KELI From Inkwell, this is the Independent News Drop. It's Sunday, May thirty-first. The time is six a.m. Central. I'm Keli, with Hast.
HAST Good morning. We're leading with a statement that was meant to stay private, then very publicly wasn't.
KELI At a private equity summit in late March, in front of sovereign wealth funds and the people who stand to profit most from knowing which country gets restructured next, the former president said Cuba was next. Then he asked the press to disregard it. Then he said it again. The dispatch at Inkwell flags what most newsrooms did with this. Some outlets ran the Cuba statement as the headline. Some ran the joke — the ask to ignore it. But the structure underneath is worth isolating. He announced a geopolitical move to the people whose money moves fastest, then asked the press to pretend they didn't hear it. The announcement wasn't the story. The fact that the announcement happened in front of that audience, in that way, was. Watch the coming days to see whether this moves from off-the-record theater into actual policy conversations with Congress, or whether it stays a private-room trial balloon.
HAST A different register entirely. The FDA missed its own deadline to ban electrical shock devices used on people with intellectual disabilities. Disability advocates are calling the delay inexplicable. The ban was promised for March. It's now June. The agency says it's still working through the rule, but the missed deadline has left thousands of people at facilities that use these devices still waiting for a federal prohibition that was supposed to be in place three months ago.
KELI Staying with enforcement failures, but a different kind. Police in Indiana have lost track of more than thirty thousand dollars they seized during massage parlor raids. The raids began after a detective with the state's human trafficking task force received sexual services at one of those locations. The money was supposed to be catalogued and secured. Instead, it vanished from the evidence system. The state police are now investigating how the funds went missing and where they ended up.
HAST Overseas now. Israel has pushed military operations past the Litani River in Lebanon. UN peacekeeping forces stationed there have watched but haven't intervened. The UNIFIL mission, which has been present since the nineteen-seventy-eight conflict, is effectively unable to enforce the buffer zone it was designed to maintain. Lebanese officials are questioning whether the peacekeeping force still has any operational purpose if it can't prevent a cross-border incursion of this scale.
KELI Before we close, one date marker. On this day in nineteen-seventy, a seven-point-nine magnitude earthquake struck Peru's Ancash region, triggering a landslide that buried the town of Yungay and killed between sixty-six thousand and seventy thousand people in what became one of the deadliest earthquakes in modern history.
HAST That's the Independent News Drop. We'll be back this evening.
KELI From Inkwell.