The World and Everything in It: August 7, 2024

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like us. My name is Lynn Siroin and I live in Austin, Texas. I hope you enjoy today's program.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Good morning! Kamala Harris has picked a running mate. It’s the governor of Minnesota. What does he bring to the ticket?

NICK EICHER, HOST: We’ll have that for you on Washington Wednesday. Also today, World Tour. And later, the complicated effort to bring gospel comfort to a town destroyed by a landslide.

BOYD: There’s a lot of trauma. Nearly every person in Enga has gone through trauma.

And WORLD Commentator Janie B Cheaney on being weird.

BUTLER: It’s Wednesday, August 7th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Paul Butler.

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

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

HARRIS: And now, welcome the next vice president of the United States, Tim Walz!

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Kamala picks Walz » And with that, Vice President Kamala Harris introduced her new running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to a cheering crowd at a Philadelphia rally.

Walz voiced his support for a number of Democratic cornerstones, including abortion access, and what he characterized as common-sense gun regulations.

He also took aim at his opponent, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance.

WALZ: Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. Come on! That’s not what middle America is!

But Vance had his own criticism yesterday, calling Walz a San Francisco-style liberal.

VANCE: Kamala Harris and Tim Walz do make an interesting team because if you remember, the rioting in the Summer of 2020, Tim Walz was the guy who let rioters burn down Minneapolis, and then Kamala Harris was the one who bailed the rioters out of jail, so they’re an interesting team in that sense.

Both Harris and Walz are expected to be officially nominated at the party’s convention later this month.

Debby update » The remnants of Hurricane Debby have drenched coastal cities in the southeast, and the system is not finished dumping heavy rain.

The storm is blamed for at least six deaths in Georgia and Florida.

David Greene with Colleton County Emergency Management in South Carolina.

GREENE: We still have significant rainfall that we’re going to experience over the next several days. And we already have a lot of flooded roads and trees down and that sort of thing.

The storm roared ashore on Florida’s Gulf Coast on Monday. And the system has already stirred up tornadoes and submerged streets in waist-high flood waters across the southeast.

It has been called a possibly historic rainfall event as it moves slowly across the region.

Israel/Hamas new leader » The Palestinian terror group Hamas says it has chosen a leader to take the place of its former leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed by a missile strike while in Tehran.

In a defiant move, Hamas has chosen Yahya Sinwar to lead the group. Sinwar was the mastermind behind Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.

U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken says Sinwar was already a powerful figure within Hamas.

BLINKEN: He has been and remains the primary decider when it comes to concluding the cease-fire.

Unlike Haniyeh, who had lived in exile in Qatar for years, Sinwar has remained in Gaza.

UNRWA accusation » The United Nations has confirmed that nine workers from its Palestinian aid agency were fired after evidence emerged suggesting they may have participated in Hamas’ terrorist attack against Israel.

U.N. Deputy Spokesman Farhan Haq said Monday that 19 staffers were originally accused of taking part in the massacre.

Haq: For nine people, the evidence was sufficient to conclude that they may have been involved in the 7th of October attacks.

Israeli leaders first accused U.N. aid workers of participating in the massacre and provided the United Nations with evidence to support the claim.

Boeing hearing » Boeing was back in the spotlight in Washington on Tuesday.

HOMENDY: This hearing is an important part of our ongoing investigation of the accident that occurred on January 5th, 2024 in Portland, Oregon.

The National Transportation Safety Board held a hearing about a panel that blew off the side of an Alaska Airlines flight mid-air earlier this year.

NTSB Investigator in charge, John Lovell, said the panel in question, known as a “door plug” left a manufacturing plant in Renton, Washington …

LOVELL:  And was delivered to Alaska Airlines without the four bolts having been installed that were required to secure it to the fuselage.

Boeing factory workers say they were pressured to work too fast and asked to perform jobs that they weren’t qualified for.

The safety board is expected to officially determine a probable cause for the incident, but that report could take another year or longer to be released.

Bangladesh » A Nobel laureate will head up Bangladesh’s new interim government as the country steers through a political crisis. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin reports.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: Muhammad Yunus will lead the interim government after former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina stepped down and fled the country amid a mass uprising against her rule.

A government spokesman says protest leaders, the country’s military chiefs, and civil leaders met Tuesday with the country’s president, President Mohammed Shahabuddin.

After many hours behind closed doors, they decided on Muhammad Yunus to head the government.

Yunus is an economist and banker. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work developing microcredit markets.

For WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: A look at the Harris-Walz presidential campaign on Washington Wednesday. Plus, World Tour.

This is The World and Everything in It.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 7th of August, 2024. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Washington Wednesday.

After President Joe Biden was forced out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris secured enough support to become the presumptive nominee, the burning question was who would join her as running mate. A list of senators and governors in moderate and battleground states included names like Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. But in the end, it was Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

BUTLER: Here now with more on what Walz brings to the campaign is WORLD’s Washington Bureau reporter, Carolina Lumetta.

CAROLINA LUMETTA: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz does not look like your typical running mate on a left-wing presidential ticket. He’s known for his love of Diet Mountain Dew, signing a free school lunch bill, and, in true Midwestern dad fashion, posting videos of fixing cars and attending the state fair with his teenage daughter. Yesterday, he was introduced to the world as the 2024 Democratic vice presidential candidate.

TIM WALZ: Hi, this is Tim. …

KAMALA HARRIS: Listen, I want you to do this with me. Let’s do this together. Would you be my running mate, and let’s get this thing on the road?

WALZ: I would be honored, Madam Vice President. The joy that you’re bringing back to the country, the enthusiasm that’s out there - it would be a privilege to take this with you across the country.

LUMETTA: Walz is new to presidential campaigning but not new to the political scene. After 24 years as a high school teacher, football coach, and a non-commissioned officer in the Army National Guard, Walz flipped a southern Minnesota congressional district blue and held onto it from 2007 to 2019. Then he tackled another hard race: keeping the governor’s seat blue while party support started to slip during Trump’s administration. He recently gained national attention after making a comment on MSNBC about the Republican ticket of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.

WALZ: Well, it's true. These guys are just weird. They’re running for he-man women’s club haters or something. That’s not what people are interested in.

Other Democrats went on to repeat the phrase…and frame the new Harris campaign around it.

HARRIS: And by the way, don’t you find some of their stuff to be just plain weird?

By now, Donald Trump has tried to turn the insult around.

TRUMP: “Well, they're the weird ones. And if you've ever seen her with the laugh and everything else, that's a weird deal going on there. They're the weird ones. 

So Walz has gained a reputation for his communication abilities, and that launched him into the veepstakes. But what is his record as a leader?

CHRISTOPHER DEVINE: He’s shifted some by the way since he left Congress. He did vote more as a moderate there.

Christopher Devine is an associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton. He recently co-authored a book on the role of vice presidents. While Walz served in the House, he frequently voted with Republicans and was rated one of the most moderate members.

But Walz’s governorship has trended more liberal. For example, Walz is a staunch abortion advocate with a 100 percent rating from Planned Parenthood. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he mandated lockdowns, indoor masking, and even a hotline for reporting people who didn’t follow the rules. Also in 2020, Walz waited three days to deploy the National Guard to respond to rioters after the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. He was criticized for allowing the city to burn … and admitted his handling of the situation was “an abject failure.” Nevertheless, Devine says Walz’s midwestern persona may obscure his liberal record in the eyes of voters.

DEVINE: It's what voters see in that person. And if they see in Tim Walz, Hey, here's a guy who comes from rural America, literally came from a small town in Nebraska originally, and someone who dresses the part of being kind of, you know, down to earth and not very formal, and that could be the kind of thing that makes people say, you know, I hear his voting record’s liberal or what he's done as governor, but you know, he seems pretty mainstream to me.

Harris also hopes to win over another demographic that is reluctant to come out to vote…Generation Z.

SOHALI VADDULA: She's a lot more energetic and a lot more people relate to her. Like she's a child of immigrants. She’s fairly young—she’s definitely younger than Joe Biden and Trump.

Sohali Vaddula is a rising sophomore at Brown University and the communications director for College Democrats of America. She’s part of the Gen-Z demographic that the Harris campaign hopes to win over at the ballot box.

VADDULA: And us as college Democrats, we want to see things like student loan debt cancellation and the stuff that you get for climate change and how she stands for things like legalizing weed. There are a lot of different things that think young people just resonate with.

Vaddula says mobilization efforts were more difficult with Biden at the top of the ticket. But now, she sees a shift in the campaign message that she can get behind:

VADDULA: I think the best thing we're going to utilize is not giving people kind of like an alternative to Trump, but rather telling them what they're voting for. Instead of saying like, this is what you're voting against, we're going to tell them, or we're going to give them something to vote for.

That includes removing protections for unborn babies and gender-confused children, and hedging on support for Israel in its war against Hamas. A new CBS poll found that Trump and Harris are now tied across several battleground states where Biden was losing. This includes Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada.

Devine says the Trump team has struggled to respond to both Harris and Walz:

DEVINE: Frankly, the Trump team has done such a bad job of carrying a simple, consistent message on who Kamala Harris is so far. They've had two weeks to define her. But we see Donald Trump getting distracted and bringing up, you know, all these other issues, the ridiculous statement that Kamala Harris somehow turned black. They can't get distracted on Harris or on Walz. And if they blow the opportunity by meandering over here or there, someone's going to define Tim Walz, but it's going to be the Harris campaign.

For her part, Harris is adapting Biden’s campaign message. Here’s Devine again.

DEVINE: When Joe Biden was still in the race, he seemed to be focusing a lot more on the threat to democracy issue. That was probably the main way that he was framing the campaign. And again, it's hard to judge how effective that was because his age was always limiting how far he could go with any given message. But Kamala Harris, while not ditching that entirely, seems to be shifting more to this simple message of freedom, as she's put it. And of course, like any good campaign message, that could mean many different things. For a lot of people, that's going to mean abortion. From the pro-choice side, it could mean a range of other things as well.

LUMETTA: Al Cross is a veteran journalism teacher and campaign commentator from Kentucky. He said Biden’s decision to drop out helped switch the momentum from Trump to Harris. Much of the excitement might fade in coming weeks, what political scientists call “the honeymoon phase,” but this election cycle is less predictable than most.

CROSS: There was such a rebound effect from Biden's departure. There was great relief among not just Democrats, but I think a lot of persuadable voters that they no longer had to choose between Biden and Trump. And while they may not have decided they're going to vote for Harris, they're certainly open to that possibility, and that is one reason that you can say her campaign has momentum.

After last night’s rally, Harris and Walz are now on a seven-state campaign blitz to many of those battleground states now in play. As of this week, a virtual roll call has given Harris 99 percent of the delegates needed to win the nomination at the Democratic National Convention later this month.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Carolina Lumetta.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: World Tour.

Onize Ohikere is off again today, and for a good reason. She got married over the weekend! She’s scheduled to be back next week. In the meantime, WORLD’s Mary Muncy is here with this week’s international news round up.

AUDIO: [Sound of protest]

Bangladesh unrest—We begin today’s roundup in Bangladesh where country-wide protests forced the dissolution of parliament yesterday.

The day before, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled the country after a 15-year rule.

AUDIO: [Man speaking Bengali]

This Bangladeshi man called the protests a movement against autocracy.

The unrest started a few weeks ago with peaceful protests against a government job quota system, but they quickly turned violent and nearly 300 people have been killed.

AUDIO: [Person speaking Bengali]

A different Bangladeshi says a mob attacked the police station. The police opened fire on the mob, but were pushed back and eventually had to flee.

UK anti-immigration protests—Next, the United Kingdom is facing its own wave of violent protests.

AUDIO: [Sound of protest]

After a stabbing at a dance party that left three children dead last month, rumors spread that the stabber was a Muslim immigrant and anti-migration protesters have been rioting and burning buildings.

Police have arrested a 17-year-old suspect and say he was born in the UK and have charged him with murder rather than terror-related charges.

The director of a group measuring anti-Muslim attacks says the community is scared.

ATTA: People cannot really go and do their day-to-day job realistically, because Uber drivers have been attacked, taxi drivers attacked, women threatened and mosques vandalized. And this is becoming, in the last few days, the activity that is happening on a daily basis across different regions of the UK.

The UK’s prime minister has blamed far-right propaganda for the protests and is calling for an end to violence.

AUDIO: [Sound of funeral]

India landslides—We move now to India, where people are mourning the deaths of more than 200 people killed by landslides.

Torrential rains triggered the landslides over the weekend in rural, southern India. Officials say the landslides destroyed homes and over 10,000 people are in relief camps.

AUDIO: [Survivor speaking Hindi]

This survivor says she told her husband to pull their children out of their house… and as soon as he got them out, everything was swept away by water.

AUDIO: [Sound of surfing]

Whale photobomber—We end today’s round-up with Olympic surfing off the coast of Tahiti where semifinal surfers got a rather large photobomber.

A whale launched itself into the air behind two surfers as they were swimming for their next wave.

Tatiana Weston-Webb representing Brazil was one of those surfers. She told ISA Surfing before the competition:

WESTON-WEBB: The women today are just pushing boundaries and breaking boundaries and I don’t know, I feel so proud to be a part of women’s surfing right now like I feel so proud of us.

She went on to win silver, just a few points behind America’s Caroline Marks.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy filling in for Onize Ohikere.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Here’s a story not about big-brother government, more like Mother Hen government.

Seems the city council in Des Moines, Iowa, ruffled some feathers when it moved to limit the number of chickens that could be kept in residential neighborhoods.

Well, now the chickens—and those who love them—have come home to roost.

AUDIO: Alright it’s eight o’clock.

So they got going early, hatched a public protest, kept the clucking to a minimum, but reminded the public officials that voters are atop the pecking order. We the people rule the roost.

Of course, there’s nothing worse than when a powerful interest group gets madder than a wet hen, and it had council members walking on eggshells.

So, the council directed a city manager to scratch out a compromise and avoid the city, you guessed it, having egg on its face.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 7th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: help for the hurting.

At the end of May, a landslide buried a village in the highlands of Papua New Guinea under 20 feet of rubble. Since then, geography, politics, and tribal tensions have complicated recovery efforts.

WORLD reporter Amy Lewis has the story of how the gospel is bringing hope.

AUDIO: [Woman speaking in Engan]

AMY LEWIS: There was very little warning before the mountain fell, says this woman from the village of Yambali.

The community of several hundred people sits at the foot of Mount Mungalo in the Mulitaka region of Papua New Guinea. It’s nearly 40 miles up a mountain road from the provincial capital of Wabag Town—about an hour’s drive under ideal circumstances.

Around 2 a.m. on Friday, May 24th, several villagers heard loud cracking noises. Some left their houses to investigate, but before they could return to wake their children, boulders, rocks, and dirt swept over the village. The landslide buried 150 houses and their inhabitants within minutes.

AUDIO: [Search and rescue efforts]

Counting the missing and dead would take much longer.

WATERREUS: There were still people on the landslide, digging, using sticks, you know, wooden poles, small hand tools, shovels, you know, so they're still trying to reach their loved ones.

Aaron Waterreus is a specialist response manager and leads a team of urban search and rescuers for Fire and Emergency New Zealand. They arrived just days after the tragedy struck.

Estimates of missing people varied from hundreds to thousands, but after two weeks of digging with hand tools, locals recovered only 11 bodies.

WATERREUS: You're standing there and looking at, you know, what is essentially a mass grave…

A week after the landslide, the country’s Prime Minister James Marape visited the area.

AUDIO: [Grieving voices]

The villagers met Marape with faces and bodies smeared with ashes, mourning while they marched.

MARAPE: [Speaking Tok Pisin] The place is a little bit unstable. That is why Works hasn’t moved in with its machinery in case it triggers another landslide.

Here Marape says that seismic reports show the ground is still moving…and bringing in heavy machinery could have triggered another landslide.

Here’s Waterreus again.

WATERREUS: There is definitely going to be another landslide there. It's not a case of ‘if.’ It's a case of ‘when,’ and that might be tomorrow, it might be next week, it might be next year. This event is not isolated, and it's not over.

Researchers think the slide was caused by heavy rainfall. They fear that monsoon rains later this year could trigger new slides. That’s bad news for the thousands already displaced, including Yayonakali Ambolo.

YAYONKALI AMBOLO: [Speaking in Engan] I don’t have a pot, blanket, mattress. Everything I had is covered by the landslide. I have no clothes. I am wearing things given to me.

Ambolo told ABC Australia that besides losing his family, he doesn’t own as much as a pot, a blanket, or a mattress. Everything he had is covered in boulders, trees, and dirt—and he’s wearing borrowed clothes.

For now, sixteen-hundred displaced people live in tents surrounding the landslide. Nations like the United States, Australia, Japan, and India have sent aid. But some long-term workers say the needs run deeper and will take longer to heal than the immediate effects of the disaster.

BOYD: There’s a lot of trauma. Nearly every person in Enga has gone through trauma.

Adam Boyd advises the translation team that’s been working for 12 years on a new translation of the Bible into Engan. With 370,000 speakers, it’s the largest language group in Papua New Guinea. Local pastors say they regularly deal with the effects of domestic violence and tribal fighting. Boyd and his family live in Imi, an Engan village of what used to be known as the worst tribe.

BOYD: We see the Gospel bearing fruit in the village where we’ve lived, and it’s our hope that that will be replicated in other villages, as well as people gain a deeper understanding of Scripture in their own language.

His team has just returned from dedicating the New Testament in four villages. One of them was less than two miles away from the landslide in Yambali.

BOYD: We had planned to do a mini-dedication in Mulitaka, in the landslide area, on July 11. We had planned that before the landslide happened. After the landslide happened, that complicated matters significantly.

They finally arrived at the end of July to distribute printed and recorded translations of the New Testament.

BOYD: It's hard to focus on dedicating an Enga New Testament when there's so many other things going on, when there's relief agencies, when people are scrambling to figure out, you know, how they're going to transport goods across the highway, now that the highway has basically become a mass burial site, the highway’s being rerouted. You know, people are distracted.

Even with the threat of another landslide in Yambali, Boyd is confident that God’s Word can bring a strong foundation for the Engan people.

BOYD: It's a huge need, to help people see how what Jesus tells us in the New Testament, what we hear from the apostles, how those words can help us deal with the trauma and allow the Holy Spirit to bring about healing.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Amy Lewis.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 7th, 2024. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Next up, WORLD Commentator Janie B. Cheaney on a misplaced political insult from Kamala Harris’s new running mate.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: It appears the Democratic 2024 campaign has settled on a word for their opponents: weird. Republicans are weird people with weird ideas and weird positions. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s newly-minted running mate, boosted himself to national attention a few weeks ago by using it over and over: “These guys” he said “are just plain weird.”

We may as well admit that Donald Trump is weird, in that he doesn’t fit the traditional mold. But the spark that lit this bushfire was a throwaway comment by J. D. Vance in a 4-minute interview with Tucker Carlson, three years ago. Vance was running for Ohio Senator at the time, and Carlson was intrigued by a speech he had made on July 23, 2021, in which Vance claimed that childless leaders on the left lacked “physical commitment to the future of this country.” That is, an overcommitment to individual freedom vs. family has resulted in an obsessive focus on the here-and-now, to the detriment of the longer term.

To Tucker, Vance explained that “What I was basically saying is that we’re in effect run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and the choices they made, and they want to make the rest of America miserable too.” After naming names (Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandia Ocasio-Cortes), he added, “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” Just asking, he said, but perhaps if he’d known he’d be running for Vice President in three short years he would have asked more diplomatically.

Donald Trump almost never asks anything diplomatically, but we all know that about him. Vance has yet to define himself, and the opposition is making sure that this one clip says everything voters need to know about him. “Childless cat ladies” is going to be hanging over him for the entire campaign, rather than the point he was trying to make. Which is, children literally are the future. How can a commitment to nontraditional marriages, radical individualism, and abortion on demand—none of which are friendly to childbearing and child raising—ensure a stable future?

Last year the American fertility rate was 1.62, the lowest on record and well below replacement level. The Biden administration advocates fertility-damaging transgender treatments to children nationwide. DINKs, or Double-Income, No Kids couples, are overwhelmingly leftwing, and single women are a major voting bloc of the Democrat party. And when the public is polled about which party is stronger on a given issue, the widest margin for Democrats is almost always abortion—which, since its legalization, has wiped out a significant percentage of subsequent generations. Sociologists are predicting demographic catastrophe, and one high-profile politician is getting buried for even talking about it.

That’s just . . . weird.

I’m J. B. Cheaney.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: new Title IX changes are on hold in many states as schools and parent groups sue the Biden Administration. We’ll hear from a leader of one of those groups. And a cook finds a new calling while completing mandated community service. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler.

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 Psalmist writes: “I will bless the LORD at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the LORD; let the humble hear and be glad. Oh, magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together!” – Psalm 34:1 - 3

Go now in grace and peace.

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