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| Presented By The Boeing Company |
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| Axios AM |
| By Mike Allen · May 17, 2022 |
| 🗳️ Hello, Tuesday. It's primary day in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, Idaho and Oregon. What to watch ... Testing Trump. - Smart Brevity™ count: 1,198 words ... 4½ mins. Edited by Zachary Basu.
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| 1 big thing: Guns, terrorism & Congress |
| A memorial near the scene of the Buffalo shooting. Photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters Congress is jump-starting legislation on domestic terrorism and guns after the attack in Buffalo on Saturday, Axios' Andrew Solender reports. - The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, put on ice last month amid objections from progressive lawmakers, will be taken up today by the House Rules Committee. The panel's chair, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), told Axios: "[I]t takes on an urgency given current events."
- Speaker Pelosi, asked about the status of the legislation, told reporters: "It's in play." In a statement this weekend about the mass shooting, she said: "[T]he House will continue to consider additional measures to strengthen efforts to combat domestic terrorism."
The bill would create offices within the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the FBI focused on domestic terrorism. - Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), some other progressives and groups including the ACLU voiced objections last month. They said they were concerned about government surveillance of civil rights activists and left-wing groups. Bush indicated yesterday that many of her concerns have been smoothed over in negotiations since.
- The bill's 207 co-sponsors include three moderate Republicans. But every Republican on the House Judiciary Committee voted against advancing it last month.
Sen Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) told Politico and CNN he thinks the Senate should act on his bill with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) to expand gun background checks, introduced after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. - "I think that would be the least offensive thing," he said. "If you can't pass Manchin-Toomey, how are you going to get enough votes for anything?"
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| 2. Plot simmered for months |
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| Celestine Chaney. Photo: Charon Reed via AP |
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| Celestine Chaney, 65 — among those killed in Buffalo on Saturday — needed shortcake to go with some strawberries she had sliced. - Her older sister, JoAnn Daniels, 74, who was shopping with her at Tops, recalled that the two giggled as they filled the cart. Celestine Chaney decided to also make shrimp salad. She checked out roast beef, complained about the price of rolls, picked out chicken legs.
The attack had been plotted for months. The white gunman accused of massacring 10 Black people wrote as far back as November about staging a livestreamed attack on African Americans, AP reports. - He practiced shooting from his car and traveled hours from his home in March to scout out the Tops supermarket, according to diary entries on the chat platform Discord, now being examined by the FBI.
The diary's author posted hand-drawn maps of Tops, along with tallies of the number of Black people he counted. He said a Black security guard at the store confronted him. A Black security guard was among the dead. - Go deeper: Why assailants livestream their crimes, by Axios' Sara Fischer and Ina Fried.
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| 3. 🐦 The Twitter quitter |
| Elon Musk tweeted at 3:32 a.m. ET that his bid to buy Twitter "cannot move forward" unless CEO Parag Agrawal provides proof for his estimate that less than 5% of users are bots or spam accounts. - Why it matters: Analysts believe Musk is using allegations that Twitter has more bots than the company claims — which would suggest executives lied or misled the SEC — to either back out of the deal or negotiate a lower price, Axios' Sara Fischer writes.
🚨 Twitter filed an SEC statement saying that during two meetings with Twitter officials in March, Musk said he was considering various options including "starting a competitor to Twitter." |
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| A message from The Boeing Company |
| Find your purpose with Boeing |
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| Boeing supports STEM education programs like Newton Rooms and workforce development programs to inspire the next generation and create opportunities for underserved communities. Get involved: Join us today and help humanity take flight. |
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| 4. 📷 1,000 words |
| Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations via AP This drug-smuggling tunnel runs the length of six football fields between Tijuana, Mexico, and a warehouse in the San Diego area. - The Justice Department — announcing charges against six people for conspiring to distribute 1,762 pounds of cocaine — said the tunnel has reinforced walls, a rail system, electricity and ventilation.
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| 5. Charted: America v. COVID |
 Data: Johns Hopkins University. Chart: Axios Visuals The official U.S. death toll from COVID hit 1 million yesterday — equivalent to a 9/11 attack every day for 336 days. |
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| 6. 🥊 WashPost owner v. Biden |
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| Via Twitter |
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| Jeff Bezos has spent days needling President Biden on Twitter about taxes, prompting the White House to fire back by attacking Bezos' wealth. - Why it matters: Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, is showing new willingness to plunge into controversy after moving last year from Amazon CEO to executive chair.
After Biden tweeted last week that making "sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share" would help tame inflation, Bezos shot back to his 4.3 million followers: - "The newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead."
A White House response taunted: "It doesn't require a leap to figure out why one of the wealthiest individuals on Earth opposes an economic agenda for the middle class." - Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers sided with Biden.
"Look, a squirrel!" Bezos volleyed. "This is the White House's statement about my recent tweets. They understandably want to muddy the topic." - Invoking Biden's stalled social-spending package, Bezos added: "Remember the Administration tried their best to add another $3.5 TRILLION to federal spending. ... [I]f they had succeeded, inflation would be even higher than it is today."
📦 Bezos, in a separate thread, dropped the mic: "25 years ago yesterday, AMZN went public. As the Grateful Dead would say, 'What a long, strange trip it's been.' It's been far from smooth. Lots of risk-taking, lots of invention, lots of mistakes, so much we still have to do better. I wouldn't trade the ride for anything." |
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| 7. 📚 Out today: Bremmer's "biggest risk of all" |
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| Cover: Simon & Schuster |
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| Ian Bremmer writes in "The Power of Crisis," out today, that the globe's three great threats are the next pandemic ... the climate emergency ... and the unexpected impact of disruptive technologies: - "The speed of technological change is the biggest risk of all," writes Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group. "Companies are now using artificial intelligence to figure out the most efficient ways to change human behavior in ways that profit them."
- "New technologies are already changing what it means to be human."
"The lead US and Chinese tech companies are central players in the drama that will determine whether the world descends into a new Cold War or heads toward a much more hopeful future," Bremmer adds. - "No other non-state actors today or arguably in history have come close to this kind of geopolitical influence."
"We've reached a crossroads," Bremmer writes: [U]nprecedented global challenges aren't lurking somewhere in our future; they're here today. Climate change will intensify, no matter what we do ... Much of our planet is becoming hostile to life. Go deeper. |
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| 8. 🇨🇳 Stunning stat |
| A resident and child look through a barrier at a closed residential area during lockdown in Shanghai, China, last week. Photo: Aly Song/Reuters. Not a single car was sold last month in Shanghai — China's largest city and financial capital — Bloomberg reports from a Shanghai Automobile Sales Association statement. - Why it matters: "The majority of the city's 25 million residents were mostly confined to their homes or residential compounds in April as part of a sweeping lockdown to stamp out the nation's worst COVID outbreak since the virus emerged in Wuhan more than two years ago."
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| A message from The Boeing Company |
| Committed to our communities |
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| Boeing is committed to creating opportunity for underserved communities. In 2021, we contributed $44 million in support of STEM education, and continue to inspire students through our DreamLearners and FUTURE U programs. Discover more by visiting the Boeing Global Engagement Portfolio. |
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