Twister: Tornadoes and powerful storms over the weekend killed at least 33 people in several southern and midwestern states between Friday and yesterday.

  The storm damage stretched from Iowa to Delaware.

  Nine people died in McNairy County, Tennessee, where some homes were blown away. Three died in rural Crawford County, Illinois. Five died across Indiana, including three in Sullivan County. The small city of Sullivan was left in rubble, with newly homeless residents wandering and looking dazed. Wynn Arkansas also was all but destroyed.

Trump World: Donald Trump is in full attack mode before his arraignment tomorrow in Manhattan criminal court. He posted on his Truth Social website that, “The Judge ‘assigned’ to my Witch Hunt Case, a ‘Case’ that has NEVER BEEN CHARGED BEFORE, HATES ME.”

  If he didn’t before, maybe the judges does now.

  When things don’t go his way, Trump always attacks. Lose the election, it was fraud. The woman who tells of an affair is a “horse face.” A team of NY Times reporters writes that in addition to his predilection for defending by attacking, “Mr. Trump also has a lengthy history of conflating legal problems with public-relations problems, treating every matter as one that can be dealt with in terms of a media strategy.”

  Former Attorney General Bill Barr in a weekend interview said that if Trump goes to trial he should not testify, “because he lacks self-control.” 

  On another front, The Washington Post reports that the Justice Department and FBI investigators have fresh evidence pointing to possible obstruction by Trump in the investigation into top-secret documents stored at his Mar-a-Lago home. 

  Trump can be expected to fight and delay at every stage of the New York and other potential criminal cases. The show starts today after 2pm.

The War Zone: An influential pro-war Russian military blogger was killed in an explosion at a café in St. Petersburg. Vladlen Tatarsky  was one among a radical sector of pro-invasion bloggers who backed Moscow’s war but also were critical of the  Russian army’s flaws and failures.

  Authorities have arrested a Russian woman as a suspect and President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said that “there are indications” that “Ukrainian intelligence agencies may have had something to do with the planning of this terrorist attack.”

  The Institute for the Study of war says that it appears to be the universal assessment that Russia’s winter offensive has failed. ISW says, “Russian, Ukrainian, and Western sources observed on April 1 that the Russian winter offensive has failed to achieve the Kremlin’s goals of seizing the Donetsk and Luhansk oblast administrative borders by March 31.”

  Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov has been running the war directly … no one ranks higher than him except Putin, so this doesn’t bode well for Gerasimov. A string of generals ahead of his have been fired.

Final Four: Third-seeded Louisiana State crushed Iowa and their top gun Caitlin Clark to win their first women’s basketball championship 102-85. The Tigers’ 102 points were the most in a Division I women’s title game. Iowa’s 85 was the most in a loss.

  The women put on a stunning show and athleticism this year, moving some basketball writers to comment that the women’s game has finally “arrived” as equal to anything the men can do.

  The NY Times notes that the women’s talent pool is now so big, and the WNBA is so small, graduates who want to go pro will have to leave the country.

  Speaking of the men, the University of Connecticut will be gunning for its 5^th NCAA championship when it meets San Diego State tonight in the men’s basketball final. UConn stomped Miami 72-59 to reach the final pairing.

  San Diego squeaked into the final when Lamont Butler Jr. hit a jump shot at the buzzer to beat  Florida Atlantic 72-71.

The Obit Page: Margot Stern Strom, a former schoolteacher who in the mid-1970s turned her ignorance about the Holocaust into a nonprofit educational organization that develops anti-hate curriculums for teenagers, died last in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was 81.

  Strom was teaching seventh- and eighth-grade language arts and social studies at the Runkle School in Brookline in 1975 when she and a colleague, Bill Parsons, attended a Holocaust workshop that wok them up to how little they knew about the murder of six million Jews.

  They went on to found Facing History & Ourselves, which uses the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, segregation, and other historical injustices teach eighth to 12th graders’ about racism, extremism, and antisemitism. 

The Spin Rack: Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced he’s running for the  Republican nomination for president, saying ​America needs a different leader than Donald Trump. That makes him the third announced Republican candidate along with Nikki Haley and Trump. — French government minister Marlene Schiappa has come under fire from fellow pols for appearing on the front cover of Playboy magazine fully clothed in a white dress for interview she did on women’s and LGBT rights. — 

Below the Fold: Residents of Paris voted overwhelmingly to get rid of the  French capital’s rentable electric scooters from their streets, in a referendum the mayor said sent a “very clear message.” It was 89% to just 11%, but Paris’ has 1.38 million registered voters and only 103,000 people voted. Even so, the 15,000 scooters could be gone at the end of August when the city’s contracts with three scooter operators expire.

  Parisians have become annoyed with the scooters that get dropped everywhere on the sidewalks and have become a hazard to city traffic, not to mention the number of times pedestrians get hit.

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