TICKET FIXING: A federal jury in Manhattan yesterday found that Live Nation, the company that controls event venues, artist promotion, and also owns Ticketmaster, the company that sells the tickets, has been operating as a monopoly in a decision that could rock the world of major live events.

  The nine member jury took four days to answer a detailed list of questions to arrive at their conclusion.

  Controlling the venues and selling the tickets is pretty much the definition of a vertical monopoly, something once a target of regulation and now no longer strictly policed. The remedy as extreme as breaking up the company will come after a separate penalty trial.

  The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged customers by $1.72 for each ticket, which doesn’t sound like much but last year alone the company sold 656 million event tickets. That’s $1.28 billion in overcharges.

  Live nation says it will appeal 

THE WAR ROOM: Senate Republicans yesterday for the fourth time blocked a Democratic effort to limit President Trump’s power to wage war on Iran. 

  The move to even take up the bill failed by a vote of 52 to 47 with.  Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted with the Republicans and Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky voted with the Democrats.

  The legal deadline for Trump to stop shooting and pull out US forces or request a 30-day extension would fall on May 1st. Some Republicans are wavering … at least in words. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said, “I hope that we are arriving at an exit strategy here to bring this to a close to preserve our security interests and bring down the cost of gasoline.”

  The financial markets appear to believe the war will come to a fruitful end. The S&P closed at a record high yesterday.

  President Trump is putting an optimistic spin on the diplomacy. “It’s a new regime,” Trump said in a Fox Business interview yesterday. “We find them pretty reasonable to be honest with you, by comparison pretty reasonable.” But the regime is not acting like they are defeated and America’s war may only have further hardened Iran’s hardliners, some analysts say.

THE SANTA CON: For five years Stefan Pildes of New jersey ran the annual Manhattan bar crawl fundraising event known as SantaCon. And for all that time he had his hand in the toy bag, according to federal prosecutors.

  For five years thousands of New Yorkers, many dressed as Santa, roamed from bar to bar drinking in the name of Christmas giving.

  But the 50-year-old Pildes is accused of diverting about half the $3 million raised to finance “personal ventures,” and spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on “extensive renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey, luxury vacations in Hawaii, Las Vegas, and Vail, extravagant meals and a luxury vehicle,” according to the indictment.

INFINITE SCROLL: 

— The US military carried out its 51^st strike against a suspected drug boat, this one in the eastern Pacific, killing three people. The strikes have killed at least 177 people.  

— Still amidst the dustup of posting a meme with himself as Jesus and his fight with Pope Leo,Donald Trump reposted a meme of himself wrapped in the arm of Jesus with the message “doesn’t it seem that with all these satanic, demonic, child sacrificing monsters being exposed … God might be playing his Trump card!”

  Trump commented on it, “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!”

— Speaking of Trump and the pope, the President is on the brink of a rift with one of the last European leaders who has his ear. Italy’s right wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has agreed with Trump on a lot of issues, drew the line at insulting the pope who, after all, resides in her country. “I find President Trump’s remarks about the Holy Father unacceptable.”

  Disagree with Trump and all his prior adulation is gone. “She’s the one who’s unacceptable,” he said.

THE OBIT PAGE: Ishmael Jaffree, a lawyer who successfully sued to eliminate an Alabama law allowing prayer in public school, died unheralded at age 80 back in 2024. His death was brought to the attention of The NY Times only recently by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

  The Supreme Court ruled back in 1962 that school prayer was unconstitutional, but Alabama passed laws to get around that. Jaffree, who was not religious, was alerted one day when his son came home from kindergarten and asked about God. Then his two older children told him their teachers had been leading them in prayer. His youngest told him other kids bullied him for not praying.

  Jaffree sued in 1982 and it took three years, but the Supreme Court ruled that the only thing allowable would be a non-denominational moment of silence.

  “Just as the right to speak and the right to refrain from speaking are complementary components of a broader concept of individual freedom of mind,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority, “so also the individual’s freedom to choose his own creed is the counterpart of his right to refrain from accepting the creed established by the majority.”

GAMBLING IT AWAY: David French writes for The NY Times about the proliferation of legal gambling: “We are making virtue more difficult and vice easier to access. By the time young men enter adulthood, they’ve been conditioned by a world that makes it ever easier to place a bet and harder to go to college. It’s easier to watch porn and more difficult to form real relationships. And the social results of this gigantic national experiment are exactly what you’d expect them to be.”

BELOW THE FOLD: “Happy Days” sitcom actor Henry Winkler revealed to late night host Jimmy Kimmel that he filmed his first nude scene at age 79. No one would have been sorry if he had kept us waiting.