8.31.26 Colorado’s preschool program, the Fed on inflation, and the ISIS Yazidi genocide

0:00Good morning. Colorado says Catholic preschools can have state money, but only if they follow state rules. But those schools say some Colorado rules are more equal than others. If the rules being applied like Swiss cheese and are all kinds of exceptions, then it's not really that important. That's a head on legal docket. Also today, the new Fed chairman wants out of what he calls the Central Banks Hall of Mirrors. Economist David Bonson is standing by. And later the World History Book. There's never been any respect for our community. The ongoing struggle of the Yazidi people in the Middle East. It's Monday, August 31st. This is The World and Everything in it from listeners supported World Radio. I'm Mary Reichard. And I'm Nick Einker. Good morning. Now news here's Kent Covington.

1:00US forces have struck Iranian rocket launchers on the straight of Hormuz, marking their first military action in a month. Iran has vowed to retaliate. Iran's revolutionary guard corps was reportedly preparing to launch rockets with sea mines into the strait. The US recently cleared sea mines from the straits shipping routes. The Trump administration just days ago had shifted focus to economic pressure, but said the US military would act if Tehran attempted to place more mines in the strait. Republicans are applauding a new oil deal with Venezuela that President Trump announced over the weekend calling it the biggest oil deal in world history. Republican congressmen Reich Crofford. Not only from an energy security perspective, but from a geographic security. I mean, Western him security perspective. This is really a good deal for the United States and a good deal for Venezuela. Under the deal, a new company gets the rights to 17 Venezuelan oil fields for at least 25

2:01years, 65 billion barrels worth. The US gets a 55% stake in the venture, including the right to buy at cost. No text of the deal has yet been released. GOP congressman Brian Mast called it a blow to America's adversaries. That's actually now going to go to the United States of America instead of China, not on Russian ships, so Russia isn't going to benefit from that. Trump says the deal will bring gas prices down, though energy analysts say that will not happen quickly. Venezuela's oil fields are racked in fixing them. We'll take years and billions of dollars. Acting Venezuela president Delci Rodriguez is also touting it as a great deal for her country. She says the money will build houses for Venezuelans who lost theirs in recent earthquakes and for families who never had one. But some Democrats in Washington are not impressed with the deal. They say the US raid that took out former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Mororo was about oil all along. They assert that American troops were risked so oil companies and Trump's allies could profit. For

3:05genius editor Tim Cain called it quote using our troops for a private oil grab. The death toll from last week's Himalayan flood has passed 800 with more than 3,000 people still missing across Nepal and Tibet. Whole villages sit buried in grey mud with homes and tractors sticking out. Nepal's foreign secretary Amrit Bahadur Raai. Our immediate national prime to remains clear. To save lives, locate missing persons, rescue them and provide us in relief to survivors and ensure that affected Nepal itself as foreigners receive appropriate assistance and support. Roughly 90 Americans are among the missing. Many were on a pilgrimage to a mountain in Tibet. One American woman said she talked with her parents less than two hours before the water came. They were just telling my sister about the amazing time that they had in Nepal and China and how blessed they felt to be on the pilgrimage.

4:06Her parents are still missing. The flood started when bedrock under a Himalayan glacier gave way triggering a rockfall so violent that it registered as an earthquake. In Nepal on Sunday warned people to stay clear of the rivers as China reported more water coming down from the mountains. A village outside of Kiev is counting its dead, 38 so far and 4 still on accounted for after deadly Russian attacks. World's Benjamin Iker has more. A Russian strike hit an ammunition dump over the weekend and the resulting blast and fire swept through houses nearby. No attack this year has killed more. President Volodymyr Zelensky called it terrible negligence, storing explosives near people's homes and he ordered an investigation. Russia has stepped up its air campaign in Ukraine, now striking Kiev in daylight which used to be rare. Moscow said Sunday it's preparing to strike Ukraine's power grid. Vladimir Putin says it's payback for Ukrainian drones hitting Russian

5:10refineries and warehouses but this is nothing new for Russia which has attacked Ukraine's power grid in past winters. Ukrainian officials warned this campaign could be the worst since the invasion began. For World, I'm Benjamin Iker. At Florida's Kennedy Space Center Sunday. NASA's newest space telescope blasted off on a Falcon Heavy rocket. SpaceX launched the $4 billion Roman Space Telescope and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said that over the next several months Roman will travel nearly one million miles from Earth. And begin transmitting imagery and data back home that will contribute to world changing science, along with all the captivating imagery that like we see from Hubble and James Webb. I have no doubt that Roman will become a household name alongside those

6:11great instruments of discovery. The telescope is named after the late Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer. NASA predicts it will find tens of thousands of planets, billions of galaxies and tens of billions of stars. At the weekend, Box Office Wiley E. Coyote hit the big screen. Have you ever said a big stack of TNT on the road hoping to blow up your nemesis but the detonator itself explodes? It's not your fault. Acme is evil. Coyote versus Acme, the blended live-action slash animated feature debuted with an estimated $15 million domestically for the weekend. But that still wasn't enough to dethrone Spider-Man brand new day, which finished in first place once again with another $22 million stateside, now $2.3 billion worldwide. I'm Kent Covington and coming up. What the Fed chairman had to say about the central bank's

7:12role in inflation plus a religious and ethnic minority in Iraq seeks justice years after a devastating attack. This is The World and Everything in it. It's the world and everything in it for August 31st, 2026. We are so glad you've joined us today. Good morning. I'm Nick Eiker. And I'm Mary Rankard. Time now for Legal Docket. The Supreme Court's new term is just five weeks away. The justices have 26 cases on the docket so far. And today we preview a high stakes religious liberty showdown set for November. St. Mary Catholic Parish V. Roy tackles a growing constitutional debate. If a state invites religious schools into a public program, can it demand they give up their religious standards to participate? And can a state claim its rules apply equally to everyone? And then at the same time, allow secular

8:19schools to customize their enrollment for specific groups. The answer to those questions may seem obvious, but straightforward cases don't typically reach the high court. And this dispute did not arise in a vacuum back in 2020. The Supreme Court ruled in an now landmark case called Bostock V Clayton County. Bostock held that federal law bars employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the policy world. That is referred to by the shorthand acronym SOGI. Now, Bostock was a workplace case, not a public benefits case, but it did accelerate a legal culture that increasingly treats SOGI as protected classifications across public policy. It's particularly visible where that understanding collides with religious belief and practice, as in the case of St. Mary. It's trouble began with Colorado's universal preschool program. The state pays preschools that voluntarily apply for and have been approved,

9:22whether public, private or faith-based. It pays for 15 hours of preschool each week for Colorado four year olds in the year before kindergarten. To accept the money, providers are expected to give children an equal opportunity to enroll and receive services without regard to SOGI. The collision course here should be obvious. Catholic schools and the archdiocese of Denver teach Catholic doctrine on marriage, sex, and the biological reality of male and female. The archdiocese maintains that local parishes cannot accept those conditions and at the same time remain faithful to Catholic teaching. So two parish preschools and parents sued. They cited the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. The Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty represents them. I talked with one of its lawyers, Nick Reaves. Starting in 2023, Colorado offered families about $6,000 a year to send their kids to the preschool of their choice. Over 2,000 preschools participate in the program. The plaintiffs argue Colorado cannot call the program universal while

10:24forcing faith-based schools to abandon their convictions to participate. I asked the Colorado Attorney General's Office and the State Department for Early Childhood for interviews, both declined and the AG's office referred me to its court filings. So here's what I found. Colorado says it isn't excluding schools because they are Catholic. Instead, the state argues that every participating preschool religious or secular must abide by the same anti-discrimination rules to receive state funds. Colorado points out that more than 40 faith-based providers participated in the program's first year. That number did include six other preschools affiliated with the archdiocese. So far, Colorado has won at every level. A federal judge rejected the school's claims after a three-day trial and a unanimous appeals court panel backed that up. So now the Supreme Court is their last resort. The schools asked the justices to overturn a landmark 1990 precedent called Employment Division V Smith. That case held that neutral laws do not violate the free

11:31exercise clause simply because they happened to burden religious practice. The justices declined to revisit Smith, but the high court did agree to decide to narrower questions. The first is whether Colorado's rule really does apply across the board. Colorado says it does. The Catholic schools say it doesn't, pointing out that the state allows specialized secular exceptions while refusing religious accommodations. The archdiocese runs dozens of preschools with an explicitly religious mission, forming children in the Catholic faith. If a family cannot agree to respect Catholic teaching within the school, a school may decline to enroll the child. Those schools also use pronouns consistent with the child's biological sex and restrict bathroom access on the same basis. Again, lawyer rives. Colorado's argument is that Catholic schools have to enroll families regardless of their religion, regardless of their willingness to agree to be respectful of the Catholic faith and the Catholic beliefs in the school. At the same time, they're turning around and

12:34saying, well, other schools can serve only their existing community and they've led over a thousand preschools specialized. And so it's really a double standard that Colorado's applying. Examples of those specialized programs include headstart programs that prioritize low-income families. Programs may also reserve places for kids with disabilities. A state official testified in lower court that preferences could potentially serve LGBTQ parents or four-year-olds with gender dysphoria. Rives says those preferences make Colorado's supposedly uniform rule look less so. The government has to show that it's treating its interest as important. That is shown by saying, look, we're applying this to everybody across the board. If the rule is being applied like Swiss cheese and there are all kinds of exceptions, then it's not really that important. Colorado says those exceptions are not discriminatory. Those specialized programs remove barriers for children. From the state's viewpoint, these programs expand access to early education,

13:37allowing a school to turn away a child because of a parent's LGBTQ status would restrict it. And that's the central disagreement. Are those secular exceptions comparable to the religious accommodations St. Mary seeks or do they advance Colorado's equal access interest? That disagreement runs through Smith and a later decision called Fulton V. City of Philadelphia from 2021. Smith arose after the state of Oregon denied unemployment benefits to two Native American men fired from their jobs for using the drug peyote in religious ceremonies. And what the Supreme Court said is, if there isn't a cross-the-board rule that applies to everybody like a criminal prohibition, you don't have to accommodate religion. You can just enforce that rule and it kind of came from this idea that, well, if you enforce the same rule against everybody, then everyone's being treated equally. So there's no free exercise problem. But Smith was not the final word. The Supreme Court has since set major limits, especially when a law allows secular exceptions while denying religious ones. In Fulton, the court ruled that a

14:41law is not generally applicable if officials have discretion to make exceptions. Or if the state allows secular programs to operate under different standards. So that leaves the Supreme Court with two central questions in this case. First, does allowing pre-schools to set specialized entry criteria turn a uniform rule into selective discrimination. And second, under the public benefits doctrine, can the state exclude an otherwise qualified school from a public program simply because of its religious identity? One of those decisions came just a few years ago in Carson versus Macon. And what the court said there was that if you deny someone a public benefit on account of their religious exercise, then you don't even look at Smith. You go straight to strict scrutiny that requires the government to prove it has a really good reason for keeping religious people out. Colorado argues this is different because it has not explicitly excluded religious schools as main did in the Carson case. Colorado welcomes religious providers and several already participate.

15:46Pre-schools just have to agree with what the state calls conduct. Treat children the same. It says that is not discrimination against religion. But the Catholic schools say that reasoning drains Carson of any meaning. The Constitution protects not only religious status like being Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or Muslim, but religious exercise, living and operating according to beliefs. Reves acknowledges that applying strict scrutiny would not automatically mean the Catholic schools when Colorado could still prove its rule serves a compelling state interest and is narrowly tailored. Catholic schools point out that a religious accommodation would not keep a family from getting state-funded preschool somewhere else and no LGBTQ person has ever filed a discrimination complaint against an archdiocesan preschool. The ruling is likely to be a big one. It could be the case that determines how much room states have to attach uniform conditions to public benefits

16:46and when those conditions become a penalty on religious exercise. And that's this week's Legal Docket. Additional support comes from Boyce College where truth comes first. Every class begins with scripture and prepares students to live with wisdom, conviction and Christ-like faithfulness. BoyceCollege.com. From WorldWatch, a 10-minute current news program designed for daily school rhythms. A free 30-day trial is available at worldwatch.news slash podcast. And from Cedarville University, equipping students for professional excellence and gospel impact. Cedarville.edu slash world.

17:57Coming up next on the world and everything in it, the Monday Money Beat. Time now to talk business markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bonson. David heads up the wealth management firm, the Bonson Group. And he's here now good morning David. Well, good morning. Good to be with you. Well, we talked last week about the anticipation around a speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, a speech with some interesting timing. New Fed chairman Kevin Warsh hit his 100th day on the job as he was delivering that speech. But I know you were looking forward to what he would say. And he said it now. So David, what did you hear as the central message? Well, I mean, I think that the major takeaway I had was that he reiterated something that he's been criticized for since becoming Fed Chair, which is that trying to do policy by hinting at future policy. What we refer to as forward guidance that he's not going to do it.

19:01The issue, Nick, is that in the here and now he has task forces that have been appointed that are in the middle of their work. And I for one, I'm very curious as to the gravity and punch and potency of what's going to come back when they talk about how they collect data, what they're going to do with the Fed balance sheet. Is it going to be kind of like most governmental task forces, which are really cosmetic and not usually very potent? Or is there something big coming out of it? What he's done with the task forces is all at once create the opportunity for some real reform, but also leave us hanging because they are TBD. Well, David, one of the reasons chairman Warsh gave in his speech for rejecting forward guidance is what he calls the Hall of Mirrors problem. Let's listen to what he had to say. If markets rely materially on the Fed's guidance and the Fed relies on market prices, we're more likely to be blinded to new developments,

20:05more likely to be caught unprepared, and more likely to commit errors in policymaking. So is that what he means by Hall of Mirrors and how does that circularity affect actual investment and economic productivity? It is what he meant, but it's also what critics of forward guidance have said for a long time, but what is profound is the Fed chair himself saying it. I put up a client's is people begin investing money not off of what their outlook is, but how they predict others are going to be investing money in response to Fed activity. It's distortive activity. It is people responding to things that are interventions, and so it is necessarily less productive, because unless you don't believe that the most productive economic activity are human beings acting in self-interest, building businesses, doing things, taking investments, taking risks,

21:06and that that's the optimal framework for economic growth. And then anything that waters that down by trying to factor in Fed guidance or how the Fed responds or this, that and the other, we can debate how marginal that dilution is, but I don't think there's a debate, not a credible academic or intellectual argument that suggests that this isn't marginalizing economic productivity to some degree. The ideal framework would be that the Fed has a much more limited scope and jurisdiction, and at some directional level, Kevin Warsha agrees with that. Well, you know, Warsha also made an unusually direct statement about the Fed's responsibility for inflation. Let's listen to this part of the speech. Now, there is one signal nobody can miss. Responsibility for 65 months of sustained elevated inflation sits squarely with the central bank,

22:06and that's where it belongs. Well, David, do you take it literally that the Fed caused all the inflation, or is Warsha simply making kind of a broader, the buck stops here kind of statement? Well, I don't agree. And nor do I even think he really believes it that all of the inflation is because of the Fed, but he may be saying the inflation could have been caused from this, this and this, but it's the Fed's responsibility to go deal with it. So there is a buck stops with us in a sense that is legitimate, but economically, it's a little too binary for my liking, but I also take the context when she's saying it differently. Now, no, I have not heard it from inside the Fed before, and you're not going to hear it from someone who was there. He can say it because he wasn't there over those 65 months, but I want to point something out, Nick. Chairman Powell was, and then Chairman Powell is now a sitting Fed governor, as are plenty of the

23:11other members of FOMC. So there's a dog whistle in this. What he is basically trying to say is, why do we want a majority of FOMC members now that were responsible for some policy mistakes then? And I do believe that there is some cordiality, but nevertheless, contentious policy disagreements right now behind the scenes, but Warsha is the one with the microphone, so he can get little jabs like that in there to help from the bully pulpit. All right. Well, last bit of the address, David, Kevin Warsha's reading of the economy. In my view, credit and loan markets are showing few signs of policy restraint. Now, certain sectors like housing and agriculture are showing strains, but on balance, I would be hard pressed to describe broad financial conditions as restrictive. Now, he also described the labor market as stable and consistent with full

24:14employment, but is stable. The same thing as strong enough to absorb an interest rate increase. Well, I think that for him to have leaned more into price worries and less into job growth worries is a way to say I'm a feeling more hawkish than dovish. You noticed, by the way, when he spoke, that short-term rates came up a little bit, but the 30-year actually came down to basis point. The 10-year barely went up. So there was a little bit of curve flattening, and that I think is speaking to him trying to reestablish a little bit of fed credibility. The issue is the vulnerability in the job market is an argument against raising rates. You either have to really believe the job market is solid, which is some anecdotal evidence. It's done pretty well. I always point to the initial jobless claims. We had another benign report there on Thursday. Yet, if he were to hike rates, people are going to lose jobs.

25:21There's just too many variables connected to that that across companies that borrow money, floating rate, mortgage-related, commercial real estate-related, that on the margin, a higher rates right now would be difficult for jobs. The job market, although not terrible, isn't great, and it's that no hiring, no firing component. Be optimistic that there's not a lot of firing, but be pessimistic that there's not a lot of hiring. But I do believe that he does not want to get in a position where he has to start cutting rates because the unemployment rate is screaming higher. That's why I think him talking about it this way gives him the ability to do what I think he actually wants to do. He does not want to cut rates and sacrifice fed credibility and be perceived as capitulating to the president. But I don't think he really wants to hike rates either.

26:24It may just be the best way for him to navigate this is to kind of leave things status quo, which is somewhat faithful to the dual mandate regarding both the employment side and the price stability side. David, before we go just real fast, I wanted to get your take on the Treasury Secretary's big announcement on Iran last week. Secretary Scott Besson announced what he calls Operation Economic Outcast. The Wall Street Journal editorial page said that the strategy threatens secondary sanctions against foreign refiners, shippers, exchange houses and banks that help Iran turn oil into money that they can spend. David, is this genuinely a new escalation? Do you think that economic pressure can change the behavior of a regime that has to date shown itself willing to impose enormous hardship on its own people? Yeah, it's interesting. The Secretary

27:25Besson was one of the people I was most excited for the new Trump administration at a cabinet level. He's one I had a relationship with going in, have met with since he has become Treasury Secretary, and therefore it's hard for me because it's now two weeks in a row of criticism. But this one, it isn't so much I'm critical what they've done. It's just a little odd the way it was melanchomatically positioned like am I supposed to believe that we we you have not been doing economic sanctions against Iran the last six months like we're just coming up with this now. I am not convinced at this time that the Iranian regime is impacted by self preservation. I believe that they are willing to do extraordinary damage to their own people. And I don't know if part of that is the jihadi culture or just a kind of resilience of the Iranian extremist, but you know they're moving to significant unemployment or inability to have

28:31capital mobility. I'm not sure that they care and I'm not sure how much of what we're now saying we're going to do we weren't already doing, but yeah I am happy that we are using economic weapons where we can against a genuine enemy, but I'm not totally sure that we weren't already doing. David Bonson is founder, managing partner and chief investment officer of the Bonson Group. You can read his regular market writing at dividendcafe.com. David also writes regularly for world opinions. David, thanks so much. We will catch you next week. Thanks so much Nick. Good morning. This is The World and Everything in it from listeners supported world radio.

29:36I'm Nick Eiker and I'm Mary Reikard up next The World History Book. The Yazidis are a minority ethno religious group in the Middle East with a long history of suffering persecution. Estimates of their numbers vary, but the European Union Agency for asylum reports that between 400,000 and a half million Yazidis lived in northern Iraq prior to recent conflicts. But in the summer of 2014, ISIS militants swept through their homeland near the Syrian border that kidnapped and killed thousands of people. 10 years after the genocide, the Yazidi community is still seeking justice. World's Jenny Ruff reports. 12 years ago this August, the terrorist group ISIS attacked the Sinjir district in northern Iraq, where the Yazidis lived. Yazidis were executed and the women and children were kidnapped. And there was no safe haven. Pari Abraham is the founder and director of the Free Yazidi Foundation.

30:36I myself am Yazidi. The Yazidis are an ethnic religious minority in Iraq. Our religion, our identity, is widely misunderstood. And their beliefs differ from both Christianity and Islam. We believe in one God. We don't have Jesus. We have seven angels. We pray towards the sun. Our holy site is in Shehan. Conflicts between Muslims and Yazidis have been going on for centuries. There's never been any respect for our community other than eradication. In the 16th century, at the height of the Ottoman Empire, political and religious leaders authorized attacks on Yazidi villages for their standalone religious beliefs. Abraham grew up hearing stories of those past persecutions. We heard stories of our people fleeing towards the mountain many, many years ago, of people cutting off pieces of body parts until somebody would convert to Islam.

31:37Abraham's family fled Iraq in 1991 during Saddam Hussein's reign. She was only three, but her parents told her about how they left everything behind and escaped over a mountain by foot. It was freezing cold. Some kids had lost their shoes. There was no food. It was very difficult. The weather didn't make it easier. At that time, my mom was very pregnant. Abraham was a law student in the Netherlands in 2014, when she heard news reports about the growing concerns taking place in her homeland. ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, had begun to take over large swaths of the country. Audio from VIA News. Two days earlier, the Jihadi group ISIS took over Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, sending hundreds of thousands of frightened residents fleeing for safety. I see everything destroyed. Everything cars and all the city destroyed. After ISIS captured Mosul, some Yazidis left, but many stayed.

32:38Within weeks, ISIS declared a worldwide caliphate, then on August 3rd, the attack. Abraham was in Germany for a family gathering. She got a flurry of phone calls. Everyone is in panic. The Islamic State is committing a genocide. We immediately knew it was a genocide. Maybe people think, okay, well, to identify something as genocide, you need to have a court decision and investigation, etc. But by the time that that happens, everyone will be dead. ISIS executed the man and older women. It kidnapped the young women and children. The women were eventually brought and sold into sexual slavery, in Syria and in Iraq, on slave markets. These girls were like toys just given to each other as gifts. ISIS attacked Christians too, but Abraham says there was a big difference. The Christians were offered a jiza, a sort of like tax, that they had to pay to ISIS,

33:40to stay in ISIS territory or leave. Yazidis were not granted that payment. Within days of the attack, Abraham started a non-profit to locate those who might still be alive and in captivity. Today, more than 2,000 women and children are still missing. There's many Yazidi families that come to us. They come to us and say like, I know exactly where my family member is. I know exactly in what camp, in what tent she is. These people are just a number at this moment. But, you know, we need to start identifying them by face and name. They're human beings. In December of 2017, military forces defeated ISIS in Iraq. Two years later, they declared victory over ISIS in Syria. But ISIS fighters still exist. Even now, resurgent groups are popping up in Syria and Iraq. I feel like people really underestimate the Islamic State. We always say like, okay, ISIS is militarily defeated, but the ideology lives forth. So the ideology remains.

34:46And I think that that is the danger. You need to try to eradicate that ideology. You need to try to tackle those root causes that created that in the first place. In stability in the Middle East, we'll just feed into this hatred. Abraham now lives in the United States, where she continues her work. I live in America. I get an amber alert as soon as a little child is kidnapped. Bam, my phone goes off. The child is missing. Keep your eye open. My people don't have that. Nobody is putting out an alert for our people. Just imagine the suffering they're going through still today. Abraham says the rest of the world has moved on from the 2014 attack, but for the families of the missing, that's impossible. That's this week's world history book. I'm Jenny Ruff.

35:49Tomorrow new ideas for Americans looking to protect their data privacy will talk with an expert. And an interview with World Contributor, AS Ibrahim, on Understanding Islam. That and more. Tomorrow I'm Nick Eiger. And I'm Mary Rygerd. The world and everything in it comes to you from World Radio. World's mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, inspires. The Bible says, be merciful to me, oh God, be merciful to me. For in you my soul takes refuge. In the shadow of your wings, I will take refuge till the storms of destruction pass by. I cry out to God most high to God who fulfills his purpose for me. He will send from heaven and save me. He will put to shame him who tramples on me. God will send out his steadfast love and his faithfulness. Versus one through three of Psalm 57. Go now in grace and peace.