We look at a new Washington Post investigation titled “Money War” that traces the effects of U.S. sanctions under the last four presidents: Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. According to the report, the U.S government has instituted, in some form or another, sanctions against a third of all other countries around the world, despite no clear evidence that they are effective in influencing target nations’ politics, and in fact may often entrench the power of ruling parties.

We play excerpts from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s interview Wednesday with a panel of Black women journalists from the National Association of Black Journalists. In response to his interviewers’ questions about his record with Black Americans, Trump cast doubts on Kamala Harris’s racial identity, repeated his claims that immigrants are threatening “Black jobs,” and declared that he was the best president for the Black community since Abraham Lincoln.

Unrest continues to brew in Israel after a right-wing mob including members of the Knesset broke into two Israeli military bases in an effort to prevent Israeli military police from detaining nine soldiers who were under investigation for gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman facility.

“This is one of the most perilous moments in the [Middle East] region in years,” says Ali Vaez, director of the International Crisis Group Iran Project, after Israel’s assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh on Wednesday in Tehran. Iranian retaliation against Israel appears imminent.

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.

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.