Independent News Drop

KELI From Inkwell, this is the Independent News Drop. It's Wednesday, August 12. I'm Keli, with Hast.

KELI We'll start in the sky. Millions of people across Europe stepped outside this evening to watch a solar eclipse, with the path of totality cutting through Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. The images coming out of the event are striking — full darkness at sunset, crowds gathered in open fields and city squares.

HAST And one person planned for it specifically. Spanish Olympic skateboarder Danny León timed a jump to land at the exact moment the moon passed in front of the sun. It was captured on video. That's the whole story, and it's a good one.

KELI Now to Washington. President Trump announced Wednesday that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt will leave her role to spend more time with her family following the birth of her second child in May. Trump posted on Truth Social calling her one of the best press secretaries in the history of the office.

HAST Hours later, former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger — who became one of Trump's more vocal critics — went on CNN and said Leavitt had done an, quote, impressive job. His specific framing was that she was skilled at denying obvious truths in a classy way. That's praise and a critique delivered in the same sentence, and Mediaite flagged it as unusual for that reason. Worth noting: the coverage of the departure itself was largely framed around Trump's tribute. Kinzinger's characterization — that the role involved systematic denial — got much less space.

KELI Also in the Senate this week, Ted Cruz posted on X promoting an episode of his podcast with the claim that COVID-19 vaccines caused an 82 percent miscarriage rate among women vaccinated early in pregnancy. Cruz wrote that Dr. Fauci and Pfizer knew the second dose carried that risk and covered it up.

HAST The 82 percent figure is not new. It comes from a years-old misreading of a preliminary vaccine safety study. That study tracked a small subset of women who received the vaccine in their first trimester and reported adverse outcomes — it was not a controlled trial and was explicitly described by its authors as incomplete. Health researchers have addressed this specific figure repeatedly. What is new this week is that text messages between Fauci, former CDC Director Walensky, and former Surgeon General Murthy from January 2021 were released. Cruz's post connects the texts to the miscarriage claim, but those messages have not been reported to contain any reference to miscarriage data. The structural point: a new document release was used to relaunch an old, debunked statistic. The press largely covered the online reaction to Cruz rather than leading with the factual correction.

KELI From U.S. domestic policy to a question about the original scope of the Second Amendment. Legal scholar Jonathan Goldstein, an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, has published an analysis of the Constitution's Marque and Reprisal Clause — the provision allowing Congress to authorize private citizens to wage war at sea. His argument is that at the founding, private citizens could and did own cannon and warships, which he presents as evidence against the claim that heavy arms were always restricted to the state.

HAST The piece ran in Reason, which has a right lean, so the framing is in favor of broad private arms rights. The factual core is narrower: cannon were not federally restricted until the 1968 revision of the National Firearms Act, which added destructive devices to the registration requirement. Former President Biden said in 2022 that you couldn't buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed. Goldstein's research says that's historically incorrect. Whether that has implications for current law is a separate question the analysis doesn't fully resolve.

KELI Finally, two international stories that deserve direct attention. In Zimbabwe, a new land policy is reopening disputes over farms that were seized during the country's land reform program beginning around 2000. Al Jazeera reports the policy is creating a new chapter of contested ownership claims, decades after the original seizures.

HAST The structural fact that coverage of Zimbabwe's land reform often skips: the original seizures displaced a significant number of white commercial farmers, but the land that followed did not uniformly reach Black subsistence farmers as intended. Much of it was redistributed to politically connected individuals. The new policy is being debated inside that unresolved history, not separate from it.

KELI And the WHO director said Wednesday that the current Ebola outbreak — declared on May 15 — is on track to be the deadliest ever recorded. More than 2,000 deaths have been confirmed, with thousands more cases reported.

HAST Two thousand deaths in under three months places this outbreak ahead of the pace of the 2014 to 2016 West Africa outbreak, which killed just over 11,000 people and remains the largest on record. The WHO chief's warning is not a projection — it's a description of the current trajectory if containment does not improve. That distinction matters.

KELI That's the drop for Wednesday, August 12. From Inkwell, I'm Keli.

HAST And I'm Hast. We'll be back tomorrow.

KELI Before we close, a word from Inkwell. There's an essay at Gil's Intelligent Version on what actually happened in 1914 — and how a real historical instinct curdled into false certainty the moment someone tried to measure it to the inch.

HAST It's called The Witness and the Ruler. At inkwell dot wiki, slash giv.