| | | | | | | Presented By Google | | | | Axios AM | | By Mike Allen · May 15, 2022 | | Good Sunday morning. Smart Brevity™ count: 1,064 words ... 4 mins. Edited by Jennifer Koons. 🇫🇮 Situational awareness: Finland, which shares a long border with Russia, today formally announced intent to apply for NATO membership. Go deeper. | | | | | | 1 big thing: Biden's anti-trust play |  | | | Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios | | | | As Congress speeds toward midterms, prospects for new tech rules are fading. But President Biden could still rock Silicon Valley: - His Federal Trade Commission plans an array of new fights with Big Tech, Axios' Margaret Harding McGill and Ashley Gold report.
What's happening: The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Georgetown professor Alvaro Bedoya to the FTC. - That gives the agency's chair — antitrust crusader Lina Khan — the majority she needs to pursue a broad crackdown on tech giants.
Khan will likely be running the FTC at least until the end of 2024, regardless of how much juice Democrats lose in midterms. - Here's what insiders expect her to pursue now that she has three Democratic votes on the five-member commission:
1. New privacy and competition rules. As part of an executive order on competition last summer, Biden told the FTC to write rules on data and surveillance, and barring unfair methods of competition on internet marketplaces. - Khan now has the votes to propose new rules on unfair competition, children's privacy, consumer privacy and the use of data.
2. Aggressive enforcement on deals. The same executive order said the FTC has the power to challenge prior mergers. 3. More stringent guidelines on mergers. The administration called on the FTC to scrutinize mergers and acquisitions by dominant internet platforms, especially when buying smaller rivals. - Separately, the FTC and Justice Department are drawing up new merger guidelines, which could change the way businesses approach acquisitions.
Share this story. |     | | | | | | 2. Hate crime in Buffalo | | People hug after the shooting yesterday in Buffalo, N.Y. Photo: Joshua Bessex/AP In what authorities call "racially motivated violent extremism," a white 18-year-old — wearing military gear, and livestreaming with a helmet cam — killed 10 people and wounded three others with a rifle at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo. - Police said he surrendered — and was charged with first-degree murder — after shooting 11 Black and two white people during a rampage he broadcast on streaming platform Twitch, AP reports.
- The suspect is from Conklin, N.Y., 200 miles southeast of Buffalo. It wasn't clear why he traveled to Buffalo. The supermarket is in a predominantly Black neighborhood.
Zoom out: The massacre sent shockwaves through an unsettled nation gripped with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes. - On Friday, Dallas police said they were investigating a series of shootings in Koreatown as hate crimes.
President Biden said in a statement: "Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America." Context, from last year: Axios' Dan Primack and Russell Contreras, "A racist conspiracy theory goes mainstream." | | | | | | | | 3. 🌹 1 million lost, 1 dot at a time | | Map: Jeremy White/The New York Times. Used by kind permission Each dot on this stunning map — running across the front and back pages of the front section of today's New York Times — represents one person who died of COVID, as the U.S. approaches 1 million lost. 💡 Axios visual, months in the making: The scale of America's loss. | | | | | | | | A message from Google | | Making sign-in safer with two-step verification | | |  | | | | Adding two-step verification to your account is the best thing you can do to help prevent cyber attacks. That's why Google has made it easy to sign into your account with this additional layer of protection. Just one tap and you're in. Learn more. | | | | | | 4. 📷 1,000 words | | Photo: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AP Tens of thousands of abortion-rights demonstrators rallied across the country yesterday — in Washington and New York ... from Pittsburgh to L.A. ... and Nashville to Lubbock, Texas. Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images A counter-protester. Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images Abortion-rights supporters march over the Brooklyn Bridge with big heads of justices. | | | | | | | | 5. 🧠 Axios explains: How late each state allows abortion |  Data: Guttmacher Institute, Axios research. Cartogram: Kavya Beheraj/Axios Abortion at later stages in pregnancy is still legal in most states. That's expected to change if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, Axios' Oriana Gonzalez reports. - If Roe is struck down, states would be allowed to regulate abortion individually — or even ban it — before viability, the point when a fetus can survive outside the womb.
- Under Roe, states have the authority to regulate abortion after viability — generally considered to be between 24 to 28 weeks after a patient's last menstrual period.
Interactive map: See the law and exceptions for each state. | | | | | | | | 6. ✝️ Read of the week: How politics poisoned the evangelical church | | One of Tim Alberta's subjects is Pastor Greg Locke (left) of Global Vision Bible Church In Mt. Juliet, Tenn., shown during a baptism in March. Photo: William DeShazer for The Washington Post via Getty Images "I've heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace," The Atlantic's Tim Alberta writes in a tour de force that runs 15 pages in the magazine's June issue. - "And, far from feeling misplaced, these conversations draw legitimacy from a sense of divine justice. The Church is not a victim of America's civic strife. Instead, it is one of the principal catalysts."
Alberta's dad was senior pastor of an evangelical church in Michigan. - "I've spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It's heartbreaking," he writes.
- "Evangelicals — including my own father — became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ."
"To many evangelicals today," Alberta continues, "the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs": How did this happen? For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life. Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation's demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement — the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another. The bottom line: "Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control." | | | | | | | | 7. 🐦 Tweet du jour |  | | | Via Twitter | | | | | | | | | | 8. 🎵 1 song thing: Ukraine wins global contest | | Photo: Yara Nardi/Reuters Ukraine's Kalush Orchestra rode a wave of public support to win the Eurovision Song Contest in Turin, Italy, last night with "Stefania," Reuters reports. - Why it matters: The 40-nation contest, staged by the European Broadcasting Union, last year drew a global TV audience of more than 180 million.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an online message: "Our courage impresses the world, our music conquers Europe! Next year Ukraine will host the Eurovision Song Contest." The winning song, in Ukrainian, fuses rap with traditional folk music. - It was a prewar tribute to the mother of band frontman Oleh Psiuk.
Since the invasion, it has become an anthem to the motherland, with lyrics that pledge: "I'll always find my way home, even if all roads are destroyed." | | | | | | | | A message from Google | | Google expands phishing protections to keep more people safe | | |  | | | | To counter the rise in phishing attempts in collaborative working tools, Google is expanding its proven AI-powered phishing protections to Google Workspace. You are automatically alerted if the doc you're working in contains a suspicious link, and are taken back to safety. Learn more. | | | | 📬 Invite your friends to sign up here to get their daily essentials — Axios AM, PM and Finish Line. |  | It's called Smart Brevity®. Over 200 orgs use it — in a tool called Axios HQ — to drive productivity with clearer workplace communications. | | | |
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