The Free Press

After decades of ignoring South America, under President Donald Trump the United States has turned its attention toward it with a vengeance. Trump had already shown a greater interest in the continent with a $20 billion lifeline to Argentina’s pro-market president Javier Milei, and tried to punish Brazil with tariffs for prosecuting its former president, Jair Bolsonaro. Venezuela is obviously a major escalation. Given the continent’s vast natural resources, its 440 million people living close to the U.S., and the growing influence of China, Americans have a great stake in how Trump’s Latin gambit plays out.

South Americans long complained that the United States did not pay enough attention to the region. And in fact it has not, perhaps because economically South America has been consistently disappointing. While China has grown to the second largest economy in the world, and India today is the fastest-growing major economy, South America essentially stopped catching up to the United States in per capita income four decades ago, after its disastrous 1980s debt crisis.

A fatal shooting in Minneapolis on Wednesday launched an immediate information war, in which politicians drew lines and exchanged accusations long before they knew the facts. From President Donald Trump down to Mayor Jacob Frey, the supposed authorities showed little interest in learning what happened and guiding the public with sound conclusions.

Details of the shooting were reported piecemeal Wednesday. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen who had blocked a group of officers.

By the afternoon, several videos emerged that show the fatal moment. What the footage shows is this: While one officer stood by the driver’s side window, Good turned the vehicle to the right and accelerated. With the front-left side of the car, she appeared to bump another officer who had been standing in front of the hood. The second officer fired several shots, which fatally wounded Good and sent her crashing into cars parked along the side of a residential street.

For nearly half a century, Americans have made dietary choices guided by well-intentioned but dangerously flawed myths. We were told to run on a treadmill to earn a brownie, to fear the fat in milk and eggs, and to buy processed “low-fat” products to stay lean. This expert advice—enshrined in previous dietary guidelines issued by the federal government—has been a catastrophic failure. Bad advice has created a broken food supply and fueled epidemics of chronic disease and obesity.

That era is officially over. The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, developed by the Donald Trump administration, represent a fundamental and long-overdue course correction. We have incorporated the best scientific research and common sense to say clearly what many Americans have known all along: We should eat more real food—high in micronutrients and derived from good sources—and less highly processed food.

The new guidelines, which inform school lunches, meals at military bases, and other government programs, incorporate several significant changes for all Americans to consider.

First, the new guidelines emphasize the critical importance of protein and raise its recommended daily intake by between 50 percent and 100 percent. For years, protein recommendations were based on flawed studies that used urine nitrogen measurements, which underestimate total body protein. Ensuing recommendations were set at a bare minimum to prevent deficiency, not to promote thriving.

The Trump administration flipped the food pyramid upside down on Wednesday with the announcement of new dietary guidelines. The news is a huge moment for MAHA, the campaign to Make America Healthy Again, by casting aside old ways and entrenched interests that proponents blame for allowing America to get sicker and sicker.

Marty Makary, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and his deputy Kyle Diamantas, laid out the case for the new pyramid in an op-ed for The Free Press, which you can read here. We also asked some doctors, journalists, and other health experts what they think of the changes. Here’s what they told us.

The Good and Bad of the New Guidelines
By Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Here is my hot take on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new dietary guidelines.

First, the good:

After catching President Donald Trump’s eye in his first term, Greenland has reemerged as a prospect for U.S. acquisition. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told lawmakers that the U.S. seeks to buy the island, Trump asserts that we need it for defense reasons, and White House adviser Stephen Miller insists that Greenland should “obviously” be part of the United States.

Overall, I am becoming more nervous rather than pleased, as I hold two views firmly: The United States eventually should come into possession of Greenland; and right now, the United States should back off altogether.

Where do those views—seemingly at odds—come from, and how do they fit together?

First, Greenland is most valuable in the hands of the U.S.

My vision is that someday the world’s largest island will hold a status roughly comparable to that of Puerto Rico. Greenlanders would have the full protection of the United States, and they also would be U.S. citizens, with full rights to migrate to the mainland. At the same time, they could have their own legislature and elect their own leaders, as Puerto Rico does today. Puerto Rico has held several referendums on independence and has rejected it each time—perhaps in part because it remains, despite economic problems, wealthier than almost anywhere else in the Caribbean.

NEW YORK CITY — In the week since he was sworn in as mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, has already managed to upset Venezuelans, Jews, and political moderates of every background. It took just three hours after his inauguration last Thursday for my phone to start ringing with objections from City Hall staffers shocked by the conduct of their new boss and his senior appointees.

These staffers, many of them Jewish, wanted to know if I had seen the posts about antisemitism that had mysteriously disappeared from the mayor’s office’s official X account, and if I knew that Mamdani had revoked hundreds of executive orders, including two key measures meant to protect Jewish New Yorkers.

Then there were the appointments. An X sleuth uncovered past social media posts from Cea Weaver, the head of the newly created Office to Protect Tenant Rights, in which she called private property a “weapon of white supremacy.” On a 2021 livestream for the Democratic Socialists of America, Weaver said that while society transitions from a system of individual to collective property rights, “families, especially white families,” would be impacted.

Anyone who doubts that a populist disquiet is brewing against artificial intelligence should look at Ron DeSantis. There are many reasons the Florida governor failed in his campaign for the presidency two years ago. An inability to identify issues that move Americans was not one of them. At a time when many members of his party were making their peace with wokeism, he was excising it from his state’s university system. When politicians were locking down their constituents during Covid, he was opening up Florida.

Now, in his final year as governor and plotting his next move, DeSantis has found another crusade. Even as the build-out of artificial-intelligence (AI) infrastructure is being credited for nearly all U.S. growth over the past year, DeSantis is urging his followers to reject the “transhumanist” strain in AI technology “with every fiber of our being.”

Democrats have until recently had little to say on AI beyond lamenting “algorithmic discrimination” and other such wokeries. But there, too, things are evolving. At the end of the year Bernie Sanders told Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union that the time had come to consider a moratorium on the construction of new data centers. Though its contours are still barely visible, a political movement against AI is taking shape.

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week, Jonathan remembers Thomas Paine’s bestseller Common Sense and its case for independence. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

Had the writer Thomas Paine published Common Sense in the age of social media rather than in January 1776 amid what he called the Age of Reason, some commenters would surely have noted—using one of the more irritating idioms of the internet—that he had dared to say “the quiet part out loud”: America needed to sever ties with Great Britain.

This week marks the 250th anniversary of Paine’s Common Sense beginning its remarkable run as the bestseller of the American Revolution. The 20,000-word pamphlet sold tens of thousands of copies and reached a far larger audience as colonists shared its memorable words with family members and friends in homes and taverns.

Although the 13 colonies were far down the path to independence by January 1776, few people still dared to declare support for it, and none could have done so with Paine’s flair. “There is something absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island,” he wrote. “In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet; and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverse the common order of nature, it is evident that they belong to different systems. England to Europe: America to itself.” To his mind, the shots fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, had rendered talk of reconciliation ridiculous. “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ’TIS TIME TO PART.”

It’s Wednesday, January 7. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The Bondi Beach victims want answers. Jed Rubenfeld on why Nick Reiner’s insanity plea just might work. Martin Gurri on whether Cuba’s autocratic government could fall next. And much more.

But first: The Los Angeles fires, one year later.

One year ago tonight, my family and I jumped in our car and fled the smoky wilds of Pasadena. We were a few miles south of the Eaton Canyon fire—one of the two major fires out of 14 that descended on the greater Los Angeles area last January. The winds were picking up. No one knew what was coming next.

We were very lucky, of course. We know plenty of people who were not. When I trekked up to our house a few days later, the neighborhood was coated in ash, and it was quiet and eerie. Everyone was masked—once again. It felt sad. Altadena, just up the road, was still burning. Our daughter’s school was gone. So were the homes of some of our kids’ classmates. And then there were the dead.

Angelenos spent the next several months regrouping: suctioning hazardous materials, soil testing, rebuilding, reimagining their homes. It wasn’t the same place anymore.

Today at The Free Press, we recall the chaos and devastation of the fires, and we explore the ways they changed life in LA and beyond.

First, we hear from someone who wasn’t as fortunate as my family and I. The house Meghan Daum had been renting—a house that, as she puts it, “happened to contain the sum total of my life’s possessions”—burned to the ground in the fires. In the year since, Meghan has been haunted by one question: Why didn’t she take more of her things with her? She became obsessed with replacing everything that was gone until, halfway through the year, her compulsions flipped. Read Meghan’s essay on what happened when she lost everything she owned:

Next, Jack Burke reports on what happened in Altadena after the fires. The town received a lot less coverage than the Palisades at the time, but it was hit hard. Read Jack’s dispatch on the people doing what they can to rebuild:

And finally, I profile Rick Caruso, the Los Angeles property developer who emerged as a leading critic of Mayor Karen Bass in the wake of the fires, and who everyone expects to announce a run for office very soon. The only question, really, is whether he has his sights on City Hall—or the governor’s mansion. My piece isn’t about the fires directly, but a test of how much they might have changed the politics of Los Angeles—and California. Read it here:

—Peter Savodnik

For more on how Maduro’s fall will impact Cuba, listen to a special edition of Conversations with Coleman. Coleman’s guest is Gelet Martínez Fragela, a Cuban activist and journalist who reports on how authoritarianism hollowed out her once prosperous country—and what comes next. Listen to their conversation wherever you get your podcasts, or by clicking the play button below.

Three weeks after the deadliest terrorist attack in Australian history, Jews across the country are still reeling. As the victims’ families pick up the pieces, some have been left wondering how Bondi Beach could have been turned into a killing field.

That’s why Sheina Gutnick, whose father was tragically killed in the attack, is calling for a royal commission—Australia’s highest form of governmental inquiry—to investigate the unchecked rise of antisemitism in the country that she said created the conditions for the attack. Read her harrowing account of grief, her reckoning with a country she once felt proud to live in, and her quest for accountability.

Also reflecting on the Bondi attack is Arsen Ostrovsky. He was struck in the head by a bullet during the attack—a bullet that, according to doctors, came within just millimeters of killing him. Today, he writes about what that near-death experience taught him.

• Venezuela will “be turning over” between “30 and 50 MILLION” barrels of oil to the U.S., Trump announced in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday evening. “That money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States,” he said.

• The White House says Trump and his advisers are discussing how to acquire Greenland, including the potential use of the U.S. military. Major European leaders have pushed back against the suggestion. “Greenland belongs to its people,” they said in a joint statement.

• The Supreme Court is expected to rule on Trump’s global tariffs for the first time on Friday. “We have a big Supreme Court case,” Trump told House Republicans Tuesday. “I hope they do what’s good for our country. I hope they do the right thing. The president has to be able to wheel and deal with tariffs.”

• California Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa died suddenly on Tuesday, the same day that Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation took effect, weakening an already shaky GOP majority in the house. At present, Speaker Mike Johnson can afford only two dissenting votes on party-line issues, assuming all Republican representatives are present.

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang isn’t sweating California’s proposed billionaire tax, he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Tuesday. The proposition, a onetime 5 percent tax on the assets of those with a net worth above $1 billion, has drawn the ire of a crop of ultra-wealthy Golden State residents. Huang disagreed: “We chose to live in Silicon Valley and whatever taxes, I guess, they would like to apply, so be it,” he said.

• Hilton has dropped the Minneapolis hotel that canceled the bookings of ICE agents earlier this week, according to the hotel operator. A Hampton Inn hotel, which is a Hilton brand, allegedly refused to put up ICE agents for the night, according to a social media post from the Department of Homeland Security.

• The Swiss bar that erupted into a deadly blaze, killing 40 people on New Year’s Eve, had missed six years of safety checks, according to Reuters. Prosecutors allege the fire was likely an accident, triggered by sparkling candles that caused a foam material used for soundproofing to catch fire on the ceiling of the bar’s basement.

Over the weekend, an American operation targeting military sites in Venezuela, and capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, shocked the world. As the dust settles, the future of this once prosperous country, hollowed out into a failed state, remains uncertain.

Gelet Martínez Fragela, a Cuban activist and journalist who has spent years closely tra…