Contributing Writers

We speak with legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw about the historic presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is facing a slew of racist and misogynist attacks from Donald Trump and others as she runs to be the first woman and the first woman of color to occupy the White House. Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality,” says Harris’s candidacy is leading to backlash from those who fear the emergence of a more diverse country.

Fears of all-out war in the Middle East are growing after top Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran on Wednesday. Haniyeh was in Iran for the inauguration of the country’s new president. Iran and Hamas both blamed Israel, which has not officially claimed responsibility but had previously vowed to kill Haniyeh and other top Hamas leaders over the October 7 attack.

Protests erupted on Monday in Venezuela after sitting President Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner of Sunday’s presidential election despite the opposition’s accusations of election fraud. Maduro has countered by accusing the opposition of attempting to stage a fascist coup. We go to Caracas for an update from Venezuelanalysis reporter Andreína Chávez, who says the opposition’s claims are still unsubstantiated.

New details have emerged about Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s past comments that continue to plague the Trump campaign, with the Ohio senator having made repeated remarks over the years denigrating people without children as “cat ladies” and “sociopaths.” We speak with ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll, who has reported on Vance and says he is “demonizing huge swaths of Americans” and embodies a “really extreme version of conservative politics.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made headlines this week after suggesting the 2024 election could be the last U.S. election if he wins in November. We look at a secret organization of wealthy Christians called Ziklag that is backing Trump’s efforts by working to purge more than a million voters from the rolls in battleground states and mobilize Republican voters to back Trump.

Just a month after the Supreme Court granted former President Donald Trump broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office, President Joe Biden has laid out a plan to reform the court. On Monday, Biden called for 18-year term limits, an enforceable code of ethics and an end to presidential immunity, though he stopped short of supporting court expansion.

Israel has vowed to retaliate against Hezbollah after blaming the Lebanese group for a rocket attack Sunday in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in Syria that killed 12 children at a soccer field. Hezbollah has denied responsibility for the attack in the village of Majdal Shams, home to members of the Druze community, an Arab-speaking minority group.

We speak with Politico reporter Ian Ward about JD Vance, who has become a lightning rod for controversy since being picked by former President Donald Trump to be his running mate. Ward spent months with Vance earlier this year for a profile about the freshman Ohio senator and his political evolution from a “Never Trump” Republican to one of the MAGA movement’s most prominent voices.

We speak with reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman about Ohio Senator JD Vance, whose history of sexist remarks has come under scrutiny since he was chosen to be Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election. Bracey Sherman says Vance’s attacks on women who do not have biological children and his promotion of a kind of “trad” lifestyle harkening back to 1950s norms show he is out of touch with modern families. “The short answer is he’s a weirdo.

Republican vice-presidential nominee Ohio Senator JD Vance has doubled down on his sexist remarks that Democrats are led by “childless cat ladies,” claiming the party is anti-family. He made the original comment on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in 2021. He has also previously suggested parents should be given more votes than childless people.

Just hours before Friday’s opening ceremony for the 2024 Summer Olympics, a series of apparently coordinated arson attacks were reported on France’s high-speed rail network. No one has claimed responsibility yet. Before the games, protests highlighted the displacement of thousands of migrants, unhoused people and other vulnerable communities as “social cleansing.

As Paris hosts today’s opening ceremony for the 2024 Olympics, we speak with Lebanese photojournalist Christina Assi of Agence France-Presse, who carried the Olympic torch Sunday in Paris to honor journalists wounded or killed on the job. Assi lost her leg in the same Israeli attack that killed Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah in southern Lebanon on October 13, and says carrying the Olympic torch was a great opportunity to highlight the “atrocities” happening in the region.

We speak to two doctors who are part of a group of 45 U.S. doctors, surgeons and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza since October 7 and wrote an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an international arms embargo of Israel. The group includes evidence of a much higher death toll than is usually cited: more than 92,000 people, which represents over 4% of Gaza’s population.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, many Democratic lawmakers skipped the speech and held an alternative event on Capitol Hill to promote peace. The panel discussion featured Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers who have both lost family members to violence. Inon’s parents, Bilha and Yakovi Inon, were killed in the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas.

Just hours before Friday’s opening ceremony for the 2024 Summer Olympics, a series of apparently coordinated arson attacks were reported on France’s high-speed rail network. No one has claimed responsibility yet. Before the games, protests highlighted the displacement of thousands of migrants, unhoused people and other vulnerable communities as “social cleansing.

As Paris hosts today’s opening ceremony for the 2024 Olympics, we speak with Lebanese photojournalist Christina Assi of Agence France-Presse, who carried the Olympic torch Sunday in Paris to honor journalists wounded or killed on the job. Assi lost her leg in the same Israeli attack that killed Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah in southern Lebanon on October 13, and says carrying the Olympic torch was a great opportunity to highlight the “atrocities” happening in the region.

We speak to two doctors who are part of a group of 45 U.S. doctors, surgeons and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza since October 7 and wrote an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an international arms embargo of Israel. The group includes evidence of a much higher death toll than is usually cited: more than 92,000 people, which represents over 4% of Gaza’s population.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, many Democratic lawmakers skipped the speech and held an alternative event on Capitol Hill to promote peace. The panel discussion featured Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers who have both lost family members to violence. Inon’s parents, Bilha and Yakovi Inon, were killed in the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, many Democratic lawmakers skipped the speech and held an alternative event on Capitol Hill to promote peace. The panel discussion featured Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers who have both lost family members to violence. Inon’s parents, Bilha and Yakovi Inon, were killed in the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas.