Independent News Drop

KELI From Inkwell, this is the Independent News Drop. I'm Keli, with Hast.

HAST Good morning. We're leading with Texas infrastructure and a governor's contradiction.

KELI ProPublica has the story. Greg Abbott spent months blasting Corpus Christi for mismanaging its water supply. He was right about the crisis — the city's water system is failing. But here's the structural problem: Abbott sits on the board of the Nueces River Authority, the state agency that controls the water that feeds Corpus Christi's system. ProPublica found the Authority itself is falling apart. Staff turnover, deferred maintenance, no long-term plan. Abbott appointed board members. He has the power to demand accountability. He didn't use it while he was running ads criticizing the city for a problem the Authority was helping cause.

HAST So he gets to look like the tough guy calling out local failure while the mechanism he controls decays.

KELI Exactly. The counter-read here is going to be simple in most newsrooms: "Governor blames city, city blames state." That's the ping-pong story. The structural reality is that Abbott had direct power over the Authority and chose visibility over oversight. Watch for the next move — either he moves fast to clean up the Authority now that this is public, which looks reactive, or he keeps the same board in place and the story becomes about whether he actually wants the problem solved or just wants credit for naming it. That's checkable in the coming weeks.

HAST On a different front, we've got the Truth Social API story from the Intercept. Trump's monetizing early access to his own posts.

KELI This one's straightforward. The Intercept reports that the White House is selling premium API access to Trump's Truth Social feed to Wall Street traders and firms. They get his posts milliseconds before the public does. That's a direct profit-and-loss edge for people paying for speed. It's also the president directly merging his personal social media account with a revenue scheme that benefits financial firms with fastest-finger advantage. The Justice Department hasn't charged anyone with it yet, but the mechanism is on the record — it's happening now, and it's built into the platform's business model.

HAST Federal conflict-of-interest law's not looking at this one?

KELI We'll see. Moving to the voting calendar — five states run primaries today. Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Virginia, and Washington. This matters because redistricting still shapes the map Congress is running on, and these races will influence which party has the operational advantage heading into next year's general. We've covered this momentum shift before, but today's the first real data point on whether the spring polling holds or shifts.

HAST Gaza and the disarmament deal.

KELI Al Jazeera's reporting that Israeli strikes in Gaza intensified immediately after the U.S.-brokered Hamas disarmament agreement went into effect. The deal was announced as a breakthrough. The strikes afterward killed dozens. The timing matters because it cuts against the public framing that the agreement was going to reduce violence. Instead, what we're seeing is escalation right after the deal was supposed to take hold. Whether that's tactical repositioning by Israeli forces or a fundamental collapse of the agreement's terms is still being reported, but the fact is the opposite of what was promised has happened in real time.

KELI Before we close, a date marker. Forty-nine years ago today, President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation that created the Department of Energy. That agency now oversees the nuclear arsenal, strategic petroleum reserves, and weapons-materials production. It grew from what was supposed to be a lean efficiency fix into something much bigger.

HAST One more — a landslide in Ethiopia killed dozens at a monastery during overnight prayer service. BBC reporting. Rocks and earth came down during the service. We'll track the death toll as it clarifies.

KELI That's the Independent News Drop. We'll be back this afternoon. From Inkwell.

KELI Before we close, something lighter from Inkwell. There's a piece asking what the Beatles songbook keeps reaching for — a world set right, meaning that holds — without pretending the band were secret prophets.

HAST An honest look, and an open door. At inkwell dot wiki, slash beatles.