AFTER THE FLOOD: Several hundred people are dead and as many as 1400 missing after that massive flash flood that swept through rivers bordering China and Tibet.

 In Nepal, about 900 people including 500 foreign visitors … Americans among them … are unaccounted for. The region is a popular destination for trekkers, religious pilgrims, and other tourists because of high-altitude beauty.

  In China, state media reports that at least 558 people are missing in Tibet’s Gyirong County, including 260 foreigners.

  The flood was triggered by a collapsing glacier and resulting landslide. The wave appeared to be 50 or 60 feet high as it hit some buildings

  Survivors have described a wave of mud, boulders, and debris sweeping away homes, whole villages, and families. Geologists have observed that the flood created a lake that could continue to fill until it bursts its unstable banks, triggering another flood.

NAMING RIGHTS: A federal judge yesterday placed a temporary block on  plans by the board of the Kennedy Center in Washington to put an inscription under the main signage saying, “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump.”

  The board plans to do that by September 8^th even though the Kennedy Center has yet to be restored and renovated. Judge Christopher Cooper delayed the inscription while he considers the objection of Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty from Ohio, an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board.

  While it’s clear the Donald Trump desperately wants his name to overshadow that of the late President John F. Kennedy, a Justice Department lawyer argued that the inscription would be fully in line with the ruling that the center could not be renamed without the approval of Congress. He said the inscription would amount to an “acknowledgment” of Trump’s role as a “builder and fund-raiser” backing the project. The lawyers have argued that without the recognition for Trump, donations for the renovation would dry up.

  Rep. Beatty’s lawsuit argues that the closure and renovations at the Kennedy center are a cover for the financial nose dive the center took after Trump took over the board and named himself chairman. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick stood outside the courthouse and claimed that if the renovations do not move ahead, the Kennedy center will deteriorate beyond repair.

OFF THE CLOCK: Two LaGuardia Airport air controllers left the tower early the night an Air Canada Express flight collided with an airport fire truck on the runway, killing two pilots the night of March 22, several news outlets report.

  Reports say the two left by more than just a few minutes and both have been put on leave. The FAA said after the accident that the control tower had been fully staffed. 

INFINITE SCROLL: 

— In a trade snit with the province of Ontario and the rest of Canada, President Trump yesterday signed an executive order re-naming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” much as he did with the Gulf of Mexico.

  The name “Ontario” comes from the Iroquois word, Ontarí’io, which means “great lake” or “lake of shining waters”. It has nothing to do with Canada.         

— Three Secret Service officials, including the agency’s top spokesman, have been put on leave in an internal misconduct investigation. Communications Director Anthony Guglielmi and two others had their security clearances suspended and work devices seized, according to several news outlets.

  This may be the result of FBI director Kash Patel’s hunt for the people who leaked the story that Donald Trump secretly switched planes leaving Turkey because of a threat to his Qatar-donated Air Force One jet. 

AFFECTIONATE FRIENDSHIP: North Carolina Republic Rep. Chuck Edwards argued in a letter fighting an ethics investigation that his conduct toward two young female staffers fell short of sexual harassment and that he should not be censured by the House. 

  In the  22-page letter, Edwards wrote, “An affectionate friendship is not a sexual proposition. A gift is not sexual misconduct. A compliment is not sexual misconduct. Poetry is not sexual misconduct. Socializing with a colleague is not sexual misconduct.”

  Maybe … but when you put them all together … 

THE OBIT PAGE: Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” who was convicted in the slaughter of  8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, has died in prison in The Hague. He was 83.

  The Srebrenica massacre was one of the biggest acts of genocide since World War II. In the midst of the 1990s war in which Yugoslavia broke up into fighting between Serbs, Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims and the Albanians of Kosovo, Mladic promised to avenge the conquest of Serbia centuries before by the Ottoman Muslim Turks. 

  Over 10 days, his troops hunted down and executed thousands of Bosnian Muslims. Women were raped. 

  Mladic was the subject of a 16-year manhunt, finally captured in 2011 and convicted in the World Court. In his first court appearance he dismissed the charges against him as “obnoxious” and “monstrous.” 

THE SPIN RACK: A Massachusetts jury has begun deliberations in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, who admits killing her three young children in 2023 but says she did it because she was affected by postpartum psychosis following the birth of her 8-month-old. —  Microsoft founder Bill Gates said in an interview with the New York Times that artificial intelligence is more dangerous than tech executives will admit. He said that addressing the risks should be “the world’s top priority.” He said, “They’re just full speed ahead and hoping that the good outweighs the bad.”  — The California legislature passed a law making disposable vaping devices illegal to manufacture, distribute, or sell in the state. The vapes have been blamed for trash and spontaneous fires caused by their batteries.

BELOW THE FOLD: A headline on the San Francisco news website “SFGATE” says, “After 27 years vacant, Calif. mall to be razed to the ground.”

  It’s like “brutal murder.” Is there any other kind?

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