Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Friday, March 19. I'm Naila Boudou.

Here's what we're covering today. The first public spat between President Biden and Vladimir Putin.

And a modified March madness gets underway in Indianapolis.

But first, responding to the Atlanta shootings is today's one big thing.

The country continues to mourn the eight people who were killed in this week's shootings at three separate spas in the Atlanta area.

Six of the victims were Asian women. Not all have been identified. But here's what we know about the victims.

Shao Jaitan lived in Kennesaw, Georgia. The 49-year-old owned the Young's Asian Spa.

She was a licensed massage therapist.

Delay Dayan of Acquarth, Georgia was 33 years old. Delayna was at one of the spas with her husband.

She leaves behind her 14-year-old son and her eight-month-old daughter.

Paul Andre Michaels was from Atlanta. The 54-year-old man was an army vet who owned his own electrical business in the area.

He was working as a handyman at one of the spas. And Dalio Fung was 44 years old.

LCS Hernandez Ortiz of Acquarth, Georgia, who's 30 years old, was injured but is in stable condition.

Joining me now to talk more about the shootings in Atlanta and other news from this week is Axios' managing editor Margaret Taliv.

Good morning, Margaret.

Good morning, Mala.

One thing that really struck me is something our reporter, Shauna Chen, said yesterday that this is a wake-up cry for the country to understand what Asian Americans have been going through over the past year.

100% I think that's true. Last spring, we, as a nation, came together around the experience that so many black Americans have in this country of being treated differently by the police about that being something that could be deadly for many people.

And it started a year of national reckoning around this issue of systemic racism. But the last year has also been a terrifying time for so many Asian Americans.

And when you saw this horrific act of violence, long before we knew what had actually happened, and what happened does matter from a perspective of the police doing their work.

But the fear that it instilled that was just beneath the surface, the fear that it exposed is something that all Americans are now understanding much better.

But that millions of Asian Americans have already been fighting and facing over the course of the last year.

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