Niger's presidential guard mounts apparent coup attempt

Armed members of Niger’s presidential guard staged an attempted coup Wednesday, surrounding the presidential palace and reportedly detaining Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum.

The African Union and the Economic Community of West African States say the presidential guard attempted to oust Bazoum, who was democratically elected into 2021 in the first such peaceful transfer of power in Niger since 1960, when the country gained independence from France.

The rebelling soldiers allegedly tried to gain support from other security services. A tweet from Niger’s presidential account said the country’s army and national guard were still opposed to the rebel forces, and “ready to attack” if the situation continued.

Streets surrounding the palace were blocked on Wednesday, as were some government offices, including state radio and television networks. The Associated Press reported hundreds of protesters marched in support of the president, chanting “no coup d’etat.”

Condemnation of the alleged coup flowed in from around the world.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the development and called for “all actors involved to exercise restraint and to ensure the protection of constitutional order.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Bazoum on Wednesday.

“He emphasized that the United States stands with the Nigerien people and regional and international partners in condemning this effort to seize power by force and overturn the constitutional order,” according to a readout from the State Department.

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Trending stories at Scrippsnews.com

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Spotty storm threat today, heat building out west

After some overnight storms, we are back to drier conditions to open our Wednesday morning. Very muggy though out-the-door, as temperatures hover in the lower 70s for most and high dew points. Expect dry weather to hold through the better part of the morning and early afternoon while temperatures begin to warm up.

This afternoon, a few, spotty, strong storms will be possible, as heat cranks up, along with the wind. The wind will help to keep us cooler while working outdoors, as temperatures warm to nearly 90° in downtown. The storm threat remains for Indianapolis and points north with the greatest threat being damaging gusts and larger hailstones. We will track as needed for your area.

A few storms could hold in spots through the evening before winding down overnight statewide. Thursday brings more heat and hazy sunshine. A heat advisory is expected for both days of tomorrow and Friday, while the hottest air of the season will likely be upon us.

This weekend brings a storm threat on Saturday as a cold front moves across the state. This will bring a return to more seasonal temperatures on Sunday and less humid conditions, much-welcomed news.

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Life in Plastic: It’s a PR-tactic!

Whether you were team Barbie or Oppenheimer over the Barbenheimer opening weekend, for PR industry geeks like us, there is no denying Barbie’s marketing campaign was anything short of genius. The Google News Barbie effect that colored our screens with pink sparkles might have been our favorite, but close runners up were Nicki Minaj’s remix to Aqua’s Barbie Girl, the myriad of pop-up Barbie experiences, the Barbie Dreamhouse listed on Airbnb, and the viral Barbiecore fashion trend.

Even if you weren’t counting down the days until the dazzling blockbuster hit the big screen (guilty), it was hard to ignore the Barbie buzz. The anticipation was palpable, and marketing stunts worked: Barbie dominated the box office and marked the largest opening weekend of 2023.

Few brands have a whopping budget like Barbie’s. But as PR professionals, it’s our responsibility to identify takeaways from how Mattel crushed the marketing blitz in order to provide client recommendations that will help transport their audiences to a land like Barbie Land.

Keep a pulse on cultural trends and think outside the (Barbie) box of how it could correlate with your client’s brand.

Pop culture is pervasive. Even if your client is in a B2B industry, it might benefit from a pop culture campaign if you can ideate how it’s relevant to the industry. You’re already staying on top of your client’s industry news. Add a pop culture newsletter to your morning reading list so you don’t miss an opportunity for your client to leverage the hype.

Newsjacking is critical no matter the type of news, including hard news, industry news, global news, and even pop culture news. While Mattel has been hard at work for Barbie in the lead-up to the premiere, don’t shy away from breaking news trends where your client could hijack or add to the news with relevant storylines.

Once you’ve identified relevant cultural trends, consider a 360-marketing play.

Even if you aren’t a full-service agency that builds creative campaigns from scratch, you’re the PR expert who knows what media like to cover. Present these findings based on what news and trends you see infiltrating your own feed.

The Barbie movie attracted over 100 promotional partners, amplifying the news across various industries and markets. Consider the synergies between your client’s brand and prospective partners to identify if there’s a mutually beneficial cross-promotional tactic. If you can find common ground, a brand collaboration may allow your client to reach new audiences and consumers.

Tap into the social media craze. A large part of the Barbie movie’s consumer engagement came from easy-to-replicate social media trends and gifs. The iconic “This Barbie is…” blew up on social media, allowing everyday consumers to easily hop on the trend.

The cherry on top of a 360-marketing campaign is an activation or VIP experience creating a consumer call-to-action. Barbie’s pop-up experiences in major cities garnered local and national press, resulting in high-traffic attendance and in turn, an influx of pink social media posts.

Collaborate with your client’s marketing team to execute a successful campaign and align on expectations.

Find out what’s feasible, what’s within budget and how quickly it can be executed.

Set expectations with your client. If the reward is greater than the marketing budget, demonstrate the worth and potential ROI. If the activation is too costly for a worthwhile return, it’s our duty to tell them when it won’t work.

Key PR data like KPIs allow clients to see realistic metrics at a snapshot, whether pre-activation for goal-setting, or post-activation to analyze the success.

Lights, camera, action!

Once the PR agency and internal marketing teams have agreed on a PR stunt or campaign activation, it’s time to execute!

Pulling inspiration from Barbie, sometimes less isn’t more. Deploying multiple collaborations or campaign builds simultaneously – rather than a spread-out cadence – can sound daunting, but if strategically planned, the reward for multiple tactics can be great. It’s only warranted for something as worthwhile as a Barbie release though!

Agree on an activation date. Like embargo-style pitching, create an initial date for the news and campaign to go wide. A set date will result in a splash of coverage and widespread attention, making the news hard for consumers to miss. The momentum from this launch will trickle throughout the campaign’s duration, creating an ongoing conversation.

Come on Barbie, let’s go PR-ty!

Looking for a PR partner for a brand activation, social media collaboration or PR support? Let us know.

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Indiana law to require school corporations to have AEDs at all activities

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — The Indiana Department of Education will begin sending out surveys to all schools in August to determine the number of defibrillators they should have on hand.

Earlier this summer, the Indiana General Assembly passed Senate Enrolled Act 369, which requires Automatic External Defibrillators to be present at all extracurricular activities, including band and drama classes.

“We just had a kid this past school year go into sudden cardiac arrest during school. We had enough AEDs in the building to where our (school resource officers) were able to administer CPR, slap the AED on, and save his life,” Andy Olson, Monrovia High School football coach, said.

The school’s athletic department also has AEDs present for all varsity and junior varsity practices.
“We’ve got a lot of AEDs and access (on campus at) Monrovia. The school corporation has done a really good job of that,” Head Athletic Trainer Brandy Crum said.

Julie West pushed lawmakers to pass the legislation after her son Jake, a football and lacrosse player in LaPorte, died from an undetected heart condition. Although the legislation took effect July 1, she says school districts could move faster in complying with the law.

“I can’t quite wrap my brain around why so many people are not seeing the importance of this and getting this in place,” West said.

Just this week, NBA star Lebron James’ 18-year-old son suffered a heart attack on the basketball court at the University of Southern California.

Younger people suffering from heart conditions is not a trend that surprises Crum. “We have better screening tools, we have better education, so it’s not surprising we are catching more of those,” Crum said.

Senate Enrolled Act 369 also requires staff and teachers involved in extracurricular activities to be trained on how to use AEDS.

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Two separate crashes involving motorcycles leave one dead, one critically injured

INDIANAPOLIS — Indianapolis police are warning drivers to stay alert after two separate crashes involving motorcycles left one man dead and another person critically injured late Tuesday.

The first crash happened around 9 p.m. in the area of 38th Street and Georgetown Road.

Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers arriving at the scene found a white Jeep that had flipped and a three-wheel motorcycle that were involved in the crash.

Lt. Shane Foley with IMPD says their preliminary investigation suggests that two drivers were traveling eastbound on 38th Street when the motorcyclist allegedly ran a stop light at Georgetown Road and collided with one of the vehicles.

Both drivers were taken to the hospital, the motorcycle driver was in critical condition and the driver of the Jeep had what was believed to be non-life threatening injuries.

“We need to be careful, we need to follow the law,” Foley said. “We shouldn’t be running red lights. Speed may be a factor, seems to be a factor in a lot of our crashes. We don’t know if that’s going to be a factor today.”

Shortly after responding to that crash, officers were called to the area of 38th Street and Michigan Road around 9:30 p.m. for a report of another serious crash involving a motorcycle and a vehicle.

IMPD officers arriving at the scene found an adult male in the road suffering from serious injuries. Despite life-saving efforts by emergency personnel, the man was pronounced dead at the scene.

The second driver, who was in a truck, remained on scene to talk to police. That driver was taken to the hospital to be treated for unknown injuries.

Foley says their preliminary investigation suggests that the driver of the truck was going eastbound on 38th Street and attempted to make a U-Turn at Michigan Avenue when he collided with the motorcyclist, who was traveling westbound at the intersection.

“Be alert. The weather is great for people to be out on a motorcycle. So I ask people to be alert. Look around, see your surroundings,” Foley said. “We ask the motorcyclists, drive with due regard, because people won’t see you. It takes responsibility on all parts. “

Alcohol is not believed to be a factor in either crash. Both drivers were taken for a blood draw as is standard with any serious crash.

“Most of these involve motorcycles,” Foley said. “We don’t know if lack of awareness of motorcycles is a factor, but certainly when speaking with people who are involved in crashes most of them say they just didn’t see the motorcycle.”

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Targeting Small-to-Midsized Firms, LexisNexis Releases Cloud Version of InterAction, Long A Leading CRM Product Among Large Firms

Launched in 1993 and acquired by LexisNexis in 2004, Interaction is one of the most established client relationship management (CRM) products in the legal market. An on-premises product designed for large law firms, InterAction is used by three-quarters of the Am Law 100 and three-quarters of the largest firms globally, according to LexisNexis.

Now, in a move to make the software available to mid- and smaller-sized law firms, LexisNexis is releasing InterAction+, a cloud-based product that unites many of the features of the legacy version with a more-modern user experience and mobile connectivity, as well as unique integrations with LexisNexis content relevant to business development and relationship management.

And even though the product is cloud-based, LexisNexis is giving customers the choice of where to host their contact data — either in the cloud on LexisNexis’s data servers or in a hybrid cloud using their own data centers.

LexisNexis will continue to develop and support the on-premises version of InterAction. In addition, existing customers can add the cloud component with minimal effort on their part, LexisNexis says.

Integrates with Context Litigation Analytics

During a preview demonstration of InterAction+ last week, Aaron Pierce, vice president of product management at LexisNexis, and Namit Pandey, group product manager for InterAction, told me that they believe small and mid-sized firms are an underserved market for CRM software.

“We see a lot of firms that are managing contacts just through Outlook or managing contacts through spreadsheets or more traditional CRM solutions that are not as legal-focused as we can be with InterAction+,” Pierce said. “So we really wanted to bring all the great things that we love about InterAction to the cloud-hosted solution and be able to bring this to a brand new market.”

One notable feature of InterAction+ is its integration with Context, LexisNexis’ litigation analytics product. The integration can be used in business development activities to see litigation data on clients, prospects, and other firms.

Company analytics in InterAction+ are drawn from Context analytics in LexisNexis.

For example, when a contact is at a company, the user can see the company’s litigation history via Context, including the kinds of cases it is most often involved with and the courts where it most often litigates.

These basic company analytics are available to InterAction+ subscribers at no extra charge. If the subscriber also has a Context subscription, then the subscriber could continue to drill down more deeply into the company’s litigation record on Context.

InterAction+ users will have the same log-on credentials as for other LexisNexis products, so access to the Context integration and planned future integrations will all be via a single sign-on.

That connectivity to LexisNexis is also useful when adding a company to InterAction+. Via the Lexis+ research database, a user can verify the correct name of the company, ensuring consistency throughout the CRM, and then automatically pull company information to fill key fields in the contact form.

Dashboard for Quick Overview

The product also features a home page dashboard (see featured image above) that provides a quick overview of connections that an attorney, marketer, or business development professional might want to focus on, including those where the connections are weak, at risk, or have had low levels of engagement.

The dashboard might show, for example, that the user has had no meaningful recent activity with 78% of the user’s connections, and it will suggest the top-three that the user should pay attention to (based on the connections for whom the longest time has elapsed since any contact).

Other features include:

• A modern user interface with improved layout and design to simplify navigation and improve readability.
• A customizable daily email digest of business development tasks and priorities.
• Mobile accessibility via iOS and Android apps.
• An Outlook add-in that creates a sidebar where users can view InterAction+ data, allowing users, for example, to view a contact’s information while reading an email involving that contact.
• A global “add” button that appears on every page for adding new contacts, activities and notes.

Over the coming months, LexisNexis says, it will continue to add new features and content integrations to InterAction+, including news and company information from LexisNexis Legal News and LexisNexis Dossier.

The product is launching globally, with a focus on the United States, the European Union and Australia as its three cloud hosting locations.

Pierce said the product could be used by firms of almost any size, but that he thinks the sweet spot is firms of 20-200 lawyers.

Pricing will be based on a per-seat subscription. He was not able to say the exact price, but did say that it will be set at a level to be affordable to firms in the target market.

Although the product does not have any native lead-tracking capabilities, Pierce said that an API will allow it to integrate with third-party marketing and email products such as HubSpot or MailChimp.

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Speech by Association – Rick Claybrook

The decision in 303 Creative gives those committed to free speech and the free exercise of religion much to celebrate. The Court held that a website designer’s work is “speech” in a constitutional sense, and so she cannot be compelled to prepare messages for same-sex weddings, to which she has religious objections.

But artistic vendors are not the only ones who have religious and other objections to same-sex marriage. So do restauranteurs who cater receptions and rehearsal dinners or lessors of facilities for large events. What does 303 Creative do for them? Nothing positive, and maybe something negative to the extent it leaves the impression that only “artistic” vendors have protection from civil rights and public accommodations laws that include the categories of sexual orientation and gender identity.

At base, all vendors who object to serving same-sex marriages, whether or not they are providing “artistic” services, have the same foundational problem: they all believe that same-sex marriage is wrong and that it would be immoral to assist or associate with such a wedding. If they all have the same foundational problem, why, then, do not artistic and non-artistic vendors have the same defenses to being compelled to support by their efforts a same-sex marriage (or be punished if they do not)? They do, on two levels.

First, refusing to service a same-sex wedding is not discrimination against sexual orientation; it is refusing to collaborate with a message, not refusing to serve because of the potential customer’s status. For instance, if a black restaurateur refused to cater a white supremacist organization’s banquet, no one would accuse him of racial discrimination against whites. That is because his discrimination is not against whites as a class, but against the message of these particular whites. The same was true for the web designer in 303 Creative, as she gladly served gay customers when it did not involve preparing a message that violated her beliefs. Her refusal to service same-sex weddings was not a substitute for discriminating against homosexuals as a class, and so it did not violate the public accommodations laws, as properly interpreted.

Of course, the civil rights and public accommodations laws are not always properly interpreted, as the Colorado courts proved in 303 Creative. According to the Colorado courts, refusing to service same-sex weddings was unlawful discrimination against individuals due to their sexual orientation. Federal courts will hopefully not fall into this error when construing federal laws and regulations that prohibit discrimination against sexual orientation and gender identity, but they cannot do anything about states construing their own laws in this overly expansive way.

This brings us to the second defense for both artistic and non-artistic vendors objecting to serving same-sex marriages. The key speech involved is that of the gay couple, not that of the vendor. Even the artistic vendor, the website designer in 303 Creative, is complaining that she is being forced to give voice to the message of the marriage participants, a message to which she has religious objections. Emanating from the First Amendment’s rights of speech and assembly, there is a right not to associate with a message one finds objectionable, and that is the most fundamental right involved in these cases. Turning again to the black restauranteur, it is the difference between saying he will not service any whites—which is discrimination against individuals because of their status as members of a protected class—and saying he refuses to facilitate or associate with a message of white supremacists, to which he has moral objections.

303 Creative reached the right result, and, certainly, artistic vendors can now safely rely on First Amendment protections for their “own” speech. Unfortunately, exactly when vendor services cross the line into speech is anything but clear.

The situation of wedding vendors is no different in essentials to that in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston. The Court in the 303 Creative opinion described Hurley as follows:

The Court held that Massachusetts’s public accommodations statute could not be used to force veterans organizing a parade in Boston to include a group of gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals because the parade was pro­tected speech, and requiring the veterans to include voices they wished to exclude would impermissibly require them to “alter the expressive content of their parade.”

While the Court identified the parade as “protected speech,” that was not the crux of the case, which did not so much focus on the speech of the veterans as it did on the message of those the city would have required them to include in the parade. Thus, the city’s action was unconstitutional because it would have compelled the veterans to facilitate the message of others (compelled speech) and also because it would force them to assemble with others with whom they did not wish to associate (compelled assembly or association). That was true irrespective of whether the veterans had a message of their own to proclaim.

Perhaps even more to the point is the Supreme Court’s decision in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, in which it ruled that the Boy Scouts could not be compelled to accept a person who was openly gay because “Dale’s presence in the Boy Scouts would, at the very least, force the organization to send a message, both to the youth members and the world, that the Boy Scouts accepts homosexual conduct as a legitimate form of behavior.” This, of course, was the message of another—a message the Boy Scouts did not wish to facilitate and with which it did not wish to associate. The Boy Scouts were not engaging in independent speech themselves when they accepted someone as a troop leader. Similarly, a vendor does not have to create speech as part of her services to facilitate the message of others through those services.

The rights of speech and assembly work hand in hand, or, as the Supreme Court has phrased it, they are “cognate.” And it is this combination right of expressive association that is under threat in the wedding vendors’ cases: public accommodations laws are being used to force vendors to associate with and facilitate a message of others. That unconstitutionally compels both speech and assembly.

303 Creative reached the right result, and, certainly, artistic vendors can now safely rely on First Amendment protections for their “own” speech. Unfortunately, exactly when vendor services cross the line into speech is anything but clear. A website designer is an easy case, but the recent cases involving cake decorators and flower arrangers present much closer questions. For example, in response to questions during oral argument, counsel for the cake decorator in Masterpiece Cakeshop said a makeup artist did not qualify as an artist, despite her title. 

These close distinctions should not matter, because whether the vendor is an artist is not the source of the vendor’s objection to fostering the event with her services. The source is the message of the wedding participants, and that should be the focus. Both artistic and non-artistic vendors with the same objection to that message have the same protections from being forced to facilitate and associate with it. Refusal to serve because of an objection to facilitating their message is not discrimination against the marriage participants’ status or identity. But, if it is deemed to be, forcing any vendor to associate with the ceremony is unconstitutionally compelled speech and assembly.

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