China Syndrome: The Chinese government is considering new laws to crack down on political protest in Hong Kong, indicating intentions to get the former British colony more firmly under mainland control.

  This seems to have been inevitable. Since the 1997 handover Hong Kong has lived under the policy of “one country, two systems,” but that’s always been an annoyance to the central government, which isn’t happy with Hong Kong’s freedom and pro-democracy street protests.

  Communist party leaders claim without evidence that the protests are the product of foreign influence. The new laws for Hong Kong are designed to prevent and punish secession, subversion, and foreign infiltration while allowing the mainland’s hard-nosed feared agencies to operate publicly in Hong Kong for the first time. 

  Wang Chen, a Politburo member and first vice chairman of the congress mentioned protesters defacing the national flag saying, “Law-based and forceful measures must be taken to prevent, stop, and punish such activities.”

The Stat Board: This morning, the US is moving steadily toward 100,000 coronavirus deaths; 94,729 so far. New York City alone has lost 21,003 people.

-Another 2.4 million people joined the ranks of the coronavirus unemployed last week, bringing the total to over 38 million.

-A recent Federal Reserve study found that approximately 40 percent of workers in households earning less than $40,000 had lost their jobs.

– Stanford University economists say that as many as 42 percent of the people who’ve lost jobs during the coronavirus shutdown won’t be getting them back. 

 -Automobile fatalities per mile driven have risen 14 percent in the past year, according to the National Safety Council. The total number of motor-vehicle-related deaths dropped by 8% in March compared to March 2019 because of the coronavirus shutdown, but the number of miles driven dropped by over 18%, resulting in a statistical rise in deaths per mile.

Arms and the Man: President Trump is expected today to pull the US out of a third major arms treaty and he has his sights set on a fourth.

 This time it’s the 30-year-old Open Skies Treaty that allows participating countries to fly over each other’s territory to check for military threats. Russia has been cheating for years, preventing some overflights. Maybe more to the point, Trump is reported to have been angered by a Russian flight directly over his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club in 2017. Maybe they caught him cheating.

  Trump tends to lack attention during briefings and depend upon his own instincts and Fox News for his intelligence, so to speak. The NY Times reports according to sources that, “Trump rarely absorbs information that he disagrees with or that runs counter to his worldview, the officials said. Briefing him has been so great a challenge compared with his predecessors that the intelligence agencies have hired outside consultants to study how better to present information to him.”

Guilty as Charged: After claiming innocence for 14 months in the college admissions scandal, actress Lori Loughlin and her designer husband Mossimo Giannulli have agreed to plead guilty today to paying $500,000 to get their two daughters into the University of Southern California as college-quality rowers.

  They are the 23rd and 24th parents to plead guilty in the case. Both daughters have since dropped out of USC.

  As part of the plea, Loughlin gets two months in prison and Giannulli, five months, if the court approves it. She would pay a $150,000 fine, with two years of supervised release and 100 hours of community service. Giannulli faces a $250,000 fine, two years of supervised release and 250 hours of community service.

Choose the Best Answer: In a harbinger of major change for college admissions, the University of California is moving toward dropping the SAT and ACT from its undergraduate admissions application. UC’s  governing board voted unanimously to suspend testing for the next two years and then omit test scores from the review of in-state applications in 2023 and 2024.

  The tests have been criticized as flawed, racist, and gamed by wealthy candidates who can pay to take preparation courses.

The Bulletin Board: The man who took video of  the pursuit and killing of the unarmed jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia has been arrested and charged with felony murder, participating in a crime that leads to murder. Investigators believe the man, 50-year-old William Bryan, was involved in the chase. — A gunman shot and wounded a security officer at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in Texas yesterday before he was shot and killed by other security officers. The shooter was identified as a Syrian-born US resident and investigators say it was an act of terrorism. —  At least 570 workers out of 2,200 tested positive for the coronavirus at the Tyson Foods chicken processing plant in Wilkes County, North Carolina. Tyson said a majority of the employees who had the virus didn’t show symptoms.

Unmasked Man: President Trump toured a Ford plant in Michigan yesterday that’s making ventilators and protective face shields but declined to wear a mask like everyone else on the tour while the press could see him. “I wore one in this back area but I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it,” he told reporters.

  Someone on the tour did catch a shot of him with a mask when the press was not present. It made him look 50 pounds lighter.

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