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Volume 55, Issue 43 | MONDAY, February 15, 2021 | ndsmcobserver.com
Right to Life holds March for Life week With annual D.C. march canceled due to pandemic concerns, students celebrate on campus By SERENA ZACHARIAS Notre Dame News Editor
While ND Right to Life was unable to attend the annual March for Life in Washington D.C., the club held a series of events last week to raise awareness and ignite discussions regarding prolife issues. Junior Mary Biese, co-director of education, said the club aimed to replicate the experience of the in-person march over the course of the week while also engaging in discussions with people in the community.
To increase conversations with students, Biese helped plan a pro-life tabling event Wednesday in Duncan Student Center to have open discussions with peers walking by. Instead of changing someone’s opinion entirely, Biese said she prefers to “plant seeds,” which helps to get people thinking about issues from different perspectives. “If you get someone thinking about [a topic], maybe it’ll come back to them later, this particular thought, or maybe it’ll give see MARCH PAGE 3
Courtesy of Mary Benx
Notre Dame Right to Life held a series of events Feb. 8-12 to spread awareness about pro-life issues. Students gathered at the Grotto on Thursday for a prayer service led by Fr. Pete McCormick.
NYT investigator Malachy Professors debate Browne discusses work minimum wage By MAGGIE EASTLAND News Writer
The Raise the Wage Act, recently proposed in the House of Representatives, promises an annual increase in the minimum wage until it reaches $15 an hour by 2025, as well as an index to continue raising the minimum wage at the same rate as median hourly wages. Two Notre Dame professors proficient in economic policy, Forrest Spence and Rüdiger Bachmann, said they support a moderate increase in minimum wage but express some CHRISTOPHER PARKER | The Observer
Malachy Browne of The New York Times gave a Zoom lecture Friday discussing the works of the Visual Investigations team, which uses digital forensics to reconstruct events and uncover the truth. By CHRISTOPHER PARKER News Writer
What do journalists do when the details of an event aren’t quite adding up? At The New York Times, they often turn to Malachy Browne. Browne spoke to Notre Dame professor James O’Rourke over Zoom as part of the Ten Years Hence lecture series on Friday. He works with a team of investigators and computer scientists to recreate frantic moments from some of the past decade’s most memorable tragedies. The team is called Visual Investigations, and their goal is
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to use digital forensics to uncover stories. “There’s an overabundance of information out there that allows you to get to the truth of an event, or a debate, or a contention or argument, a denial by a government around the human rights abuse,” Browne said. “And that’s a lot of what our work is, doing that digging, digging, digging through the online sources, as well as getting on the ground and talking to people.
The examples in his presentation demonstrated not only the scope but the gravity of their work: reconstructions of
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the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, a 2018 Syrian chemical attack by the country’s leader Bashar al-Assad, the 2020 shooting of a Palestinian medic by Israeli soldiers, the 2020 murder of Breonna Taylor, and the repeated and continuous bombing of Syrian hospitals by Russian military. Browne said their first investigation, the Las Vegas shooting, was motivated by a mutual distrust between “tight-lipped” authorities and online communities who sensed a cover-up. see JOURNALIST PAGE 3
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concerns that such a drastic change, more than doubling the current national minimum wage, could have some unintended consequences. “From an economist’s standpoint, I’m surprised that the proposal is such a huge increase relative to what the current federal minimum wage is, $7.25 currently,” Spence, an assistant teaching professor in the department of economics, said. Both Spence and Bachmann, an associate professor of economics, cited the Congressional Budget see WAGES PAGE 4
SMCDM to hold fundraiser By EMMA BACON News Writer
Saint Mary’s College Dance Marathon (SMCDM) will hold a week of fundraising and awareness that will include giveaways, a talent show and a virtual auction for Riley Hospital for Children. While SMCDM is most well known for their “Dance Marathon” fundraiser in the spring where students from Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s and
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Holy Cross Colleges come out to dance for nine hours without sitting down to “dance for those who can’t,” the club also hosts several fundraisers throughout the year, SMCDM chair of family outreach Kathleen Soller said. This week, the club will host Riley Week to raise money and awareness for the hospital and specific patients that SMCDM sponsors. Riley Week see DANCE PAGE 3
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