KELI From Inkwell, this is the Independent News Drop. It's Monday, May twenty-fifth. The time is four p.m. Central. I'm Keli, with Hast.
HAST Good afternoon. We're leading with something from our Ground News desk — a moment from early pandemic that didn't get the coverage it deserved.
KELI March twentieth, twenty-twenty. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who ran the CIA before his cabinet post, was at a White House briefing. He said, quote, "We're in a live exercise here. To get this right." The president was standing right there. Trump's immediate response: "You should have let us know." That exchange happened on camera, on the record. But here's what the press did with it. Every major outlet ran the story as "Pompeo Pressures China on COVID Data." Not one front page covered what the ex-intelligence chief actually said, or what the president said back. The phrase "live exercise" — from the man who had access to the most classified information in the government — got treated like a verbal slip, a tic. It wasn't investigated as a structural question.
HAST What's the structural reality underneath?
KELI When a senior official uses a term like that publicly and the sitting president says he wasn't informed, there are two possible framings. One: it was imprecise language and nothing more. Two: there's a gap between what intelligence and state were telling the president in real time versus what he was hearing. The press chose not to report the second possibility at all. It went straight to the China angle because that fit existing narratives. Watch the coming hours and days — you'll see how outlets handle statements from cabinet officials that don't fit the main story line. That's the pattern.
HAST Staying with conflict overseas. Israel carried out new attacks on multiple villages in southern Lebanon today, killing at least three people. The strikes came as Israeli forces issued additional displacement orders to civilians in the region. This continues weeks of cross-border fire and escalating military pressure along that border.
KELI On a different front, the U.S. military announced strikes against Iranian positions this afternoon. The timing is notable — just hours after President Trump said negotiations are moving forward on a potential deal to end the war, and that more countries should normalize ties with Israel as part of any agreement with Iran. So there's military action happening while diplomatic language is being floated. That gap between what's said in the negotiation room and what's happening on the ground is something to keep an eye on.
HAST More than a million and a half Muslim pilgrims have begun the hajj in Saudi Arabia this week. The BBC reports that's about eleven thousand more than made the journey last year. The increase comes despite concerns about regional instability and the ongoing wars in the Middle East. Security has been heightened across Mecca and surrounding areas.
KELI Different scale entirely. Japan's tobacco regulation is getting attention stateside. A piece in Reason magazine notes that Japan's smoking bans work differently than America's — business owners decide whether to allow smoking in their establishments, and customers choose whether to go there. It's a market-based approach rather than a blanket prohibition, and it's raising questions about how other democracies handle regulation versus consumer choice.
HAST On the biotech side, regulatory advisers in Europe and the U.S. are split over an AstraZeneca breast cancer drug. STAT News reports that a competitor from Merck-Kelun is outperforming in trials. It's a window into how approvals process differently across regions, and how trial results are reshaping the landscape for cancer treatments this year.
KELI Before we close, one date marker. On this day in nineteen eighty-five, a tropical cyclone and storm surge hit Bangladesh, killing approximately ten thousand people.
HAST That's the Independent News Drop. We'll be back this evening. From Inkwell.