The Free Press

WASHINGTON, D.C. — I met the First Lady of Nigeria at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., during her short trip to the U.S. last week. “I’m here,” said Oluremi Tinubu, “to make some clarifications.” She’s aware of what she calls “the recent hype in the social media that there is Christian genocide,” and has come to America to “really tell who would like to listen the real situation on the ground.”

I have reported on the atrocities committed against Christian communities by Islamists in Nigeria. I’ve also spoken to Nigerians who are on the ground. I’ve reviewed photographs of butchered children and heard eyewitness testimonies that are not easily forgotten. So I was curious to know how her husband’s government views the violence.

In early October 2025, President Bola Tinubu told an audience in Imo State, which is majority Christian, that there is no religious persecution in his country. To say otherwise, he said, “is a lie from the pit of hell.” I asked his wife if that is still his position, and she replied: “To an extent.”

It’s been 12 days since Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie, disappeared from her home near Tucson, Arizona. Footage from a doorbell camera near Nancy Guthrie’s front door showing a masked man with a gun only deepened the mystery about what happened to her, where she is, and what investigators are doing to find her.

I asked Danny Coulson, who launched the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Hostage Rescue Team, to evaluate the investigation, explain what is going on behind the scenes, and interpret the scant details that have emerged so far.

Coulson isn’t part of the Guthrie investigation, but he worked at the FBI for 33 years, including as deputy assistant director. He led the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and operations that led to the recovery of over 300 hostages. His responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

For years, horror and distance were the reaction of most Canadians to school shootings in the United States. Those shootings belonged to a different nation and culture, not to Canada. That divide vanished with the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, that killed eight people and injured 25.

Tumbler Ridge is a mining town of roughly 2,400 people in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, so remote that cellphone service cuts out about 30 seconds after leaving town. The secondary school where the shooter fired on students and staff has about 160 students. The mother of a 12-year-old girl who is battling for her life in the hospital was friends on Facebook with the killer’s mother, Jennifer Strang, and they both worked at the same mining company. “I will probably know every one of the victims,” the mayor said.

Shootings are not a recurring feature of national life in Canada, and the language used by law enforcement officials also sounded distinctly different. Early police alerts referred to the suspect as a “gunperson,” and a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer described the killer as “female” at a press conference, saying that authorities would respect the suspect’s preferred gender identity.

Young women have never struggled to find people with opinions about when they should have a baby, and that is especially true these days, across the political spectrum.

Recently, the liberal podcaster Dax Shepard said he was talking with his 11-year-old daughter, Delta, about how she wanted to be a mother one day. “When do you think you’ll have your first child? When you turn 18?” he asked her. The sixth grader rejected her father’s suggestion that she might want to have a baby in seven years, and so Shepard managed to out-crazy his previous suggestion by telling his child, “If you want to, we’ll freeze your eggs when you’re 18. I’ll pay for you to get your eggs frozen, so you don’t have to think about that.”

Listen up, Girl Dads, as I believe you’re called: If you’re talking to your—and I cannot stress this enough—11-year-old about eggs, it had better be about the kind she might eat for breakfast. Otherwise, something very weird is going on in your brain.

Dear Abigail,

I am a 30-year-old single woman. I am happily single—I have a successful career, make good money, live in a desirable neighborhood with my cute and companionable dog, and have best friends who are also single. I travel, enjoy sporting events, go to exercise classes, drink cosmos, run marathons, and spend lots of time out in the city with friends.

After ending a four-year relationship last year, I see my singledom as a complete gift. To be free, happy, and independent after years of being unsure or unhappy is a blessing. I eat exactly what I want for dinner, play Joni Mitchell at full volume in the car, FaceTime my mom for hours in the evenings. I never have to explain my choices in home decor or get annoyed at how someone cleans the bathroom.

Yet I know that I dream of a partnership and being a parent. When I venture into the dating scene, I struggle with the ups and downs: the instant hit I get from male validation, the blow to my self-esteem when I’m ghosted, the anticipation before a date, the fixation on wondering what I did wrong, disappointment with lack of connection, and guilt when they pursue me but I’m not interested.

It’s Thursday, February 12. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: More footage from the Epstein tapes. Will Rahn on how he built an app to tackle Catholic guilt. Peter Coy on the Bitcoin crash. And Columbia’s four finalists for the new Edward Said Professorship.

But first: He tried to warn them.

Senator Rand Paul is one of Washington’s loneliest men, with ironclad libertarian views that often put him at odds with Donald J. Trump’s Republican Party. But now, in his third term, Paul is also a party elder, with a prominent platform to challenge his colleagues.

Today, as the head of the Homeland Security Committee, he’ll question Trump’s top immigration officials about the showdown in Minneapolis that has made ICE, and Trump’s deportation push, the talk of the nation. Don’t expect Paul to go easy on his subjects. As he told Peter Savodnik in a new interview for The Free Press, Paul believes the Trump administration has been “reckless” in its pursuit of mass deportations.

It didn’t have to come to this. Last June, Paul tried to slash the massive amount of funding Republicans wanted to supercharge ICE, and he warned that the cash would let the agency run amok. His party pushed him aside and raced ahead.

Where does Paul expect things to go from here? Read the full interview to find out.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

AI is advancing at a bewildering pace, and leaving anyone who uses it wondering where things are heading. Today, two Free Press writers reckon with the astonishing advances and what it means for how we live.

Up first: Maya Sulkin recounts the tale of how ChatGPT saved her from a nurse practitioner’s misdiagnosis—and what the experience taught her about the future of medicine. Read Maya on how ChatGPT saved her feet:

Next: We’d been wondering where our colleague Will Rahn had been over the past few days, and what exactly he was up to. The answer, it turns out, is building an app. Yes, “vibe coding” has arrived at Free Press HQ, and Will has used it to build an app that will distill Catholicism’s best advice for quelling his anxiety about “mass unemployment” and runaway tech. Will discovers that “you tell Claude to do something and it just does it.” Read about Will’s app—and what he learned from the bewilderingly easy process of making it without knowing any coding skills:

This week’s guest on Conversations with Coleman is journalist Michael Tracey, who argues that the Epstein saga has spiraled into a “moral panic” untethered from the documented facts. While not defending Epstein’s “reprehensible behavior,” Tracey challenges claims that he ran a “global pedophile ring” or left behind a secret “client list,” urging the media and the public to separate what’s proven in court from what has grown in the cultural imagination.

Join the new Free Press Instagram channel to get our biggest story of the day directly to your DMs. Click here to sign up.

• A transgender shooter killed at least eight people—six at a secondary school and two of the shooter’s family members at a nearby home—and wounded 27 others in remote Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, before committing suicide. This marks Canada’s deadliest mass shooting since 2020.

• The Congressional Budget Office warns that despite President Trump’s sweeping tax cuts and high tariffs, the federal debt is still projected to reach record levels—hitting 120 percent of GDP by 2036—with a $23.1 trillion shortfall over the next nine years.

• A growing coalition of Hollywood unions, trade groups, and antitrust advocates is mobilizing in Washington to oppose Netflix’s proposed $82 billion acquisition of Warner Bros., warning regulators that the merger could slash residuals, cut production jobs, and pose an existential threat to entertainment workers and theaters.

• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Congress he met Jeffrey Epstein “three times over 14 years” and insisted “I have done absolutely nothing wrong in any possible regard,” while acknowledging he once had lunch with his family on Epstein’s island. Republican congressman Thomas Massie called on Lutnick to “just resign,” a move the White House says President Trump does not support.

• The Pentagon has directed a second aircraft carrier strike group to prepare for possible deployment to the Middle East as President Trump considers military action if nuclear talks with Iran collapse, potentially marking the first two-carrier presence there in nearly a year.

• The IRS improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with the Department of Homeland Security as part of a controversial data-sharing agreement targeting undocumented immigrants, a disclosure discovered only recently that may have violated federal privacy law.

• In the current 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, Norway leads the medal table with 13, while Team USA has won 12 total medals (4 gold, 6 silver, and 2 bronze).

Dylan Thomas is one of the 20th century’s legendary poets.

In this episode, English journalist David Aaronovitch joins Shilo to discuss Thomas’ 1954 play Under Milk Wood, a portrait of a small Welsh seaside town, originally produced for radio.

With rich, musical language, Thomas reveals the secret interior lives of the villagers—their dreams, lusts, resen…

It’s undeniable that the Jeffrey Epstein case has become a cultural obsession. How could it not? We’ve been sold a story of a multimillionaire financier who ran a global pedophile ring, supplied children to be abused by presidents, prime ministers, and princes, and secretly recorded powerful men in compromising positions to blackmail them on behalf of i…

In February 2026, Columbia University released its recommendations for reshaping the university’s approach to Middle Eastern studies.

After Columbia lost $400 million in federal funding over antisemitism allegations in 2025, it reached a settlement with the Trump administration. As part of the settlement, Columbia appointed a senior vice provost and a Regional Review Committee to ensure “balanced” curricula for the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies departments. Two of this committee’s members, Timothy Mitchell and Bruno Bosteels, signed an October 2023 letter describing Hamas’s October 7 attack as a response to Israel’s long-standing “crushing and unrelenting state violence.”

Part of Columbia’s announcement is the replacement for the Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature, previously held by Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi held the position from 2003 to 2024, and left citing disdain over the university’s shifting priorities. The author and historian described Hamas’s October 7 attacks as “inevitable,” and criticized the university’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance antisemitism definition, which he said “deliberately, mendaciously, and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel,” making it “impossible” to teach without being accused of antisemitism.

When President Donald Trump urged Iranians last month to take to the streets and promised help that never came, the country’s Kurdish provinces stayed largely quiet. This is because the Kurds already saw that regime forces were readying for a slaughter.

“We saw them ahead of time. They had machine guns on pickup trucks and military vehicles, they were armed to the teeth, and we know they had orders to shoot to kill,” Abdullah Mohtadi, the exiled secretary general of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, told The Free Press in an interview last week. “They don’t need a pretext to kill people in Kurdistan. So when we saw them prepared and determined to shoot people, we did not call for demonstrations.”

Mohtadi’s insight suggests that Iran’s regime was not nearly as vulnerable to mass demonstrations as Trump and Iran’s exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi claimed at the time. Rather, the security forces made preparations to crush the uprising that began in the last days of December, when merchants in the big cities began demonstrating against the regime after the collapse of Iran’s currency, the rial.