The Sunday Read: ‘A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies’

This year has been a banner year for video games, with an abundance of surprise releases and unexpected hits. On this week’s Sunday Special, Gilbert Cruz talks with two fellow gamers — Zachary Small, a culture reporter, and Jason Bailey, an editor on The Times’s culture desk — about the state of the industry, the biggest releases and the games they loved playing in 2025. They also share their predictions for Game of the Year.

At only 35, the actress has been through the celebrity wringer. Here’s where she landed.

Representative Kevin Kiley is one of five California Republicans who are all but certain to lose their seats in the next midterm elections if voters grant final approval to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s newly drawn congressional districts. Mr. Kiley showed up to work in protest against Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to send the House home indefinitely as the government shutdown drags on. A new poll from The Washington Post found that more Americans blame the shutdown on Trump and congressional Republicans than on Democrats. “The Daily” sat down with Mr. Kiley for a conversation about his one-man campaign to try to fix what he believes his party is getting wrong in this moment.

Earlier this month, after Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement, the Israeli military said it would withdraw from parts of Gaza — allowing some Palestinians displaced to the south to try to return home to the north. Rachelle Bonja, a producer of “The Daily,” ​recently spoke by phone with three Gazans​ who were making or contemplating the journey home. ​One of them, Saher ​Alghorra​, is a photojournalist ​who often works with The Times; another is Nidal Kuhail​, ​a former restaurant worker ​whom The Times has spoken to over the course of the war. The third is Hussein Khaled Auda​, a former bodybuilder who ran a small gym in Jabalia. Mr. Auda’s story is about his family. His four young children were killed in airstrikes during the war, and his wife was seriously injured. He has been traveling back home in large part to find and bury the remains of two of his children, who had been in the rubble of his house after one of the airstrikes. We interviewed his wife, Rawa, and other relatives, and reviewed death certificates and video footage to help understand what happened to his family. In our reporting, The Times also learned that a cousin of Mr. Auda’s was a senior leader of Hamas in Gaza who was killed during the war last year. The Times asked Mr. Auda if he himself had any ties to Hamas. He said he was not a member of Hamas and not political, and had dozens of cousins. He said he had seen the one affiliated with Hamas just a couple of times in his life. Like other news organizations, The Times has not yet been able to send its own staff journalists into Gaza unescorted. This episode, like many other Times pieces for more than two years, seeks to help our audience understand the experiences of Gazans during a devastating war.

President Trump’s trade war against China has so far proved harder to win than his administration ever let on. And it reached new levels of tension this month when China said it would further restrict exports of rare-earth minerals to the United States and Europe. Keith Bradsher, the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, discusses a potential turning point in the standoff as Mr. Trump meets this week with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in what will be their first talks since the trade war began.