Portal:Current events/2013 October 8
October 8, 2013 (Tuesday)
Arts and culture
- Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi announces that the Third Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops will be held from October 5 to 19 in 2014, during which the bishops will reflect on the theme of “The pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelization.” (Catholic World News), (Catholic News Agency)
Business and economy
- Reuters reports that major money market fund managers are avoiding U.S. Treasury debt due to mature in the next few months, as the debt ceiling nears and Governmental deadlock deepens. (Reuters)
Disasters and accidents
- Heavy flooding in the Philippines city of Zamboanga leads to thousands of families being displaced and schools and most government offices being closed. (ABS-CBN)
- At least four people are killed and hundreds of thousands of people evacuated as Typhoon Fitow hit eastern China yesterday. (Reuters)
International relations
- North Korea claims to put its army on alert and warns the United States of a "horrible disaster". (Reuters)
Law and crime
- A Denver couple, Wayne Sperling, 66, (jailed) and Lorinda Bailey, 35, (free) are accused of felony child abuse in one of the most egregious cases of suspected abuse in state history. Four boys, ages 2 to 6, were living in a house filled with cat feces and urine, with flies everywhere. They were nonverbal, malnourished, filthy, and uneducated, communicating to caseworkers and police in grunts. The couple were accused of misdemeanor abuse of 3 other children in 2006. (MSN)
- Four people living at the same address in Savannah, Tennessee (3 men and 1 woman), believed to be involved in an area child pornography investigation and who had earlier fled a September 2013 FBI investigation (where computers and cameras were seized) are found dead of gunshot wounds (they may have been drugged) in a murder-suicide on a road in Double Springs, Winston County, Alabama. (MSN)
- Proposals for a Royal Charter on self-regulation of the British press put forward by the press industry itself are rejected by the Privy Council. (BBC)
Politics and elections
- Voters in Canada's Nova Scotia Province go to the polls to select members to the province's Legislative Assembly.[citation needed]
- The Federal Reserve circulates a new design for the United States one-hundred-dollar bill. (NPR)
Science
- Theoretical physicists, Briton Peter Higgs and Belgian François Englert, win the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the origin of the mass of subatomic particles. (The Guardian) (CNN)