The Free Press

The fear of the forever war has captivated the American mind—and not for entirely wrong reasons. Twenty years in Afghanistan. Nearly nine years in Iraq. Half a decade fighting ISIS. In the wake, Americans have turned inward: A 2023 poll showed 53 percent of Republicans now say the United States should stay out of world affairs.

Even some of Donald Trump’…

Jona Affholder was around eight weeks’ pregnant, and it was a little after 4 a.m., when she said she woke up to find her boyfriend on top of her. For a split second, she thought he was hugging her. Then, she told me, she realized he was pinning her down, forcing his fingers into her mouth: “I truly thought he was going to kill me.”

After a two-minute struggle, Affholder had a thought: If her boyfriend wanted to kill her, she’d already be unconscious. She remembers realizing that he was smashing a crushed powder inside her bottom lip and onto her gums. “I knew, after that point, that it was an abortion medication,” she said.

It was December 18, 2024, and the then–27-year-old Affholder, from Toledo, Ohio, had been dating 32-year-old Dr. Hassan-James Abbas—a local surgeon—for around three months. In the beginning, she had been excited about the relationship, and hoped it might turn serious. “All I’d ever seen from him was just like a completely normal person who led with kindness,” Affholder said. “He seemed very genuine.”

But when, a week before the alleged assault, she told Abbas she was pregnant—and that she wanted to keep the baby—she saw another side of him. She said he became “aggressive,” “angry,” and “nasty,” insisting that the pregnancy would bring shame on his family, and demanding she have an abortion. He also admitted that he had an estranged wife, to whom he was still legally married.

Affholder was horrified. “I just didn’t want anything to do with him moving forward,” she said. She told him their relationship was over and that she would raise their baby without him.

Days later, Affholder said, Abbas reached out to her and apologized profusely. “He was crying, explaining that he was so sorry for the things that he said and that he did not want me to have an abortion and that we would figure it out,” she said. “He knew exactly what he needed to say or do to get me to come back to him.”

Affholder decided to give him a second chance, and Abbas spent the week being “very attentive,” making sure she was eating and drinking enough. For the first time in their relationship, she recalls, he began making her teas and buying her hot chocolates.

“I wasn’t really finishing the beverages,” she said. “I’m not a big tea person, so I sipped on it for a little bit, and then I dumped the rest down the drain.”

In hindsight, Affholder now believes that Abbas had laced the drinks with drugs that can induce miscarriage—otherwise known as abortifacients—and that he resorted to brute force only when these attempted poisonings failed.

That night, Affholder told me, when she woke up to find Abbas on top of her, it took several minutes for her to fight him off. At 4:50 a.m.—as verified by phone records—she called 911, but didn’t get a chance to explain what was happening. “He took my phone, hung up the 911 call,” she said. She remembers running toward his front door, and Abbas preventing her from leaving. “That’s when I ran to the kitchen to rinse my mouth out,” she said.

Twenty-five years ago, then-governor George Pataki led New York through the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, one that killed nearly 3,000 people and left the nation’s financial capital in ash and rubble. On September 11, 2001, Pataki closed bridges and tunnels and refused his own security detail’s advice to retreat to an underground bunke…

It’s Wednesday, September 9. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Audrey Fahlberg on the purity tests disrupting the DSA’s path to victory. Isabella Redjai interviews residents of the “data center capital of the world.” Matt Pottinger and Liza Tobin on the great Chinese AI heist. And much more.

But first: Does guaranteed basic income for ex-cons work?

Every month, a Florida man gives away $800 to ex-cons to help them regain their bearings. It’s part of an experiment being conducted in a number of places to see if a guaranteed income, for six months or a year, will help keep those newly released from prison from winding up back inside. The data so far is promising, though far from definitive, writes P.G. Sittenfeld. But anecdotally, their transformative effects are clear.

The Florida man is Kevin Scott, who heads a Gainesville-based nonprofit, and he was once behind bars himself. “The joy of being free was counterbalanced by the terror of, ‘How am I going to make these probation payments?’ ” Scott said.

Leaving prison on parole is one thing. Staying out is another matter entirely—many states charge parolees monthly fees when they leave, and of course someone with a felony on his record has a difficult time finding work. That’s where Scott, and other private philanthropists, come in.

Sittenfeld also knows what it’s like to serve time. As he wrote in a Free Press article last year, he was caught up in an FBI sting and wound up in jail for four and a half months before President Donald Trump pardoned him in 2025. Read his latest report on the NGOs writing the checks, the ex-cons cashing them, and whether the solution to our high recidivism rates could be as simple as a little bit of money.

—The Editors

On October 1, Bari Weiss returns to the stage for her first live event in nearly a year, joined by renowned historian Dr. Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss his latest book The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. Paying subscribers get early access to tickets until Thursday, September 10, at 12 p.m. ET.

Get Tickets Now

• Britain, Canada, and France issued sanctions against Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Tuesday, citing concerns of escalating settler violence. In response, Israel threatened to close the British consulate in Jerusalem, which represents the UK in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.

• Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie G. Bunch announced his resignation Tuesday following clashes with President Trump over how the American museum presents its history and values. “I have to be honest, it has been stressful,” Bunch, 73, told The New York Times. “And at a certain point, I’d like to wake up in the morning and not look at my cellphone.”

• Justice Brett Kavanaugh blocked a redrawn Missouri congressional map favoring Republicans on Tuesday, deferring to the state’s Supreme Court, which said voters must approve the map in a statewide referendum. The map had already been used in last month’s primary election, and the state court did not specify what map would be used in November’s general election.

• Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods took effect Tuesday in an escalation of the trade war between the two neighboring countries. The tariffs span about $20 billion in American products—including milk, video game consoles, and fishing rods—which represent a small piece of the $700 billion in goods that flowed across the U.S.-Canada border last year.

• Houthi terrorists attacked four Saudi cities on Tuesday, wounding more than 70 people and marking a major expansion of the war in Iran. The U.S. also resumed attacks on Iranian tankers after a two-day pause, responding to attempted Iranian strikes on a U.S. Navy warship, officials said.

• Two art thieves stole four Renoir paintings Tuesday from a museum on the French Riviera, jettisoning two of the works as they fled. The heist took less than three minutes and targeted the most valuable paintings in the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer, according to the office of the regional prosecutor.

• A secret screening of a documentary featuring disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes stirred the Telluride film festival into a frenzy over the weekend. The three-hour documentary features exclusive, at-length interviews between comedian Nathan Fielder and Holmes that were conducted months before she began her 11-year prison sentence. The film will debut in theaters on October 16.

At around 8:40 p.m. on a late August evening, a meeting of the South Brooklyn branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was drawing to a close. Grace Mausser had just made the case for why she and Gustavo Gordillo, her fellow New York City DSA co-chair, deserve $95,000 salaries, and it was now time for the few dozen of her comrades gathered inside a dimly lit Park Slope bar to weigh in.

Not everyone was convinced. One woman kicked off the venting session by saying she wasn’t sure she could continue as a member after watching local party leaders “defend things that I don’t agree with,” including on police-related issues. A 10-year member of the DSA objected to the proposal on procedural grounds, noting that neither co-chair is working class to begin with. Another member, Alex Rivera, said he didn’t oppose paying leadership in principle but questioned how salaried co-chairs would be held accountable, considering the chapter has no real budget process and no member vote on meeting agendas, and relies on borrowed bar space for monthly meetings, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by The Free Press.

“This feels very much top-down leadership instead of like, bottom-up,” Rivera said.

Two days later, the resolution to approve the co-chair salaries passed overwhelmingly anyway. The scene inside this Brooklyn bar late last month revealed the fault line running through DSA nationally as the coalition looks to expand its growing foothold in American politics. Riding its best-ever electoral stretch, the organization now has real hope that the soon-to-be-elected bloc of socialist Congress members might finally start extracting major concessions from establishment Democrats and reshape the party in the DSA’s image.

One of the wealthiest counties in the U.S. bet big on data centers and is already seeing the results: huge increases in tax revenue, lower property taxes, and a new $102 million recreation center. The D.C. suburb of Loudoun County, Virginia, is now considered the “data center capital of the world,” housing more than 250 of them. The new infrastructure h…

American companies will spend roughly $700 billion this year on the physical build-out of artificial intelligence: data centers, chips, and computing power. Every dollar is a bet on American capitalism—that the advances those facilities help produce will earn enough to fund the next breakthrough.

The advent of Chinese open-weight models is undermining that bet, not just by ordinary competition, but by theft. (Open-weight means its code is freely downloadable and customizable, unlike its proprietary U.S. rivals.) Chinese AI models like DeepSeek, Moonshot’s Kimi K3, and Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen barely registered in American C-suites before last year. They now run inside Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash, and many others.

China’s prowess is attributable in part to real ingenuity. It also owes much to a technique called distillation, in which a state-of-the-art American model is asked millions of questions, its answers are recorded, and a new model is trained on them—inheriting much of the original’s capability without needing anything like the research and investment that produced it. Done with permission, it’s an acceptable research practice. Apple pays Google to distill the latter’s Gemini model and make a smarter Siri. University labs use the technique to study how models work.

Kevin Scott gives money away. Recipients can do whatever they want with the no-strings-attached $800 they receive each month. The money is doled out over the course of a year, meaning the participants get nearly $10,000 by the time the spigot is turned off. So far, Scott and the initiative he leads on behalf of a Gainesville, Florida–based nonprofit have given away a total of $1.3 million to 172 men and women. They all have one thing in common: They were recently released from prison.

Guaranteed income programs have been proposed for centuries—from Thomas More to Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King Jr. to Sam Altman—and have been fiercely debated across the centuries, too. According to one study, there are currently 70 pilot programs of various kinds across the country, with proponents arguing that they help pull people out of poverty. Opponents say they amount to “welfare for able-bodied adults with no strings attached.” It is thus unsurprising that a program involving unrestricted cash for convicted criminals would elicit mixed reactions.

“The jury is still out on whether they produce better public safety outcomes than. . . mental health services [and] job training,” Jennifer Webb-McRae, president of the National District Attorneys Association, told me recently.

Is there a more consequential region in the world than the Middle East? Its wars, rivalries, and upheavals have shaped the world for millennia, and show no signs of abating. And few people are better equipped to explain them than historian Simon Sebag Montefiore.

In 2011, Dr. Montefiore released his bestseller, “Jerusalem,” an epic, 3,000-year history of a city whose influence extends far beyond its walls. And in his forthcoming book, “The Cauldron,” he turns to the modern Middle East, tracing its history from 1900 to today.

Today’s essay, which he has written specifically for us, takes on the question at the core of the region’s turbulent history. In a landscape defined by competing powers vying for dominance, who will win? For anyone seeking to understand the forces reshaping the Middle East—and the world—this is essential reading.

And that’s not all. On October 1, Free Press founder and CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss returns to the stage for her first live event in nearly a year, sitting down with Montefiore for the opening night of his U.S. book tour. The two will meet in uptown Manhattan for a wide-ranging conversation about the history that made the modern Middle East, and the forces shaping it now. A limited number of tickets include a signed copy of “The Cauldron.” Get your tickets here. (Paying subscribers get early access to tickets until Thursday at 12 p.m. ET.) You won’t want to miss this. —The Editors

Every day, it becomes clearer that the tournament of power known as The October 7 Wars—the spasm of conflict between Israel and America versus Iran and its proxies unleashed by Hamas’s slaughter spree three years ago—marks a new era in the turbulent history of the Middle East. While America’s armed blockade may be starting to make gains against Iran (which, in turn, is being quietly supported by the other megapowers, China and Russia), the powers of the region are realigning themselves in profound and once unimaginable ways, trying out new alignments and conjunctions.

A month ago, on August 7, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, a self-declared “Islamic NATO” in which “any armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all.” Israel, meanwhile, has signed a huge defense contract with Greece and intensified its cooperation with India. Iran has continued to hit Arab states—some advised on their defenses by Ukraine, others by Israel, all by America—while its ally Russia furnishes it with new missile technology. And across the region, large and small powers are promoting neo-imperial interests—particularly in a new arena of competition for rising Middle East powers, East Africa. According to U.S. African plenipotentiary Massad Boulos (whose son Michael is married to President Donald Trump’s daughter Tiffany), a total of 12 Middle Eastern powers are participating in the Sudan war, the site of the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the last three years.

Which leaves a natural question: Out of all this, who will emerge to rule the Middle East?

On October 1, Free Press founder and CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss returns to the stage for her first live event in nearly a year, to sit down with renowned historian Dr. Simon Sebag Montefiore for the opening night of his U.S. book tour for The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.

The two will meet in uptown Manhattan for a wide-ranging conversation about the history of the modern Middle East, from 1900 to the forces shaping it now.

Paying subscribers get early access to tickets until Thursday, September 10, at 12 p.m. ET. Choose from a selection of ticket tiers, including options that come with a signed copy of The Cauldron and, for just 12 guests, an intimate post-event dinner with Simon. If you’re a paying subscriber, scroll down for your access code. If not, become one today!

Since September 11, 2001, the Middle East has shaped U.S. foreign policy and dominated the American mind. Twenty years fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Nearly nine years fighting the insurgency in Iraq. The Arab Spring. Wars over land and nationhood. And today, a battle against Iran with no end in sight.

Through it all, Simon argues, one truth endures: America’s quagmires in the Middle East stem from a deep misunderstanding of the region—on both the left and the right.

Simon, author of worldwide bestsellers Jerusalem: The Biography, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Young Stalin, The Romanovs: 1613–1918, and The World: A Family History of Humanity, has set out to understand not only the last 25 years in the Middle East, but the last 125. From kings and terrorists to diplomats and dictators—and the cultures and faiths that underpin them all—he brings to life the history essential to understanding the region today. His newest book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, quickly rose to be a No. 1 bestseller in the UK.

Join Bari and Simon on October 1 for a rare live conversation—and the first U.S. stop on Simon’s book tour for The Cauldron.