Democrats in Washington are working against a rapidly approaching deadline to end a standoff with Republicans that could force a partial government shutdown and a panic over the nation's credit rating.

"We're calm and everybody's good and our work's almost done," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said as she returned from a meeting with the president at the White House. "We're in good shape."

Months of bipartisan negotiations over policing reform legislation have ended with no agreement, according to the lawmakers who led the process.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat, told reporters that he had a conversation on Wednesday with Republican negotiator Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, indicating that the talks were over.

An outside ethics group filed ethics complaints Wednesday against seven U.S. House lawmakers — four Democrats and three Republicans — over failing to report stock trades.

One of the members of Congress — Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York — failed to file required reports on approximately 300 transactions, according to the complaint from the Campaign Legal Center.

Five of the seven lawmakers sit on the powerful House Financial Services Committee.

TAICANG, China — The one-bedroom apartment was to be Penelope Wu's retirement home, an escape from the bustle of Shanghai — or, at least, that's how Evergrande, the Chinese property developer, painted it. To jump in line ahead of hundreds of other prospective homebuyers, Wu paid the sticker price of about $200,000 in full last year, before construction had even broken ground.

Federal Reserve policymakers now think inflation will run hotter than previously expected this year, but the central bank still believes price hikes will moderate in 2022 as pandemic pressures fade.

Former President Donald Trump has sued The New York Times and several of its reporters, along with one of its key sources — his niece — for obtaining tens of thousands of pages of his tax documents for an investigation into his finances that won a Pulitzer Prize.

The articles, published in October 2018, concluded that Trump "participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud."

LOS ANGELES — Britney Spears said in a court filing Wednesday that she agrees with her father that the conservatorship that has controlled her life and money since 2008 should be terminated.

The filing in Los Angeles Superior Court from Spears' attorney Mathew Rosengart says she "fully consents" to "expeditiously" ending the conservatorship, which her father James Spears, who has controlled it for most of its 13 years, asked for in a Sept. 7 petition.

It's been nearly 20 years since B.J. Novak first took the stage as a stand-up comic. He still remembers the date: Oct. 10, 2001, less than a month after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

It was a tough time to be telling jokes and Novak was inexperienced. His set bombed.

It took him three months to get back on stage after that show. But when he did, he booked five shows in a single week, vowing to himself that he wouldn't let a single show be a referendum on whether or not he should continue.

According to the National Weather Service, at 3:20 p.m. EDT today, the Autumnal Equinox (the moment when the length of daylight and darkness are almost perfectly equal) occurs.

From Matilda to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl's delightfully offbeat children's books have been turned into movie, TV and theater gold over the decades. On Wednesday, Netflix announced it has acquired The Roald Dahl Story Co. (RDSC), which manages all things related to the British novelist's catalogue.

Let's get this out of the way: It's uneven.

There.

Any anthology series has episodes that work better than others. Star Wars: Visions is an anthology series; some of its episodes work better than others.

Which episodes work better for you will depend entirely on what you come to the Star Wars franchise for.