The Daily

“The entire state is burning.” That was the refrain Jack Healy, our national correspondent, kept hearing when he arrived in the fire zone in Oregon. The scale of the wildfires is dizzying — millions of acres have burned, 30 different blazes are raging and thousands of people have been displaced. Dry conditions, exacerbated by climate change and combined with a windstorm, created the deadly tinderb...

This episode contains strong language. After Donald Trump was elected president, two filmmakers were granted rare access to the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since Mr. Trump had campaigned on a hard-line immigration agenda, the leaders of the usually secretive agency jumped at a chance to have their story told from the inside. Today, we speak to the filmmakers about what they...

Prince is 9 years old, ebullient and bright; he has spent much of the pandemic navigating the Google Classroom app from his mother’s phone. The uncertainty and isolation of the coronavirus lockdown is not new to him — he is one of New York City’s more than 100,000 homeless schoolchildren, the largest demographic within the homeless population. Families like Prince’s are largely invisible. Samantha...

When many in California talk about this year’s wildfires, they describe the color — the apocalyptic, ominous, red-orange glow in the sky. The state’s current wildfires have seen two and a half million acres already burned. Climate change has made conditions ripe for fires: Temperatures are higher and the landscape drier. But the destruction has also become more acute because of the number of homes...

This episode contains strong language. “So there’s just shooting, like we’re both on the ground,” Kenneth Walker, Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend, said of the raid on her home. “I don’t know where these shots are coming from, and I’m scared.” Much of what happened on the night the police killed Ms. Taylor is unclear. As part of an investigation for The New York Times, our correspondent Rukmini Callimac...

At the beginning of 2020, Breonna Taylor posted on social media that it was going to be her year. She was planning a family with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker; she had a new job and a new car. She had also blocked Jamarcus Glover, a convicted drug dealer with whom she had been romantically involved on and off since 2016, from her phone. But forces were already in motion. The Louisville Police Depa...

This episode contains strong language. In March, Daniel Prude was exhibiting signs of a mental health crisis. His brother called an ambulance in the hopes that Mr. Prude would be hospitalized, but he was sent back home after three hours without a diagnosis. Later, when Mr. Prude ran out of the house barely clothed into the Rochester night, his brother, Joe Prude, again called on the authorities fo...

Three months into Broadway’s shutdown because of the coronavirus pandemic, Michael Paulson, a theater reporter for The New York Times, got a call from a theater in western Massachusetts — they planned to put on “Godspell,” a well-loved and much-performed musical from 1971, in the summer. Today, we explore how, in the face of huge complications and potentially crushing risks, a regional production...

This episode contains strong language. Jimmy Lai was born in mainland China but made his fortune in Hong Kong, starting as a sweatshop worker and becoming a clothing tycoon. After the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, he turned his attention to the media, launching publications critical of China’s Communist Party. “I believe in the media,” he told Austin Ramzy, a Hong Kong reporter for The New York Time...

Aleksandr Lukashenko came to office in Belarus in the 1990s on a nostalgic message, promising to undo moves toward a market economy and end the hardship the country had endured after gaining independence from the Soviet Union. As president, he acquired dictatorial powers, removing term limits, cracking down on opposition and stifling the press. In recent years, however, economic stagnation has bre...

Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s plan for winning the presidential election relies on putting together African-American voters of all ages, including younger Black people who are less enthusiastic about him, and white moderates who find President Trump unacceptable. At last week’s Republican National Convention, the Trump campaign appeared to be sowing discord within that coalition. By framing the response t...

This episode contains strong language. As a police officer in his hometown of Flint, Mich., Scott Watson has worked to become a pillar of the community, believing his identity has placed him in a unique position to do his job. He has given out his cellphone number, driven students to prom and provided food and money to those who were hungry. After watching the video of the killing of George Floyd,...

Many American states use the labor of inmates to help fight its fires, but none so more than California. Using incarcerated firefighters saves the state’s taxpayers an estimated $100 million a year. The women that choose to enter the firefighting camps are afforded better pay, by prison standards, and an improved quality of time served. However, the money they earn from putting their lives on the...

For much of his life, Donald Trump Jr. has been disregarded by his father. He played only a bit part in the 2016 campaign and when the team departed for Washington, he was left to oversee a largely unimportant part of the Trump Organization. But after The New York Times revealed that he had played an integral role in organizing the Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and Russians promis...

This episode contains strong language. The shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black father from Kenosha, Wis., by a white police officer has reverberated through the city, fueling protests and unrest. There have been marches and demonstrations, as well as instances of destruction: businesses and property set alight, fireworks launched at the police. On Tuesday night, a group of armed men, who claimed to b...

At the 1968 Republican National Convention, Richard Nixon made an appeal to voters in the suburbs concerned about racial unrest across the United States after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. They helped deliver him the presidency that year, cementing suburbanites’ role as an integral voting bloc. The 2020 election is also taking place against a backdrop of mass protests and unrest over...

In the U.S., emergency-use authorization has been granted for convalescent plasma, the efficacy of which is yet to be robustly tested. For some, this echoes the situation with hydroxychloroquine and the government’s subsequent U-turn on its rollout. Meanwhile, America’s infection rate appears to be flattening out — but at tens of thousands of cases per day. This stands in stark contrast to China,...

Gun violence is on the rise in New York City. By the end of July, there had been more shootings in 2020 than in all of 2019. Shootings have risen in other metropolises, too, including Atlanta, Chicago, Denver and Houston. Several theories have been advanced about why. Experts on crime say the coronavirus outbreak has deepened the endemic problems that often underlie gun violence, including poverty...

Much of the fashion industry has buckled under the weight of the coronavirus — it appears to have sped up the inevitable. This story was written by Irina Aleksander and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your fa...

When the coronavirus hit the United States, the N.B.A. was faced with a unique challenge. It seemed impossible to impose social distancing in basketball, an indoor sport with players almost constantly jostling one another for more than two hours. However, there was a big financial incentive to keep games going: ending the 2019 season early would have cost the league an estimated $1 billion in tele...

Joseph R. Biden Jr. first ran for president in 1988, when his campaign was cut short after he made a series of blunders. After six terms in the Senate, he tried again in 2008 but failed to gain any traction in a contest won by Barack Obama. In the current political landscape, however, his focus on personal integrity and experience, which were also centerpieces of his previous campaigns, has proved...

The installation of Louis DeJoy as postmaster general has caused alarm. Since taking up the role in June, he has enacted a number of cuts to the Postal Service: ending overtime for workers, limiting how many runs they can make in a day, reassigning more than 20 executives and, from the perspective of the unions, speeding up the removal of mail-sorting machines. The actions of Mr. DeJoy, a Republic...

In March 2018, Mark Landler — then a White House correspondent at The New York Times — attended a dinner party hosted by the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, at a Washington restaurant. There he witnessed a chance encounter between the ambassador and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel — one the ambassador asked to keep private. Two years after that delicate conversation...

Operation Warp Speed has in some ways lived up to its name: The U.S. government has awarded almost $11 billion to seven different companies to develop vaccines, three of which — Moderna, AstraZeneca and Pfizer — are in late-stage trials. Things are going according to the most aggressive schedule. However, accelerating the development process has increased the likelihood of cronyism and undue polit...

What is the extent of Russia’s interest in the 2020 U.S. election? Last year, a classified report written by intelligence officials tried to answer this question. In this episode, Robert Draper, a writer-at-large at The New York Times Magazine, explores what happened after the report — which stated that President Trump was Russia’s favored candidate in the upcoming election — was drafted. This sto...