The World and Everything in It: August 12, 2026

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Massachusetts joins a growing number of states changing when and why a woman can get an abortion.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: We’ll talk about post- Dobbs changes and more, ahead on Washington Wednesday, Hunter Baker is standing by.

Also today on World Tour: Why Greenland may still one day play a bigger part in American security.

And a wealthy donor brings chess to kids in rural Mississippi.

NATIONS: I'm just staring till I finally pop an answer to my brain, and I just play the move.

And WORLD Commentator Cal Thomas on why the American oil problem is so hard to fix.

REICHARD: It’s Wednesday, August 12th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

MAST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Good morning!

REICHARD: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Primary elections » Voters in six states cast ballots in primary elections Tuesday … including two more races that analysts say test how far to the left Democratic voters are willing to go.

SOUND (Flanagan watch party): Peggy! Peggy!

In a Minnesota U.S. Senate primary … Peggy Flanagan soundly defeated Congresswoman Angie Craig.

FLANAGAN: Thank you Minnesota!

Flanagan is a hard-left progressive with the backing of the party’s socialist wing … while Craig was widely considered the establishment candidate.

Another left vs hard left contest took place in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor. But as of early this morning, that race was too close to call.

Socialist candidate Francesca Hong was trailing David Crowley by fewer than 3,000 votes when the clock struck midnight.

SOUND: [Applause]

Meanwhile, in South Carolina …

NORMAN: Looks like we did it folks!

Republican Congressman Ralph Norman was one of the two leading vote-getters in a GOP Senate primary. That qualifies him for a runoff election in a couple of weeks. But Sen. Darline Graham, the sister of the late Lindsey Graham will be the favorite. She bested Norman by about 8 points last night.

GRAHAM: I want to thank President Trump. His steadfast support and his complete and total endorsement mean so much to me.

In the GOP primary for governor in Minnesota, Lisa Demuth defeated My Pillow founder Mike Lindell by double digits.

New airport safety systems » A new radar is going up at Newark's airport in New Jersey ... but this one watches the ground, not the sky.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy showed it off Tuesday. It replaces equipment installed nearly 30 years ago.

DUFFY: If they can't see out of the tower and see what's happening on the tarmac, they can actually use this radar to actually see on their screens where everything is at, airplanes, vehicles, um, and again, it keeps the American traveling public, uh, safer

The Federal Aviation Administration is replacing surface radar at 44 airports ... part of a $12.5 billion rebuild of American air traffic control.

And Newark showed why. Last year, controllers handling its flights lost radar and radio contact with planes ... and hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed.

DUFFY: When we build the new infrastructure of new telecom, new radar, um, new radios, um, we get from analog to digital, the magic will happen with the software as well. Um, and I wanna, I wanna see those come together at the same time.

Duffy wants it all done by 2028 ... but he'll need Congress to approve another $20 billion dollars to get there.

Ukraine » Ukraine says Russia is getting more military help from North Korea after a recent attack. WORLD's Benjamin Eicher reports.

SOUND: [Russian strike]

BENJAMIN EICHER: Ukrainian authorities say a Russian missile attack hit an urban district in Kyiv … damaging a children’s hospital.

Children and medical workers had to seek shelter...but there were no reported injuries.

Meanwhile…

ZELENSKYY: [SPEAKING UKRAINIAN]

EICHER: ...Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russia is now receiving ballistic missiles from North Korea … and that Moscow is preparing to deploy more North Korean troops on Russian soil.

He added that Russia had to seek outside help … because for the first time in this war, Moscow does not have a secure ‘strategic rear.’

That means it no longer has a secure area behind the front lines … where it can freely move troops, weapons, and supplies.

For WORLD...I'm Benjamin Eicher.

Colombia quake » In the Colombian city of Cali, rescue crews are still digging for people buried under collapsed apartment blocks.

Two days after Colombia's earthquake, local officials confirmed more than 200 dead and climbing ... most of them in Cali and in the city of Pereira.

The epicenter sits in Chocó ... a poor region of mountains and jungle where armed groups have fought for years. María José Torres Macho is the top United Nations official in Colombia.

MACHO: We know more about what is the impact in the capital cities, but less in the rural remote areas that are also affected by, um, by the situation of conflict in, in Colombia. So we are very much following up on that.

Much of Chocó is reachable only by boat or plane, and aid workers struggled to reach it before the quake.

Crews in the city of Cali have pulled more than 80 people out alive. But aid agencies say the chances of a rescue drop off sharply after three days ... and tomorrow morning makes three.

Officials list nearly 200 people as missing. On citizen-run websites, families have posted thousands of names.

WHO on Ebola » For months, health workers in eastern Congo misdiagnosed Ebola patients … treating them for malaria and typhoid. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has that story.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: The World Health Organization says that gene sequencing suggests Congo's outbreak began as early as February. Nobody declared it until mid-May.

WHO's Africa director says—his words—we are chasing the virus, the virus is ahead of us.

Confirmed infections have topped 4,300. At least 2,000 people have died. It's the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record … and the fastest-growing.

The rare strain behind this outbreak has no approved vaccine or treatment. WHO advisers now want to try an existing Ebola shot anyway.

Africa's disease agency is going door to door, hunting cases nobody counted.

For WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

I'm Kent Covington. 

Coming up… why Greenland still has geopolitical appeal for the U.S. Plus, bringing chess to kids in rural areas. This is The World and Everything in It.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Wednesday, August 12th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Time now for Washington Wednesday!

Joining us is political scientist Hunter Baker. He is a senior fellow at the First Liberty Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. Good morning Hunter!

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning!

MAST: Well, Wisconsin Gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong went into yesterday’s primary with a sizable lead in the polls. She’s a democratic socialist who has said she wants expanded child care, greater public-school funding and higher taxes on wealthy residents and corporations.

She watered down some of her positions as the primary neared…walking away from statements about defunding police and cancelling Thanksgiving. Here’s her stance on democratic socialism from last week’s debate:

FRANCESCA HONG: I do not support the full platform of the National DSA, and I am not endorsed by DSA National. What democratic socialism is is a form of government that puts working class people first, that puts work first.

She went on to talk about plans to increase taxes on high earners and block new data centers from the state.

So Hunter, what do you make of her definition of democratic socialism…and is it part of the razor thin margins in this race?

BAKER: I think that this idea of democratic socialism as the political movement that is for working people is one that can definitely be challenged. I mean, if you are an auto worker in the Midwest and you belong to a union, and you've negotiated a really great health insurance deal with Ford or GM or something like that. You're not going to be all that excited about Medicare for all or sort of a single payer system. I think that it appeals to a certain group of people, and you see that it appeals to to that group of people. But to call it the the the movement for working people, I think that I think that that's excessive. 

I mean, if you want to know who can make a pretty good claim to that, it's Donald Trump. He is the candidate who appeals to a lot of working people, a lot of blue-collar people. We all know empirically that the Republican Party has become a more blue-collar party under Donald Trump. So it's not as simple as she would make it out to be. But there's no question that there's a lot of appeal that the Democratic Socialists have, and you see it in a race like this razor-thin countdown that we sort of saw in Wisconsin.

MAST: The success of various socialist candidates has turned into one of the major stories of the midterms. But turnout in these primaries is relatively low and the wins are somewhat geographically clustered. How big of a trend is this really, and how big does it need to be to make substantial political change?

BAKER: Well, it's a really great question. I don't know. I don't know if this is going to persist. I tend to think that it will. When AOC first came on the scene and other members of the squad, and they were kind of following Bernie Sanders, and I wondered if this would be just sort of a flash in the pan, but it hasn't been. It it has grown, it has extended. And we are talking about democratic socialism in a more serious way than many people might have predicted. 

Now, what's going to happen? Well, we live in a a binary kind of a political system, as opposed to somewhere like Germany that has a proportional system, and so a party cannot tolerate a third party that is to its left for the Democrats or to the right for the Republicans, they they have to find a way to to absorb it to bring it in. And so right now, what we're having is a battle in the Democratic Party over who's going to be absorbed, who's going to be in the driver's seat. The progressives and the Democratic Socialists are going to end up together, but the question is, who's going to be calling the shots?

REICHARD: Hunter, one of the policy planks these Democratic Socialists seem to have in common is a promise to ban new data center construction. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are working on legislation in Congress. Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong are the latest to promise moratoriums.

Republicans have also raised concerns about strain on the energy grid and water supply…but they’d rather tech companies pay the energy bill than block them from building.

How big of an issue do you think this will be when November rolls around?

BAKER: Well, when you try to understand an issue like data centers, you start kind of casting backwards, looking for something that seems similar in any way. And the issue that kind of stands out to me is fracking. During Obama's presidency, the United States was really facing a new situation regarding world energy. Had we hit peak oil, and what were we going to do about it? 

And so fracking became a major technology. It really bailed the United States out. It was helpful economically, but there was all this concern about what was fracking doing to the environment. How was fracking affecting the communities around it? If you watched various television dramas, they would have people turning on their sink, and their water would catch fire from all the fracking and things like that. 

And I sort of wonder if the data centers are not in that category. Now we'll see, right? I mean, maybe we'll just normalize, and this will be a regular sort of thing, and we'll accept it, and it won't be sort of one of these not in my backyard sort of things, or maybe it will turn out to be a big deal. But right now, I think it's just too early to tell. But one thing is for certain: it is a retail political issue right now, and politicians are talking about it. And certainly, the Democratic Socialists are taking care to kind of steward the concern over that issue.

REICHARD: Onto another race last night…the special primary in South Carolina to replace the late Senator Lindsey Graham on November’s ballot.

President Trump’s pick, Darline Graham Nordone—Lindsey’s sister—got a third of the votes…she’s set to face U.S. Congressman Ralph Norman in two weeks. Graham can claim a few weeks of being the incumbent, but other than that she’s new to politics. What are you seeing in the results from last night?

BAKER: I'm not surprised that she got the most votes. I have to go ahead and acknowledge that I said that I do not think she will end up being the elected senator, and I maintain that position. I think that what we saw is that she got, as you said, about a third of the votes, and then the rest of it was split up by what we would call legacy politicians, a couple of congressmen, a former governor slash congressman in the form of Mark Sanford. 

And while we're at it, let's just say this is probably the end for Mark Sanford. He is famous for having popularized the idea of walking, hiking the Appalachian Trail as a euphemism for having an affair. But he came back from that, was elected to Congress again, and now he decided to make a move for the Senate in this race, and it didn't work out. 

So we have Lindsey Graham's younger sister over against Ralph Norman, and Ralph Norman is a classic Republican conservative, somebody who is still highly concerned with the national debt in a time when it seems like less people are worried about that. But he ran for governor earlier. He really got his name out there, and I'm not surprised that he's in the runoff. And my guess is is that he's going to have a good chance to win this race.

REICHARD: Massachusetts recently changed its law governing late term abortions, allowing physicians to provide care now based on their own professional medical judgment rather than the previous legal restrictions. It’s part of a growing number of states changing when and why women can get abortions.

Hunter, what do you make of where we are, where we are going, four-plus years post-Dobbs.

BAKER: It's pretty shocking where we are. When abortion was originally legalized, we really knew relatively little about fetal development. If you were to scan the databases, you wouldn't see that many articles on the topic. Certainly, ultrasound was an emerging technology, and if you would have said that we're going to know an incredible amount about fetal development, not only that, we're going to have the ability to observe development in the womb through almost like a window into the womb, and further than that, women all over America are going to have ultrasound images on their refrigerators or posted on their social media. And with all of that happening, we're going to see a state like Massachusetts pass a law that allows abortion up to the moment of birth. 

I don't know how you work out the crazy cognitive dissonance in those two things. How do you have a country where many people are just so thrilled by the idea of their unborn child and other people being thrilled for them, and at the same time holding the view that a child at the same stage of development, even the stage of development right before birth, can simply be executed. It's highly analogous to slavery, where the mother is like the owner of the child and has the right to dispose of the child any way that she wants. I believe that someday this is going to be looked back at as a form of barbarism. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that. 

But right now we're in a different kind of a period. We are in a period of abortion valorization and there are many women who give testimonies about their abortion in the same way that a Christian might testify about Jesus.

MAST: Hunter Baker is senior fellow at First Liberty’s Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. Thank you, Hunter.

BAKER: Thank you.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: World Tour.

Greenland may be sparsely populated, but its location makes it increasingly important to American security.

The island is three times the size of Texas, but home to only about 56,000 people. It lies between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, strategically located between Europe and North America. The Kingdom of Denmark has managed the territory since the 18th century.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: President Trump reignited an international debate earlier this year when he argued that the country is vital to U.S. security. His push to acquire Greenland met with strong resistance from European leaders.

WORLD’s Emma Eicher has the story.

EMMA EICHER: Buying the world’s largest island has been on President Trump’s mind since his first term in 2019.

TRUMP: Essentially it’s a large real estate deal. A lot of things could be done. And strategically for the United States it would be nice.

In early January this year, the idea resurfaced.

TRUMP: We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not, because if we don’t do it Russia or China will take over Greenland, and we’re not going to have Russia or China as a neighbor.

At first, Trump said he wouldn’t rule out military force, but later called for negotiations. Then he threatened to impose tariffs on some European countries until a deal could be reached.

KLAUS DODDS: President Trump has made it very clear that Greenland is integral to American homeland security.

Klaus Dodds is professor of geopolitics at Middlesex University London. He says there are several reasons behind Trump’s insistence, like stronger security against China and Russia.

Greenland also has potential to be mined for rare earths. These minerals are vital for making advanced tech, including smartphones, electric vehicles, and military hardware.

DODDS: There's a great deal of concern in Europe and North America about the stranglehold, you might say, that China has on rare earth processing and refining, and President Trump and the European Union have been keen to break that.

But European leaders have repeatedly declared that Greenland is not for sale.

And Greenland agrees:

DODDS: The Greenlandic community, by and large, have said, "No, actually, we suddenly find that relationship with Denmark and Copenhagen quite a comfortable one, and that's the one we'd rather have.

Trump remains undeterred, often criticizing Denmark’s management.

TRUMP: Denmark doesn't spend money to really help Greenland.

Around 45 years ago, Greenland became a semi-autonomous territory with its own self-government, but it still relies on a hefty sum from Denmark for the public budget. That includes universal healthcare, welfare support, social services and education. And Denmark still manages the island’s Arctic security.

The U.S. established a military presence on Greenland during the second World War. And Trump is not the first American president to consider buying it. In 1946, Harry Truman offered $100 million dollars:

DODDS: Truman's offer was politely rebuffed, and then really up to the Trump era, the United States has largely been able to do what it wanted to do.

Trump argued that Chinese and Russian vessels and aircraft are in close proximity to Greenland, threatening global security.

Denmark’s government disputed this claim. Nordic officials say Russian vessels roam the Arctic ocean, but aren’t often found near Greenland.

Instead, those ships are sailing much closer to American soil:

DODDS: Where you find Chinese and Russian naval and aerial patrolling, it's in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska.

But Dodds admits that Trump has some legitimate arguments:

DODDS: Trump is quite right to highlight the structural weaknesses of Greenland. In the recent past, they were very quick to say Greenland is open for business, and indeed there was actually quite a lot of overtures towards China.

Trump’s administration discussed an offer with a price tag as high as $700 billion dollars, and in March, he appealed to the people of Greenland directly:

TRUMP: We strongly support your right to determine your own future. We will keep you safe, we will make you rich.

Dodds anticipates that a future deal may not result in buying Greenland outright. Instead, it would involve American red lines:

DODDS: Denmark and Greenland give a guarantee to Donald Trump and future American administrations that China and/or Russia will never be allowed to have an infrastructural or investment foothold in Greenland itself.

And Greenland may agree to increased U.S. presence in the country:

DODDS: We will probably find the United States will establish other bases and facilities in Greenland as part of that, if you like, guarantee. If those red lines and other guardrails can be agreed upon, there may be a deal that comes together sometime this year.

In late July, Greenland sent a warning to a U.S. oil drill company, which was setting up operations off the coast without a permit. The company has ties to some White House officials, and is in the process of getting permit approval from Greenland’s government.

Critics say the situation sends a clear message: that the Trump administration won’t back down.

That’s this week’s World Tour. I’m Emma Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Law enforcement in Pickens County Alabama had to steer things in an unusual direction after a report of a trespasser. Audio from WBRC-TV.

COUCH: We don’t train for this kind of moment because you don’t know what to do with a giant bull,

Giant as in 1500 pounds, complete with 3 foot long horns. It had escaped from a farm about 2 miles away and staked its claim in someone’s yard. Officers put a local school on lockdown and called in some nearby cowboys.

JARREAU: We were close to the main highway and you know the safety of the bull and the safety of our horses. That was our main concern.

It took about 20 minutes to safely lasso the bull and take it to a new temporary home.

Mooove along, folks nothing more to see here.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 12th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Chess.

It's a centuries-old game with timeless lessons: planning ahead, staying focused under pressure, and making every move count.

REICHARD: A generous donor believed those lessons could benefit students in a small Southern community. So he made a big move to bring chess to their schools.

Did his philanthropy pay off?

WORLD Senior Writer Kim Henderson brings us this report.

KIM HENDERSON: In rural Mississippi, a chess center is about as common as a snowplow.

AUDIO: [GREETING BETWEEN TEACHER AND STUDENTS]

But for more than a decade, the Franklin Chess Center has broken the mold in the tiny town of Meadville.

BULINGTON: Check and mate. Everybody line up on the wall. I’ll pick opponents.

The center is a two-story building decked out with the latest chess tables and boards and computers, all thanks to the provision of a generous donor.

An anonymous donor with the foresight to hire Jeff Bulington, one of the country’s top chess instructors.

BULINGTON: The Rook is going to take you back. All you've achieved is an even exchange, right? And we want to profit, don't we…

Bulington signed a 10-year contract when he founded the center in 2016. He came from Memphis, a city with a busy chess scene, to a town with no chess scene at all. And he managed to raise up players who made it to the national stage.

BULINGTON: So this is the upstairs where kids have to graduate to get to be up here, and they have to earn the right to be up here to work . . .

Chess has a level playing field here—boys and girls, blacks and whites, rich and poor. The biggest variable is drive.

BULINGTON: Your notation is good. Okay, I want you guys to switch colors and notate one more game, and then we'll go upstairs and go over them.

Every afternoon, students from the local school arrive for lessons. Some even come on Saturdays.

BULINGTON: I usually find that second grade is a good place to start.

That’s when Emma Nations first came to the center. Now she’s Mississippi’s third grade chess champion. She just went to a national competition, where a single game could last hours.

EMMA: It's exhausting. My brain's just like looking at the chessboard, like, should I do this or should I do that, and I'm just staring till I finally pop an answer to my brain, and I just play the move.

Emma’s mother likes the way chess challenges her daughter.

NATIONS: She's starting to think about, if I do this, what's going to be the reaction to this? I don't think your normal average third grader has to think about the repercussions of things, whereas now she's starting to connect those things.

That’s exactly what that anonymous donor hoped would happen. Wade Creekmore’s role in funding the chess center became more widely known after his death last November. Bulington says Creekmore wasn’t some kind of chess fanatic. He simply wanted to contribute something meaningful to the community.

BULINGTON: Having a chess program like the one that he had become aware of in Memphis seemed like the kind of thing that might really matter. It was, you know, approached cautiously and thoughtfully on his part.

Part of the expense of building a competitive scholastic team is travel—giving players the opportunity to lose.

BULINGTON: . . . lose quality games, the kinds of games that push you forward in your learning. And that's not so easy to do, and that requires travel.

So they traveled—New Orleans to Niagara Falls, and Philadelphia to Palm Springs, California. And not just to lose. They grabbed trophies and titles and a feature on 60 Minutes.

All supported by Creekmore–the then-secret donor.

BULINGTON: He was an advocate of travel as a form of education to sort of see that there are alternatives out there to the life that you yourself experience, not that you leave yours for that, but just to know that there are other ways of doing things…

Emma Nations’ mother is grateful for that. And for her daughter’s opportunity to go to nationals.

NATIONS: She's never been to Michigan before, and to be able to compete on that kind of level, that's a huge thing for her and the other kids who are able to do it.

The future of the center is uncertain for now. Jeff Bulington fulfilled his contract with the Franklin Chess Center in the spring and moved out of state. But he took good memories with him.

BULINGTON: In all the places I've taught chess, I've never had a school superintendent travel with us on a chess tournament because his children were playing in the tournament. All of this great small town stuff played out so nicely because of the small community.

And because of the quiet generosity of a thoughtful philanthropist.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kim Henderson in Meadville, Mississippi.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

MARY REICHARD, HOST:  And I’m Mary Reichard. America has long had problems with reliance on foreign oil. While those problems may be difficult to solve, WORLD’s Cal Thomas says it’s no time to give up.

CAL THOMAS: I am not in the habit of favorably quoting former President Joe Biden, but he was right when he said this.

BIDEN: We are the United States of America and there is nothing we can’t do if we do it together.

Why, then, are we still beholden to Iran and Saudi Arabia for so much of our oil needs?

A Wall Street Journal headline says: “Gulf States are Resigned To Iran Control of Straight (of Hormuz).”

Must we also be resigned to an unending dependence on Middle East oil? Presidents since Jimmy Carter have said we must overcome that dependence and loosen their grip on our economy.

PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: When we import oil we are also importing inflation, plus unemployment. We've got to use what we have.

The problem is the difference between American production and that which comes from the Middle East.

The U.S. mostly produces light, sweet crude from shale formations, while the Middle East largely supplies heavier, higher-sulfur crude. Old U.S refineries were not built to process heavier crude. Building new ones would cost billions of dollars. They would also be hampered by environmental laws. Some consider new refineries a bad financial risk as the country shifts toward renewable energy and electric vehicles.

That sounds like defeatism to me. President Trump says he has spoken to the United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, urging him to tap more light sweet crude from the North Sea. Trump says Burnham responded he would take a “pragmatic approach” to opening up the region, which is rich in oil and gas. Trump said if he did, it would massively boost the UK’s economy.

The U.S. has been held captive for years to Middle East oil, and moreover we have allowed far-left environmentalists to set the agenda, depriving us of oil from offshore California and Florida. Critics always raise the specter of oil spills and damage to wildlife and beaches, but improved technology has reduced the likelihood of such events. The alternative is more of what we have now, continued spending of billions of dollars, along with the cost in human lives while trying to keep the oil flowing from the Persian Gulf region.

Iran has the U.S. over an oil barrel. They are betting Democrats will take over Congress in the fall election and deny the president funds to continue targeting their country. The U.S. naval blockade seems to be working. Iran’s economy is in shambles, but the Ayatollahs don’t care about their people, or they would not slaughter anti-government demonstrators and engage in public hangings.

Putting Democrats back in a congressional majority won’t solve the problem. Gas prices and inflation were higher during the Biden Administration. If a lack of funds forces the U.S. to stop attacking Iran, Iran is likely to resume its effort to create a nuclear weapon and the rockets to deliver them to Israel and the U.S. It is unlikely we will see gas prices significantly decline as the president said they would after what he wrongly predicted would be a two-week war. Besides, there will always be a need – at least as far as anyone can see – for petroleum: it is in thousands of products we use everyday, including plastics, and synthetic fabrics like nylon, cosmetics, and medicines.

Rather than accept defeat and wringing our hands, I prefer the approach of President John F. Kennedy in a 1962 speech at Rice University in Houston:

JOHN F. KENNEDY: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Many have started this sentence to encourage others to do the hard things: “If we can go to the moon…” You can finish it.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Tomorrow: we’ll talk to detransitioner Chloe Cole on backpedaling by the leading medical group supporting transgender procedures. And, life at 102 years old: how one member of the Greatest Generation is making the most of it. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Lindsay Mast.

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.

The Bible says, “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.” —Ephesians 6:10–13 

Go now in grace and peace.

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