THE BIG STORY

King Soopers employees struggled as essential workers in the pandemic. Then they were attacked.

Emily Giffen and her King Soopers coworkers can’t stop thinking about why the shooter chose their store in Boulder, Colorado. The suspect in the shooting that left 10 people dead, including three grocery store workers, is from Arvada, 30 minutes away. “It’s 16 miles away from this store. It’s insane,” Giffen told us.

Still, it’s also now a grim reality. Giffen is grieving her coworkers. “They are like my family here, and now they are just dead on the floor,” she says. Of Denny Stong, 20, one of the ten people killed in Monday’s shooting, she adds, “Denny wasn’t even supposed to be there, he was buying a box of strawberries and then he became nothing.”

My colleague Brianna Sacks is in Boulder, and she filed an incredibly powerful report after talking to employees at the grocery store. They told us about how becoming essential workers left them vulnerable, and about the horror of the day of the shooting.

“I know in a week no one will remember and life just keeps going on, but these people are gone and I am really scared. I don’t know how to work anywhere,” Giffen says.

King Soopers employee Logan Ezra Smith and a coworker are evacuated from the scene of the shooting in Boulder on Monday. Matthew Jonas/MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images

STAYING ON TOP OF THIS

After a lot of drama with the government, AstraZeneca lowered early estimates of its vaccine effectiveness by just 3 percentage points

Earlier this week, AstraZeneca announced the vaccine was 79% effective in preventing cases of COVID-19 with symptoms. But later that day, an independent panel of medical experts notified US health officials that it was “concerned” about the way the results had been presented.

Now the drama has been resolved, and AstraZeneca has slightly lowered estimates of its vaccine’s effectiveness to 76%. One expert we talked to told us the roller coaster may reflect a clash of cultures between a European company and the US system of trial oversight and vaccine approval.

Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters, “At the end of the day, when you look at the data, this is going to turn out to be a good vaccine.”

SNAPSHOTS

A man drove his car through a crowd at an anti-Asian violence rally and yelled “fuck China.” Authorities in Los Angeles are looking for the driver, a white man in his fifties, and are investigating the incident as a hate crime.

Hundreds of far-right militias are organizing, recruiting, and promoting violence on Facebook. A new report identified more than 200 militia pages and groups on Facebook as of March 18, more than two months after the insurrection at the Capitol.

Instagram influencer Jay Mazini was charged with wire fraud for allegedly stealing $2.5 million in Bitcoin from his followers. Prosecutors said Mazini, who claimed to have a net worth of $33 million, offered to buy Bitcoin from his Instagram followers for more than market value but never sent the money.

Haunting photos show the massive flooding that has overwhelmed Australia. Australia has experienced its worst flooding in decades, as thousands struggle to handle the massive amounts of rainfall. The photos will leave you speechless.

A property is surrounded by floodwaters in Londonderry, March 23, 2021. Mark Baker / AP

A LONG-STANDING HOSTILITY

Atlanta sex industry workers say they’re used to being branded “sinners” — and fearing for their lives

Last week, a shooter opened fire on three Atlanta-area spas, killing eight people, six of them Asian women. For sex workers at nearby sex shops and strip clubs, the attack was a deadly escalation of a long-existing hostility against the sex industry.

The Atlanta shooter, who received treatment for sex addiction at an evangelical clinic, said in his statement to police that he wanted to eliminate sexual “temptation” at the locations he targeted.

As the country grapples with the toxic stew of racism, religion, and misogyny at the root of the spa killings, advocates say remaining silent about the hatred of sex workers — who often labor in the shadows, without protection from violent clients and mistreated by police — will only enable violence against them to continue.

Read Otillia Steadman’s report from Atlanta, on the anxieties of sex workers and the stigma and dangers they still face.

Memorials outside the Aromatherapy Spa in Atlanta following the shooting. The red umbrella is a symbol of the fight for the rights of sex workers. Courtesy of Stella Zine

THE POWER OF A NAME

What’s in your “other name”? Asian Americans are trying to reclaim their native first names and wear them proudly

My colleague Tanya Chen wrote a moving piece about her relationship with her Anglo first name. Her parents gave her the name “Tanya” shortly after moving to the US, when she was 5. It needed to “sound close,” she writes, to her birth name, but still translate in a US context.

“Until very recently, I’d adopted an emotionally removed practice with how I used my English name,” Chen writes. This has changed now. Read her piece on a powerful movement: on social media, Asian people are encouraging one another to put their “other” names, their birth names or otherwise second native names, on their profiles.

Hoping the joy comes easy and without a fight today,

Elamin