The Free Press

In his widely anticipated speech to the nation, President Donald Trump said we were winning, without declaring victory. He boasted that military objectives were met ahead of schedule, but offered no date to end the war. “Tonight, Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them,” Trump said, “are now dead.” Nevertheless, the war must go on. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong,” he said. “In the meantime, discussions are ongoing.”

The president is threading a delicate needle. While his war on Iran is still overwhelmingly popular with his base, the majority of Americans disapprove. Gas prices have hit $4 a gallon. Markets are nervous. Iran is charging tankers for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Many in Washington expected the president to announce an exit ramp. Politico reporter Dasha Burns posted on X: “POTUS will use his address tonight to declare that the war in Iran is winding down.”

On the night of March 21, 2026, Cuba’s electrical grid collapsed for the third time in a month, the result of a fuel shortage triggered by a U.S.-imposed oil embargo, decades of underinvestment in a crumbling grid and, most consequentially, the post–Nicolás Maduro halt of Venezuelan crude, on which Cuba had depended for years to cover roughly a quarter of its oil needs. Eleven million people plunged into darkness. Hospitals, public utilities, and other critical services were thrown into chaos.

At the United Nations General Assembly, at summits, and on the floors of international forums, the leaders of Latin America’s democratic left have not been shy about where they place the blame. They have thundered. They have invoked international law, sovereignty, and human dignity to condemn Washington’s embargo against Cuba. But what about the more than 1,200 political prisoners sitting in overcrowded cells in Cuba, a historic record, their only crime having dared to demand freedom? Or the estimated 2.75 million Cubans who have fled the country in recent years, one of the largest peacetime exoduses in the western hemisphere’s modern history?

On the topic of the suffering of the Cuban people at the hands of their own government, Latin America’s democratic left remains shockingly silent.

The Supreme Court just heard arguments in not one but two important cases challenging Trump administration policies dealing with illegal aliens. In Wednesday’s case, regarding birthright citizenship, the administration is headed for defeat. In a different case last week, which involves President Donald Trump’s effort to stop illegal aliens from making so many asylum claims, the Court looked ready to hand the government a win.

This disparity is a great sign for the country. Many anti-Trumpsters blast the Court for kowtowing to the president, and they refuse to believe that the Justices might actually be trying to follow the law. But the rule of law is alive and well in America. The Court looks like it’s going to hand the administration one loss and one win in these two cases—and if so, the Court will be right in both.

Let’s start with the barn burner: the birthright citizenship case. On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order purporting to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens and aliens in the U.S. on temporary visas. In oral argument on Wednesday, with the president himself in attendance, Solicitor General John Sauer did a yeoman’s job trying to defend this order, but a majority of the justices did not sound like they bought it.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump unveiled the first renderings of his planned presidential library. It would be the tallest structure in Miami, with a cavernous lobby so large that it could fit the Air Force One given to him by Qatar, several fighter jets, and some number of military helicopters.

It will also have a reproduction of the golden escalator from Trump’s original 2015 campaign announcement, not to mention a giant theater that includes a golden statue of the retired leader. And, in a very Trumpian break with tradition, it will also “most likely” be a hotel, the president told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.

The Trump announcement comes as former president Barack Obama prepares to open his long-delayed library in Chicago on Juneteenth. The Obama Presidential Center has already received mixed reviews from architectural critics, including Trump, an erstwhile real-estate mogul who has called it “a disaster” due to “woke” people building it.

Trump’s plans for a tower in Miami, and Obama’s monstrosity in Chicago, had Free Press editors wondering: Are presidential libraries really necessary? Or should we scrap the whole idea?

In a shocking ruling delivered in Helsinki last week, the Supreme Court of Finland convicted Päivi Räsänen, a 66-year-old longtime Christian Democratic parliamentarian, and her Lutheran bishop, Juhana Pohjola, of hate speech for “making and keeping available to the public a text that insults a group.” The court ordered that the text, a 2004 pamphlet explaining and defending traditional Biblical teaching about homosexuality, must be “removed from public access and destroyed.” The High Court also dismissed hate speech charges against Räsänen for posting a Bible verse about homosexuality to X in 2019.

What this means is that it is now illegal in Finland for Christians to defend traditional Christian teaching about homosexuality. You can’t write or speak about the matter without risking arrest. This, in Europe, in 2026.

Räsänen, a physician by training, wrote the pamphlet in 2004 to inform debate within the Finnish Lutheran Church over the church’s policy on homosexuality and related issues, like gay marriage and adoption. Räsänen is theologically conservative, and explained at length traditional Christian teaching about sexuality and how, in her opinion, it should inform Christian thinking about the law.

What does it mean to be an ally of the United States, or an enemy? These aren’t merely philosophical questions, because the answers can determine whether American service members live or die.

Right now, Russia is directly helping the Iranian regime do what it has been doing for decades: kill and injure Americans. On March 23, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that “we have irrefutable evidence that the Russians continue to provide intelligence to the Iranian regime. Russia is using its own signals intelligence and electronic intelligence capabilities, as well as part of the data obtained through cooperation with partners in the Middle East.” Ukrainian intelligence isn’t the only source for these claims. The Wall Street Journal reports that “Russia has been expanding its intelligence sharing and military cooperation with Iran, providing satellite imagery and improved drone technology to aid Tehran’s targeting of U.S. forces in the region.” That article was published on March 17, 10 days before Iran attacked American airmen at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, injuring 12 of them and destroying an enormously valuable surveillance aircraft.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has been doing all it can to help America’s friends in the Gulf defend themselves, even as Ukraine itself endures brutal attacks from Russia. Ukrainian forces have years of experience defending against the deadly Shahed suicide drones supplied to Russia by Iran, and Ukraine has now sent more than 200 counter-drone specialists to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to help them defeat attacks from these very drones. So Ukraine, which has signed defense cooperation agreements with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, is a new ally of our Gulf Arab allies.

In medical training, we are taught how to take a social history. Who do you live with? What do you do for work? Do you smoke? Do you drink? Do you use drugs?

These questions are meant to tell us about a person’s risks. But no one taught me to ask a question that now seems embarrassingly obvious, given that we spend about 90 percent of our time indoors: What kind of environment are you living in?

We are trained to think of health as something that happens largely inside the body. Organs malfunction, hormones shift, and cells mutate. We search for pathology in blood and on scans. Sometimes that is exactly where the answer is, but not always.

What enters the lungs matters—hence the typical “Do you smoke?” question. But many of us spend almost all of our time breathing the air of homes, offices, schools, hospitals, barracks, dormitories, and apartment buildings. We assume these spaces are neutral backdrops to our lives, when in fact they are active participants.

For the last few years, Jews in Britain, like those around the world, have been subject to a rising tide of antisemitism. It has taken many forms, from media bias, to exclusion from cultural spaces, to the nadir of a terrorist attack on a Manchester synagogue on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur.

Despite this backdrop, too few politicians are willing to accurately describe the problem, instead offering platitudes and thoughts and prayers whenever another horrific incident occurs. That makes interventions from those offering plain truths about the problem all the more valuable. That’s what former prime minister Tony Blair did in our pages last week. And it’s what Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, is doing today. On the occasion of Passover, she has written an open letter to Britain’s Jews. We think it is a robust and coherent response to the problem, which is why we’re publishing.

— The Editors

Why is this year different from all other years?

Because in other years, we haven’t seen Jews murdered in a synagogue on their holiest day. Because in other years, we haven’t seen Hatzolah ambulances torched in the middle of a Jewish area. And because in no other year have I met so many Jews asking me whether it’s safe for them to stay in the UK.

I stood at the wrong times, couldn’t remember which way the books opened, and hardly recognized a thing beyond “Baruch atah Adonai.” But I found myself unexpectedly moved during a recent Shabbat service—a day that used to mean nothing to me, except more time to scroll online or work.

It was only my fourth or fifth service as an adult, and the first one where I felt something.

I pictured my father in a synagogue, reciting these words. His father, and the ones who came before him. I remembered my sister as a kid, squeaking out phrases like “v’tzivanu” at our seder—how in awe of her I was.

I realized how close I was to losing all of this. Or rather, never really having it in the first place. I’d never had a bat mitzvah, hardly recognized the prayers, but there I was in an ankle-length skirt, crying in shul, which is not where I would’ve expected to be on a Friday night a few years ago. But a lot has changed since October 7, 2023—and October 8—when I watched my peers, including my best friend, celebrate the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust as a righteous victory. The crack that opened that day has only widened. So has my determination to carry forward an ancient tradition that I was on track to abandon.

The story is this: My father is Jewish and my mother, who was born into an Episcopalian family, is an in-your-face atheist. She tells me that as a child in rural Indiana, she once rode her bike past a Pentecostal church. She heard screams, saw convulsions, and said religion gave her the “creeps” after that. My father grew up in a Jewish household in Newton, Massachusetts. His father, an advertising entrepreneur named Harold, was the first of my paternal line to be born in America. Before that, as far as anyone told me, it was generations of generic Shmuels and Rochels in the mists of Eastern Europe—shtetls all the way down. This country has given us safety and, at times, prosperity—but by the time I was born, there wasn’t much left of our heritage to pass down.

We observed Passover most years, maybe Yom Kippur, and were encouraged to develop our own creeds. In fourth grade, I rebelled against Hebrew school.

With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

The media has spent the past year playing a terrible game of Mad Libs. When faced with the headline “Donald Trump set to announce . . . ,” it tends to fill in the same kinds of answers: “he is sick of Bibi,” “ending the war early,” or the classic, “he is done with Israel.” Usually, Mad Libs answers are either accurate or funny; so far, the media has been neither.

Tonight at 9 p.m. ET, Trump is set to deliver an “important update on Iran.” At 4 a.m. Israel time, most Israelis, including the leadership, will be away from their phones, either asleep or still celebrating the first night of Passover. When they eventually wake or finish the Passover meal and check their updates, I am certain they will not be blindsided by the announcement.