City of Firelight: France and the world are in shock today after fire destroyed the roof and much of the interior of Notre Dame Cathedral in central Paris, one of the oldest, most historic, and beautiful buildings in the world. This morning the twin bell towers of the cathedral’s grand entrance stand over smoking rubble.

  Fire burned in the heart of the cathedral, collapsing the roof and toppling its iconic central tower. “Everything is collapsing,” a police officer said as he watched it burn. Parisians and tourists stood by praying, singing hymns, and weeping.

 French President Emanuel Macron vowed that Notre dame will be rebuilt to its medieval grandeur. “Notre Dame of Paris is our history,” Macron said. “The epicenter of our lives.” 

  Notre Dame has been a repository for irreplaceable artworks and Catholic relics that firefighters fought to save as the cathedral became a stone furnace. It had previously survived riots, revolution, and world war. It was gutted by fire.

  There was no immediate word of the cause, but the cathedral has been under renovation and has been surrounded by scaffolding.

  Notre Dame sits on an island in the middle of the Seine river which passes through Paris. It is a focal point of Paris visited by 13 million people every year.

 Construction began in 1160 and was largely completed 100 years later. Its pointed gothic arches and flying buttresses to support its vaulted ceilings were a new method of building at the time. Its two towers are the tallest structures in Paris, second only to the Eiffel Tower. Victor Hugo called it a “vast symphony in stone.”Today, Notre Dame is the focal point of grief.

Low Board Scores:Some of the students who gained fraudulent admission to college have been sent “target” letters by federal prosecutors, informing them that they are under criminal investigation. The feds are tightening the screws.

  Most if not all of the students involved in the college admissions scandal knew that their parents were putting in the fix to get them into school. Actress Felicity Huffman says her daughter didn’t know.

  Rolling the dice on a prison term, actress Lori Loughlin and her designer husband Mossimo Giannulli, pleaded not guilty Monday to charges that they paid $500,000 in bribes to get their daughters into the University of Southern California.While more than a dozen defendants in the admissions scheme have already agreed to plead guilty. Loughlin and Giannulli are either negotiating, or putting up a fight that could get them a longer prison term if they lose.

Under Audit:Yesterday was tax day, the day that President Trump’s lawyers urgedthe Treasury Department not to hand over Trump’s tax returns to House Democrats, warning that releasing the documents would turn the Internal Revenue Service into a political weapon.

  Rep. Richard Neal, the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, gave the Treasury Dept. until April 23^rdto turn over six years of the President’s returns.

  The law says Ways and Means can look at the taxes of any filer. It’s pretty simple and clear. The refusal by Trump and Treasury could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

  Trump refused to reveal his returns while running for President then said he wouldn’t release them because they are under audit. There’s nothing about being under audit that prevents hm from releasing his taxes.

Mueller Time:The long-awaited Special Counsel report will be released to Congress in redacted form on Thursday, the Justice Department says. How much of the nearly 400-page report into Russian election influencing and connections to the Trump campaign will be blacked out remains to be seen.  According to the guidelines described by Attorney Gen. William Barr, probably a lot of it will be behind black bars.

  The President has been doing his best to define the report before it can define itself in public. He tweeted yesterday, “The Mueller Report, which was written by 18 Angry Democrats who also happen to be Trump Haters (and Clinton Supporters), should have focused on the people who SPIED on my 2016 Campaign, and others who fabricated the whole Russia Hoax. That is, never forget, the crime.”

  He is reviving the claim that his campaign was infiltrated by US government spies, but there’s no evidence of that.

The Pulitzers:The Sun Sentinel of South Florida won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for its coverage of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. It’s the second time the paper with a circulation of 164,000 readers has won the Pulitzer’s most prestigious prize.

  In addition to documenting the shooting and its aftermath, Sun Sentinel reporters revealed the failures by local officials and law enforcement that, the paper wrote, cost children their lives.

  At The New York Times, three reporters were cited for their revealing investigation of how President Trump built a fortune out of an inheritance from his father and his family’s  “suspect” tax strategies.

  The Pulitzer committee also gave a special citation to the Annapolis Gazette for its response to a newsroom shooting in which five staffers were killed.

Going Analog:New York freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has a talent for making headlines and using social media to raise the blood pressure of Republicans, announced in an interview that she has quit Facebook. She described social media as a “public health risk” because it can lead to “increased isolation, depression, anxiety, addiction, escapism.”

  Also political knife fights.

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