The World and Everything in It - April 20, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Some might say that one silver lining of the past year is that the number of homeschooling families doubled. We’ll talk about the numbers and the reasons why.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also the ethics of doing business with China.

Plus The Olasky Interview. Today a conversation about Israeli politics with Ze’ev Chafets.

And finding your purpose when the kids leave home.

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, April 20th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: The news is next. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Jury deliberating in Chauvin case » The case against former police officer Derek Chauvin is now in the hands of a Minneapolis jury.

The 12 members of the jury began deliberating on Monday after nearly a full day of closing arguments with Defense attorney Eric Nelson arguing that the only reasonable verdict is not guilty.

NELSON: You can see at points when Mr. Floyd’s legs kick back, it actually almost knocks officer Lane over. It knocks off the body-worn camera and the badge of officer Chauvin.

The defense also argued that drug use and heart disease, not Chauvin’s actions, caused George Floyd’s death.

But prosecutor Steve Schleicher told jurors that Chauvin had to know Floyd’s life was in danger and that there was no way to justify his use of force.

SCHLEICHER: Beyond the point that he had a pulse, the defendant continued this assault —9 minutes and 29 seconds.

With a verdict expected soon, some area businesses have boarded up windows with plywood as National Guard troops patrol the area.

The city has also been on edge in recent days over a fatal police shooting of a young black man in a nearby suburb.

New Delhi locks down amid virus surge » One of the world’s largest cities is locking down once again amid a surge in new COVID-19 cases. WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown reports.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, REPORTER: New Delhi imposed a weeklong lockdown Monday night to prevent the collapse of the Indian capital’s health system.

In recent days, ambulances have raced from one hospital to another, trying to find an empty bed while patients lined up outside of medical facilities. Some patients have died in the parking lots of hospitals while waiting to be admitted.

Just months after India thought it had seen the worst of the pandemic, the virus is spreading faster than ever, fueled by more infectious variants. And the country is racing to speed up vaccinations.

Right now just over 1 percent of India’s 1.4 billion residents are fully vaccinated compared to 25 percent in the United States.

India announced Monday that as of May 1st, everyone over the age of 18 is eligible to be vaccinated.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown.

Díaz-Canel replaces Castro dynasty in Cuba » Cuba's Communist Party congress has—as expected—chosen Miguel Díaz-Canel the country’s next communist leader.

It marks the first time since the 1959 revolution that the Castro family is not in control of Cuba. But it’s unclear what, if anything, will change for the Cuban people.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said last week that President Biden’s policies toward Cuba will be governed by two things:

PSAKI: Support for democracy and human rights will be at the core of our efforts in empowering the Cuban people to control their own future and second, our belief that Americans, especially Cuban-Americans, are the best ambassadors for freedom and prosperity.

The 61-year-old Díaz-Canel was born a year after the revolution in the west-central city of Santa Clara. He earned an engineering degree and dedicated himself to official politics, rising rapidly through the government ranks. In 2012 he rose to one of Cuba's vice presidencies and soon thereafter was named first vice president.

Díaz-Canel has been supportive of some small-scale reforms, such as allowing more small private businesses. But he has steadfastly defended Cuba’s communist system.

Navalny transferred to prison hospital amid failing health » Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been moved to a hospital in another prison after his doctor said he could be near death. WORLD’s Leigh Jones reports.

LEIGH JONES, REPORTER: Russian authorities transferred Navalny from a penal colony near Moscow to a prison hospital just over 100 miles east of the capital. That according to his lawyer on Monday.

Navalny is in the third week of a hunger strike, and Russia's state penitentiary service said in a statement that he has agreed to take vitamin therapy.

Reports of his failing health have drawn renewed protests from supporters.

And that triggered a warning from the Kremlin.

              PESKOV: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]

President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said protests could be considered "unlawful" and demonstrators risk being arrested.

Navalny’s allies have called for massive protests in the heart of Moscow and St. Petersburg tomorrow.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leigh Jones.

NASA's Mars helicopter takes flight on red planet » NASA’s experimental helicopter Ingenuity rose into the thin air above the dusty red surface of Mars on Monday, making history.

SOUND (NASA NATS): Confirmed, today Ingenuity has performed its first flight, the first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet!

Flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California declared success after receiving the data and images relayed from Perseverance rover.

It was a brief hop—just 39 seconds and 10 feet—but still, the first flight on Mars.

Ingenuity hitched a ride to Mars on Perseverance, clinging to the rover’s belly when it touched down in an ancient river delta in February.

Walter Mondale dies

Former Vice President Walter Mondale has died.

Mondale represented Minnesota in the U.S. Senate for 12 years before serving as President Jimmy Carter’s vice president from 1977 to 1981.

MONDALE: Carter invited me down to Plains along with some others after it was clear that he was going to be the nominee, and we had a talk about what he had in mind. I was not interested in a ceremonial job. I wanted to be a part of things.

But many will remember Mondale for his own president bid … losing one of the most lopsided elections in history to President Ronald Reagan in 1984.

In a statement Monday night, former President Carter said “Mondale provided us all with a model for public service and private behavior.” Walter Mondale was 93 years old.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: the pandemic-surge in homeschooling.

Plus, Kim Henderson on being created for good deeds.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 20th of April, 2021.

Thanks for joining us for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up: homeschooling.

The topsy-turvy past year forced a lot of changes, not all of them bad. Millions of Americans have come to appreciate the advantages of teaching children at home.

A recent report by the Census Bureau revealed a big surge in homeschooling households.

When the survey began around the 1st of May last year, the number of U.S. households with school-aged children teaching them at home was just over 5 percent.

REICHARD: Five percent in May, but get this: by the fall of 2020, that percentage had more than doubled to just over 11 percent.

Here with insight about the increase in homeschooling is Mike Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association. Mike, thanks for joining us!

MIKE SMITH, GUEST: Well, thank you, Mary, looking forward to it.

REICHARD: We just mentioned this new data about homeschooling. But we should say that there’s a difference between homeschooling and virtual learning. Virtual schooling means kids are temporarily attending their local schools from home. Homeschooling means kids aren’t enrolled in local schools and parents assume responsibility for their education.

The Census Bureau had to update their survey to clarify that difference. So Mike. do you have a gauge on how reliable those numbers are? Has homeschooling really doubled?

SMITH: Yes, Mary, I think it has because as you said, they have actually cleaned up the question so that they're asking the question now to make sure that the children that are actually being homeschooled are not enrolled in public school. So that means they're not in the virtual program. So I think these are accurate, but we want to explain something. They're actually just—they've been just serving parents. So if they find one parent or two parents, they count that as a household. So they're at 5.1 million households, which makes up a little over 10 percent of the school age population, if we assume that household only has one child. Okay? What if that what if that household has two children? Then we're talking about doubling that to like 19 percent of the school age population. They're going to actually in the next survey they do that they come out with, they will actually give us the number of children that are being homeschooled. That's going to be critical. I don't know what it's going to be. But it's going to be more than what they have right now.

REICHARD: What, specifically, has driven so many parents to teach their children themselves? Do you think it’s just been dissatisfaction with the distance learning, or something else?

SMITH: Well, that's part of it. I think there are a lot of reasons. We actually polled some people that actually are brand new members of HSLDA. And of course, a lot of it has to do with the fact that they don't want their children to have to go back into a public school setting where they're wearing masks, separating themselves and all that. So they tried homeschooling. They could have gone with the virtual school. Some of them went with that. That didn't work out, especially the younger children, you know, six hours a day in front of a computer, that doesn't really work very well. So I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they may have tried it, it didn't work. And so then they tried homeschooling. And the folks that have joined our organization are committed to 80 percent of them say they're going to continue even when school gets back in session.

And I'll tell you, Mary, the number one thing they're looking at, that they're seeing that's really helping, encouraging parents is what it does for the family by bringing the children home. So what they're saying to us, the most important reason, and the reason they would continue to homeschool, is does this work for their family? That means probably a parent has to be in that home. Well, some parents were working totally away from home until the COVID. Now they're in the home. So will they be able to stay and work virtually? If they can, then I think more and more of these children are going to be homeschooled.

REICHARD: I know that the census bureau survey showed that some states have seen big homeschooling spikes but other states haven’t so much. Why do you think that is?

SMITH: I looked at that, and I couldn’t—They don’t have California on that. I know California has spiked tremendously tremendously in homeschooling, and they do not have it. So I wonder if it's a function something the way that they're actually serving folks, families? I don't know, maybe the California folks are not responding. That's a possibility. But I do believe that this is actually uniformly across the board. So I'll be interested to see this next survey what we see with that as well.

REICHARD: Do you think the rise in homeschooling will last beyond the pandemic?

SMITH: Yes, I do think obviously, some people are going to go back. There's no doubt about that. But again, the polling that we have done with the folks that have been there brand new homeschoolers, and they have become part of HSLDA is over 80% of them say “we're convinced, we're going to continue to do this.”

REICHARD: And if you’re right, if the surge in homeschooling does extend after the pandemic is behind us, do you think that will spark aggressive action from school districts and teachers unions against homeschooling?

SMITH: Well, I certainly hope not. But there's a possibility of that, obviously, because we're gonna see a big funding loss right off the bat. Because average daily attendance makes up about 90 percent of the funding of all schools across America. So as these children are no longer being counted as students in their school, that's gonna make a difference. There's no doubt about that.

REICHARD: Mike Smith is with the Home School Legal Defense Association. He’s been our guest today and Mike, we thank you so much for that!

SMITH: Mary, thanks for having us.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: doing business with China.

In 2017, reports began to emerge that the Chinese communist government was building concentration camps. China then forced Uyghur Muslims into the camps for re-education to adopt Chinese culture. The government said this was necessary to combat Muslim extremism.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Part of this so-called “re-education” includes forced labor—making imprisoned Uyghurs produce products exported around the world. And that has some Western companies rethinking how they do business in the country. WORLD’s Sarah Schweinsberg reports.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: Today’s clothes are made from a range of materials. Some are synthetic, like nylon. Others are supplied by animals such as wool and leather. But a fifth of the world’s jeans, T-shirts, and socks still come from one of the oldest-used fibers in the world: cotton.

COMMERCIAL: The touch, the feel, the fabric of our lives. The touch the feel of cotton….

One-fifth of the world’s cotton comes from China. And nearly all of the country’s fluffy, white fibers grow in Xinjiang (SZinJung). That’s the northwestern province where China has incarcerated up to 1-and-a-half million Uyghur Muslims.

IBRAHIM: Xinjiang produces 85 percent of China’s cotton.

Azeem Ibrahim (Eebraheem) is a scholar at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy. In a recent report, he and his team reviewed hundreds of internal Chinese government documents. Ibrahim says there’s overwhelming evidence that Uyghur Muslims are being used as slave labor to pick cotton by hand.

IBRAHIM: The Chinese government simply cannot deny this. This is their own documentation in terms of what's going on in these areas.

But the government isn’t only forcing imprisoned Uyghurs to labor in the fields. Those living outside the camps are also forced to work.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection investigation found this forced labor is coerced through debt bondage, restriction of movement, and withheld wages.

IBRAHIM: So essentially all the Uyghurs are one way or another, are victims of this. But, you know, Western companies, the onus is on them to make sure that their supply chains are clean. And they're not contaminated in any way.

Many human rights advocates agree. Last summer, nearly 200 organizations in more than 30 countries asked clothing companies to cut ties with China within the next year.

Governments and business investors are also adding pressure. In January, then-President Trump banned all imports of cotton or cotton products from Xinjiang. The United Kingdom and Canada have similar bans.

And last month, a group of investors contacted more than 40 companies asking them to stop sourcing cotton from China. Those businesses include retail giants H&M, Hugo Boss, and Zara parent company Inditex.

But companies are often slow to make changes to their supply chains, says Clare Carlile. She’s a researcher at Ethical Consumer, an organization that researches company supply chains.

CARLILE: So, a lot of companies put out statements, but it's not really clear how robust those actions are.

But the Chinese government and Chinese consumers are taking the statements seriously.

Last month, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and the European Union announced sanctions against Chinese officials coordinating the camps.

In response, Chinese customers and e-commerce sites called for boycotts of H&M and Nike. Chinese celebrity brand ambassadors also dropped clients like Tommy Hilfiger, Adidas and Calvin Klein, saying their online statements lied about China’s Uyghur policies.

In response, some companies deleted their statements or told Chinese customers they do use Xinjiang cotton. Ethical Consumer’s Clare Carlile says that’s a disappointing capitulation.

CARLILE: So some people are actually taking backward steps on the issue.

Harry Haney is the director of the supply chain and sustainability Center at Loyola University, Chicago. He says companies face several challenges in removing Chinese cotton from their clothing lines. First, it takes time to move factories or find new supply sources. The Workers Rights Consortium estimates that American retailers import 1.5 billion garments using Xinjiang cotton every year.

HANEY: You think, well, just stop sourcing there and go somewhere else. And it's not always quite that easy. Trying to avoid cotton out of that region is very difficult, and to say, well, let's just move out of China and entirely go somewhere else—it can take time to do it.

Then, there’s unintended consequences of blacklisting a region in any part of the world. In Xinjiang, what happens to the people who actually make a legitimate living growing and selling cotton?

HANEY: It's not just as simple as, you know, just eliminate it, and wipe it out. You've got to come at this more systemically to provide other options for these people to earn a living to be able to sustain themselves. If you kind of blacklist a region, one of the risks is that you just push the abuses further underground, you know, and they just get, they get harder to find. So, no easy solutions here.

Other supply chain analysts see these challenges with China as a wake-up call for companies.

Felicitas Weber audits supply chains at the Business and Human Rights Resource Center. She says many companies aren’t aware of where all of their materials come from. Increasing public scrutiny is changing that.

WEBER: We've seen now, a lot more effort recently, from companies rushing to trace their supply chains, which is really exciting, and which actually also shows what is possible.

George Magnus is researcher at the China Center at Oxford University. He says he’s hopeful that growing public awareness will play a bigger role in pushing clothing companies to sever strong trade ties with China.

Magnus says it will become increasingly difficult for companies like Nike and Adidas to claim the human rights high ground at home if they disregard them abroad.

MAGNUS: The more that the public generally finds out about the sort of the darker side of China, the more I think their brands will be at risk if they are not seen to be either categorical about we do not use forced labor. Or just say they’re moving their business, you know, we're going to, we're going to buy our cotton somewhere else. But I think that the status quo—it's very, very tenuous.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Well, necessity is the mother of invention and companies have to be especially creative even as we come out of the Covid recession.

Airlines, especially need to find new revenue sources. Japan’s All Nippon Airways for example.

It’s offering an innovative new service for $550: a first class ticket to nowhere.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: What?

EICHER: Well, first-class dining aboard a stationary Boeing 777, so a three-hour fine dining experience.

And if the first class price of $550 is outside of your budget, no problem! Dining in business-class is half the price.

They know the market evidently. About 60 guests piled in to dine on day one of meals on wings.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, April 20th.

You’re listening to WORLD Radio and we’re so glad you are! Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

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

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The Olasky Interview.

Today, a conversation between WORLD editor-in-chief Marvin Olasky and journalist Ze’ev Chafets.

Over the last two years, Israel has held four elections. Each time, Benjamin Netanyahu‏’s Likud party has emerged victorious, but the prime minister has failed to form a coalition government.

This interview over Zoom happened just before last month’s election. In this excerpt, Chafets describes Israel’s electoral system and analyzes the political forces at play. Olasky starts us off.

MARVIN OLASKY: Let me ask about Israeli politics, which is a mystery, I think to most American readers. Can you give us the ABCs—the aleph, bet, gimel of Israeli politics?

ZE’EV CHAFETS: Well, I'll try. In the country, there's only 9 million Israelis, which means about 7 million voters. It's like the size of an election in Michigan, for example. The system is that it's a parliamentary government. The Parliament here is called the Knesset, it has 120 members. To form a government, you need 61 votes in the Knesset.

Each party—there are about a dozen real parties here, maybe ten, twelve, fourteen, depending on the election season—puts up a list of candidates. And the results are based on the proportionate number of people of candidates each party gets. So for example, if Likud, which is the party of Prime Minister Netanyahu gets 25 percent of the vote, well, then they get one quarter.

And what happens is that all of the government's ever since the beginning of the State of Israel, there's never been an absolute majority for any party. So all of our governments, are coalition governments. The demography here has shifted over the years. What used to be roughly 50/50 in terms of left and right. Today, I would say that among the Jewish population here—which is 80% of the country—80% of that 80% is right wing. I don't think that's going to change.

OLASKY: Well, I'm trying to put it in terms for American readers: right and left on foreign policy, is it predominantly right?

CHAFETS: To be right wing here means first of all, that you are a hardliner on the issue of Iran. And by the way, those people who are right wing, are right wing on those kinds of issues, they may be much more liberal than American liberals, certain other issues, for example, abortion here is not controversial. On the right or the left.

OLASKY: I mean, along with Israeli and American political systems differ, I mean in a sense, the religious system is different as far as Judaism is concerned, right? Because, as opposed to orthodox, conservative, reform—at least my sense is, it's orthodox and secular.

CHAFETS: Well, there is middle ground. There are gradations of Orthodox and there are gradations of secular. But, you know, at the end of the day, Israel to people who are not ultra-orthodox is a big synagogue, it's an outdoor synagogue, and we're all the congregation. You know, we don't have to send our kids to Hebrew school because they will grow up speaking Hebrew. We don't have to teach them Jewish history because they're living in the land of the Bible and Jewish history. We don't have to convince them to be engaged Jews, because they are anyway. That's what citizenship here means.

OLASKY: What's the primary—or the first couple—misunderstandings that most Americans are, let's say most American evangelicals have about Israel.

CHAFETS: First of all, a lot of Americans understand quite a lot about Israel after so many years. A surprising amount. But people who think of us tend to think of Israel as a very militarized country. I can walk around in Tel Aviv for a month and not see a soldier. And almost never a policeman. But it's not a militarized society, really. Guys are in the army—women too. But you'd be surprised how little of a role it plays in in the daily life of people.

I think some people think that Israel still is a desert country. It has a desert in it, you know, two thirds of the country is desert, but it's also a very verdant country in the parts where most people live.

And it's very, very Americanized. When I came to Israel in ‘67. There was no Coca Cola here. There was no television. The government—the socialist government—didn't allow television because they thought it would be deleterious to the morale of the public. It was a very, very different place. It was more like Romania than it was like Michigan.

Today, it's a seamless cultural and media web between here and the United States. We're all watching the same things. We're listening to the same music. We're wearing the same clothes. And we have, to a large extent, the same central Western values with a couple of additions.

But what surprised me, I once spent a couple of weeks with a group of evangelical pilgrims for a book that I was doing. They came to Israel, and they were all very, very Zionist: very warm to Israel. And I noticed that they weren't interested in the political thing at all. This was a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And they knew so much about it. But what they knew about was from the Bible, they didn't care about what was in the newspaper. And if I tried to engage them in discussions about, you know, what's the big thing, big topics of Israeli politics, it was matters that were very secondary to them.

They want to support Israel, they loved Israel, because that's, you know, that's what God said they needed to do. Bless those who bless Israel, and curse those who you know, cursed them. And that's an oversimplification, but that was really the attitude. And I was impressed by how much more they knew about certain aspects of this country than I did.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, April 20th. This is The World and Everything in It. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Have you ever felt mired in day-to-day life and wondered where God wanted to use you for His eternal purposes?

World commentator Kim Henderson spent some time in a ditch pondering that very question.

KIM HENDERSON, CORRESPONDENT: So the man standing there behind the podium a Sunday ago, he tells us about good deeds and being created to walk in them. I listen hard, because my season of raising a brood of five is coming to a close. What do good deeds look like now? When days consumed with feeding a family’s bodies, minds, fevers, and frenzies suddenly aren’t?

I have time to think of such things when I’m sitting in a ditch, face to face with a barb-wire fence and the reality that the car I’m driving is stuck, and good.

It had been quite a day already. Not long after daylight, my husband and I tackled the impossible – bathing two cats. That feat was followed by our youngest succumbing to illness and the couch. Then there were four loads of laundry, a printer that failed to perform, and now this: a Sentra’s sad slide into muddy oblivion. Did I mention our 4-wheel drive was in the shop? And all the while it rained. Steady.

Sitting still in a ditch has its perks, though. You have the luxury of time to notice things like the rhythm of rain and windshield wipers. Wrinkles on your hands. Grass spikes in the dead of winter. And you have time to ponder this business of good deeds.

What are good deeds, anyway? Here’s what they aren’t. Good deeds aren’t the Boy Scouts required “do a good turn daily,” as fine a goal as that is. The Bible’s good deeds aren’t simply changing a tire or bringing a casserole or paying someone’s light bill. But they could be. It’s those things done as a gospel demonstration. Those things done by someone with a heart that beats for Christ.

Truth is, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing some noteworthy good-deeders. A lady doing the dirty work of curbing human trafficking. A pastor who’s a mover and shaker in the foster care community. A group that donates hand-knitted masterpieces by the boatload. Storm-chasing volunteers with chainsaws who clear the way. A woman who loves orphaned kids. A Christian educator who teaches medical students, the ones who’ll be poking and prodding us all in years to come.

Whenever I put a mic up to that kind of mouth, I get inspired.

But back to the ditch.

I didn’t have to wait long before my dad and his trusty Silverado came to my rescue. That’s important, because my “quite a day” wasn’t over. Supper needed starting. The cougher on the couch needed attention. A passel of praying brothers and sisters needed me to make it to Wednesday night church.

I may not have my next season all figured out, but I guess I know what’s needful now.

Paul put it to the Ephesians this way: We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

For what good deeds were you created? Walk in them today.

I’m Kim Henderson.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: ending the war in Afghanistan. President Biden has set a hard deadline for bringing the last U.S. troops home from the country. We’ll talk about the risks and the benefits.

And, we’ll meet a man who found his calling in church, but not in the way you might expect.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

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

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

WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

Go now in grace and peace.

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