Weekly News Roundup - 9/13/24
Loomer lurks // Mortgage rates are down // Pope says 24 election is choice of "lesser evil"
Welcome to the 36th Weekly News Roundup of 2024. The archive for all weekly news roundups is here.
In 2024, the Border Stalkers Substack is featuring one news update a week, and one book a month, with weekly posts on each book. The book of the month schedule is here.
These weekly dispatches are designed for people who may not have time to do more than glance at the headlines, or who want to stay informed without becoming obsessed by politics and news. These roundups are a targeted way to get a sense of the shape of the past week on the national level. Without such a map, we can be disoriented, not knowing where we have been over the past several days, or where we may be going.
But by spending concentrated, limited time thinking about the big picture, we can devote more of our time to where “agency and justice begin and end,” as Karen Swallow Prior put it: “on the ground, bodily, in community and real relationships, in flesh and blood.”
Quotes of the Week
"If we define ourselves by who and what we love, and I think we should, then it’s valuable to love as many things as we can, to accumulate enthusiasms and lean into them, to hold onto passions when we discover them and not let them fall away. This way, our identities become rich, multidimensional, expansive. Sometimes it feels like there’s more to dislike than to like, more to disdain than to embrace. My longing for tennis feels like an opportunity, a reason to open my arms wider, to take more of the world in. I’m going to seize it." - Melissa Kirsch
"In 1965, there were almost 60,000 priests and 178,740 religious sisters in the United States. In 2023 there were 34,092 priests and 35,680 sisters. Even many of these are elderly." - Thomas Reese
"We live in a time when religious experience has grown cold and dead, and political affiliation feels alive and invigorating. Plus, it’s easy." - Russell Moore
Big Stories this Week
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump meet for the first time in person, on a debate stage in Philadelphia at the National Constitution Center. Harris is widely viewed as the night's winner, even by many Republicans and Trump advisers. The question is how much it will matter, and that's hard to tell. But it is, at the least for Democrats, not a setback and almost certainly a boost in what is a very close race, especially in polling averages of the key battleground states.
Mortgage rates fell to their lowest point in a year and a half, coming to 6.2%
A manhunt in Kentucky continued for a highway shooter who wounded five people last weekend by shooting them in their cars while they were driving.
Pope Francis finished his trip to Asia, and criticized both American presidential candidates in strong terms on his trip back to Rome.
Los Angeles endured three major wildfires followed by an earthquake.
Week in Review
Saturday, Sept. 7
Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez flees to Spain to avoid arrest by the government of Nicolas Maduro, who claimed to have won a recent election over Gonzalez despite evidence to the contrary. Maduro had threatened to arrest Gonzalez and law enforcement under his control were reportedly seeking to arrest other politicians opposed to Maduro.
Five people driving on a highway in southeastern Kentucky are shot by what authorities believe is a single shooter firing randomly at vehicles on the interstate. Nine vehicles are struck, and one person is shot in the face.
Sunday, Sept. 8
The NFL season kicks off in earnest, with the first full slate of games, and Kendrick Lamar is named as the 2025 Super Bowl halftime entertainer. "Sports are swallowing American culture and the media business," Ben Smith writes for Semafor. "Part of this is a supply-side phenomenon — money pouring in from gaming, from rich guys in the US and the Gulf, and from content-hungry streamers who have supercharged everything from women’s soccer to pickleball. But some of it is also this cultural moment. Skipper’s dual diagnosis: 'Everyone along a continuum of traditional media to disruptive media is finding that sports is the best and most valuable content,' and 'it is a safe subject in a world where you’re not going to say, "Do you hate or love Trump?"'"
Joseph A. Couch, 32, is named as a suspect in the Kentucky highway shooting after his SUV is found near the scene of the crime.
Monday, Sept. 9
Pope Francis receives a warm welcome in East Timor, a small southeast Asian island nation of 1.3 million people in which 98% of the population is Catholic, "making it the most Catholic country in the world outside the Vatican," according to the AP. The country was far less Catholic just 25 years ago, when only 20% of the population belonged to the church. But after an occupation by Indonesia and an ensuing war that claimed the lives of 200,000, the nation's religious demography has changed. Francis alludes to an abuse scandal involving some of the country's war heroes, but does not linger on it.
The New York Times publishes an explosive investigation into Tim Ballard, a man so famous for crusading against child sex trafficking that his story was made into a movie called "Sound of Freedom," which became a smash hit that grossed $250 million. The Times says that 10 women who worked for Ballard say he used his so-called method of posing as couples on sex tourism trips to engage in "sexual harassment, coerced sexual contact and sexual assault," and that little actual work to help victims of sex trafficking was done.
Actor James Earl Jones, a legend of the screen best known for his booming voice, dies at age 93. The New York Times eulogizes him as "a stuttering farm child who became a voice of rolling thunder as one of America’s most versatile actors in a stage, film and television career that plumbed race relations, Shakespeare’s rhapsodic tragedies and the faceless menace of Darth Vader ... He was abandoned as a child by his parents, raised by a racist grandmother and mute for years in his stutterer’s shame, but he learned to speak again with a herculean will."
A manhunt continues in Kentucky for Joseph Couch, who is formally charged by authorities with carrying out the interstate shootings on Saturday.
Tuesday, Sept. 10
Over 140 Ukrainian drones strike inside Russia, killing at least one woman near Moscow and injuring eight others.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump hold their first debate. Some Trump backers complain about the ABC moderators, but most also acknowledge that Trump does as much to lose the debate as Harris does to win it, going off on tangents about immigrants eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio. This is a story based on an internet rumor that reporters trace to a Facebook post by a 35-year old Springfield hardware store worker named Erika Lee. Lee's post was a story passed on to her by a friend, named Kimberly Newton, about Newton's friend (a third person), who said that their friend (Newton's friend's friend -- we are now on to person #4) told them this story. So, yes, that's at least a fourth-hand uncorroborated story that Newton said she had no proof for, which then became a talking point for a presidential candidate. PBS Newshour did a good segment on the challenges Springfield is dealing with due to a large influx of Haitian immigrants that are stretching the city's resources.
Taylor Swift endorses Harris.
Harris and her campaign say she is ready to do a second debate.
Three major wildfires grow larger and more out of control north and south of Los Angeles.
Singer Jon Bon Jovi talks a women contemplating suicide off the ledge of a bridge in Nashville.
Wednesday, September 11
Americans observe the 23 anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
At Ground Zero in New York, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump stand a few feet apart during a ceremony commemorating the victims of the 9/11 attacks and the firefighters who died trying to save them. Trump is also accompanied by activist Laura Loomer, who also traveled with Trump to the debate the day earlier. Loomer posted last year on social media that 9/11 was an "inside job." She has a long history of conspiracy-mongering and racially based political attacks. Trump allies blame Loomer for encouraging Trump to question Harris' racial identity. Loomer wrote earlier in the week that if Harris wins the presidency "the White House will smell like curry." Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, blasts Loomer in the evening for this "appalling and extremely racist" message.
Hurricane Francine makes landfall in Louisiana as a Category 2 hurricane, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of people and bringing flooding.
19 women and children are killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza.
Thursday, Sept. 12
A 4.7 Richter-scale earthquake rattles Los Angeles as firefighters battle three major fires in the area that have displaced thousands.
Trump says he won't debate Harris again.
U.S. mortgage rates fall to 6.2%, the lowest since February of 2023. A year ago the rate was 7.18%
The death toll from a typhoon in Vietnam climbs to 199 with over 100 people still missing.
Friday, Sept. 13
Pope Francis, speaking to reporters in flight on his way back to Rome from his trip to Asia, is asked to provide guidance to American Catholics about the presidential election. He criticizes both Harris and Trump in very strong terms. "Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies,″ the Pope says. "One should vote, and choose the lesser evil."
33,000 Boeing employees near Seattle walk off the job in a labor dispute.
The manhunt for the Kentucky highway shooter continues into its seventh day, with police officers pressing deeper into Daniel Boone National Forest.
Boar's Head says it will close a plant in Jarrat, Va., a town near the I-95 corridor close to the North Carolina state line, that it has found was the cause of a listeria outbreak that killed nine people and hospitalized another 50. "Government inspectors found 69 instances of 'noncompliance' at the facility over the last year, including instances of mold, insects, liquid dripping from ceilings and meat and fat residue on walls, floors and equipment," the AP reports.
Interesting Reads
To the World, He Is an Anti-Trafficking Hero. Women Tell a Different Story, by Mike Baker for The New York Times
Four Days With Phish, America's Greatest Jam Band for 40 Years and Counting, by Grayson Haver Currin for GQ Magazine
Triple Hearsay: Original Sources of the Claim that Haitians Eat Pets in Ohio Admit No First-Hand Knowledge, by Sam Howard and Jack Brewster for NewsGuard
This was Trump's election to lose. And he just might, by Nate Silver for Silver Bulletin
‘No Politics Allowed’: These Americans Are Avoiding the Conversation at All Costs, by Clare Ansberry and Kris Maher for The Wall Street Journal
Max Boot Called Trump a Foreign Asset. Now His Wife Is Indicted for Just That, by Michael Schaffer for Politico Magazine
Criminal Charge Against Outspoken Short Seller Unsettles Wall Street, by Matthew Goldstein for The New York Times
The Canary, by Michael Lewis for The Washington Post
Will Your Presidential Vote Send You to Hell? by Russell Moore for Christianity Today
Has the Tide Turned for TikTok, Telegram and X? by Alexander B. Howard for The New York Times
Underage, Under Fire As war rages in Gaza, Israel’s crackdown on West Bank insurgency is killing Palestinian youths, by Adam Geller and Jalal Bwaitel
Ballot measures in 41 states give voters a say on abortion and other tough questions, by David A. Lieb for The Associated Press