| Forwarded this email? Subscribe for more |
 |
| By The Free Press |
It’s Thursday, May 14. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Olivia Reingold profiles Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji. Demographers Nicholas Eberstadt and Patrick Norrick on the global population crash. Haviv Rettig Gur examines how propaganda makes its way into New York Times columns. Jed Rubenfeld takes on overheated claims about “Jim Crow 2.0.” And much more.
But first: Trump and Xi meet in Beijing.
At 10 a.m. local time Thursday, Xi Jinping welcomed Donald Trump to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The meeting, which ran for more than two hours, kicked off what is set to be a hugely consequential summit between the two most powerful men in the world. On the agenda: Taiwan, trade, and more.
“We should be partners, not rivals, achieve success for one another, prosper together and forge a correct way for major countries of the new era to get along with each other,” said the Chinese president. But, the warm words were short lived as Xi also warned Trump that the U.S. would enter an “extremely dangerous place” if Chinese concerns over Taiwan were “handled poorly”.
We’ve been laying out the stakes of the talks in our pages all week.
For our columnist, historian Niall Ferguson, the most important topic up for discussion will be Taiwan—even if Trump may not have realized it going into the talks. Read his piece on why there is so much riding on the summit in Beijing today.
For more on Taiwan, Tanner Nau reached out to leading China experts for their predictions of what the meeting might mean for the island. Read their takes here:
We’ve also put the spotlight on two victims of Beijing’s religious and political persecution—whose families are holding out hope that Trump could help free them. Frannie Block told the extraordinary story of Pastor Ezra Jin, who was arrested last October for daring to preach his Christian faith without government supervision.
Another man behind bars for living by his principles is Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong businessman and publisher of a pro-democracy newspaper sentenced to decades in prison for standing up to Beijing. His children, Sebastien and Claire, delivered a simple message in The Free Press: Mr. President, bring our father home.
On School of War, Aaron MacLean sits down with Sam Brownback—former Kansas senator and governor, and author of China’s War on Faith—to discuss a dimension of the U.S.-China rivalry that rarely gets the attention it deserves: Beijing’s systematic persecution of religious minorities, and whether freedom of religion should be treated as a central front in the competition between the two powers.
—The Editors
 |
The First Lady of New York City
In early March, I—along with a handful of other journalists—discovered that Rama Duwaji, wife of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, had an extensive history of liking or reposting anti-Israel content online. There were posts that celebrated convicted Palestinian terrorists, engaged in Holocaust inversion and, as we covered in The Free Press, referred to sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, as a “mass rape hoax.”
The few times the mayor and his wife have addressed the mounting scandals, they’ve repeated variations of the same line: that she’s a “private person,” not a public figure like her husband. Is that a legitimate excuse? I called up dozens within Duwaji’s circle to find out—all while continuing to comb through her social media activity. Read my profile to find out what I pieced together about the unlikely politician’s wife who has become the undeniable “it girl” of New York City.
—Olivia Reingold
 |
Peak Human Is Coming Sooner Than You Think | ||||
 | ||||
|
And for more on America’s and China’s coming population crash—and what it means for the international world order—listen to Nicholas Eberstadt’s conversation with School of War host Aaron MacLean last week: