Donate

Trump Takes a Trip, A Foiled Terror Plot, A Teacher’s Warning

The Takeaway

Coming up on today’s show:

  • President Donald Trump is on his first official trip overseas. This past weekend, the president was in Saudi Arabia, and today he’ll be in Israel before he heads to Rome, Sicily, and Brussels. Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. from 1993 to 1996, and Steve Eder, an investigative reporter for our partners at The New York Times, look at Mr. Trump’s visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia. 
  • According to a group of current and former U.S. intelligence officials, from 2010 to 2012, at least a dozen C.I.A. informants were thrown in jail or killed by the Chinese government. Adam Goldman, a reporter with The New York Times who has been covering this story, has the details. 
  • A whistle-blower at UnitedHealth Group is claiming that big insurance companies have been using Medicare Advantage to profit-game the system in order to be paid more. Fred Schulte, a senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, explains.
  • The chemical chlorpyrifos, which was slated to be banned under the Obama administration but then reversed by President Trump, is responsible for sickening dozens of farm workers in California. Dana Boyd Barr, a professor at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, a member of the scientific advisory panel for the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act that recommended the ban to the EPA, weighs in. 
  • The Takeaway looks into a foiled terrorist plot set to be carried out in Kansas by three members of an anti-Muslim white supremacist group called the Crusaders. Ted Genoways, a contributing editor to The New Republic, investigated the group’s radicalization, their plan to bomb an apartment complex comprised of mostly Somali immigrants, and how the town rallied to the defense of these refugees.
  • As students across the country prepare for graduation, Rob Barnett, a public school teacher in Washington, D.C., says that schools are too fixated on graduation rates and passing students to boost their numbers. As a result, real learning has become a secondary goal. 

This episode is hosted by Noel King.

Are you with The World?

The story you just read is available to read for free because thousands of listeners and readers like you generously support our nonprofit newsroom. Every day, the reporters and producers at The World are hard at work bringing you human-centered news from across the globe. But we can’t do it without you: We need your support to ensure we can continue this work for another year.

When you make a gift of $10 or more a month, we’ll invite you to a virtual behind-the-scenes tour of our newsroom to thank you for being with The World.