WARSAW — For a second night on Saturday, several hundred protesters gathered outside Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, behind a line of riot police, to demand the reinstatement of a judge the government says should never have been in charge. Inside, the question that has paralyzed Polish constitutional law for a decade had come down to its simplest physical form: who is allowed through the door.

The sequence began late Friday. The tribunal announced that Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska had suspended its president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański, and had taken temporary charge of the court. According to the BBC, Korwin-Piotrowska is one of five judges elected by parliament since March whom President Karol Nawrocki has refused to swear in, citing alleged flaws in their selection. The BBC also reported that Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek had asked for Święczkowski and Sochański to be stripped of their immunity so that criminal charges could be brought against them.

Riot police had been posted at the building since Friday afternoon. Nawrocki is an ally of the Law and Justice party (PiS), which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023. He had been flying to the Youth Olympic Games in Dakar. He turned his plane around mid-flight, went to the court, and, according to his chief of staff, entered the building. Early Saturday, an aide read his statement outside: “Tonight, there was a breach of public order in the Republic of Poland and a forcible takeover of a constitutional body.”

The tribunal’s social media account, still speaking for the two judges being removed, went further. It said Święczkowski and Sochański remained the court’s lawful senior judges and that “all persons participating in these actions are committing the crime of a coup d’etat.” PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński called the suspension an “assault” on the court.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk answered in a prime-time television address on Saturday night. “I am certain that the Constitutional Tribunal will function as it should. Also, independently of me and in line with the constitution,” he said, according to Reuters. The executive’s task, he said, was to guarantee the court’s safety and working conditions. He added, as the Guardian reported, that “in certain matters, there can be no compromise.”

Two claims to the same constitution

The government’s case rests on a record that begins in 2015, when Poland’s two main political camps, Civic Platform and PiS, clashed over the appointment of five judges. The fight widened into an eight-year conflict with the European Union over judicial independence. European courts later ruled that the tribunal, as composed, was no longer an “independent and impartial tribunal.” Tusk’s government has used those rulings as grounds to stop publishing the tribunal’s judgments. For practical purposes, Poland has been operating with a constitutional court whose rulings the executive does not recognize.

The opposition’s case is procedural, and on its own terms simple. Święczkowski was appointed under the law in force at the time. The judge who suspended him has not taken an oath before the president. A justice minister who seeks criminal charges against the court’s leadership fits the textbook picture of executive capture. Nawrocki’s refusal to swear in parliament’s judges is why Korwin-Piotrowska’s authority is contested. It is also why the government says it had no other route.

What has not happened

No body with uncontested standing has ruled on whether Friday’s suspension was lawful, and it is not obvious which body could. Tusk returned to office in 2023 promising to unwind PiS’s judicial changes, but opposition-aligned presidents with broad veto powers have repeatedly blocked his attempts to legislate a reset. The past forty-eight hours did not settle the legal question. They moved it from law journals to a fence line.

Why it matters beyond Warsaw

Poland is the largest EU member on the bloc’s eastern flank and the logistics hub for Western support to Ukraine. Brussels spent the PiS years fighting Warsaw over its courts and has treated Tusk as the leader who would undo that damage. Friday showed what undoing looks like when the head of state refuses to cooperate: police at the gate, prosecutors at the bench and contested appointments on both sides, all invoked to reverse what PiS built. Whether that is restoration or retaliation depends on which appointments one treats as valid. That question is the entire dispute, and no neutral referee exists to answer it.

What to watch

Whether prosecutors formally move against Święczkowski and Sochański. Whether the court under Korwin-Piotrowska issues rulings, and whether the government publishes them. And whether Nawrocki, who held political consultations throughout Saturday, responds with vetoes, appointments of his own, or another visit to the door.

Iran’s foreign minister said Saturday that Tehran and Qatari mediators had worked out a plan to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz within two days, once the United States meets Iran’s conditions. In an interview with Al Jazeera, Abbas Araghchi also said Iran had no plans to meet American officials directly. “We see no need to meet with the Americans at present, our conditions are clear, and the mediators continue their consultations regarding them,” he said, as reported by Iran’s state news agency and relayed by CBS News.

The offer shortens a timetable, not a list. Last month Araghchi proposed reopening the waterway within a week if Washington lifted its blockade of Iranian ports, released frozen Iranian assets and waived sanctions on Iranian oil sales, among other demands. The United States rejected that proposal. Nothing made public on Saturday indicates the conditions have changed. Araghchi did call a U.S. outline, delivered through Qatari mediators last weekend and led by Vice President JD Vance, “a positive step” toward broader dialogue. Qatari and Pakistani mediators met an Iranian delegation in Doha on Saturday.

At a Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump said the talks were “going fine,” though he called Iran “not very reliable.” He said Washington was “not in that much of a hurry” because U.S. forces had “knocked down their Navy” and “knocked out their air force” and anti-aircraft defenses. He said one or two nuclear sites remained, naming the underground complex known as Pickaxe Mountain, and added: “We can do that in 10 minutes.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Trump had not decided whether to resume strikes and preferred a diplomatic outcome. The Washington Examiner reported that the president is weighing new strikes after Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Two counts of one strait

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted on X on Saturday that “transit levels are back to pre-conflict levels minus Iranian barrels.” He added: “The world can live without Iranian oil. Iran cannot live without oil exports.” A day earlier, the Associated Press described the war, which the United States and Israel began in February, as having impeded most shipping through the strait.

These claims are not necessarily contradictory. They count different things: ship transits by non-Iranian traffic in one case, and the strait’s full prewar flow, which included Iran’s exports, in the other. Neither government has published the underlying count. Iran’s offer to “reopen” the strait treats it as closed. Bessent’s post treats the closure as a problem only for Iran.

The count nobody can edit

Prices offer the only measure that neither side controls. As of Friday, Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude were each about 70 percent above their levels a year earlier, according to CBS News. The national average for diesel was $6.32 a gallon, up 71 percent from a year ago, according to AAA. Diesel set a record above $6 in September. Russia’s war in Ukraine is also squeezing fuel supply, so the strait alone does not explain those numbers. But they are not the prices of a market that believes Hormuz is back to normal.

What to watch: Iran’s formal reply to the Vance outline, and whether the two-day plan is written down with the conditions attached, or only described on television.

On October 28, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s public-health institute recorded 78 new confirmed Ebola cases and 32 deaths. That is an ordinary day for this outbreak, close to the seven-day average of 72.7 cases. The cumulative toll now stands at 10,274 confirmed cases and 4,992 deaths, a fatality rate of 48.6 percent, across 67 health zones in eight of the country’s 26 provinces. The newest zone, Yakoma in Nord-Ubangi, was added that day.

The headline figure is the death count, which will pass 5,000 within days at the current pace. The more telling figure is in Nord-Kivu: 508 patients in treatment centers built for 410. Nationally, centers are at 92 percent of capacity, according to the same bulletin. The seven-day average of deaths, 37.9 a day, is higher than the week before.

Where people are dying

The World Health Organization’s latest outbreak notice, covering the period to October 20, found that of 482 deaths reported since its previous update, 307 occurred in the community rather than in treatment centers. Deaths at home mean infections were found late or not at all, and they mean bodies and caregivers outside any controlled setting. The WHO says these figures reflect continuing problems with early detection and timely access to care.

The outbreak has crossed borders. Kenya had reported nine cases, including one death, by October 20, all linked to a single imported case from Congo. Nigeria confirmed an imported case in Abuja the same day, in a traveler who had come from Uganda. The WHO advises against restrictions on travel or trade.

The vaccine gap

This is Bundibugyo virus, not the Zaire strain behind the West African epidemic of 2014–2016, and there is no licensed vaccine or treatment specific to it. Congo has given 10,018 people Ervebo, the Zaire-strain vaccine, since August 26, while researchers try to establish whether it offers any cross-protection. A pivotal Phase 2/3 trial of Bundibugyo-specific candidates, called TUMAINI, enrolled its first participants in Bunia on October 23.

Médecins Sans Frontières has asked Merck, known as MSD outside North America, to send all Ervebo doses released in the coming months to the international emergency stockpile. It has also asked high-income countries not to reserve doses beyond their immediate needs. In August, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations was still seeking $128 million of a $270 million emergency research budget. At that time, the continental response plan from the Africa CDC and WHO, budgeted at $518 million, had disbursed $333.2 million.

Why this is on our front page

An American election in two days and a war in the Gulf will fill most news budgets this weekend. An outbreak that kills roughly one of every two confirmed patients, in a conflict zone, with no licensed vaccine and one province over capacity, does not pause for either. The numbers above are the ones to check next week: beds, community deaths and whether the trial produces anything faster than the virus spreads.

Late Friday, U.S. District Judge Trina L. Thompson issued a temporary restraining order against the Justice Department. The order bars the department from threatening, intimidating or coercing California election officials and workers into halting, segregating or refusing to count the ballots of registered voters solely because the department alleges they are ineligible. It also bars the department from threatening those workers with criminal prosecution for processing ballots under state and federal law.

The central sentence in the order is the one election workers will read most closely: “When state and local government employees perform the work of distributing, processing, or counting ballots or otherwise administering the 2026 midterm election in the manner required by their state and federal laws governing the administration of elections, they do not violate federal criminal law even if a particular ballot belongs to a registered voter alleged by Defendants to be ineligible to vote.”

What the department had been doing

According to CBS News, the department pressed California officials this month to separate out the mail ballots of roughly 20,000 people it alleges are not U.S. citizens, and issued grand jury subpoenas to officials in Los Angeles County. California says the list is highly unreliable and probably includes many citizens. Earlier on Friday, a federal appeals court rejected the department’s request to have the state set those ballots aside, the Associated Press reported. Hours later, Thompson ruled on a separate suit filed one day earlier by labor unions and other groups.

The order also requires the department to notify every state or local government that received its letters that those demands have been enjoined. And it requires the department to tell the court about any pending search-warrant applications, grand jury subpoenas or other demands for election materials connected to its lists.

What the order is not

This is not a final ruling. Thompson found the plaintiffs had shown the department’s actions “likely violate” the Voting Rights Act’s intimidation provision and the Constitution, which is the standard for emergency relief, not a judgment on the merits. The order expires at 5 p.m. on November 16, and the next hearing is November 13. It protects the people handling ballots. It does not settle whether any particular voter was eligible.

The weekend around it

More than 50.5 million early votes had been cast nationwide by Saturday morning, according to the University of Florida’s election lab, well above the 45.9 million cast early in the entire 2022 midterm. In the states that report party registration, 10.7 million registered Democrats had voted, compared with 7.8 million registered Republicans. That shows who has voted, not how they voted. In Alaska, state officials filed a motion Saturday to dismiss a separate Justice Department lawsuit seeking to segregate some Senate ballots.

The practical effect of Friday’s order is narrow and specific. For the next sixteen days, a county worker in California who opens an envelope and counts what is inside has a federal judge’s word that doing the job is not a crime.

ExxonMobil reported third-quarter earnings of $15.4 billion on Friday, or $3.72 a share, about double the $7.5 billion it earned a year earlier. Chevron reported $9.9 billion, nearly triple its year-ago profit. Both beat Wall Street estimates, and both stocks touched all-time highs. The press releases credit discipline. The line items credit the war.

The tell is where the money was made. Chevron’s refining earnings rose to $4.9 billion from $1.1 billion a year earlier. Its oil and gas production earned $5.7 billion. Fuel-making, normally the thin-margin part of an oil company, nearly matched the wellhead. Chevron’s U.S. refineries processed a record 1.09 million barrels a day at close to 98 percent utilization. Exxon reported its highest global diesel yield and highest North American diesel volumes. Meanwhile Chevron’s total net oil-equivalent production fell by 106,000 barrels a day from a year earlier, which the company attributed to lower entitlements from higher prices and to the Middle East conflict. Chevron pumped less and earned more.

“Refining capacity is very tight today,” Exxon chief executive Darren Woods told CNBC. “Frankly, diesel is the key crunch point here because it is so critical to economic growth [with] very inelastic demand.” Chevron’s Mike Wirth put it more briefly: “The system is under stress.”

“Inelastic demand” is the polite term for customers who cannot stop buying. On Friday the national average diesel price was $6.32 a gallon, up 71 percent in a year, according to AAA. Truckers, farmers and every business that ships anything by road pay that price, and it passes through to grocery shelves with a lag. The majors’ refining profit and the diesel price are the same transaction seen from opposite ends.

What they are doing with it

Exxon generated $25.7 billion in operating cash flow and $19.1 billion in free cash flow. It returned $9.4 billion to shareholders, $4.3 billion in dividends and $5.1 billion in buybacks, and announced $20 billion of repurchases for 2027, the same pace as the previous two years. Reuters reported that Exxon cut debt by $8 billion in the quarter. Chevron has cut net debt by nearly $14 billion since the end of 2025. Its chief financial officer, Eimear Bonner, noted that Brent swung from $68 to $132 a barrel during the quarter. “We think in decades, not quarters,” she said.

European companies also increased prospective distributions. Shell will raise buybacks to $5 billion over the next three months, up from $3 billion. TotalEnergies has floated an extra dividend if cash flow reaches $43 billion.

The American majors are returning cash and reducing debt at the same time. Exxon’s release says it reached 44 consecutive years of annual dividend-per-share increases and announced $20 billion of 2027 repurchases, matching the prior two-year pace. Chevron declared a $1.78 quarterly dividend while cutting total debt by $3.5 billion and net debt by $7.8 billion in the quarter. Those allocation choices do not reveal how long either company expects current diesel prices to last. Shareholders get cash and stronger balance sheets. Diesel buyers get no similar cushion.

OpenAI went looking for $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation. According to The Wall Street Journal, it has secured about $11 billion at $1.25 trillion after some large investors showed what the Journal called “tepid” interest. The company now aims to raise up to $20 billion. The Financial Times first reported the $10 billion cut on Friday, and CNBC confirmed the new target on Saturday, citing a person familiar with the deal who said the round is still open and the figures could change.

The details are what an investor would actually read. OpenAI set Friday as the commitment deadline, and some investors reduced their allocations, according to the FT, which said the first close would likely come in below $20 billion. The company told shareholders it expects to raise more in the coming weeks from family offices and high-net-worth individuals, the Journal reported. The FT said state-backed MGX of the United Arab Emirates is likely to be the largest backer, with SoftBank, Founders Fund, Coatue, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz also planning to invest.

What changed

The Journal tied the shortfall to a brutal week for technology stocks, after disappointing results from Alphabet, Amazon and Intel made investors more selective about financing the AI build-out. Earlier this week, this paper reported that Alphabet spent more than it brought in from operations and that Amazon’s spending outran its cash. A private round at $1.25 trillion is being priced against public companies whose shareholders are now asking when that spending pays back.

The valuation held at $1.25 trillion. Investors cut the size of their commitments instead of the headline price. That is the usual pattern late in a private-market cycle: protect the price everyone will quote, and adjust the amount and the investor base underneath it. Turning from large institutions to family offices and wealthy individuals does not prove weakness. But it is not where a company goes first when the large institutions are eager.

The public test

OpenAI plans to list as soon as early next year, the Journal reported. The FT reported that Anthropic, which made its IPO filing public on Monday, plans to go public next month at a valuation of at least $1.5 trillion. Two private companies are each valued above most of the S&P 500 while they spend heavily on data centers. Public markets will soon price both of them, and public investors will get audited numbers, not a pitch.

A smaller round does not tell us OpenAI’s business is faltering. It tells us the investors who were offered the most access chose to commit less.

Start with what is true. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal was broken on purpose. Starting in 2015, Law and Justice packed it, turned it into a political instrument, and spent eight years telling Brussels to mind its own business. European courts concluded that the body, as constituted, was no longer an independent and impartial tribunal. Nobody who followed those years should pretend that Bogdan Święczkowski’s court was a neutral institution that fell victim on Friday night.

Now look at what happened on Friday night. A judge whom the president has refused to swear in suspended the court’s president. The justice minister asked for the court’s two senior judges to lose their immunity so they could be prosecuted. Riot police took up positions at the entrance. The government had already stopped publishing the court’s rulings. Each step has an explanation. Taken together, they form a pattern that any future government can cite.

That is my objection. It is not that Tusk is wrong about the history. It is that a precedent does not keep track of who had the better case. The next time a Polish government decides that a court’s composition is illegitimate, which it will, it will not need to build an argument. It will point to October 30, 2026: suspend the president of the court, seek charges against his deputy, and post police at the door. The European Union, if it accepts this method without applying the standard it used on PiS, will weaken its own standing to object.

Tusk’s defenders will say there was no alternative. Nawrocki vetoes everything and refuses to swear in parliament’s judges. The constitution assumes that presidents and prime ministers will cooperate at least minimally, and when one refuses, the system jams. All of that is true. But a deadlock is a political problem, and it has a political solution: put the question to voters. Make the court the explicit, central issue of the next parliamentary election. Win a mandate large enough to amend the constitution, or lose and accept the consequences. That is slower and less satisfying, and it is the only route that leaves the court more legitimate than it was before.

Here is what Brussels should do: apply the standard it used on PiS. When PiS sidelined judges it considered illegitimate, the Commission called it an attack on judicial independence, because the government’s view of a judge’s legitimacy could not substitute for a court’s. That principle did not belong to one side, and it does not expire when a friendlier government takes office.

A court’s authority comes from people obeying it without being made to. Every officer posted at the tribunal this weekend is evidence that, for now, Poland’s court has lost that authority. Tusk may hold the building. He has not yet restored the court.

Executive Order 14434, signed September 29 and published in the Federal Register on October 2, is titled “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence.” It directs federal agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI,” and declares that the executive branch “will not acknowledge the usage of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in any applicable setting.” This month the Navy and the Marine Corps complied. The Marines’ data office is now the Chief Data and Super Intelligence Office.

Read Section 3. It defines “Super Intelligence” as the technologies covered by the term “artificial intelligence” in section 9401(3) of title 15 of the U.S. Code. That is the old statutory definition, unchanged. So the new term means precisely what the old one meant. Section 2(b) says existing regulations, contracts and grants need not change. The Marine Corps directive implementing the order also keeps the old wording in its own references, such as the published title of its order on Data and Artificial Intelligence. Under the order’s own rules, the administration has changed the label and left the thing it labels untouched.

Critics will call this vanity. It is worse than vanity, because it spends down a word we will need.

For decades, “superintelligence” has been the word for a hypothetical system that exceeds human ability across the board. It was a warning term. Scientists, philosophers and the labs themselves used it to describe the point at which oversight might stop working. It mattered because it described something that did not yet exist. Applied by decree to every chatbot, procurement tool and spreadsheet assistant that meets a 2020 statutory definition, it no longer warns anyone. If a system ever deserves the word, we will have to invent another one, and we will have to argue the case through a vocabulary the government has already cheapened.

The order defends the change on the grounds that today’s systems “far exceed” what was imagined when the term “Artificial Intelligence” came into use. That may be true. But if the capabilities are new, the honest response is a new definition, with new obligations attached: testing, disclosure, liability. This order supplies the impressive name and none of the obligations.

The timing is telling. In the same week that sailors were updating fleet advisories, OpenAI’s private investors committed about $11 billion of the $30 billion it sought, and technology stocks fell on doubts about the spending. The private market lowered its valuation. The government raised the rhetoric.

My advice to anyone writing a federal grant or a procurement memo: comply, because you must, but read the definition section first. It still says artificial intelligence, as it should.

On Friday night at Inglewood’s Intuit Dome, the first of Phoebe Bridgers’ three hometown shows on her Lost Tour, the price of admission included your phone. As you walked in, a venue employee locked it in a fabric pouch, putting your clock, camera and voice recorder out of reach until you left. The Los Angeles Times critic Mikael Wood headlined his review with the result: the arrangement “lets an arena hear her think.”

That is the right word. Bridgers’ new album, *Lost Weekend*, deals with her father’s death and with her relationship with the comedian Bo Burnham, and it cuts the grief with a dry, biting humor. The show opened, like the album, with “The Outside,” a song that puts the listener at her father’s funeral. These are not songs you can absorb through a six-inch screen held over a stranger’s head. They depend on timing, on a pause before a line, on a joke landing at the wrong moment. Phones turn that into content. Taking them away makes it a performance again.

The usual complaint about phone bans is that they are paternalistic: I paid, so I can film. True. But a concert is not something you own. It is a room full of people agreeing to look at the same thing, and the agreement fails if one person in ten is filming for later instead. The pouch is not nostalgia. It is a ticket condition, like a dress code, and it says that what is being sold is everyone’s undivided attention at the same moment.

Thousands of miles away, the Baku International Arts Festival is showing William Kentridge’s *Oh to Believe in Another World*, an hour-long collage animation with live-action choreography, screened with a live orchestra playing Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw called it “perhaps the most amazing animation I have ever seen.” Nobody needs a pouch for that one: the form itself means you can only experience it by being in the room while it happens. A recording would preserve the images and lose the event.

Both productions answer the same question, which is what an audience pays for now that every song and image can be streamed for nothing. The answer is presence, and artists are learning to design for it.

There is a risk worth naming. If being fully present becomes the premium product, it will be priced like one, and attention will become another luxury good for people who can afford the third hometown night. The phone-free show is a good idea. It should not become something only the rich can buy.

For now, here is a small test: next time you go to a show, leave your phone in your pocket for one song and see how much more of it you remember.