The World and Everything in It: March 25, 2024

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is brought to you by listeners like me. I'm Paul Owen and my wife and I serve the kingdom in Mercy Ships. Today, I listened  in Madagascar. I hope you enjoy today's program.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! Today on Legal Docket: Should government be allowed to police misinformation through social-media proxies?

BHATTACHARYA: The No. 1 source of misinformation during the pandemic was the government. And yet the premise of the oral arguments seemed to be that the government got everything right.

NICK EICHER: HOST: Also today the Monday Moneybeat: the government versus Apple and defining a SPAC and its purpose.

And the WORLD History Book. This week a pro-life activist decides she has to defy the government.

ANDREWS: I knew I could not face God when I die if I didn’t do everything I could to try to save his little children.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, March 25th. 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: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: ISIS terror attack Russia » The U.S. government is forcefully refuting Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that Ukraine was linked to a deadly terrorist attack at a concert hall near Moscow.

Vice President Kamala Harris:

HARRIS: There is no — whatsoever — any evidence, and in fact, what we know to be the case is that ISIS-K is actually, by all accounts, responsible for what happened.

The Afghanistan arm of ISIS has claimed responsibility for the massacre, which killed more than 130 people.

But that hasn’t stopped Putin from trying to publicly tie Ukraine to the attack. He told Russians in an address to the nation … that the gunmen were arrested after trying to escape.

PUTIN: They tried to hide and move toward Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side.

The United States and Kyiv say Putin may be angling to use the incident as a false flag justification … to escalate attacks against Ukraine.

Weeks earlier, the U.S. government warned of intelligence indicating that extremists had “imminent plans” to target large gatherings in Moscow. Putin dismissed the warning as, “provocative.”

Israel-Gaza latest » The U.N. Security Council plans to vote today on a call for an immediate Ramadan cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Russia and China back the resolution after vetoing a U.S.-led cease-fire resolution last week.

Beijing and Moscow claimed the earlier resolution was too vague, but the U.S. government said they had ulterior motives for blocking it.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield:

GREENFIELD: Russia and China simply did not want to vote for a resolution that was penned by the United States, because they would rather see us fail than to see this council succeed.

Washington says the new draft resolution fails to condemn Hamas for its October massacre in Israel and that it would give the terror group an excuse to walk away from ongoing cease-fire negotiations.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate speaker » Georgia GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene says her push to oust Speaker Mike Johnson, is only a warning, for now.

GREENE: I filed this motion to vacate, but I haven’t called it to the floor. This is like issuing a pink slip and giving our conference a notice saying that we have got to find a new speaker. This may take weeks. It may take months.

She says a spending bill the House passed last week to avert a shutdown — and recent GOP retirements show the speaker’s not in control.

Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy knows the sting of being ousted, but he had this message for Speaker Johnson:

MCCARTHY: Do not be fearful of a motion to vacate. I do not think they can do it again. I don’t think the Democrats will go along with it too.

He said that’s because matters of concern to Democratic members could stall if the speakership is vacated again. He told CBS’ Face the Nation that Johnson should move forward fearlessly.

Funding package » And speaking of that $1.2 trillion dollar funding bill the House passed last week, President Biden signed it into law over the weekend.

That came after the Senate approved it in the overnight hours early Saturday morning.

AUDIO: On this vote, the yeas are 74. The nays 24.

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton was one of those 74 yeas.

COTTON: This is far from a perfect bill. I wish it had been written very differently. I wish it had been written in a different way. But about 70 percent of the money in the bill goes to our military. It funds very needful priorities, like pay raises for our troops, or investments in our industrial base to build up the weapons and munitions we might need in a conflict with, say, China over Taiwan.

Pride flag ban » The White House is vowing to work to overturn one provision of the funding package.

A rule tucked into that bill effectively blocks the government from flying Pride flags over U.S. embassies around the world.

Obama administration officials were the first to raise Pride flags at U.S. embassies. President Trump halted that practice, before President Biden brought it back.

The new ban stipulates that most flags other than the Stars and Stripes are barred from embassy flagpoles.

China land buying in U.S. » The United States must stop China from buying up U.S. farmland immediately. That’s the message from many in Washington and in state houses across the country.

GOP Congressman Mark Alford:

ALFORD: I don’t believe that any foreign adversarial nation or citizen thereof should be able to buy any land, not even an outhouse, in the United States of America.

Chinese ownership of U.S. land has grown by more than 250 percent since 2012, now roughly 400,000 acres.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem says that trend could give China alarming sway over our food supplies.

NOEM: And a country that can’t feed ourselves — we are no longer in control of our destiny. So if we think a pandemic was scary, imagine what happens when they control our food.

She recently signed a bill blocking foreign entities from buying farmland in her state. Almost half the states in the country now have similar restrictions.

But many are just as concerned about where that land is being purchased reportedly near sensitive intelligence sites, military bases, critical water sources, and national labs.

Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville has authored a federal bill that would block foreign adversaries from buying American land.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Government coercion on this week’s Legal Docket. Plus, the Monday Moneybeat. 

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 25th day of March, 2024. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Legal Docket.

The main event today is the oral argument on one of the biggest cases to come along in awhile … involving how much leeway the constitution gives the government to police so-called misinformation.

EICHER: But first, we want to let you know about two opinions the court handed down last week.

First, FBI versus Fikre. A unanimous court sided with an American citizen who sued after the government put him on the no-fly list. It was while he was on an overseas trip that the government placed him on the list … and then offered to remove him, but only if he agreed to become a government informant.

REICHARD: He refused, and wound up stranded because the no-fly list operated exactly as you’d expect it to: he couldn’t get a commercial flight back to the U.S.

So he sued the government and alleged that it violated his right to due process.

EICHER: When he sued, though, the government took him off the list and then made the argument that the case was moot.

And that was the question: is the case moot?

All nine justices said no. The man may now proceed with his case in lower court.

REICHARD: Next opinion is in the case, Wilkinson versus Garland. It’s a win for a man from Trinidad who overstayed his tourist visa and was later arrested for dealing in crack cocaine. The arrest triggered deportation proceedings, but he argued the life of his disabled son qualified him for a hardship exception.

EICHER: The legal question was whether federal courts have authority to review an immigration judge’s decision about hardship exceptions.

By a vote of 6 to 3, the high court said federal courts can review them. So: case remanded for further consideration … meaning not that he automatically gets a hardship exception, but that a federal court can weigh in on whether the immigration judge ruled correctly in denying him one.

REICHARD: Alright, now for the big case last week: Murthy versus Missouri.

The dispute concerns efforts by the Biden Administration to pressure social-media companies. Specifically, the White House had deemed certain posts misinformation primarily about COVID-19 and the 2020 election. And it wanted the platforms to remove them. Which they did.

The legal question is whether the government’s influence over the platforms transforms the platforms into state actors. If it does, then First Amendment protections kick in.

EICHER: Two states and five individuals sued named members of the Biden Administration.

One of those individuals whose voice was flagged, downgraded, removed, or deplatformed is Jay Bhattacharya. He’s a medical doctor, a PhD economist, and has been a professor for more than twenty years at the Stanford University medical school.

Dr. Bhattacharya co-authored an open letter called the Great Barrington Declaration. He and his co-authors published it in October 2020 in response to the way the government was handling the pandemic.

REICHARD: So I called him up.

JAY BHATTACHARYA: What we argued there was that the lockdowns were a tremendously damaging thing to the poor, to the vulnerable, to working-class people. It wasn't working to protect old people who were really at highest risk of dying if they got COVID. And so we called for focused protection of vulnerable older people and lifting lockdowns.

That led to Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, essentially calling for a devastating take down of us. He wrote an email which we saw via FOIA to Tony Fauci. And just sort of a hate campaign. I mean, I was subject to death threats…. And then when the vaccines came out, the argument that we made was that it made sense for the vaccines for older people, but the benefit/ harm analysis didn't make sense for younger people. And that idea especially got censored.

Also disfavored by the government was talk about the efficacy of the COVID shots and mask mandates, the origin of the virus, and evidence of vaccine injuries, particularly among young men.

Here’s Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the Lex Fridman podcast in June last year:

MARK ZUCKERBERG: And unfortunately I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that, you know, kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that in retrospect ended up being, you know, more debatable or true.

EICHER: Dr. Bhattacharya homed in on a point that really wasn’t debatable:

BHATTACHARYA: The idea that there was a consensus in favor of lockdowns itself was a lie. What we were saying was to anyone with any social-science background and real medical background could see what was true. But the information infrastructure that included this sort of censorship complex made it impossible to get the message out.

Now, back to the court proceedings.

Arguing on behalf of Dr. Bhattacharya and the others was Louisiana state Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga:

BENJAMIN AGUINAGA: As the Fifth Circuit put it, the record reveals unrelenting pressure by the government to coerce social media platforms to suppress the speech of millions of Americans. The district court, which analyzed this record for a year, described it as arguably the most massive attack against free speech in American history, including the censorship of renowned scientists opining in their areas of expertise… . Behind closed doors, the government badgers the platforms 24/7, it abuses them with profanity, it warns that the highest levels of the White House are concerned, it ominously says that the White House is considering its options …Under this onslaught, the platforms routinely cave.

REICHARD: They did cave … even though just last month in two other disputes before the Supreme Court, the social media platforms said they create their own content moderation policies.

Yet here, Aguinaga argued, unrelenting government pressure caused them to change those policies.

Call it persuasion or call it coercion, he argued it amounts to the same thing.

AGUINAGA: The government has no right to persuade platforms to violate Americans' constitutional rights, and pressuring platforms in back rooms shielded from public view is not using the bully pulpit at all. That's just being a bully.

EICHER: On the other side defending the government’s actions, Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher:

BRIAN FLETCHER: The government may not use coercive threats to suppress speech, but it is entitled to speak for itself by informing, persuading, or criticizing private speakers … this case should be about that fundamental distinction between persuasion and coercion. But, … this is not a typical suit where a speaker challenges government actions affecting its own speech. Instead, two states and five individuals are trying to use the Article III courts to audit all of the executive branch's communications with and about social-media platforms. That problem has infected every step of this case.

But as Justice Samuel Alito seemed to see it, it was the government’s coercive language and actions that infected every step of the case.

You’ll hear Justice Alito point to Section 230; that’s the law that protects social-media companies from liability for what others say on their platforms.

Listen to this exchange with government lawyer Fletcher:

JUSTICE ALITO: Mr. Fletcher, when I read all of the emails exchanged …I see that the White House and federal officials are repeatedly saying that Facebook and the federal government should be partners, we're on the same team, officials are demanding answers, I want an answer, I want it right away, when they're unhappy, they curse them out…. constant pestering of Facebook and some of the other platforms and they want to have regular meetings, and …-- they suggest rules that should be applied and why don't you tell us everything that you're going to do so we can help you and we can look it over. And I thought: Wow, I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media... If you did that to -- to them, what do you think the reaction would be? And so I thought: You know, the only reason why this is taking place is because the federal government has got Section 230 and antitrust in its pocket and its uh, to mix my metaphors, and it's got these big clubs available to it. And so it's treating Facebook and these platforms like their subordinates. Would you do that to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or the Associated Press or newspaper or wire service?

FLETCHER: So there's a lot packed in there…

And so Fletcher proceeded to unpack. He argued context matters, and this was during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. So extraordinary times, extraordinary measures.

Justice Alito countered that the government didn’t behave that way with the print, broadcast, and cable media, maybe implying that they’re already largely in line.

But still, inconsistency is a very bad look.

REICHARD: Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had a different concern. Here she addresses Aguinaga, lawyer for Dr. Bhattacharya and the others:

JUSTICE JACKSON: So my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods … . And so I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information.  

REICHARD: Ample constitutional history indicates the very point of the free-speech, free-press clauses of the First Amendment is to “hamstring” the government. And in so doing: to protect citizens from government violating their rights.

Dr. Bhattacharya was sitting in the courtroom listening to this.

BHATTACHARYA: I found that very distressing … . The No. 1 source of misinformation during the pandemic was the government. They spread misinformation about the lack of immunity after COVID recovery, whether everyone was equally at risk from dying if they got the disease … . The harms of lockdowns, the wisdom of school closures, item after item after item, it was the government that was misinforming … . And yet the premise of the oral arguments seemed to be that the government sort of got everything right and they needed this tool of censorship in order to suppress misinformation.

But his distress, of course, did not resonate with the government’s lawyer. Here’s Fletcher again with Justice Clarence Thomas later questioning him:

FLETCHER: That's not censorship; that's persuading a private party to do something that they're lawfully entitled to do, and there are lots of contexts where government officials can persuade private parties to do things that the officials couldn't do directly. So, for example, you know, recently, after the October 7th attacks in Israel, a number of public officials called on colleges and universities to do more about anti-Semitic hate speech on campus. …and we think that's what the government is doing when it's saying to these platforms, your platforms and your algorithms and the way that you're presenting information is causing harm and we think you should stop, and the platforms are—

JUSTICE THOMAS: So you—you really don't see any difference between the government coordinating with the platforms to exclude other speech and persuading the platforms to … not engage or permit other speech?

FLETCHER: I—I guess I'm not seeing it.

EICHER: Whether the justices see it, others do based on first-hand experience beyond U.S. borders.

Two weeks ago, the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, held a hearing. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson delivered a warning:

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I know that my colleagues on the psychological front and on the medical front in Canada are increasingly frightened of making any of their political opinions known in any form whatsoever, because governmental agencies, usually of the mid level, bureaucratic sort have been empowered as a consequence of our lack of First Amendment rights to intervene as they see fit in relationship to stated opinion, political or otherwise. And it's not good.

REICHARD: Canada has so-called charter rights … that are not nearly as robust as the First Amendment in the U.S. And men of science like Dr. Bhattacharya hope the Supreme Court remembers it:

BHATTACHARYA: I mean, I wish I could go back to being a quiet scientist. Before the pandemic, I never wrote an op ed … I really love being a scientist, but I don't see how you can do science if you don't have free speech. You actually need to make a public case for the scientific ideas you have so that there stands a chance against a whole host of people who just don't want to believe the data that you have.

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: It's time to talk business markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnson. David is head of the wealth management firm, the Bahnson group, and he's here now. David, Good morning.

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

EICHER: I would like to explore the big anti trust case the Justice Department filed last week against Apple.  It seems that the case is predicated on Apple's strategy they've been following ever since Steve Jobs came into work in bare feet. I mean, namely the idea of a walled garden, controlling the experience, so that the software works seamlessly with hardware. And Apple hardware tends to work best with other Apple hardware. And the way it works, seems to be why it's so popular. David, why would that be illegal?

BAHNSEN: Well, this is the stuff that antitrust lawyers fight about. But I think antitrust scholars have been debating for a long time. The late Robert Bork—who I was a huge fan of his judicial philosophy—really expounded a legal doctrine that there had to be harm to consumers. That size in and of itself did not meet monopolistic standards. And bundling of products that were beneficial to customers did not in and of itself lead to harming a customer or harming a consumer. You recall the course in the late 90s, the DOJ's very famous pursuit of Microsoft for daring to bundle a free web browser with their operating system. And the DOJ failed quite a bit with some of those pursuits. In this case, what they're accusing Apple of is essentially, “You're making people really like using your device.” And so it's very different than forcing someone to use a product they don't want to use. But you're there. It's a condition of getting them to use a product they do want to use. There is a bipartisan—I hate saying that—but a bipartisan increase in those who believe big is bad. And the big tech crackdown for all the different things that people might be concerned about legitimately with privacy, with data, with censorship, you know, there's other social and cultural issues at stake here. But the one that is Linda con FTC, and the one that does Biden DOJ seem to want to go after is more related to size.

EICHER: And so David, how do you distinguish this case from other trust busting cases in history, say, the Teddy Roosevelt era, or when Taft broke up Standard Oil, or in the Reagan years the breakup of Ma Bell into all the baby bells?

BAHNSEN: Yes. And so I am not going to say that I think it was the right thing they did at the time. I believe the trust busting done by Teddy Roosevelt has a mixed legacy. And it would take us an hour to walk through the legal nuances. But is that different in the entire category than what is going on here with Apple? Yes, it is. It's categorically different. Most people now believe there was legitimacy to a lot of the trust busting, including both Ma Bell and big oil at the time. I would add what they ended up doing made the companies rich or not poor, particularly the Rockefellers, with what we now consider to be Exxon. It was Standard Oil then, and there was spread, there was so many different things that went on with it. But big is better, is one side of the equation, and big as bad as the other. And my view is let the consumer decide and don't use the arm of government to legally squeeze out competition that could help consumers and allow other people to compete. Most monopolies in my opinion are not created by a greedy business, they're created by a greedy business getting in bed with the government.

EICHER: David, the Fed had another opportunity to cut interest rates last week. It chose not to, but the market seemed to be cheered by Fed Chair Jay Powell's words last week.

BAHNSEN: Well, it was actually a really significant week in the markets. But Powell press conference was highly confirming to everybody paying attention that he does intend to continue going forward with their plan of cutting rates later into the year. The markets rallied hundreds of points on Wednesday after his press conference, where he also alluded to Okay, yeah, it looks like we're going to have to stop some of our quantitative tightening or slow or quantitative tightening in the months ahead. And then it rallied again, hundreds of points Thursday, although it gave some back on Friday. But though, hitting all time highs in the s&p and the Dow on Wednesday and Thursday, was really a byproduct of investors thinking okay, The Fed is not getting cold feet about cutting the rates, they are still going forward. And that was the big market story of last week. For me, the big story is no surprise there whatsoever about the Fed. I've been saying that all year long. However, the valuations continue to get very expensive. And it will be quite interesting to see what happens in the weeks and months ahead with some of these expensive NASDAQ stocks, but still on the Fed.

EICHER: It’s still on the Fed, David, it's still telegraphing three quarter point rate cuts this year, there are enough meetings left to get that done. Oh, sure.

BAHNSEN: And of course, three rate cuts is another way of saying 75 basis points, they can get 75 basis points done in two rate cuts do 51 and 25. The other the market was pricing and six rate cuts at the beginning of the year. It's now pricing in for the Fed is saying three in their own predictions or dot plots. So that's what the market is looking at 75 to 100 basis points coming out of the current Fed funds rate by the end of the year.

EICHER: All right, defining terms this week, David. It's going to be an acronym, SPAC. S-P-A-C. SPAC was the method that former President Trump used to merge his social media company Truth Social, with a more highly capitalized, publicly traded company. And the deal closed on Friday. Voila! He's got several billion dollars more of net worth on paper. And I have to wonder whether he can leverage that this morning, satisfy the judgment against him in New York. But we just have to see on that. But all day long on Friday, David, we heard this acronym. SPAC. Define the term for us.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, so basically, a SPAC stands for special purpose acquisition company. And they've actually been around a long time. But they got very, very popular a number of years ago, and it's a backdoor way a company can go public. So what would happen is a person can raise the money and then say, I'm going to pick a company to acquire. So the investors are not investing in a company, because they don't know what it is yet. They're investing in a person or an outfit, who's saying we're gonna go find a company,. Then if they don't like the company, they can get their money back. And if they do you like it, or they can let it go, and then it will eventually go to IPO. So it does still IPO. But by going through a SPAC it avoids what's called an S-1 filing where you're having to go to the street and reveal all the information about your company. And you don't have to do that filing where you're giving away all this information about your company, because the SPAC allows you to go public without the same regulatory filings. Now, why would anyone do it? Well, because they're trying to get in on the ground for the next big thing that someone is going to buy. And most of these went really poorly. There were some that did well, but this Trump social media company Truth Social, they went through a SPAC early in the SPAC process. And eventually it went way, way up, then the stock totally crashed. And now it's somewhere in the middle. And people are waiting to see what will happen with it. The way SPACs work, and the pros and cons of their existence in our capital markets, is kind of immaterial to this particular situation, or President Trump. Right now the company is going to either end up being worth something or it isn't. And the courts are either going to give him an extension on what he has to file or give them some relief and how much he asked to post or they're not. But yeah, he owns a certain amount of shares that he obviously couldn't sell, that are worth on paper a certain amount of money that might help with this bail requirement. So yeah, as you say, it's a TBD I think in the days ahead, perhaps even in the hours ahead, we'll know, more.

EICHER: Okay, David Bahnson, founder, managing partner and chief investment officer of the Bahnson group. David's latest book is Full Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. And you can find out more by visiting the website for the book fulltimebook.com. David, have a great week. We'll talk to you next week.

BAHNSEN: All right. Thanks so much, Nick. Good to be with you.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, March 25th, 2024. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Each summer WORLD puts on a journalism intensive course for college students and recent graduates. WORLD Journalism Institute is two intense weeks of instruction and hands-on experience. 

EICHER: If you have a young person in your home interested in journalism this is a great opportunity to see what it’s like…to learn first hand from our reporters and editors how we approach covering the news objectively, from a Christian worldview, centered on the scriptures. Thanks to generous donors, we offer this program without charge to the students.

REICHARD: The course runs from May 16th to June 1st on the campus of Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa. This Friday is the application deadline, and the process does require a bit of writing. So don’t put it off.  Apply today at wji.world. We’ll put a link in today’s transcript and show notes as well.

EICHER: Up next, the WORLD History Book. Fifty years ago this week, a space probe journeys to Mercury. And, a pro-life activist spends years behind bars for her advocacy.

REICHARD: But first, a devastating factory fire prompts legislative reform for workers. Here’s WORLD Radio reporter Emma Perley.

EMMA PERLEY: At the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, supervisors lock their employees in the factory each day to prevent theft and unauthorized breaks. The sweatshop makes women’s blouses with girls as young as 14 cutting thread and sewing for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. On March 25th, 1911, cigarette ash falls into scraps of cloth. A fire begins on the eighth floor.

Within minutes the fire is out of control as an alarm blares. Workers pound against the locked doors—hoping to escape the flames.

MAX HOCHFIELD: I saw the entire 8th floor is aflame. Nobody there. And when I looked out the window, I saw girls—men—people walking down the fire escape.

Max Hochfield is a former sewing machine operator. He spoke with Sigmund Arywitz in 1957. As the workers fill the fire escape, the rickety structure collapses, and 20 are killed. Some employees manage to escape to the roof through an unlocked stairway. Many workers are trapped. They gather against the windows.

HOCHFIELD: Now, but a few of them couldn't stand the fire. The fire was licking them and they couldn't stand it so they jumped. And they jumped and they dropped dead immediately.

Firemen spread out nets on the streets to catch the falling bodies, but the nets break on impact. Twenty minutes after the fire begins, 146 workers are dead, most of them women.

Factory owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris are found liable for their negligence. The disaster sparks a wave of fire safety and building regulations reforms.

On the 2011 centennial of the tragedy, hundreds of bells rang out across the U.S. to commemorate when the first fire alarm went off.

Next, 50 years ago on March 29th…

SOUND: [MARINER 10 LAUNCH]

NASA’s Mariner 10 blasts off for the planet Mercury.

Mariner 10 is the first mission to the “swift planet.” And NASA has a secondary goal in mind. Audio here from a National Air and Space Museum film:

FILM CLIP: The spacecraft’s flight path was carefully chosen to skim past the planet orbiting between Earth and Mercury: cloud-covered Venus.

Scientists plan to catch a glimpse of both Mercury and Venus during its journey. And they study the atmosphere and surface characteristics of the planets from high quality photographs. They discover that Venus’s cloudy atmosphere rotates much faster than the planet itself. Dr. Bruce Murray, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, explains.

FILM CLIP: The atmosphere rotates around the planet once every four days. The surface rotates once every 243 days.

Mariner 10 uses Venus’s gravitational field to catapult towards Mercury. And more photos reveal vast mountain ranges on Mercury’s surface from a prior asteroid impact.

FILM CLIP: These pictures reveal craters and other features which were formed very early in the history of Mercury. And may refer to events that affected the entire inner solar system: Mars, Earth, Moon, and Venus as well as Mercury.

Mariner 10 sends back almost 3,000 pictures to NASA. Over thirty years will go by before the next robotic probe visits Mercury.

We end on March 26th, 1986, as pro-life activist Joan Andrews is arrested for tampering with equipment at an abortion facility in Pensacola, Florida. A devout Catholic, her advocacy landed her in prison over 100 times.

JOAN ANDREWS: I thought, I’ll be spending the rest of my life in jail because I knew I could not face God when I died if I didn’t do everything I could to try to save his little children to the best of my ability.

Andrews speaking with radio host Mark Harrington three years ago.

As part of her activism, she broke into abortion facilities to disable suction machines. Andrews justified her unlawful actions by saying that blocking entrances and handing out pamphlets just wasn’t enough.

ANDREWS: But when children are dying, you have to do more … Because it’s never legal to murder an innocent person.

Andrews served 2.5 years for the maximum 5 year sentence. She was arrested again in 2023 under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. In trouble this time for blockading an abortion facility in 2020. She faces up to 11 years in prison and a fine of $350,000 dollars. Here is Andrews with LSNTV one year ago:

ANDREWS: Everything in life is in God’s hands … if we’re persecuted, we accept it as God’s will, that we can give him honor and glory and we can show love for these little babies.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Emma Perley.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Friday’s terrorist attack in Moscow. We’ll have analysis with a foreign policy expert. And, adopting from China. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

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 records that “When [the Apostles] had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.’” —Acts 1: 6-8

Go now in grace and peace.

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