The Dail‪y‬ The New York Times

It’s been almost a year since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.

And the virus is persisting: A downward trend in the U.S. caseload has stalled, and concern about the impact of variants is growing. Yet inoculations are on the rise, and the F.D.A. has approved Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine, the third to be approved in the U.S.

Today, we check in on the latest about the coronavirus.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the Microsoft founder Bill Gates was the most powerful and provocative private individual operating within global public health.
Today, we look at the role he has played in public health and his latest mission: procuring Covid-19 vaccines for countries in the developing world.

The Senate is preparing to vote on another stimulus bill — the third of the pandemic.
The bill has the hallmarks of a classic stimulus package: money to help individual Americans, and aid to local and state governments. It also contains provisions that would usher in long-term structural changes that have been pushed for many years by Democrats.
Today, we explore the contours of the Biden administration’s stimulus bill and look at the competing arguments.

Even as the cold has lifted and the ice has melted in Texas, the true depth of the devastation left by the state’s winter storm can be difficult to see.
Today, we look at the aftermath through the eyes of Iris Cantu, Suzanne Mitchell and Tumaini Criss — three women who, after the destruction of their homes, are reckoning with how they are going to move forward with their lives.

It all started when Sigrid E. Johnson was 62. She got a call from an old friend, asking her to participate in a study about DNA ancestry tests and ethnic identity. She agreed.

Ms. Johnson thought she knew what the outcome would be. When she was 16, her mother told her that she had been adopted as an infant. Her biological mother was an Italian woman from South Philadelphia, and her father was a Black man.

The results, however, told a different story.

Today on The Sunday Read, what the growth in DNA testing, with its surprises and imperfections, means for people’s sense of identity.

Odessa is a four-part audio documentary series about one West Texas high school reopening during the pandemic — and the teachers, students and nurses affected in the process.
For the past six months, The New York Times has documented students’ return to class at Odessa High School from afar through Google hangouts, audio diaries, phone calls and FaceTime tours. And as the country continues to debate how best to reopen schools, Odessa is the story of what happened in a school district that was among those that went first.