AID WORKERS KILLED: Seven aid workers for World Central Kitchen riding in a convoy were killed today when their marked armored SUV was hit by an Israeli airstrike. They had just finished unloading food in what was supposed to be a “deconflicted zone” with their movements coordinated with the Israeli military.

   The seven were from Australia, Poland, Britain, the United States, Canada, and Palestine, according to World Central Kitchen. The organization has suspended operations in Gaza following the incident.

   The Israeli military said it is investigating at the highest level and that it “makes extensive efforts to enable the safe delivery of humanitarian aid and has been working closely with W.C.K. in their vital efforts to provide food and humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.”

  The missile went right through the WCK logo on the roof of the car.

  World Central Kitchen was founded in 2010 by Spanish-American chef José Andrés after the devastating earthquake in Haiti and has since fed people in disaster and war zones around the world.

THE WAR ROOM: Also yesterday, seven ranking Iranian military officers including three generals were killed yesterday in an Israeli air strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria.

  The generals served in Iran’s Quds Force, the military and intelligence service of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Israeli military officials confirmed anonymously to reporters that Israel carried out the attack. Iran claimed the right to respond.

  The strike is part of wat’s been called the “Shadow War” Israel is waging with Iran. The conflict is increasingly coming out of the shadows.

VIABILITY: The Florida Supreme Court overturned years of its own precedents ruling that the State Constitution’s privacy protections do not cover abortion, therefore allowing the state to ban the procedure after six weeks.

  In a separate ruling, the same court ruled that a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee the right to abortion “before viability” could go on the November ballot.

  In the privacy case, the Florida court said it is following the US Supreme Court in ruling that the Privacy Clause does not guarantee the right to an abortion through the end of the second trimester as once held in the historic Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal throughout the country. The Florida judges said their own panel had been wrong for decades.

ORANGE ALERT: The New York judge in the criminal case involving Donald Trump’s hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels expanded his gag order on the former president to include the judge’s family. Trump in recent days has openly attacked Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, a Democratic political consultant, calling her “a Rabid Trump Hater” even though she has nothing to do with the criminal case. Trump has defended his attacks as “core political speech.”

  “This pattern of attacking family members of presiding jurists and attorneys assigned to his cases serves no legitimate purpose,” Merchan wrote. “It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings, that not only they, but their family members as well, are ‘fair game’ for defendant’s vitriol.”

  In Trump’s New York civil fraud case, he was able to put up a $175 million bond to be able to appeal and avoid having to pay the full $434 million judgement and interest levied by the judge in that case. Trump was found to have inflated his assets by as much as $2 billion in order to get more favorable terms on loans and insurance.

THE BRACKETS: Iowa’s phenomenal Caitlin Clark hit nine 3-pointers and scored a total of 41 points to lead the Hawkeyes to a 94-87 win over LSU. She dropped one in from over 27 feet.

  On Friday, Iowa tips off against powerful UConn in the Final Four. Also on Friday, South Carolina meets North Carolina State to determine the final pairing for the championship.  

THE OBIT PAGE: Actress Barbara Rush, who in 1954, won the Golden Globe Award for most promising female newcomer for her role in the 1953 science-fiction film “It Came from Outer Space,” died Sunday at age 97.

  Rush had a long career in movies and television. She was a regular in the prime time soap opera “Peyton Place” and on the daytime soap “All My Children.” She appeared in the movies  “The Young Philadelphians,” “The Young Lions,” “Robin and the 7 Hoods,” with the Sinatra/Sammy Davis Rat Pack, and “Hombre,” with Paul Newman.

THE SPIN RACK: The price of stock in Donald Trump’s Truth Social media company took a 21 percent dive yesterday. That follows a 6 percent drop last Thursday. The day it went public, Truth Social was the most shorted stock in the US, meaning investors were betting it would go down. The company lost $58 million last year yet managed to be valued at $7 billion. — Dozens of wildlife protection and animal welfare organizations are fighting a US Fish and Wildlife Service plan to kill roughly half a million barred owls to protect the northern spotted owl. The barred owls are pushing out the less aggressive spotted owls. The Wildlife Service says that if no action is taken, the spotted owl faces extinction. — A federal judge in Boston ruled that migrants flown from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022 can continue with their lawsuit against the Florida company that took them there. The judge, however, dismissed claims against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other officials who arranged the migrant dumping operation.

BELOW THE FOLD: Presidential candidate and anti-vaxxer conspiracy monger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. yesterday told CNN’s Erin Burnett that President Joe Biden is a bigger threat to democracy that Donald Trump. He said that’s because Biden is the first president in history to use federal agencies to censor the political speech of an opponent. Of course, he was speaking about himself and if what he said is true he wouldn’t have been able to say it.