’m sure President Xi will ask me about it,” Trump said, before pivoting. “I just know Jensen very well. I just think he’s a very honorable man. I mean, he’s a great — he built a great company, American company, and I think he’s a very honorable guy. And I feel very confident that he’ll be in good shape.” 

Huang is being accused of fooling around with Alice Huang, a top executive at the Singapore-based data center and cloud computing firm Megaspeed. The affair, which he later admitted to in a humiliating statement to his company employees, could have massive effects on the AI industry. 

The US government is alleging that Alice Huang was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to gather intel on Jensen Huang and possibly even push him to sell Nvidia’s coveted AI chips to China. The Chinese government denies this, and whether she was indeed a spy or just an opportunist — or, heck, if she was motivated by true love — remains unclear.

The whole saga stinks to high heaven, though. Megaspeed was being investigated for allegedly diverting its Nvidia chips to the mainland, circumventing a US export ban on AI hardware to China. Nvidia, meanwhile, reportedly used its influence to abruptly quash the US Commerce Department into Megaspeed.

For Trump to defend Huang isn’t too surprising. The pair have a close relationship, and Huang is widely considered too important of a figure in the AI boom to go down; it’s his company that’s providing all the hardware, and in many cases the money, to keep the gravy train chugging along.

And he has his own skeletons in the closet, after all, with numerous cheating scandals and an even uglier rap sheet of sexual harassment and rape allegations. It’s solidarity from one unfaithful billionaire to another.

More on AI: We Are Now Learning in Real Time Whether the Stock Market Cares About an AI Executive Admitting to an Affair With an Alleged Chinese Spy