Hack Attack: A critical petroleum pipeline between Texas and New York was shut down over the weekend as the result of a ransomware attack. Someone is holding their computer system hostage.

  Unknown hackers encrypted the information and programming on the computer system for Georgia-based Colonial Pipeline.

  The shutdown has had no impact yet, but if this goes on, it could lead to shortages of  gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, leading to spiking prices. Colonial said it is trying to re-start branches of the system but won’t say whether they are paying the ransom.

Kremlinology: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy openly endorsed New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to replace the outspoken Liz Cheney as the #3 in House Republican leadership.

  McCarthy’s support for removing and replacing Cheney is a clear signal that the Republican leadership believes former President Donald Trump is not the past, but the party’s future. Anyone who steps out of line will be politically killed.

  “We need to be united, and that starts with leadership,” McCarthy told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. What he doesn’t say is that he wants everyone to fall in line with Donald Trump’s lie that the election was stolen in a massive fraud.

  Cheney has been the rare Republican politician to oppose the former president, who’s been pulling the party puppet strings remotely from Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

  Cheney has only a handful of supporters or colleagues who speak up the way she does. Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “Every member, not just leadership, every congressman, every state representative, every member of the party that pulls a ballot in the primary has to decide, are we going to exist on lies or exist on the truth?”

The Taliban Returns: American forces have not even completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban are already stepping up attacks to take over the country.

  Over the weekend a triple bombing outside a girls high school killed at least 50 people, many of them school girls. As many as 100 were wounded.

  A car bomb was set off outside the school and then as people rushed out of the building, two more bombs went off.  The ground was left littered with books, backpacks, and bodies.

  Hopes of reaching some kind of truce, cease fire, or peace deal with the Taliban are fading. It’s clear they intend to take over the country again and have the ruthlessness to do it.

The Shooting Gallery: Six people were gunned down and the shooter killed himself in a massacre during a birthday party at a mobile home park in Colorado Springs yesterday morning.

  It was one of 10 mass shootings over the weekend. A total of 16 people were killed and 34 wounded.

  The Colorado Springs gunman was “a boyfriend of one of the female victims,” the police said. He walked inside “and began shooting people at the party before taking his own life,” they said.

  There were children in the home, but none were injured.

In the Crosshairs: Idaho’s governor has signed a new law that will allow hunters to kill up to 90 percent of the wolf population, drawing outrage from scientists, conservationists, and even pro-hunting groups.

  Idaho has about 1,500 wolves and opening them to hunting threatens to mostly undo years efforts to recover the wolf  population costing tens of millions of dollars.

  The wolves are, of course, a threat to livestock and the native elk. The ranchers say they’re losing too many animals. The new law allows them to shoot from airplanes, helicopters, ATVs, and snow machines. Baiting and night hunting with spotlights will be permitted

“It’s senseless,”  Carter Niemeyer, a retired wildlife manager, told National Geographic. “To me there’s just not the justification for it. We’re going backward.”

Horse Sense: After failing a post-race drug test, the Winner of the Kentucky derby is going to be allowed to run in next Saturday’s Preakness Stakes at Pimlico in Maryland.

  The horse, Medina Spirit, was found to have been given a greater than allowable does of a steroid used to treat swelling and joint pain. The implication is that the horses trainer, Bob Baffert, raced a horse on dangerously tender legs.

  Baffert has been suspended from running horses at Churchill Downs. Sally Jenkins writes for The Washington Post that, “Baffert could well be innocent. But this is the fifth time in a year one of his horses has returned a positive test.”

  Political analyst Jeff Greenfield tweeted that, “I knew there was something fishy about the Derby when Medina Spirit scarfed down three pounds of Twinkies right after crossing the finish line.”

Second Opinion: Seventeen students at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine have been accused of cheating on remotely-administered exams. The school says students looked up answers. 

  But rather than unearth cheating, Dartmouth stirred a hornet’s nest because they have secretly been using an online tracking system called Canvas, which allows them to surreptitiously examine their students’ online history.

  The NY Times reports that many universities have “required students to download software that can take over their computers during remote exams or use webcams to monitor their eye movements for possibly suspicious activity, even as technology experts have warned that such tools can be invasive, insecure, unfair and inaccurate.”

The Spin Rack: Debris from the Chinese space rocket that fell back into the atmosphere landed in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives early yesterday morning, China’s space administration announced. They didn’t know whether anything hit the islands. —  Several states are turning down supplies of Covid vaccines because of decreasing demand. Wisconsin, Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington State and Connecticut are all scaling back on their vaccine requests. — Former President Barack Obama revealed that former first dog Bo, a black and white Portuguese Water Dog, has died of cancer at age 12.

He was a good dog.

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