For more than five decades, 60 Minutes has covered it all—from headline news to quiet human stories—fit neatly in one hour. Now in the digital age, we have more time and use novel approaches to report the news.

Syria was home to one of the first civilizations on earth; today, the country is picking up the pieces from the ruins of humanity’s oldest sin. Half a century of dictatorship between Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez. Half a million lives lost in a civil war under the younger Assad’s hand.

Now that he’s gone, Syria is looking toward its future. But before the country can plan what’s to come, its people want the world to be reminded of what has taken place.

In May, Norah O’Donnell sat down with Pope Francis for a historic interview. The head of the Catholic Church for more than a decade, Francis had previously never spoken at length with an English-language American broadcast network, and he spoke to 60 Minutes in his native Spanish. 

In a wide-ranging conversation lasting more than an hour, O’Donnell spoke with the pontiff about numerous topics, including the war in Gaza. There is one Catholic church in the Gaza Strip, the Holy Family Church, and the pontiff told O’Donnell he calls there every evening at 7 p.m. and speaks with the priest, Father Youssef Asaad.

Because his more progressive approach has created a division with traditionalists, O’Donnell asked Francis how he saw his legacy.

“Church is the legacy, the Church not only through the pope, but through you, through every Christian, through everyone…” he answered. “We all leave a legacy, and institutions leave a legacy. It’s a beautiful progression. I get on the bandwagon of the Church’s legacy for everybody.”

In February, 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi reported on the challenges humanitarian aid workers are facing inside Gaza as they try to deliver food, medicine and health care to Palestinians caught in the crossfire between Israel and Hamas. 

“I don’t think I’ve been this close to the sound of missile strikes…with a hospital shaking while I’m trying to operate,” Dr. Nareen Ahmed, American doctor and medical director of MedGlobal, told 60 Minutes.

Alfonsi and producer Ashley Velie have been reporting on Gaza since the first Israel-Hamas war in 2006. One stark difference this time is the lack of access: Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza independently. While they were able to speak with Hamas leadership in 2006, for this story, Alfonsi and Velie had to rely on aid workers who documented their harsh reality. 

“This is unusual,” Alfonsi said. “There is a longstanding precedent of allowing journalists into the war zones.” 

In his bid for a second term in the White House, President-elect Donald Trump made immigration a defining issue in the 2024 presidential race. 

“The Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” he said at the Republican National Convention this past July, as his crowd of supporters held signs bearing the phrase “mass deportation now!”

Trump has pledged to expel a large number of migrants since at least 2015, when he was first running for commander in chief. In the last nine years, one thing has frequently come up when Trump mentions removing en masse the migrants who have crossed the border illegally: the name of another former president. 

“You look back in the 1950s, you look back at the Eisenhower administration, take a look at what they did, and it worked,” Trump told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley in 2015.

What the U.S. government did under Dwight D. Eisenhower was a massive military-style sweep. U.S. Border Patrol agents conducted raids to round up Mexican laborers from farms and ranches, then transported them deported deep into Mexico. Historians say the program tore families apart, violated civil rights — and at times, even turned deadly.

Moreover, those who have studied the Eisenhower administration’s approach say this short-term show-of-force did not stop the problem.

For the season premiere of 60 Minutes, correspondent Cecilia Vega and a producing team intended to report on tensions between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. They did not expect to end up in the middle of an international incident themselves, seeing China’s intimidation tactics first-hand. 

The plan was for the 60 Minutes team to accompany the Philippine Coast Guard on a routine mission to resupply its ships and stations aboard the Cape Engaño. While aboard the ship, the team was woken up at 4 a.m. by a loud bang, followed by an alarm. A Chinese ship had rammed the Cape Engaño, the Philippine crew informed them, telling them to put on life jackets and stay put inside their cabins. 

Once back on deck, the 60 Minutes crew saw the three-and-a-half-foot hole torn into the Cape Engaño’s hull. As daylight dawned, they also saw how many Chinese ships surrounded the Philippine ship, bows pointed at it. During the standoff, the crew aboard the Cape Engaño was unable to access internet or cell service, and the Filipinos said it was likely because the Chinese were jamming their communications.  

“It was scary. I mean, there’s no other way to describe it,” 60 Minutes producer Andy Court said. “And I don’t think anything you put on television will accurately convey what it’s like.”

This fall, 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim reported on the recent success of the WNBA, the top league of American women’s basketball. Legions of new WNBA fans are filling up arenas and tuning into games. Attendance is up 48% across the league and TV ratings have surged 153% from last season.

One thing has driven this boost in viewership: rookie WNBA player Caitlin Clark. Millions watched Clark’s performance in the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament earlier this year and were amazed by what has now become her signature shot: a three-pointer from just inside mid-court, near the home team logo, also known as the “logo 3.”

Now a player on the Indiana Fever, Clark took 60 Minutes to a Fever practice court and showed Wertheim all the different elements that come together for this crowd-dazzling shot. 

In New York City, there has been a quarter-century-long effort to reclaim the dead.

On September 11th, 2001, the bodies of nearly 2,800 people were buried at ground zero, reduced to anonymous fragments in a grave made of concrete and steel. Most people know of the visible bravery in lower Manhattan that day, the nobility of the first responders running up the stairs while everyone else was coming down. Less well known was another group of first responders, whose tireless effort to identify the victims has been quietly ongoing since.

Today, new technology is helping the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner keep a promise to do whatever it takes, as long as it takes, to put names to the remains.

Ukraine has a landmine crisis. 

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began two years ago, Ukraine has become one of the most mined countries in the world. These hidden weapons are crippling the country’s agricultural economy and maiming — even killing — its civilians. Since 2022, landmines and explosive remnants of war have contributed to more than 1,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine. The HALO Trust, a nonprofit organization focused on ridding warzones of landmines, estimates the number of mines in Ukraine at the moment to be in the millions. 

“We must remember that the conflict is still ongoing and is likely to for the foreseeable future,” said Pete Smith, the Ukraine program manager for the HALO Trust. “So, many of these minefields are not actually in reach of us at this moment in time. But when Ukraine is able to recover its territories, clearly a concerted effort is going to be needed over generations.”

U.S. officials in Vietnam were injured in a Havana Syndrome style attack ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2021 trip to Hanoi. Now, new evidence suggests Russia may have been involved — and that it may have been the Vietnamese themselves who were given technology that could have caused the injuries. 

At the time, the U.S. embassy in Hanoi announced that a possible “anomalous health incident,” the federal government’s term for so-called Havana Syndrome attacks, was slowing Harris’s arrival in Vietnam. 60 Minutes has learned that 11 people reported being struck in separate incidents before Harris entered the country: two people who were officials at the American embassy in Hanoi, and nine people who were part of a Defense Department advance team preparing for Harris’s visit.

“Once you admit that this happened, it is a Pandora[‘s] box,” said Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist who currently leads investigative work for The Insider. “It requires you to confront the fact that you have your arch enemy acting against your own people, your own intelligence workers, on your territory, and this is nothing other than a declaration of war.”

In May, Anderson Cooper reported on a photo album received by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that turned out to be the personal scrapbook of a high-ranking SS officer, Karl Höcker. Höcker worked at the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp.

A play that has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, “Here There Are Blueberries,” is now telling the story of the historians and archivists who uncovered the identities of the people in the haunting photographs. The play’s title comes from a series of photos in the album— young secretaries who worked under Karl Höcker are seen eating blueberries. 

They were called ‘Helferinnen,’ or ‘helpers,’ and they weren’t just young women who got drafted and sent there. These were young women who, historians say, had grown up with Nazi ideology and knew full well what was transpiring at Auschwitz.

“Part of the communication that they had to do was communicating the arrivals of trains, how many people had been selected for work, and how many people had been selected to be gassed,” said Rebecca Erbelding, a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who in 2007 had received the photo album in the mail. “And so they were sending those messages back to Berlin. So they absolutely [knew].”  

In the last year, hackers from around the world have teamed up to attack tech companies, hotels, casinos, and hospitals in the United States, taking their data hostage by encrypting it and demanding ransom for the keys to unlock it. 

Jon DiMaggio, a former analyst who worked for the National Security Agency, now investigates ransomware as chief security strategist for the cybersecurity firm Analyst1.

DiMaggio said he has spent years developing relationships with ransomware hackers on the dark web and worked his way up to the leadership of the ransomware gang LockBit. 

“I realized these guys are touchable…I can pretend to be someone else and go out and actually talk to them and extract information,” he told 60 Minutes.