As Democrats face the reality of President Trump’s second term, they share a fundamental belief: This moment calls for an inspirational message from their party. They just cannot decide what, exactly, that should be. In private meetings and at public events, elected Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided. They disagree over how often and how…

The website for the U.S. Agency for International Development went dark Saturday afternoon as lawmakers and aid workers, already reeling over the recent freezes to foreign assistance and the suspension of senior officials, braced for the possibility that the agency might be shut down. A slimmed-down page for U.S.A.I.D. appeared on the State Department’s website…

The Federal Aviation Administration was using a backup system to send real-time safety alerts to pilots late Saturday because its primary one was “experiencing a temporary outage,” the Transportation Department said. “The primary NOTAM system is experiencing a temporary outage, but there is currently no impact to the National Airspace System because a backup system…

The Education Department placed a number of employees across its offices on administrative leave on Friday, part of a wave of what staff members and union representatives say are dozens of suspensions at the agency in the Trump administration’s purge of diversity efforts. In letters obtained by The New York Times, the department notified affected…

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was traveling to Washington on Sunday for meetings this week with President Donald J. Trump and senior administration officials at a pivotal moment for the Middle East. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he wants the wars in the Middle East to end after the October 2023 Hamas-led…

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to understand the first few weeks of the…

The Ukrainian authorities said Sunday that two airstrikes a day earlier had killed at least 18 civilians, one of the highest single-day tolls so far this year and a grim reminder of the war’s enduring devastation as it approaches its fourth year. The first strike occurred Saturday morning when a Russian missile hit a residential…

The time had come to bend the knee — or at least bend to reality. A delegation of Russian diplomats arrived last Tuesday in a caravan of white SUVs for a summit in Damascus and an unenviable assignment: lay the groundwork for Russia to keep its military bases in Syria, less than two months after…

There is something exciting about the best new artist award at the Grammys. It is, by its nature, celebrating the fresh and, sometimes, the novel. Some of the nominees are sweetly green, while others have toiled for years without piercing the mainstream. All seem thrilled to be nominated. The award can be a kind of…

In 2017, China watched in awe — and shock — as AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program backed by Google, defeated a Chinese prodigy at a complex board game, Go. The decisive loss to a foreign computer program, which had similarly trounced a South Korean player, was a sort of Sputnik moment for China. That year,…