The Takeaway

Vive la France. On Sunday in Moscow, the French national soccer team will vie for its second FIFA World Cup title — a day after Bastille Day on July 14, no less — when it takes on fellow European squad Croatia for the right to be named kings of the international version of the planet’s most popular sport.

Last week, Mexican congressional candidate Fernando Purón was shot while posing for a selfie with his supporters, and his murder was captured on video.

Picture enough people to fill the city of Charlotte, North Carolina — living in makeshift housing in an enormous camp with only one road running through it and one road going around it. Now picture massive amounts of rain.

Given his history using offensive language, it has become hard for President Donald Trump to make headlines simply for what he said. Yet on Wednesday, he did just that by referring to a group of immigrants as “animals” during a roundtable discussion about immigration policy in California.

“These aren't people,” Trump said on record. “These are animals and we're taking them out of the country at a level at a rate that's never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast. We get 'em. We release 'em. We get 'em again. We bring them out. It's crazy.”

Last week, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin told CBS News, “Teachers want more [school funding]. But it’s kind of like having a teenage kid that wants a better car.”

That type of dismissal of teachers’ requests is exactly what forced Oklahoma educators out of their classrooms and into the streets. On April 2, teachers from around the state skipped class to call for more reliable funding mechanisms for schools, in addition to higher salaries and more money for student textbooks, electives and school supplies. The strike is now in its second week.

Young voices took center stage on Saturday in the March For Our Lives, a show of force by students unseen, most likely, since the Vietnam War protests.

Children and young adults came out in droves to decry the recent mass shootings in Parkland, Florida, Silver Springs, Maryland, and others. But for many communities of color, the newfound public attention on this issue is bittersweet.

On Wednesday, the man believed to be responsible for a rash of fatal parcel bombs in Austin, Texas, detonated a device inside a car he was using to flee police as a SWAT team approached the vehicle. The suspect died in the explosion. The suspect, now identified by multiple media outlets as 24-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt, evaded federal and local authorities for weeks as he allegedly planted packages rigged with explosives throughout various locations in Austin, killing two and injuring multiple others.

For more than four decades, the United Nations has marked March 8 as International Women’s Day. While it’s a global celebration of the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women around the world, the day is also used to bring attention to the essential challenges affecting women everywhere — especially in poorer countries.

This week marks 45 years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in the Roe v. Wade case. Though it’s the law of the land in the United States, family planning clinics face onslaughts of protesters on a daily basis, and for many women access to health care also includes persistent harassment.

Monday marks 45 years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in the case of Roe v. Wade. The 7-2 decision guarantees that women have a constitutional right to choose to have an abortion.

But it wasn’t always that way.

This week marks 45 years since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade. For 33 of those 45 years, Clarke Forsythe has worked with Americans United for Life in the courts and state legislatures to restrict abortion — always with an eye on overturning Roe v. Wade.

Oxygen — we all need it to breathe.  And the ocean needs it to produce marine life and help maintain biodiversity and a healthy ecosystem. But as the planet warms, the oceans hold less oxygen, which is creating dead zones and areas where marine life cannot survive.

Now, a new analysis by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, published in the journal Science, shows that the oceans are suffocating as the number of dead zones is dramatically increasing.

Congressional leaders met Wednesday with White House officials to explore the possibility of a legislative solution that would give lasting legal status to people currently benefiting from DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. 

Both Republicans and Democrats have expressed a desire to bring DACA recipients — typically, undocumented migrants who were brought to the US as children, then grew up here — into the fold. But with a president who rode into office using anti-immigrant rhetoric, it’s unclear what kind of concessions might be made.

Roland Williams isn’t like other 11-year-old boys. He has stage 4 lung cancer, and he is bedridden most days. 

“My son doesn’t get to do anything,” says his mother, Myra Gregory. “He’s at home in bed in pain right now.”

Gregory and Roland live in St. Louis, Missouri. Roland and his two brothers rely on the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, for access to medical care. Nearly 9 million children across America depend on CHIP for everything from annual checkups and vaccinations to treatment for serious illnesses.

It seems that every morning the world waits for a new tweet notification from the president of the United States, but is it always Donald Trump hitting the send button?

Early Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump retweeted three videos from a Twitter account linked to the extreme right-wing group Britain First.

Are you under 35? You are the future of the Democratic Party.

That’s according to Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2005 to 2009, a six-term governor of Vermont and a former presidential candidate.