The World and Everything in It: July 27, 2026

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Today on Legal Docket: Alaska Airlines asked employees what they thought of the company’s support for a controversial bill. Two flight attendants answered, and the airline fired them.

TAUB: Can someone please shut down comments—or put Marli and Lacey in a burlap bag …?

NICK EICHER, HOST: Now Marli and Lacey want a jury to rule on religious discrimination.

Also today the Monday Moneybeat: David Bahnsen is standing by.

And later the WORLD History Book:

SANDBERG: The actions that took place were complicated.

Today: The collision that sank the Andrea Doria.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, July 27th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Now the news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Iran latest » The U.S. military stopped bombing Iran Thursday night, and it hasn't resumed. That halted two weeks of nightly airstrikes.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz said Sunday President Trump is giving peace talks a little breathing room:

WALTZ: We've had both Oman and Iran, and a number of our other negotiators, engaged at every level, from the most senior levels all the way down to the technical level over the past few weeks, and particularly in the past few days.

Iran has stopped firing missiles at American forces. But it's still going after ships. Iran's Revolutionary Guard says it fired warning shots at several vessels in the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend.

Attacks on shipping started the latest U.S. bombing campaign. Iranian drones and missiles later killed three American soldiers at an air base in Jordan.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced his support once more for keeping the pressure on Teheran.

NETANYAHU:  When this regime is either toppled or it's sufficiently weakened that it knows it has to end its nuclear program and has to, uh, change its course. That's really what President Trump is trying to achieve, and I back his, uh, fully

Netanyahu to meet w/ Trump, attend Graham funeral » And the prime minister is on a plane to Washington today.

NETANYAHU: [Speaking Hebrew]

He told Israeli leaders at a Sunday cabinet meeting that he will meet with President Trump at the White House tomorrow, where the Iran war will top the agenda.

Afterwards, he’ll take part in the funeral of the late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, someone the prime minister called “a big friend of Israel.”

Graham’s body lies in state at the Capitol tomorrow, ahead of a service at Washington National Cathedral. South Carolina services follow Wednesday.

Heatwave in southern U.S.  » Millions of Americans are still enduring a brutal heatwave today.

Forecasters say it could feel like 115 degrees in parts of Iowa and Nebraska. But it reaches much farther. Bob Oravec of the National Weather Service, said Sunday.

ORAVEC: The heat that is affecting large parts of the country from the Western US into the middle part of the country from the Canadian border all the way down to the Gulf Coast is affecting about a hundred and thirty million people. These are people that are under either an extreme heat warning or a heat advisory

Those alerts are still up this morning. A heat dome is driving it, high pressure parked overhead like a lid. Forecasters say it slides south and east this week, toward Memphis and the Gulf Coast.

Oravec says storms should bring some relief by midweek, but the pattern holds through the end of the month.

Islamic attack at German LGBT attack » German police say the suspect in a deadly attack on an LGBT parade in Berlin was an Islamic extremist. WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher reports.

BENJAMIN EICHER: Officers tracked down 21-year-old Abdul Ballout Sunday evening in a Berlin suburb. Police say he ran at them with a sharp object at which time they shot and killed him.

Investigators say Ballout drove a van into a crowd in a park near the Brandenburg Gate Saturday night, then stabbed people with a machete.

One woman was killed, 29 others were hurt.

Ballout was born in Germany. He traveled to Lebanon last year trying to join ISIS in Syria. A Berlin court convicted him in May of spreading ISIS propaganda and plotting an attack. But the court suspended his sentence, citing time already served.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher.

Box office » At the weekend box office, The Odyssey continues to rake in the big bucks.

CLIP [The Odyssey trailer]: Tell me what you remember. A wife … a son …

Christopher Nolan’s latest epic earned another $87 million dollars domestically. Among R-rated movies, only Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine made more money in its second weekend.

Worldwide, The Odyssey has now raked in $640 million dollars in roughly 10 days.

Lagging far behind, Disney’s live action remake of Moana, Toy Story 5, and Minions & Monsters each took another roughly $10 million dollars.

I'm Kent Covington: 

Straight ahead: A religious discrimination case involving Alaska Airlines. And later, the WORLD History Book.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for July 27th, 2026 . We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Time now for Legal Docket.

Congress considered a controversial civil-rights bill five years ago titled The Equality Act. It was a measure that would likely affect relations between businesses and the public, and Alaska Airlines invited employees to comment on it.

Two Christian flight attendants offered theirs. And the airline fired them both.

EICHER: Now, five years later, a federal appeals court says a jury may decide whether Alaska acted improperly, using its own rules as a cover for religious discrimination. Or whether they were merely enforcing neutral workplace rules. Marli Brown is one of the fired flight attendants.

REICHARD: Lacey Smith is the other.

SMITH: And so my question was, “As a company, do you think it's possible to regulate morality?” And that's the question that got me terminated.

The appeals court has not decided that Alaska discriminated. It just decided the evidence is disputed enough that a jury should hear the case.

EICHER: To understand how the dispute began, it’s helpful to remember how unsettled was the summer of 2020.

The country was living through COVID lockdowns, nationwide unrest after the death of George Floyd, and a bitter presidential campaign. Employers were rapidly adopting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. And many workers were finding out that disagreement over sexuality and gender could carry professional consequences.

In the middle of all that, the Supreme Court ruled in a case called Bostock v. Clayton County.

REICHARD: By a vote of six to three, the Court held that Title VII’s prohibition on workplace sex discrimination also covers sexual orientation and gender identity.

Title VII already protects employees from religious discrimination.

So Bostock placed those protections alongside one another in federal employment law—without resolving every conflict that might arise between them.

EICHER: The following year was when Congress took up the Equality Act.

The bill would have expanded federal civil-rights protections involving sexual orientation and gender identity across employment, public accommodations, and other areas.

As a company, Alaska Airlines took a position in favor, but also solicited employee comment.

REICHARD: To a point. Alaska held that only what it considered “civil and respectful” comments would be tolerated, and ruled out of bounds what it regarded as harassment and discrimination.

Smith had worked as an Alaska flight attendant for six years. She posted the question we heard a moment ago:

SMITH: Do you think it’s possible to regulate morality?

I asked Smith what was behind the question.

SMITH: God tells us that He created us male and female. And He created us and told us to…populate the earth… So giving us guidelines in terms of law and what he's expecting from us. So as a Christian, that's one of the things where if you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, which I do, and if you believe that…God's commands are true and that the Bible is relevant, which I do, then those are things that you have to adhere to….Laws first give us a mirror, they tell us kind of what's wrong or right. And then secondly…they try and punish evil and reward good. And the third thing they do for us is allow us to know what God thinks is good and to strive for living that life ….And so I take legislation… a little bit more seriously on my faith in terms of what we're allowing into our legislation….because whether we like it or not, legislation often regulates morality…..And so for me, if Alaska's in support of something that's going against my own biblical belief and faith and the inerrancy of God's word, that's when I have a concern about it.

The other flight attendant, Marli Brown, posted later that day. Her comment was much longer—and expressly religious.

She said the Equality Act threatened the church, religious freedom, and conscience protections. She also argued that its provisions could diminish the privacy and safety of women and girls. And she warned—and here’s the key—that sexual predators could exploit rules allowing access to private spaces designated for the opposite sex.

EICHER: Alaska said Brown in saying that had equated LGBTQ people with sexual predators, defining her post hateful and discriminatory.

At that point, Alaska removed both women’s comments and opened disciplinary investigations against them.

REICHARD: Smith and Brown are both Christians. Both were also members of the Association of Flight Attendants—the labor union that was supposed to represent them.

Alaska ultimately fired both women the same day. Smith says she was stunned.

SMITH: I don't think anybody expects to get fired for writing a comment which was encouraged on a post that Alaska themselves brought to their employees. So I think the termination definitely felt incredibly extreme.

EICHER: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employers from discriminating against employees based on religion. It also applies to labor unions.

But religious belief does not give an employee immunity from neutral workplace rules. An employer may discipline employees for genuine harassment or discrimination—even when religiously motivated.

REICHARD: The question here is whether Alaska applied its policies neutrally—or used them to punish beliefs the company opposed.

I contacted Alaska Airlines and the union for comment, but didn’t hear back in time for this story. I’ll update you if I receive a response.

EICHER: Before bringing a federal employment-discrimination lawsuit, workers ordinarily must first pursue an administrative claim. Smith and Brown did that. Then they sued both the airline and their union.

Stephanie Taub is Senior Counsel at First Liberty Institute, which represents the women:

TAUB: Normally you have to go through…the EEOC or another state agency first. And so it takes some time to go through the state agency before you can bring a lawsuit. And then you file a lawsuit in the district court and you go through the process of gathering evidence. So that takes more time too. And then what happened here is the district court filed an opinion saying that we weren't able to go to trial because the district court thought that we didn't have enough evidence of religious discrimination.

But we do have good news because the Ninth Circuit just recently … overturned that decision and … laid out all of the evidence that we presented, which we believe is overwhelming evidence of religious discrimination, and they agreed with us. We had enough evidence of religious discrimination to go to trial against the airline and against the union.

REICHARD: More precisely, the appeals court held there was enough evidence for the claims to continue, not necessarily that discrimination occurred. The ruling was that the evidence in dispute should not have been resolved by a judge without a trial. And much of the evidence came from internal airline and union communications obtained in the discovery process.

EICHER: As Alaska prepared its public response to Smith’s morality question, a lawyer in the airline’s legal department wrote this: “Employees actually do not have the right to believe that LGBTQ rights are ‘immoral.’” He placed quotation marks around the word “immoral.”

Alaska’s vice president of in-flight operations replied, “I 100% agree.”

The appeals court said a jury could consider that exchange as possible evidence of religious hostility.

REICHARD: Taub also points to the language Alaska used when discussing the word “inclusion:”

TAUB: They repeated that phrase over and over and over again. There's only a few categories that are protected in federal law, and they omitted one. They omitted religion. And so this is absolutely telling.

The union’s internal messages were even more blunt.

One union official called Smith’s comment “reprehensible” and wrote that employees could be bigots in their private lives—but not at work.

EICHER: The union president repeatedly contacted Alaska management about the women’s comments. In one message, he complained that too many people struggled to reconcile their faith with inclusion. And one of Brown’s own union representatives sent a message to other union officials, as Taub describes.

TAUB: Marli's union representative, she texted to other union representatives, can someone please shut down comments or put Marli and Lacey in a burlap bag and drop them down a well. So if that's not evidence of anti- religious hostility, I don't know what is.

REICHARD: That union official later represented Brown during Alaska’s investigation. The union filed grievances after the firings. But it declined to take either woman’s case to arbitration. Smith says she felt abandoned by the people who were supposed to be representing her.

SMITH: I had a union person who basically said that they didn't think that I was going to get represented in arbitration early on. What's interesting about that is she's been doing it long enough that she just knows. Yet when it came to my defense and any of the grievance process, she never said one word. So somebody who's incredibly skilled at defending and knowing just what's happening had not one word to say on my behalf to Alaska Airlines.

EICHER: The federal district court ruled for Alaska and the union without a trial.

But last month, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, voting 2-1, reversed.

The majority treated the two women’s claims somewhat differently.

Holding: Brown’s comment was explicitly religious, and Alaska and the union plainly understood that.

And the panel noted: Brown had also worked at the airline for eight years with no prior discipline.

REICHARD: Smith’s case is more complicated. Her brief question on regulating morality did not mention religion. And when Alaska interviewed her, Smith described her question as philosophical. She did not expressly claim religious discrimination until after the company fired her.

Unlike Brown, Smith did have a previous disciplinary record arising from a workplace dispute over Alaska’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

EICHER: Even so, the majority said Alaska did not evaluate Smith’s case in a vacuum. Company and union officials discussed the two women together. Brown’s investigation included extensive discussion of religious objections and occurred before Smith’s. Yet both were fired the same day.

From that evidence, the majority said a jury could conclude that Alaska understood the religious context of Smith’s question and used its neutral policies as a cover.

REICHARD: The dissenting judge in the case said the company would’ve had to be “clairvoyant” to know Smith was making a religious claim. She concluded an employer cannot discriminate against an employee because of a religious meaning the employer was unaware of.

And that sort of disagreement might illustrate the difficulty Smith could face before a jury: Did Alaska fire the women for violating neutral rules? Or did company and union officials treat their Christian convictions as evidence of harassment?

EICHER: The five-year legal battle has already carried significant personal costs. Smith moved across the country and became a stay-at-home mother. Brown found work at another airline—but at the cost of a decade of seniority.

REICHARD: I asked Smith why she’s continued with the litigation:

SMITH: As a Christian, you know that you’re not expecting a golden road to walk down. You know they say rejoice whenever you face persecution of any kind. So, not that rejoicing comes easily, but I think that’s when you have a lot of spiritual growth that comes to it. And so, in this process, there’s a lot of rejoicing for the fact that I’m standing on solid ground. I’m standing up for my faith in God. And in this nation, to be able to worship God without fear, is a big deal.

By terminating people of faith, it makes you not able to stand up for your faith without fear. You fear losing your job, you fear providing for your family, you fear the repercussions that are going to happen. People speaking against you. I’ve lost friends over this process. If it did anything for me, it helped my roots grow deeper and for that? Yeah, I’m thankful.

The case is Brown v Alaska Airlines, Inc and is currently pending for trial in Washington State.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It:

The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time now to talk business markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group, and he’s here now. Good morning, David.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Good morning, Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: David, let’s talk long-term interest rates. The New York Times reports that the yield on the 10-year Treasury has climbed to 4.7 percent—its highest point of President Trump’s second term. The paper points to several possible causes: the Iran war, higher oil prices, and heavier government borrowing.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has called the 10-year yield a barometer of the administration’s success on affordability. Is that the right measure? And by that measure, is the administration losing ground?

BAHNSEN: Well, I want to do a little explanation for listeners that I think is going to be very helpful here this morning to give us a level reset on how all this works. The 10-year bond yield is the most important metric in all of economics. It is the thing that I consider to be the most important measurement. It’s the most liquid instrument. It is deeply held. It is global. It is risk-free, so it is purely measuring interest rates and, and economic growth expectations, devoid of other credit risk and currency considerations, so it’s pretty well isolated.

However, it’s a barometer of two things, and that’s where I think the secretary may have missed the mark in his comment, because nominal GDP growth is more or less the expectations of nominal GDP growth is more or less going to be measured in a 10-year bond yield. However, nominal GDP growth means two things: inflation expectations and real growth.

So I’m making up a number here, but if we had a 5% 10-year with 1% inflation, meaning 4% real growth expectations wouldn’t everyone consider that a wonderful thing? That’s the barometer you love. And then inversely, if we had a 2% 10-year, because we had only 1% inflation expectation but only 1% real growth, would anybody think that’s a good thing?

So I believe that the tenure measures two things. One of them is bad, and one of them is good, and you have to capture both. And to the extent the tenure goes higher, and this is the essence of your question: Is Secretary Besant failing by his own measurement because the tenure is going higher in concert with higher price expectations, that would be a negative.

However, I if the tenure was at 4.6 or 4.7 where it is now, and inflation was down at 2% I’d be thrilled for 2.7% real growth. We’ve been getting one and a half to 2% for a long time, so I just don’t think the 10-year bond yield, without more information about growth and inflation, is enough.

And I think that that is where the press has to understand this. The administration certainly does understand it, but when sometimes people are saying, "Oh, I really hope the tenure goes down to 3%, three and a half. If what they mean is it’s because I hope inflation drops, I get it. But people have to understand you’re not getting a tenure with a three in front of it unless we have really bad economic growth, and that’s not what any of us want.

So hoping for a bond yield that misprices things or is indicating bad economic growth-that’s not something anyone should be rooting for. The, the sweet spot has been around four. The problem with our four is that it’s become more two and a half to three inflation, one and a half or so growth. I want to reverse that. I want inflation below two and growth above two.

EICHER: So how does the bond market separate those two—and when it looks ten years out, how much weight does it put on a temporary oil-price shock rather than persistent inflation expectations?

BAHNSEN: Bob Rubin, the Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration, did something brilliant. They created something called TIPS, Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, that investors can buy, that people that sold all over the world. That’s trillions of dollars of our government’s debt is actually a lower yield, but then it attaches to it the inflation rate, so it gives investors the protection from inflation. So you can isolate what the expectations for inflation are. That includes food and energy.

But the reason we strip when you’re talking about core versus headline, the reason we strip it out month over month and quarter over quarter is because of the volatility. But over 10 years, it’s, it’s expected it’s going to be lumpy along the way. But the 10 year level is the 10 year level.

And, and this notion that bond yields go higher because this week oil prices were higher and next week they’re lower. It’s ridiculous. The 10 year is going higher because of structural expectations. Goods inflation was at 0% when President Trump took office, and it’s now 1.7%. That’s meaningfully moved higher because we always have higher services inflation, shelter, and other things that fit in there, but goods inflation has come way up, and I believe tariffs are the reason for that.

EICHER: Well, let’s talk about that, talk about tariffs. You’ve said all along that if the courts struck down the administration’s early tariff program, the White House had other legal authorities ready as a backup.

So that has now happened: The Supreme Court struck down the original regime of tariffs, and the administration has begun rebuilding tariffs through other provisions of law. So what is the new economic environment? Did the Court materially reduce the tariff burden—or has the White House largely restored it by another route?

BAHNSEN: Oh, I, I think that the Supreme Court did the administration a huge favor by striking down about 120 billion dollars of tariffs, and the administration has done themselves a huge disservice by bringing back what was about 50 billion, and then now this week they’re going to get about another 12 billion back in through the back door for six months, and it’s bad for two reasons.

First of all, is just the cost of it. It is a literal cost to the U.S. economy that American import businesses pay at a time when small business does not need this tax, at a time when the economy does not need this burden. However, it’s really a problem too, Nick, because it adds to the instability and erratic nature of policy, the unpredictability.

I saw some comments from Australia this week just saying, "What in the world is going on? They haven’t done anything to agitate, and, and they thought they had a deal and then now they’re caught into some new you know tariffs on this stuff and I think that that’s a really big problem not, not only for our counterparties in in other countries but for American businesses themselves when you just kind of don’t know what to expect it’s hard to make hiring plans. It’s very hard to make capex plans to, to make put a shovel in the ground when, when these things are changing the way they are.

Look, the administration could change their mind next week. You know, they coffee prices were getting high, and they go, okay, never mind. And home appliances were getting high, and they said, never mind. Everyone talks about how mad they are about housing prices, but no one seems to want to take away tariffs on lumber, which is just absurd that we’re tariffing wood.

So I just, I really wish that the administration would take the gift, because it would be a real blessing to the economy to have these things removed. They’re still lower and substantially lower than they were a year ago because of the Supreme Court’s ruling. But yes, as you say, what the administration did this week is formally announced their ways to try to work around it, and, and it’s good for at least six months.

EICHER: Finally, jobs. The Wall Street Journal reports that initial jobless claims fell to 187,000—far below expectations—and have now declined for six straight weeks.

How much signal is there in those numbers? And more broadly, does what you’ve talked about for months: the “low hire, low fire” market… does that describe a sturdy labor market—or one that is simply stalled?

BAHNSEN: The job market feels reasonably sturdy, and the weekly jobless claims are the best measurement of that. I don’t want to put too much credence in the 187,000 because, as I’ve been saying now for so many years with you, it’s just kind of fun to be able to say that we’ve been talking about this as many years as we’ve been doing this together.

But you really need like 234-week averages because you get lumpy data, you get a spike of something that sometimes can be double reporting, or you get states that missed reporting, you get seasonal factors, and three-week averages are low and they’re very healthy, and, and the weekly unemployment claims have been low and healthy for years, so there’s a lot of consistency there.

But going from around 210 to 220,000 a week to all of a sudden 187. That’s not going to hold. This week was an anomaly, but we’ll see how those average out.

My only concern: I want to get the BLS number in August for the month of July and see what revisions were for May and June, because the last, the last monthly number was not very good. And the last monthly number was even worse with revisions to the past couple months, so we’re we’re in a kind of summer seasonal watch moment on the labor data.

What I can safely say is that it has not gotten a lot worse from the precarious position it started the year and that’s a good thing, but I don’t think it’s gotten a lot better either. We’re just in this mode where there doesn’t appear to be a lot of hiring, but thank God there doesn’t appear to be a lot of firing.

EICHER: David Bahnsen is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of the Bahnsen Group. He writes at dividendcafe.com and also at WORLD Opinions from time to time. David, have a great week, and we’ll see you next time.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next: A maritime disaster.

70 years ago, the luxury ocean liner the SS Andrea Doria set sail on its 101st voyage from Genoa, Italy, bound for New York City. Aboard were passengers of many different walks of life: Some, immigrants seeking opportunity. Others, wealthy Hollywood elites on vacation.

REICHARD: But late on the night of July 25th, 1956, the Andrea Doria would find itself on a collision course off the coast of Nantucket.

WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has the story.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: As the Andrea Doria closed in on New York, another ship was leaving. The MS Stockholm—a Swedish ocean liner with a reinforced bow needed to safely navigate its icy North Atlantic routes.

Both the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm were equipped with state of the art technology: radar. They shouldn’t have been able to surprise each other… yet what exactly transpired that night is still debated. How did the two vessels see each other and still collide?

SANDBERG: The actions that took place really were very complicated.

Captain George Sandberg is a professor emeritus with the U.S. Merchant Marines. He’s studied this case for years.

SANDBERG: The Andrea Doria was proceeding in fog as their testimony and the Stockholm which was outbound testified that they had clear visibility. So there was a discrepancy right off the bat.

The Andrea Doria was considered one of the fastest and safest of all of Italy’s ships. The builders still had the sinking of the Titanic in mind, and specifically designed the ship with watertight compartments and 16 lifeboats—enough for every passenger aboard.

The goal was to never need the lifeboats. With radar, the crews would have incredible visibility. But the screens lacked backlight—a dangerous flaw.

SANDBERG: What had to be done in those days was taking range and bearings on the radar and actually plot it on the separate maneuvering sheet and take a series of positions and determine the course and speed and the closest point of approach of the other ship.

Whether the officer on duty aboard the Stockholm was doing that is unclear.

The Stockholm reported clear conditions, but the Andrea Doria encountered a fog bank off the coast. Her captain slightly reduced speed.

On the radar screens, the two ships noticed each other. The rule of the road is for each ship to pass on the port side. So, the Andrea Doria turned hard to the left. The Stockholm veered right.

The radar failure would cost lives.

MOYER: When the bow of the Stockholm penetrated the Andrea Doria, of course, there was a forward momentum.

John Moyer is a professional diver who has gone to the wreck more than 100 times. He says the force of the impact from the Stockholm’s reinforced bow ripped into the side of the Andrea Doria. The resulting internal damage is what ultimately sank the ship.

Within two minutes, the Andrea Doria developed a severe 18 degree list.

MOYER: The staircases were tilted and the hallways were all tilted. So yeah, they all had trouble getting out from below decks up to the top deck where they had to evacuate. I've spoken to a lot of survivors who were there that night and they told me how they had to slide down the deck.

Captain Sandberg says the list also made the rescue efforts more complicated.

SANDBERG: Lifeboats can only be launched if there's a 15 degree list. So that meant that all the port lifeboats could not be used.

Half of the ship’s lifeboats rendered useless. And over the course of 11 hours, the ship slowly sank.

SANDBERG: They sent out an SOS message, and there were a number of ships that responded in the area, notably another very fast, beautiful cruise ship, the Île de France. She came steaming, flew ahead through the fog to get there. And she ended up rescuing I think over seven hundred of the passengers.

The Stockholm also rescued more than 500 passengers, and other smaller ships in the area took some survivors as well.

In all, the collision claimed the lives of 51 individuals. Yet Moyer notes the death toll could have been far greater: there were 1700 people aboard the Andrea Doria.

MOYER: It really is a miracle that so many people survived.

It was the greatest peacetime rescue in maritime history.

Both shipping lines settled the matter out of court, each assuming equal blame and wrapping the investigation quickly.

But that left a terrifying question unanswered: If the Andrea Doria was the safest ocean liner and both ships had radar, what really happened?

In 2001, a master mariner with the U.S. Merchant Marines ran a simulation to try to solve the mystery. But trying to reproduce the collision based on the testimony from the Stockholm’s officer on duty proved impossible.

SANDBERG: In fact, in order if he used that testimony alone, Andrea Doria would have had to make a sharp turn and increase speed to over two hundred knots, which he could not do.

Assuming the Stockholm’s radar was on the wrong scale was the only way the collision happened.

The Stockholm was repaired and went on to sail for several decades. What remains of the Andrea Doria is now resting at the bottom of the ocean.

MOYER: It doesn't look anything like it did when I first started diving on it.

While technology may have failed the ships that night, it’s the monumental human efforts that ensure the Andrea Doria is remembered not just for the lives that were lost, but for the ones that were saved, too.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book, I’m Kristen Flavin.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Tomorrow: new legislation designed to make the abortion pill even more accessible to college students. We’ll have a report. And, author Ryan Bomberger on how learning the truth about his origin story strengthened his faith. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

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 Bible says, “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever.” —Psalm 23.

Go now in grace and peace.

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