The Takeaway

It has been a year since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the brutal invasion of Ukraine. A country on the border of NATO and the European Union. And while the future of geopolitics is still up in the air, one twelve-year-old girl took it upon herself to tell the stories of children caught in the war. Yeva’s diary began on her 12th birthday– only a handful of days before the invasion that displaced her and her grandmother. She is now 13. We spoke with Yeva Skalietska, author of You Don’t Know What War Is: The Diary of a Young Girl from Ukraine.

But UMWA and Warrior Met are still at a standstill on contract negotiations, all while the mines are still operating with replacement workers, and still earning a profit.  Last week, UMWA leadership informed the remaining members on strike that the union would be ​​entering a new phase to win a fair contract, and sent a letter to the CEO of Warrior Met announcing that the striking miners were willing to return to work on March 2. Now, those coal miners who choose to return to work will be working under their old contract, while the UMWA and Warrior Met continue to negotiate. We get updates from Kim Kelly, an independent labor journalist and author of the book, "FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor." Kim has been covering the Warrior Met Coal strike since April 2021. Here is our previous coverage of the Warrior Met Strike:Alabama Union Coal Mine Workers Enter Fifth Month of StrikeAlabama Miners Are Still on Strike Nearly Nine Months Later

Wilmot Collins was born and raised in civil war-torn Liberia. Being witness to political violence and corruption in his own country, he became fascinated with America’s system of government in college.  Confronted with violence, and hunger, he eventually fled with his fiance, Maddie, to Ghana in 1990, finding work as a teacher. Still struggling, they then decided to go to America. Maddie, pregnant at the time, got a student visa to go to nursing school in Montana. Wilmot would join her, and meet his young daughter, almost two years later in Helena.  Today, Wilmot Collins is the first Black mayor of Helena, Montana's capital city with a population 33,000. Montana state has a less than 1-percent Black population.  We speak to Mayor Collins about his journey to America as a refugee, the hope and worry he sees in America's democracy, and leading a predominantly white city as a Black mayor.

Dr. Samuel Ramsey believes entomology is the study of diversity since insects are the most diverse species on the planet. In 2022, he was featured on Hulu's Black History Month special Your Attention Please which shines a light on Black innovators in art, science, culture, and more. And he has used social media to help the world better understand insects and their importance.    Dr. Sammy is also the founder and director of the Ramsey Research Foundation, which is closely studying communicable diseases in bees and plans to make all of this research openly accessible to the public, an unprecedented move in the scientific community. Through his work in entomology, Dr. Sammy has found some interesting connections between humans and insects, and he joined The Takeaway for the next edition of Black.Queer.Rising. to discuss all of this and more. 

Technology is touted as the future but one thing the industry has not been able to solve is its lack of gender and racial diversity within the field. Black Girls CODE was founded in 2011 to improve the pipeline of Black girls in tech. To change the landscape of what technology looks like and to build a new generation of computer programmers. Today, Black Girls CODE aims to deepen their impact by showing the world that Black girls can code, lead, innovate, and engineer their own futures.  We spoke to Sofia Mohammed, Interim Executive Director of Black Girls CODE

The anti-abortion movement continues to gain momentum, and its strategies against reproductive rights are evolving. We check in on attacks on abortion rights, from federal court in Texas, to Kentucky’s Supreme Court, to state legislatures across the country.   We're joined by Caroline Kitchener, national political reporter covering abortion at the Washington Post.

Conflict, repression, economic circumstances, drought, and famine have driven the migration of nearly 2 million people from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East to Southern Europe in the last decade. Migrants all over the world have died and gone missing at alarming rates. In the past decade, this endless tragedy has plagued the Mediterranean Sea in particular. Since 2014, over 25,000 migrants have gone missing and presumably died while taking the perilous journey asea. Aid groups like who have been giving life-saving assistance to migrants who cross are now being criminalized. Twenty-four aid workers in Greece stand trial for helping migrants who were crossing through the Mediterranean. We speak with New Yorker staff writer Alexis Okeowo who covers conflict, culture, and human rights across Africa, Mexico, and the American South to better understand the scale and impact of this crisis and what can be done to improve migration conditions.

For well over a decade, rural hospitals have been in crisis. Since 2010, 141 hospitals in rural communities have closed. And although they’ve been struggling financially for years, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed them to the brink with a record 19 closures in 2020 alone.  And while pandemic-era federal aid stopped some of these rapid closures, much of that aid expired at the end of last year. The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform estimates that more than 600 rural hospitals – or nearly 30% of all rural hospitals in the country – are at risk of closing in the near future. The federal government tried to address this crisis with a plan called the Rural Emergency Hospital (REH) designation, but the plan comes with hard choices for many of these hospitals and would have a huge impact on the rural communities they serve. For more on the crisis at rural hospitals, we spoke with Harold Miller, President and CEO of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. 

Da’Shaun L. Harrison is an organizer, trans theorist, Editor-at-Large at Scalawag Magazine and winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in transgender nonfiction for their book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness. For our series Black.Queer.Rising, they share their understanding of the connection between anti-fatness and anti-Blackness, why and how they’re able to show up as their full unapologetic self, and what they view as the limitations of liberation while existing within an oppressive system. 

On February 24th, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked, full scale military attack on Ukraine. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine are ongoing, and with the first anniversary of war approaching, we check-in with journalists we’ve spoken to throughout the conflict to reflect on the past year and look at the current state of the war.  We spoke with Christopher Miller, Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times and author of the forthcoming book about Ukraine, “The War Came To Us,” and Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. We also spoke with Ukrainians we’ve talked to throughout the conflict: Last April, we spoke with Olena Shevchenko, Head of Insight Ukraine, an LGBTQ advocacy group based in Ukraine. Olena was in the Kyiv at the start of Russia’s invasion. She stayed for 14 days, partially sheltering in a basement, and then decided to move the Kyiv-based part of her organization to the western city of Lviv. They went back to Kyiv in June, and have hubs all around the country. Throughout the war, the organization continued advocacy work around LGBTQ issues, but they also helped tens of thousands of people who were fleeing the country or who were internally displaced, by offering legal consultations, distributing humanitarian aid, and finding temporary shelter. Last March, we spoke with Mariia Sirychenko, just a couple of weeks after the Russian Invasion. She was in Kyiv when the city was attacked and she left two days later, also to the safety of Lviv. Nearly a year later, she’s back in Kyiv. Mariia is from Mariupol, a city that was under siege for more than 80 days. And it's estimated that thousands of civilians were killed in the attacks, but exact numbers are difficult to verify. The city is currently under Russian control. When we last spoke to Mariia, she hadn’t been able to contact her grandmother in Mariupol for 10 days, but thankfully they found a way to rescue her. We check-in with these voices on the ground in Ukraine about how life has changed for them and how they’re reflecting on this one-year mark of the war.

Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, and U.N. ambassador has officially entered the 2024 presidential race. She is the first major Republican challenge to Former President Donald Trump… only two years after she said she wouldn’t.  Katon Dawson, former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party joins us to find out if Haley's bid is not just for president but for "the soul" of the Republican party. 

The new docuseries "Murder In Big Horn" which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and premiered on Showtime this Month looks into a disturbing trend: “the disappearances and possible murders of a group of Native American women in rural Montana.” We hear from directors Razelle Benally (Oglala Lakota/Diné) and Matthew Galkin about the epidemic of MMIW or Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women.

Democratic Colorado Representative Leslie Herod joins us for our series Black Queer Rising. Herod has held down the 8 district in Colorado since her victory in the 2016 – and is the first openly Black woman in the Colorado House of Representatives elected in the state’s history.  Herod has made a name for herself by tackling and securing sweeping changes with a police reform bill signed into Colorado law in June 2020. Her efforts have defelonized drug possession and introduced bail reform. As a representative she supported and guided the passage of a voter supported tax to fund mental health and drug rehabilitation centers in the city of Denver. She turns to the city with her eyes on the coveted prize of Mayor. The Mayoral election is set to take place in early April of this year.  Representative Herod joins us to explain the reasoning behind her focus on criminal justice reform, and her plans for the future of Colorado.

Two weeks ago, a train carrying toxic chemicals through a small town in eastern Ohio derailed in a fiery crash and flames and black smoke filled the sky. Federal investigators have said the derailment was caused by a mechanical issue with a rail car axle. But rail companies have used their influence to lobby against federal regulations that could have made an event like this less possible — including mechanical safety upgrades for trains carrying hazardous chemicals and what chemicals are even classified as hazardous. With such trains criss-crossing thousands of miles across the U.S., the event in Ohio is a warning for the country. The Lever, a national reader-supported investigative journalism outlet, recently investigated the rail industry's lobbying against proposed federal regulations. We speak with reporter Matthew Cunningham-Cook.  

Gray Love: Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60 is an ambitious effort that includes forty-two essays covering a range of topics. From dating while mourning the loss of a partner, to what to write on an online dating profile. Some stories are sad and tragic while others are funny and joyful. We talk to the Co-Editors of the book Nan Bauer-Maglin and Daniel E. Hood.