Second Amendment News: The man charged in the Atlanta-area massage parlor killings was able to legally buy his gun and use it the same day.

  Hours before the shootings, 21-year-old Robert Long bought a 9 millimeter pistol from Big Woods Goods, a gun shop in suburban Atlanta, according to a lawyer for the store. In Georgia, if you pass the background check, you can buy a gun and walk out of the store with it.

  Long was arrested Wednesday about 150 miles south of Atlanta. The police said Long told them he had been on his way to Florida, where he planned to shoot up a business tied to the pornography industry.

  Although six of the eight people killed were Asian women, investigators so far say that Long tells them he was addicted to sex and was attacking the sex industry, not Asians. CNN  reports that Long checked into a rehab facility for sex addiction in 2019. 

  The NY Times cites a former roommate who said Long had a “religious mania” yet frequented massage parlors that may also have offered a happy ending.

  Critics of police reports say it’s impossible to kill six Asian people without it being a hate crime. Over the past year as Donald Trump has blamed the pandemic on the “China virus,” there’s been a dramatic increase in hate crimes against Asians. Nearly 3,800 incidents targeting Asian-Americans have been reported since last March, according to an organization called Stop AAPI Hate. 

  The organization says Asian Americans have reported being slashed across the face, burned with chemicals, punched, and thrown to the ground.

Viral News: Despite reports of blood clots in recipients, the European Union’s drug regulator said the AstraZeneca covid vaccine is safe just as the US announced it is sending millions of doses of it to Mexico and Canada.

  Here in the US, the pace of vaccinations is rapidly increasing and the administration is pushing to go even faster. President Biden said the US was a day away from his goal of 100 million shots in 100 days, putting the effort six weeks ahead of his goal. “We’re way ahead of schedule,” Biden said at the White House, “but we have a long way to go.”

  So far, just this month, nearly 24,000 Americans have died of Covid-19.

China Syndrome: Things got direct at the first high-level talks between US and Chinese officials under the Biden administration in Alaska.

  Chinese officials accused the US of inciting countries “to attack China”, while the US said China had “arrived intent on grandstanding”. Relations between the two superpowers are at their most strained for years. The Chinese are pushing back at the US in the belief that America doesn’t wield the global power it once did. The Chinese feel more confident eliminating human rights in Hong Kong and pushing their territorial disputes with India, Japan, and other countries in the South China Sea.

 A US official said private talks following the open meeting were “substantive, serious and direct,” which in diplomatic understatement sometime means people were shouting. 

The Spin Rack: The House yesterday passed a bill that would grant a path to citizenship for 4 million illegal immigrants, including farm workers and the so-called “Dreamers” brought here as children,. The Republicans have vowed to fight it. — Police yesterday arrested a 31-year-old Texas man on gun charges near Vice President Kamala Harris’s official residence. The police report says Paul Murray of San Antonio had was in possession of an “AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, 113 rounds of unregistered ammunition, and five 30 round magazines” in the trunk of his car. 

The Obit Page: Steven Spurrier, the Brit who owned a wine shop in Paris and set up the famous wine tasting known as the “Judgment of Paris,” has died at age 77.

  Back when California wines were dismissed by the French, Spurrier set up a blind tasting of 10 reds and 10 whites, including some that were considered France’s best.  Both the reds and whites included six each from California, but all nine judges were French.

  In a sign of what was to come, one of the judges, as he tasted a French red, said, “This is definitely California. It has no nose.”

  The judges’ decision turned wine snobbery on its head. The judges’ favorites were a 1973 chardonnay from Chateau Montelena, and a 1973 cabernet sauvignon from Stag’s Leap Cellars, both Californian. The 2008 movie “Bottle Shock” replayed the drama of the tasting.

  Spurrier, had family money that kept him afloat in a career of ups and downs in the wine business, but he knew wine, and the French He told The NY Times  in 1977, “There is a myth about Frenchmen, that they know all about wine simply because they grew up drinking it. In fact, most Frenchmen don’t know anything about wine. They don’t really care. They care about food.”

Woke Up: In the new unforgiving “woke” world of cancel culture, rising journalist Alexi McCammond resigned her new position as editor of Teen Vogue in an uproar over things she posted on Twitter when she was a teenager. 

  McCammond , who is black, tweeted in 2011 “Now googling how to not wake up with swollen, asian eyes…” 

  Another said, “Give me a 2/10 on my chem problem, cross out all of my work and don’t explain what i did wrong…thanks a lot stupid asian T.A. you’re great.” 

  The tweets were shared in a now-viral Instagram post by Diana Tsui, an editor at the website The Infatuation, who wrote: “I’m tired of big media organizations pretending to give a damn about diversity and inclusion.”

  But in the new world, you can’t be forgiven for being a teenager. In announcing her resignation, McCammond tweeted, “I hope to have the opportunity to re-join the ranks of tireless journalists who are shining light on the issues that matter every day.”

  She’s 27 and her career might be over.

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