ACTING OUT: Now it’s the actors going on strike, following the Hollywood writers and bringing Hollywood to a showstopper.

  About 160,000 television and movie actors went out on strike midnight, shutting down Hollywood production for the first time in 63 years. Big name actors, including the Barbie movie’s Margo Robbie, left their promotional tours.

  “I am shocked at the way people we have been in business with are treating us,” said Fran Drescher, president of the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union. “How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right, when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting.”

  Drescher, who made her fame in the 1990s sitcom The Nanny, said, “When employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors who make the machine run, we have a problem.”

  The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said in a statement that it was “deeply disappointed” that the union had decided to walk away from the talks. Disney boss Bob Iger said, “There is a level of expectation they have that is just not realistic.

  The actors are fighting to continue making a living wage … when they’re working … in the changing world of streaming entertainment. It used to be that a good part in a television show could pay residuals for years after, and the actors want that same deal for streaming services.

 The actors, like the writers, are also concerned that their work could be replaced or replicated with artificial intelligence bots.

Defensive Measures: Senate Democrats are faced with the possibility of having to shoot down the defense appropriations bill because House Republicans loaded it up with social issues, including limits on abortions for service members, gender transition procedures, and diversity training.

  The defense bill is one of the few things that brings general agreement between the parties, but not this time. Included in the $886 billion bill are a 5.2 percent pay raise for the military, programs to counter China and Russia, and establishment of a special inspector general to oversee US aid to Ukraine.

  Bu the Republicans attached measures to eliminate the Pentagon policy of providing time off and travel expenses for service members who need to travel out of state to get an abortion. They are also seeking to stop the military from offering health coverage for gender transition surgeries and related hormone therapies.

ORANGE ALERT: Responding to Donald Trump’s request for delay of his trial on charges of mishandling secret documents because of the coming election season, federal prosecutors said in a court filing that “There is no basis in law or fact for proceeding in such an indeterminate and open-ended fashion and the defendants provide none.”

  In other matters, Federal prosecutors have questioned Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and former aide Hope Hicks about whether the former president admitted back in 2020 that he lost the presidential election in an effort to find whether Trump attempted to overturn the results based on a lie.

  What they want to be able to prove is whether Trump acted with corrupt intent, something that would give foundation to potential charges of election interference.

  The NY Times reports according to a source that Kushner testified that it was his impression that Trump really believed the election was stolen. But others have said Trump admitted the loss. Alyssa Farah Griffin, the White House communications director following the 2020 and now a television political analyst, told prosecutors that Trump had said to her,” Can you believe I lost to Joe Biden?”

LIKE A HEAT WAVE: Temperatures in Death Valley, California could hit 130 degrees this weekend as a dangerous heat wave lingers over the Southwest. Phoenix has had a string of 110-degree days and Las Vegas is expected to be 117 by Sunday. 

THE SPIN RACK: The Food and Drug Administration has approved a birth control pill that can be sold without a prescription for the first time in the United States. The pill call Opill is expected to be available next year, and it could be life changing for reproductive-age women who, for whatever reason, don’t go to a doctor for prescription birth control. — Aspartame, a common artificial sweetener used in diet drinks, has been labelled as cancer-causing by the World Health Organization. It’s not the first time aspartame has been under question, but it’s used in everything from Diet Coke and toothpaste to low-calorie yogurts and cough drops. — Kyle Fitzsimons, a butcher from Maine who assaulted five police officers during the January 6^th insurrection, was sentenced yesterday to more than seven years in prison. — The Secret Service ended its investigation into a small amount of cocaine found in a public area of the White House with no result.

BELOW THE FOLD: Ukraine is fighting for its life, China hacked US government emails, global warming is altering the planet, but in Great Britain this week the focus of the news has been a good old-fashioned sex scandal. 

  The Sun, a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, reported last Friday that an unnamed staff member of the British Broadcasting Corporation had paid a teenager the British equivalent of roughly $45,000 for explicit photos over a period of years that began when the subject was just 17. The reports do not say whether the “young person” was male or female, but it’s a crime in Britain to take, share, or possess indecent images of anyone under 18.

  The Sun did not name the BBC staffer, but word quickly spread that it was news anchor Huw Edwards, one of the primary voices of stability for the staid and traditional news organization. This would be like Walter Cronkite getting into a sex scandal.

  Edwards’s wife now says that he’s in the hospital with a nervous breakdown. It’s unlikely that Edwards will ever return to the airwaves and his wife said he’ll be receiving inpatient care “for the foreseeable future.”

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