The Trump administration has said that domestic abuse is no longer grounds for receiving asylum in the United States. We share one asylum seeker’s story.
On today’s episode:
• Mariam, a survivor of domestic violence who came to the United States from Burkina Faso, and who asked not to be identified by her real name.
Background reading:
• A ruling that Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued in a closely watched case will make it difficult for asylum seekers to gain entry in the United States based on fears of domestic or gang violence.
• As Washington’s immigration policies become increasingly restrictive, a growing number of refugees from Central America are waiting at the Mexican border.
Tag: The Daily
🎧 ‘The Daily’: What Trump Gave Kim | New York Times
In a joint statement, President Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, committed to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Why is a seemingly significant promise being dismissed by critics as meaningless?
On today’s episode:
• Nicholas Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times who writes about human rights and global affairs, and who has repeatedly traveled to North Korea.
Background reading:
• The summit meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim yielded a vaguely worded joint statement in which both parties agreed to work toward peace, but offered few details on how they planned to move forward.
• In a news conference after the meeting, Mr. Trump announced that the United States would halt joint military exercises with South Korea, a decision that appeared to catch both the Pentagon and South Korean officials off-guard.
• The president’s concessions to North Korea may vastly outweigh their returns, Mr. Kristof writes in an Op-Ed. Lawmakers in both parties have noted that it remains unclear what, if anything, has been gained by the U.S.
• The encounter between the two leaders was rich in spectacle — and in ambiguity. Here are 10 takeaways from the event.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: A Historic Handshake | New York Times
For the first time ever, a sitting president of the United States has met with a North Korean leader. Was the handshake between President Trump and Kim Jong-un a beginning or an end?
On today’s episode:
• Mark Landler, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, who is reporting on the summit meeting from Singapore.
Background reading:
• In an encounter that seemed unthinkable just months ago, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim met face-to-face for the first time in Singapore on Tuesday morning. Here are live updates and photographs from the meeting.
• Among the issues on the table were the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War and economic relief for North Korea.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: Part 5 of ‘Charm City’: What’s Behind the Black Box? | New York Times
The relatives of a Baltimore teenager think they know the name of the police officer who killed him. But when his mother finally sees the surveillance video of his death, a new story emerges.
Every day this week, we’ve brought you the story of Lavar Montray Douglas, known as Nook, who was fatally shot by a police officer in Baltimore in 2016. His family has been searching for answers ever since.
Part 5 is the conclusion of our series. We talk to Nook’s mother, Toby Douglas, about how grief has changed her. She tried joining a support group for mothers, many of whom now fight to stop gun violence. But her son had a gun, and he was shooting it.
Toby and her mother, Davetta Parker, think they know the name of the police officer who killed Nook. They’ve heard it around the streets. We visit him at his home in the suburbs, and he’s not at all who we expected.
Nook would have turned 20 in late May. We drive with Toby to tie balloons at his grave and to a stop sign at the corner of Windsor Avenue and North Warwick Avenue, where he was killed. She often goes there to feel close to Nook, sometimes sleeping in her car at the intersection.
One day, Toby gets a phone call. It’s the police. They want to show her the complete surveillance video of Nook’s final moments.
If you’d like to start from the beginning, here are Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: Part 4 of ‘Charm City’: The Police Scandal That Shook Baltimore | New York City
As the Baltimore Police Department tried to repair its public image, a corruption trial exposed the depths of misconduct: An elite group of officers had been stealing from residents.
Every day this week, we’re bringing you the story of the life and death of Lavar Montray Douglas, known as Nook. He was 18 years old when he was killed by a police officer in Baltimore in 2016, a year after Freddie Gray died in police custody.
In Part 4, we go to the heart of the problem with the Baltimore Police Department, beginning with the trial of officers from the Gun Trace Task Force — a plainclothes unit created during the peak of zero-tolerance policing — accused of stealing from residents for years. We talk to Leo Wise and Derek Hines, federal prosecutors nicknamed “the Twin Towers of Justice,” because they are both very tall and thin.
Their case started with a pair of heroin overdose deaths. As the case grew, it revealed a sprawling network of criminal activity, in which police officers used brass knuckles and baseball bats and went after drug dealers, because they kept cash. When those drug dealers complained, no one believed them.
The officers are now being sentenced. Over time, they stole hundreds of thousands of dollars. They planted guns and fabricated evidence. The city announced this week that it would have to re-examine around 1,700 cases that involved the task force.
If you’d like to start from the beginning, here are Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
🎧 The Daily: “Charm City,” Part 3: The Lure of the Streets | New York Times
What happened to the generation caught between a crack epidemic that consumed their neighborhoods and the aggressive police tactics meant to fix the problem?
Nook spent the first few years of his life in an affluent suburb. But when he returned to Baltimore, he became part of a young generation caught between the crack epidemic and the aggressive police tactics meant to fix the problem.
For the past two days, we’ve been bringing you the story of the life and death of Lavar Montray Douglas, known as Nook. He was 18 years old when he was shot dead by a police officer in Baltimore in 2016.
In Part 3, we look at Nook’s childhood. He spent the first few years of his life with an aunt in an upper-middle-class home outside Baltimore, taking piano lessons and going to church every week. Yesterday, we learned that Nook’s mother, Toby Douglas, kept returning to Baltimore. The same thing happened to Nook.
We go to Nook’s Baltimore, to his corner on Calhoun Street and Pratt Street. Some of his friends are still there, and we talk to them about Nook’s life. He was ambitious, they say. A leader. His mother was proud of that.
Everybody was talking about the Baltimore police officers who had just been on trial, accused of stealing from drug dealers. You see, they said, we were right. The cops are robbers. We said this all along, but nobody believed us.
Suddenly, two police officers pull up, and we encounter something that seems to be emblematic of the changes in the Baltimore Police Department.
If you’d like to start from the beginning, here are Part 1 and Part 2.
🎧 The Daily: “Charm City,” Part 2: The Legacy of Zero-Tolerance Policing | New York Times
How did trust between the police and the people in Baltimore collapse within the span of three generations?
Yesterday, we started telling you the story of Lavar Montray Douglas, known as Nook, an 18-year-old in Baltimore who was killed by the police in the spasm of violence that began after Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained while in police custody.
In Part 2, we visit Nook’s mother, Lashanda Douglas, known as Toby, in the house she moved into after her son was killed. She sits on the floor of her bedroom, partially covered by a large pile of clean clothes. She is grieving, and folding them and putting them away is soothing. We learn about her past. She graduated from high school with honors. She fled Baltimore to escape a bad boyfriend. But the city eventually lured her back.
We’ll also go back in time, to the Baltimore of Nook’s grandmother and great-grandmother, of flower pots and tidy blocks, when men were still part of families and middle-class jobs were plentiful. We’ll see that relations with the police weren’t always bad. But job loss and drugs tore through the city like plagues. And the policing idea of zero tolerance, transplanted from New York City, created an entire generation of young men with criminal records.
Every day this week, we’ll bring you a new chapter in Nook’s life and his family’s search for answers about his death. If you’d like to start from the beginning, here’s Part 1.
🎧 Introducing ‘Charm City,’ a 5-Part Audio Series from ‘The Daily’ | New York Times
A year after the killing of Freddie Gray, a teenager in Baltimore was fatally shot by the police. This is the story of his life and death, and of a grieving family looking for answers.
[Read a transcript of Part 1 of the series.]
As soon as I heard Davetta Parker’s voice, I knew I had to meet her. Her grandson Lavar Montray Douglas, known as Nook, was among seven young people from one high school in Baltimore who were killed in the spasm of violence that shook the city after the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of a severe spinal cord injury while in police custody.
I cold-called her. She was sitting at her desk in a Baltimore public library. She said, “I think God sent you to me.” She said that she had so many questions about the death of her grandson, who had been shot by a police officer, and that she needed someone to help investigate, because the police never did. She said that she had written letters to news channels and newspapers, but that no one had written back. And there I was on the phone.
My colleague Lynsea Garrison and I spent four months examining Nook’s case. It took us on a journey from a quiet back room in the central library, where we first met Ms. Parker and her daughter Lashanda Douglas, known as Toby, into the streets of Baltimore, to drug corners, living rooms and grand homes in the county.
We wanted to tell his story for the simple reason that events like these are rarely told, even though they have become ordinary. Nook and his friends — many of whom have also been killed — were typical for homicide victims in Baltimore. They all had records with serious crimes. But they were boys. Most hadn’t even turned 18. And the deeper question in our minds was: How did things get like this for them?
You’ll meet Ms. Parker and Ms. Douglas in Part 1. Every day this week, we’ll bring you a new chapter in the life of Nook and his family’s search for answers about his death.
🎧 Introducing ‘Charm City,’ a 5-Part Audio Series from ‘The Daily’ | New York Times
A year after the killing of Freddie Gray, a teenager in Baltimore was fatally shot by the police. This is the story of his life and death, and of a grieving family looking for answers.
[Read a transcript of Part 1 of the series.]
As soon as I heard Davetta Parker’s voice, I knew I had to meet her. Her grandson Lavar Montray Douglas, known as Nook, was among seven young people from one high school in Baltimore who were killed in the spasm of violence that shook the city after the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of a severe spinal cord injury while in police custody.
I cold-called her. She was sitting at her desk in a Baltimore public library. She said, “I think God sent you to me.” She said that she had so many questions about the death of her grandson, who had been shot by a police officer, and that she needed someone to help investigate, because the police never did. She said that she had written letters to news channels and newspapers, but that no one had written back. And there I was on the phone.
My colleague Lynsea Garrison and I spent four months examining Nook’s case. It took us on a journey from a quiet back room in the central library, where we first met Ms. Parker and her daughter Lashanda Douglas, known as Toby, into the streets of Baltimore, to drug corners, living rooms and grand homes in the county.
We wanted to tell his story for the simple reason that events like these are rarely told, even though they have become ordinary. Nook and his friends — many of whom have also been killed — were typical for homicide victims in Baltimore. They all had records with serious crimes. But they were boys. Most hadn’t even turned 18. And the deeper question in our minds was: How did things get like this for them?
You’ll meet Ms. Parker and Ms. Douglas in Part 1. Every day this week, we’ll bring you a new chapter in the life of Nook and his family’s search for answers about his death.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: The Truth Behind #WhereAreTheChildren | New York Times
The United States government lost track of nearly 1,500 undocumented children in the last three months of 2017, giving rise to claims that they had been separated from their families at the border. What does the confusion reveal about President Trump’s approach to immigration?
On today’s episode:
• Caitlin Dickerson, a national immigration reporter for The New York Times.
Background reading:
• An official with the Department of Health and Human Services said that the agency had not been able to contact 1,475 migrant children it had placed with sponsors in the United States. The children had entered the country as unaccompanied minors; many were fleeing violence in Central America.
• The Trump administration says it separates immigrant families only when necessary to protect the child. But the government’s own figures show this has happened in more than 700 cases.
• The number of children who were unaccounted for was conflated with the number of children who been separated from their guardians in a public outcry that gave rise to hashtags like #WhereAreTheChildren.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder? | New York Times
The sole survivor of an attack in which four people were murdered identified the perpetrators as three white men. The police ignored suspects who fit the description and arrested a young black man instead. He is now awaiting execution.
On today’s episode:
• Kevin Cooper, who has been on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California for three decades.
• Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist who has written about Mr. Cooper’s case.
Background reading:
• The evidence against Mr. Cooper has largely been discredited, but Gov. Jerry Brown of California has refused to allow advanced DNA testing that may shed light on the case.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: What Trump Learned From Clinton’s Impeachment | New York Times
Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton survived impeachment after casting himself as the target of partisan motives. What lessons has President Trump gleaned from that strategy?
On today’s episode:
• Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, who covered the investigation and impeachment of Mr. Clinton.
[READ: When the President Testified: People in the Room Recall Clinton’s 1998 Interrogation]
Background reading:
• Mr. Trump has assailed the Russia investigation as a politically motivated “witch hunt” brought about by Democrats who oppose his presidency. The partisan narrative bears similarities to the one promulgated by Mr. Clinton and his supporters during the inquiry into whether he had lied under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky; Hillary Clinton characterized the matter as a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” against her husband.
• How will the president fare in the Russia investigation? Here’s a look at several possible outcomes, including a finding of no wrongdoing, impeachment and indictment.
• Some Republicans are seizing on the specter of impeachment to energize voters ahead of midterm elections, and Democrats are divided on how to respond.
• Several people who were in the room with Mr. Clinton during his grand jury testimony on Aug. 17, 1998 recall their experience of his interrogation.
🎧 “Caliphate,” Chapter 6 Paper Trail | New York Times
“Something was off.” Rukmini’s doubt fuels a quest to uncover the truth.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: When Democratic Newcomers Challenge the Party Line | New York Times
Alarm over the election of Donald Trump spurred dozens of first-time candidates to run for Congress. Some of those candidates now present a problem for the Democratic Party.
On today’s episode:
• Mai Khanh Tran, a Democratic candidate for a United States House seat in California.
• Alexander Burns, who covers national politics for The New York Times.
Background reading:
• National Democrats, fearing that crowded rosters of primary candidates could fracture the party, have begun to intervene by urging some to bow out of the election.
• The party views the California midterms as a particular risk. The state’s nonpartisan primary system — in which the top two vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation — could propel two Republican candidates to the November race.
• Here’s what to watch for in the California primaries, which take place on Tuesday.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: ‘Dear Mr. Chairman …’ | New York Times
President Trump abruptly canceled on Thursday the highly anticipated summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, that was scheduled to take place on June 12. In a letter to Mr. Kim announcing his decision, Mr. Trump wrote, “The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace.”
On today’s episode:
• Mark Landler, who covers the White House for The New York Times.
Background reading:
• Mr. Trump announced his decision to call off the summit meeting in a strikingly personal letter that contained mixed messages, both raising the possibility of military action against the North and leaving the door open for a future diplomatic encounter between the two men.
• The announcement came hours after North Korea appeared to destroy its only known nuclear test site in a spectacle that was attended by foreign journalists and was meant to be a sign of good faith ahead of the meeting with Mr. Trump.
• North Korea responded in a carefully worded statement that it remained “willing to sit down with the United States any time, in any format, to resolve the problems.”