The Free Press

On Saturday, the United States and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and at least 40 Iranian leaders. Iran is now retaliating against American allies and military assets in a counteroffensive that has killed at least six American service members.

In the days since, social media has filled with a single …

Fitness entrepreneur Tabby Knight said she was at home in Dubai on Saturday when the building next door, a luxury tourist hot spot called Fairmont The Palm Hotel, was hit by debris from an intercepted Iranian missile, resulting in a fire that injured several people.

“Obviously, it was scary on the first day because none of us have ever experienced anything like that,” said Knight, an Australian who moved to Dubai in December 2024. Despite the war raging in the region, she says she still feels safe there and has no current plans to leave.

One out of every 20 deaths in Canada is triggered by the government-run assisted suicide program. The sheer number is startling. Even more shocking is the speed and efficiency with which it ends patients’ lives.

In Ontario alone, 219 people were killed by the end of the next day following their request for “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) in 2023, according to a 2024 report by an advisory committee. About 30 percent of those deaths occurred on the same day that the person sought the government’s permission to die. The committee hasn’t published comparable numbers since then.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump declared that “the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation” against the Iranian regime. He assured the American public that the United States was armed and ready for battle. “I built and rebuilt our military in my first administration,” Trump said. “There is no military on Earth even close to its power, strength, or sophistication.”

But there’s a second war to be fought against Iran and America’s chief adversaries, one experts fear the U.S. is ill-equipped to win: the information war.

The winds of change are howling across Europe, and they’re not powered by turbines. In recent months, the once-unshakable European consensus in favor of aggressive net-zero climate policies has fractured under the weight of skyrocketing energy costs and economic reality. With the war in Iran driving up oil and natural gas prices, the pressure on Europe is now even higher.

Rewind to 2017, when French president Emmanuel Macron proudly declared, “If in the years ahead, we don’t have a significant price of carbon per ton to allow for a profound change in our economies, then it would be worthless.”

On February 22, nearly a week before the U.S. and Israel launched joint military strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran, five Iranian Kurdish opposition parties announced they’d formed a unified front against Tehran. The press conference in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil generated little attention at the time. But as Washington and Jerusalem expand their war against Iran, and the regime’s military forces grow depleted, the Kurdish regions of the country are voicing their intent to be the first to formally break from Tehran.

“Our main and common goals in this alliance are to struggle for the toppling of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to realize the right of Kurdish self-determination,” the parties said in a statement released that day.

As coordinated American and Israeli strikes on Iran continue, I wanted to sit down with Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a leading expert on Iran’s nuclear program and U.S. sanctions policy.

I asked Mark the most pressing questions to emerge since the major conflict began over the weekend: How does this serve Americ…

What the hell is Joe Gebbia doing in D.C.?

When I recently asked the Airbnb co-founder if he ever expected to be living and working in the capital, he told me in so many words: No.

The exact words were: “You could have made me a bet a long time ago that I’d end up here—and won a lot of money.”

We spoke over FaceTime, him from his office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just off Pennsylvania Avenue—where, in the fall of last year, he set up the National Design Studio (NDS), per one of President Donald Trump’s many executive orders. Under his leadership, the NDS has since made waves by overhauling government websites about everything from the food pyramid (“We are ending the war on protein,” one section of the landing page reads) to the federal retirement system. Gebbia has spearheaded new platforms, too, like TrumpRx, where Americans can download coupons for prescription drugs, or Tech Force, which the administration set up to recruit software engineers to “tackle the most complex and large-scale civic and defense challenges of our era.”

In the past 15 years, the consensus on marijuana has changed dramatically. After Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize weed in 2012, others quickly followed suit—and marijuana is now legal for recreational use in 24 of the 50 states. With widespread legalization, the stigma that surrounded weed has largely fallen away.

Almost overni…

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. Here’s Amit’s daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

During the last major coalition war involving Arab countries, the First Gulf War, Washington spent months building the coalition. Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, but the war itself only began in January 1991. For roughly five months, the United States invested enormous effort and capital in assembling a coalition of more than 30 countries. One of the guiding principles was that Arab states would participate and Israel would remain on the sidelines.

Israel’s then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir made what was arguably the most difficult decision: to hold back. Even though Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles at Israel, Jerusalem refrained from responding militarily in order to not fracture the Arab coalition. For years afterward, that decision was simply known as “restraint.”