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Debates can get, well, ugly in Congress, but rarely do they descend to the level of physical taunts. Yet that is exactly what happened on Thursday during a meeting of the House Oversight Committee.

During a discussion about whether Attorney General Merrick B. Garland should be held in contempt of Congress, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, told Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat from Texas, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York whose own signature red lipstick has become something of an online lighting rod, then leaped to Ms. Crockett’s defense.

“How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person,” she said.

Further name-calling ensued, culminating in Ms. Crockett’s covertly returning the insult by asking the chair, James R. Comer, “If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blond, bad-built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?” (That description being a not-entirely-implicit reference to Ms. Greene.)

All in all, not a pretty moment.

As much as anything, however, the makeup vs. body image brouhaha reflects not just the way Capitol norms have changed over the last six years, but the way physical appearances have become weaponized against all genders since Donald J. Trump first took office, bringing with him his penchant for costumery, casting and playground insults.

Whether it’s calling Stormy Daniels “horseface,” saying Rosie O’Donnell had a “fat, ugly face,” anointing Marco Rubio “little,” comparing his former aide ​​Omarosa Manigault Newman to a “dog,” dismissing E. Jean Carroll as “not my type,” or criticizing Nikki Haley’s dress choice, the former president and current presidential candidate has made an art out of the playground insult. With these barbs, he attacks not policy positions but rather shared insecurities, rooted deep in old gender politics and stereotypes. It’s like a wormhole back to middle school, and everyone can relate.

Which also makes it particularly effective. After all, few forms of ridicule are as belittling as being reduced to a body part, or being called out for your beauty choices, especially in the context of a public career. It’s the essence of objectification.

This scrutiny is even more loaded when it comes to women, who have historically borne the burden of surface evaluation. Indeed, it’s hard (though not impossible) to imagine Ms. Greene’s fellow committee member Jim Jordan being jeered at for his receding hairline, or someone slagging on Chuck Schumer for his wrinkles.

The rare times appearance has been raised in the recent past, it most often has been used as a form of humor — by the person involved. Hillary Clinton, for example, joked about her own hair color when she was running for president. “I may not be the youngest candidate in the race, but I have one big advantage: I’ve been coloring my hair for years,” she said in 2015. “You’re not going to see me turning white in the White House.”

It’s a different story, however, when the jab comes from someone else. Not long ago, the comedian Michelle Wolf was castigated for a set at the 2018 White House Correspondent’s Dinner in which she mocked the eye shadow of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, saying, “She burns facts, then uses that ash to create the perfect smoky eye.”

At the time, her comments provoked criticism from both sides of the aisle. Mika Brzezinski, the co-host of “Morning Joe” and a woman Mr. Trump had once described as “bleeding badly from a face-lift,” said she could empathize. “Watching a wife and mother be humiliated on national television for her looks is deplorable,” she said.

Apparently, that truce no longer holds. Now it appears Mr. Trump’s supporters in Congress, such as Ms. Greene, are simply following his lead, in this way as in so many others. Their opponents, meanwhile, are lowering themselves to the occasion. In which case, who really wins?

In his winning run for the presidency in 2016, Donald J. Trump came tantalizingly close to taking Minnesota, falling just 1.5 percent points shy of Hillary Clinton in a state that seemingly loves to break Republican hearts.

On Friday, the former president will be back, speaking at a fund-raising dinner for the Minnesota Republican Party in St. Paul that is open only to paying guests and invited media. Whether the visit is a feint to draw Democratic dollars to the state or a true effort to expand the electoral map, only the Trump campaign knows.

But it is a moment to look at the stark divisions in a state where the urban and rural political and social gulf is particularly vast.

“Nobody lives this stronger than I do,” said Representative Angie Craig, a Democrat whose swing district, maybe the last in the state, runs from the southern edges of Minneapolis and St. Paul into rural areas southeast of the cities. “Look, I was on the ballot in 2016 when Trump first ran. He won my district, and I lost my race. We’re all going to have to work really, really hard this year.”

Minnesota has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Richard M. Nixon won the state in 1972. But Mr. Trump’s share of the vote actually rose from 2016, when he won 44.9 percent and Ms. Clinton took 46.4 percent, to 2020, when the former president won 45.3 percent and President Biden won 52.4 percent.

Republicans in the state insist 2024 is their year.

“Minnesotans are hard-working, blue-collar Midwesterners, and they are being crushed by the policies of this administration,” said Representative Pete Stauber, a Republican who in 2018 flipped a Democratic seat that covers a vast swath of Northeast Minnesota, including its iron range. “Those 10 electoral votes are going to go to President Donald Trump.”

Some Democrats are worried. Representative Dean Phillips, a Democrat who represents the affluent, educated suburbs west of Minneapolis that for years voted Republican, then switched to him, said he had been surprised by the number of constituents he has spoken to who are ready to vote for Mr. Trump. Mr. Phillips challenged Mr. Biden for the Democratic nomination and got nowhere. Now he wants to see the president re-elected.

“I don’t think Trump would be spending his precious time coming to that event, in the Twin Cities mind you, if his campaign didn’t have some good internal numbers,” Mr. Phillips said.

No Republican has won a statewide election since 2006, but the Democratic winning streak does not capture the complicated dynamics of a state where the urban core, Minneapolis-St. Paul and its suburbs, has grown sharply in population and noticeably leftward, while rural Minnesota has moved to the right.

The defeat of Representative Collin Peterson, the 15-term moderate Democrat and leader of the House Agriculture Committee, in 2020, and the retirement of Rick Nolan in 2018, who was replaced by Mr. Stauber, swept away the last remnants of Democratic centrism in the vast northern reaches of the state. The largely rural southern Minnesota district once represented by the state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, now has a conservative Republican entrenched as its congressman.

Meantime in Minneapolis, the Democratic Socialists of America and their allies secured a majority on the City Council last year. The suburbs, once dominated by moderate Republicans, have moved to the Democrats.

The Trump campaign believes it can capitalize on — or foment — a backlash to the leftward march of the Twin Cities and still-fresh memories of the unrest after the killing of George Floyd.

“Very sad what’s happened to your state,” Mr. Trump told a newscaster on the conservative website Alpha News on Thursday, attacking Minneapolis’s progressive Representative Ilhan Omar as a “hater,” promising “mass deportations” and vowing “to bring back the law enforcement the way it was” before Mr. Floyd’s murder. “Your state is out of control, and it’s this radical left philosophy that cannot be left to continue.”

Recent polling has Mr. Biden clinging to a narrow lead in Minnesota, inside some polls’ margins of error. His tenuous position has been exacerbated by the war in Gaza. A protest campaign for “uncommitted” in the Democratic presidential primary in March drew 19 percent.

“We have a real opportunity to expand the map here,” Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump campaign adviser, told The Associated Press ahead of Mr. Trump’s visit.

Even Democrats in the state have their worries.

“In the end, I don’t really think Minnesota will be in play, in part because when the contrast between a completely unhinged Donald Trump and Biden crystallizes toward the end of the campaign, disaffected and undecided voters here will turn out for President Biden,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic political consultant who lives in Minneapolis. “But it’s going to be too close for comfort.”

Mr. Phillips said, “I confess to have spoken to more people, and some remarkable people, who say they will vote for Trump. Many will, and many more than will admit it.”

That said, Minnesota has been to Republicans what North Carolina has been to Democrats. They can see how to win it. They have won it in the past. But they always seem to come up short. Barack Obama won North Carolina in 2008. Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota’s last Republican governor, barely won re-election in 2006.

Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia underwent an additional surgery, officials said on Friday, as questions continued to swirl about the assassination attempt that put him in the hospital.

The authorities have kept details to a minimum about the attack, about the assailant and about who is leading the country while the prime minister is hospitalized, even as shock over the shooting has begun to give way to trepidation over what comes next for the deeply polarized country.

On Friday afternoon, Slovakia’s deputy prime minister, Robert Kalinak, said that the government was carrying on, telling a news conference that “all our work and tasks are being done.” He also offered an update on Mr. Fico, who he said had undergone a nearly two-hour surgery but was conscious.

“I can see progress,” he told reporters outside the hospital where Mr. Fico is being treated, adding, “I am in a much better mood now.”

Mr. Fico remains in serious but stable condition, according to the hospital director, Miriam Lapunikova. She said it was not yet known whether the prime minister would require additional procedures.

The brief afternoon update — the first from officials in nearly 24 hours — was unlikely to put to rest the many lingering questions in the aftermath of the attack.

The authorities still have not named the suspect — whom Slovakia’s interior minister described as a “lone wolf” radicalized after last month’s presidential election — nor said when he will appear in court to face a charge of attempted premeditated murder. They have called the shooting politically motivated and urged the public and politicians to dial down political rhetoric and hatred as investigations play out.

Local news media reported on Friday that police officers had escorted the suspect to his home in the central Slovak town of Levice, where they searched the premises and seized documents. The police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Details of Mr. Fico’s injuries and condition also have been closely guarded. Local news outlets reported that doctors will meet on Monday to determine whether the prime minister can be moved to the capital, Bratislava, from the intensive care unit of the hospital in central Slovakia where he underwent surgery. Mr. Kalinak, though, said on Friday that it was too soon to start thinking about that.

“It’s a serious situation,” he told the news conference, expressing “full trust” in the medical team at the hospital, in Banska Bystrica.

He also appeared to dodge a question about who exactly is making high-level decisions for the government. There has been no formal announcement about who is in charge in Mr. Fico’s absence, although local news media have quoted ministers saying that Mr. Kalinak had been leading meetings.

“He is still the prime minister and is acting in the capacity he can,” Mr. Kalinak said of Mr. Fico, noting, however, that the capacity was limited. “I have never seen a stronger man.”

The authorities are mounting two investigations — one into the attacker, the other into the response of security forces at the scene — and urged against rushing to judgment.

Slovakian officials have acknowledged that there is criticism over the actions of officers. Local news outlets have published interviews with security experts analyzing the movements of the gunman and officers’ responses to try to understand how the attacker could have fired at least five times at close range before being subdued.

The inquiries are unfolding against a backdrop of deep political divisions in Slovakia. Mr. Fico has been pushing a strongly contested overhaul of the judiciary to limit the scope of corruption investigations, and he has moved to reshape the national broadcasting system to purge what the government calls liberal bias.

And senior officials in Mr. Fico’s governing Smer party have, in effect, accused liberal journalists and opposition politicians of motivating the assassination attempt through their intense criticism of government actions. Still, Mr. Pellegrini, an ally of Mr. Fico’s who was elected last month, has been among the loudest voices calling for calm.

Amid the dearth of information from the authorities, speculation over the attacker’s identity and motivations has been rife, prompting the Interior Ministry to repeatedly warn against spreading “unverified” details.

The ministry said late Thursday that “a large amount of misinformation” was circulating about the attack. On an existing ministry website dedicated to fighting hoaxes, it labeled a number of unconfirmed news reports — that the suspect was a member of a Slovak paramilitary group, that his wife was a Ukrainian refugee — as “not true” but did not offer up anything verifiable.

As officials warned that tensions risked spilling over, some in Slovakia were expressing concerns about whether Mr. Fico might yet die — but also what might happen should he recover.

“The polarization is very present in the society today and will get worse after this attack,” said Hana Klistincova, 34, a translator interviewed in Bratislava. “I personally am not afraid that the attack could repeat itself — it was the impulsive behavior of one individual — but I am afraid of the impact that this will have on society because of our coalition leaders, who started blaming the opposition and the media right after.”

Veronika Kladivikova, a 27-year-old seamstress from Banska Stiavnica, a small town in central Slovakia, said she was horrified by the attack.

“Even families are divided. I feel it in my own family,” she said, as she watched her child play in a sandbox at the park.

But she said that she was “not afraid right now,” adding, “I hope people will be sensible enough not to panic, or be even more against each other, divided.”

Sara Cincurova contributed reporting from Bratislava.

Two years into President Biden’s term, his aides began negotiating with Saudi leaders to have the kingdom establish diplomatic relations with Israel. But when the Israel-Hamas war began last October, the talks withered.

American and Saudi officials have tried to revive prospects for a deal by demanding more from Israel — a cease-fire in Gaza and irreversible steps toward the founding of a Palestinian nation. Now those officials say they are close to a final agreement on the main elements of what the Saudis want from the deal: a U.S.-Saudi mutual defense pact and cooperation on a civilian nuclear program in the kingdom.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto Saudi leader, about these matters in private on his visit last month to Riyadh, according to the State Department. And Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, is expected to follow up when he goes to Saudi Arabia and Israel this weekend.

But there are no signs that Israeli leaders are moving to join them, despite the symbolic importance for Israel of establishing ties with Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Arab nation.

That resistance, along with a potential full-scale assault by the Israeli military on the Palestinian city of Rafah, puts in jeopardy a potential three-way grand bargain that Mr. Biden envisions as the foundation to a long-term solution to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has rebuffed calls for the creation of a Palestinian state, saying that it would become a “terror haven.” Most Israelis also oppose it, according to polls. Mr. Netanyahu has not proposed a governance system for Gaza, and Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, criticized him on Wednesday for the lack of such a plan.

Since Mr. Blinken’s visit to Saudi Arabia, American and Saudi officials have begun challenging Mr. Netanyahu by publicly saying they are getting closer to agreement on a package that they will offer Israel. Mr. Netanyahu can either take the megadeal and move toward regional peace and potential security cooperation with Saudi Arabia that could counter Iran, their shared adversary — or reject it and perpetuate the cycle of Israeli-Palestinian violence and Israel’s isolation in the region, they say.

“We continue to work to finalize both the bilateral pieces of such an agreement as well as what the pathway to an independent Palestinian state would look like,” Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, said this month.

The “bilateral” part was a reference to the talks between the United States and Saudi Arabia on their agreement, which in addition to a defense treaty would involve cooperation on a civilian nuclear program with uranium enrichment in the kingdom, the sale of advanced American-made weapons and, potentially, a trade deal.

U.S. officials have emphasized that Israel must agree to a Palestinian state for any agreement to be finalized. Mr. Sullivan delivered that message on May 4 at a Financial Times conference in London.

“The integrated vision is a bilateral understanding between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia combined with normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, combined with meaningful steps on behalf of the Palestinian people,” he said, adding: “All of that has to come together.”

This month, some Saudi and American policy analysts who were briefed by Saudi officials have argued that a bilateral deal — a “plan B” — might be the best course because the Israeli-Palestinian part seemed too difficult to achieve.

Saudi officials have not made any such suggestion publicly and continue to insist on a larger deal with an Israeli commitment on a Palestinian nation. But they have noted how far the U.S.-Saudi talks have advanced.

“We are very, very close; most of the work has already been done,” Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, said at the World Economic Forum in Riyadh last month. On a pathway to a Palestinian state, he said, “We have the broad outlines of what we think needs to happen.”

He suggested that Israel could be persuaded, referring to “mechanisms within the toolbox of the international community that can overcome the resistance of any party, any spoiler, on any side.”

However, even the Saudis’ most immediate demand of Israel — a sustainable cease-fire in Gaza — seems out of reach for now. Israel has avoided committing to a permanent cease-fire, and efforts by Arab mediators to get Israel to agree to a temporary cease-fire for the release of some hostages faltered last week. At the same time, Israel has stepped up strikes in Rafah, where more than one million Palestinians have sought shelter.

Saudi Arabia, the United States and other nations have warned Israel not to carry out a major offensive there.

Given all that, Saudi officials remain wary of the domestic political cost of normalizing relations with Israel.

“At this stage, it looks like a long shot,” said Ali Shihabi, a Saudi analyst close to the government.

Some officials in the region say the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain got very little out of normalizing ties with Israel under the Abraham Accords that the Trump administration helped engineer in 2020. The Israeli government did not fulfill promises to respect Palestinian territory in the West Bank.

“We hear this from Saudis all the time: look what happened to the Emiratis, look what happened to the Bahrainis, when they went full on,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Before the war, U.S. and Saudi officials planned to ask the Israelis for modest concessions for the Palestinians, U.S. officials say. But the stakes are higher now. Mr. Biden sees a deal involving a Palestinian nation as a critical component of the war’s endgame. And Israeli acquiescence to such a state could be the only way for Prince Mohammed to get broad support for the deal from citizens enraged by the killings of an estimated 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza.

Mr. Biden’s willingness to grant a mutual defense treaty and other benefits to Prince Mohammed is a sharp departure from his vow during the 2020 presidential campaign to ensure the country remains a “pariah” because of human rights violations. Those include the killings of civilians during the Yemen war and the murder in 2018 of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and Virginia resident, by Saudi agents in Istanbul.

U.S. and Saudi officials are modeling the defense treaty on the pacts that the United States has with Japan and its other Asian allies. The two sides are trying to work out the conditions that would trigger a mutual defense clause.

Prince Mohammed wants a treaty that is ratified by a supermajority in the U.S. Senate. But administration officials say that would be hard without a robust Israeli-Palestinian component in the deal, since skepticism of Saudi Arabia is strong among many Democratic and some Republican lawmakers.

For Saudi Arabia, the biggest threat is Iran. Saudi officials remain bitter that the Trump administration did not intervene militarily when oil installations in the kingdom were attacked with drones and missiles in 2019 — an assault that Saudi and U.S. officials say was linked to Iran.

“The basic concept that they’ve been trying to establish is: What would trigger U.S. kinetic action in defense of Saudi Arabia?” said Hussein Ibish, a senior scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

“Saudi Arabia and others, including the Emirates, don’t know when the U.S. would act,” he added.

U.S. officials say they also plan to extract promises from Saudi Arabia to limit cooperation with China on military matters and on advanced technology, and that the kingdom would continue to buy oil in dollars rather than renminbi, China’s currency. But some American analysts say they are puzzled about why U.S. officials insist this is an important reason to make a deal with the Saudis. China has no interest in being a security guarantor in the Middle East. And analysts say there is little chance that Saudi Arabia would forsake the dollar — which its own currency is pegged to — for the renminbi.

The Biden administration also hopes Saudi Arabia will commit to keeping oil prices from surging, especially as the U.S. presidential election approaches. U.S. and Saudi officials clashed over such perceived promises in 2022, when the Saudis went against Mr. Biden’s wishes.

Locking in American cooperation on a civilian nuclear program is important for Prince Mohammed. U.S. and Saudi negotiators are working out details of how the United States would maintain strict oversight of in-country uranium enrichment, officials say.

Prince Mohammed says he will develop nuclear weapons if Iran does so, and some U.S. lawmakers and many Israeli officials oppose Saudi Arabia having a nuclear program of any kind.

Karen Young, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said the nuclear program was the “No. 1 priority” for Prince Mohammed.

For Saudi Arabia, she asserted, “it’s always been a bilateral deal; it’s not a trilateral one.”

“Israel is so peripheral,” she said, “which is beyond ironic.”

There has hardly ever been as fierce a defender of free speech as the current Supreme Court.

Since John Roberts became chief justice almost 19 years ago, the court has expanded the protective net of the First Amendment to cover such activities as selling videos depicting animal torture, spending unlimited amounts of money in support of political candidates and refusing to pay dues (or a dues-like fee) to a public employee union.

This last decision, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Council 31, overturned a 41-year-old precedent and led a dissenting justice, Elena Kagan, to accuse the majority of “weaponizing the First Amendment.” In the 303 Creative case last year, the court gave a Christian web designer the First Amendment right not to do business with would-be customers whose same-sex wedding websites would violate her views about marriage.

The court’s version of free speech has become a powerful tool against government regulation. Six years ago, effectively striking down a California law, the court gave so-called crisis pregnancy centers — offices that try to imitate abortion clinics but strive to persuade women to continue their pregnancies — a First Amendment right not to provide information on where a woman could actually get an abortion. The state said the notice was needed to help women who came to such centers under the false impression that they provided abortions. In his majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said the “unduly burdensome” requirement amounted to unconstitutionally compelled speech.

Now the question is whether the court’s solicitude toward those who would rather not talk about abortion extends in the other direction. What about state laws that prohibit rather than require offering information about where to get an abortion?

While there is not yet such a case on the Supreme Court’s docket, lower courts have been tightening a First Amendment noose around efforts by anti-abortion states to curb the flow of information about how to obtain legal abortion care across state lines. Federal District Courts in Indiana and Alabama both ruled this month that while states in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise can ban abortion, they cannot make it illegal to give abortion-related advice, including advice to minors seeking abortions without parental consent.

A federal magistrate judge issued a similar ruling last November on Idaho’s abortion law, one of the most extreme in the country, which makes it a crime to assist a minor in obtaining an abortion in any state without a parent’s consent. Idaho could criminalize abortion, the judge, Debora Grasham, wrote. “What the state cannot do,” she went on, “is craft a statute muzzling the speech and expressive activities of a particular viewpoint with which the state disagrees under the guise of parental rights.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard Idaho’s appeal on May 7.

With the Supreme Court extremely unlikely to revisit its decision 23 months ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that eradicated the constitutional right to abortion, the question of how far states can go to prevent their citizens from finding alternative ways to terminate a pregnancy will become increasingly urgent. In his concurring opinion in the Dobbs case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised the question of whether a state could now “bar a resident of that state from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion.” The answer was “no,” he continued, “based on the constitutional right to interstate travel.” It is worth noting that Justice Kavanaugh wrote only for himself; none of the other conservatives who made up the Dobbs majority joined him. “Other abortion-related legal questions may emerge in the future,” Justice Kavanaugh offered noncommittally.

The future arrived quickly enough in the form of the two abortion-related cases awaiting decision before the court’s current term, which concludes at the end of June or in early July. Both are anomalous in that they involve questions of federal rather than state authority.

One, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, concerns the government’s approval of the expanded use of the medication that first received F.D.A. approval 24 years ago. Medication abortion now accounts for more than half of abortions in the United States. The case contains an off-ramp for the court that, based on the argument in March, the justices appear likely to take: Because the anti-abortion doctors, dentists and medical groups who challenged the F.D.A. suffered no harm from the availability of the medication, and are unlikely to suffer harm in the future, they never had standing to bring the case in the first place.

The other, Moyle v. United States, results from a clash between the federal government and Idaho over whether federal law requires the state to provide emergency abortion care in its hospitals. The outcome largely depends on whether the court accepts the Biden administration’s view that there is no abortion exception to the law at issue, which prohibits hospitals from turning away people who need emergency care.

In the abortion cases in Indiana, Idaho and Alabama that may yet find their way to the Supreme Court, the justices would face the acute dilemma of reconciling their fealty to the First Amendment with the profound anti-abortion sentiment the Dobbs majority opinion displayed.

In defending their laws, the states argue that what they are prohibiting is not actually speech but conduct, namely inducing criminal activity. Rejecting this argument in the Indiana case, Judge Sarah Evans Barker of Federal District Court wrote that the Planned Parenthood affiliate that challenged the law simply “seeks to provide truthful information to clients regarding out-of-state options and medical referrals to out-of-state providers for abortion services that are legal in those states.” A prohibition on providing such information, the judge said, “does not further any interest Indiana may have in investigating criminal conduct within its borders.” In the Alabama case, another Federal District Court judge, Myron Thompson, observed that “unable to proscribe out-of-state abortions, the attorney general interprets state law as punishing the speech necessary to obtain them.”

From the cases they are in the process of deciding this term, the justices are well aware that their effort to wash their hands of the nettlesome business of abortion has failed. One or more of the First Amendment cases is likely to reach the court during its next term. I wonder if the justices have a clue about how much pain lies ahead when they have to decide whether the right to speak inevitably encompasses the right to choose.

Linda Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.

Chinese officials signaled their growing alarm over the country’s worsening real estate market on Friday, unveiling a plan to step in to buy up some of the vast housing stock and announcing even looser rules for mortgages.

The flurry of activity came just hours after new economic data revealed that Chinese authorities are staring at a hard truth: No one wants to buy houses right now.

Policymakers have tried dozens of measures to entice home buyers and reverse a steep decline in the housing market that has shown few signs of recovering soon.

On Friday China’s vice premier, He Lifeng, indicated a shift in the government’s approach to dealing with a housing crisis that has prompted households to cut spending. Mr. He told policymakers that local governments could begin to buy homes to start dealing with the huge numbers of empty apartments.

The government-purchased homes would then be used by authorities to provide affordable housing. Mr. He did not provide any details on when such a program would begin or how it would be funded.

The approach is similar to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, that the United States government established in 2008 to buy troubled assets after the collapse of the American housing market, said Larry Hu, chief China economist for Macquarie Group, an Australian financial firm.

“The policymakers realize that the demand side stimulus is not enough,” said Mr. Hu. “So they have to step in as a buyer of last resort.”

Even so, China’s central bank on Friday took steps to encourage home purchases by effectively lowering mortgage interest rates and slashing requirements on down payments.

“Policymakers are desperate to boost sales,” said Rosealea Yao, a real estate expert at Gavekal, a China focused research firm.

The government’s official data shows that Beijing has a long way to go to increase confidence in the real estate market. The amount of unsold homes is at a record high, and prices are declining at a record pace.

The inventory of unsold homes was equivalent to 748 million square meters, or more than 8 billion square feet, as of March, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. In April, new home prices in 70 cities fell by 0.58 percent, and the value of existing homes fell by 0.94 percent. The price drops were even more stark in yearly terms: New home prices fell 3.51 percent compared with a year ago, while existing home prices fell 6.79 percent, both record breaking declines.

China’s housing crisis has been fueled by years of heavy borrowing by developers and overbuilding that underpinned much of the country’s remarkable decades-long economic growth.

But when the government finally intervened in 2020 to put an end to risky practices by developers, many companies were already on the precipice of collapse. One of its biggest developers, China Evergrande, defaulted in late 2021 under huge piles of debt. It left behind hundreds of thousands of unfinished apartments and bills worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Evergrande was the first in a string of high-profile defaults that now punctuate the industry. A Hong Kong court ordered the company to be liquidated in January. Another beleaguered real estate giant, Country Garden, had its first hearing on Friday in a Hong Kong court in a case brought by an investor seeking the company’s liquidation.

Siyi Zhao contributed research.

Russian-backed authorities in the occupied Crimean city of Sevastopol said on Friday that an overnight attack by Ukraine’s military had hit an electricity substation, leading to rolling blackouts throughout the city that is home to part of the Russian naval fleet.

Schools have been closed across Sevastopol, a city of about a half million people on the Black Sea, Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Russian-backed governor of the city, said on Telegram. At least 51 drones were intercepted overnight in Crimea, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said. Ukraine’s military did not immediately comment on the attacks.

Reports on social media showed fires and explosions, including at a fuel depot in the city of Novorossiysk. Internet connectivity in Sevastopol dropped to about 16 percent, according to NetBlocks, an internet monitoring group.

Ukraine’s military has made some of its most significant progress with its operations in the Black Sea. After Russia withdrew from an agreement allowing Ukraine to resume some export shipments through the sea, Ukraine’s military began a campaign to drive out the Russian Navy. It destroyed many of Russia’s warships and attacked its headquarters.

The operation allowed Ukraine to establish a new shipping corridor, and seaborne grain and oilseed exports are nearing prewar levels, according to according to data shared with The New York Times.

This a developing story.