It’s Tuesday, December 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Hadley Freeman remembers Rob Reiner—while the president mocks the dead. David Wolpe and Deborah Lipstadt on the twisted logic of anti-Jewish hate. Charles Lane on why Amnesty delayed its October 7 report. And more.
But first: The Chinese dissident Beijing can’t break.
What does a hero look like? Well, today, a hero looks a lot like Jimmy Lai.
Lai is the founder of Apple Daily, once Hong Kong’s most influential pro-democracy newspaper. Five years ago, after Chinese president Xi Jinping imposed the sweeping national security law that effectively crushed Hong Kong’s freedoms, Lai became one of the Chinese government’s primary targets. In 2020, he was arrested and sent to a maximum security prison. He has now spent over 1,800 days in solitary confinement.
On Monday, a panel of judges in Hong Kong convicted Lai, 78, of sedition and collusion with foreign forces in what was quickly condemned as a show trial. He now faces a potential sentence of life in prison in Hong Kong.
Lai became a wealthy man in Hong Kong through a successful clothing business. But after conquering the business world, he turned to journalism and publishing. As Hong Kong’s freedoms faded, Lai, a British citizen, could have fled. Instead, he stayed.
As his daughter, Claire Lai, put it to me on Monday, “a man doesn’t abandon his ship.”
“My father is a man who stands for truth. He stands for freedom of press. He stands for faith,” she said.
Today in The Free Press, we bring you two pieces from those who know Jimmy well. The first is from Claire. She writes of a father who arrived in Hong Kong with only a half-eaten chocolate bar in his pocket and found “family, God, freedom, and truth” there. But, she writes, her father is not a martyr. “He is still fighting for his life from prison.”
The second piece is from Natan Sharansky, a man who knows what it is like to face tyranny. Sharansky was imprisoned by the Soviet Union in 1977 on manufactured charges of treason and spent nine years in a gulag. He writes to his friend Jimmy, who sits alone in a cell in Hong Kong, and offers some advice: “These dictators think that you are facing a life sentence. In fact, they are the ones who will be living as slaves all their lives.” Read Natan’s full letter to Jimmy in our pages.
—Frannie Block
“Making a movie is like having a party,” film director Rob Reiner once said. As Hadley Freeman tells it, this was Reiner’s approach to everything: Make people happy, make the world better. In a moving remembrance of the Hollywood giant who brought us “This Is Spinal Tap” and “Stand by Me,” Freeman contemplates Reiner’s success in nearly every genre, his pride in his nepo-baby roots, and how making “When Harry Met Sally” changed his perception of love forever.
The news of Rob Reiner’s passing could hardly be more shocking. He and his wife Michele were stabbed to death. Their daughter found their bodies. Their son is in custody, and police say he is “responsible” for their deaths. How did the president of the United States react to this tragedy? With a disgraceful post on social media insulting the beloved director. Read our editorial on how “Trump has once again lowered the bar for what we can expect from the president.”
It starts with children tucking in their Star of David necklaces and removing their kippahs in public. Security increasing around synagogues. Menorahs disappearing from windows. Then, the unthinkable happens. In this essay, Rabbi David Wolpe and former U.S. envoy on antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt argue that there is a very clear thread in the logic of anti-Jewish hate: to make Jews afraid.
How did Amnesty International, a leading human rights advocacy group, allow the release of a report outlining atrocious human rights abuses to turn into a moral muddle? It’s because the report involved Israeli victims and Hamas perpetrators. Amnesty’s delayed release of its report about Hamas’s atrocities in Israel on October 7, 2023, writes Charles Lane, came only after months of delay and internal strife that show how unserious Amnesty is about upholding the values it purports to champion—and how much the truth can hurt.
Instagram Teen Accounts default teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see.
Police are still searching for the shooter who killed two Brown University students and injured nine others on Saturday. Police released a second video showing the possible gunman, but are looking for more help in their manhunt.
Ford Motor Company is scaling back much of its plans to produce electric vehicles, resulting in $19.5 billion of charges to the company’s financial statements and the halting of several electric vehicle models. “We are looking at the market as it is today, not just as everyone predicted it to be five years ago,” one Ford executive said.
President Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC on Monday, accusing the British broadcaster of “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction” of the president’s remarks before the January 6, 2021 riots. The suit says the BBC “intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers.” The head of the BBC resigned last month after renewed criticism of the BBC’s coverage.
The Australian prime minister said that he will propose stricter gun control measures in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre during a Hanukkah celebration over the weekend. The two suspected gunmen, a father-son duo, were legal gun owners. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the shooting “an act of pure evil, an act of antisemitism,” and “an act of terrorism.”
Federal law enforcement officials thwarted plans of a New Year’s Eve bombing spree, arresting four members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front—a Los Angeles–based pro-Palestinian, anti-government group—on Friday. The arrests were made as the suspects constructed and attempted to test prototype pipe bombs in the Mojave Desert, federal officials announced.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will brief members of Congress on Tuesday about the U.S.’s military strikes in the Caribbean. While confirming the briefing, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the Trump administration’s bombing of suspected drug boats “rogue and reckless.”
The Office of Personnel and Management is launching the “U.S. Tech Force,” an initiative hiring engineers to “accelerate artificial intelligence implementation and solve the federal government’s most critical technological challenges.” The two-year program will deploy about 1,000 engineers through federal agencies in “non-partisan roles focused on technology implementation,” according to the government.
The European Union announced new sanctions on Russian oil interests, targeting people and companies that have helped Russian firms circumvent previous Western sanctions since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The measure prohibits EU countries from doing any business with sanctioned entities. So far, the EU has sanctioned over 2,600 Russia-linked individuals and companies.
Workers at the Louvre in Paris voted to strike, forcing a shutdown of the world’s most-visited museum. The union decried “increasingly deteriorated working conditions” and inadequate resources for security. The Louvre welcomed 8.7 million visitors last year but was targeted in a daylight heist in October. It isn’t clear when the museum will reopen.
“KevinDuRANT?” is on a tear today! Go get ‘em!
Quite the Reiner lovefest yesterday and today...