It’s Thursday, March 5. 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 Dubai expats sheltering in luxury. Europeans get mugged by climate reality. Newsom misses the point in Iran. And much more.

But first: If the Iranian regime falls, what comes next?

President Donald Trump hasn’t eased his campaign to batter Iran’s regime into submission. Iran “has no navy, it’s been knocked out. They have no air force, that’s been knocked out. They have no air detection, that’s been knocked out,” Trump declared from the Oval Office, less than 100 hours into the fighting.

Yet few U.S. reports so far have captured how Iranians opposed to the regime are responding amid the rubble and twisted steel. Even a battered regime will likely cling to power until its remains are pushed out by an organized force.

For early signs of resistance, look to the Kurds. The minority group in Iran’s mountainous northwest has clashed with the regime since before the 1979 revolution reached its end. Last month, five Kurdish groups committed to fight the regime, and now they’re organizing under the cover of U.S.-Israeli air power. Jay Solomon reports on whether these fighters could push out the regime—or plunge Iran into civil war:

Iran’s Persian majority lacks much organized resistance because their rulers have killed, jailed, or cast out would-be opposition leaders. Now millions are looking to those exiled and imprisoned men to emerge and command their nation. Amy Kellogg profiles some of the brightest lights, from the former prime minister who stood up to the hard-liners, to Reza Pahlavi, the deposed crown prince who could restore the shah’s throne.

With the internet and cellular networks knocked out across much of Iran, it’s difficult for dissidents to rally, or even know what’s going on in the war. For decades, the U.S. had a tool tailor-made for this purpose—until the Trump administration began to dismantle it last year. What motivated Trump to gut radio services like Voice of America, which could draw millions of Iranians toward America’s mission? Read Frannie Block’s investigation to find out.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

Join us at noon ET for a live taping of a Free Press podcast, School of War, hosted by Aaron MacLean, the FP’s newest columnist (read more about that here) and national security analyst for CBS News. MacLean is a Marine veteran and former professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. Today, he will host General Frank McKenzie (retired) to discuss the ongoing operation in Iran and the implications it has for the future of warfare. You don’t want to miss this.

If the prospect of braving another blizzard—or the midterm elections—all alone bums you out, The Free Press is here to help. Our old-school, straightforward matchmaking service, Free Press Cupid, is back and better than ever. This past week, we ran letters from a 22-year-old who is “substance-free, but with substance,” a Paris-born hotelier, and an “evangelical Christian slowly making my way toward Rome.” (And a few more!) Read our last batch of letters from the eligible Free Pressers here (you’ll get their email addresses, too). If you’d like to be included in next week’s romantic batch, email [email protected] with a short write-up about who you are and what you are looking for in a mate.

• A United States Navy submarine sank an Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sri Lanka Tuesday night, the first sinking of an enemy ship by a U.S. submarine since World War II. The U.S. has destroyed 20 Iranian naval ships since the operation began last week, according to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Dan Caine.

• Legendary college football coach Lou Holtz died yesterday at the age of 89. Holtz led the Notre Dame Fighting Irish to a 1988 national title, one of 249 victories in his 33-year coaching career. He later became a college football analyst for CBS and ESPN. Holtz was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, in 2020.

• The Texas Republican Senate primary is heading to a runoff, after incumbent John Cornyn and the state’s attorney general Ken Paxton both failed to pass the 50 percent threshold in Tuesday’s Senate primary election. President Trump announced his intention to offer an endorsement “soon,” calling on the candidate who is not endorsed to immediately drop out.

• The Senate blocked a measure that would curtail President Trump’s authority to continue the war in Iran. The 53–47 vote was almost completely down party lines, except for Rand Paul (R-KY) voting for the restrictions and John Fetterman (D-PA) voting against the measure. A similar measure is up for debate in the House of Representatives, but is not expected to pass.

• The U.S. government’s civilian workforce shrank ‌by 12 percent between September 2024 and January 2026, according to government data published on Wednesday. The Treasury Department lost 24 percent of its workforce, and the Department of Health and Human Services’ workforce was cut 20 percent. The Department of Homeland Security was the only department to gain staff—it grew by less than 1 percent.

• An Iranian ballistic missile heading toward Turkish airspace was shot down by NATO air defenses in the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey’s defense ministry announced on Wednesday. “NATO stands firmly with all allies, including Turkey, as Iran continues its indiscriminate attacks across the region,” a NATO spokeswoman said.

• Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee, fielding questions over the administration’s immigration crackdown and her tenure at DHS. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) chastised Noem’s “smear campaign” of two Americans she referred to as domestic terrorists after their deaths at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis, while Republicans offered support for the secretary’s record.

In this episode, Shilo Brooks sits down with New York City public defender Ben Schatz to discuss the novel True Grit—and the nature of justice in America.

Ben founded the nonprofit Books Beyond Bars, which sends requested books (not just random donations) to individuals locked in New York jails and prisons, giving them dignity, mental escape, and intelle…

It was unsettling to watch California governor Gavin Newsom on Monday spouting off a rejiggered blood libel this week, and not simply because Democrats have mostly succumbed to a fashionable Jew hate.

“We have to reconcile why our bombs were used, or Israeli bombs were used, to kill children—young girls—at a school, and what the imminent threat was,” Newsom said at a press conference meant to slam Donald Trump’s war on Iran.

As the U.S. and Israel continue to degrade the military infrastructure of the Islamic Republic, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and decimating the regime’s leadership, Iran’s fractured expatriate opposition faces a question it has debated for decades but never with such urgency: Who should govern the country next?

Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, commands the most visible support, with crowds chanting his name during street protests and a freshly unveiled policy platform to his credit. Once reluctant to contemplate a return to Iran, Pahlavi has become far more active in seeking the mantle of leadership, telling 60 Minutes that “millions of Iranians inside Iran and outside of Iran are calling my name.”

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.