Midday Roundup: Pope calls meeting to tackle family matters

Catholic family values. More than 200 senior Roman Catholic bishops gather today for the Synod on the Family at the Vatican. The group will try to find ways to address various cultural challenges to centuries-old church teaching on marriage and family. The gathering is scheduled to run through Oct. 19. Last week, a group of noted Catholic and Protestant thinkers from the United States sent a letter to Pope Francis and the Synod delegates urging them to use the gathering to “express timeless truths about marriage,” and to articulate why those truths matter. “Men and women need desperately to hear the truth about why they should get married in the first place. And, once married, why Christ and the Church desire that they should remain faithful to each other throughout their lives on this earth,” the letter stated.

Verbal spat. Liberal commentator Bill Maher is taking heat for pointing out the intolerance of Muslim doctrine. The commentator got into a debate with actor Ben Affleck on the episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher that aired Friday night. Maher said in a panel discussion on the show that “liberal principles” such as equality for women, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and gay rights are not valued in the “Muslim world.” Affleck, who was on the show to promote his new movie Gone Girl, fired back, saying Maher’s viewpoint was gross, racist, and disgusting. Maher articulated his position in a follow-up interview with Salon: “I think we’re just saying we need to identify illiberalism wherever we find it in the world, and not forgive it because it comes from [a group] people perceive as a minority.”

Roots of a pandemic. Scientists believe they have pinpointed the birthplace of the AIDS pandemic, giving them more insight into the history of the disease and how pandemics get started. According to a study in Science, HIV first emerged in humans in 1920 in the Congolese town of Kinshasa. The town was a major business center in Central Africa and also home to a large number of sex workers. The study found “a ‘perfect storm’ of factors, including urban growth, strong railway links during Belgian colonial rule, and changes to the sex trade, combined to see HIV emerge from Kinshasa and spread across the globe,” according to an Oxford University statement on the study.

Under surveillance. In the ongoing quest to stop Ebola in its tracks in the United States, police this weekend located a homeless man who rode in a contaminated ambulance. The man is believed to have been exposed to Ebola in the same ambulance that carried Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian man now fighting the disease in a Dallas hospital. The vehicle has been quarantined, Dallas County officials said. The man, whom officials did not name, is at low-risk for Ebola and is being housed in a location where doctors can monitor his health as a precaution.

Baby Doc dies. Jean-Claude Duvalier, the brutal former Haitian dictator known as “Baby Doc,” died Saturday at his home in Port-Au-Prince. He was 63. In 2011, Duvalier returned to Haiti after a 25-year exile, allowing victims of his regime to pursue legal claims against him in Haitian courts. But the claims never developed into much, and a frail Duvalier spent his final years quietly, in a mansion on the hills above the Haitian capital.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.