The World and Everything in It: September 4, 2024

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like me. I'm Cassandra Payton, a probate attorney in Midlothian, Texas. My favorite pieces are always the commentaries by Janie B. Cheney. And I always leave the program feeling more informed, more educated, and inspired. I hope you enjoy today's program.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Good morning! Changing dynamics in Arizona could determine the outcome of this year’s election.

BEAU: Traditionally we've been a red state or a red leaning state. I'd say we are a moderate leaning state right now.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: That’s ahead on Washington Wednesday. Also, World Tour. Plus, how a family in Brazil manages to homeschool despite the government saying it’s illegal.

MARIA: Years ago, I would talk about homeschooling. But nowadays, to protect our family, we don't say it.

And WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney on the limits of brain chemistry.

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

BUTLER: And I’m Paul Butler. Good morning.

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

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Garland announces charges against Hamas leader » The Justice Department has announced criminal charges against Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and other Hamas militants.

Attorney General Merrick Garland:

GARLAND: In the early morning hours of October 7th of last year, Hamas, led by these defendants, committed its most violent large-scale terrorist attack to date.

Garland noted the murder over the weekend of six Israeli hostages, including 23-year-old Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

GARLAND: We are investigating Hersh’s murder, and each and every one of the brutal murders of Americans, as acts of terrorism.

The criminal complaint filed in federal court in New York City includes charges of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, resulting in death.

The impact of the case may be mostly symbolic given that Sinwar is believed to be hiding out in tunnels.

Cease-fire push, protests » Meantime, the State Department says the United States remains committed to achieving a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas to bring peace to Gaza and secure the freedom of the remaining Israeli hostages.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller:

MILLER: Over the coming days, the United States will continue to push for a final agreement. During talks last week, we made progress in dealing with the obstacles that remain.

Many thousands of Israeli demonstrators have flooded the streets, calling for a cease-fire agreement after the bodies of those six Israeli hostages were recovered from a tunnel in Gaza.

Campus protests » Meantime, in New York City …

AUDIO: [Campus protests]

As a new school year begins, protesters are back on the campus of Columbia University, the epicenter of last spring's pro-Palestinian, and often anti-Israeli, campus demonstrations.

Administrators say they're working to deescalate tensions, while circulating new guidance on protests.

Russian attacks in Poltava » In Ukraine, at least 50 people were killed after two Russian ballistic missiles hit an educational facility and a hospital in the city of Poltava.

Pentagon spokesman Gen. Pat Ryder says the United States condemns what he called Russia’s “vicious” attacks on civilian targets …

RYDER: To include on civilian infrastructure as we go into the winter, Russia targeting, uh, infrastructure, energy infrastructure, uh, that will be vital, uh, as it gets colder in Ukraine.

And he said Washington continues to work with allies on further bolstering Ukraine’s air defenses.

Mongolia ignores warrant, rolls out red carpet for Putin » Meanwhile, in Mongolia …

AUDIO: [Mongolia band]

A military band performed while Russia’s Vladimir Putin received a red-carpet welcome Tuesday as the country ignored calls to arrest him on an international warrant for war crimes. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has more.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: Putin’s visit Tuesday was Putin's first to a member country of the International Criminal Court since it issued the warrant in March 2023.

Ahead of his visit, Ukraine urged Mongolia to hand Putin over to the court in The Hague.

But the European Union expressed concern that Mongolia might not execute the warrant.

After decades under communism with close ties to the Soviet Union, Mongolia transitioned to democracy in the 1990s and built new relations with the United States, Japan and others. But the landlocked country remains economically dependent on its two much larger and more powerful neighbors, Russia and China.

For WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Conditions 'very fragile' at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia power plant » The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog is renewing warnings about the risk of a serious incident at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

IAEA Director Rafael Grossi:

GROSSI:  I have very often characterized it as a very, as very fragile with a certain, for some days we have some stability and then the next day there is, uh, uh, an event, uh, an issue, a drone impact.

The warning follows fresh attacks near the site in central Ukraine.

The Zaporizhzhia plant came under Russian control in the wake of Moscow's full-scale invasion in 2022.

Congo prison break » In Africa, at least 129 people are dead after an attempted jailbreak at a prison in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Officials say authorities shot and killed 24 inmates when they tried to escape, dozens of others died in a stampede.

KALENGA (Lingala): We were asleep and suddenly we heard gunshots from the prison. We were told that the prisoners had broken through the wall and they escaped.

This resident says he was jolted awake in the early morning hours by gunshots.

The prison in the capital of Kinshasa and has been the site of other jailbreaks. Amnesty International says the facility is severely overcrowded.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Swing state politics on Washington Wednesday. Plus, World Tour.

This is The World and Everything in It.

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

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

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

Time now for Washington Wednesday. Today, election politics in a battleground state. But first, a preview of news from Capitol Hill.

The August recess ends this weekend. When members of Congress return, they will have three weeks until the deadline to agree on government funding for 2025.

MAST: Republicans in the House of Representatives promised to get back to the regular order of business with single-topic appropriations bills. So far they’ve only cobbled together enough support to pass five of 12 needed spending measures. So, seven more to go. Part of the holdup has been a disagreement over tying spending bills to voter-integrity measures included in the SAVE act, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.

BUTLER: Meanwhile, the Senate hasn’t yet touched appropriations. And with House bills containing conservative priorities, it’s likely the Democrat controlled Senate and White House won’t pass them.

That leaves a tough choice for Republicans: force a shutdown on the eve of an election, pass an omnibus bill funding 2025, or kick the deadline out with a short-term funding extension.

MAST: Turning now to the presidential election. A recent addition to the list of swing states that could determine who wins the White House and the Senate.

Here’s WORLD’s Washington Bureau reporter Carolina Lumetta.

CAROLINA LUMETTA: Arizona was once a reliably red state with voters consistently putting its 11 Electoral College votes in the Republican column. But not anymore.

SAMARA KLAR: I remember in 2020, we put a sign up on our front door that said, “We've already voted early, please don't knock.”

That’s Samara Klar, a political scientist and professor at the University of Arizona.

SAMARA KLAR: You know, I'd always looked at places like Iowa, New Hampshire, and thought like, “Oh man, that must be an annoying place to live during elections.” And now I live there too, I get it.

While states like Pennsylvania and Michigan have been swing states for decades, Arizona has only recently become competitive.

KLAR: So Arizona is now a swing state. I moved here in 2013. And back then, you know, Arizona had been voting Republican so consistently that we didn't get a lot of ads. We didn't get a lot of knocks on the doors or text messages. But if you look at every election year over the last 20 years, Republicans have been winning elections in Arizona by smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller margins until we kind of reach the natural outcome of this long trend in 2020 when the Democrat finally won.

The Democrat was President Joe Biden, who carried Arizona by fewer than 11,000 votes.

So, how did Arizona get here? Part of it is due to population shifts: Arizona’s largest county has grown by nearly 100,000 people since 2020 as West Coast residents leave their blue states. But Democratic Party registration has plummeted by more than 186,000 over the same time period, while Republican affiliation dropped by nearly 74,000. The only group to expand? Unaffiliated voters, who now make up about a third of the Arizona voting population.

KLAR: The vast majority of Independent voters do prefer one of the two parties, and if you ask them, “Which party do you prefer?” they can tell you. The vast majority of Independents—and when I say that, I mean 75% to 80% of Independents—will vote for that party very consistently.

That’s not just true for presidential candidates. Back in 2022, Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema switched to independent in an attempt to shore up support at home. But polls showed that she still would have suffered in a three-way race. When Sinema announced she would not seek another term, that put one of Arizona’s senate seats in play for this election.

On the Republican side is former television news anchor Kari Lake who ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 2022. She still has not conceded that she lost that election, and instead blames tainted election results. Her case appealing that election is pending in the Arizona Supreme Court. Among conservatives, Lake maintains a popular following. She received more than two minutes of applause from rallygoers chanting her name at a Trump and Turning Point USA rally last month.

KARI LAKE: Do me a favor. Let's let those guys back there in the fake news know that MAGA is alive and well in Arizona! Let them hear it!

On the Democratic side is Ruben Gallego, a sitting Congressman representing the state’s largest district where Phoenix is located. Gallego has a liberal reputation, with endorsements from every major pro-abortion group and organizations like the AFL-CIO. But while Kari Lake has been touting her status as a Trump ally, Gallego has begun appealing to moderates on issues like border security. For example, here’s a recent campaign ad featuring a border city sheriff: 

GALLEGO AD: Every day on the border is a challenge. Both parties created it, and neither has the guts to fix it. But Ruben Gallego has stood side by side with me, the only member of Congress that has come regularly to my border…

Recent polls suggest Gallego has taken a slight lead over Lake.

BEAU LANE: It's interesting because they both kind of come from the extreme ends of each party.

Beau Lane is the executive of a digital advertising company in Arizona. In 2022, he ran for secretary of state as a Republican but lost in the primary. He says the way Gallego and Lake communicate with voters in the center may determine who wins this election.

LANE: Kari Lake has run as a full on MAGA candidate and has made very little appeal to the moderate Republicans. In fact, she's, she's sort of chased them away and told them to not be involved anymore. So right now, Ruben has kind of gone to the to the middle, at least in his campaign, and he seems to be attracting the most of the left or right of middle, and middle segment of the electorate. So, conventional wisdom is that he will cruise to an easy victory and what should be a very competitive race.

Lane is concerned that Kari Lake’s strategy may reinforce the transformation of Arizona from a red state to a purple state.

LANE: In 2022, we elected, statewide, almost exclusively Democrats because the Republicans that were nominated were looked to be too much on the fringe…We have essentially two Democratic senators, I mean, Sinema is on her way out, but it looks like she'll be replaced by a Democrat. So we'll have two Democratic senators, Democratic governor, Democratic attorney general, Democratic secretary of state. That's the first time in my lifetime that that's ever happened in Arizona. So traditionally, we've been a red state or a red-leaning state. I'd say we are a moderate-leaning state right now.

So what does all this mean for Trump and Harris in November?

Before dropping out of the race, President Biden was lagging behind Trump by more than five points in Arizona. But Harris and Trump are now statistically tied in FiveThirtyEight’s polling. With the state up for grabs, both campaigns are focusing time and dollars on winning over voters. More than 13,000 attendees flocked to Trump’s rally in Glendale last month where he added former candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to his campaign team. And Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance will be in Phoenix tomorrow to deliver remarks. Meanwhile, data from AdImpact shows that the Harris campaign is pouring nearly $35 million into the state in digital ads alone, compared to the Trump campaign’s $10 million.

LANE: We understand that we have a lot of influence. I think there's a general anticipation that on election night, Arizona is going to be a key element to decide who's our next leader.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Carolina Lumetta.

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

We’re excited to announce that just a few weeks ago, Onize Ohikere got married. And along with a new husband, she has a new name.

So, here’s World Tour with our reporter in Africa, Onize Oduah.

AUDIO: [Sound of meeting, camera shutters]

Senegal-Spain partnership — Today’s roundup takes off in Senegal, where Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye met with the prime minister of Spain to tackle illegal migration.

Senegal is a major departure point for thousands of Africans who cross the dangerous Atlantic route to enter Europe mostly through Spain’s Canary Islands.

The two leaders signed new agreements which will offer temporary work opportunities and vocational training for Senegalese nationals in Spain.

Senegal’s Faye has said his administration is working on measures to stop the departures, but he called for greater cooperation to address the root causes of the problem.

FAYE: [Speaking French]

He says here that his government is interested in developing more local projects to retain people in the country but also promote legal migration.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez also made similar stops in Mauritania and Gambia during his trip.

More than 20,000 people have arrived on Spain’s shores since January.

AUDIO: [Sound of fire, crowd reactions]

Grenfell report — Over in London, former residents and grieving family members are today awaiting the results of an inquiry into the deadly Grenfell Tower fire.

The blaze killed 72 people seven years ago, marking London’s deadliest residential fire since World War II.

Authorities have blamed the fire on cheap flammable cladding, or a covering for building materials to improve the structure’s appearance and insulation. Britain has since banned that type of cladding. Today’s report is expected to provide more details on what exactly played out.

But many who are still waiting for answers worry it may not make a difference. Shah Aghlani lost his mother and aunt in the fire.

AGHLANI: It's very painful just for us, you know, who have lost a loved one. To see that their death, you know, is going in vain is very disturbing. It actually, you know, stops us coming to a closure.

Back in May, police said any charges related to the fire would not be announced until late 2026 and that a trial may not begin until a year after that.

The Grenfell Next of Kin group is also pushing for a ban on unsafe cladding across Europe. 

AUDIO: [Protesters chanting]

South Korea climate case — Over in South Korea, the constitutional court last week ruled in favor of young environmental activists, concluding that many of the country’s climate goals are unconstitutional.

The court found that the government’s limited climate targets do not sufficiently protect the basic rights of the people.

Lawmakers will now have to revise the country’s climate goals to include more concrete measures to reduce carbon emissions.

Lee Chi-sun was one of the lawyers involved in the case.

LEE: [Speaking Korean]

He says here that he hopes the ruling will strengthen climate reduction targets in the country, just as a similar ruling did in Germany.

The case is a first of its kind in Asia. The group of petitioners lists four children, including one who was still an embryo but is now a toddler.

AUDIO: [Sound of Tango music]

Tango championship — We wrap up today at the annual World Tango Championship in Argentina’s capital of Buenos Aires.

More than 750 couples from 53 countries participated in the qualifying rounds. But the final stage closed last week with 60 couples competing in the stage tango and salon tango categories.

Ayelen Morando and Sebastian Martinez won the stage tango category.

MARTINEZ: [Speaking Spanish]

Martinez explains here that he loves tango and will continue to fight for it.

The tango is a traditional South American dance that’s now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage.

That’s it for this week’s World Tour. Reporting for WORLD, I’m Onize Oduah in Abuja, Nigeria.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: A simple lesson in supply and demand—and the power of TikTok—has given the country of Iceland a bit of a raw dill.

LOGAN MOFFITT: Sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber. Let me show you the best way to do it.

Canadian TikTok-er Logan Moffitt makes videos showing how to make different cucumber salads.

MOFFITT: Start by slicing an entire cucumber, that was tiny so I’m going to add some extra.

And in Iceland, they’re eating it up. Big time.

Problem is, there aren’t enough cucumbers to go around! Iceland news source RUV says one grocery chain reports a 200 percent increase in demand for ingredients Moffitt often uses.

Iceland, of course, sits far to the north and grows a lot of its produce in greenhouses meaning a limited supply. Many stores have sold out of cucumbers entirely.

One grocery chain has gone so far as to order emergency cucumbers from the Netherlands.
As for the country’s cucumber aficionados, well, you might say they’re in quite a pickle.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, September 4th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Paul Butler.

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

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: homeschooling in Brazil. It’s popular, but there’s one problem: the government says it’s illegal.

Parents there choose homeschooling for many of the same reasons that American parents do. Until recently, the political environment was broadly more favorable towards homeschooling. But today, parents are up against a hostile government that is actively looking to prosecute them.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: How do they cope?

WORLD senior writer Emma Freire visited a homeschool mom in Brazil. And is here with her story. And just a quick note, we have agreed not to use her real name for her protection.

AUDIO: [MARIA READING ALOUD IN PORTUGUESE]

EMMA FREIRE: It’s time for a homeschool history lesson. Homeschool mom Maria reads aloud to three of her children as they snuggle together on the dark gray sofa in the living room of their apartment. A few Paw Patrol trucks and other toys are scattered around.

AUDIO: [PIANO PLAYING]

That’s her 9 year old son practicing piano on a keyboard in the living room.

Maria and her husband live in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. They have five children, with a sixth due next year.

MARIA: How old are you? 10, yes…

The children have never attended a brick and mortar school. Maria and her husband learned about homeschooling when they were expecting their oldest and loved the idea, particularly because they’re Christians.

MARIA: We believe that education is a lot of, a lot more than math, Portuguese. It’s more of like building a human being, right?

But the Brazilian government doesn’t think parents like Maria should be teaching history—or anything else—at home.

A 2018 ruling by the Brazilian Supreme Court left homeschooling parents in a legal limbo.

JULIO POHL: It said that the practice of homeschooling is not against the constitution of Brazil, but that it required a federal law to be allowed.

That’s Julio Pohl. He’s a legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom International focused on Latin America and he helps homeschool families in Brazil.

POHL: And we need to remember one thing here, when we're talking about Brazil, is that Brazil is signatory of major international human rights treaties that allow homeschooling because they protect the rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.

Pohl believes those treaties apply in the absence of specific legislation. But Bazil’s left-wing presidential administration thinks otherwise. A bill to legalize homeschooling is currently stuck in the Brazilian senate. In the meantime, Pohl says the government has ordered local prosecutors to go after homeschooling parents.

POHL: The Vice President said it in some public remarks maybe four months ago, six months ago, at the beginning of the year, he said something like, homeschooling is a racist creation of Americans that didn't want to have schools with black and white. That's what he said, which is completely wrong, first of all, and second of all, he says that because he tries to demonize homeschooling

Maria has noticed the shift since the left-wing government took power last year.

MARIA: Years ago, I would say, I would explain. I would talk about homeschooling. But nowadays, to protect our family, we don't say it.

She knows two families who were forced to stop homeschooling because they were prosecuted. They were threatened with the loss of their children if they didn’t enroll them in a brick and mortar school.

To avoid questions, Maria tries to create the impression that her children attend school.

MARIA: I live in a building. I don't let my kids go down and play in the morning. And at afternoon, I choose a period of the day that they can go so my neighbors doesn't know that they aren't at school.

But it’s hard to fly under the radar because her big family stands out in a city where most people only have one or two children.

MARIA: So since we have a lot of kids, one of the first questions that people do is: where do they study? I think they think, how do you pay the school if you have so many kids? It's sad, but we trained our boys to answer that they go to a school in their neighborhood and that they… I don't say the truth, because we are afraid.

Pohl estimates there may be 100,000 homeschooled children in Brazil and that number is going up.

POHL: Homeschooling is growing because the situation of education in Brazil in general is lacking, not only because of it is not good in academic respects, but also because schools are, I would say, laboratories of indoctrination in Brazil. And that's that's the case. There's a lot of gender ideology being pushed, a lot of attacks on religious freedom of parents in the sense that children are being taught against the convictions of their parents.

Maria knows about a Christian private school in her city that she likes. But she can’t afford the tuition.

MARIA: A big reality here is that private schools are very expensive. So is another big deal to it. So, even when you have, when you find a good one, can you pay it for it?

Maria’s family participates in a homeschool co-op every Tuesday. It’s good for the children, but perhaps even better for the parents.

MARIA: It's nice to have a place where you already have families that every week you are there. It makes us comfortable, I think, with the situation. So we not, we don't feel so alone.

Pohl says Brazilian homeschoolers are probably stuck waiting for a solution until after the next elections scheduled for 2026. That could bring senators who will pass the bill legalizing homeschooling or perhaps a new president who is less hostile. In the meantime, families like Maria’s will have to make do as best they can.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Emma Freire in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, September 4th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. WORLD Commentator Janie B. Cheaney now on where brain science ends and wisdom takes over.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: Once upon a time, medical science preached the theory that illness was caused by an imbalance of “humours” in the body, related to the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water. Treatment aimed at restoring balance. That was the rationale behind the widespread practice of “bleeding,” which persisted into the 19th century. Leeches never had it so good.

Fast-forward to the 1990s: Remember the Zoloft commercial with the unhappy blob under a raincloud? The blob represented depression, which might result, the narrator suggested, from a chemical imbalance in the brain. Substitute “chemicals” for “humors,” and we’re not that far from medieval medicine.

Six months ago my husband started taking Thorazine for psychosis, so I won’t complain about pharmaceuticals in themselves. But the chemical-imbalance theory has got to be oversimplified. That was the point of a recent podcast from Radio Atlantic called “The Mandala Effect”: how a shift from talk-based therapy, such as psychoanalysis, to chemical-based psychiatry in the 1990s created dangerous expectations about what drugs could do.

The central narrative of the podcast belongs to Cooper Davis, now in his 40s, who began taking Ritalin for ADHD in his late teens. The effect was immediate, and dramatic. Like a superpower, he says--“Like, it wasn’t fixing my brain; it was making my brain even better than the average brain.”

In time, though, he became dependent—not on the drug, but on the conviction that if he wasn’t feeling 110% all the time, something was wrong. Anxiety in college led to a prescription for Ativan, to be balanced by stimulants like Adderall in ever-higher doses. The crash came with his first real job at a local paper, where his erratic behavior and missed deadlines led to “You’re fired.”

Cooper explains that he’d convinced himself he was under intolerable pressure. But that wasn’t the case: “What I really had was a lack of maturity and an inability to manage my time.”

Why exercise self-discipline when he had superpowers?

Maturity barged in when his girlfriend told him she was pregnant, and he began to think seriously about fatherhood. Drugs were not the villain, he realized; his son might need low doses of Ritalin to get over a rough patch. But he would also need a realistic view of himself and his abilities. He would need to fail at times. He would need to be challenged, not superpowered.

The optimistic notion that chemistry was the key to depression, ADHD, and all forms of mental illness has hit a wall. That’s because the brain is more than physical matter. It houses a mind, with a profound spiritual dimension that chemicals can’t touch. In a way, our brains are still reeling from the Fall; as the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes, there is a time to weep.

We can be grateful when “uppers” and “downers” serve their purpose. But sadness and failure have a purpose too, especially if Jesus walks us through.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Tomorrow: Dueling ballot initiatives on abortion in Nebraska. We’ll have a report. And, how a group of people in Australia are redeeming forgotten fruit. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Paul Butler.

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

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 gospel of Luke says: “The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ And the Lord said, ‘If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,” and it would obey you.’” —Luke 17:5, 6

Go now in grace and peace.

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