Europe will be represented at the Ukraine talks that open in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, sending a joint European Commission and European Council team, the national security advisers of France, Germany and Britain, and NATO’s chief of staff to a round the United States is hosting. The delegations arrive after another night of strikes in which three people were killed in Odesa and one in Russia’s Leningrad region, and a Ukrainian drone attack set alight the Kirishi refinery. In Washington Monday’s register carried 98 documents, among them the 2027 physician fee schedule and a rule codifying Medicare drug price negotiation. Mississippi’s Senate count entered the day before its ballot deadline where it has stood since Friday evening, at a margin of 2,574 votes.

The administration and the rule of law

The Federal Register published 98 documents for November 8 and 9: no presidential documents, 15 rules, eight proposed rules and 75 notices. The absence of presidential documents is a fact about the window, not a gap in what could be read.

Three of the rules govern Medicare. The CY 2027 physician fee schedule, 91 FR 70992, sets next year’s payment policies under the fee schedule and other Part B changes, the shared-savings program requirements and the prescription drug inflation rebate program; it takes effect January 1, 2027. A Medicare drug price negotiation rule, 91 FR 72176, finalizes and codifies the negotiation program created by the Inflation Reduction Act and sets new Part D policies, including for certain new fixed-combination drugs; it takes effect December 5. A home health payment rule, 91 FR 72022, updates the 2027 home health prospective payment system rates.

Two other documents reach beyond health care. The Bureau of Industry and Security extended its suspension of an interim final rule that would expand end-user export controls to affiliates of certain listed entities, through January 10, 2027; the suspension had been set to end on November 9. And the Treasury and the Federal Reserve withdrew a 2020 proposal, 91 FR 70824, that would have lowered the threshold for reporting cross-border funds transfers from $3,000 to $250 and clarified how the rule treats convertible virtual currency. The agencies said they will take no further action on it.

The Labor Department finalized electronic filing rules for its Office of Administrative Law Judges, 91 FR 70790, effective December 9, with exceptions for good cause and for parties representing themselves. The Justice Department filed a response to public comments in the RealPage case, 91 FR 70898. Commerce opened antidumping and countervailing cases on seamless steel pipe from India and Georgia and on wooden fence components from China, issued orders on solar cells from India, Indonesia and Laos, and continued mattress duties against seven countries. Two OFAC sanctions notices appeared among the 75 notices, which otherwise ran to information collections, advisory-committee meetings, hydropower construction extensions and a long series of SEC rule filings.

The courts

The Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit filed no opinions in the window. The district court in Washington recorded two new complaints, both on November 8: Hejazi v. Rubio, 1:26-cv-03946, and Center for Immigration Studies v. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 1:26-cv-03945. The pack carries captions and docket numbers, not complaints, so this report can say who sued whom and not what the suits allege.

All five watched dockets were silent: Beatty v. Trump, the Kennedy Center matter; Phang v. Blanche in the district court and its consolidated appeal in the D.C. Circuit, both over the Epstein files; MSW Media v. Department of Justice; and D.C. Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, the East Potomac golf case, which had recorded two minute entries on Saturday.

That is a quiet courts beat: no opinions, two new filings, no movement on the cases this report watches. The two new captions pair private plaintiffs with the government, one naming Rubio and the other the citizenship agency, which is the shape of suit that has filled this docket all month.

Markets

The cash equity market has not opened yet; the board is Friday’s close. The S&P 500 finished at 7,376.86, up 23.13 points or 0.31 percent; the Nasdaq Composite at 24,579.425, up 264.428 or 1.09 percent; the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 51,285.73, down 237.33 or 0.46 percent.

The overnight prints moved more than the close did. In the pre-market quotes collected around 06:00 CT, the VIX was 23.51, down 2.13 or 8.31 percent; front-month WTI crude was $88.16, down $2.67 or 2.94 percent; gold was $4,119.70, up $44.80 or 1.10 percent; and the dollar index was 101.865, down 0.433 or 0.42 percent. Those are morning prints, not closes, and they were taken before the week’s first cash open.

The ten-year Treasury yielded 4.859 percent, unchanged. Treasury’s curve for November 6 ran 4.51 percent at two years, 4.86 at ten and 5.26 at thirty, a 2s10s spread of +0.35 against +0.38 the day before.

Total public debt outstanding was $40,556,120,784,984 on November 5, up $5,890,737,374 from the day before. Of that, $32,766,722,473,716 was held by the public and $7,789,398,311,268 was intragovernmental.

The economy

October is the newest month in two of the three series and September in the third. The all-items consumer price index for September was 336.940 on the 1982-84 base, 1.96 points or 0.59 percent above August and 3.02 points above July. Unemployment was 4.1 percent in October, a tenth below September’s 4.2. Total nonfarm payrolls were 159,293 thousand in October, 165 thousand above September’s 159,128 thousand and 225 thousand above August.

Taken together the three readings describe prices rising faster than the labor market is loosening. A monthly consumer price gain near six tenths of a percent is not a settled pace, while unemployment fell a tenth and payrolls grew by 165,000. No October consumer price reading has been published yet, and the next one is the number that will say whether prices and hiring are moving together or apart.

Elections and the midterms

The congressional ledgers did not move over the weekend. AP’s count, as displayed by the tracker at Votelect, read 252 Democrats to 161 Republicans with 22 House races uncalled, and the Senate 54 to 44 with two uncalled. The page carried a 4:00 a.m. PT clock on November 9, but its House ledger still bore the stamp of 5:46 p.m. PT on November 6 and its Senate ledger 12:27 a.m. PT on November 4. No call has been recorded in either chamber since Friday.

Mississippi is the uncalled race with a deadline this week. The tally ABC News displays, updated at 9:03 p.m. ET on November 8, had Scott Colom at 467,930 votes or 49.1 percent and Cindy Hyde-Smith at 465,356 or 48.8, a margin of 2,574 votes with 97 percent of the expected vote counted. 16 WAPT’s page shows the same two totals stamped 5:02 p.m. on November 6, so no ballots have been posted in more than two days.

The state Republican chairman, Mike Hurst, told CNN that between 23,000 and 25,000 affidavit or mail-in ballots were still outstanding, WLBT reported. The clock on them is short. The Secretary of State’s office says mailed ballots must reach the circuit clerk and affidavit voters must present identification by November 10. Counties must certify by November 13, and ABC notes that Mississippi has no recount process. The race is uncalled.

Alaska is not counting yet either. Mary Peltola held a small lead when the first-choice count paused, and the state’s ranked-choice tabulation is scheduled for November 18.

Polymarket priced both. Colom stood at 98.7 percent on $18,256 of twenty-four-hour volume and Hyde-Smith at 1.4 percent on $42,462; Peltola at 98.4 percent on $106,089 and Senator Dan Sullivan at 1.6 percent on $66,177. The chamber contracts put Chuck Schumer at 93.5 percent to be the next Senate majority leader and Hakeem Jeffries at 93.3 percent to be Speaker, and the House popular-vote spread put a Democratic margin of 14 to 16 points at 82.2 percent. Those are the venue’s prices, not this report’s view.

The world

The talks that Washington has been assembling open in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, and Europe will be in the building even though the Kremlin has described the round as trilateral. The European Commission and the European Council are sending a joint team led by Bjoern Seibert, chief of cabinet to Ursula von der Leyen, and Anna-Maria Boura, chief foreign policy adviser to António Costa. France, Germany and Britain are sending national security advisers, and NATO is represented by its chief of staff, Geoffrey Van Leeuwen. The delegations named by Euronews put Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the American seats, Vladimir Medinsky, Sergei Ryabkov and Mikhail Galuzin in Russia’s, and Rustem Umerov, Kyrylo Budanov, Sergiy Kyslytsya and Davyd Arakhamia in Ukraine’s for the round on November 10 and 11.

The format is the fight before the substance. The Kremlin has described the Europeans as attending through separate channels rather than at the table, and Euronews reported that the possibility of direct engagement with the Russians, never done before, remains on the table. Von der Leyen said the EU will be present alongside its partners and that freedom of navigation in the Black Sea must be restored, and she backed Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s call for a ceasefire covering food and energy infrastructure. Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, warned against Western Europe dealing with Russia over the heads of the East Europeans. Kushner said a wider format would be organized if progress is made.

The war did not pause for the talks. Overnight into Monday, Russian strikes killed three people in Odesa and wounded one, and a Ukrainian drone attack set alight the Kirishi refinery in the Leningrad region, where falling debris killed a woman and where the governor said air defences brought down 113 drones. Ukraine’s military chief of staff said a plant near St Petersburg that produces explosives and fuel for Russian missiles was struck. Russia said three power substations and a cargo ship in the Black Sea were hit, and claimed the ship carried arms for Ukrainian forces. Al Jazeera reported the exchange and said it could not independently verify the Russian claims. Ukraine’s energy ministry said Russia has attacked the energy sector 128 times in the past week.

The week’s diplomacy has a second stage. Trump told reporters on Sunday that he will go to China for the Asia-Pacific summit in Shenzhen on November 18 and 19 and expects to meet both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping there, Euronews reported. Euronews noted that the meeting was not confirmed as definite. By Trump’s account the agenda included denuclearization and ending the war in Iran, and Euronews noted reported interest in brokering a Ukraine settlement favorable to Moscow. Both wars are being negotiated while they are still being fought.

Sources

Market, yield, debt and prediction-market figures were collected at 06:00 CT on November 9, 2026 from CNBC’s quote service (the November 6 close for the equities, and morning prints for the VIX, the ten-year, gold, crude and the dollar), the U.S. Treasury daily yield curve (November 6), FiscalData (November 5) and Polymarket’s Gamma API (twenty-four-hour volume). The BLS public API supplied the three series named above. Federal Register counts and document descriptions were read from the register’s own API, and the courts section draws on CourtListener’s RECAP search and the watched dockets’ own feeds. The election counts draw on AP’s race calls as displayed by Votelect, on ABC News and 16 WAPT for Mississippi and on Alaska’s News Source for the ranked-choice schedule. The account of the Ukraine talks and the overnight strikes draws on Euronews and Al Jazeera.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman