The World and Everything in It — November 14, 2019

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! 

The price of insulin keeps rising. We’ll talk about the reasons for that and what to do about it.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Also immigration reform and biblical values. A coalition of Evangelical leaders tries to bring resolution to the debate.  

Plus, we’ll hear about an Illinois town that came together in the aftermath of a tornado.

NEWS COVERAGE: Reality is setting in for the people of Washington, many of whom lost everything.

And Cal Thomas on the value of a little humility in leaders.

REICHARD: It’s Thursday, November 14th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

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

REICHARD: Up next, Kent Covington has the news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Public impeachment hearings officially begin » SCHIFF: The committee will come to order. [gavel strike] Good morning everyone. 

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff gaveled in Wednesday’s impeachment hearing—this time with TV cameras in the room. In his opening statement, Schiff said Congress must determine if the president abused his power and invited foreign interference in a U.S. election. 

SCHIFF: Whether President Trump sought to condition official acts, such as a White House meeting or U.S. military assistance, on Ukraine’s willingness to assist with two political investigations that would help his reelection campaign. 

Democrats called two witnesses: Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent and Acting Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor. Both had already testified privately. But on Wednesday, Taylor provided new information he said he just learned last week. 

He testified that someone on his staff told him about overhearing a July phone call between U.S. Ambassador to the UN Gordon Sondland and the president. 

TAYLOR: The member of my staff could hear President Trump on the phone asking Ambassador Sondland about the investigations. Ambassador Sondland told President Trump the Ukranians were ready to move forward. 

He said Sondland then told his staffer that Trump’s primary concern with regard to Ukraine was an investigation of the Bidens. Taylor had already testified privately that it was his “clear understanding” the White House wouldn’t release military aid to Ukraine unless it publicly committed to a corruption probe. Republicans called Taylor’s testimony hearsay, noting that he had no firsthand knowledge of a quid pro quo. 

And Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan pressed Taylor, pointing out that Ukraine got the aid without such a commitment. 

JORDAN: The whole point was you had a clear understanding that aid will not get released unless there is a commitment. You used clear language, clear understanding and commitment. And those two things didn’t happen, so you had to be wrong. 

Democrats say Wednesday’s testimony reaffirms the need for the inquiry. 

Trump hosts Turkish president at White House » Meantime, at the White House, President Trump met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Oval Office, despite bipartisan complaints. Lawmakers had urged him to rescind his invitation to Erdogan over Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria and the country’s decision to buy Russian-made missile systems. President Trump told reporters… 

TRUMP: Turkey’s acquisition of sophisticated Russian military equipment, such as the S-400, creates some very serious challenges for us, and we are talking about it.  

Trump said the ceasefire in northern Syria is holding—despite reports that the fighting there between Turkish and Kurdish forces never actually stopped.

As for the impeachment hearings, the president said he’s too busy to watch. He again called the process a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.”

Many students fleeing Hong Kong amid unrest » Many students in Hong Kong are leaving the city—fearing for their safety amid sometimes-violent protests and police crackdowns. WORLD Radio’s Kristen Flavin has more. 

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: University students from mainland China and Taiwan are fleeing Hong Kong and those from three Scandinavian countries have been urged to leave. 

That as college campuses become the latest battleground in the city’s anti-government unrest. 

Police raided the Chinese University of Hong Kong late Tuesday. They claimed suspected demonstrators used it as a base to make gasoline bombs. 

Protesters blocked roads around the university after violent clashes with police. Authorities then used a boat to help a group of mainland students leave the campus when they were unable to drive out.

Education officials announced that primary and secondary school classes would be suspended today amid the unrest. 

Reporting for WORLD Radio, I’m Kristen Flavin. 

Lawmaker assumes interim presidency in Bolivia » Bolivia has a new interim president—just a few days after former President Evo Morales resigned amid national protests. 

Lawmaker Jeanine Añez claimed the South American country’s top job after higher-ranking successors also resigned. She has promised to hold a new election within 90 days. 

MORALES: [Speaking in Spanish]

But not everyone is ready to recognize Añez as the rightful leader. Morales spoke to reporters from Mexico on Wednesday, where he’s accepted political asylum and claimed once more that he was the victim of a coup. And his supporters continue to protest against Añez in the streets of Bolivia. 

Car bomb kills at least 12 in Afghanistan » At least 12 people are dead in Afghanistan after a car bomb tore through a city street during morning rush hour. WORLD Radio’s Anna Johansen has that story. 

ANNA JOHANSEN, REPORTER: Commuters packed a busy street in Kabul Wednesday when the car bomb exploded, sending shrapnel flying as flames and smoke filled the air. 

The bomb appeared to target a private security company’s convoy. But the blast also killed bystanders—including a 12-year-old girl and her 7-year old brother, who were walking to school with their father. 

Twenty other people sustained injuries, including four of the company’s foreign staff.

No one immediately claimed responsibility, but both the Taliban and ISIS are active in the Afghan capital and have claimed many previous attacks in the city.

Reporting for WORLD Radio, I’m Anna Johansen.

COVINGTON: I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: the drug pricing formula driving up the cost of insulin. Plus, putting a community back together after a tornado tears it apart. This is The World and Everything in It.

MEGAN BASHAM: It’s Thursday, the 14th of November, 2019. You’re listening to The World and Everything in It, and we’re glad you are! Good morning, I’m Megan Basham.

MARY REICHARD: And I’m Mary Reichard. First up, the price of insulin.

A decade ago, the two most popular forms of insulin cost about $100 a vial. Today, the same insulin costs nearly three times as much.  That means some people who need insulin can’t afford it.

BASHAM: For people with diabetes that’s a big problem. Diabetics need insulin to survive. 

Reports of diabetics dying because they can’t afford insulin has lawmakers trying to force drug companies to drop prices.

WORLD Radio’s Leigh Jones reports now on what caused the increase and efforts to roll it back.

LEIGH JONES, REPORTER: Doctors diagnosed Jon Yates with diabetes when he was 16 years old. Right away he discovered that managing his glucose levels could be tricky.

YATES: I became very good at mathematics and learning mental math because there’s a lot of counting involved, looking at carbohydrates and things to that effect to make sure that I’m delivering the right amount of insulin to myself.

After years of doing all that math, Yates had his system down pat. But four years ago he switched insurance companies. And the insulin he’d been using all his life suddenly shot up in price.

YATES: To get NovoLog, I basically would have had to pay for the vast majority of that out of pocket, on my own. And that was something that I wasn’t obviously willing to accept because that becomes quite costly.

To keep using NovoLog, Yates would have had to pay about $2,000 for a 90-day supply. If he switched to Humalog, he would only pay about $90.

Why such a dramatic difference? Negotiated discounts.

Here’s how drug pricing works. Pharmaceutical companies set the list price. Then insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers negotiate discounts based on how much of a drug they think their customers will buy. The actual cost paid by patients like Jon Yates depends on how good their insurance companies are at negotiating discounts.

AXELSEN: Over time if you look at the net price of insulin, so like the net price after discounts, many have gone down or have gone up far less than what the list price is.

Kirsten Axelsen is a policy analyst and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She says that while the discounted price has remained relatively steady, the list price has continued to rise.

AXELSEN: What happens is the drug companies raise the list price then they give the discount back to the health plans to get the formulary access. For the health plans that’s a win because they can use that discount either to reduce the copay on the insulin or to reduce the premium or to reduce the copay of something else. So it gives them maximum flexibility with what to do with that revenue.

That increasing list price spiral isn’t new. But it never used to be a problem.

AXELSEN: Cause it used to be that people rarely ever experienced that list price. Most people had insurance and only the cash payers, but now you have a large number of insured people experiencing that list price of their drug because they have a high deductible or they have co-insurance.

And for many of those people, the list price is unaffordable.

Last month, Congresswoman Diana DeGette of Colorado introduced a bill that would roll back insulin prices to what they were in 2006. It would interrupt the price spiral by ending drug company rebates to insurers. And it would require insurers to fully cover any insulin priced at the 2006 levels.

But Kirsten Axelsen says that might actually raise the price most patients pay.

AXELSEN: If you were to just drop the price of the insulin, you don’t have the ability or the leverage then to negotiate a discount for the lower copay for the patient.

Given the other issues occupying Congress at the moment, DeGette’s bill seems unlikely to get passed any time soon. Other bills designed to reform drug pricing across the board will probably also remain sidelined until after the 2020 election.

Until then, doctors and pharmacists are coming up with creative solutions to help the patients who need it.

Andrew Straw is a pharmacist and pharmacology professor at Cedarville University. He says 85 to 90 percent of the patients he works with have no trouble getting their medication at an affordable cost. For the others, he has a checklist of options.

As a last resort, he recommends switching to older, less expensive forms of insulin.

STRAW: But they do have different properties so they have different durations. They require different administration timings and just a little bit different approach in their administration, and then when you’re eating based on that. So it’s different than our ultra rapid acting in our long acting that we use for a lot of patients.

And making a switch like that isn’t without challenges.

When Jon Yates moved from NovoLog to Humalog, he had to completely rethink his mealtime math.

YATES: I had to basically be much more conscious upfront about the type of food that I was about to eat determine what that was and then basically socialize for about five minutes before I actually began to consume my food. So there was definitely some struggles and transitions that I had to go through in that process.

Reporting for WORLD Radio, I’m Leigh Jones.

MEGAN BASHAM: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: immigration reform.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in the fight over DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. President Obama enacted the program via executive order in 2012. President Trump rescinded it five years later in 2017. 

And that was the last major effort to change the nation’s immigration policies.

MARY REICHARD: But Christians haven’t forgotten about the plight of immigrants and their families. The Evangelical Immigration Table is a broad coalition of evangelical organizations and leaders. Its goal is to advocate for immigration reform consistent with Biblical values. 

Last week it issued an open statement urging lawmakers to resume the debate over reform and consider adopting what’s called ‘restitution-based changes.’

Danny Akin is president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He signed the statement and joins us now to talk about it.

Good morning!

DANNY AKIN, GUEST: How are you doing, Mary?

REICHARD: Thanks for coming on the program. Well, let’s start with the proposal that you all are advocating. What is restitution-based reform?

AKIN: Well, it’s trying to approach the issue of our immigration problem in a way that is grounded in biblical principles—all those that are affirming it, evangelical Christians. Secondly, we want to honor both the rule of law and we’re definitely advocates of safe and secure borders. At the same time, we want to have—if at all possible—a pathway to citizenship that is reasonable but also fair and doable. And I think that what we’ve laid out, especially in the five principles that flow out of our objective, that it allows for this. And so you put all that together and I do think that it’s very frustrating to see the roadblock—the stalemate is actually a better word—between the Democrats and Republicans. Seems to me that what we’re proposing could be attractive across the aisle to both parties and I wish they would at least give it a good long and hard look.

REICHARD: I want to get to brass tacks exactly what you mean by restitution-based reform. That’s not immediately apparent what it means.

AKIN: Well, in the statement that we issued, we’re talking about the fact that we recognize, one, that what they did was a violation of the law that they admit to. And then secondly, there are imposed fines and penalties that would be paid by immigrants but that would be done, one, in a reasonable period of time. We’re talking about somewhere up to maybe seven years. And, secondly, it would be what they could reasonably achieve and be able to do. And, again, we’re looking at people that have not committed violent crimes. We’re talking about people that are working, they’re contributing to our tax-base. And so, again, as a Christian, I believe in upholding the law and I believe in honoring the government and at the same time, I want to operate with a heart of compassion and grace. And so I’m not in favor of open borders at all, but I’m not a hardliner either. I don’t see immigration as a great threat to our nation especially if it’s done reasonably and legally, that continues to also advocate for safe and secure borders. And I want all of that. And I’m not convinced it can’t be done.

REICHARD: Immigration seems like it’s always in the headlines, but there’s no real immigration plan on the table right now in Congress. Why issue this statement now?

AKIN: Well, we have an election year coming up and so no doubt things are going to be hot and heavy in this regard over the next 12 months. To get this out on the table now then allows persons, whether it be as representatives, senators, or the president, to position themselves on what they would like to see us do in the future. And, again, Mary, I’m equally frustrated with Democrats and Republicans over this. I was talking with a good friend, Al Mohler, a couple of weeks ago and this is a political football that gets kicked back and forth. And I would just argue, again, yeah, we ultimately have to leave the fine details to our government officials, but again, if you can follow or you buy into the guidelines and the principles that we put forth, I think this does provide a way for us to move the ball.

REICHARD: Do you think evangelicals are more or less united on immigration matters than they were a few years ago?

AKIN: I know this, I’m a member of the Southern Baptist Convention and we have put forth a couple of resolutions in the last five to seven years that would be thoroughly consistent with the principles set forth by the Evangelical Round Table. So I think when it comes to our heart, most evangelicals want to see something like this particular idea pushed forward and set forth. There are some, I realize, that are a little harder but I think, to be honest with you, most evangelicals would like to see something done here and not see this stalemate continue.

REICHARD: I’m curious about what you hope to achieve with this statement. Do you think a statement like this can really make a difference, given the gridlock over immigration?

AKIN: I am pessimistic but hopeful and as a follower of Jesus Christ, I’m always hopeful. And for me morally, I believe—and biblically—this is just the right thing for us to do and, therefore, I’ll keep beating my head against the concrete wall until hopefully, eventually it begins to crumble and crack and who knows what the Lord might do on the other side.

REICHARD: Danny Akin is president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a member of the Evangelical Immigration Table. Thanks so much for joining us today!

AKIN: Thank you, Mary. Honored to do so.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: As the people of Germany learned 30 years ago when the Berlin Wall fell—freedom tastes pretty sweet.

AUDIO: [Sound of hitting wall]

That is the sound of freedom lovers knocking chunks of wall to the ground right before eating them. 

You heard right. They ate chunks of the wall! 

Just not the actual Berlin Wall. This was a scaled down replica made of chocolate. 

A French chocolatier created a wall out of 440 pounds of chocolate! Patrick Roger and some helpers carefully crafted it to look like the real thing. Even down to the faux spray paint with the words “freedom” and, “I am a Berliner,” in German.

Roger and a few friends hammered the replica to the ground last weekend to celebrate the actual wall’s coming down in 1989.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MEGAN BASHAM: Today is Thursday, November 14th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to get started today. Good morning. I’m Megan Basham.

MARY REICHARD: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: when disaster brings out the best in us. 

Six years ago, devastating tornadoes ripped through the Midwest. Dozens of them. One with winds up to 190 miles per hour hit the town of Washington, Illinois, 135 miles southwest of Chicago. 

Minutes later, three people were dead, 125 suffered injuries. Six hundred homes, destroyed.

BASHAM: WORLD reporters Leah Hickman and Hannah Harris visited the town of 16,000. They talked to people who lived through it. Here’s Hannah with the story.

NEWS COVERAGE CLIP: Folks across Illinois and much of the Midwest woke up to a disaster zone this morning. The aftermath–unthinkable….

REPORTER: The tornado hit on a Sunday morning. 

NEWSCLIP: If you are in the path of this cell, now is the time to take cover…

Washington residents Dan and Carol Learned were at church when the sirens went off. As they emerged from the church basement, one of their kids received a text from a neighborhood friend:     

LEARNED: They texted, the whole Street’s gone. And we said, well, he can be a little dramatic sometimes. Yeah, he’s probably exaggerating. And it turned out he was quite correct.

The tornado tore open their roof and broke every window. Two-by-fours stuck through the walls. Furniture from the front room blew into the back yard. Carol Learned describes the scene:

LEARNED: It looked like a blender had gone through the house. Just everything’s broken and uh, just piles and piles of the insulation.

Matt Whitworth and his family live two minutes from the Learned’s. When the tornado hit, Whitworth was standing in his garage with his oldest son. His wife and youngest son were inside.

WHITWORTH: The next thing I knew is, I’m not like standing inside the house. My youngest or oldest son and I have actually been picked up and tossed basically in this area of the house, um, right in front of the basement door. Imagine this deafening sound and debris flying over and you’re just, you know, huddled down wondering what’s going to hit you next.

Debris cut Whitworth’s son in the back, narrowly missing his spine. When the storm passed, they took him to the hospital. Their damaged vehicles were unusable, but a stranger gave them the keys to his car. 

NEWS COVERAGE CLIP: Reality is setting in for the people of Washington, many of whom lost everything. The National Weather Service estimates the twister brought winds 170 to 190 miles per hour… 

When the Learneds arrived home, their friends were already there, waiting for them. 

LEARNED: There’s a guy, Dan works with every day still. So I see him all the time and he just put his arm around me and just like, let’s go in and look together. It’s kinda like maybe at a funeral, you never know what to say, but just your presence is a big deal.

Some of the best help the Learneds received was from friends who texted or called to say they’re praying for them. Other friends gave them gift cards, washed their clothes for them, or made them meals. 

WMBD 31 NEWS: And good evening everybody, I’m Bob Larson, and I’m Maria Chandler. Tornados touched down in Washington, Pekin, and East Peoria. The Red Cross has set up shelters at Crossroads United Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Methodists Church in Washington…

Local churches played an active role in helping newly homeless families like the Whitworths and Learneds. 

DAVIDSON: I think immediately after the all clear was done, our church knew we needed to act.

Ben Davidson is the associate pastor at Bethany Community Church. The congregation meets in a community center less than half a mile from the path of the tornado. Once the storm passed, they went into the neighborhoods and invited people in. Then they compiled lists of the destroyed houses and matched the newly homeless with church families whose houses were still standing. 

DAVIDSON: We couldn’t just drive by these devastated properties on our way to go do our ministries as usual. And so we suspended all of our ministries except for our Sunday morning ministry.

Bethany Community Church became a hub for volunteers from as far away as Florida and Alaska. They cleaned up lawns and provided yard supplies like shovels, rakes, and wheelbarrows. 

Other churches collected donations for the tornado victims. Karen Frey from Grace Presbyterian Church in Peoria helped organize what she calls a “free Walmart” in an empty storefront in town.

FREY: There were clothes that were donated immediately. There were toiletries, things like that,  that were donated. And just as that, emergency first step place to be able to come and get some of those life necessity things that people need to make it to the next day. One of the biggest things was laundry detergent just so that they could take care of their things that were there. You know, take it to a laundromat to, to get it washed and cleaned so that it’s their possessions and what they are familiar with. And to give them that normalcy.

Other donations were not so helpful. Frey says they received so much clothing that they couldn’t use it all. Dan Learned remembers how some donated just to get rid of unwanted belongings.

LEARNED: And then there were just funny stories of people who were like…Well, I got a bunch of junk from my garage I’m trying to get rid of. Where will I take it? And we’re like, did you just say that? I mean, that’s not how we help people in times of crisis. We give of our first fruits. 

Because the Learneds saw what helped them the most, they now know what to give others facing similar disasters. Dan and Carol recently helped with recovery efforts in another town by bringing gift cards to the families and helping dismantle a destroyed garage. Another go-to for them is cash donations. But they know from their own experience that the presence of friends is the biggest help. And that’s a resource not everyone has.  

LEARNED: We went through a minor problem and we had hundreds around us to help us. There are people around the world going through bigger problems without the world sweeping in like what we enjoyed.

For WORLD Radio, I’m Hannah Harris reporting from Washington, Illinois.

REICHARD: If you’d like to read more about this story, Leah Hickman’s written piece is featured in the November 23rd edition of WORLD Magazine.

MARY REICHARD: Coming up next, an excerpt from Listening In. This week, a conversation with Boz Tchividjian. He’s a former prosecutor and now advocates for abuse victims within the church. His ministry teaches the church how to properly respond to abuse.

MEGAN BASHAM: In this excerpt of their conversation, Tchividjian explains one of the reasons why it’s so hard for victims to come forward when the abuser is a leader in the church.

WARREN SMITH: It seems to me that there’s also another dynamic that is maybe unique to the church and that is a lot of these girls and women who are victims love the church. They love the people and they know that if they speak up, it’s like pulling the pin on a hand grenade in that church, it’s going to blow up the church. And they don’t want to do that either. 

BOZ TCHIVIDJIAN: There’s a tremendous amount of tension because oftentimes they have grown up in these environments where even though this man may be victimizing me. If I say something, it’s not just going to implode the church, but it’s going to destroy his career and his ministry. And it’s a really distorted way of looking at it, but going, wow, but look at all the people that God is saving through this man’s ministry.

And, they’ve been told repeatedly growing up, “don’t do anything to hurt the church.”

SMITH: “Touch, not God’s anointed” is a verse many use.

TCHIVIDJIAN: Yeah. Or, if you do this…I mean, I had kids on the mission saying their missionaries, their abusers who were abusing them said, “if you step forward and disclose this, which would require your parents to leave the mission field, the bush, and come back to this boarding school, there will be Africans going to hell because of that.” And we wonder why those kids stayed silent for decades. Think of it through the lens of his little seven year old boy being told that the Africans are going to end up in hell if he says something about this abuse. It’s a tremendous manipulation and in my opinion, a horrific crime on top of the already existing crime of abuse. 

SMITH: We’re clearly at an inflection point in this conversation, right? I mean, the, the #me too movement, the #we too movement, the #church too movement, however you want to describe it.I mean this conversation is happening in ways that, to my knowledge, has never happened before. Does that make you hopeful?. 

TCHIVIDJIAN: I want to see more than a conversation. It’s easy to put on a conference. It’s easy to talk about it because, let’s face it, the whole world’s talking about it. It’s the hard work of rolling up your sleeves without the cameras around and effectuating cultural transformation. That’s what I haven’t seen yet and that’s what I’m waiting to see. I’m hopeful. The fact that we’re talking about it is that perhaps, uh, a good first step, but we have a long way to go.

MARY REICHARD: Today is Thursday, November 14th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

MEGAN BASHAM: And I’m Megan Basham. There’s the saying: a leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. Commentator Cal Thomas says humility should infuse all of it.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: If you’re over 50, no doubt you remember the name Jim Bakker. He was a high-flying TV evangelist in the 1980s. 

Bakker ran into legal trouble after his “Praise the Lord” (PTL) associates sold $1,000 “lifetime memberships” to people who were promised annual three-night stays at his Heritage USA luxury hotel complex. But prosecutors revealed that Bakker sold tens of thousands of these memberships for a hotel that had only 500 rooms planned. And it was never actually completed. Bakker allegedly kept $3.4 million of the money for himself.

Shortly after Jim Bakker’s release from prison in July 1994, I invited him to my home. There was an important question I wanted to ask him. 

“When did you start to go wrong?” I asked Bakker. His answer was instructive: “When I began to surround myself with people who told me only what I wanted to hear.”

I thought of that statement when I read a recent comment by former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. He was speaking at a Washington Examiner event in Sea Island, Georgia. He recounted the last thing he said to President Trump before leaving his position. Quoting now: “Whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth. Don’t do that, because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.” End quote. 

The latest White House Press Secretary, Stephanie Grisham, sounded like a “yes-woman” when she said—quote—“I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.” End quote. 

It’s fair to note the army of opposition arrayed against the president. Many have sought to impeach him since the day he took office. But that doesn’t negate good leadership principles. 

The key to great leadership is to not overly regard yourself. It means understanding you don’t know everything and realizing you are flawed and can make bad judgments—just like everybody else. 

A good leader surrounds himself with people who are willing to speak honestly, even when that honesty means disagreeing with the leader’s perspective. 

Some of those evangelical “advisers” to President Trump might consider a verse with which they must be familiar. It is from Proverbs 15:22: Plans go wrong for lack of advice; many advisers bring success. They owe it to the president, themselves, and God to speak the truth. 

Generals require committed privates in order to achieve success in warfare. Presidents need the same, along with staff who don’t always tell them what they want to hear, but sometimes what they need to hear.

For WORLD Radio, I’m Cal Thomas.

MEGAN BASHAM: Tomorrow for Culture Friday, the global fertility crisis. What does the Bible have to say about it?  

And, I’ll review a movie about America’s most beloved children’s television host.

That and more tomorrow. 

I’m Megan Basham.

MARY REICHARD: 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.

Colossians says to let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 

Go now in grace and peace.

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