Top 5 US news stories
September 29 2025
Gunman Kills Four After Driving Car into Michigan Church, Setting it Ablaze
Shutdown Nears as White House, Congressional Leaders Remain Deadlocked
Trump Orders Troops to Portland
Leveraged Deals Signal New, Riskier Phase of AI Infrastructure Boom
US Intelligence Report Says China Is Modifying Ferries for Taiwan Invasion
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Gunman Kills Four After Driving Car Into Michigan Church, Setting It Ablaze
At least four people were killed after a gunman attacked a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc Township, Mich., on Sunday. The attack occurred when a man drove a car into the church building, set fire to it and shot worshipers, the authorities said. Eight other people were wounded, one of whom was in critical condition. The gunman died after a confrontation with officers. Investigators had not yet determined a motive.
NYT
Shutdown Nears as White House, Congressional Leaders Remain Deadlocked
WASHINGTON—Congressional leaders head to the White House on Monday amid low expectations from either party of avoiding at least a brief government shutdown, less than 48 hours before federal funding lapses and agencies partially close. President Trump agreed to the meeting over the weekend after canceling an earlier planned sit-down, but the White House and congressional Republicans signaled little change in their stances. Republicans want to pass a seven-week stopgap spending bill before cutting any deals, while Democrats are insisting on billions in healthcare funding before they will sign on to a GOP plan. Raising the stakes, the White House budget director, Russ Vought, instructed agencies to draw up lists of employees to fire if funding lapses, beyond the temporary furloughs and missed paychecks typical of past shutdowns. The government will partially shut down Wednesday at 12:01 a.m. if Congress can’t pass a short-term spending patch.
WSJ
Trump Orders Troops to Portland
President Trump has said he was directing the Pentagon to send in troops to “protect War Ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE facilities.” Scores of Portland residents have responded on social media by posting picturesque photos of life in Portland this weekend with the hashtag #WarRavagedPortland. The Defense Department has authorized sending 200 members of the Oregon National Guard to Portland for 60 days, according to state Attorney Gen. Dan Rayfield. He said the state and city have filed a lawsuit to stop the deployment. The feud resurrects tensions between Trump and one of America’s more left-leaning cities. The Trump administration and Portland clashed during his first term. Demonstrators flooded downtown in the months following the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020. Late-night violence and property destruction often followed, some perpetrated by a local antifa movement. When some federal agents Trump sent to guard a courthouse picked up suspects in unmarked vans that summer, protests and violence swelled and state police were sent to calm the situation. The protests this year have largely been smaller and milder than in 2020, according to local observers. The continuing demonstrations occur at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility outside of the downtown area. Police have made some arrests, including two people for attempting to assault officers during a demonstration on June 14, according to Portland police. Trump’s Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican and former Congresswoman from Oregon, thanked Trump on social media for “taking action to keep our ICE facilities protected and Make America Safe Again!” “Recent statements by the president suggesting Portland needs federal military intervention are inaccurate and counterproductive,” said an open letter released Sunday by the Portland Metro Chamber and signed by more than 100 organizations and leaders, including the Oregon Business & Industry association along with Gov. Tina Kotek and Sen. Ron Wyden, both Democrats. Kotek said at a news conference that Portland can “manage its own public-safety needs” and that “there is no insurrection. There is no threat to national security.”
WSJ
Leveraged Deals Signal New, Riskier Phase of AI Infrastructure Boom
In the initial years of the AI boom, comparisons to the dot-com bubble didn’t make much sense. Three years in, growing levels of debt are making them ring a little truer. Early on, wealthy tech companies were opening their wallets to out-joust each other for leadership in artificial intelligence. They were spending cash generated largely from advertising and cloud-computing businesses. There was no debt-fueled splurge on computing and networking infrastructure like the one that inflated the bubble 2½ decades ago. While big tech companies are still at AI’s forefront and are in solid financial shape, a crop of more highly leveraged companies is ushering in an era that could change the complexion of the boom. A few smaller companies—most prominently CoreWeave—have been relying on creative financing to vault themselves to the AI forefront for a while. More recently, though, the ambitions of companies such as OpenAI are poised to take leverage and mega contracts to a whole new level. OpenAI is laying the groundwork for a network of data centers that will cost at least $1 trillion over the next few years. As part of its push, the company signed a $300 billion, five-year contract this month under which Oracle is to set up AI computing infrastructure and lease it to OpenAI. To make good on its end of the contract, Oracle has to spend on that infrastructure before it gets paid in full by OpenAI—which means a lot of borrowing. Analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets estimated in a recent note that Oracle would have to borrow $25 billion a year over the next four years. And Oracle is already highly leveraged. The company had long-term debt of about $82 billion at the end of August, and its debt-to-equity ratio was about 450%. By contrast, Google-parent Alphabet’s ratio was 11.5% in its latest quarter, and Microsoft’s was about 33%.
WSJ
US Intelligence Report Says China Is Modifying Ferries for Taiwan Invasion
A classified US military intelligence report seen by the ABC says China is rapidly building up the country's commercial ferry fleet to prepare for an invasion of Taiwan. The report dates from earlier this year and was prepared by members of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for the Pentagon. The US intelligence says the large ocean-going vessels have been modified to carry tanks and partake in amphibious operations. The ABC has seen the report on the condition that it is not quoted directly, in order to protect the source of the information. In 2022 alone, some 30 Chinese commercial ferries were monitored by Five Eyes intelligence in military exercises involving People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops. Five Eyes is an intelligence-sharing alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. China is building more than 70 of the large vessels by the end of 2026.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
September 29 1939: Nazis and communists divvy up Poland
On September 29, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agree to divide control of occupied Poland roughly along the Bug River—the Germans taking everything west, the Soviets taking everything east. As a follow-up to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, (also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact), that created a non-aggression treaty between the two behemoth military powers of Germany and the U.S.S.R., Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, met with his Soviet counterpart, V.M. Molotov, to sign the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty. The fine print of the original non-aggression pact had promised the Soviets a slice of eastern Poland; now it was merely a matter of agreeing where to draw the lines. Joseph Stalin, Soviet premier and dictator, personally drew the line that partitioned Poland. Originally drawn at the River Vistula, just west of Warsaw, he agreed to pull it back east of the capital and Lublin, giving Germany control of most of Poland’s most heavily populated and industrialized regions. In return, Stalin wanted Lvov, and its rich oil wells, as well as Lithuania, which sits atop East Prussia. Germany now had 22 million Poles, “slaves of the Greater German Empire,” at its disposal; Russia had a western buffer zone.
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Sources
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/us/michigan-mormon-church-shooting-fire.html
- https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-faces-democrats-as-shutdown-deadline-nears-ec8e5d54?mod=hp_lead_pos2
- https://www.wsj.com/us-news/its-trump-vs-portland-again-in-clash-over-federal-troops-c2669d0e?mod=hp_lead_pos10
- https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/debt-is-fueling-the-next-wave-of-the-ai-boom-278d0e04?mod=hp_lead_pos4
- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025/09/29/us-intelligence-warns-china-ferries-built-for-taiwan-preparation/105606720
