The Free Press

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where our sanctions reach all the way to Israel, what a Jewish journalist saw on Yom Kippur gets him in trouble, and more. Let’s jump right in!

At the United Nations last week, prime minister Mark Carney announced $100 million in aid for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, including $20 million for peace and security efforts. Canada has contributed more than $600 million since October 2023, while sanctioning two Israeli cabinet ministers last year for allegedly offering “political cover” to perpetrators of settler violence.

In case you still have any doubts about where Canada stands, let me tell you about Regavim, an NGO in Israel. Regavim was one of seven targets of Canadian sanctions in June, accused of “directly or indirectly facilitating, supporting, providing funding for, or contributing to the use of violence by Israeli extremist settlers against Palestinian civilians or their property,” according to the government.

Meir Deutsch is the director general of Regavim. He described Regavim as essentially a legal and policy organization. “We are more of a think tank,” he told me. “We work mostly with members of Parliament, we work with the media, we work by researching and filing court cases.”

It’s Tuesday, September 29. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Joe Nocera on the problem with the Protect College Sports Act. Tyler Cowen on why AI will make you smarter—if you let it. Suzy Weiss welcomes Sydney Sweeney to the tribe (maybe). And much more.

But first: Will Trump keep his promise to Venezuela?

Last week, the Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient María Corina Machado attempted to do something that, in a free country, would be straightforward: return home. According to her advisers, Machado, who has been living in exile in Panama for more than a year, was denied entry to Venezuela three times in 24 hours.

Machado’s thwarted return is the latest example of how little has changed in the 10 months since the country’s longtime dictator Nicolás Maduro was nabbed by U.S. forces and Donald Trump promised “peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela.”

So far, Venezuelans have seen none of the three. Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s right-hand woman turned pet of the Trump administration, is the country’s de facto ruler. There are no scheduled elections. And Trump, speaking at the UN last week, boasted about how American companies can extract the country’s oil. “To the victor belong the spoils,” he said.

In our latest editorial, we argue that this sorry state of affairs isn’t just bad for the Venezuelan people. It’s also a betrayal of American values, and doesn’t even serve U.S. interests. Read the piece on the future the Venezuelan people deserve—and why Trump should stick to the promise he made in January.

—The Editors

• Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has recused himself from a major environmental protection case against two energy companies accused of contributing to climate change, according to a letter sent Monday to the lawyers involved. The letter did not state a reason for Alito’s recusal, but CBS News reports that it is likely due to the justice’s stock holdings in oil and gas companies, based on his most recent financial disclosures.

• A Russian drone struck Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences on Monday, killing two and injuring six. The institution, which was hit and evacuated in the middle of the workday, is responsible for nearly all major scientific discoveries in the country.

• The Trump administration rolled back fuel economy standards for new cars on Monday, in its latest move to reverse Biden-era policies aimed at incentivizing electric vehicle production. The new rules require vehicles in model year 2031 to achieve an average fuel efficiency of 34.9 miles per gallon, compared to the Biden standard of 50.4 miles per gallon.

• Nvidia on Monday debuted a new tool it says can quickly contain rogue AI agents to prevent security breaches and other illegal activity. The safety software comes amid rising reports and fears of illegal hacks by AI agents. It promises to “quarantine agents that attempt to move outside their boundaries in milliseconds,” according to a press release.

• British police are investigating the possibility of foreign involvement in a suspected plot to attack an air base used by the United States after five UK citizens were detained and then released on bail over the weekend. Iran denied it had a hand in the alleged plot, though the country’s Revolutionary Guards said in July the base was a legitimate target.

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dispatched department employees to use “advanced intelligence and cyber capabilities to identify, disrupt, and neutralize foreign interference” in the midterm elections. The move echoes an effort from the Biden administration before the 2022 midterms to “disrupt, deter, and degrade foreign adversaries’ ability to interfere with and influence how U.S. citizens vote and how those votes are counted.”

The best way to understand what happened yesterday evening on the Senate floor, where the Protect College Sports Act overwhelmingly passed by a vote of 77 to 22, is that Congress responded to the college sports establishment’s plea to save it from itself. Not that anyone put it that way, of course. The bill’s lead sponsor, Ted Cruz, insisted last week that the Protect College Sports Act will “bring order to the chaos consuming the new era of college sports.” My reading of the bill, however, is that it will deprive a distinct group of Americans—college athletes—of the economic rights that every other citizen is entitled to in a country that claims to believe in capitalism.

Is there chaos in college sports? I can’t deny it. Ever since the Supreme Court concluded in 2021 that long-standing NCAA rules preventing college athletes from being paid violated the nation’s antitrust laws, an absolute gusher of money has poured into college sports. At the big-time sports schools, “collectives” of wealthy boosters are handing out millions to athletes under the guise of payments for their “name, image, and likeness” (NIL). Ohio State University, for instance, paid its football team between $49 million and $55 million this season, with star wide receiver Jeremiah Smith receiving an estimated $5 million. When you throw in what the school and its boosters pay its basketball players, its soccer players, its tennis players, and so on, it probably approaches $80 million. A similar story can be told at Louisiana State University, University of Michigan, Indiana University, and most of the other schools that get the College GameDay treatment from ESPN during football season.

“Let’s whisper it,” said historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. “The Trump blockade is working.” It can be hard to parse the state of play in the Middle East amid escalating rhetoric, but history gives us the necessary perspective to call balls and strikes in the present day. Today, the author of The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East joins Schoo…

Unlike athletes, there is no dearth of MVP Jewish actors—specifically, actresses. Natalie Portman. Scarlett Johansson. Must I go on? Barbra Streisand. Rachel Weisz. The late, great Betty Joan Perske, better known as Lauren Bacall. But still, this Jewish woman can’t help but squeal with excitement at the rumor that the superstar of the moment, Sydney Sweeney, is considering converting to Judaism, potentially the most exciting pickup since Ruth.

The famously bodacious Sweeney, 29, has been dating music executive Scooter Braun, 45, who is Jewish, for a little over a year. They met at the Bezos’ wedding in Venice. Since then, they’ve danced at a country music festival, snorkeled in the Great Barrier Reef, and jet-skied in the Mediterranean off David Geffen’s superyacht. They’ve been to NBA Finals games and the Armani Beauty Dinner at the Venice Film Festival. Most monumentally, earlier this month, they celebrated Rosh Hashanah at Temple Sholom in Greenwich, Connecticut, sparking furious speculation over whether Sweeney and Braun will get engaged anytime soon, and whether she will join the tribe, and when.

When I interviewed Braun a few months ago, he was bashful about his relationship with Sweeney—“I’ve met an extraordinary woman,” he said—but not about his faith. He’s a proud Jew who is interested in Kabbalah, takes his charitable cues from the Torah, and is outspoken about Israel; he organized an exhibition to commemorate the October 7, 2023 attack on the Nova music festival.

Have we already passed the peak of human intelligence? AI models have come under heavy criticism lately, with the charges ranging from an increased risk of ordinary hacks to the possibility that they will kill us all, but one abiding critique is that AI systems will make us stupid and turn us into docile pets. After all, why should you bother to think when very smart AI models can do that for you?

One of the leading purveyors of this critique is Gregory Conti, a professor at Princeton and a leading intellectual himself whose writing has appeared in The Free Press. Conti wrote: “The channels for the human mind to swim in will dry up, one by one.” He continues that campaign on X. In an podcast interview with Lex Fridman, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein expressed the same worry in more open terms, saying, “My biggest concern about AI is we’re going to make ourselves much stupider without realizing it.” University students may be affected the most, as AI-enabled cheating could prevent many from learning to think, write, and solve problems.

I am more optimistic. In fact, I believe we may see a renaissance of the human intellect. After all, Conti and the other critics have hardly ceased their own efforts or trotted off into graceful retirements.

One intellectual advantage of AI models is that they can, or soon will, free up our time from tedious and thankless tasks. That includes filling out forms online, booking flights and hotels, doing our taxes, and writing mundane emails. That will give us the option—and I do stress the word option—of devoting more of our time and energies to creative pursuits. That goes for students too, who will be able to spend less time on the process of research and more on consuming and applying knowledge.

“We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela,” President Donald Trump proclaimed in the hours after he sent American forces to arrest and detain that country’s longtime dictator, Nicolás Maduro.

Now, nearly 10 months later, it’s becoming increasingly clear that another reality is taking hold, one in which Venezuelans continue to suffer under the illegitimate leadership of Maduro’s former deputies. And while Trump continues to promise that Venezuelans will one day enjoy freedom, he also boasted to the UN General Assembly last week that American companies are now merrily extracting Venezuelan oil. “To the victor belong the spoils,” Trump said to world leaders gathered in New York.

There have recently been nods toward democracy by Trump and de facto Venezuelan leader Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former vice president. “There will be elections in Venezuela,” Rodríguez said after the UN gathering, and Trump echoed her: “Yes, we talked about elections. By the way, she was very kind and fantastic.” Yet neither mentioned a time frame or any plan for ensuring a legitimate vote of the public. And most notably, it isn’t clear who will be allowed to run.

For Americans perpetually enraged about Israel, the ordeal of Mahmoud Khalil has become an obsession. On March 8, 2025, this Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist was snatched from his home by federal agents and whisked off to a series of detention centers. Since then he has fought his deportation tooth and nail. Khalil’s lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to reverse the deportation order from last year on constitutional grounds.

Khalil first gained notoriety in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, massacre. In the campus turmoil that followed, he emerged as a spokesman—one of the few who was unmasked—for students at Columbia using the occasion of the Hamas-led slaughter to demand the university cut ties with and divest from the state Hamas attacked, Israel.

Today, he has emerged as a secular saint for New York’s progressive literati. His legal battle to remain in the United States is being fought by a team of more than 20 lawyers representing the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other progressive groups. New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, hosted Khalil for a Ramadan dinner in March, paying tribute to his “profound courage.” The New Yorker compared the appearance of his 6-month-old-son, Deen, to “a Rubens portrait of the infant Jesus, if the Flemish had been more realistic about a Nazarene’s complexion.” This month he spoke at a Yom Kippur rally with anti-Zionist Jews in Brooklyn at a podium draped in a sign reading, “For the sin of genocide, we atone.”

Khalil’s journey from Syria to Lebanon to Columbia and through the federal government’s immigration and deportation system is the grist for his new memoir published this week, No Land to Stand On. As one might expect, the blurbs include high praise from the anti-Zionist left. Peter Beinart calls it “a defining document of our age.” Beinart is correct but for different reasons than he imagines.

It’s Monday, September 28. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Inside the 50,000-person ceremony for the man who could become America’s next saint. Arthur Brooks on whether adult children have a duty to care for their aging parents. River Page meets Rachel Dolezal. And much more.

But first: Audrey Fahlberg talks to the man trying to salvage the midterms for the GOP.

Gas and diesel prices are at electorally dangerous levels. The U.S. is locked in a prolonged and unpopular war with Iran. And if you believe the polls, Donald Trump’s approval ratings are at record lows. No wonder some vulnerable Republican candidates are distancing themselves from the president in the final stretch of the 2026 midterm campaign.

And yet, the man leading Republicans’ 2026 midterm strategy, former deputy White House chief of staff James Blair, told me that the GOP’s electoral prospects aren’t anywhere near as dire as the polls or the party skeptics suggest.

“I don’t think there will be a blue wave at all,” he said, in an exclusive sit-down interview in his office. This isn’t a presidential contest, he emphasized, but rather “trench warfare” over a scattering of really close races. The idea of a “massive swing” for the Democrats just doesn’t track with what he’s seeing, he told me.

Wishful thinking, or the hard-nosed assessment of one of the most respected strategists in the GOP? Read my interview with a man who, in his words, usually avoids journalistic profiles “like the plague,” and judge for yourself. —Audrey Fahlberg

Last week, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was beatified—the penultimate step in the Catholic Church on the path to sainthood. If Sheen takes the final step, he’ll find himself among just 11 Americans ever recognized as a saint. Sheen was one of the most famous priests in America, having pioneered a new form of mass evangelization in the 1950s that drew an audience of 30 million people a week. He became eligible for beatification because a miracle was attributed to him: In 2010, a stillborn baby’s heart began beating after the parents prayed for Sheen’s intercession.

I spent last week in St. Louis, Missouri, where 50,000 Catholics turned out to celebrate a man who died years before many of them were born. In a Church deeply divided by liturgy and politics, why was Sheen able to bring them together? Read my dispatch to find out. —Madeleine Long

• A nor’easter battered the East Coast over the weekend, flooding coastal New York and New Jersey, killing one person in Brooklyn, and knocking out power for tens of thousands across the Northeast. Both states declared emergencies, with more rain and flooding expected through Monday before the storm weakens later this week.

• British counterterrorism police arrested five men early Sunday on suspicion of planning a terrorist act, after three vehicles were reported heading toward an English air base that U.S. bombers have used for strikes on Iran. More than 80 nearby households were evacuated while bomb disposal teams examined the vans.

• A day after rejecting Iran’s latest peace proposal, President Trump said on Sunday that he expects more talks with Tehran this week, with mediators saying indirect negotiations could resume as early as Monday. Also on Sunday, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said that Iran is ready for either renewed fighting or diplomacy, and that the choice rests with Trump.

• The White House dropped CNN from the press pool covering Trump’s Saturday trip to a college football game in Knoxville, Tennessee, even though the network had been scheduled to fly aboard Air Force One. The move follows a judge’s order last week temporarily restoring White House access to CNN, MS NOW, and Politico after the president banned the outlets. (For more on the White House press ban, read our editorial and Jed Rubenfeld’s legal analysis.)

• On Sunday, the Trump administration aired the third in a series of taxpayer-funded ads that prominently feature imagery and rhetoric from the 2024 campaign. Democratic members of Congress and ethics officials have raised concerns that the ads—which the White House has characterized as public service announcements—are political advertisements and may therefore violate federal law.

• At least 27 people were killed in two separate mass shootings in South Africa over the weekend, including in an attack Saturday night in which eight gunmen opened fire at a bar west of Johannesburg, killing 17. Hours later, gunmen killed 10 more at an entertainment venue outside Cape Town; no arrests have been made in either attack.

• Two giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, arrived at Zoo Atlanta on Sunday on a 10-year loan, days after Chinese president Xi Jinping promised to send “envoys of friendship” while visiting the White House. Xi’s trip, his first to the White House in over a decade, came amid strained relations over trade and Chinese military activity around Taiwan and the Pacific.

• Roughly 800,000 people crowded the Champs-Élysées in Paris on Saturday for an open-air Mass led by Pope Leo XIV, the first pope to visit France in almost 20 years. The turnout, far exceeding the 600,000 who registered, was a striking show of faith in a nation where church attendance has long been falling.

Delano Squires used to sit in on morning calls with the assistant police chief while working in D.C.’s office of gun violence prevention. He told me it was always the same story: a young black man—sometimes the victim, sometimes the perpetrator—but always the focus. What struck him, looking back, was that when the city later rolled out its plan to addre…