| | | | | | | Presented By BlackRock® | | | | Axios AM | | By Mike Allen · Jul 10, 2022 | | 🧀 Good Sunday morning and happy birthweekend to Joan VandeHei — the toast of Lambeau Land. - Smart Brevity™ count: 1,196 words ... 4½ mins. Edited by Jennifer Koons.
| | | | | | 1 big thing: How "red flag" laws can work |  | | | Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios | | | | "Red flag" laws — which allow judges to confiscate guns from people who threaten violence — tend to be toothless unless they have a local champion — a sheriff, district attorney or other authority figure who makes it their business to teach people to use them. - Why it matters: Incentivizing states to implement red flag laws is a centerpiece of the gun bill President Biden signed last month, Axios' Jennifer A. Kingson writes.
What's happening: 19 states + D.C. have such laws, which enable law enforcement, family members and school officials to petition courts to remove firearms from people who show homicidal or suicidal signs. - Such laws in Illinois and New York didn't prevent the mass shootings in Highland Park and Buffalo.
- But research shows that when police officers, educators, and community leaders are encouraged to use these laws and trained in their nuances, more court orders are filed that keep firearms away from potentially dangerous people.
💡 Lessons learned: In the early days of California's law, which took effect in 2016, it "wasn't being used unless there was a local champion or someone who was in a position of influence who was saying, 'Here is this law, it's on the books, let's start using it,'" said Veronica Pear, a professor at U.C. Davis who published a recent study about the law's efficacy. - From 2016 to 2019, at least 58 Californians who threatened mass shootings had guns confiscated because of gun-violence restraining orders, Pear found.
🔭 Zoom out: Red flag laws are considered a nascent policy tool in the broader field of "behavioral threat assessment" — the practice of evaluating and intervening when people show disturbing signs. - Illinois and Connecticut are among the states requiring schools to conduct behavioral threat assessments.
Share this story. |     | | | | | | 2. 💰 Dem donors flock to Liz Cheney | | Rep. Liz Cheney talks to Cassidy Hutchinson on June 28. Photo; Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters Jeffrey Katzenberg and other top Democratic donors are backing House Jan. 6 committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) in her tough GOP primary on Aug. 16, the N.Y. Times' Kate Kelly and Maggie Haberman report (subscription). - Why it matters: Many of her Democratic and independent donors are "profoundly out of step" with Cheney on many issues. But they've "been impressed by her courage in opposing the former president ... and standing up for the peaceful transfer of power."
Dmitri Mehlhorn — a political strategist who advises LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor — told The Times: - "Cheney is the most important politician in America right now."
| | | | | | | | 3. 🔮 Danger of "default cascade" | | Demonstrators inside the President's House in Colombo, Sri Lanka, yesterday. Photo: Jinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters In South Asia, Sri Lankans roamed through a ransacked presidential palace today, after protesters stormed the building and forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to announce his resignation, Reuters reports. - The political chaos worsens Sri Lanka's economic crisis, which has stalled imports of fuel, food and medicine.
Threat level: Sri Lanka stopped paying foreign bondholders this year. Then Russia missed a big debt deadline. Now a "quarter-trillion dollar pile of distressed debt is threatening to drag the developing world into a historic cascade of defaults," Bloomberg reports. - "Now, focus is turning to El Salvador, Ghana, Egypt, Tunisia and Pakistan — nations ... vulnerable to default."
| | | | | | | | A message from BlackRock® | | Invested in the future of first responders | | |  | | | | We're proud to manage the pensions of those who serve others. All across the country, we're helping Americans invest for their future. Meet Joshua, one of the hundreds of thousands of first responders whose retirement plan assets are managed by BlackRock. Learn more. | | | | | | 4. 📷 1,000 words | | Photo: Paul Faith/AFP via Getty Images This 198-foot tower of pallets is being stacked in Larne, Northern Ireland, in an effort to set a world bonfire record (previous record: 286 pallets high) during tomorrow's Eleventh Night celebration. | | | | | | | | 5. 🛣️ Novel HOV defense | | A pregnant woman from Plano, Texas, got a ticket for driving alone in an HOV lane — and plans to fight it by arguing her unborn baby counts as a passenger, reports the NBC affiliate in Dallas. - Brandy Bottone was driving alone on an expressway when she was stopped at a sheriff's checkpoint targeting HOV violators.
"He starts peeking around," she told the station. "He's like, 'Is it just you?' And I said, 'No there's two of us ... Right here,'" she recalled, pointing to her stomach. "I said: 'Well, not trying to throw a political mix here, but with everything going on [end of Roe], this counts as a baby.'" - She got the $275 ticket. Her court date is July 20 — around her due date.
🧠 Reality check via the WashPost: While the state's penal code recognizes a fetus as a person, the Texas Transportation Code doesn't. | | | | | | | | 6. 🥊 Sentence of the day | | Warner Bros. Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav stopped to talk to the media as he arrived at the Sun Valley conference Tuesday. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Allen & Co.'s annual media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, "is typically covered like an athleisure version of the Met Gala, with photographers capturing the arrivals of fleece-vested media moguls, and reporters making note of power-lunches at the Konditorei café," Reuters reports. - Keep reading ... "Mars, birth rates, but no Twitter: Elon Musk captivates Sun Valley moguls."
Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Above: Warren Buffett, 91, gets a ride in Sun Valley on Wednesday. | | | | | | | | 7. 💈 Remembering Vernon Winfrey | | 1987 photo: Mark Humphrey/AP Oprah Winfrey announced on Instagram that her father, Vernon, died Friday in Nashville at 89. - "[W]ith family surrounding his bedside, I had the sacred honor of witnessing the man responsible for my life, take his last breath. We could feel Peace enter the room at his passing," she told her 21 million followers.
Earlier in the week, Oprah, 68, surprised him with a Fourth of July BBQ in Nashville. "Vernon Winfrey Appreciation Day" included a barber chair — he owned his own shop in Nashville for 50 years. - "Less than a week ago we honored my father in his own backyard," she wrote. "My friend and gospel singer Wintley Phipps saluted him with song. He FELT the love and reveled in it until he could no longer speak. ... That Peace still abides. All is well."
Backstory: Vernon Winfrey was a member of Nashville's Metro City Council for 16 years and a Tennessee State University trustee, AP reports. - Oprah spent her early childhood at her father's hometown of Kosciusko, Miss., and in Milwaukee with her mother, Vernita Lee, who died in 2018. Oprah also lived with her father in Nashville, between the ages of 7 and 9 and during her teens.
"I was smart and my mother, because she didn't have the time for me, I think, tried to stifle it," Winfrey told the WashPost in 1986. - "If I hadn't been sent to my father [when I was 14], I would have gone in another direction. I could have made a good criminal. I would have used these same instincts differently."
Read the 1986 article, "The Man Who Saved Oprah Winfrey." | | | | | | | | 8. 🕶️ 1 for the road: Handshakes are back |  | | | Illustration: Gabriella Turrisi/Axios | | | | Contrary to speculation at the onset of COVID, the ancient greeting — handshakes — have returned, Axios Closer co-author Hope King writes. - Hope has attended events over the past two months in L.A., Austin, D.C. and Cannes, France.
Why handshakes matter: A handshake gives a sense of the person behind the hand. Hope's right hand was still throbbing hours after being painfully squeezed by someone she met for the first time at an event this week. She writes: The message I received in the two to three seconds (along with a strong, locked gaze) seemed to be: I'm in control and you probably don't want to mess with me. The bottom line: We can't replicate what we learn from human touch. Share this story. | | | | | | | | A message from BlackRock® | | Invested in the future of communities | | |  | | | | At BlackRock, we are serving the communities that help the country thrive. We are proud to invest in the projects that build our economy, with $20 billion in U.S. roads, bridges and transportation invested on behalf of our clients. Learn more. | | | | 📬 Invite your friends to sign up here for their daily essentials — Axios AM, PM and Finish Line. |  | | Are you a fan of this email format? It's called Smart Brevity®. Over 300 orgs use it — in a tool called Axios HQ — to drive productivity with clearer workplace communications. | | | |
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