Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen said Thursday he will challenge New York’s Chuck Schumer for Senate majority leader when Democrats retake control of both chambers of Congress in January. This follows historic gains for Democrats in last week’s midterm elections. They’ll now control at least 255 seats in the House of Representatives and 55 in the Senate. This is Senator Van Hollen speaking on MS NOW.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen: “And it wasn’t only a rejection of Donald Trump and his corruption and his wars and his cruelty. It was also about a call for a larger change to take on a broken economic system that’s rigged in favor of the very wealthy against working people and that’s fueled by a corrupt political system. And the call was really to reject the status quo and to reject business as usual. And to do that, I think we need new leadership.”

Van Hollen is the first Democratic senator to launch a leadership challenge since 1994. His bid was quickly endorsed by Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed and Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders.

More than 50 young activists with the Sunrise Movement were arrested Thursday after hundreds of protesters staged a sit-in inside Senator Chuck Schumer’s Washington, D.C., office. Activists are pushing for new Democratic leadership in the Senate after nearly a decade under Schumer. They also want Democrats to abolish the Senate filibuster. Children also participated in the action Thursday as many of the protesters held signs that read “The filibuster kills,” “Stop the climate crisis,” and “Schumer: Step up or step aside.”

Sunrise Movement activist 1: “Chuck Schumer and establishment Democrats are more scared of the voices of young people than of the climate crisis.”

Grace: “The American public is tired of the same old politics, and we’re ready for real change.”

Sunrise Movement activist 2: “Chuck Schumer would rather listen to billionaires than young people.”

Sunrise Movement activist 3: “Chuck Schumer doesn’t listen to us. He listens to corporate money, specifically coming from AIPAC. Over $400,000 have been invested into him.”

Jamie: “I chose to do this because when I was in high school, I saw the places I love burn to the ground because of the climate crisis. As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen American tax dollars go to burning and bombing Gaza.”

Grace: “I think everybody, including young people the most, can see the writing on the wall at this point, right? And we’re all saying the ship needs to be going in this direction.”

Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang has resigned. The chip maker says its longtime chief financial officer, Colette Kress, will serve as interim CEO while Nvidia’s board of directors searches for a permanent replacement. Huang stepped down as Reuters reported he’d had an intimate relationship with a second employee, whom Reuters did not name. That follows reports that Huang had an affair with a Chinese businesswoman who U.S. intelligence officials claim was spying for Beijing as part of a Chinese intelligence operation seeking to acquire advanced computer chips, which are banned by U.S. export controls. Huang reportedly helped the alleged spy acquire at least $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips for China via a Singapore-based cloud computing company called Megaspeed International. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports Jensen Huang has agreed to testify before House lawmakers in a closed-door hearing later this month. Nvidia has lost nearly $2 trillion in market capitalization since its all-time high in early October. We’ll have more on this story after headlines.

In more technology news, Microsoft is scrambling to fix a major outage that’s disrupted communication for millions of people across at least 74 countries since Thursday morning. The outage has cut off access to Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps says it destroyed a U.S. early-warning radar system in Bahrain in retaliation for a U.S. strike on a telecommunications tower in southern Iran. Officials also claimed four attacks on oil tankers in ​the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, following strikes on a pair of supertankers one day earlier.

Iran’s attacks came as President Trump on Thursday sidelined Vice President JD Vance as the top U.S. negotiator with Iran. Trump said in a social media post he’d directed Vance to instead focus on fighting what Trump called “corruption and crime” in Democratic-controlled cities and states. Trump wrote, “We don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”

Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, known as the Houthis, has claimed fresh attacks on oil infrastructure and an air base in Saudi Arabia. A Houthi spokesperson said targets included the Yanbu oil facility on the Red Sea, an Aramco facility in Riyadh and a pumping station on the East-West Pipeline, which is Saudi Arabia’s main route for shipping oil past Iran’s blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, the Arab League warned Thursday that a Houthi siege of the southwestern Yemeni city of Taiz is leading to a humanitarian disaster, with “acute shortages of fuel, oxygen, medicines and medical supplies.”

Russia and Ukraine traded drone and missile attacks overnight, despite a diplomatic push by the Trump administration that’s purportedly seeking an end to the conflict. The violence came after President Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, followed by a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Dublin. Both Russia and Ukraine agreed to a prisoner swap that Zelensky called the largest since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, Zelensky has accused Elon Musk’s SpaceX of once again restricting service to Starshield, the military-grade version of the Starlink internet satellite constellation, which Ukraine uses for drone attacks.

In Gaza, a Palestinian infant has died from hypothermia after Israeli attacks left his family displaced and living in a tent in Khan Younis. Kinan Ahmed Raqiq was just 9 months old. His death came as Israel continued to impose severe restrictions on imports of fuel and winter supplies into Gaza. U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher says 150,000 tents remain stuck in warehouses at Gaza’s borders, even as some 350,000 displaced Palestinians face heavy rain, flooding and plummeting temperatures. On Thursday, a group of 49 nations issued a joint call for Israel to ease restrictions on shelter, fuel, water, sanitation and medical supplies to Gaza. The United States did not sign the statement. This is Britain’s ambassador to the U.N., Sarah MacIntosh, speaking from U.N. headquarters.

Sarah MacIntosh: “As winter sets in, far too many people in Gaza are still without adequate shelter and risk exposure to hypothermia, respiratory infections, waterborne diseases and other preventable illnesses. Constraints on the entry of critical shelter items and other life-saving supplies continue to prevent humanitarian organizations from responding at the scale required.”

In more news from Gaza, a Palestinian was killed by Israeli gunfire east of Gaza City earlier today. That followed an Israeli strike on a car near the gate of Al-Shifa Hospital which killed one person and left several others critically wounded. That attack came as Palestinians in Khan Younis held funerals for a ​surgeon, a teenage boy and four other Palestinians killed when an Israeli airstrike targeted southern Gaza’s Nasser Hospital complex. We’ll have more on that attack, and the latest from Gaza, later in the broadcast.

In California, community members are demanding the release of beloved nurse and University of San Francisco professor Ann Lawani, who was detained by ICE nearly two months ago. Lawani is originally from Nigeria and has lived in the U.S. since 2007. She was reportedly at home in Lodi, still wearing her pajamas, when ICE agents showed up at her door in early September, taking her to a local holding facility. Then she disappeared from ICE’s database for three days, with her older brother telling The New York Times, “It was the worst time of my life, knowing she had been siphoned into an abyss and there was nothing I could do about it.” Lawani is now being detained thousands of miles away at an ICE jail in Basile, Louisiana.

Hundreds of protesters, including teachers and elected officials, rallied outside San Diego’s federal building Thursday, calling for an 8-year-old Haitian boy to be reunited with his relatives. He was taken into federal immigration custody after a check-in last week. The boy is a third grader at a local elementary school. His family and advocates say they do not know his whereabouts.

Nearly two dozen immigrants died in the custody of ICE during the first year of President Trump’s second term due to medical neglect. That’s according to findings by the San Francisco Chronicle, which obtained internal ICE investigations into the 29 deaths that occurred in 2025. ICE’s own documents admit immigration jails failed to provide emergency medical care. In some cases, ICE jail staff even mocked or ignored people who requested help and who later died.

At least 62 immigrants have died in ICE custody since Trump’s return to office. In response to the abuse, immigrants jailed across the nation have staged hunger strikes and other peaceful actions. This week, the publication L.A. Taco reported at least 24 people detained at the Adelanto ICE jail in California’s Mojave Desert started another hunger strike — the second so far this year. Meanwhile, another hunger strike at the Northwest ICE jail in Tacoma, Washington, is also ongoing. Hunger strikers at both facilities have reportedly faced threats, including being transferred to other ICE jails across the country. Both Adelanto and Northwest are operated by the for-profit prison company GEO Group.

Here in New York, tenant advocates are demanding justice after what they described as the preventable collapse of an apartment building in Brooklyn that killed at least eight people, including two children, and injured at least 23 others Wednesday. Among the victims were two construction workers from Ecuador and Guatemala; a food delivery worker and Amazon worker, who were relatives from Guinea in West Africa; and two young cousins from Colombia.

The publication amNewYork reports the collapse may have been caused by corner-cutting by subcontractors and developers working on an adjacent construction site where crews were digging a pit for a new massive, multi-story development. In the wake of the collapse, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said five contractors and developers connected to the disaster are associated with about 100 other sites across New York, and that the Department of Buildings would immediately begin inspecting those sites.

The executive director of NYS Tenant Bloc, Sumathy Kumar, said in a statement that the tragedy “stresses the urgency of taking buildings out of the hands of bad landlords who are looking to make quick profits at the expense of people’s safety” and “highlights the need for dignified, high quality housing built with union labor, which is why we are fighting for social housing across the city and state.”