Life Within War, Secret Tapes, Political Folk Opera

Coming up on today’s show:

• Earlier this week in Yemen, attempts to renew a 72-hour ceasefire between Shiite Houthi rebels and the Saudi-led coalition failed — the sixth time such a truce in nation’s civil war has been unsuccessful. Adam Baron, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a journalist who was based in Yemen from 2011 to 2014, has the details.

• More than 10,000 civilians have been killed in Yemen’s civil war, and millions are malnourished or starving because of food blockades. Mohammed al-Asaadi isa father of four living in Sana’a, a rebel stronghold and Yemen’s largest city. A former journalist now working in communications for Unicef, al-Assadi describes the burden that war has put on his family.

• On Wednesday, The Guardian received leaked secret tapes of British Prime Minister Theresa May speaking to Goldman Sachs back in May. In the recordings, she expressed concern over the economic impacts of Brexit. Those remarks go in direct contradiction with how she ran her campaign. Rowena Mason, deputy political editor for The Guardian, explains. 

• On Election Day, voters in 35 states will weigh in on a total of 163 different ballot initiatives. Many of the initiatives relate are about criminal justice issues. Beth Schwartzapfel, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, gives us an overview of the issues on the ballot. 

• Last year, Nebraska became the first conservative state to repeal the death penalty in over 40 years. GOP Governor Pete Ricketts has since garnered enough public support and signatures to introduce a ballot measure to overturn the ban on capital punishment. For more on this story we turn to Kate Bolz, a Democratic state senator from Nebraska representing District 29.

• New York City’s Vision Zero initiative aims to completely eliminate pedestrian, bicyclist and vehicular fatalities by 2024. But is this really possible? Peter Norton, an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia and author of “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City,” explains how it could be done. 

• Ten years before Donald Trump declared his desire to build a wall along the border with Mexico, Vermont-based folk singer Anaïs Mitchell was writing “Why We Build the Wall.” It’s the musical hit from her folk-opera “Hadestown,” and she joins The Takeaway to talk about how the show has evolved alongside this election.