The World and Everything in It: March 4, 2026

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Good morning!

The policy and politics of the war with Iran.

JOHNSON: It's defensive in nature and in design and in necessity.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Washington Wednesday with Hunter Baker.

And Nepal holds elections, after the overthrow of the Prime Minister.

And a martyr’s story, told for a new generation.

YOCUM: It makes you evaluate your own life… and realize, you know, I can do more

And WORLD Commentator Janie B. Cheaney on the value of an analog education.

MAST: It’s Wednesday, March 4th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

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

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

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Iran: Adm. Cooper update » The Pentagon says the U.S. military, along with the Israelis, have largely devastated Iran’s Navy and Air Force, among other things.

Admiral Brad Cooper with U.S. Central Command said U.S. forces have struck more than 2,000 targets.

COOPER:  We have severely degraded Iran's air defenses and destroyed hundreds of Iran's ballistic missiles, launchers, and drones. And in simple terms, we're focused on shooting all the things that can shoot at us.

Cooper added that–his words, “thus far we have destroyed 17 Iranian ships, including the most operational Iranian submarine that now has a hole in its side

COOPER: For decades, the Iranian regime has harassed international shipping today. There's not a single Iranian ship underway in the Arabian Gulf, straight of Horus or Gulf of Oman, and we will not stop.

And he said that in retaliation, the Iranian regime has launched “over 500 ballistic missiles and over 2000 drones”, firing them off “largely indiscriminately” at targets all over the region.

Iran: Rubio, Trump update » One of those retaliatory strikes included a drone attack against the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia.

Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisors Marco Rubio:

RUBIO:  A drone unfortunately struck a parking lot adjacent to the, to the, uh, chancellery building and then set off a fire in that place. All personnel are accounted for.

And he again stated the case for taking this action at this time. He said President Trump acted on the timeline that provided the greatest odds of success.

RUBIO:  You're seeing it play out right now, and you'll see it in the days to come. We will systematically take apart their missile program. We will destroy their ability to sponsor terrorism, by the way. We will destroy their factories. We will destroy their navy.

Rubio on Tuesday briefed Congress about the military action in Iran.

Democratic leaders continue to claim that the president acted unlawfully, by ordering the military action without seeking approval from Congress. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

JEFFRIES:  And it's now the Congress's responsibility to go on record because Donald Trump has unconstitutionally and illegally chosen to launch a war.

The administration says that is not so, that it is in full compliance with the War Powers Act, which gives the president this authority.

Israeli airstrikes in Beirut, ground operation » Elsewhere in the Middle East:

SOUND: [Sidon attack]

..Israel hit the Lebanese port city of Sidon yesterday. The Israeli military said it was targeting members of the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah.

As of Tuesday night, no word on any casualties.

NETANYAHU: [Speaking Hebrew]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heard here warning the Lebanese government and people that Hezbollah is dragging them into war over the weekend death of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, something Netanyahu says has nothing to do with them.

Noem testimony » On Capitol Hill, members of a Senate panel grilled Homeland Security Sec. Kristi Noem for more than 4 hours – sparring with her and one another on immigration enforcement. WORLD’s Harrison Watters has more.

HARRISON WATTERS: In one fiery exchange GOP Senator Thom Tillis noted that President Trump placed border Czar Tom Homan in charge of operations in Minnesota in January. That came after a pair of fatal shootings involving federal agents souring public perception of immigration enforcement.

TILLIS: Who does Tom Holman work for? You or the president?

NOEM: The president.

TILLIS: Okay. Why is that? Because I believe the president recognized that you weren't getting it done in Minneapolis. And you're putting us further away from pointing to this. We're beginning to get the American people to think that deporting people is wrong. It's the exact opposite. The way you're going about deporting them is wrong.

WATTERS: Noem defended ICE operations, and while she expressed regret for protestor deaths, she did not apologize for them.

She also called out Democrats for blocking funding to the rest of DHS in their efforts to extract reforms.

NOEM: More than 100,000 dedicated DHS employees are once again being asked to work without pay for the third time in just five months.

WATTERS: Members of both parties questioned Noem about multimillion dollar spending on advertising and stalled FEMA payments.

Secretary Noem will testify to lawmakers at the other end of the Capitol later this morning.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Harrison Watters.

Texas bar shooter investigation » The FBI says it’s investigating a deadly weekend assault in Texas as a potential act of terrorism.

A gunman killed three people and injured at least a dozen others when he opened fire on a bar in Austin.

Authorities say the suspect fired the first shots from his SUV at people on the sidewalk and inside the bar, before getting out of the vehicle and firing on others.

Police fatally shot him at the scene.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said there are plenty of clues regarding his motivation.

CORNYN:  The things like the sweatshirt he was wearing and the T-shirt underneath with the Iranian flag on it sure seems to point to a radicalized, uh, individual.

The suspect, 53-year-old Ndiaga Diagne reportedly first came to the U.S. from Senegal in 2000 . and became a naturalized citizen in 2013.

Primary votes » Voters went to the polls in primary elections in several states on Tuesday.

Former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and ex-Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley have won their respective party nominations for a North Carolina U.S. Senate seat.

But when the clock struck midnight, a big race in Texas was still too close to call. Incumbent GOP Sen. John Cornyn is trying to fend off a challenge by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Washington Wednesday with Hunter Baker. Plus, remembering a modern day martyr in Pakistan.

This is The World and Everything in It.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 4th of March.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

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

First up on The World and Everything in It.

Well, today the WORLD editorial team has gathered for a staff retreat, and so as we build today’s program, we’re doing it a good bit differently. Typically our team members work remotely. We’re a close team relationally, but we do work in different places around the country. But we are today in our retreat center.

We’ve got several friends—I can’t count exactly how many—but we have many, many people in the room. So welcome to you folks, and thanks for coming on out.

And so also in the room with us is Hunter Baker. He is a political scientist, he is a contributor to WORLD Opinions, and he’s our regular Washington Wednesday analyst. Good morning to you, Hunter.

BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well clearly, Hunter, the story of this week—and I think as we expect it to be likely subsequent weeks—is the war with Iran. So let’s get right to the intersection of American politics and global foreign policy.

I would frame up the first part here of the conversation like this: Hunter, as you see it, what kind of risk is President Trump taking here politically with this war with Iran?

BAKER: He’s taking an immense risk.

You may remember—I certainly do—I remember being in college at the time of the first Gulf War, and George H. W. Bush came on broadcast to the entire nation. Those of us here may remember what Bush said: “This will not be another Vietnam.” That was reminding everybody.

And of course that was a relatively short engagement that we completed and walked on from. But then we had the second Gulf War, which was an entirely different situation altogether.

We spent multiple trillions of dollars on that affair, several years, and many American lives lost. So as Donald Trump approaches this engagement with Iran, people are going to be having similar questions.

They’re going to be wondering: Is this going to be something that happens quickly, as he seems to have promised, or is it going to drag on and consume a great deal of American blood and treasure?

EICHER: Do you have a good definition for what “drag on” actually means? We heard him say just a couple of days ago that it could go four to five weeks, maybe a little bit longer than that. What do you think, just as a political scientist, the American people’s tolerance for a dragged-on war would be?

BAKER: I think not a lot more than that.

The thing that people are really going to be watching is this question of whether we commit American troops. Nobody—and I mean nobody—I think wants to see large numbers of American troops in the Middle East again.

So the fear is that he’ll be unable to achieve the kind of political result that he wants in Iran and will have to move into a kind of occupation mode.

MAST: Well Hunter, it’s a midterm election year. Let’s assume that the war goes well, however that’s defined.

Do you see the president’s party—and we have to emphasize that of course the president’s not on the ballot—but do Republicans generally benefit from a Trump success on the battlefield?

And then look at the same question, if you would, assuming that the war goes badly.

BAKER: There’s an expression that many of us will remember. People who are younger won’t, but this expression was: “Partisanship ends at the water’s edge.”

I don’t know if people remember that.

EICHER: I think a lot of people have forgotten it.

BAKER: That used to be a common statement of American foreign policy. We are in a totally different era now, which is really, really bad for the country. Our political culture has suffered somewhat since that time.

The ideal situation would be that Republican and Democratic legislators would be sitting in some sort of Socratic stance, evaluating the arguments for and against. I’m afraid that is just not the situation.

EICHER: Let me ask you this. Do you think that Iran is different from, let’s say, an Afghanistan or an Iraq?

We’ve got some history there. The Iranians in 1979 overran our embassy and took American hostages for 444 days. I’m old enough to remember this stuff.

Does that change the calculus at all with a known bad guy who’s been a bad guy for that long?

BAKER: What I would say about Iran is that Iran is in many ways a more frightening adversary.

The reason I would say that is that we saw their determination with the revolution in 1979 and taking American prisoners. But if you look at our own War on Terror, Iran cooperated with us in a few places.

Generally speaking, what they did during the War on Terror was try to make America miserable. They tried to cost us a lot of lives and cost us a lot of money—not because they loved Iraq, for instance—but because they wanted to make sure the Americans did not establish a long-term presence in the Middle East.

They did all that they could to hurt America during that time, and they were pretty effective in doing so.

To tie back to the political question, they understand that American involvement in foreign countries is subject to the political debate within our country. So if you can increase the cost in lives, money, and sheer human suffering, then you can reduce American commitment.

EICHER: When we talk about Iran outlasting or making calculations, a lot of them are dead. Who are we talking about? Who’s doing this calculation?

BAKER: Great question. ​​We have engaged in what is called a decapitation attack, in which we have removed a significant portion of the leadership of the Iranian regime.

But what needs to be understood is this is a highly ideological state, and they have supposedly tried to duplicate that leadership four levels down and at the same kind of level of determination.

MAST: Okay Hunter, I want to know: How does a conflict like this, a war like this, fit or conflict with the “no forever wars” brand that helped define the president’s movement?

BAKER: I think there’s no question that the only way that you get to a Donald Trump presidency is with the failure in the Middle East with the War on Terror—kind of that loss of American prestige and confidence.

Certainly it’s on the Republican Party, and certainly its impact on the Republican Party led to the kind of sea change that you saw in the Republican Party in 2016.

So Donald Trump has a lot riding on that reputation as somebody who can be successful and somebody who won’t get caught up in what J.D. Vance calls a stupid war.

Really what Trump has to do is avoid falling into that same kind of trap that engulfed the last Bush administration.

MAST: Hunter, the war has raised concerns over possible terror attacks here at home, especially during a government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.

So far we have heard of at least one suspected attack that took place in Austin, Texas.

In a Senate Homeland Security oversight hearing, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham also connected the dots.

GRAHAM: I wonder how many people like that are waiting to pounce and D.H.S. doesn’t have appropriated funds. This is insane!

How do you see this affecting the DHS funding debate? Does it change the calculus on holding up funding if you’re a Democrat?

BAKER: This gets back to what I was talking about with the ideal of the Socratic legislator.

If you were just dealing from a stance of pure reason, you would say: We’ve engaged in hostilities with Iran. Iran is a major sponsor of terror. Now is exactly the wrong time to have a shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security.

So maybe you pull back on your strategy.

I can absolutely understand why Democrats were using this point of leverage and trying to get the changes that they wanted in ICE. But the calculus has changed, and now we need the Department of Homeland Security operating at its very best. It’s the wrong kind of strategy to be pursuing now.

Nevertheless, I think that currently they’re still going that direction.

EICHER: I expect the mainstream media will be all over that, right?

BAKER: They should be. They should be.

Honestly this is where good journalists should be saying we cannot be engaged in effectively a war with the number one sponsor of terror in the world and not have our Department of Homeland Security operating.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is provost at North Greenville University.

Thanks for coming all this way to be with us. Let’s thank Hunter Baker for Washington Wednesday.

BAKER: Thank you.

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

Nepal is electing new leaders today after deadly protests six months ago culminated with the resignation of the Prime Minister.

Citizens want a new start for the country, but change may be slow to come. WORLD’s Mary Muncy has the story.

MARY MUNCY: Today, former Nepal Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is trying to get his job back.

Oli resigned in September after young Nepalese people organized several huge protests over government corruption. They turned violent, and police killed 19 protesters. Hundreds of others were injured.

Now, voters in the country of 30 million are deciding who will fill the 275 seats in the member assembly. Over 3000 people are running. Some other elections have seen tens of thousands of candidates.

Challenging the former Prime Minister are the Nepali Congress party’s Gagan Thapa, and Balendra Shah, who served most recently as the mayor of the capital city of Kathmandu.

SHAH: [Nepali] Our agenda is that the poor people who have no money in their pockets should get a full education. The poor people with empty pockets should get access to the health facilities.

Shah says he wants to help poor people get an education and healthcare. He also wants to focus on job and technology growth. About 20 percent of the population lives in poverty. Shah believes corruption in government is to blame.

Shah, at 35-years-old, is relatively young, and his party is relatively new.

And that may be what some voters want.

SHARMA: Nepali people have largely been accommodative of any new force.

Santosh Sharma Poudel is the co-founder of the Nepal Institute for Policy Research in Kathmandu. He says corruption has been a problem at all levels of government for decades and each new party brings new hope.

He says there’s currently high-level policy corruption—like officials changing electric vehicle policies to suit their business interests.

SHARMA: The bureaucrats or the politicians who barely had a good suit to start with when they started their political career now roam around in cars that cost millions.

There’s also low-level corruption that affects people at home— exorbitant fees to register a new baby or unexplained delays in building permits.

Sharma’s research institute did a survey of what Gen Z expects going forward.

SHARMA: We asked them, ‘What was the major issue that we are facing?’ Almost three quarters of them pointed at the political system, so they have very low trust on the institutions themselves.

Candidates in this election have been touting their plans for rebuilding trust in the government, but so far, it’s unclear exactly how they’re going to implement them.

Right now, there are a few new voting reforms in place—things like transparency rules for campaign donations. But the mechanisms for enforcement remain weak.

For today’s election, the country deployed 300,000 additional security troops. Sharma says that isn’t unheard of, and it's likely there will be attempts at election fraud.

SHARMA: But I don't expect it to happen to a level whereby the whole election result is contested.

Sharma says the system needs to be gutted and rebuilt, but worries voters’ attention span may be too short for that.

Nepal also sits between and trades with China and India. Both of those countries, along with the United States, see Nepal as a security concern.

With outside actors interested in the elections and the country’s future, there are some reports of those forces stirring unrest, and influencing Gen Z through social media. But Sharma thinks the country would have gotten here, regardless.

SHARMA: My response is, so the kind of frustration we are feeling were not real? Or the lack of economic growth we had for the last 30 years was not real? or the number of people living in Nepal seeking some livelihood in harsh conditions, that's not real?

Sharma blames leaders and the political structure. He says lasting change will take time.

At a rally for Shah, one young voter says she’s tired of the old leaders.

BHUJEL: [Nepali] We have seen enough of the old leaders, they say one thing and do another, and are deceptive by nature. Now, the youth should move beyond this mindset and bring some change, even if it cannot be drastic.

She says they are “deceptive by nature” and the youth should try to bring change… even if those changes aren’t “drastic.”

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That high-pitched squeak is as much a part of the soundtrack of basketball as the referee’s whistle.

Now scientists say they finally know the mechanics behind it.

Researchers at Harvard slid basketball shoes across glass under high-speed cameras.

What looked like a smooth glide was anything but.

DJELLOULI: Squeaking is basically your shoe rippling… creating wrinkles that travel super fast… and they repeat at a high frequency.

The rubber sole sticks, slips, and snaps forward thousands of times per second.

Tiny earthquakes — the same physics as shifting tectonic plates.

Only beneath a shoe.

Now that engineers understand the mechanism, they can design for it — or against it.

How would stealth sneakers change the game?

It’s The World and Everything in It.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, March 4th.

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

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

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

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Remembering a modern day martyr.

Shahbaz Bhatti was the federal minister for minorities affairs in Pakistan. By population it’s the 5th largest country in the world, and just 4% of the population is non-Muslim.

MAST: Bhatti was assassinated in March 2011 for his outspoken opposition to Pakistan's blasphemy laws and his advocacy for religious minorities. The new graphic novel, Blood and Water, depicts his life and how his faith inspired him to fight for religious minorities.

Joining us now is the book's co-author Matt Yocum and its creator Knox Thames.

Matt, Knox, good morning.

MATT YOCUM: Good morning.

KNOX THAMES: Thank you so much.

MAST: As I mentioned a moment ago, this book is a graphic novel. What made you choose that format for this story?

THAMES: I've been in policy spaces for over 20 years looking for ways to advance religious freedom internationally here in Washington, D.C. But I've got two boys who are teenagers and while I write a lot of articles, they don't usually read them. But I saw when they were younger how The Action Bible—the Bible in sort of graphic comic style—was so captivating for them. And so when this opportunity came up to remember my friend on this 15th anniversary, this idea of graphic novel was presented and I thought, what a fantastic way to reach young people about this compelling story that challenges them and really all of us to think about how we can advocate for those who are suffering for their beliefs..

MAST: How did you know that Bhatti’s commitment to religious freedom was more than just political?

THAMES: Yeah, the last time I saw him was in February 2011 when he was here for the National Prayer Breakfast and the death threats were piling up. A month before, one of his allies—the Muslim governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer—was assassinated by his bodyguard because he was also speaking up against the blasphemy law. So this was clearly a life or death situation. And he talked about how his commitment to Jesus Christ gave him courage, it gave him hope, and it gave him the commitment to see this through. And there's this haunting video taken days after he left here where he explains it. And that's one of the last scenes in the graphic novel. It was just this powerful testimony of someone who gave it all to Jesus. You just don't meet people like that very often in life. Such a powerful example of what it means to really live a sacrificial life.

MAST: Matt, I'll direct this to you as the author of the book. Tell me a little bit about what, tell me a little bit about the decisions that you made as you were trying to weave in the faith component into each chapter of the novel.

YOCUM: Right. As Knox mentioned, his life really was exemplified by a boldness for his faith and a compassion for the destitute, the lost, the poor. And so it was very obvious even to his own family that Shahbaz was different as a young person. He saw the people who are unseen and he had a heart for them so early in life and even remembers the moment after a Good Friday service that he had decided

as a 13 year old, what he was going to dedicate his life to. So it was easy to show what was inspiring him and then how he began to enact that as his calling in life. And all the way from early in his life through his years in college, and then his advocacy organizations that he created until finally being invited to be a minister in the government representing the minorities until the day he died.

MAST: Knox, what do you think that Shahbaz Bhatti would make of the situation for religious minorities in Pakistan where he's still alive today?

THAMES: You know, at one level he'd be heartbroken, but then he'd also be motivated to work even harder. Pakistan has never been an easy place for religious minorities. It wasn't then, it isn't now. But he was starting to make a difference. He was seeing laws change. He was seeing new policies implemented that were starting to create more breathing room for religious minorities, starting to ensure that their place in Pakistani society rose up a notch or two. And he was starting a process that was questioning whether or not this blasphemy law that they have, which is the worst version of any country in the world, should remain as it is. And it was because of that success that the forces of darkness came after him. So he'd be busy. He'd be working the telephones, he'd be finding ways to advocate for the least of these, to speak up for the oppressed. And to push back against this tidal wave of persecution that risks drowning his entire country.

MAST: Matt, I'll direct this last question at you as the author. What was it about either the process of working on the book or the story itself that bolstered your faith?

YOCUM: Yeah, I think when I got into the details, you realized very quickly there's more, there's more details and incidents and episodes that he was involved in than you even had time to tell. And I think that seeing how deeply his life was invested in living out his faith was extremely inspiring. And it makes you evaluate your own life, to be honest with you, and realize, you know, I can do more. For someone to be this bold and this compassionate and to have discovered his purpose and lived it with everything that he had. It is inspirational. It was part of the reason that we wanted this to be aimed at a younger audience to serve as an inspiration. To not end as a gravestone. But you know, this is not intended to be the end of the story, but the beginning of an inspiration for the younger generation. And it certainly did that for me.

MAST: Matt Yocum and Knox Thames, co-author and creator of the graphic novel Blood and Water: The Life and Martyrdom of Shahbaz Bhatti. Thank you so much.

THAMES: Thank you.

YOCUM: Thanks, Lindsay.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. When it comes to education, the delivery method of information matters. WORLD’s Janie B. Cheaney says that after several decades, the great digital school experiment may be waning.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: I hate to say I told you so  . .

But I was not the only one. When school districts began purchasing laptops for all their students – and you can be sure Apple and Microsoft were right there offering sweet deals – I thought it was a bad idea. So did many others, even though the digital revolution was still relatively new and hopes for the Information Superhighway were high.

It still amazes me to have all the answers stored in a pocket device. How many arguments have you settled with a “Hey Google”? I’m old enough to remember the cumbersome databases I could only access at the library. And before that, the card catalogue! So thanks, IT: I couldn’t do my job without you.

But the developing brain of a 12-year-old is another matter. Maine was the first to adopt a statewide laptop program for 7th-graders in 2002, to be expanded over time. Fifteen years later Fortune Magazine reported that student test scores in Maine had not improved. By then school districts across the country had sunk millions into computer labs, Chromebooks, and iPads.

Now, almost a quarter-century after the experiment began, what’s the result? In testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, neuroscientist Jared Horvath had some bad news.

HORVATH: So a sad fact our generation has to face is this: our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. Since we've been standardizing and measuring cognitive development since the late 1800s, every generation has outperformed their parents . . .

But, Horvath went on to say,

HORVATH: Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to underperform us on basically every cognitive measure we have, from basic attention to memory to literacy to numeracy to executive functioning to even general IQ, even though they go through more school than we did.

In a written report to the same committee Horvath clarified,

HORVATH: This is not a debate about rejecting technology. It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works.

Exactly – but how does human learning actually work?

Every world-changing advance leads to corresponding ideas about the human mind. With the development of writing, and later printing, came philosophical speculation about the mind as a blank slate. The scientific revolution raised questions about the mind/body problem, which the industrial revolution answered by imagining the brain as a sophisticated machine. Today, our brains are seen as computers, processing information in basic binary code. So shouldn’t computer learning be compatible?

Apparently not. The mind remains a mystery, but children should be well understood by now. We know what comes naturally to them and what doesn’t, and discipline and focus do not. Once children grasp the ability to interpret symbols on a page as words, and transfer words into meaning, they can go from strength to strength – as long as they’re allowed to take their time and develop their comprehension skills without distraction. But distraction is the primary temptation of a digital screen.

Pushback may be coming. At least 35 states have signed or already enacted laws that ban the use of cell phones in class – an obvious, and overdue, first step. In Missouri, State Representative Tricia Byrnes has introduced House Bill 2230, which restricts the use of tech in the classroom through grade 5 and mandates cursive writing, with a pencil, on paper.

BYRNES: I just want people to come around the table and say, ‘hey, hold up. We all jumped on board with this, and nobody had any science. I mean, we beta tested on the kids.

Byrnes’ bill is currently in the Rules Committee and will soon head for the floor. May it pass, and others like it. This beta testing on young brains needs to end.

For WORLD, I’m Janie B. Cheaney

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Tomorrow: The government invites Americans to help in its war on fraud. And, how to talk to kids about sex, gender, and God’s good design. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Lindsay Mast.

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

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: “But I will sing of your strength; I will sing aloud of your steadfast love in the morning. For you have been to me a fortress and a refuge in the day of my distress. O my Strength, I will sing praises to you, for you, O God, are my fortress, the God who shows me steadfast love.” —Psalm 59:16-17

Go now in grace and peace.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.