Worlds Awaiting

Guest: Jereon Dewulf, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of German and the Director of European Studies at the University of California—Berkeley  Three explosions in the airport and a metro station of the Belgian capital left more than 30 people dead. The extreme terror group ISIS – or the Islamic State – has claimed responsibility.  It’s a strike at the heart of the European Union and likely also linked to the arrest last Friday of the sole surviving fugitive believed to have participated in November’s terror attacks in Paris.  That man and a suspected accomplice were captured in a suburb of Brussels called Molenbeek, which has been called Europe’s capital of jihad. Per-capita, Belgium is Europe’s largest contributor of ISIS fighters in Syria.

Guest: Quinn Mecham, PhD, Professor of Political Science at BYU  Other big news happening on the international stage today comes out of Cuba, where Barack Obama is the first US President to visit since 1928. In a televised speech seen in Cuba and abroad, President Obama said he had come to “bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.”  President Obama also said that change will depend upon the Cuban people. The United States “will not impose its political or economic system” on the country.  Cuba is where we begin with BYU political science professor Quinn Mecham, back for his monthly analysis of three international events we should be paying attention to.

Guest: Neal Harmon, Co-founder of VidAngel  There have been a fair number of companies over the last decade have tried to rent or sell cleaned-up versions of Hollywood films with profanity, violence and sexual content cut out. But they’ve come up against copyright law and the courts have ruled much of that practice illegal. Meanwhile, web-enabled TVs and streaming video have opened up new avenues for filtering content that, so far, have managed to pass legal muster. One of the newest entrants into this field is VidAngel.