MORE THAN BAD LUCK:  The founder of World Central Kitchen which lost seven aid workers in an Israeli aerial attack in Gaza charged yesterday that the organization’s three armored vehicles travelling in a convoy were targeted “systematically, car by car.”

  Renowned Spanish-American chef José Andrés said the aid team had informed Israeli defense forces of their travel plans and were in touch when they were attacked. “This was not just a bad luck situation where ‘oops’ we dropped the bomb in the wrong place,” Andrés said.

  He said the last of the three vehicles was hit and the workers inside it got into the next car ahead of them. The second car was then hit and survivors got out and into the third car. All three vehicles were destroyed and the seven were killed.

  “This was over a 1.5, 1.8 kilometers, with a very defined humanitarian convoy that had signs in the top, in the roof, a very colorful logo that we are obviously very proud of,” Andrés said. It’s “very clear who we are and what we do.”

  He rejected claims by the Israeli military that the strike was not deliberate. “This it seems is a war against humanity itself,” Andrés said. “And you can never win that war. Because humanity eventually will always prevail.”  

SWEET JESUS: He isn’t just selling Bibles, Donald Trump is making an appeal to Christians, posing as one of the devout in his quest for votes.

  Trump has taken to ending his campaign speeches with somber calls for prayer. “The great silent majority is rising like never before and under our leadership,” he recites from a script. “We will pray to God for our strength and for our liberty. We will pray for God and we will pray with God. We are one movement, one people, one family and one glorious nation under God.”

  Otherwise on the campaign trail, no one is less Christian than Trump, accusing people of corruption and political bias, even making fun of Joe Biden’s stutter. Trump has been married three times, convicted of business fraud, indicted multiple times, and had a fling with a porn star.

  In his Bible-selling video Trump says the Good Book is his favorite and that he has “many” of them, although there’s little evidence that he reads anything, let alone the Bible, or that he goes to church.

  In a not-so-subtle identification with Christian nationalism, Trump says in his video, “Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country, and I truly believe that we need to bring them back. And we have to bring them back fast.”

ON ICE: Just two seconds into their game last night, the New York Rangers and New Jersey devils erupted into a full five on five brawl resulting in four players from each team being ejected from the game. The fight was the result of a grudge carried over from the last time the teams met on March 11^th.

THE OBIT PAGE: Christopher Durang, the Tony Award-winning playwright and satirist who The NY Times said “mixed high art and low humor,” died at his home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania at age 75.He had dementia.

  NY Times critic Frank Rich wrote that Durang had a “special knack for wrapping life’s horrors in the primary colors of absurdist comedy.”

  Durang was best known for his 1979 “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You.” In plays that skewered revered works and cultural icons from “The Brothers Karamazov” to “Snow White,”Durang’s subjects ranged from religion and sex to metaphysics, serial killers and psychology,

— John Barth, the novelist who broke traditional limits of storytelling with his books “The Sot-Weed Factor” and “Giles Goat-Boy,” died at a hospice facility in Bonita Springs, Florida. He was 93.

  Barth was part of the post-modernist school of fantastical literature in which rocket ships come out of toilet bowls. He argued that old conventions of literary narrative were “used up.”

  He was 30 in 1960 when he published his third novel, the “The Sot-Weed Factor” a satire about a man in colonial America who is made Poet Laureate of Maryland. Literary critics put him in the ranks of innovative writers like Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. He followed that success with “Giles Goat-Boy,” in 1966, which he described as a story “about a young man who is raised as a goat.”

THE SPIN RACK: The judge in Donald Trump’s New York hush money trial declined to delay the April 15th trial opening until Trump gets a ruling on presidential immunity from the Supreme Court. — Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law lowering the country’s military draft age from 27 to 25 to bolster his battered forces.  Ukraine has about 1 million people in uniform. Military analysts say Ukraine may not be able to hold its lines against the Russians unless it gets renewed military aid from the US. — For the second year in a row, executives of the Walt Disney Company fought off an upstart effort to take two seats on its board of directors in an attempt to steer the company in a different direction. A hedge fund known as Trian Partners has been criticical of Disney’s streaming strategy, lagging stock price, and planning for a successor to CEO Robert Iger. The two sides spent $600 million to end up with the same leadership. — Voters in Enid, Oklahoma voted out a white nationalist member of their city council. Judd Blevins, 42, had been a member of the white supremacist group Identity Evropa and admitted marching in the 2017 white nationalist  Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

BELOW THE FOLD: New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is demanding a payment of roughly $750,000 a year from the organization that runs the marathon to make up lost toll revenue for closing the Verrazzano bridge for the race. At least they are not charging congestion fees for 50,000 runners.

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