Podbit · Empire: World History
Tiny Sophia — five feet tall — rushed into the melee on Black Friday to body-check a police officer who had repeatedly slammed a woman into the pavement. She then chased the officer through the crowd demanding his badge number, repeating 'V700' until she had it memorised, and escalated the complaint all the way to Winston Churchill's desk.
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At 44:48 · chapter starts 39:50
The climax of the episode arrives with Black Friday. The government has repeatedly dragged its feet on the Conciliation Bill, which would extend the vote to some women. On 18 November 1910, Asquith announces the bill will not have time to pass — effectively guillotining it. Emmeline Pankhurst has anticipated this: 300 of her most committed suffragettes are assembled at Caxton Hall, and they plan to march to Parliament in groups of 12 to circumvent Churchill's new law banning gatherings larger than that number. Sophia marches shoulder to shoulder with Pankhurst. At St Stephen's Gate they are kettled by police. Churchill's order for the day — 'don't arrest the women, discourage them' — is a deliberate choice not to let suffragettes occupy courtrooms and make speeches. What follows is six hours of police violence: women picked up and thrown against pavements, their breasts punched, kicked between the legs, thrown into crowds of men. Some police officers have covered their badge numbers. MPs hang out of Parliamentary windows to watch. Anand's account does not soften any of it.
On 18 November 1910, Churchill ordered police to 'discourage' suffragettes rather than arrest them — a euphemism for sexual assault and physical violence lasting six hours. Police covered their badge numbers. Women were picked up and thrown into crowds of men. Emmeline Pankhurst and Sophia Duleep Singh stood at St Stephen's Gate watching it happen.
Prime Minister Asquith guillotined the Conciliation Bill on 18 November 1910, which would have given some women the vote, triggering the Black Friday march.
The violence on Black Friday, 18 November 1910, lasted six hours, during which suffragettes were sexually assaulted by police who had covered their badge numbers.
Factories that replaced coal engines with electric ones in the early 1900s got only 6% efficiency gains. Those that redesigned their entire factory around electricity got a 3x productivity improvement. Swapping AI tools into your existing structure will give you 6%. Rebuilding around AI will give you 10x.
Lebanese terrorists backed by Iran were holding American hostages throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan had loudly campaigned against negotiating with terrorists — putting him in an impossible position that his team quietly decided to ignore.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the US openly supplied Iraq with weapons, training, and intelligence. At the same time, Oliver North was secretly funneling missiles to Iran. The US was playing both sides of a shooting war.
Oliver North traveled to Iran under the alias 'William P. Goode' with a fake passport. CIA Director William Casey allegedly gave him cyanide pills so he could kill himself rather than be tortured if captured. He returned safely and the deal moved forward.
The Pentagon sold missiles to the CIA for $3,700 each. The CIA sold them to Richard Secord at cost. Secord sold them to Iranian middleman Ghorbanifar for $10,000 each. Ghorbanifar charged Iran even more. The profit — including $3 million in interest in one Swiss account — was diverted directly to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran in 8 shipments over more than a year. Only 3 of 7 hostages were released. Three more were taken. The net result was zero freed hostages and a full-blown constitutional scandal.
On October 5, 1986, a CIA Contra supply plane flew a weapons drop at 2,500 feet in broad daylight. A Sandinista soldier shot it down. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfuss, had borrowed a parachute from his skydiving brother. He was captured, paraded in front of cameras, and told the Sandinistas everything he knew.
The CIA supply operation used a front company called Southern Air Transport, widely known to be a CIA cover. Crew members of the downed plane carried their Southern Air Transport employee IDs in their wallets. One also had a business card directly linking him to Oliver North's office in Washington.
When the scandal broke, Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall conducted what became known as a 'shredding party,' destroying a day's worth of documents. The full truth of Iran-Contra may never be known because of what was fed through that shredder.
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