Empty Threats: Backing down from his threat to close the Southern border this week, President Trump said he’s giving Mexico “a one-year warning” to stop the flow of drugs and stem the tide of immigrants passing through to the United States.

  Trump said, “Mexico understands that we’re going to close the border or I’m going to tariff the cars — one or the other.” He said auto tariffs would be a “very powerful incentive.”

  The President appears to have been convinced by his advisers that closing the border would be an economic torpedo so he’s putting it on hold.

  Again, Trump is demonstrating that he doesn’t know how things work. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is still in effect, neither country pays tariffs for goods passing over the border. In the case of motor vehicles, parts sometimes pass back and forth over the border repeatedly as units are built and ultimately installed in finished vehicles.

Get Out of Jail Free Card:President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen is making a bid to stay out of prison with an offer to congressional Democrats of more damaging information, presumably on President Trump and his organization.

  Cohen’s lawyers say their client found files on a hard drive that might be helpful to federal investigators in the  Southern District of New York.

  Cohen, who pleaded guilty to financial crimes, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress, is supposed to report to prison on May 6^th. His lawyers say they hope his imprisonment “will be substantially postponed while he is fully cooperating with prosecutors and Congress.”

Amazon Prime:Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie finalized their divorce as fast as express delivery. According to the settlement, he keeps 75 percent of their jointly-owned stock and voting control of all of it. He also keeps control of The Washington Postand his aerospace company, Blue Origin.

  MacKenzie’s share of stock is about 4 percent of the entire company which doesn’t sound like much, but yesterday it was worth $35.5 billion. 

Fight Control:A report out of Ethiopia on the crash of one of its airliners suggests that Boeing is wrong, or worse, about the safety of its anti-stall system on the 737 Max 8.

  Ethiopian investigators say their pilots followed the proper procedures for turning off the system that was forcing the plane into a fatal dive. The NY Timesreports according to Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the American Airlines pilots union and a 737 pilot that, “The captain was not able to recover the aircraft with the procedures he was trained on and told by Boeing.” 

  Boeing now admits that a faulty sensor may be to blame for the crashes of Lion Air and Ethiopian jets killing 350 people.

The Roundup:The City of Chicago plans to sue actor Jussie Smollett if he doesn’t pay $130,000, the cost of investigating his false claim that he was the target of a hate attack. — The Motel 6 chain has agreed to pay $12 million to the state of Washington to settle a lawsuit over giving the names of guests to customs and immigration.

Strange:An Illinois family is coming down from hopes that a long-missing family member had been found.

 Wednesday in  Newport, Ky., a young man who looked disheveled identified himself as Timmothy Pitzen, an Illinois boy who vanished in 2011 at age of 6 after his mother committed suicide in a motel room. 

  He said he had just escaped his kidnappers whom he described as two bodybuilders. He even gave the Pitzen’s correct birth date.

  The FBI ordered quick DNA tests and the results were disappointing all around. It wasn’t Timmothy Pitzen. It was Brian Michael Rini, a 23-year-old convicted felon from Medina, Ohio.

  “It’s been awful,” said Alana Anderson, Timmothy’s grandmother, who lives in Illinois. “We’ve been on tenterhooks. We’ve been alternatively hopeful and frightened. It’s just been exhausting.”

  Why Rini identified himself as Pitzen, and how he knew some details, is yet to be explained.

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