The World and Everything in It: March 31, 2025

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Good morning!

Today, what to do with radioactive waste from power. For decades, it’s ended with some form of “not in my backyard”, including the current dispute at the Supreme Court over a dump near Texas oilfields.

NIELSON: What the Commission has just done is put a permanent terrorist bulls-eye on the most productive oil field in America.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket

Also today the Monday Moneybeat, and the WORLD History Book. 20 years ago today, Terri Shiavo breathes her last.

MICHAEL: She told me what she wanted. And the courts heard it over and over and over again.

ROUGH: It’s Monday, March 31st. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Jenny Rough.

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

ROUGH: Now the news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Israel-Hamas negotiations » In the Middle East Hamas is reportedly agreeing to a new Gaza ceasefire proposed by Egypt and Qatar.

It's similar to a plan presented by the U.S. several weeks ago. It would include the release of five Israeli hostages.

NETANYAHU: [SPEAKING HEBREW]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a Cabinet meeting on Sunday … said military pressure is working.

In a new ceasefire Hamas is said to be seeking a return to the conditions of phase one, which expired a month ago along with an agreement to negotiate a second phase. Israel has responded with a counter offer.

Trump unhappy with Russia » Meantime, negotiations toward a ceasefire in Ukraine have not progressed as President Trump had hoped. Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin told NBC’s Meet the Press:

MULLIN:  What has happened here is that Putin, he doesn't feel is negotiating on actual terms. He keeps delaying. And what President Trump has said right now is if he continues to play games, he's gonna get tough on Russia.

Mullin says Trump did the right thing by starting with a cooperative tone with Russia to get Vladimir Putin to the table.

But Democratic Sen. Michael Bennett says the Kremlin is:

BENNETT: … doing exactly what everyone on planet Earth would've expecting d Putin to do, which has not come to an agreement unless he's forced into an agreement.

He charges that Trump has eased the pressure on Moscow, thereby undermining the bargaining power of Ukraine and its allies.

President Trump is threatening the Kremlin with tariffs and secondary tariffs that would apply to any country that does business with Russia.

Signal chat aftermath » White House officials remain in the hot seat after messages from a discussion among top defense officials were accidentally leaked.

Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner calls it “very concerning. He told ABC's This Week:

TURNER:  I do think though that that both the Armed Services Committee Intelligence committees are taking up this issue, and I think that there will be a review going forward as to whether or not signal should be used and whether not these types of conversations should occur.

Signal is the encrypted app on which that defense discussion took place.

Turner said he has not lost confidence in Trump administration defense officials.

But the top Democrat on the Senate Intel Committee, Sen. Mark Warner, says he does not share Turner’s confidence. And he adds that this incident:

WARNER:  Was the first time, I think, um, since the second Trump inaugural where the Democrats were on offense because of the repeated, sloppy, careless approach to classified information.

The editor in chief of The Atlantic later published details about a recent U.S. strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Greenland » The Danish foreign Minister is criticizing the Trump administration's tone following Vice President JD Vance's visit to Greenland.

During a visit to a U.S. military base in Greenland on Friday, the vice president said:

VANCE:  We respect the self-determination of the people of Greenland, but my argument again to them is I think that you'd be a lot better having coming under the United States security umbrella than you have been under Denmark security umbrella.

President Trump is pushing for control of Greenland. He says it’s critical for U.S. national security to counter the growing military presence of China in the Arctic Circle.

Vice President Vance Friday accused Denmark of under-investing in the territory and said the U.S. could make it much more secure.

Denmark's foreign minister calls the rhetoric inappropriate, saying the country is already investing more in Arctic security and is open to U.S. collaboration.

Earthquakes » A magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit near Tonga early this morning local time. There were no initial reports of injuries.

Jessica Turner with the U.S. Geological Survey:

TURNER: With any large shallow earthquake, we do expect aftershocks to continue. Uh, one thing we do need to be aware of with a large magnitude earthquake that can cause aftershocks is those aftershocks can be larger themselves and cause more damage.

Meanwhile, in Myanmar, the death toll from a 7.7 magnitude earthquake there on Friday is now well over 1,600.

And that figure will likely continue to grow. At least 17 people were also killed in Thailand.

I'm Kent Covington.

A battle at the Supreme Court over radioactive waste. That’s ahead on Legal Docket. Plus the Monday Moneybeat.

This is The World and Everything in It.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: It’s Monday March 31st, and you’re listening to The World and Everything in It from WORLD Radio. Good morning! I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST:  And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Legal Docket.

First, the Supreme Court handed down two opinions last week. One upheld a federal regulation on so-called ghost guns. The decision allows the government to expand the definition of firearms it can regulate to include gun-parts kits and unfinished frames or receivers. It reverses an appellate court ruling that held only a firearm is a firearm. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

The other was a win for the IRS. The court set a limit on the power of a bankruptcy trustee to recover tax payments made to IRS before a bankruptcy is filed.

ROUGH: Today we get up-close and personal with nuclear waste.

Not too close, but close enough to understand a problem the U.S. government’s not been able to solve: Namely, where to store highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.

So if the federal government can’t solve this problem, maybe the private sector can.

EICHER: In steps a company named Interim Storage Partners. It proposes building a storage depot in Texas. Andrews County, population 19,000, on the border with New Mexico and just north of Midland, Texas.

The company filed an application with a federal agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC granted a license on the grounds that Interim Storage Partners could really make good on the name “Interim”—meaning the storage facility the company would build would be a temporary one.

ROUGH: Temporary meaning forty years!

Power plants from around the nation would ship radioactive waste by train to that temporary dump, until a more permanent solution can be found.

EICHER: But the state of Texas said, no thanks! It sued, and so did private landowners who run oil and gas operations in the nearby Permian Basin. They want to stop the project.

Texas and the landowners argue the federal agency—the NRC—doesn’t have authority to allow that.

Whether the NRC can license a private company to build a temporary waste facility is one question the Supreme Court is looking at. A second relates to the question whether the objecting parties even have standing to bring this lawsuit.

ROUGH: We’ll get to the legal arguments in a minute. but I wanted first to understand more about nuclear energy.

So I got in touch with a nuclear engineer named Doug Hardtmayer. He’s been interested in this form of energy since he was a kid.

HARDTMAYER: Wait a minute, you're telling me that a piece of uranium fuel that's the size of a gummy bear or something like that has as much energy as six train cars or so filled with coal?

Today, Hardtmayer’s all grown up. He works for a consulting firm where he develops strategies to build nuclear reactors.

HARDTMAYER: When you think of sources like coal or natural gas or nuclear, all that comes down to is a different way to boil water that spins a big turbine that then converts that into electricity and powers on the appliances and everything we need in our day-to-day life. And so rather than burning something, which is what we do typically with natural gas or with coal, nuclear splits atoms.

Uranium atoms.

HARDTMAYER: And when you split those atoms—

A process called fission—

HARDTMAYER: You create a lot of heat in the process that in turn boils water to go spin that turbine.

Eventually, the uranium is unable to sustain the fission process, and what’s left behind is called “spent nuclear fuel.”

HARDTMAYER: The fuel, which is a solid, it’s a ceramic pellet, they’re stored in these big fuel pins and fuel bundles. And then they’re put into a spent fuel storage pool, for four to 10 years or so.

These are specially designed pools of water.

You need that because those bundles and pellets are so hot.

So after they cool, they go to dry storage at the reactor site.

HARDTMAYER: The spent fuel is put inside these gigantic cement casks that can withstand getting hit by a rocket powered train. That’s the design tolerance they were tested to … that end up sitting at the parking lot at the reactor.

The parking lot, so to speak, is not exactly full. The waste doesn’t take up a lot of space—but it is dense. It’s heavy.

HARDTMAYER: You know, it’s surprising to a lot of people that if you took all that waste and stacked it up—

Stacked it about 10 yards high—

HARDTMAYER: it would cover about a football field in the U.S., right? So there really isn’t a whole lot of it. The trick with it is that because it’s been in that reactor, it’s radioactive.

So you have to shield people from it.

Texans worry about the risk of accidental exposure that could cause cancer or other health problems.

EICHER: Fifty-four nuclear plants operate in 28 U.S. states.

Nuclear power accounts for about a fifth of the electricity in America. It is considered clean energy, except for that toxic waste. Storing it above ground in cement casks wasn’t the original plan.

In 1982, Congress asked the Department of Energy to deal with the problem of nuclear waste by finding a long-term storage repository underground. Twenty years later, Congress found a place to bury it, under Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

HARDTMAYER: Which is located nearby to Area 51, where the U.S. did a lot of its atomic testing back in the ‘50s and identified that as a long-term geological repository where there are very stable earth formations. And, you know, anything that goes down into that cavern, there’s nothing that’s going to happen down there.

Still Nevadans pushed back and it turned into a political quagmire.

With Barack Obama in the White House, he halted the program in 2009.

That brings us to present day at the U.S. Supreme Court.

GORSUCH: So Yucca Mountain was supposed to be the permanent solution. Congress so ordained — I think it said it had to be done by 1998. No president has complied with that in all the years since. We've spent something like $15 billion on it. It's a hole in the ground.

ROUGH: Justice Gorsuch said the new plan in Texas doesn’t seem very temporary. He’ll refer to the company that wants to build it Interim Storage Partners, by its initialism ISP.

GORSUCH: And you parties seem to think the Yucca Mountain project is dead. And if that's true and there's no different permanent repository, how is this interim storage that the government is authorizing here in any meaningful sense and especially when I think ISP's given a 40-year license? That doesn't sound very interim to me.

MALCOLM STEWART: Well—

GORSUCH: And it's renewable too apparently.

MALCOLM STEWART: It is renewable. If they applied for a renewal of the license, there would be a new Commission adjudication. And to the extent that—

GORSUCH: Forty years from now.

MALCOLM STEWART: Forty years from now I don't mean to seem glib, but the repository is intended to keep nuclear waste stored safely for a temp—

GORSUCH: On a concrete platform in the Permian Basin, where we get our oil and gas from. So, hopefully, we won't have radiated oil and gas.

But Stewart argued the health and environmental risk is not the issue before the court. It’s simply whether the Commission has authority to grant the license.

EICHER: Two federal statutes are at play here: the Atomic Energy Act and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The parties favoring the Texas plan say there’s nothing in the statutes expressly prohibiting the federal Commission from granting a license.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh discussed that with the lawyer for the would-be licensee: Interim Storage Partners.

KAVANAUGH: This is what you’re saying, I think: Congress would have explicitly prohibited private offsite had it wanted to do so? Is that what you’re saying?

BRADLEY FAGG: Yes.

The statutes don’t expressly prohibit, but neither do they expressly authorize it. Here’s Justice Clarence Thomas:

THOMAS: There’s no language that you could use to say that spent fuel shall be or is permitted to be stored offsite? You’re stitching together, it’s seeming, just constituent parts, not just spent fuel.

ROUGH: Solicitor General of Texas Aaron Nielson raised a big fear.

NIELSON:"What the Commission has just done is put a permanent terrorist bulls-eye on the most productive oil field in America.

He does have well-publicized evidence.

Three Mile Island in the U.S. Chernobyl in Ukraine. Fukushima in Japan. These were human error, design defects, or natural disasters. But the fear of a deliberate attack,  Justice Kavanaugh asked Nielson about that.

KAVANAUGH: In your opening, you used the phrase “terrorist bulls-eye,” which is obviously distinct language. We’ve known of that since at least September 11th, 2001. Yet Texas supported this project, correct me if I’m wrong, for several years.

He’s referring to the fact that before Governor Greg Abbott objected, former Governor Rick Perry seemingly approved the project.

Nielson clarified, not exactly.

NIELSON: That is not a ringing endorsement by Governor Perry. He was just going to say this is the best of the bad options.

EICHER: There’s another issue here, too. Under a federal law called the Hobbs Act, if you want to challenge an agency’s decision in court, you first have to have been part of the agency’s proceedings.

When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission took up the issue, Texas filed an objection, but did not intervene as a party. The landowners did try to intervene, but the Commission wouldn’t allow it. Now the NRC is invoking the Hobbs Act saying neither Texas nor the landowners were parties to the proceedings, so the court has to dismiss the case.

Justice Elena Kagan said the Commission might be right on that point, even if it’s unfair the agency has so much control.

KAGAN: It seems to me “party” means somebody who has participated in an agency proceeding with the degree of formality required for that proceeding. … I don’t see how we can say you were a party.

ROUGH: The court could dismiss this case for that reason and never get to the merits.

If it does reach the merits, the justices might say the law of the land still calls for a permanent repository and kick the ball back to Congress to finish the job.

Whatever happens, the need for energy is not going away. If anything it’s growing and nuclear could be the key.

Doug Hardtmayer, the nuclear engineer, would like our country to recycle spent fuel. Right now, the United States uses a “once through” cycle. It goes from the mine to the reactor to storage forever.

HARDTMAYER: If you took a log and threw it into the fireplace, and the log has bark on it. The once-through cycle is like burning the bark off the log and then taking the rest of the log and throwing it back out in the woods.

Other countries, like France and Japan, use a “closed loop cycle” known as reprocessing. The spent nuclear reactor fuel goes to further use.

HARDTMAYER: So a lot of this waste, as we call in here in the U.S., is still viable, and we can get a lot more energy out of it.

The United States considered reprocessing in the 1970s, but it went the way of Yucca Mountain. Just a big empty hole in the ground. So it may be time to start digging again.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

JENNY ROUGH, 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 adviser David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm The Bahnsen Group. He is here now. Good morning to you, David.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Well, good morning.

EICHER: David, you’ve been on the road quite a bit lately—including a trip to Washington. I want to start with that. You’ve said you came away encouraged about the prospects for tax reform, but your latest Dividend Café paints a pretty downbeat picture overall. Talk about why.

BAHNSEN: Well, the negative read all centers from the concerns about tariffs combined with the questions as to whether the offsetting thing, the good thing, is going to come—the tax reform. So I think that if there were no tariffs on the table, with tax reform and deregulation coming, that’s the best case scenario where policy positively impacts the economy.

If we were in a case where there were tariffs on the table, an uncertainty about trade impairment, that would be a negative. But then there was this positive of tax reform about to happen extending the tax cuts along with deregulation. You could argue that becomes a little bit of a mixed bag. Then inverse to the double positive is the double negative, where theoretically, what if you get the tariffs and uncertainty surrounding them—and yet you don’t get the upside supply shock of tax reform, tax cut extension.

The analogy we’ve been using is like if you get your spinach, but don’t get the dessert. I don’t know that that is going to happen, but that would certainly be a scenario that markets are worried about.

I came away from my time in Washington a little more encouraged that there’s a very substantial priority to get this tax reform done at Treasury. They acknowledge that their messaging got off a little bit. The media is going to run with all of the negative and none of the positive, but no, I do believe it’s still a priority for the administration to get these tax cuts extended and hopefully to get it all done sooner than later. There’s two things going on: not just getting it done, but when you get it done.

Because if this isn’t going to happen till the very end of the year, that is going to leave months and months of uncertainty that could very well impact business decisions and capital investment along the way. So the bulk of my negativity centers around the tariff policy.

Unfortunately, as we’re sitting here at the beginning of this week, when April 2nd, Wednesday, a couple of days from now, is when they’re anticipating these big announcements.

My view is we’re not really going to get a lot of clarity, that we’re going to get some announcements, but then they can very well un-announce it the next day. And that’s sort of the posture the administration’s taken so far, Nick.

EICHER: Your friend Larry Kudlow wrote a piece in which he argues that fears about tariffs are overblown, because Trump’s supply-side tax cuts and deregulation plans will more than offset any negative effects—potentially delivering over $5 trillion in pro-growth stimulus, versus the cost of just a few hundred billion in tariffs.

What do you think of the argument?

BAHNSEN: Oh, sure, I had dinner with Larry four nights ago and we talked about this for a long time.

So I have a couple of thoughts: I don’t agree with Larry entirely about it. I believe that Larry is also speaking to that second part that I alluded to, the dessert that he feels more sanguine about—the spinach if the dessert is going to come and he’s confident it will.

I personally do not agree with him on the spinach portion either. I’m more in Steve Forbes camp here. You know, you have these guys, Steve Forbes, Steve Moore, Larry Kudlow, Art Laffer, who are all key economic advisers in Trump 1.0. Two or three of them are still pretty much with me on being free traders and tariffs, and a couple have taken a little bit more open posture around tariffs.

Without speaking out of turn, I’ll just say that there’s some friendly disagreement amongst all of us.

EICHER: Let’s drill down into the tariffs just announced on automobiles and auto parts. The messaging seemed all over the map—leaks to the press, reversals, surprise inclusions. What’s your read on what actually happened and how it’s landing in the markets?

BAHNSEN: Well, I think the 25% tariffs he did announce last week on both auto imports and auto parts—and it would take billions of dollars in years to move a lot of that on shore—that cost is very detrimental to U.S. automakers.

I don’t believe companies are going to be able to onshore that anyways, because they know that we have an election in a few years and why spend billions of dollars for a four- or five-year plan when you could ride it out and see what the political winds are doing in a few years? It was also kind of surprising because the administration leaked to The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday afternoon that they were not going to impose that tariff cost on auto parts. Then when the president made the announcement, they did include auto parts.

So it just sort of speaks to the fact the administration feels, for whatever reason, that there is a benefit in keeping markets and people on their toes and the changes that are coming so frequently. There are some days where he has said, this can’t be undone, we’re going forward, we’re going to get this fairness, and this is going to be a tariff cost that’s going to really help America. Then he said on Thursday, “Oh, I might lower China’s tariffs if they let us buy TikTok.”

It’s very difficult to know, are these tariffs really important or not? Why would a little teenage dancing app change the tariff policy? It’s just kind of bizarre, but I think that we may end up needing to talk in a couple days because we are going to know more April 2nd that might enable me to answer this question better.

But one of my big points right now is I’m not really sure that I’m going to know more in a couple days because I believe that the president is holding on to a lot of personal discretion—outside of his Commerce Department, outside of his Treasury Department—for him to say, this one I’m gonna do, this one I’m not gonna do, this goes up, this goes down. That’s a difficult policy framework for companies to make investment decisions. It’s very difficult for markets to price in what the cost are going to be. And I assure listeners that there is a cost.

EICHER: We’ve been spending lots of time in the Washington policy zone, and really nowhere else in business, markets, and the economy. Are we right to hang out there, or is there a big story elsewhere we’ve missed?

BAHNSEN: The Washington policy zone is the largest story right now in markets in terms of day-to-day sentiment and how risk takers are feeling about being investors. But it’s certainly not the only story. Valuations are still very elevated, even for a lot of these tech companies that have gotten hit pretty hard. From a pure investment story, Nick, I think it’s fascinating that a lot of dividend stocks and value stocks are up on the quarter.

It has not even been a down quarter, even as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq entered correction territory, both going down over 10%. That elevated volatility, whether it’s a good or bad story, markets were up 600 points Monday and down 700 points Friday. So there’s a lot of give and take. Then now, as we get into the middle of April, we’re still a few weeks away, earnings season will start again. Then you get to see what companies are reporting from their first quarter results and their projections going forward.

This is where that Dallas Fed survey that I talked about is so important because it’s certainly not a political deal. These are absolutely, for the most part, Trump voters, you know, oil-and-gas executives in the energy exploration and production space, all saying that steel costs going up 30% is hurting them. That uncertainty about tariffs is causing them to lay low on different projects. That’s the oil-and-gas sector, let alone other parts of the industrial economy.

So, there’s plenty going on. People can say tariffs are the variable that may or may not tip the economy in recession. But recession is a question. You know, are we facing better economic conditions or worse ones as we go into the spring, summer, you know, later into 2025? All of these stories are separate, but they all kind of connect from the Fed to tax policy to tariffs, and then ultimately these economic conditions.

The last thing I’ll say next from last week was non-defense capital goods orders went down in the month of February. They had been up almost one percent in January. They contracted a half of a percentage point, but they were supposed to go up a little bit.

I think that again, it’s only one month. We want to look for how this kind of plays out for a longer period of time. But that to me is a very big story around business investment holding the economy and our growth expectations.

EICHER: David Bahnsen, founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. David writes at dividendcafe.com, for WORLD Opinions, and you hear his news and comment here each week. David, thanks!

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick!

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Today is Monday, March 31st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Next up, the WORLD History Book.

In the pre-dawn hours of February 25, 1990, a 26-year-old Florida woman named Terri Schiavo suffered a severe brain injury — an injury that, according to the Pinellas County coroner, remains unexplained. Terri Schiavo’s medical plight triggered a bitter legal battle that’s still studied in universities today.

Depending upon one’s perspective, the issue is either the right to die, or the right to live.

ROUGH: The Schiavo case ended in 2005.

But Terri’s family returned to court just last year.

Two decades have passed since Terri died, but they’re still trying to uncover the whole truth.

Here is WORLD’s Lynn Vincent.

LYNN VINCENT: It’s March 18, 2005, the first day of Terri Schiavo’s slow-motion death.

ANCHOR: Despite the prayers of millions, pleas from the Vatican, the President and an act of Congress, it came down to a handful of judges, especially this judge, George Greer of Florida, who time after time ruled that Terri should be allowed to die.

Allowed to die. It’s one of those slippery phrases that’s lodged itself in the historical catechism of the Terri Schiavo case. There are others, such as comatose, unresponsive, and right-to-die.

You may remember this case:

SHANNON BREAM: It started as a fight between her parents and her husband over ending her life support…

Terri suffered a severe anoxic brain injury in her St. Petersburg, Florida, apartment. It happened in the middle of the night. Only her husband Michael was at home. The incident left Terri dependent on caregivers—and on a feeding tube for nutrition, but no other life support.

Eight years later, Michael Schiavo took Terri’s parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, to court. His claim? That Terri had once told him she would never want to be kept alive artificially. That she would have wanted to die.

MICHAEL: She told me what she wanted. And the courts heard it over and over and over again.

For twelve long years, the Schindlers argued that Terri was alive and responsive, especially with family. They said Michael invented Terri’s wish to die only after receiving money from a medical malpractice suit—and after falling in love with another woman.

Terri’s brother Bobby Schindler:

BOBBY SCHINDLER: He was living with another woman. There was a lot of money that he would have assumed upon her death. What else do you need to know?

The Schiavo case inspired a generation to create advance medical directives, to spell out their wishes on paper in case of tragedy. The case is still studied in university schools of law and medicine, and in the field of bioethics. That’s one reason that though 20 years have passed, the Schindler family has not given up.

In March 2024, Bobby and his mother Mary filed a motion to unseal guardianship records in the case—that is, court records that show the history of Michael’s actions during the 15 years he served as Terri’s legal guardian.

BOBBY: Almost immediately after Terri passed away… one of the first things that Michael did… is petition the court to seal her guardianship files … And I remember at the time we wanted to look into it and find out why, or oppose it or somehow fight it.

That was in 2005. In 2021 and 2022, WORLD Radio reinvestigated Terri’s case for a our true crime podcast, Lawless. What we found drew bright lines between the received version of history—what you’ll likely read on the internet and hear on other podcasts about the Schiavo case—and what actually happened.

Bobby says it was WORLD’s investigation that put the guardianship records back on his radar.

BOBBY: So from that time, I've been talking to our attorney, David Gibbs, about it, and we, we decided to go ahead and petition the court to see if, in fact, we can have them reopened. We don't know … what is contained in those records. We don't know why Michael was so quick to seal them.

In Florida, guardianship records contain a wealth of information, including financial transactions. From the very beginning of the Schiavo case, money was a burning issue. On Terri’s behalf, Michael won a seven-figure medical malpractice judgment in November 1992.

During the trial, Michael told the jury—and the Schindlers—he would use any money won in the case to take care of Terri. But just a few months later, after nearly coming to blows with Terri’s father Bob, he broke with the Schindlers—and made the first of at least six attempts to end Terri’s life.

During the 12-year court battle that followed, each side accused the other of wanting Terri’s medical trust fund for themselves.

In court last March, attorney David Gibbs argued that there’s no point in keeping Terri’s guardianship records sealed after all this time. That all the facts should now be known —especially since the Schiavo case still affects law and medicine.

DAVID GIBBS: We in Florida have a concept called the Sunshine laws … basically the idea is that good government, good courts, should be examined by the public, that they should be in the sunshine. They shouldn't be in the shadows.

But last month, Judge Sherwood Coleman denied the Schindlers’ motion, and today, the guardianship records remain sealed.

When Schindler vs. Schiavo finally hit the national news in 2003, it galvanized protests:

PROTESTERS: [Chanting] Let Terri live. Let Terri live…Why are you out here today? I don't want to live in a Christian fascist theocracy…

CARRIE KIRKLAND: Demonstrators who have remained camped out in front of Terri Schiavo’s hospice in Pinellas Park showed frustration and desperation yesterday. …a half dozen got out of their wheelchairs yesterday and laid out in the road…

It drew in Congress, President George W. Bush, the U.S. Supreme Court, and even the pope. There were death threats against Michael Schiavo and the main judge in the case, probate judge George Greer.

GEORGE GREER: I wore a bulletproof vest when I wasn't in the court house and wasn't at home. When I walked the dog, I wore a bulletproof vest.

By the spring of 2005, the street outside Florida Hospice of the Suncoast was jammed with satellite trucks and celebrity news anchors. The Reverend Jesse Jackson showed up. There were even snipers on the rooftops.

By then, Terri’s parents had exhausted their legal options. And on March 18 at 1pm (ck), doctors removed the only life support Terri relied on: that feeding tube that delivered her nutrition since she couldn’t swallow on her own.

This was the third time doctors had removed the tube. The first two times, 11th-hour seeming miracles pulled Terri back from the brink of death. But this time Mary Schindler prayed as though this might be the end:

MARY: Just going to Mass … and just asking the Lord to please just whatever you're gonna do …I don’t want her to suffer.

For 13 days supporters around the world prayed with Mary for yet another miracle. Instead, Terri wasted away. Her eyes sank into her skull. Her tongue turned white and flaky. As her face caved in, her teeth protruded like those of an Auschwitz prisoner. And in her final hours, as Terri labored to breathe, the death rattle in her chest could be heard halfway down the hospice hall.

Twenty years ago today, on March 31, 2005 at 9:05 AM, Terri Schiavo took her last breath.

From the White House briefing room, President George W. Bush addressed the nation:

GEORGE BUSH: I urge all those who honor Terri Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life. Where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others. The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. Cases where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in the favor of life.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lynn Vincent.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Wisconsin heads to the polls to elect a new supreme court justice. The outcome will affect the balance of power in that state.

And, a former bartender on a mission to meet the demand for non-alcoholic beverages.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: And I’m Jenny Rough.

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, “To you it was shown, that you might know that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him.” –Deuteronomy chapter 4, verse 35.

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