The World and Everything in It - April 15, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month released the fatality numbers from Covid-19. We’ll hear what the statistics tell us.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Also, dire warnings about a “twindemic” of Covid and flu didn’t happen. We’ll find out why.

Plus the legacy of a medical missionary who treated the body and soul of people suffering from leprosy.

And commentator Cal Thomas on police officers under siege. What’s that mean for our future?

REICHARD: It’s Thursday, April 15th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

BASHAM: And I’m Megan Basham. Good morning!

Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: CIA, FBI leaders warn lawmakers of mounting threats » Testifying on Capitol Hill top intel and law enforcement officials warned lawmakers on Wednesday about growing threats to the United States.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said number one on the list is China.

WRAY: I don’t think there is any country that presents a more severe threat to our innovation, our economic security, and our democratic ideas.

CIA Director William Burns told the Senate Intelligence Committee that we must work with partners to combat Beijing as the United States competes with China technologically.

Burns also said the origin of COVID-19 remains an open question. He said it’s clear that China has not been honest, open, or cooperative and has not provided the data that might clear up questions about its origin.

Burns also answered questions about new threats that could emerge in Afghanistan after the president’s planned troop withdrawal over the summer.

BURNS: We have to be clear-eyed about the reality, looking at the potential terrorism challenge both al Qaeda and ISIS in Afghanistan remain intent on recovering the ability to attack US targets, whether it’s in the region in the West or ultimately in the homeland.

He said “after years of sustained counterterrorism pressure” neither of those terror groups have that capacity right now.

Iran supreme leader dismisses Vienna nuclear talks » Iran’s supreme leader on Wednesday dismissed initial offers at talks in Vienna to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said—quoting here—”The offers they provide are usually arrogant and humiliating (and) are not worth looking at.”

The White House says it remains hopeful that renewed nuclear talks will bear fruit. Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the president believes “the diplomatic path is the only path forward.”

PSAKI: And that having a discussion, even indirect, is the best way to come to resolution. It doesn’t mean that we hold back on concerns we have and don’t encourage our P5+1 partners to [express] those same concerns.

And European allies are expressing concerns over Tehran’s recent announcement that it is stepping up its enrichment of uranium up to 60 percent.

In a joint statement, Britain, France and Germany called that announcement “particularly regrettable” and “dangerous.”

Iran announced its ramped up enrichment following a cyberattack that damaged its underground Natanz nuclear facility. Leaders in Tehran have accused Israel of orchestrating that attack.

Minnesota cop will be charged in shooting of Black motorist » A white police officer who resigned this week after fatally shooting a black man in suburban Minneapolis will face criminal charges over the shooting. WORLD’s Leigh Jones reports.

LEIGH JONES, REPORTER: A prosecutor said Wednesday that he will charge former Brooklyn Center police Officer Kim Potter with second-degree manslaughter.

The fatal shooting happened on Sunday during a traffic stop. Officers pulled over 20-year-old Daunte Wright for expired tags and discovered an outstanding warrant for his arrest.

Police body camera footage appears to show Wright struggling with police. And Potter can be heard repeatedly shouting “I’ll tase you” before firing a single shot from her handgun.

Police say it appears 48-year-old Potter intended to fire her taser instead of her gun.

The incident has sparked days of both peaceful and violent protests just miles from the courthouse where former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for the death of George Floyd.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leigh Jones.

Harris planning trip to Mexico, Guatemala » Vice President Kamala Harris is planning a trip to Mexico and Guatemala. It’s part of the Biden administration’s effort to examine the root causes of a surge on the U.S. southern border.

HARRIS: looking forward to traveling, hopefully as my first trip, to the Northern Triangle, stopping in Mexico and Guatemala sometime soon.

She said she would go as soon as possible, depending on restrictions put in place for the pandemic.

President Biden last month put Harris in charge of addressing the border surge.

But when asked if she would visit the U.S.-Mexico border, Harris suggested she had no plans to do so.

That drew criticism from GOP House Minority Whip Steve Scalise.

SCALISE: Vice President Harris needs to go down the border and see this for herself, because maybe she would then encourage President Biden to reverse his policies that have failed.

The Biden administration said a broken immigration system is to blame, not the president’s policies.

Last month, a record number of unaccompanied children attempted to cross the border. And the Border Patrol saw its largest number of encounters overall with migrants in two decades — just under 170,000 in total.

Bernie Madoff dies » Bernie Madoff, the infamous architect of the largest ponzi scheme in US history has died. WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown has that story.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN: Madoff died behind bars on Wednesday of natural causes at the age of 82.

He received a 150-year prison sentence in 2009 for an epic securities swindle that burned thousands of investors.

A former chairman of the Nasdaq stock market, he attracted a devoted legion of investment clients — from Florida retirees to celebrities like Steven Spielberg.

But his investment advisory business was exposed in 2008 as a Ponzi scheme that wiped out people’s fortunes and ruined charities.

Court-appointed trustees have spent years laboring to unwind the scheme. They have so far recovered more than $14 billion of an estimated 17-and-half billion dollars that investors poured into Madoff’s business.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: counting the lives lost to COVID-19.

Plus, Cal Thomas on the thankless job of law enforcement.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday, the 15th of April, 2021.

You’re listening to The World and Everything in It and we’re so glad you’ve made the decision to join us. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: And I’m Megan Basham.

First up on The World and Everything in It: COVID-19 statistics.

Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released provisional numbers showing how many lives the coronavirus took in 2020.

WORLD’s Sarah Schweinsberg breaks down the data.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: Three-point-three million Americans died last year, according to the CDC. That’s about 828 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 715 in 2019.

Another way to look at that: the country saw half a million more deaths last year—a near 16 percent increase from 2019.

Ali Mokdad is a professor of health metrics at the University of Washington. He says deaths over and above a previous year are called excess deaths.

MOKDAD: You would expect in a normal circumstance, like there is no war, there is no measure of natural or manmade disaster, you would expect mortality to follow the same pattern. So the way to compare what’s the impact of a shock on mortality is to compare this in a year compared to the previous year. And do it by age, by sex, by causes specific for COVID-19, for example…

To figure how many excess deaths to attribute to COVID-19, the CDC reviewed death certificates. The agency concluded the virus killed about 378,000 people last year, making it the third leading cause of death in 2020. It came in behind cancer and heart disease.

But according to the CDC, only 5 percent of death certificates listed COVID-19 as the only cause of death.

Ronald Fricker is a professor of statistics at Virginia Tech. He says the coronavirus was usually listed on death certificates as an underlying condition.

FRICKER: Typically, people will die from say, respiratory failure. And that’s the immediate cause. But what caused respiratory failure was COVID, for example. So ultimately, though, this is always a judgment call of a medical professional who’s assessing for a particular person in a particular circumstance, what they believe actually caused their death. 

CDC data also show how the virus affected different age groups. Not surprisingly, the most deaths happened among those 85 and older. Then between the ages of 75 to 84.

But Fricker says the age group that saw the biggest overall death rate increase came as a bit of a surprise.

FRICKER: So compared to the number of people that just die of all causes, the rate of 2020 compared to 2019, was about 24 percent higher for those aged 25 to 44. When for older folks, when you compare the number of people that died in 2020 to 2019, it was in the middle teens, 13,14, 15 percent, higher death rates. That’s from all causes though—not just from COVID.

So if 500,000 more people died last year and 378,000 of those are attributed to COVID, what about the other 126,000? Ronald Fricker says some probably died from COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic, while testing capacity was still limited.

FRICKER: And in other cases, we may be counting people who died who wouldn’t otherwise have because of restrictions or lack of access to medical care or or overstretched medical facilities because of COVID. So it’s probably a combination of both and some evidence is available to support both of those positions. So it’s probably a combination.

European nations also saw a jump in their excess mortality rates. Poland had the highest rate with a 12 percent increase, followed by Spain, then Belgium. The United Kingdom came in eighth at 7 percent.

Now as more countries begin to publish 2020 coronavirus data, politicians and researchers will also begin to debate death rates in relation to the legacy of lockdowns. Were they worth it?

Philippe Lemoine is a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. He argues they weren’t.

He cites similar transmission rates between strict lockdown states like California and more relaxed states like Florida. He also points to how despite resisting lockdowns, Sweden had the 23rd lowest number of excess deaths in Europe.

LEMOINE: I don’t think you can precisely estimate the effect of lockdown policies in general, but basically if you compare countries that have had extremely heavy restrictions, countries or states in the US, extremely heavy restrictions to those that have used the more liberal approach to mitigating the pandemic, you don’t see striking differences. 

Lemoine says COVID data aside, the economic and psychological price of lockdowns did not outweigh perceived benefits.

LEMOINE: I think if you just look at the effect they’ve had on people’s well being, that’s enough to make the cost not worth the benefit. 

But other scholars say it will take years to sort out whether lockdowns protected more people from an early death or made little difference while causing countless other problems.

Ryan Bourne is a scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of Economics in One Virus. He says conducting a cut and dry cost-benefit analysis isn’t that easy. And a politically charged atmosphere doesn’t help.

BOURNE: I like to think of lock downs as kind of bundles, some of which might have been useful in curbing the spread of the virus, but others clearly have costs that exceed their benefits. I think in the longer term, you would hope that academics would have the freedom to engage in this retrospective analysis a lot more carefully and empirically than we’ve seen so far.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: the flu.

Last year, public health experts issued dire warnings about the possibility of a double pandemic: COVID-19 and influenza. Cases of the flu normally spike in the winter, and doctors worried patients needing hospital care would overwhelm the already strained medical system. But that didn’t happen.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: By this time last year, nearly 300,000 people had tested positive for the flu. This year, the CDC has logged fewer than 2,000 cases. So, what’s behind this record-breaking good news?

Joining us now to explain is Amesh Adalja. He is an expert in emerging infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. Good morning!

ADALJA: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

REICHARD: Well, let’s just start with the obvious connection between COVID-19 and the flu. Things like wearing masks, social distancing, and limiting mass gatherings do help prevent the spread of all kinds of sicknesses. So is that what helped to defeat the flu this year?

ADALJA: Yes, it likely was a combination of all of the social distancing, all of the mask wearing, all of the hand hygiene that basically made it very difficult for flu to spread. And you couple that to the fact that we have population immunity from prior flu seasons, as well as from prior flu vaccinations, and we had a pretty aggressive flu vaccine program this year. So there were a lot of things that made this season not very hospitable to influenza.

REICHARD: Well, this phenomenon isn’t unique to the United States. Nor is it unique to countries that had the strictest lockdown measures, even those with limited restrictions didn’t experience a normal flu season. So what other factors do you think might have been involved?

ADALJA: Well, I think it’s what I had mentioned. You have to remember that flu has more barriers to transmission than COVID-19 did. There is not a highly immune population. Flu has to deal with the fact that people got antibodies, that there are people that are vaccinated. And it just was something that was a barrier that was too hard for this virus to climb, but something that COVID-19 could easily climb over.

And I think that’s what we have to think about as we go back to normalcy that we’re kind of all anxious to see what happens to flu because it hasn’t circulated in the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere for about a year now. And that’s going to be interesting to see what does flu throw at us next. And I think it really just shows that there is value in some of this social distancing and masking that goes beyond COVID-19. And that may cause some people even when mask mandates are lifted to think about wearing masks when they’re in crowded and congregated places.

REICHARD: Some people have questioned whether cases diagnosed as COVID-19 might actually have been the flu. Do you think that’s possible?

ADALJA: Not really. I think what we’ve seen when we’ve looked for flu—and I’ve been a doctor that’s been taking care of patients throughout this pandemic—is almost every test we do for flu is negative. And in the midst of the flu season, when it was when we expected the flu season to occur, we were testing patients for both and flu tests were coming back negative. I think it’s likely the other way around—early in the pandemic that some people that they thought had influenza really had COVID-19. But now we’ve been looking for flu pretty aggressively and it’s just not there.

REICHARD: Well, in preparation for this flu season, this most recent one, health experts did urge everybody to get a flu shot anyway. Did that help?

ADALJA: I do think that the high level of vaccination with influenza this season and the public messaging did get a lot of people to get flu vaccinated. And that just erected another barrier for the flu virus that was really insurmountable for it this season.

REICHARD: Well, it’s good news that we had fewer cases of flu. But I wonder if there’s a downside. Do you think this will affect preparations for the next flu season?

ADALJA: Well, when we decide which strains of influenza to put into a vaccine, we look at the last season, we look at the other hemisphere, and we try to come up with our best estimate of what strains of the virus are going to circulate. So because there hasn’t been much circulation to flu for about a year, it becomes a much harder prospect to be able to come up with a match. So we may have a lot more uncertainty with the next version of the flu vaccine. And in terms of how well it’s going to match what circulates. So we could be in for a surprise in the next season, but we’ll have to wait and see.

REICHARD: Amesh Adalja is an expert in Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University. Thanks so much for joining us today.

ADALJA: Thanks for having me.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Pretty soon, people in Houston will have a new way to get their Domino’s pizza delivered.

Your friendly pizza delivery driver won’t bring your pizza pie to the door with this option, though. That’s because there is no driver.

This delivery method involves no human contact.

When your ‘za arrives, you’re gonna have to walk out to the curb and punch in a pin number on a touch screen.  Then you’ll grab the pizza from a special compartment.

Domino’s partnered with the tech company Nuro to roll out autonomous robot delivery cars.

The Nuro R2 vehicles are about the size of a golf cart with the Domino’s logo painted on the side.

Customers will no doubt pay a delivery fee, but no tips.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: But I like my pizza delivery person!

It’s an option. You can still get a real person if you want.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, April 15th.

This is WORLD Radio and we thank you for listening!

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: And I’m Megan Basham.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: A medical missionary’s legacy. In 1914, an English couple serving in India welcomed a baby boy named Paul Brand. Little did they know he’d grow up and achieve world renown for his innovative techniques to treat leprosy.

REICHARD: Dr. Brand’s work also led to some surprising conclusions about pain. Detecting pain is normal body business for most of us, but Dr. Brand understood some that some people have to think about pain—because it’s absent for them. WORLD Senior Correspondent Kim Henderson brings us his story.

SPEECH INTRODUCTION: I first met Dr. Brand in India. And it’s a great honor and privilege to introduce you and to welcome you here. And we all look forward very much to your presentation. [APPLAUSE]
BRAND: Thank you very much…

KIM HENDERSON, SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Paul Brand devoted his career to improving the lives of people diagnosed with leprosy, which today is known as Hansen’s Disease.

BRAND: When I went to India, I went to teach surgery at the Christian Medical College…

While he was a surgeon in India, Brand proved that nearly every injury leprosy patients sustain is related to their insensitivity to pain. You’ve probably seen pictures of what happens when someone suffers from leprosy—the seemingly lost toes and fingers. They’re actually deformed from wounds and contractures. Brand tried to describe to audiences the associated stigma.

BRAND: Just as a person who can’t feel, thinks of his own limb as being dead, so other people looking at the way he behaves think of him who is dying by inches. In India, they call leprosy, the “creeping death.”

YANCEY: My name is Phillip Yancey, and I was privileged to spend almost 10 years in writing with Doctor Paul Brand. 

Author Phillip Yancey became interested in Brand’s work in 1976, back when Yancey was a young journalist.

YANCEY: I just called him up out of the blue because I came across a pamphlet he had written on pain. He had a different perspective on pain than anyone I’ve ever met. He said, “Thank God for pain. If I had only one gift I could give to my leprosy patients, it would be the gift of pain.” I had never heard anybody thank God for pain. 

Yancey drove to Louisiana, where Dr. Brand was conducting his research at the national leprosarium. He watched as the doctor demonstrated why some of his patients were going blind.  

YANCEY: We all have little pain cells in our eye. Whenever our eye gets a little dry, that pain cell signals subconsciously, “You’ve got to blink, you’ve got to blink,” and we do — about 28,000 times a day.

But people without those pain cells can’t sense the need to blink, so they don’t. Brand’s wife, Margaret, an ophthalmologist, developed techniques to help people with leprosy.

YANCEY: “If you stop blinking, you may go blind. If you keep blinking, I can almost assure you that I can keep you seeing,” she would tell her patients.

BRETT: Sometimes when I’m going to medical appointments and I’ll mention Dr. Brand, the doctors will light up: “Oh, Dr. Brand, he was incredible…”

Anne Brett knew the Brands. Her leprosy legacy spans both sides of her family.

BRETT: My dad said that Dr. Paul Brand was the closest thing to Jesus Christ he ever met…

Paul Brand operated on her mother’s hands, which were drawn inward from the disease. He pioneered tendon transfer surgeries for patients just like her.

Anne Brett observed firsthand the important part pain plays in our lives. Her mother had lost much of her pain sensitivity.

BRETT: So she would put like almost boiling water in the sink. And one time it was so hot, the gloves melted on her fingers, and she didn’t even know it… 

Even washing a crystal vase could be dangerous.

BRETT: She looked down into the sink, and the sink had blood in it. And when she lifted her arms, she had cut her tendon and she didn’t know it.

Brand taught leprosy patients—and others—how to prevent problems in the absence of pain’s warning signals.

Those decades-ago discoveries have a direct impact today on John Figarola. He works to rehabilitate patients at the National Hansen’s Disease Program in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

FIGAROLA: This is our shoe shop, and in this area is where we actually fabricate orthotics. We mold orthotics. You’ll see an oven that you use to heat the material…

Some of his patients need special insoles for their shoes or splints for their fingers. Nerve damage from leprosy has left them vulnerable.    

FIGAROLA: Teach them to inspect their hands every day. Because untreated, a simple wound could actually lead to a bone infection and cause them to lose the tips of the fingers, even a hand or foot. 

Philip Yancey says former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Coop also recognized Dr. Brand’s contributions.

YANCEY: Dr. Coop told me that he had insisted on continuing funding for the leprosarium, even though there were very few people in the United States who had leprosy, because he said what Dr. Brand had discovered about pain applied in many diseases that cause anesthesia.

That’s right. The inability to distinguish pain isn’t just a problem for leprosy patients. Diabetes can also cause nerve damage. Brand realized it’s undetected injuries and stress, not wounds that won’t heal, that lead to amputations for diabetics.

Here he is giving a speech on the subject just two years before his death in 2003.

BRAND: And we were able to prove by these foot pad experiments, that the number of steps per day are really more important and how much stress each step makes.

Brand’s findings changed the lives of many people living with diabetes.

YANCEY: Dr. Coop told me that Dr. Brand’s discoveries probably saved about 50 to 70 thousand amputations a year in the United States. 

Brand didn’t just study the property of pain from a medical perspective, though. He wrestled with it theologically, eventually writing this conclusion: “God designed the human body so that it is able to survive because of pain.” Thus, it’s a gift.

And while Brand’s work benefited the masses, both Philip Yancey and Anne Brett say his one-on-one approach with patients was unforgettably Christlike.

Brett has a story to back that up. Dr. Brand was on stage at a celebration:

BRETT: And one of the patients—he was in a wheelchair—and he wanted to shake hands with Dr. Brand. And Dr. Brand came over, and it’s a simple thing, but he came over and he knelt down and bent over to shake hands with this patient. They truly loved the patients.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kim Henderson in South Louisiana.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Coming up next, a preview of Listening In.

This week, host Warren Smith talks to author and English professor Jeffrey Bilbro.

Our access to information has advanced a lot over the last twenty years, thanks to technology.  We’ve been able to keep up with more personal connections with new media.

But we know the downsides: distraction, anxiety, noise, information overload, and a breakdown in meaningful communication.

Jeffrey Bilbro believes the church must step into the void. Here’s Warren.

WARREN SMITH: We’ve got to live in community with one another. If we’re consuming media, whatever it is—social media, news media, whatever—in ways that are militating against us living in community with one another. That’s a real problem isn’t?

JEFFERY BILBRO: Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, I started writing about this a couple years ago. And I think it’s only more apparent now: the ways in which the media that we consume—and are formed by—is shaping us to be in real conflict with our neighbors. And it’s very atomizing and fragmenting. And the challenge, I think, is that we don’t always realize it’s the very medium that we rely on to stay informed, often, that has that result.

And part of what I wanted to talk about was how the patterns of attention that form our lives, are going to inevitably play a big role in shaping who we imagine ourselves belonging to, and who we imagine ourselves sharing life with. And that’s why the church has historically made some big claims on our attention through worship and through regular gatherings together and shared meals. But if we replace those kinds of ecclesial practices with, you know, media consumption, then that the corollary is going to be that our sense of belonging shifts from the church to our sort of whatever however, we imagine our tribe of fellow news junkies.

BASHAM: That’s Jeffrey Bilbro talking to Warren Smith. Look for Listening In tomorrow to hear the whole conversation. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Today is Thursday, April 15th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Megan Basham.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

This week’s police shooting in Minneapolis has renewed calls for police reform, especially when it comes to use of force. Commentator Cal Thomas warns the justifiable outrage over a few bad officers is itself creating a public safety crisis.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: Police officers across America are getting out. The reason should be obvious. While a miniscule number behave badly—and in rare cases criminally—the media and political narrative has turned against them.

Where was the media and national outrage over the murder of a police officer in New Mexico who was making a routine traffic stop? He had a wife and young children. His killer was a drug dealer. The incident occurred in February. Did you hear about this until recently? I didn’t.

Other cops are shot, or assaulted in other ways with growing frequency. But no one riots when a police officer is killed.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that across America’s 50 largest cities, “at least 23 have seen chiefs or line officers resign, retire, or take disability this year. Nearly 3,700 beat cops have left, a large proportion from the New York Police Department (down 7 percent of its officers) but with big drops in Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and elsewhere, too. The Major Cities Chiefs Association told The Wall Street Journal that 18 of its 69 member executives had retired, resigned, or been fired over the past year.”

Recruitment of new police officers has declined for at least the last two decades. That trend is escalating now because of recent incidents and media coverage. While salaries may have increased in some places, the danger to police has also gone up. That makes the risks less worth taking for some officers. That includes those who might have once considered policing a career but now think better of it.

Police officers leave home every day, not knowing whether they will be attacked—physically or verbally—shot at, killed, wounded, run over, accused of racism, second guessed, and disrespected by the very people they protect. Spouses and children cannot be sure if their loved ones will come home safe. Ask yourself if you would put up with anything close to what cops face daily in your job. Probably not at any salary.

USA Today reported last week that in 2020 “the United States tallied more than 20,000 murders—the highest total since 1995 and 4,000 more than in 2019. Preliminary FBI data for 2020 points to a 25 percent surge in murders—the largest single year increase since the agency began publishing uniform data in 1960.”

The story blames lack of policing as “even the most dedicated officers who now face a greater risk of being sued, fired, or prosecuted for doing their job feel pressure to pull back.”

The treatment of police has become a serious public safety issue. But increasing numbers of politicians prefer to side with protestors and other anti-police factions, rather than the overwhelming majority of officers who do their jobs professionally.

In doing so, they are sowing the wind and even now are beginning to reap a whirlwind of rising crime.

I’m Cal Thomas.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: On tomorrow’s program: Church attendance. It’s at an all-time low. We’ll talk about it on Culture Friday.

And, I’ll have a review of a new stand-up special from one of my favorite comedians.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Megan Basham.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

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Go now in grace and peace.

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