The Take

The 2020 election is expected to be the biggest vote by mail in US history, and concerns over changes at the US Postal Service are mounting at a time when many people are seeing delays in their mail for the first time ever. As President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden make their case for the presidency, Americans are trying to figure out HOW to vote on November 3. So what does this mean for voters’ ballots?

The military draft evokes fear in almost every young man in Thailand, but some say they fear their military training more than war. Amnesty International has documented acts of physical, mental and sexual abuse during Thailand's military hazing. We hear about one family whose son died during a hazing incident, and why they're demanding justice.

More days than not, Korean-pop band BTS is trending worldwide. Their popularity extends from Seoul to Santiago, and we wanted to know why. This Quick Take explores the band's universal appeal, and what happens if mandatory military service in South Korea forces it to break up.

Allan Lichtman has accurately predicted the outcome of every US presidential election since 1984. So will he be right again this year? He offers up his forecast this year with The Take, and explains why his methodology still works 36 years after its inception.

After 16 years, the center-left Dominican Liberation Party is out in the Caribbean country. The new president, Luis Abinader, a businessman turned politician, was sworn in just hours ago. Now, he'll lead a country plagued by corruption, a fragile economy, and COVID-19. We hear from a local journalist and a Dominican-born U.S. Congressman Adriano Espaillat about what people hope will change with the new administration.

Egyptian women have had a breakthrough fighting sexual violence — and the authorities are listening. After more than 100 women accused one man of assault and harassment, the consequences he faced surprised some observers. But the activists leading the charge online have also faced death threats as they try to expand their movement. Many say this reckoning over sexual assault is long overdue, but how far does it still have to go?

Ireland's Mother and Baby Home scandal destroyed families, cost up to 6,000 babies' lives, and emotionally scarred an estimated 30,000 women — and it's just one part of a system of institutional abuse. Al Jazeera documented how this network of abuse is a window into the church-sanctioned violence against women in Ireland, and the government’s alleged attempts to sweep it all under the rug.

More than 1,000 current and former Doctors Without Borders employees have signed an open letter demanding the aid organization root out its institutionally racist, colonialist and white supremacist policies while examining its hiring practices and workplace culture. A manager in the United States and a former supervisor in South Sudan talk to The Take about the discrimination and racism they’ve experienced, and their colleagues’ fears about speaking out.

It takes a lot to deal a blow to a city like Beirut, but Tuesday’s blast was like nothing Lebanon has ever seen. In the 24 hours following the explosion, Al Jazeera correspondents sent The Take voice notes covering the aftermath. The explosion didn’t just destroy Beirut’s downtown, it also destroyed the country’s lifelines to stave off collapse amid an imploding economy and a spike in coronavirus cases. The question now is: How will the Beirut explosion affect all of Lebanon's other crises?

A spike in gender-based violence is one of the side effects of the pandemic. In Sierra Leone, violence against women was already a national crisis. Today, we revisit an episode from last summer about efforts there to end sexual violence from the top down — and the ground up.

Alvin Cole, a Black teenager, was shot and killed in February, a month after his 17th birthday. The officer accused of killing him is Joseph Mensah with Wisconsin's Wauwatosa Police Department — and Mensah is accused of shooting and killing two other men of color. These shootings haven't seen as much attention as other incidents of police violence in the country, but today, we're telling the story.

Today we're bringing you something new, and we're calling it a Quick Take — a shorter episode about something that caught our attention this week. A lot of us have been ordering dinner from delivery apps a little more often throughout coronavirus lockdowns. There are at least a dozen popular apps to choose from, and what we've noticed across them all are the fees. They aren't new, but they're hitting restaurants harder during the pandemic.

Chances are you've never heard of the Coca Codo Sinclair Dam. It's a project that was designed to supercharge renewable energy in Ecuador. Instead, it brought oil spills, flash floods, corruption, and crippling debt. In the second half of our two-part series on Ecuador's Amazon, we're examining how the ill-advised dam continues to plague indigenous communities years after it was inaugurated.

In the first of this two-part series, we bring you a story of what happens when an environmental crisis and a health crisis are stacked on top of one another, affecting one of the most vulnerable populations in one of the world's most vulnerable regions. When COVID-19 hit Ecuador, its indigenous communities fled to their ancestral homes in the Amazon. But more trouble awaited them in the rainforest.

Lebanon’s financial collapse is accelerating — and the old normal is fading, even down to the traffic lights. In a country where people were once able to pay just as easily with dollars as with local currency, many now can find neither. The Lebanese are no strangers to handling crisis, but this one could be the biggest since the civil war.