WORLD Radio Rewind

PAUL BUTLER: This is WORLD Radio Rewind: a 10-minute review of some of our news coverage and features from the past week on WORLD Radio. I’m Paul Butler.

Coming up first, we return to Tuesday’s program as WORLD Reporter Sarah Schweinsberg brought this story about the beef industry.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: Don’s Meats sells almost every cut of beef, pork, and poultry available. Lance Lasater manages the butcher shop in Syracuse, Utah.

He says since March meat prices have been rising—especially beef.

LASATER: T-Bone steak right now, probably, you're gonna be around anywhere from depending on the week...I don't know $12 to $15 a pound...Normally, we have them like anywhere from like $8 to $10 a pound…

Lasater worries that if prices keep going up, customers will stop buying.

LASATER: I just can't see this stuff getting much higher... And, you know, you know, eventually it will hurt. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Andrew Griffith is a livestock economist at the University of Tennessee. He says over the last five years, cattle prices have disconnected from consumer demand for beef.

GRIFFITH: Prior to 2014, as box beef prices went up, then you would see finished cattle prices increase. Or if if box beef prices went down, you'd see finished cattle prices go down. But that has not been the case the past four or five years. And so that has a lot of cattle producers concerned about it.

Lawmakers have proposed a couple possibilities to deal with that disparity.

David Trowbridge manages a 7,500 head feedlot in Tabor, Iowa. He says something’s got to change, but the government could just make things worse.

TROWBRIDGE: We've seen government involvement in agriculture as far as crops. There are very few people that are fans of that happening in the beef industry.

But others, like Scott Varilek in Sioux Center, Iowa say the big four’s market dominance makes government intervention at some level necessary. Or else, for many, it will be too late.

VARILEK: Voluntary sounds fine. And maybe we would love to have it that way. But it just doesn't seem like that's going to change anything. And we would continue on the same path that we're on heading towards the family feed yards exiting the business.

PAUL BUTLER: Coming up next, Afghanistan.

Speaking in Brussels on Monday, President Biden said that while the U.S. military is pulling out of Afghanistan, the United States is not abandoning the Afghan people. But what that U.S. support in Afghanistan will look like in the months and years ahead … is not entirely clear.

On Wednesday’s program, WORLD Senior Editor Mindy Belz spoke with host Mary Reichard about what the troop pullout means for the people of Afghanistan.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Have we seen any early clues that might give us a sense of how this will unfold as the last of the U.S. and allied troops depart?

MINDY BELZ, SENIOR EDITOR: Well, sadly, we have. Even before the departures were underway, the Taliban began offensives and interestingly enough, because I think the U.S. media, most of us have been focused on the cities, and there are really three main cities in Afghanistan. But the Taliban is smarter than us and understands the territory better. And they immediately went into rural areas. And really, it's striking, in just the last six weeks—since May 1—they have gained control of 30 districts across Afghanistan, that means half of the country's 34 provinces have Taliban strongholds in them right now. And so clearly, the Taliban aims to get control. What we have to understand about Afghanistan is that gaining control of these rural areas of the village is essentially how you control the cities. The cities are made up of people who once lived in the villages and the society is still very clearly geared that way. And it looks like for right now, they are largely unimpeded. There have been firefights. There have been areas where the Afghan National Army has beat them back and continue to hold territory. But the Taliban is clearly gaining ground.

REICHARD: Mindy, what’s life like for Christians in Afghanistan? How are they meeting together and worshiping despite all of these challenges you mention?

BELZ: A lot of their fellowships take place in homes, in private residences, in office buildings. They're very careful. They're very careful in terms of discipling new believers, but it is, I think, a picture of the power of the gospel that it has not been hindered in one sense, despite, I think, some of the greatest hindrances in the world. And so it's a church that is vibrant and yet also very much under threat at this time. It's a precarious time as they face perhaps a destabilizing situation and the exit of American forces.

PAUL BUTLER: Our third story today comes from Thursday’s program. Last year, the United States Postal Service lost $9 billion dollars. Efforts to balance the budget have largely failed. But a new bill in Congress aims to fix some of the most glaring problems and keep mail carriers making the rounds. WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown had the story.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, REPORTER: This blue mailbox is a dying breed. It’s on a quiet street corner in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Even residents who’ve lived on this block for years don’t know it’s here. But a postal worker comes to check it, every single day around 3 p.m.

That’s because the postal service has one core mandate: universal service. This universal service obligation makes the postal service special … but it’s not necessarily cost effective. Sometimes, it would make more sense to cut service to a certain area. But the postal service doesn’t make the rules. Congress does.

GEDDES: The Postal Service is, in fact, in this limbo.

Rick Geddes teaches infrastructure policy at Cornell University. He says that, in some ways, the postal service is supposed to operate like a business. It generates revenue from stamps and fees, then uses that to cover the costs of operation, without any government funds.

But in other ways, the postal service runs like a federal agency. It doesn’t set its own service standards, or even the price for stamps. Congress does that.

GEDDES: So it's very much still a government entity, even though it's supposed to operate in this business-like fashion. But people don't send letters anymore, people send texts and phone calls and emails, and other electronic substitutes for a letter.

Instead of doubling down on six-day-a-week delivery, Geddes thinks Congress ought to consider reducing it.

GEDDES: It's not clear that people need to receive mail delivery six days a week to every address. What we think Congress should do is revisit that maybe it should be three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday is enough.

And those blue mailboxes on street corners? Geddes says we probably don’t need quite so many of them.

Both Geddes and Edwards say the reform bill is a good start. But they think the postal service needs more changes to keep the carriers going for generations to come.

EDWARDS: There is the weight of history here that the U.S. postal system has been, you know, a real key part of our republic now for two centuries. But times have changed. And I think we need our postal system to adjust to the new realities of the 21st century economy.

PAUL BUTLER: For our last story: earlier this week, US President Joe Biden met with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Geneva. The summit lasted about 3 hours. The two leaders discussed cyber-warfare, diplomatic relations, nuclear weapons, among many other topics.

WORLD’s European correspondent Jenny Lind Schmitt joined Mary Reichard from the newsroom in Geneva on Thursday’s program and she had a few initial observations.

REICHARD: It sounds really busy in the press room there. Describe what it’s like.

SCHMITT: It is busy. This is a big media tent set up just down the hill from the Villa La Grange, where the summit took place and right on the shores of Lake Geneva.

REICHARD: Well, Jenny, what came out of this meeting?

SCHMITT: So, at Biden's press conference after the summit, he said that he was very pleased, it was a constructive meeting. And he had said he had come to do three things and that he accomplished them. One, identify areas of mutual interest. Two, communicate directly with Putin. And three, clearly lay out our country's values and concerns.

So much of these in-person meetings is a lot about posturing and body language. As the two met and sat down in the library and the photographers were snapping photos, they were both pretty stoney faced. But Putin was just kind of slumped in his chair. And the thought that crossed my mind is the look of a naughty child who knows he's got a scolding coming. And I was not in those meetings. I don't know what happened. But I would say that from the reactions and the press conferences afterwards, I got the impression that Putin was not completely happy with how things had gone and that Biden was.

PAUL BUTLER: That’s it for this edition of WORLD Radio Rewind.

If you’d like to hear the full versions of any of these features, we’ve included links in our transcript at wng.org/podcasts.

Stories we’re working on for next week: a sit down with the newly elected Southern Baptist Convention president, the emerging US foreign trade policy with Europe, and the Biden administration's broadband initiative.

For the latest news, features, and commentary from WORLD Newsgroup, visit wng.org. For WORLD Radio, I’m Paul Butler. Have a great Father’s Day weekend.

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.