The Supreme Court declined to block Texas from executing Robert Roberson, a man who insists his conviction for murdering his 2-year-old daughter was not a "shaken baby syndrome." However, a Texas state court ruling, which was handed down moments before, paused the scheduled execution that was set to take place. 

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday night that he believes God saved him from death when an assassin tried to shoot him on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. The president spoke at the 79th Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City, a charity dinner where presidential candidates poke fun at one another. Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris skipped the event, making her the first presidential nominee to skip the dinner in decades. As Trump spoke, he referenced the July 13 attempt on his life, when a would-be assassin shot him in the ear, narrowly missing his head, and killing a father seated behind Trump named Corey Comperatore. “Is that luck, or was that God that did that?” he asked the assembled guests. “And I think it was God that did that, I do.” “I have a very fresh appreciation for how blessed we are by God’s providence and his divine mercy,” he continued. “I was not supposed to be here tonight, that I can tell you. So with God’s help I know there is nothing that cannot be achieved, we can achieve so much good with this country.” (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images) Since the assassination attempt — which was followed by another assassination attempt in Florida as Trump was playing golf — the GOP nominee has repeatedly posted on social media about revered Catholic figures including Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, Saint Michael the Archangel, and most recently, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a Catholic priest who was murdered by communists in Poland for encouraging resistance to communism. Trump celebrated Popieluszko’s martyrdom on Saturday, praising him as a “truly great Catholic priest” and a “source of tremendous spiritual strength for the Polish Solidarity Movement and, indeed, the entire nation of Poland, in the 1980s.” “Yesterday, in Chicago, I was honored to sign a Commemoration about this solemn anniversary and present it to Father Jerzy’s nephew, Marek Popiełuszko, as well as receive from him a book of Father Jerzy’s sermons and other beautiful mementos to remember the life of this extraordinary man of heroic virtue,” he said in a post on Truth Social. On Thursday evening, Trump also spoke with EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo, who asked the former president whether he is “telling voters something about [his] spiritual journey.” “No, I don’t think so, it’s just beautiful to me,” Trump responded. “I look at the whole thing, the words, and the pictures, the pictures are so beautiful. Yeah, I put up some stuff, somebody else asked me that same question, it’s really that I think it’s really beautiful.” .@RaymondArroyo questions Trump about his recent religious social media posts featuring prayers to St. Michael the Archangel, and the “Ave Maria” sung in honor of Corey Comperatore at the Butler rally. “It’s just beautiful to me,” Trump responds. pic.twitter.com/bNx8P0Kxaz — Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) October 18, 2024 Polling released Wednesday, conducted by the National Catholic Reporter, found that Trump is leading Harris among Catholic voters in the crucial swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Fifty percent of respondents said that they would “probably” or “definitely” vote for Trump, asked who they would vote for if the election took place that day, and 45% said they would “probably” or “definitely” vote for Harris. The polling found Harris with an advantage over Trump when it comes to Hispanic and Black Catholics. Trump has a lead of 16 percentage points over Harris among white Catholic voters.

Former President Donald Trump is open to religious exemptions to his proposed in vitro fertilization (IVF) mandate that would require insurance companies to cover the costs of IVF treatments. “It sounds, to me, like a pretty good idea, frankly,” Trump told EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo, as they spoke on Thursday evening at the 79th Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City. Arroyo had pointed out to Trump that many Catholics and Christians object to the fertility treatments on moral grounds. The Catholic Church is opposed to IVF and says that it is “morally unacceptable,” teaching that “the gift of human life must be actualized in marriage through the specific and exclusive acts of husband and wife, in accordance with the laws inscribed in their persons and in their union.” “As you know,” Arroyo pointed out, “some Catholics feel, and the Church believes, that when you implement this technology, you’re killing embryos. Will you have a religious exemption to your IVF mandate for religious organizations and businesses that feel, ‘This violates my religious principles?'” “I haven’t been asked that, but it sounds like a pretty good idea, frankly,” Trump responded, adding: “Even Catholics, a lot of them, they want IVF. It’s fertilization, basically, they view that as helping the family, helping parents have a child, and it’s a very popular thing, but certainly if there is a religious problem, I think people should go with that. I really think they should be able to do that. But we’ll look into that.” Donald Trump says he’s open religious exemptions to his proposed IVF mandate: “It sounds, to me, like a pretty good idea, frankly…certainly if there’s a religious problem I think people should go with that..we’ll look at that.” pic.twitter.com/PrxEtTEeOp — Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) October 18, 2024 Trump described himself as the “father of IVF” during a Fox News town hall with women this week, calling the Republican Party “the party for I.V.F.” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told the New York Times that the “father” remark was “a joke President Trump made in jest when he was enthusiastically answering a question about I.V.F.” The Trump campaign has approached the controversial IVF issue from the stance that the Republican party supports women, supports fertility, and supports more babies. “We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump told NBC News in August, adding: “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.” At a rally in Michigan in August, Trump promised that under a future Trump administration, “your government will pay for or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment.” The former president added: “We want more babies!”

Contributions to Harvard University’s endowment dropped by $151 million – 14% – in fiscal year 2024 following ongoing anti-Israel protests that have turned off several billionaire donors. The Harvard Crimson reported that total contributions to the endowment fund actually dropped by $193 million – the greatest year-over-year drop in the past decade, but a $42 million increase in current-use gifts propped up the final net total decrease. The massive loss to fundraising comes after several billionaires said they would stop donating to the Ivy League university because of how it handled anti-Semitism on campus. Hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin, who graduated from Harvard in 1989, announced in January that he would pause donations. A year earlier, he donated $300 million to the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Griffin blamed the school’s handling of anti-Semitism for his pause on donations. “I’d like that to change and I have made that clear to members of the corporate board,” he said at a conference, according to the Crimson. “But until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role as educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues, I’m not interested in supporting the institution.” He also called Harvard students “whiny snowflakes” obsessed with “microaggressions” and “DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion].” “Will America’s elite university get back to their roots of educating American children – young adults – to be the future leaders of our country or are they going to maintain being lost in the wilderness of microaggressions, a DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame, and just being loss in the wilderness?” he asked. The Crimson also reported that university leaders were privately worried about longtime donors pulling back after the university’s response to anti-Israel protests on campus. Even with the backlash, the university hasn’t appeared to take any steps to stop the anti-Semitism. Just this week, The Daily Wire reported that Harvard allowed students 10 minutes to protest an anti-Hamas speaker invited to the campus. The Harvard student hosting the speaker was also forced to read a statement informing the audience about the protest. MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ COMING TO DAILYWIRE+ OCT. 28 Harvard is not the only Ivy League facing funding issues. Columbia University’s annual “Giving Day” donations dropped nearly 30% after the school allowed anti-Israel protests to linger on campus, The Daily Wire reported previously. For the first time, the university suffered a massive drop in donations, after pausing the event in 2023 after the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, the Columbia Spectator reported. Since resuming the event, the school has had a nearly 30% drop in donations. In 2022, Columbia raised $30 million on Giving Day, compared to $21.4 million raised in 2024 – a 28.8% drop. This was the lowest amount raised since 2018. The number of donations also declined 27.9% this year after rising steadily for the first 10 years of the event, the Columbia Spectator reported.