President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris visited Atlanta Friday to mourn the six Asian women and two others killed in Tuesday’s shooting rampage. “It’s been a year of living in fear for their lives,” Biden said of Asians scapegoated by his predecessor for the pandemic. “Our silence is our complicity.” Robert Aaron Long, 21, facing eight murder counts, reportedly told police he was battling “temptation” posed by the massage parlors he’d visited. Long had gone to a Christain rehab clinic for sex addiction, and his Southern Baptist church said it was expelling him, blaming the attacks on “a depraved mind.”

Sources: NYT, Axios, NBC

2. Coming Up: Israel’s Election Hamster Wheel

“What can I do, cry?” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to how he’d handle defeat seems logical, considering Tuesday’s parliamentary poll is Israel’s fourth in two years. After the previous three, political leaders lacking sufficient support have failed to create viable governments. Now Israel’s longest-tenured leader’s fate teeters between the world’s model vaccination effort and his ongoing corruption trial. He’s promised to accept voters’ judgment, but rival Avigdor Lieberman charged that Netanyahu is planning a U.S. Capitol-style riot if he loses. The reality’s expected to be more mundane: more political deadlock, and perhaps a fifth election.

Sources: Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post, Washington Post

3. France Doesn’t Want Vaccines

Paris is in lockdown again. COVID-19 cases are surging across Europe. And yet the nation of Louis Pasteur, the French Republic that helped create anthrax and rabies vaccines, can’t adequately immunize its population. Why? Because as few as 40 percent of French citizens intend to get shots, making it the most vaccine-hesitant nation in the developed world, expressed through widespread online posts claiming the inoculations are harmful. Meanwhile, cases are going through the roof not just in Europe but in Brazil, giving pause to U.S. authorities whose hopes are fading in the face of case numbers, which had been falling, starting to inch back up.

Sources: The Atlantic, The Hill

4. Denver Jet Engine Breakup Happened Before

The images were striking: a Boeing 777 airliner engine on fire, exposed after its housing was blasted away by a broken fan blade Feb. 20. Similarly configured 777s were grounded, but the Wall Street Journal now reports that the problem wasn’t new. Another United Airlines 777 was shaken by a similar failure on its way to Hawaii in 2018, and two months later, a Southwest passenger died after a flying engine cover broke a Boeing 737’s window. Yet the Federal Aviation Administration, which says the incidents aren’t necessarily related, didn’t require additional engine inspections until the Feb. 20 incident produced the spectacular viral video.

Source: WSJ (sub)

5. Also Important …

A volcanic eruption 25 miles from Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, has halted air travel in the area. President Biden is “100 percent fine” after stumbling while climbing aboard Air Force One Friday. And Australia’s east coast is facing “life-threatening” flooding amid torrential rains.

In the Week Ahead: Today is the Persian new year, Nowruz, observed by some 300 million people from Albania to India. The Simpsons' 700th episode will air Sunday. And on Monday, a bill to grant statehood for Washington, D.C., will get a congressional hearing with presidential support.

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After a year of COVID-19, even experts can’t explain it. While the virus originated in East Asia, its devastation has been the worst in the West, observes journalist David Wallace-Wells. Some blame callous leadership in places like the U.S. and Britain, which initially treated widespread infections as inevitable, but scientists cite other contexts, like an older demographic and travel patterns. One factor though may have been devastating: anti-Asian bias that allowed authorities to initially blame China’s outbreak and reaction on backwardness and authoritarianism. Emulating Beijing, as nations from South Korea to Australia did, could have resulted in a very different reality today.

Source: NY Magazine

2. Rwanda’s Hero Becomes Its Prisoner

He’s Rwanda’s most well-known citizen. Paul Rusesabagina was immortalized in the film Hotel Rwanda for saving the lives of 1,268 people from his country’s 1994 genocide, catapulting him from Belgian taxi driver to human rights campaigner. His friend Paul Kagame, who led rebels to end the genocide, became Rwanda’s president. But now Rusesabagina, tricked last summer into returning, is standing trial on terrorism charges after years of speaking out against Kagame’s iron-fisted rule. Evidence points to his involvement with a rebel group, and his conviction is virtually assured, promising that at 66, he’ll spend his final days behind bars.

Source: Der Spiegel

3. How Croissants Led to AI Cancer Diagnosis

It started as a way to buy pastry. Japan’s BRAIN Co. developed artificial intelligence using interwoven algorithms to identify products for a bakery chain, using far less computing power than neural networks that emerged later. This “artisanal” programming, as New Yorker writer James Somers describes it, has recently been adapted to identify other things, like bad bolts in jet engine components and even cancerous cells from a microscope slide. While experts say more sophisticated neural nets can do the same identification, BRAIN’s artificial intelligence might be the tech versatile enough for widespread use.

Source: New Yorker

4. Sharon Stone’s Unwanted Exposure

Surprised? Imagine how she felt. Sharon Stone, in a new book, says she was in a “room full of agents and lawyers” screening 1992’s Basic Instinct when she realized she’d been tricked into the infamous scene exposing her uncovered crotch. In Vanity Fair’s excerpt of The Beauty of Living Twice, she drops other shocking accusations, such as how an unnamed producer urged her to sleep with a co-star to build onscreen chemistry. She refused, and “was considered difficult.” Often feeling alone as a woman, she’s encouraged by today’s #MeToo movement: “This time, this generation, the government needs to listen to us.”

Source: Vanity Fair

5. Ohio State Is First March Madness Upset Casualty

Fifteenth-seeded Oral Roberts University scored a 75-72 overtime win over the second-seed Buckeyes in the men’s NCAA Tournament yesterday. The upset came in the Round of 64, with forward Keven Obanor and guard Max Abmas together scoring 59 points. Meanwhile, a top NCAA official apologized for providing far better weight-training facilities for men’s teams than for women’s in Indiana’s pandemic tournament bubble. But top women’s coaches noted that the inequality went much further, from poorer quality “swag bags” to food options — even the type of COVID-19 tests — provided to the tournament’s female players.

Sources: Yahoo, Bleacher Report, ESPN

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