KELI From Inkwell, this is the Independent News Drop. It's Thursday, May twenty-eighth. The time is six a.m. central. I'm Keli, with Hast.
HAST Morning. We're leading with a structural story — how a legal requirement, a patent portfolio, and fragmented reporting converged during the pandemic.
KELI From our Ground News desk: during the emergency authorization process for COVID vaccines, the FDA's statute required a specific finding — that no adequate approved alternatives existed. That's the law. What didn't get assembled in the press coverage: 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 alone collected six hundred ninety million in royalties during the pandemic. And separately — separately — it became public that one of Fauci's senior advisers, David Morens, routed communications through personal Gmail accounts to avoid FOIA requests. Each fact appeared in reporting. The structure connecting them — the legal requirement, the patent holdings, the royalty stream, the communication opacity — that's what the press covered piecemeal, never whole. The listener can track this by watching whether any major newsroom now addresses all four elements in a single story. If they don't, you're still seeing the fragments.
HAST Staying stateside — Louisiana. The state legislature has approved a new congressional map that eliminates a majority-Black district, and this follows an April Supreme Court ruling that gave states more latitude here. You may have heard about this fight already.
KELI Right. The Black voting-rights groups sued, saying the redistricting dilutes their representation. The state argued the new map complies with the Court's decision. What's moving this morning is the legislative vote itself — it passed. So the map now goes forward barring another legal challenge.
HAST Different scale, but also about governance. Ghana's parliament has passed a bill that criminializes same-sex conduct. People identified as gay, lesbian, or transgender face jail time under the new law. Ghana's courts will weigh it next, but the legislative passage signals where the country's political center sits on this question right now.
KELI Abroad again — Spain. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is in a deeper fight for political survival. Corruption probes involving his party colleagues and his wife have mounted over recent weeks. He's been in office eight years. The question now is whether the scandals force him toward resignation or whether he can hold his coalition together long enough to outlast them. This is a live-moving story with no certain endpoint yet.
HAST One date marker. On this day in twenty-seventeen, Takuma Sato won the Indianapolis Five Hundred, becoming the first Japanese and Asian driver to claim the race. Fernando Alonso, a double world champion trying the Indy Five Hundred for the first time, retired with engine trouble.
KELI That's the Independent News Drop. We'll be back this evening. From Inkwell.