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 piece from our Ground News desk — a moment when what the press covered and what actually happened drifted pretty far apart.
KELI June twentieth, twenty twenty. The president was at a rally in Tulsa. On stage, he said — and I'm quoting — "So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please." The White House came out afterward and said it was a joke. The president himself pushed back and said he doesn't kid around. Now, here's where the coverage split. Most newsrooms led the next morning with the TikTok story — the rally attendance had been inflated by TikTok users booking fake tickets. That story ran everywhere. The testing comment got reported, sure, but it lived in the shadow of the attendance piece. The structural thing that mattered: at that moment in the pandemic, testing data was driving every single public health decision in America. States were using it to decide reopenings, hospitals to allocate resources. The core admission — that the president may have deliberately suppressed that data — competed for oxygen and lost. You can track what happened next by watching whether testing numbers dropped in the weeks after that rally. That's the counter-read.
HAST Staying overseas. Hungary's prime minister Peter Magyar has given the country's president until today — that's right now — to resign. Magyar came to power in April and has been moving quickly to reshape the government. The president, Tamas Sulyok, was expected to step down this morning. This continues a broader power struggle in Budapest between competing visions of how the country should move forward.
KELI Different continent. Ethiopia's government has suspended voting in parts of the country due to security concerns. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's party is widely expected to dominate the election overall, but active conflicts in several regions have made polling impossible in those areas. The vote itself has been overshadowed by ongoing instability.
HAST And back stateside — the Intercept obtained a law enforcement document showing that police in multiple jurisdictions have been scanning social media specifically looking for posts critical of artificial intelligence data centers. The document suggests an organized effort to monitor and flag people opposed to the buildout of these facilities. It's a new wrinkle in the broader conversation about surveillance and how it gets deployed against particular kinds of speech.
KELI One date marker before we close. Fifty-four years ago today, in nineteen sixty-one, the South African Constitution became effective, formally creating the Republic of South Africa and removing the country from Commonwealth membership — a constitutional moment that would hold until the end of apartheid in nineteen ninety-four.
HAST That's the Independent News Drop. We'll be back this evening. From Inkwell.