Years ago, I found myself drinking single-malt Scotch with a small group of raptor enthusiasts on a remote island off the coast of Maine. One of them had been Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s roommate at boarding school. He had stories to tell: I’d rather not get sued, but I can report that the two bonded over a shared obsession with falcons.

Falconry wasn’t on most Americans’ radar until RFK Jr. was elevated to the rank of secretary of Health and Human Services; around the time of his appointment, it was gleefully reported that he was a longtime falconer. This, along with the fact that he keeps ravens as pets and was once (wrongly) said to have decapitated a whale carcass with a chainsaw, became shorthand for: This guy’s a weirdo.

I can’t comment on the peculiarity of RFK Jr., but I can defend the reputation of falconry. This past spring, I joined a couple hundred falconers about a dozen miles from downtown Boise, Idaho. We gathered at The Archives of Falconry, a low-slung building perched on a hill with a commanding view of the valley and the snowcapped mountains beyond.

You could also see the somewhat bleak, treeless new housing developments crawling out from the city’s outskirts.

We were all there for the annual gathering of falconers organized by the Archives. We call it a “rendezvous,” a nod to the Old West and its annual meetups of trappers, hunters, and traders who exchanged furs and pelts for supplies and companionship after a lonely year in the wilderness. The rendezvous’s centerpiece is a moving outdoor ceremony where people stand up and reminisce about falconers who died that year and whose names have been added to the Wall of Remembrance.

This year almost 250 falconers showed up, filling a Boise hotel with mostly older white men between the ages of 60 and 90. They’re easy to spot: dusty hiking boots, blue jeans, zippered fleece over a T-shirt. Their caps advertise falconry clubs, farm stores, factories, suppliers of hawk food. Many have known each other for decades, so there is a lot of backslapping and awkward man-hugging. A handful of women falconers also came; more women are involved in falconry now than ever, but they still only make up about 30 percent of the 3,000 American falconers.

Once I would have said that most falconers leaned Libertarian, or Republican. But this year, there was a noticeable shift in tone. Much of the conversation revolved around rumors that the Trump administration would allow public lands to be sold off, opening them up to development and extractive industries. The rollback of environmental protections could have a devastating effect on wildlife, people said—and therefore on their sport.

It’s Tuesday, June 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Trump’s giant gamble with Iran appears to pay off; the case against cremation; why the GOP candidate for New York City mayor has no shot; Zohran Mamdani’s volunteer army; and much more.

But first: The latest developments in the Iran showdown.

At 6 p.m. on Monday, Donald Trump declared a ceasefire. In a post on Truth Social that came as a surprise to just about everyone, the president said: “It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE.”

Trump congratulated Israel and Iran on “having the Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence to end, what should be called, ‘THE 12 DAY WAR.’ ”

Confusion followed. Iran’s foreign minister initially said there had been no such agreement, before appearing to acknowledge an agreement. Israel did not immediately confirm the deal. Whether or not a deal had in fact been reached when Trump hit send on his post—and whether or not such a deal holds—there were already signs on Monday that Iran was in no mood or position to escalate. Yes, Tehran fired missiles at a U.S. military base in Qatar, but only after telegraphing the attack to the Qataris, who informed Washington. It was, as one official tells Jay Solomon in his piece for The Free Press today, “basically a kabuki dance.”

And so, as of late Monday, it looked like Trump’s gamble had paid off. He appeared to have struck Iran’s nuclear program without triggering the kind of inexorable escalation that his doubters—including many in MAGA World—had predicted. That was certainly the message from the president’s party after the news. Republicans boasted of “peace through strength.”

Today, we have three stories covering the latest developments, the strategic big picture, and the political ramifications.

Jay Solomon reports on how the temperature was lowered on Monday—and what a ceasefire might mean for what remains of Iran’s nuclear program.

Next, the historian Victor Davis Hanson says that the way you know Trump’s strikes were a success is “the poverty of both foreign and domestic criticism.” Victor surveys the world after the strikes and explains why he thinks Trump will avoid becoming yet another U.S. president who comes unstuck in the Middle East.

And third, Free Press columnist Matthew Continetti looks at the domestic politics of the strike—and how the Democrats have gone AWOL on Iran. The party has had nothing to say, switching between silence and procedural complaints. “The Iran crisis doesn’t just reveal the Democrats’ irrelevance,” writes Matt. “It exposes a fundamental unseriousness that makes their other problems worse.”

—Oliver Wiseman

Was Trump’s strike on Iran’s nuclear facility a decisive blow—or the start of something bigger, even amid reports of a possible ceasefire deal? In this episode of Honestly, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, investigative reporter Jay Solomon, and Free Press Israel correspondent Matti Friedman unpack what we know—and what we don’t—about the Fordow strike, Iran’s next moves, and where we’re headed next.

• More than half of Americans are under a heat advisory today as a widespread heatwave continues to break daily temperature records nationwide. Tens of thousands of people experienced blackouts across the country yesterday, including 50,000 in and around Cleveland and 14,000 in New York City.

• Two top Federal Reserve officials appear keen to lower interest rates as early as July, including Michelle W. Bowman, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision. Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell, however, is not as eager to make cuts and told reporters last week that the central bank will “be where we are” for now.

• The United Kingdom officially designated Palestine Action as a terror organization, citing the group’s “long history” of criminal violence. If approved by British Parliament, the ban would make support of the group a criminal offense punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

• The Supreme Court said yesterday that it will hear the case of a Rastafarian prisoner whose dreadlocks were chopped off by correctional officers, allegedly in violation of his religious freedom. “When I was strapped down and shaved, it felt like I was raped,” Damon Landor said in a statement to The New York Times last year.

• New York State plans to build a major nuclear power plant—the first American nuclear project of its scale in over 15 years—Governor Kathy Hochul told The Wall Street Journal yesterday. The new facility is part of a push to add at least 1 gigawatt of nuclear power generation to the state’s reactor fleet, Hochul said, which is enough to power approximately one million homes.

• Oil prices plunged more than seven percent yesterday following Iran’s retaliatory strikes on a U.S. air base in Qatar. “Crude is pulling back as the market digests signs that energy infrastructure is not Iran’s first choice for retaliation,” Rebecca Babin, a senior energy trader at CIBC Private Wealth Group, told Bloomberg yesterday.

• FICO scores will now include buy-now-pay-later loans, Axios reported yesterday. With more than 90 million Americans using such loans to amortize purchases from clothing to Coachella tickets, FICO said the new criterion will allow more opportunities for borrowers to build credit.

As the sun set in New York City on Friday night, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani began walking. He started in Inwood Hill Park, at the very top of Manhattan, and didn’t stop until he saw the bright blue lights of the Staten Island Ferry all the way in Battery Park. For seven hours, he strode in running shoes down the streets of Manhattan. Almost every step of the way, Mamdani was greeted by gasps, coos, and selfie requests.

“I voted for you!” a man with a Spanish accent said, grinning as a waving Mamdani, 33, passed him in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in northern Manhattan.

At about 8 p.m., the Democratic Socialist candidate joined former MSNBC host Joy Reid’s new streaming show from his smartphone. He downed a folded slice of pizza to help keep going. By Times Square, Mamdani had amassed a crowd of about 40 supporters. A young man in the East Village shouted: “That’s my guy!”

Whatever you think of Mamdani’s politics, the following that he attracted while walking from one end of Manhattan to the other showed the stunningly strong campaign that he has run, with huge help from volunteers. Those volunteers are a prime reason why the Democratic primary has narrowed to a two-person race between Mamdani and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. A poll released Monday showed Mamdani prevailing over Cuomo in the eighth round of ranked-choice voting. Mamdani’s support has surged by more than 30 percentage points during the past five months, while Cuomo’s has basically been stuck.

It looked at first as though the Middle East war was about to kick into a new gear. On Monday, fewer than 36 hours after the U.S. bombed three Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities, Iran shot about 14 ballistic missiles at the Al Udeid military base north of Doha, Qatar—an American base that houses between 8,000 and 10,000 U.S. military personnel.

By 1 p.m. on Monday, Qatari spokesman Dr. Majed Al Ansari had taken to X to threaten a military response “in a manner equivalent with the nature and scale of this brazen aggression” by Iran. This exchange rapidly stoked fears that the Trump administration’s Saturday air strikes risked setting off a much broader regional war. Influential anti-interventionists, such as talk show host Tucker Carlson, offered prayers for the U.S. on his podcast.

But at 6:02 p.m., President Trump announced on Truth Social, his social media platform, that “a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE” had been agreed upon by Israel and Iran. It was set to begin, Trump said, in six hours, and would end what he called “THE 12 DAY WAR.”

At the time of this writing, neither Israel nor Iran had confirmed the deal. And shortly after Trump’s announcement, CNN followed up with a report that the Iranians had not received any ceasefire proposal and that, according to a senior Iranian official, Iran “is on the verge of intensifying its retaliatory strikes, with no ear to listen to the lies of its enemies.”

Trump administration officials, who spoke to The Free Press after the announcement, assumed the ceasefire was real, but still questioned whether the Iranians would abide by it. “That’s a terrible decision for them,” one told me. “Let’s see.”

For decades, abortion has been legal in the United Kingdom up to 24 weeks—the same time period that was guaranteed by Roe v. Wade—and later in exceptional circumstances when approved by two doctors. But last week, British lawmakers voted to decriminalize abortion beyond these limits—which would allow women to end their own pregnancies at any stage, for any reason, with no legal repercussions.

Members of parliament voted in favor of this amendment after just two hours of debate in the House of Commons, with 379 to 137 in favor of the change. It will now advance to parliament’s second chamber, the House of Lords, for review.

The amendment’s supporters argue that full decriminalization is the next frontier in reproductive rights. In principle, they argue, no woman should be put through the upsetting ordeal of a criminal investigation after her pregnancy ends. Nor should a woman be prosecuted for ending her own pregnancy. They believe abortion should be seen as a human right.

In fact, another proposed amendment—which did not advance to a vote—would have gone even further, explicitly enshrining abortion as a human right, essentially removing all regulations and allowing healthcare professionals to abort viable babies on demand up until birth as well as allowing women self-inducing abortions at home.

Stella Creasy, the Labour MP sponsoring the more radical of the two amendments, argued that “U.S. colleagues warn of the compromises made in the Barack Obama and Joe Biden years on securing abortion rights that left them so exposed.”

But for some, the lesson from America is quite different. Many British feminists denounced the new amendment as wrong in principle, and counterproductive in strategy. They warn that when one side of a controversial movement goes too far, the result is that the pendulum swings too far the other way. Responding to Creasy, Janice Turner, a columnist for The Times of London and a prominent feminist, wrote on X: “No, the lesson on abortion rights from America is uphold public consensus. Not pursue extreme change by the back door which will fuel an anti-choice backlash.”

The abortion debate is often framed in terms of competing rights. In early pregnancy, most Brits agree that a woman’s right to autonomy trumps the embryo or fetus’s right to life. But later in pregnancy, that consensus flips. Two-thirds of the public support abortion access before 24 weeks and the same amount oppose it after 24 weeks (except in extreme circumstances, such as when the mother’s life is at risk). Only 3 percent of British women believe that the abortion limit “should be extended to birth.”

With advances in neonatology, fetal viability is now considered between 22 and 24 weeks, depending on a hospital’s resources. This is around the time that a baby is capable of feeling pain. By 32 weeks’ gestation, over 95 percent of babies born will survive, the vast majority of whom will have no long-term health complications. In the third trimester, babies are physically indistinguishable from premature and newborn infants.

Some abortion absolutists argue that babies don’t have any rights until they’re born. But many within the pro-choice camp recoil at this extremism. Kathleen Stock, another prominent feminist, wrote on X in reaction to the news: “It sounds dementedly callous to try to deny the interests of babies in this sort of issue by defining them out of existence, or just ignoring the fact they do exist at all.”

“Late-term abortions kill babies,” she added. “Viable babies.”

Under preexisting British law, women whose pregnancies have advanced beyond 10 weeks cease to be eligible for medication abortions—where the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol are respectively administered to cut off nutrients, then expel the fetus. Before 15 weeks, a “vacuum aspiration” can be performed, removing the fetus through suction. Between 15 and 24 weeks, the procedure is “dilation and evacuation,” which involves dismembering and extracting the fetus with forceps.

In the limited circumstances that abortion is permitted in Britain beyond 24 weeks—for instance, for a fatal fetal abnormality or a disability such as Down syndrome—the method is “feticide,” injecting a lethal drug into the baby’s heart through the mother’s abdomen, then inducing a stillbirth. These later abortions are rare (less than 1 percent of total abortions).

But since the 2020 pandemic, Britain has allowed for abortion pills to be dispensed by mail and administered at home. Supporters argued that it was more convenient for women to have abortions in their own homes; critics argued it would open the door to abuse and endanger women who take the drugs later than designed.

At its most successful, the pro-choice movement recognizes that late-term abortion is not a winning issue, and the best path to consensus is moderation.

Indeed, some women have reportedly lied about how far along they were in their pregnancies and taken abortion drugs at home beyond the legal limit and without medical approval or supervision. Beyond the first trimester, this method becomes increasingly dangerous or even life-threatening for the pregnant woman. It’s also incredibly painful.

And women who did this have been prosecuted.

Take Carla Foster, a 44-year-old mother of three who, in May 2020, was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant when she pretended to be in the first trimester to get abortion pills by mail. Foster wanted the abortion because she didn’t want her estranged partner to learn she was sleeping with other men. Foster was hospitalized after taking the drugs as her daughter, Lily, was born dead. In 2023, a judge sentenced Foster to 28 months, half of which will be spent in custody.

The amendment’s sponsor, Tonia Antoniazzi, a Labour MP, shared Foster’s story as proof of why the change in law is necessary. She also spoke about a handful of women who had been prosecuted or investigated for ending their pregnancies in the UK—including Nicola Packer, 45. In November 2020, Packer acquired abortion pills after telling her healthcare provider she was fewer than 10 weeks pregnant. But she wound up in the hospital with complications, delivering a baby estimated to be 26 weeks’ gestation. After that, she was arrested.

The Crown Prosecution Service argued she had lied to get the drugs; she claimed she did not know how far along she was. In the end, Packer was cleared by a jury.

Antoniazzi argues that abortion should be decriminalized to spare women the ordeal of being investigated after an already traumatic medical event.

Another supporter of the amendment, Dr. Sonia Adesara—a doctor and spokeswoman for Doctors for Choice UK—said: “We’re not changing the time limits in this law. We’re just stopping the prosecution of women.”

She was speaking to pro-choice Talk TV presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer, who disagreed. “If you abort your baby at seven or eight months and there’s no medical reason for that, yes, I think you should be prosecuted,” she said. “I would like you stigmatized. I think you’re a baby killer.”

“A woman who kills her baby the day after her baby was born would be prosecuted for murder,” she went on. “But a woman who kills her baby the day before her baby is due to be born—that would be okay? I don’t think that’s going to sit right with the British public.”

At its most successful, the pro-choice movement recognizes that late-term abortion is not a winning issue, and the best path to consensus is moderation. For instance, Helen Lewis, the British feminist and Atlantic staff writer, has attributed the success of the 2018 abortion referendum in Ireland to a campaign that “presented pro-choice beliefs as sensible, compassionate, and mainstream.”

“It shouldn’t be taboo for activists to entertain compromise, and to acknowledge the reality of principled opposition to abortion,” she wrote in 2022. “In the U.S., there has never been a better slogan for defending abortion rights than ‘safe, legal, and rare.’ ”

But in the U.S., today’s abortion activists speak more in terms of absolute rights than commonsense compromises, with campaigns like “Shout Your Abortion”—which allow their more conservative opponents to appeal to moderates. During his campaign, Donald Trump attacked the most extreme pro-choice activists, who refused even to say if they supported any limits at all, while simultaneously moving his party’s stance closer to the center. As I wrote previously, this strategy paid off.

This is the real lesson from America for pro-choice Brits, as a few feminists have recognized.

“There is no good case for full decriminalization as voted for today,” wrote Kathleen Stock on X. “And there is no genuine political will for it either, because most people haven’t been slowly boiled in a vat of hyperliberal feminism.”

“All this will do is further undermine the legitimacy of feminism generally,” she argued, “and also undermine public trust in lawmakers.”

Read more by Madeleine Kearns:

President Trump heard from many people before ordering last weekend’s strike on Iran’s nuclear program. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, G7 leaders, Republican senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham, Vice President J.D. Vance, conservative journalists Mark Levin, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson—all weighed in on military action, pro and con. The debate was robust: whether our intelligence was correct, would our weapons work, what might the costs and benefits be, how the mullahs would respond.

What was remarkable wasn’t the intensity of the debate, but its location: It took place almost entirely on the right.

By last weekend, Israel’s Operation Rising Lion had already changed the Middle East profoundly. And America’s oldest political party was AWOL. Normally, Democrats would stake out a position on such a consequential issue. Instead, in the lead-up to Operation Midnight Hammer, they were more interested in ICE raids and performative civil disobedience than in the future of nonproliferation. They had plenty to say about Medicaid work requirements and Juneteenth celebrations. On Iran? Silence.

On Tuesday night, New York City will be fixated on the results of one race: the Democratic mayoral primary. Meanwhile, in an afterthought for most city residents, a 71-year-old radio host named Curtis Sliwa will capture the Republican nomination and formally become the party’s pick for the general election in November. 

You might think that the Republicans have a golden opportunity to win a race like this. 

There’s a better than even chance that the Democrats will choose 33-year-old socialist state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani to be their nominee, a darling of the party’s far left who otherwise seems designed in a lab to alienate moderates. If Mamdani doesn’t get the nod, voters will almost certainly go with Andrew Cuomo, New York’s tough-to-love former governor. 

The Democratic incumbent, Eric Adams, is so unpopular that he skipped the primary altogether. And Cuomo says he’ll do the same if he loses to Mamdani, perhaps setting the stage for a crowded November contest where the eventual victor could squeak by with just a slim plurality of the vote.  

Will Sliwa be the one squeaking by? No. Allow me to explain.

What to make of Saturday’s “surgical strikes” on Iranian nuclear installations? Ask Vice President Vance: “We had an incredibly targeted, precise surgical strike on the nuclear facilities that are the target of the American operation,” he declared on Sunday. It was, he later added “a very precise, a very surgical strike tailored to an American national interest. And that national interest is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

Americans, and especially Republicans, have long relished the term surgical strike, and it’s easy to understand why. Standards of surgery are exceptionally high in the United States, just as tolerance of military casualties is relatively low. The notion is therefore alluring that one can resolve an international problem—especially an intractable one such as Iran’s long-standing ambition to acquire nuclear weapons—with a single, swift, surgical procedure.

Ironically, as Richard Nixon’s former speechwriter William Safire pointed out nearly 40 years ago, the term surgical strike originated as left-wing satire. The first use of the phrase, according to Safire, was in an article by Richard Barnet in Harper’s Magazine in November 1971. “Even [in] the language of the bureaucracy,” Barnet wrote, “the ‘surgical strike’ for chasing and mowing down peasants from the air by spraying them with 8,000 bullets a minute—takes the mystery, awe, and pain out of violence.”

I thank God that the vacuous term ‘de-escalation’ has now been left to the Europeans, and that peace through strength is back.

There was nothing surgical about the American use of air power in Vietnam. According to the diary of Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, Henry Kissinger also used the phrase at around that time, though the surgical strike he had in mind was a possible Soviet attack on Chinese nuclear facilities.

Only with the advent and rapid development of precision weaponry such as guided missiles in the 1980s did the term lose its pejorative connotation. By the time Safire was writing—just after Ronald Reagan’s administration had struck Libyan targets in retaliation for the West Berlin discotheque bombing of April 1986—surgical strike had taken on the modern meaning used by Vice President Vance on Sunday. As with the revival of the slogan “peace through strength,” this is one of those conscious echoes of Reaganism that befuddle those who would misrepresent the second Trump administration as isolationist.

Last week, when I was explaining why I expected Trump to strike the Fordow fuel enrichment plant, I pointed out that, despite frivolous jokes about the TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) trade, Trump Enjoys Surgical Strikes (TESS). We saw that three times in his first term: in April 2017, when he dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” on Afghanistan; a year later, when he ordered missile strikes on Syria in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime; and in January 2020, when he authorized the assassination of commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Qasem Soleimani. The relish with which Trump announced the strikes against Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan on Saturday night was characteristic. “A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow,” he enthused. “All planes are safely on their way home. . . . NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

For more on Trump’s decision to strike Iran, read the historian Victor Davis Hanson’s latest Free Press essay:

Swift, decisive intervention, leading to peace—and at the same time restoring American deterrence: “ANY RETALIATION BY IRAN AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL BE MET WITH FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED TONIGHT,” as he put it in a follow-up post. This is the essence of the perfect surgical strike.

It is difficult to imagine any other Republican or Democratic president taking such a risk to hit Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. The Middle East is understandably viewed as the graveyard of presidential misadventures, where an administration’s good polls crash and sometimes do not revive.

Jimmy Carter’s reelection hopes blew up after the failed 1980 rescue mission. Iran-Contra almost sabotaged Ronald Reagan. Even the successful 1991 Gulf War ended poorly with the survival of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the ensuing endless “no fly zones”—and a repudiated George H.W. Bush in 1992.

George W. Bush lost control of his presidency with the devolution of the 2003 Iraq War. Joe Biden’s polls never recovered from the skedaddle from Kabul, Afghanistan.

But President Donald Trump’s limited and defined agenda—and unpredictability—was a different operation and may avoid such a fate.

My husband and I are only nine months apart. I smoke cigarettes and have a family history of early-onset dementia. Chris is a bad driver. Because of this, it’s a real toss-up as to which of us will die first. We speak about it sometimes. I want a proper Irish wake, corpse laid out. He wants to be cremated.

I tell him, “You better die second.”

For the past few weeks, I’ve been watching HBO’s horrifying and much-acclaimed new docuseries, The Mortician. It follows David Sconce, a sociopathic undertaker from Pasadena, California, who went to prison in 1989 after mutilating corpses and holding mass cremations in order to maximize his profits. (In the series, ex-employees allege that Sconce hired them to beat up people who were looking into his case, and heavily imply that he may have killed a guy, or possibly three. Those allegations weren’t proven.)

“All the ashes were mixed up, so people thought they were getting their dad or whatever, but now they’ve got an urn full of strangers sitting in their foyers or whatever,” I told my husband after the latest episode aired. “He hired all these crackheads and had them pulling the gold out of people’s teeth.”

My husband told me he was trying to sleep. 

Once, Chris actually said he’d like to donate his corpse to scientific research—before it was cremated. I shut the conversation down, pointing to a case in Surprise, Arizona, where somebody’s grandmother—whose body had supposedly been donated for Alzheimer’s disease research—was strapped into a vehicle and blown up by the U.S. Army. Her family was none the wiser until reporters called to ask them about it. 

“I’m putting you in the ground,” I said.