Scamming attempts might seem to just come out of nowhere to suddenly appear in your WhatsApp, but a special economic zone in Laos has emerged as a hotbed of cryptocurrency schemes—where victims of human trafficking are trapped and forced to attempt more crime.
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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, and Patrick Fort.
Before President Donald Trump’s first term, he was in a “tight spot” financially, according to New Yorker writer David Kirkpatrick. At the start of his second term, Kirkpatrick says, Trump was in an “even tighter” spot. But six months later, Trump’s financial situation had substantially improved. Kirkpatrick has done a full accounting of the money, that’s flowed into the Trump family coffers. Kirkpatrick says even using the most conservative estimates, the Trumps have made almost $4 billion dollars “off of the presidency,” in just about a year. Today on The Sunday Story, we turn to our friends at NPR’s Planet Money to help us understand how President Trump and his family have found ways to profit from the presidency.
The Winter Olympics in Italy are disrupted by violent protests and the authorities launch an investigation after severed cables cause mass delays on the railway network. Also: The veteran French politician, Jack Lang, resigns as head of the Arab World Institute in Paris over his links to the late American sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. France urges people to have more children to boost the population because there were more deaths than births last year. Spain carries out the world's first face transplant from a woman who gave consent before she underwent an assisted dying procedure. President Zelensky says the US wants a peace deal agreed between Russia and Ukraine by June. Voting is underway in a general election in Thailand, where the governing Conservative Party faces tough competition from the People’s Party. Critics are sceptical about Elon Musk's plans to build AI data centres and send them into space. Washington Post CEO, Will Lewis, steps down after mass layoffs at the newspaper, and a new exhibition about Iran's new wave of cinema opens in London.
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US President Donald Trump has set a deadline for the end of the war in Ukraine - June. President Volodomyr Zelensky has said he will be sending a delegation to Miami for US-brokered talks in Miami.
We get a Ukrainian MP's reaction to the latest deadline and hear about life in Kyiv as Russia targets the country's energy infrastructure.
Also in the programme: the rush to get key AI components into outer space; and the small change in French rural life that could be fuelling the rise of the far-right.
(Photo: A person with a flashlight in a dark street during a power cut in Lviv, Ukraine. Credit: Mykola Tys, EPA/Shutterstock)
Certified Financial Planner Stephanie Marini joins Robert Brokamp for this month’s installment of the 2026 Financial Planning Challenge. Stephanie and Bro (Robert’s nickname at The Motley Fool) explain how to calculate and automate the amounts you need to pay off your debts, build a safety net, and save enough to accomplish your financial goals. Also in this episode: -While many tech stocks struggle, energy stocks are gushing -The bond market has struggled mightily since the pandemic, but the future looks brighter -Cisco finally surpasses its previous high reached in March of 2000 -Accomplish the financial tasks that are sticking in your craw – your bottom line and your peace of mind will thank you Host: Robert Brokamp Guest: Stephanie Marini Engineer: Bart Shannon
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