Arotrios

Nearly five months after thousands of film and TV writers went on strike over more equitable pay and working conditions in the streaming era, effectively shutting down the entertainment industry, Hollywood studio and streaming executives at long last have reached a tentative deal with the Writers Guild of America, East and West.

In an email to members late Sunday, the union said it had reached “an agreement in principle on all deal points, subject to drafting final contract language.”

The union said it will share details about what the union negotiators and studio executives agreed to once union leadership reviews the final language in the agreement.

“What we have won in this contract—most particularly, everything we have gained since May 2nd—is due to the willingness of this membership to exercise its power, to demonstrate its solidarity, to walk side-by-side, to endure the pain and uncertainty of the past 146 days. It is the leverage generated by your strike, in concert with the extraordinary support of our union siblings, that finally brought the companies back to the table to make a deal,” the email to members continued. “We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional—with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership.”

Once ratified by the union members, the agreement could have huge effects, setting historic precedents on major industry-wide issues. Throughout the strike, writers have framed the fight as an existential one, showing the ways longstanding inequities in the industry have jeopardized the future of writing as a profession and restricted the types of people who can make a living as a writer in Hollywood. The issues that led them to strike include dwindling pay while corporate executives reap profits from writers’ work and the need for guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence. (HuffPost’s unionized staff are also members of the WGA East, but are not involved in the strike.)

The resolution to the strike means writers can soon resume work on film and TV shows, putting an end to a monthslong standstill on virtually all film and TV production. Looming deadlines likely motivated the studio executives, represented by the trade group Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, to finally reach a deal with the writers. Had the strike stretched further into the fall, network shows would not have enough time to put together a partial season of programming.

In the email to members, the union said that the writers are technically still on strike, since the agreement is subject to votes from the union’s negotiating committee and then from leaders of the WGA West and East. Those votes are tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, the WGA said.

Following those votes, union leaders would then authorize a full membership ratification vote on the agreement. During the ratification vote, members would then be allowed to return to work, the union said.

Throughout the strike, writers have had the upper hand in terms of public perception, picketing nearly daily in front of major studios and corporate headquarters in New York and Los Angeles. In addition to laying out the stakes of the strike in no uncertain terms, they were also able to point to the massive corporate greed of Hollywood executives, showing the huge gap between executive salaries and most writers’ relatively meager wages.

It did not help that studio executives continually dug a deeper hole for themselves and added to the public perception of them as cartoon villains — including giving anonymous quotes to Hollywood trade publications asserting the strike was meant to bleed writers dry. For instance, in July, a studio executive anonymously told Deadline: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

The writers’ ability to wield the power of public protest also got results. Earlier this week, Drew Barrymore reversed plans to resume her talk show without her striking writers, after she faced a week of massive public backlash. Her announcement set off a domino effect: Several more talk shows that had been slated to return while their writers are on strike also reversed their plans.

Since July, actors represented by the Screen Actors Guild have also been on strike over similar issues as the writers. While studio executives will need to reach a separate agreement with SAG-AFTRA, the resolution of the writers strike is an optimistic sign for a similar deal with the actors.

The twin strikes have marked a historic moment for Hollywood labor unions. They also come amid a turning point for the labor movement across the country. Just last week, workers represented by the United Auto Workers launched a series of historic strikes, the first time the union has conducted a simultaneous work stoppage at all three major U.S. automakers. In recent years, accelerated by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, workers across many industries have unionized, drawing attention to corporate greed, exploitation and inequality between corporations and workers.

@jeaton Your profile pic absolutely demanded I send this to you, but that might just be the soup talking.

#movies

DENVER (AP) — The Colorado judge overseeing the first significant lawsuit to bar former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 presidential ballot on Friday issued a protective order prohibiting threats and intimidation in the case, saying the safety of those involved — including herself and her staff — was necessary as the groundbreaking litigation moves forward.

“I 100% understand everybody’s concerns for the parties, the lawyers, and frankly myself and my staff based on what we’ve seen in other cases,” District Judge Sarah B. Wallace said as she agreed to the protective order.

The order prohibits parties in the case from making threatening or intimidating statements. Scott Gessler, a former Colorado secretary of state representing Trump in the case, opposed it. He said a protective order was unnecessary because threats and intimidation already are prohibited by law.

It was sought by lawyers for the liberal group Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is seeking to disqualify Trump from the ballot under a rarely used Civil War-era clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Gessler said heated rhetoric in this case has come partly from the left.

“We do have robust political debate going on here,” he said. “For better or worse, this case has become a focal point.”

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed around the country seeking to disqualify Trump from the 2024 ballot based on the 14th Amendment clause barring anyone who swore an oath to the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection” against it from running for office. Their arguments revolve around Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to halt the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election.

The case in Colorado is the first filed by a group with significant legal resources. The issue is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, which has never ruled on the insurrection provision in section three of the 14th Amendment.

Wallace has set an Oct. 30 hearing to discuss whether Trump needs to be removed under Colorado law prohibiting candidates who don’t meet qualifications for higher office from appearing on ballots. She has said she wants to give the Colorado Supreme Court — and possibly U.S. Supreme Court — as much time as possible to review the decision before the state’s Jan. 5 deadline to set its 2024 presidential primary ballot.

A parallel case in Minnesota filed by another well-financed liberal group is scheduled to be heard by that state’s supreme court on Nov. 2.

Trump’s attorneys are scheduled to file two motions to dismiss the lawsuit later Friday. One will contend the litigation is an attempt to retaliate against Trump’s free speech rights. Wallace has set an Oct. 13 hearing to debate that claim.

Sean Grimsley, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the case, proposed the protective order in court Friday. He cited federal prosecutor Jack Smith last week seeking a gag order against Trump for threats made in his prosecution of the former president for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

“At least one of the parties has a tendency to tweet — or Truth Social,” Grimsley said, referring to Trump’s own social network where he broadcasts most of his statements, “about witnesses and the courts.”

Birdsong is one of the most beautiful sounds on the planet, but did you know that those tweets and calls have a complex 'sentence' struture that could tell us a lot about the evolution of human language?

When composer Emily Doolittle was given the chance to spend time at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, the birds she heard became her inspiration.

Doolittle wove together the sounds of partridges, geese and wrens in a piece she titled Seven Duos for Birds or Strings, first performed in 2014.

"Many birds use similar timbres, pitch relationships and patterns to human music," she says. "I think there is lots of room for musicians and scientists to work together to better understand animal songs."

Like Doolittle, researchers around the world are increasingly exploring links between birdsong and human sounds. We may be far apart on the evolutionary tree (scientists estimate the last common ancestor of birds and mammals may have lived more than 300 million years ago), but humans nevertheless happen to have a lot in common with birds when it comes to making themselves heard. The musician wren, for example, which features in Doolittle’s work, is native to the Amazon and has inspired music across South America. As Doolittle found, the wren sings using the same intervals found frequently in human music – octaves, perfect fifths and perfect fourths.
Meaning behind the music

But do beautiful birdsong and chirping calls contain more than melody? Is there a deeper complexity that affects the meaning? Toshitaka Suzuki and his colleagues at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan certainly think so. They’ve found that Japanese tits can arrange the calls they make in order, like words in a sentence, with the arrangement of calls changing the overall meaning – a system known as syntax. The rules of syntax in human language relate to the structure of a sentence, and the order in which we say words. It’s why we would say ‘I’m going to the shops,’ rather than ‘the shops to I’m going,’ for example.

"Tits are known for having these very complicated call systems – a lot of the calls in the Japanese tit repertoire have meanings," explains David Wheatcroft at Uppsala University in Sweden, who also worked on the Japanese study. One call refers to predatory snakes, for instance, and another to the danger of hawks overhead. Parents also have different calls for their chicks, telling them to flee or duck in the face of danger. What is special about Japanese tits is that they seem able to combine at least two of these calls together.

The researchers learnt that there was one particular combination that prompted birds to scan for a predator and then also to approach and harass it. Like human syntax, this combination only worked if the tits’ calls were uttered in a particular order.

"Syntax was considered to have uniquely evolved in humans, but our study demonstrates that it has evolved in a wild bird, too. I think many basic features of language capacity are shared between humans and non-human animals, including birds," says Suzuki. According to Wheatcroft, songbirds such as the Japanese tit may even provide a new model for studying the evolution of syntax.

Linguist Moira Yip at University College London welcomes such exciting new work into animal communication, but points out that tits’ capabilities are limited when compared to what humans can do.

"They have found a system that has two “words”, and one combination, and at the moment that is it," she says. "We, on the other hand, can combine any adjective and any noun to make a new phrase… so from only 10 adjectives and 10 nouns we can create a hundred two-word phrases."

"In evolutionary terms, birds are extremely distant relatives of humans," she adds. Even so, the way birds learn their songs does show some parallels with the way humans acquire language – for example, the way we use syllables and stress certain sounds in a rhythmic way. "Birdsong has internal structure that is reminiscent of the way human speech groups sound," says Yip.
Honeyed tones

However far apart we are from birds in terms of evolution, most of us love birdsong. Bird watchers often learn to imitate their calls, and a few societies have built a dialogue with the birds around them. In parts of Africa, honey gatherers connect with a bird known as the honeyguide, which helps them track down bees’ nests.

"People walk through the bush making special sounds to alert honeyguides. The Yao people of Mozambique make one particular sound in this context," says evolutionary biologist Claire Spottiswoode at the University of Cambridge, who has studied them. It’s like a trill followed by a grunt, she says.

‘Talking’ to the birds like this doubles the odds that a honeyguide will help search for a bees’ nest.

"It tells the honeyguide you’re their friend," one honey gatherer told her. This system brings many benefits. For the hunter-gatherer Hadza community in Tanzania, as much as a tenth of their calories comes from the honey they collect. In return, the birds feed on the wax after the humans have taken the honey.

"The interaction between humans and honeyguides is likely to be very ancient, probably something in the order of hundreds of thousands of years," adds Spottiswoode. While tame animals often interact with their owners, honeyguides are wild, making this relationship unique. "Their cooperative behaviour has almost certainly evolved through natural selection," she says.

Research such as this highlights that birds aren’t as ‘bird-brained’ as some people had assumed. Indeed, in 2016, European and South American researchers studying two-dozen species found that, while birds’ brains may be relatively tiny, the cells within them can be more densely packed than those of rodents and some primates. Parrots and songbirds have some of the most surprising brains of all.

"We probably underestimated how many species have some communication system," says Moira Yip. "Nevertheless, the gulf between human language and the systems found in birds, cetaceans and even primates remains huge, and how that gulf was crossed as humans evolved remains largely mysterious."

Even so, bird researchers continue to be surprised by the likenesses they see between humans and birds, especially in making a tune.

"There is no common ancestor of birds and humans that had a music-like song," says Doolittle. "But somehow, independently through evolution, birds and humans have ended up fairly similar, both in the way they sound and in the role songs play in their lives."

In my long experience working with artists across all media, one of the things that I've found the most rewarding is discovering their inspirations, which often lead to new creative ideas of my own.

So I thought I'd ask Kbin, what inspires you? Is it a piece of music? A novel? A poem? A picture? A philosophy? A spiritual text? What lifts your soul to song? A software? A science? A symphony?

What gets your creative juices flowing?

Full disclosure - I am the mod of @13thFloor, which is dedicated to engaging the creative spirit. Your inspirations and creativity are more than welcome there as well.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but congressional Republicans are once again careening toward internal crisis and a damaging government shutdown.

You may remember this song-and-dance from the last four or five times the party’s hard-line Freedom Caucus members held America’s economy hostage. That doesn’t make our latest spin on the roller coaster any less nauseating.

In the past, Republican leaders managed by the slimmest of margins to avert financial catastrophe by working with Democrats to pass temporary funding bills. This time it isn’t even clear they can achieve that minimum level of competence — in part because House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has blown his internal credibility to bits.

Meanwhile, the American people are watching the slow, loud and very public disintegration of Republican unity.

Once again, McCarthy’s own caucus has taken the sledgehammer to his knees. Over the weekend, a dozen Republican lawmakers publicly declared they would oppose the Speaker’s latest effort to keep the government open. Now McCarthy’s legacy risks being defined by the GOP’s transformation into a nonfunctional party of nonstop national crisis.

It isn’t even clear that a sizable minority of Republican lawmakers want to keep the government open. Freedom Caucus stalwarts including Reps. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) dismissed McCarthy’s proposal out of hand without even attempting to offer an alternative. Luna, who recently gave birth and is still in the hospital, went so far as to say she’d leave her recovery bed in order to guarantee McCarthy’s continuing resolution fails.

Luna offers the perfect visual of the current GOP: A lawmaker willing to drag herself out of a hospital bed in order to ensure the federal government does not function.

That’s all the more perverse when you realize a federal shutdown would deny a paycheck to nearly 15,000 Floridian federal workers, as it did in 2019. A shutdown would also grind Federal Housing Authority and Veterans Administration mortgage processing to a halt, slamming the brakes on thousands of Florida homebuyers. If only Luna and her colleagues were so willing to risk their health in ways that actually helped their constituents.

The spat over funding the government also drew Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) into a Twitter scuffle with Gaetz, who called the stopgap plan “a terrible bill” and “one BAD VOTE,” while once again raising the specter of calling a vote to oust McCarthy from his position. Gaetz will find ready allies in House Democrats, who dismissed McCarthy’s 8 percent across-the-board cuts to domestic programs as unserious. Once again, the Speaker of the House finds himself without any allies to advance his agenda.

Even non-Freedom Caucus Republicans are abandoning McCarthy. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) torched the plan in a statement released on Monday, accusing McCarthy of lacking the spine to lead.

“It is a shame that our weak Speaker cannot even commit to having a commission to discuss our looming financial catastrophe,” Spartz wrote. “Our founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves.” Hardly the language of someone likely to support McCarthy if the Freedom Caucus puts forward a vote of no confidence.

There is some truth to Republicans’ many criticisms. A party that rants endlessly about increasing border security can’t, in the same breath, support a resolution that slashes funding for those same border security efforts. That lack of foresight is trademark McCarthy: a plan rushed out under duress, full of internal contradictions and not especially convincing to anyone who matters.

But if McCarthy’s bill is dead-on-arrival, it’s not clear the Freedom Caucus has the support to do any better. A Democratic Senate won’t even glance at the HFC’s even more extreme proposed cuts, and members of their own party are losing patience with their antics. Said Rep. Mike Lawler of New York: “This is not conservative Republicanism. This is stupidity … these people can’t define a win. They don’t know how to take yes for an answer. It’s a clown show.”

In the nine months since taking power in the House, Republicans have only proven capable of careening the nation from one preventable crisis to the next. Eventually their brinksmanship will break down and plunge our nation into a costly, painful government shutdown. Not only is there no one leading the GOP, every effort at unifying them behind a clear policy platform only deepens their bitter fractures. It is worth asking why these types of financial disasters only happen when Republicans control our national purse-strings.

In the end, American voters still appreciate a competent government that looks out for their financial futures. They won’t find that in whatever passes for today’s Republican Party. Instead, they will find lawmakers who have given up on governing in favor of the easy work of grievance politics.

That may offer many soon-to-be-ousted Republicans a lucrative second act in the right-wing media, but it does nothing to solve the problems facing our nation. Whatever Speaker McCarthy may wish to be true, his Republican Party is now undeniably the party of nonstop national crisis. That constant chaos will weigh heavily on voters’ minds next year.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

We created https://urusai.social as a safe, cozy, English-first home for happy weebs and all of our varied interests - URUSAI! Social: All the otaku content. None of the toxicity. Come join us in our mission to be wholesome!

Transferring servers is a simple 2-step process and all your stuff comes with you, even your followers! #anime #manga #mastodon #instance #server #otaku #nerds #geek Boosts appreciated! #BoostMe

This is a bit of test post to see if it helps federate urusai.social with kbin's domain tracking. @neatchee is the admin, and they're running a nice stack over there - otaku fans should go check them out.

The end of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 has had a profound effect on maternal healthcare and abortion access across the country. Fourteen states have now completely banned abortion and two dozen more have bans at 22 weeks or less. As a result, an already grim maternal health care landscape has worsened.

New data reveals an unexpected consequence of these developments: Young women, even those in states where abortion remains legal, say they are foregoing having children because they are afraid to get pregnant because of changes that followed the Dobbs decision that ended Roe.

Polling conducted in August by my organization, All In Together, in partnership with polling firm Echelon Insights found that 34 percent of women aged 18-39 said they or someone they know personally has “decided not to get pregnant due to concerns about managing pregnancy-related medical emergencies.” Put another way, poor or unavailable maternal health care post-Dobbs is leading people to alter some of their most important life choices.

For young people, the maternal healthcare crisis is deeply personal. More than a third of young people and 22 percent of young women told us they have personally dealt with or know someone who has “faced constraints when trying to manage a pregnancy-related emergency.” And 23 percent of 18- to 39-year-old women say they have themselves or know someone else who has been unable to obtain an abortion in their state — a number almost three times higher than respondents in other age groups.

Perhaps most surprisingly however, these results are similar regardless of whether the respondents are living in states with abortion bans or states without restrictions on abortion access. The consistency between red and blue states suggests that the statistics on maternal mortality and the stories and struggles of women navigating the new normal on abortion access have penetrated the psyche of young people everywhere. The Dobbs decision, it seems, has fundamentally altered how people feel about having families and the calculus for getting pregnant.

Alexis McGill Johnson, CEO of Planned Parenthood, told me that the stories of women dying or facing near-death experiences because of abortion restrictions has struck fear in the hearts of young people, many of whom were already ambivalent about having children because of the costs and pressures that generation faces.

“Abortion bans make pregnancy less safe,” she said, “and women are acutely aware of the consequence of restricting access to reproductive health care in their own lives.”

In the wake of Dobbs, stories of women enduring horrific medical trauma in states where abortion is illegal have been widely reported. For instance, Carmen Broesder, an Idaho mom, documented her 19-day long harrowing miscarriage on TikTok – including her three trips to the emergency room. While only six weeks pregnant, she was denied access to a D&C (dilation and curettage) surgery because of Idaho’s abortion ban.

It goes almost without saying that this is not good news for the already declining birthrates in the U.S. According to research from Pew, birthrates in the U.S. had been falling since the early 2000s and plummeted during the Covid pandemic. Fertility rates briefly rebounded after the pandemic but now, post-Dobbs, they have dropped again.

Should this trend continue, the reluctance of young women to have children now will have vast and long-term consequences for the American economy and fabric of the nation. Falling birth rates can affect everything from tax revenue to labor force participation, schools, housing, elder care and more.

But beyond the macro-economic ramifications, there is also a human and emotional toll for people who may want children but are too afraid to have them. The hallmark of a flourishing society is one where people can fulfill their hopes and dreams, and for many, those dreams include raising a family. But for a generation of Americans, that dream now appears frustrated. Gen Y and Z Americans report higher rates of mental health challenges and stress than other generations. The Dobbs decision has clearly contributed to that anxiety.

All of this signals troubling, unexpected and ominous continuing consequences of the Supreme Court’s deeply unpopular Dobbs ruling and the ripple effects that abortion bans, which polls show a majority of Americans oppose, have created. It’s a trend worth watching and weighing – for lawmakers, for women, for families and for all Americans.

Mitt Romney’s retirement shines a glaring spotlight on the potentially bleak future of the Senate’s ideological center in both parties. If Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema follow him out the door, it will get worse.

Manchin, a centrist Democrat, and the Independent Sinema are both still mulling whether to run again. Like Romney, they could be replaced by senators on either end of the ideological spectrum — almost surely a Republican in Manchin’s West Virginia.

And as maligned as Romney, Manchin and Sinema are by one party or the other’s faithful, the possible 2024 departures of two or three of them would change the Senate, which passed several notable bipartisan deals in the last Congress.

“You lose the center, you lose the moderates, you’re screwed. You really are screwed,” Manchin said in an interview. “I’m hoping the voters will wake up.”

It had become cliche to bemoan the Senate’s increasing partisanship over the past two decades, a period of fewer big bipartisan deals, endless procedural delays and episodes like the GOP’s 2016 Supreme Court blockade. Then, for two years under a 50-50 Senate, President Joe Biden found some legislative success by letting the chamber work its will.

A roving bipartisan group started on Covid aid in late 2020 and came together on big issues that had bedeviled previous Congresses: gun safety, same-sex marriage protection, microchip manufacturing and infrastructure investment. Democrats made their fair share of partisan moves, jamming through hundreds of billions in party-line dollars and a massive pandemic aid plan, but the Senate’s playing field was also open for centrist maneuvering.

These days, the House is run by Republicans in no mood to deal, and it’s hard for some to see the conditions of 2021 and 2022 returning anytime soon. That alone was enough for Romney to call it quits.

“That group was so productive. And it was so fun,” Romney said of his fellow Senate centrists in an interview on Wednesday. “That little group, I think, is not going to be around. And so, time for new groups to form.”

Every few years, the Senate undergoes sweeping changes due to retirements and lost reelection bids. Taken together, over time, they reshape the act of legislating in surprising ways. Some new senators step up to fill the voids, while other efforts disappear. As Romney sees it — and he’s not alone — the Senate’s current referendum on bipartisanship has three others at its “heart": Sinema, Manchin and Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), a more progressive red-state dealmaker who faces a tough reelection campaign.

Should some or all of them leave Congress next year, it would mark a repeat of the 2014 and 2018 cycles when a drove of red-state Democrats were ousted or retired. The losses of former moderate Sens. Heidi Heitkamp, Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly still sting among the party’s red-state survivors.

But it’s not just Democrats. A quintet of deal-making GOP senators retired last year, and some were replaced by more conservative or pugnacious senators.

That’s certainly a possibility when it comes to Romney’s seat. Utah could elect an establishment Republican like Gov. Spencer Cox or a combative conservative like Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). Romney said he’ll be neutral in the race to replace him but that he doesn’t “think we’re going to get someone off the wall.”

Sinema, if she runs, would face a three-way race against Congressional Progressive Caucus member Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and a hard-right Republican like Kari Lake or Blake Masters. If Manchin retires, Democrats would almost certainly cede the seat to the GOP, which faces a primary between Gov. Jim Justice and the more conservative Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.).

“With the sort of populist phase we’re going through right now, you may have fewer [centrists] coming out of primaries,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), another bipartisan collaborator.

Manchin and Tester’s reelection wins in 2018 were impressive given the deep-red hues of their states. There are some other success stories for the centrist crew: Two moderate GOP senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have withstood challenges from a Democrat and Trump-backed Republican, respectively, in the last two cycles.

Now, it’s the Democratic caucus’ turn. There, some worry that Sinema and Manchin joining Romney in retirement could shrink a centrist group that swelled during the last Congress down to the size of a Senate phone booth, with negative consequences.

“This place functions the best when you have individuals on both sides of the aisle that are willing to work across the aisle together. And I think that’s true for the three of them,” said Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Sinema’s home-state colleague.

Still, the legislative filibuster and its 60-vote threshold remain intact — and that could mean new members step into the bipartisan breach. The question is whether that means collaboration only on essential government functions like keeping the lights on and raising the debt ceiling or whether there’s a bipartisan desire to do more.

“If that gets hollowed out, working across the aisle, nothing will get done. It’s not like over in the House, where if you had the majority, you can still push it through,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), a member of GOP leadership who often supports bipartisan compromises. “I don’t know how we function without that, whoever the personalities are.”

Capito said she did not believe Manchin, Sinema and Romney would all necessarily follow the same path or were coordinating at all: “It’s not a groupthink there. I think they’re all [operating with] three separate different ideas and issues as to where they want to go.”

Romney’s decision probably predates Manchin’s and Sinema’s by months. Manchin is looking at an end-of-year choice, which would be just before his state’s January filing deadline. Romney has urged Manchin not to seek the White House on a third-party ticket.

“I encouraged him not to run [for president]. I tell Joe that in my opinion, him running would only serve to elect Donald Trump,” Romney said.

Since Sinema is an independent, she faces even less time pressure to decide. She’s giving almost nothing away about her thinking; senators of all stripes are unsure of where she stands, despite having close relationships with her.

In a statement, Sinema spokeswoman Hannah Hurley said that “Arizonans are sick of career candidates constantly fighting the next election. Kyrsten promised Arizonans she’d be an independent senator who delivers lasting solutions, and that’s exactly what she’s done.”

Romney said he’s encouraging his friend Sinema to run again, despite his own decision to retire. Both first-termers, their circumstances are otherwise different: Romney is 76 and at the end of his career; Sinema is 47 and could serve in the Senate for decades if she keeps winning.

Manchin is 76 and faces by far the most difficult political circumstances of any Democratic incumbent. But as the only game in town for the Democratic Party, he’s winning some converts who might not seem like obvious Manchin fans.

“I really, really like Joe Manchin. He’s a good dude. I don’t agree with some of his votes, but he’s just a good dude,” said Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who said he would support Gallego over Sinema if he lived in Arizona. “He would be a much, much better senator than Gov. Justice.”

KYIV — Ukraine on Thursday confirmed it wrecked a Russian submarine with British weapons, during a missile attack on the Black Sea port of Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea.

The Russian cruise missile carrier — the Rostov-on-Don — was significantly damaged in the massive Ukrainian strike, as was Kremlin warship the Minsk.

A senior Ukrainian military official confirmed to POLITICO that Ukrainian pilots used the British cruise missile Storm Shadow for the attack.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Ukraine launched 10 cruise missiles on the Sevastopol shipyard on Wednesday, but only three hit their targets, damaging two military vessels. Unusually, on Thursday morning Ukraine’s army claimed the attack and said Russia would not be able to repair the ships in the near future.

“The large Russian landing ship Minsk and the submarine Rostov-on-Don, which were hit during the night attack in Sevastopol, most likely cannot be restored,” Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, said on Ukrainian TV. Russian Telegram channels confirmed the names and types of vessels.

Natalia Humeniuk of Ukraine’s Army Operational Command South added that the military ships were most likely damaged beyond repair for the Russians, as the only place to carry out repairs was the shipyard which was razed in the attack.

Ukrainian Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk hinted publicly that the Ukrainian Air Force was behind the Sevastopol attack and used British Storm Shadow missiles for the attack.

“While the occupiers are still recovering from a storm in Sevastopol, I would like to thank the pilots of the Air Force for their excellent combat work! To be continued … ” Oleshchuk said in a pointed statement.

The operation happened a few days after Ukraine seized control of four oil and gas drilling platforms in the Black Sea near the shores of Crimea and deactivated Russian radar monitoring all movement in that part of the sea.

“Ukrainian forces used a rare opportunity to target a submarine while it was on the surface of the sea. It was the first time air-to-air missiles were successfully used against a submarine,” Ukrainian military expert and former military officer Roman Svitan told POLITICO. He compared the significance of the operation to last year’s sinking of Moskva cruiser in the Black Sea: “I would say this is an even bigger success.”

Invading Russian forces have frequently launched cruise missiles against сities and towns in the west of Ukraine from submarines in the Black Sea, as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war continues.

Saudi Arabia’s $700bn sovereign wealth fund – which has been used as a lever of global influence by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – has been subpoenaed by a powerful Senate committee after it refused to voluntarily comply with information requests about its US dealings.

The subpoena, which was issued by the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, is targeting the Public Investment Fund’s wholly-owned US subsidiaries in connection to the group’s proposed golf deal and “related investments throughout the United States”.

The PIF is also the majority owner of the Newcastle United football club.

The subpoena was announced on Wednesday at a committee hearing led by its chairman, the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. On its face, the hearing was meant to focus on Saudi’s controversial proposed golf merger.

But the hearing – and lengthy remarks by both Democrats and Republicans – delved instead into Saudi’s record human rights abuses, the kingdom’s alleged role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and fundamental objections to attempts by the oil rich nation to takeover assets of national interest.

Senators were visibly agitated by the PIF’s lack of compliance with voluntary requests for disclosure, which is seen by the lawmakers as part of a troubling posture by Saudi officials to put themselves out of reach of US law.

“The Saudi Public Investment Fund cannot have it both ways: if it wants to engage with the United States commercially, it must be subject to United States law and oversight,” Blumenthal said.

Expert witnesses described the PIF as “inextricably intertwined” with the Saudi state and Prince Mohammed, who the Human Rights Watch researcher Joey Shea said wields “unilateral decision-making” over the fund, with little transparency or accountability”.

In her testimony, Shea also pointed to internal Saudi government documents, which have been submitted to a Canadian court in connection to a legal claim, which show how the crown prince’s advisers ordered Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the fund, to transfer 20 companies that were captured as part of a so-called anti-corruption campaign directly into the fund.

The transfers in at least one case involved a deed that was stamped by the Saudi ministry of justice but never signed by the individuals who were said to have agreed the transfer to the government’s coffers, Shea said.

“There is a risk that these companies were “transferred” from their owners without due process,” she added.

Blumenthal, one of the Senate’s biggest critics of Saudi Arabia, pointed to PIF’s ownership of a company whose jets were later used to transport the killers of Jamal Khashoggi from Saudi Arabia to Turkey, where the Washington Post journalist was murdered in 2018.

“Saudi Arabia’s use of foreign of sovereign wealth fund resources to attempt to gain influence in the United States should provoke us all. Under Crown Prince bin Salman Saudi Arabia remains a brutal regime, utterly resistant to criticism, devoid of any right of free speech,” Blumenthal said. “The PIF has been implicated in some of Saudi Arabia’s most abhorrent atrocities.”

He also pointed to the PIF’s role in financing the development of Neom, a desert city that is a critical element of Prince Mohammed’s Vision 2030, an economic plan he has put forward to diversity Saudi’s wealth away from oil revenue. Members of a tribe who have resisted the Neom project have been sentenced to death.

It is far from clear whether the PIF will comply with the subpoena. The fund has in the past described itself in contradictory terms. In the UK, the fund’s bid to take over Newcastle was approved in part because the investors denied that the Saudi government would have a direct say over the football club’s management. But in the US, where the fund has faced its most serious legal and political scrutiny, the fund has sought protection under diplomatic protocols such as sovereign immunity.

The hearing on Wednesday was noteworthy for one other fact: it provided a rare glimpse of agreement between Democrats and Republicans, including its senior Republican senator Ron Johnson, who centered his remarks on remaining questions about Saudi’s role in 9/11.

“This inquiry started with an event that interested in me – the PGA trying to come to an agreement with the PIF – but it is certainly expanding well beyond that,” Johnson said. He also suggested that he believed Blumenthal had “higher goals” in pursuing an investigation into Saudi’s PIF.

“It’ll be interesting to see where this progresses,” he said.

The former president has talked regularly with members of the House Freedom Caucus and other congressional Republicans who pushed for impeachment.

On a sweeping patio overlooking the golf course at his private club in Bedminster, N.J., former President Donald J. Trump dined Sunday night with a close political ally, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

It was a chance for the former president to catch up with the hard-right Georgia congresswoman. But over halibut and Diet Cokes, Ms. Greene brought up an issue of considerable interest to Mr. Trump — the push by House Republicans to impeach his likely opponent in next year’s election.

“I did brief him on the strategy that I want to see laid out with impeachment,” Ms. Greene said in a brief phone interview.

Mr. Trump’s dinner with Ms. Greene came just two nights before Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced his decision on Tuesday to order the opening of an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, under intense pressure from his right flank.

Over the past several months, Mr. Trump has kept a close watch on House Republicans’ momentum toward impeaching Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump has talked regularly by phone with members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus and other congressional Republicans who pushed for impeachment, according to a person close to Mr. Trump who was not authorized to publicly discuss the conversations. Mr. Trump has encouraged the effort both privately and publicly.

Ms. Greene, who has introduced articles of impeachment against Mr. Biden, said she told Mr. Trump that she wanted the impeachment inquiry to be “long and excruciatingly painful for Joe Biden.”

She would not say what Mr. Trump said in response, but she said her ultimate goal was to have a “long list of names” — people whom she claimed were co-conspirators involved in Biden family crimes. She said she was confident Mr. Trump would win back the White House in 2024 and that she wanted “to go after every single one of them and use the Department of Justice to prosecute them.”

While Mr. Biden’s son Hunter is under investigation by a special counsel who is expected to lodge a gun charge against him soon and could also charge him with failure to file his tax returns on time, Republicans have not shown that Mr. Biden committed any crimes. House Republicans are proceeding with the impeachment inquiry without proof that Mr. Biden took official actions as vice president to benefit his son’s financial interests or that he directly profited from his son’s foreign deals.

Mr. Trump has also spoken weekly over the past month to Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the third-ranking House Republican, according to a person familiar with the conversations who was not authorized to discuss them publicly. During those conversations, Ms. Stefanik also briefed Mr. Trump on the impeachment inquiry strategy, this person said.

The former president thanked Ms. Stefanik for publicly backing the impeachment inquiry in July, the person added. Ms. Stefanik, who talked to Mr. Trump again on Tuesday after Mr. McCarthy ordered the impeachment inquiry, had been the first member of House Republican leadership to publicly call for taking the first step in the process of impeaching Mr. Biden.

A person familiar with Mr. Trump’s thinking said that despite his eagerness to see an inquiry move forward, the former president has not been twisting Mr. McCarthy’s arm. Mr. Trump has been far more aggressive in pushing several members to wipe his own impeachment record clean, the person said, potentially by getting Congress to take the unprecedented step of expunging his two impeachments from the House record.

Mr. Trump has not been expressing concern about the possibility that the McCarthy impeachment effort might backfire and benefit Mr. Biden, according to two people with direct knowledge of his private statements over several months. Instead, he wondered to an ally why there had been no movement on impeaching Mr. Biden once he learned that the House was back in session.

A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy did not respond to a question about his interactions with the former president regarding impeachment.

When asked for comment, Mr. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, pointed to Mr. Trump’s public statements about impeaching Mr. Biden.

The former president’s public commentary on the possibility of a Biden impeachment has escalated from wistful musings about the Justice Department’s supposed inaction to explicit demands.

“They persecuted us and yet Joe Biden is a stone-cold criminal, caught dead to right, and nothing happens to him. Forget the family. Nothing happens to him,” the former president said at a rally in March.

In a June town hall with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, Mr. Trump lamented what happened after authorities found boxes of classified documents in both Mar-a-Lago and the Bidens’ Delaware residence.

“It is a dual system of government,” Mr. Trump said. “You talk about law and order. You can’t have law and order in a country where you have such corruption.”

That same month, after Mr. Trump was arraigned on charges that he had improperly retained sensitive national security documents and obstructed investigators, he declared that if re-elected he would appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Mr. Biden and his family.

By July, Mr. Trump had begun suggesting that Republicans should impeach the president, and as the summer wore on, he conveyed his desire with greater urgency.

“So, they impeach me over a ‘perfect’ phone call, and they don’t impeach Biden for being the most corrupt president in the history of the United States???” Mr. Trump wrote in all caps on his website, Truth Social.

In yet another nearly all-cap Truth Social post in late August, the former president wrote, referring to congressional Republicans: “Either impeach the bum, or fade into oblivion. They did it to us!”

Jonathan Swan is a political reporter who focuses on campaigns and Congress. As a reporter for Axios, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Donald J. Trump, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for “overall excellence in White House coverage” in 2022.

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia.