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 Morning. We're leading with a structural story — something the press covered in pieces but never quite assembled. Then we'll move to elections in Ethiopia, data center expansion in the U.S., and developments overseas.
KELI From our Ground News desk: during the pandemic, the FDA had a legal requirement. Before authorizing any vaccine under an emergency use authorization, the agency had to find that no adequate approved alternatives existed. That's statutory. At the same time, the National Institutes of Health held co-inventorship patents on the Moderna mRNA platform. Moderna later settled with NIH for four hundred million dollars. NIAID — that's the infectious disease arm — received six hundred ninety million in royalties during the pandemic years. Those are the facts. Here's where the assembly matters: a senior adviser to Dr. Fauci, David Morens, wrote in an email that he tried to communicate via Gmail because his NIH email was FOIA'd. Quote: "I can't be FOIA'd on my personal email." The press reported each of these items separately — the royalties, the patent stake, the email routing. What it didn't do was ask what the structural incentive looked like when you put them together. Watch for this in the coming weeks: as more FOIA releases land, look for whether new coverage connects the financial interest to the legal finding, or keeps reporting them as separate stories.
HAST Staying with elections now. Ethiopia is voting today, and it's the first nationwide poll since conflict fractured the country. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's party is expected to dominate, but large areas of the country won't participate — some can't because of ongoing fighting, others because opposition groups are boycotting. Abiy's had his share of criticism for the conduct of elections in the past. The international observer presence is thinner than it was in 2015. This is a continuing story we've tracked — the backdrop is years of civil war.
KELI Different front: from Utah to Georgia, communities are pushing back on artificial intelligence data centers before they're built. The resistance started as local zoning fights, but it's moved into state legislatures now. Moratoriums on new data centers are gaining traction in places where power grids are already stressed or water tables are at risk. Companies are racing to get infrastructure sited before the opposition organizes at the statewide level. We'll track how many states pass moratoriums in the next session.
HAST The French Navy has seized a Russian oil tanker in the Mediterranean. The vessel was suspected of circumventing European Union sanctions. It's one of several enforcement actions Europe's been taking against Russian shipping that tries to mask its origins or move through European waters.
KELI Before we close, a history note.
HAST On this day in 2017, a car bomb detonated near the German embassy in Kabul during rush hour, killing over ninety people and injuring four hundred sixty-three.
KELI That's the Independent News Drop. We'll be back this evening. From Inkwell.