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The World and Everything In It
9.18.25 Genocide charge against Israel, vigils for Charlie Kirk, and injectable weight loss drugs
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Good morning. The United nations is accusing Israel of much more than warfare. If people are repeatedly told that Israel is committing genocide like Nazis, that is an encouragement to relate to Jews as though they were evil. Also, remembrances for Charlie Kirk from around the world. And is our culture's obsession with weight unhealthy? And then we have all these influences. Influencers go on, use the drugs and show how different they look. And all of this is just adding pressure to already a obsessed generation. And world commentator Cal Thomas says Americans must reclaim the virtues that made us Strong. It's Thursday, September 18th. This is the world and everything in it. From listener supported World Radio. I'm Mary Reichard. And I'm Myrna Brown. Good morning. Time now for the news. Here's Kent Covington. The Federal Reserve is cutting its key interest rate by a quarter point, the first cut since December. Chairman Jerome Powell said the board decided that under the circumstances, the time is right to make a change in the near term. Risks to inflation are tilted to the upside and risk to employment to the downside. A challenging situation when our goals are intentioned like this. Our framework calls for us to balance both sides of our dual mandate. And with that balanced approach, the Fed also projects it will cut interest rates twice more this year. Until now, Powell and most of the Fed board had been united in holding off on rate cuts as they evaluated the impact of new trade tariffs and other policy shifts. Higher tariffs have begun to push up prices in some categories of goods, but their overall effects on economic activity and inflation remain to be seen. President Trump welcomed the Fed's rate cut but blasted it as too small, saying the central bank should have acted more aggressively. And today, the president and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer are set to meet in London for trade talks. Trump says UK Leaders are hoping to get US Tariffs on British goods reduced. But while it's down to business today, it was all pageantry at Windsor Castle. On Wednesday, Trump looked on from a tent sitting alongside King Charles III as the UK Hosts the for a second state visit. The festivities included lunch with the royal family in the State dining Room, wreath laying at Queen Elizabeth II's tomb, and a state banquet at Windsor Castle in the evening with speeches on Capitol Hill. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, labor and Pensions will please come to order. The committee heard testimony from the former director of the cdc, Susan Menarez, who told senators that America's public health system is headed to a dangerous place. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy fired Menares last month, and she claimed that was because she refused Kennedy's request to rubber stamp vaccine recommendations without seeing the evidence behind the changes. I refused to do it because I have built a career on scientific integrity and my worst fear was that I would then be in a position of approving something that would reduce access of life saving vaccines to children and others who need them. Secretary Kennedy rejects her account, calling it false. He says he never asked her to ignore evidence and that she was removed after less than a month on the job because she was, in Kennedy's words, not trustworthy. A Pennsylvania man is facing felony charges after ramming his car into a manned gate at an FBI office in Pittsburgh. Authorities say that after 46 year old Donald Henson smashed the gate on Wednesday, he pulled an American flag from his car 3 threw it over the gate and ran away. Christopher Giordano is the assistant special agent in charge of the office. We do believe that there is a mental health problem and a history of mental health issues with the subject. Giordano called the incident a targeted act of terror, but FBI officials later clarified that they are not treating it as a terrorism investigation. Henson, reportedly a former US Military service member, is charged with assault with a deadly weapon and damaging government property. And the trial is underway this week of Ryan Roof, a man accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump on a golf course last year. And the Department of Justice has now released the audio of Secret Service agent's radio transmission from the day of the incident. Shot fired, shots fired, shot fired. Individual in the bush with a gun. That shot was fired by the Secret Service agent heard there after spotting the barrel of a rifle poking out of the bushes in his direction. All units be advised they look like an AK47 style assault rifle pointed through the fence onto the golf course. Individual has not gained entry to the golf course. He's on the exterior of the compound. Prosecutors say Ruth's fingerprints were on the scope of that rifle. Ruth is representing himself in the trial. The prosecution is expected to rest its case as early as today. Ukraine will soon receive U S made missiles for Patriot Air Defense Systems and HIMARS rocket launchers under a new Internet national funding program. World's Benjamin Eicker has more, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday the first batches are already moving, with more shipments expected in the weeks ahead. The weapons are being financed through a NATO led mechanism that pools money from US Allies to buy American arms. Known as the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, the fund has already secured more than $2 billion with total commitments expected to reach $3.5 billion next month. Separately Washington and Kyiv are launching a $150 million fund to spur investment in Ukraine's mineral sector, part of efforts to rebuild the economy while sustaining military support. For World I'm Benjamin Eicher. I'm Kent Covington. And straight ahead, serious accusations by the United Nation, Israel, plus remembrances of Charlie Kirk around the globe. This is the World and everything in it. It's Thursday, the 18th of September September. This is World Radio and we're glad you've joined us today. Good morning. I'm Myrna Brown. And I'm Mary Reichard. First up on the World and everything in it, the United nations says Israel is committing genocide. On Tuesday, the UN released a report saying Israel is trying to eradicate at least part of the Palestinian population. But what does genocide mean and does the UN have the power to declare it? World's Mary Munsey reports. We still do have more than 20 members of our families sheltering at the two churches there. Faris Abraham is a Palestinian American businessman from Bethlehem. He and his wife lead a Christian discipleship program in the Middle east called Levant Ministries. His wife and her family are from Gaza. You know how many people have to die to atone for the sins of Hamas to say, you know, enough is enough? Abraham says Israel's recent military campaign in Gaza appears to be focused more on removing Palestinians from their land than freeing hostages. And we don't have to second guess it because it's being aired, it's being documented, the highest level of the Israeli government are saying it flat out and they're declaring their intention of emptying Gaza of its residents and relocating them somewhere else. For two years now, the United nations has been investigating accusations that Israel is committing genocide. We heard from live witnesses. We got a lot of live testimony. We held oral hearings here in Geneva. Navi Pillay was the chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory during the investigation. She spoke to Great Britain's Channel 4 news after the report's release on Tuesday. And that's why we were extra careful about ensuring that we personally investigate and verify everything. You know, that's the best we could do because we were not allowed into the country. Israel, for its part, says the UN took officials quotes out of context and used unverifiable evidence. The UN used at least some casualty numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry, an organization run by Hamas, and its evidence standard is lower than what's used in a court case investigating genocide. Still, Pillay says the investigation is a first step for government action because many governments, including the U.S. are under an obligation to intervene in cases of genocide under the Genocide Convention, an international treaty that criminalizes it. So what is the Genocide Convention and how does it work? We're going back to the 19, actually 30s. Ial Moroz is a Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. And a Jewish Polish legal expert by the name of Raphael Lankin noticed that there were a lot of mass killings of a particular kind that didn't have a name that he couldn't really identify as illegal experts. So he worked on a definition and in 1948 the United nations adopted a shorter version. It says genocide means any acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The five categories for acts considered genocide include killing members of the group, inflicting bodily or mental harm, imposing life threatening conditions, preventing birth and forcibly relocating children. The UN says Israel is committing 4 of those under the Genocide Convention. Signatories like the United States and other governments have a duty to provide effective penalties for anyone meeting that definition. Genocide is predominantly legal term and therefore only qualified court, for example the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court is allowed to rule legitimately that something that is taking place is either genocide or not. But Moroz says proving intent to commit genocide can take years and by then it may be too late to do anything about it. In 2023, South Africa brought a case accusing Israel of genocide to the International Court of Justice. The court says there likely won't be a ruling until 2027. Miroz says the real impact of a genocide declaration by anything other than a court of law is changing public discourse. Indeed, as we saw in Gaza, when the genocide label was started to be used on daily basis by advocates by the media, then the attention of both international publics and the media grew. Meroz thinks this early declaration by the UN is a good way to address what he thinks is genocide in Gaza. But others disagree. So I think that it's very important in terms of anti Semitism. David Hirsch is the academic director and CEO of the London center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. If people are repeatedly told that Israel is committing genocide like Nazis, which is what people associate with genocide, especially when they're talking about Jews, I think that is an encouragement to relate to Jews as though they were evil. Hirsch believes that so far Israel's actions have been within the bounds of war and that Hamas should be blamed for committing genocide, both of Israelis and Palestinians. He says Israel has been trying to protect civilians I don't know of any other conflict, military conflict, in which one side has been providing food and medicines and fuel to the civilians of the other side. Hersh says Israel should be held accountable for any bad actions during the war. But loaded terms like genocide should be used with great caution on the ground. In Israel, one resident told World that he sees the war as self defense, not genocide. It is not us in this scenario that we're looking for a war. We're not looking to. We gain nothing from it and there's no reason to for us to want to do it. We're just trying to protect ourselves. Now Israelis are facing a tough question, what does it mean to be protected? Palestinian Christian Faris Abraham thinks that safety on both sides of the border will take more than court orders or weapons of war. Palestinians are not going to drive the Jewish population out and the Jewish population are not going obviously drive the Palestinian out. They have to figure out a way to live between the river and the sea in peace. Reporting for world, I'm Mary Muncie. Up next, remembering Christian conservative Charlie Kirk. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. This week, hundreds of people gathered in Arlington Heights, Illinois, Charlie Kirk's birthplace, to remember his legacy. Charlie's example showed us that political dialogue doesn't have to be about shouting someone down, but about listening and engaging, even when we see things differently. And it wasn't just Arlington Heights. People all over the world gathered for prayer vigils. In Orem, Utah, the town where Kirk was shot, thousands gathered to pray and reminisce about how Kirk impacted them. And then the last thing he was doing was basically testifying that Jesus Christ is his Lord and savior. Those were one of his last phrases, one of his last words before the next person got up to speak. And I'm so moved by that world. Reporters attended a handful of those vigils. To understand more about why people gathered, we begin with Emma Eicher, who attended a memorial in Phoenix. Individuals who engage in inappropriate or disruptive behavior will be removed from on the Arizona State University campus, Dan Beasley stands outside holding a 10 foot tall cross made from cedarwood. It weighs 65 pounds. I built this cross four years ago and God told me to bring it to wherever the darkest situations are around the country. Last Wednesday, Beasley saw that someone killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk. So he hopped in his truck and drove from Michigan to Arizona. He rolled into Phoenix on Friday night and the next morning he started a memorial outside Turning Point USA headquarters. Since then, hundreds of people have paid their respects. The sidewalks are covered in bouquets and handmade signs mourning Kirk. The air smells like flowers wilting in 100 degree heat. And everybody came up and just started to share their hearts with the community as to what they felt and their love for Charlie, their love for God, their love for the country, the love for the Bible. On Monday evening, Dan holds the cross outside the ASU Desert arena for a vigil hosted by Turning Point USA. There's 14,000 seats in the stadium and families, college kids and older couples fill more than half of them. Nearly every person wears red colors or a MAGA hat or shirts that say I am Charlie Kirk and freedom and the Rockets are on the line at 5:30pm Everyone stands with a hand over their heart as an ASU student sings the national anthem and one by one speakers take the stage. Almost all of them knew Kirk personally. Troy Holderby is president of the College Republicans at Arizona State. If Charlie Kirk had an impact on your life, can we hear you please? Over the next three hours, 22 people honor Kirk's legacy. Some call for political action in the wake of his murder, like conservative firebrand Jack Posobic, who promises to take up Kirk's mantle. And Charlie Kirk will not have died in vain. As long as I am alive, as long as there is blood in my veins and aired in my lungs, I will make sure that the radical left, the media and the Democrats never forget the name of Charlie Kerr. Others call for a different response, one rooted in scripture. So Charlie has left us with a clear set of instructions to read our Bible, to evangelize the gospel, to get married and have kids and fight for America. How about that for a nine years? I can say a consistent theme appears throughout the night. Kirk was known publicly for being a prolific debater, but his co workers and friends knew him as a family man who loved Christ. Tyler Boyer is chief operations officer of Turning Point usa. He's worked with Kirk from the very beginning. A bunch of us kids, 20 something year old kids running a massive organization and turning into what Turning Point USA is to that. But I'll tell you the biggest thing that I loved watching was watching him become a husband and a father afterwards. Outside the stadium, nearby speakers blast hymns. 31 year old Elijah Day says he's taking the words from the vigil to heart. There will be a reckoning, there will be a price to pay for the choice to murder a young man, a father, two children, a husband and a son of God. And I think all of us will stand for that and we will be fighting as hard as we can going into 2026 and in the future. And Dan Beasley is still standing outside holding onto the cross as the crowd fades into the night. Everybody just loves what Charlie stood for. And Charlie loved America and he loved the cross. And that's why I'm here. Reporting for world I'm Emma Eicher in Phoenix. And on Sunday, I attended a vigil in the small town of Ozark, Missouri. Hundreds of faces in the town square were lit up with candles as music and testimonies filled the night. Local organizer Jessica Wood framed the purpose to ozarksfirst.com it's an opportunity for the church to stand up and show everyone what it is to be a church that you can handle a crisis like this and spread the gospel. Mourners prayed for the Kirk family, for the man charged for killing him, and for the soul of Irina Zarutska, the woman slayed on public transit in North Carolina. And they prayed for the nation. The founder of the local high school chapter of TPUSA spoke of Kirk's influence. Charlie Kirk inspired me to be the man that I am today. He inspired me to immerse myself in the Christian faith and start my chapter for 18 year old Luke Gordon Kirk. Gave him courage to see him out there doing what nobody else would do, going out there promoting the freedom of speech and just having free debate with each other, listening to what people had to say, not judging, but holding to his standards. And it's really encouraged me to. I've always been kind of more of a quiet person in the back of the crowd type of guy and encouraged me me to come out, really try to do something for this country because if I don't do it, I shouldn't expect you to. Taylor Newsome is in his 30s and he sees a movement afoot. Charlie lived his faith out loud. I mean, we live in an age where there's a lot of lukewarm Christians who privatize their faith. He was the tip of the spear against woke ideology and he was pushing back against that. I've heard that turning point like has like 32,000 new chapters that people have signed up for. So it looks like there's already an amazing movement that's taking place in his wake. The scene in the Missouri Ozarks was repeated many times around the world since last Wednesday's shooting vigils in South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and London. And one thing Charlie Kirk did is he very much advocated against violence, especially political violence. He said when people stop talking, bad stuff starts. And I very much agree with that. And across the ocean in the Middle East, Jews and Christians were mourning the loss of Charlie Kirk. World's Travis Kircher is currently on assignment in Jerusalem and has this report. Sophia about three dozen pilgrims led by Rabbi Yehuda Glick ascended the Temple Mount in Jerusalem yesterday. They sang songs and offered prayers in memory of slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. Glick described Kirk as a friend of Israel who inspired so many people around the world, mainly in his believing in dialogue. His main identity was dialogue. And here we are, people who like him loved Israel, like him loved Shabbat, and like him, understood the value of family. While Jews worship freely at the Western Wall, the Temple Mount is administered by Muslims. Non Muslim prayer is strictly forbidden at the site. In an unusual arrangement often referred to as the status quo, Israeli police provide security to ensure that no Jewish or Christian religious activities occur on the Temple Mount except in very limited areas. About a half dozen armed Israeli police escorted the pilgrims as nearby Muslims looked on. Glick said Kirk's true impact stemmed from his words, not the manner of his death. And I want you to understand the fact that he was assassinated doesn't prove that everything word he said was true. But he fought for truth. He fought for reporting. For World, I'm Travis Kircher in Jerusalem. Additional support comes from Eyewitness powerful audio dramas bringing faith, courage and history to life in unforgettable ways. At the letter I witnesspod.com from planted Gap Year, where young adults combine Bible classes, hands on farming and outdoor adventures. More@plantedgapyear.org and from Praymore, a new app for churches to share prayer requests with members and send reminders to pray. Free trial available@praymore.com World well, more from our Monopod beat Ned the Snail happens to be a romantic underdog. Found in a garden in New Zealand. He's one out of 40,000 because his shell coils to the left instead of to the right. And that means that unless a lefty female turns up, well, Ned's love life is stuck in neutral. Giselle Clarkson is an illustrator and writer with New Zealand Geographic. She spotted him while weeding her bok choy. We've had lots of enthusiasm and encouragement for Ned, a lot of people who can relate and really want the best for them as a symbol of hope for everyone who's looking for love. Sadly, so far no shellmate has answered the call. Poor Ned. It's the world and everything in Today is Thursday, September 18th. Thank you for turning to World Radio to help start your day. Good Morning, I'm Mary Reichard. And I'm Myrna Brown. Coming next on the World and everything in it, problems with weight loss. Ozempic, Manjaro, Wegovy, Zepp, Hound. Well, you've probably heard of these injectable weight loss drugs. Some 33 million Americans have tried them and many of them have lost lots of weight. But how should Christians think about weight loss and body image in the midst of the weight loss obsession world? Senior writer Kim Henderson has the story. Lean forward a little bit. Ochsner is a state run family medical clinic in Monroe, Louisiana. Charles Norman is here for an appointment. He's explaining how he injects himself with the drug Mangero. Real easy. Just put it to your side right here and click it on and pop it. That's it. It'll click back when he finish. Dr. Amy Givler is seeing Norman for the first time. She says another practitioner put him on Manjaro for diabetes, not weight loss, even though he was on the heavy side. But then you lost a good amount of weight and now you're normal weight, right? Yeah. Yes. And your diabetes is in perfect control, which is fantastic. Yeah. Gifler has seen it over and over. The wonder working power of GLP1 drugs, as they're called. I've just got to say, for diabetes, it has been amazing. This class of drugs is great at controlling diabetes and great at shedding we and it's that weight loss component that's turned drugs like Manjaro and Ozempic into superstars. Everyone's talking about a new class of game changing drugs. Ozempic. Ozempic, Ozempic. Major potential breakthroughs in the booming world of weight loss drugs. Part of that weight loss comes from the way Ozempic works. Doctors say they work by mimicking hormones in the gut. Our society prioritizes thinness. So when injectable drugs that make you eat less became available, Americans ate them up. They spent an estimated $71 billion for GLP1 medications in 2023 alone. There's just so much pressure on the Internet when you're looking at billboards, when you're shopping, when you're doing, I mean, everywhere you look, weight is significant. That's Linda Mental. She's the chair of behavioral sciences at Liberty University's College of Osteopathic Medicine. And then we have all these influencers now and, you know, social media gurus who, you know, go on, use the drugs and show how different they look. And all of this is just adding pressure to already a obsessed generation. Mental isn't against GLP1s. She thinks they may be a good tool for some patients fighting obesity. But using the drugs to drop weight when it's not medically necessary, that's a problem. This is not going to treat the emotional issues that a lot of people eat out of. Dr. Ben Beckman agrees. He's a metabolic scientist who goes as far as labeling some Ozempic use as drug abuse. There are perfectly lean women who are very healthy who have leveraged these weight loss drugs in order to get even skinnier than they already are because they have an eating disorder. And this has made it even easier. Bickman is a professor at Brigham Young University. He says it's naive to ignore the problem, especially when it's so obvious and they start to look like zombies. It's very sad. It's sickening. It's disheartening even to see it happening in 18 or 19 year old college students whose parents are enabling it. I get extraordinarily incensed about the whole thing. I think the church needs to back away from what I would call diet culture. Heather Creekmore is a Christian body image coach and self described recovering comparer. She wants Christians to think differently than the world does about their bodies and dieting. We've demonized bread and Jesus calls himself the bread of life. Isn't that confusing to anyone, right? So I think we need to stop and question why have we bought into this. Creekmore believes that a lot of people who are grabbing ozempic to lose 20 pounds have the wrong perspective on food and identity. Food is a good gift from him. God created us to eat. I was made on purpose for a purpose and that purpose is more than just weighing a certain amount or looking a certain way. Linda Mental agrees. The real solution is a spiritual one that we need to value what God values and take care of our bodies, be healthy to do the work that God has called us to do, but not to obsess and be preoccupied with them and define ourselves based on how weight Reporting for World I'm Kim henderson in Monroe, Louisiana. Foreign Today is Thursday, September 18th. Good morning. This is the world and everything in it. From listener supported World Radio, I'm Myrna Brown. And I'm Mary Reichard. Here's world commentator Cal Thomas on what we need to do to preserve America from the inside. Charlie Kirk has been called many things, including an influencer, especially of young people. A better label might be converter. The power to speak truth in a way that changes a political mindset is better than influencer. Kirk Possessed that power, which led to his murder by a 22 year old man who wanted to rob him of it. Written on one of the shelves recovered at the scene was hey, fascist. Catch. Among the many videos of Kirk debating students who disagreed with his conservative philosophy and Christian faith was a young man who asked about some of what he called Kirk's fascist statements. Dude, like you, can you name one thing I believe that's fascist? You believe that like you are. I'm such a bad fascist, I let the people who disagree open mic to talk to me for two hours uninterrupted. Okay, I'm an awful fascist. The student appeared flustered, looked around for help and couldn't answer. It appeared he had simply repeated what he'd read on the Internet or heard from others. The Internet and its social media pages have become sewers. Many on the left blame conservatives for political violence. Yet the body count tells a very different story. Online reactions from those who disagreed with Kirk range from how Kirk brought this upon himself to much more disgusting and vile celebrations of the assassination. Anyone celebrating Kirk's murder on social media or promoting any violence against anyone should be banned. This isn't about free speech. It's about incitement. Social media has kept too many Americans from knowing each other. We are identified by labels which say nothing about our humanity and intrinsic value. We speak of some of our fellow citizens as being on the other side. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are on the other side. Their dictators are opposed to what we stand for. Do we need enemies among us? If so, we will become, out of one, many the opposite of our unifying national motto. When I was more active on the college lecture Circuit in the 80s and 90s, I participated in civil debates. Afterwards, I would occasionally have dinner with my political opposite. One was Liberal Senator George McGovern, a Democrat from South Dakota. He was a World War II veteran, as was my father. McGovern and I became friends because we got to know each other beyond politics. It was the same with the late Bob Beckel, who ran Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign. He used to say, I manage Mondale to the greatest loss in political history. Now I'm on TV as an expert. It's a great country. I agree. Bob became my best friend and we grew to love each other. I had the privilege of leading him to Christ. We even changed the other's minds on a few issues because we took time to listen to what the other had to say. This is supposed to be a special year leading up to the 250th anniversary of nation's our birth. Instead, it is rapidly becoming something else. We had better re examine the values and virtues that initially contributed to this unique nation. Or like other nations before us, America will implode and cease to exist. That was part of Charlie Kirk's message to the young. A young man who didn't want them to hear it killed him. But his ideas will find other voices because many of those ideas are true and truth has the power to change people's minds. I'm Cal Thomas. Tomorrow, John Stonestreet is back for Culture Friday. Also, we review Angel Studios new sports movie the Senior and George Grant has this month's Wordplay. That and more tomorrow. I'm Mary Reichert. And I'm Myrna Brown. The world and everything in it comes to you. For more, World Radio World's mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates and inspires. The Bible says, this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. Verses 12 through 15 of John 15 go now in grace and peace.