Independent News Drop

KELI From Inkwell, this is the Independent News Drop. It's Thursday, August 20. I'm Keli, with Hast.

KELI We start with a domestic governance story. President Trump posted on Truth Social in July that Washington D.C. went from, quote, high crime to no crime, and credited his deployment of the National Guard. A Reuters investigation and accompanying data tell a different story. Crime in D.C. had already fallen 29 percent before the Guard arrived. In the year since deployment, Guard activity was concentrated near the city's core. Court records show no reference to Guard troops assisting law enforcement in the neighborhoods where nearly 82 percent of the city's murders have occurred over the past five years. Soldiers were more frequently mentioned in arrest records in higher-income areas. The Pentagon has plans to keep at least 2,500 troops in the city through 2029.

HAST The structural point the coverage mostly skips: the pre-existing crime trend does the work the administration is attributing to the deployment. The Guard's footprint and the city's homicide geography don't overlap in any way the data can confirm. That's not an argument against the deployment; it's just what the record shows.

KELI In a federal courtroom in New York, a lawsuit brought by Mohamed Abdou, a visiting professor at Columbia University for the spring 2024 term, has been dismissed. Abdou, a North African-Egyptian Muslim scholar in Cultural Studies, alleged discrimination and a hostile work environment. His employment ended May 31, 2024. The suit stemmed in part from a congressional hearing on April 17, 2024, at which then-Columbia president Minouche Shafik testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. During that hearing, Representative Elise Stefanik referenced pro-Palestinian social media posts, some attributed to Abdou. The judge, Kathleen Waterman-Marshall, wrote in her ruling that Abdou provided no authority standing for the proposition that expressing disapproval of a foreign terrorist organization in a congressional hearing amounts to discrimination or creates a hostile work environment. An appeal is described as imminent.

HAST Two things to separate here. First, what the court actually ruled on: not whether the statements were fair or accurate, but whether the legal threshold for a hostile work environment claim was met. The judge said it wasn't. Second, the phrase Abdou used publicly, that he was with Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad but up to a point, is on the record. Whether that phrase was fairly characterized in testimony is a separate question the ruling doesn't resolve.

KELI Staying in the courts. The Tennessee Supreme Court last week declined to review a Tennessee Court of Appeals ruling, allowing it to take effect. The case concerns the writings of the Covenant School shooter, who killed six people in Nashville in 2023 and was killed by responding officers. The shooter's parents inherited the copyright interest in the shooter's writings, including a manifesto. They assigned that interest to a trust held for the benefit of victims' children and argued that copyright law protected the writings from public release. A trial court agreed. The Court of Appeals reversed. The Tennessee Supreme Court has now let that reversal stand.

HAST The legal question that actually got resolved here is narrow: copyright law, in this instance, does not provide a mechanism to block the release of the documents. The court did not rule on whether release is wise or harmful. That distinction matters because the coverage has often conflated the legal question with the policy debate about whether the manifesto should be public at all.

KELI The Department of Justice put California on formal notice last week that two state women's prisons have likely violated the Constitution. A Civil Rights Division report dated August 13 documents what it calls an unbroken pattern of often violent sexual misconduct by staff against prisoners from 2000 through 2024, continuing to the present, at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla and the California Institution for Women in Chino. The report found that although the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation repeatedly substantiated allegations of sexual abuse by correctional officers, officials failed to take meaningful corrective action across that entire span.

HAST The timeline is the story. This is not a newly discovered problem. The state's own disciplinary process was substantiating these allegations for more than two decades. The DOJ finding doesn't introduce new facts so much as attach federal constitutional weight to a record California had already been building against itself.

KELI To Bangladesh. The country's parliament has elected Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir as president, filling a vacancy left by the resignation of Mohammed Shahabuddin. Alamgir is a veteran of the ruling party establishment.

HAST Not much detail in the available reporting beyond the electoral fact. Worth noting that Bangladesh has had significant political turbulence around its leadership transitions in recent years, so the vacancy itself carries context the headline doesn't explain.

KELI A policy and economics story. Proposed wealth taxes targeting billionaires run into a structural problem: many entrepreneurs with very high net worths hold most of that value in illiquid equity, shares in private or early-stage companies that have no ready market. The question the tax design has to answer is who lends a hundred million dollars against stock that may or may not be worth anything when it finally liquidates.

HAST This is a design problem, not a values argument. You can support or oppose a wealth tax on any number of grounds. But the mechanism question, how you convert a paper valuation into a tax payment without either forcing an asset sale or creating a loan market the government has to backstop, is a genuine unsolved engineering problem in every version of the proposal that has been put forward so far.

KELI Finally, former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard posted a video Thursday disclosing that her husband Abraham Williams was diagnosed earlier this year with a very rare form of bone cancer. Gabbard described the period as challenging and said she and her husband made the video in response to widespread public outreach. She described his recovery as ongoing.

HAST No policy dimension here. We note it because Gabbard remains a public official in the national security orbit, and the disclosure is on the record.

KELI That's the drop for Thursday, August 20. From Inkwell, I'm Keli.

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

KELI Before we close, a word from Inkwell. Over at Gil's Intelligent Version there's a piece on what the original words of scripture actually say about the Trinity — before any translation decided for us.

HAST Six words, examined in Hebrew and Greek. It's at inkwell dot wiki, slash trinity.