ORANGE ALERT: Donald Trump lost his third attempt just this week to delay or kill his upcoming trial in the Stormy Daniels porn star payoff. Lawyers filed new motions yesterday and an appeals court judge quickly shot them down. Trump can still appeal to a full appellate panel, but it’s probably too late to delay the open of the trial on Monday.

  The latest filing was sealed, but Trump has been trying to get the trial moved, have the judge removed, and attempting to be granted presidential immunity from prosecution. 

  On that last issue, Trump is accused of committing a crime before he was elected president and was not charged until after he was no longer in office. His buckshot legal filings seem to indicate growing panic about actually going to trial next week.

THE WAR ROOM: An Israeli airstrike killed three sons of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas. Three of Haniyeh’s grandchildren were also killed, according to Hamas-affiliated media. 

  Haniyeh is reported to have said that the deaths will not affect his position.

  In a separate development, Hamas says it does not have 40 living hostages that meet the criteria being discussed for a cease-fire and prisoner exchange, raising fears in Israel that more hostages are dead than they had thought.

  The current proposal is to deliver 40 women, older people and ill hostages as well as five female Israeli soldiers in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

THE INTEL: Right wingers in the House stalled a move to extend the life of the warrantless Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) after Donald Trump posted a message to kill it.

  The former president posted on his Truth Social website, “KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS, THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!”

  FISA allows the US to listen in on foreigners — not Americans — who might be plotting against the US. It has been deemed critical in for fighting international terrorism, but even some liberal organizations have questioned the legality of FISA.

  In Trump’s case, surveillance under the act picked up attempts at foreign influence on the Trump campaign. 

ECON 101: Stocks fell sharply yesterday on discouraging news about inflation, sparking fears that the Federal Reserve will postpone cutting interest rates. 

  Prices rose 3.5 percent in March, revealing that inflation isn’t going away. The Dow Jones fell 422 points, just over 1 percent.  

DIRECTLY TO JAIL: Six white former Mississippi sheriff deputies who formed what they called “the Goon Squad” were sentenced yesterday to state prison terms ranging from 15 to 45 years in prison for beating, torturing, and sexually molesting two Black men because they were in a house with a white woman.

  All six will serve their state time concurrent with federal sentences.

  One of the victims, Michael Johnson, said in a statement read by his lawyer that, “Your honor, they killed me. I just didn’t die.”

  The Rankin County sheriff has not resigned over the scandal and says he didn’t know about the Goon Squad even though his fourth in command was the leader of it.

THE OBIT PAGE: Peter Higgs, the Nobel-winning physicist who predicted the existence but did not actually discover the fundamental particle originally known as “the God particle,” died at home in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was 94.

  Higgs was just 35 in 1964 when he posited the existence of a new particle that would explain how other particles acquire mass. It was ultimately named “The Higgs boson.” A boson is a subatomic particle.

  His idea set off a billion dollar search that resulted in his particle being found in 2012. A year later he was awarded the Nobel.

  Higgs was described as a very private and outdoorsy man who celebrated the discovery of his particle with a can of beer. The brilliant physicist didn’t own a television, a cellphone, or use email.

NATIONAL PUBLIC REACTION: Right wing commentators and Donald Trump seized on the article written by an NPR employee to denounce the publicly-funded news network as “woke” and left wing.

  Trump posted on his Truth Social calling NPR a “LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE” and said, “NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!” 

  NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner wrote in his article that the network is a bubble of liberal groupthink that has lost its traditional audience. He said the network both internally and in its news coverage is obsessed with such things as gender, sexual identity, climate change, and the dangers of Republican politics to the country.

   A banner on Fox News host Jesse Watters’ primetime program shouted, “NPR PUMPED OUT AN ASSEMBLY LINE OF PROPAGANDA.” 

  NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, in a memo to staff said she rejects Berliner’s assessment. “We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” Chapin wrote. “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.”

THE SPIN RACK:  Former Trump company CFO Allen Weisselberg was sentenced to another five months in New York’s Riker’s Island yesterday for his guilty plea to lying about the size and value of Donald Trump’s New York triplex apartment. — A former assistant principal at the Virginia elementary school where a 6-year-old boy shot his teacher last year has been indicted on eight felony counts of child abuse and neglect. Ebony Parker is accused of doing nothing when told more than once that the boy might have a gun. — Republicans in the Arizona legislature yesterday thwarted Democrat efforts to repeal the 1864 law that banned abortion in the state. 

BELOW THE FOLD: Asked yesterday at The White House about the abortion politics in Arizona, President Biden said, “Elect me, I’m in the 20 … 20^th Century … 21^st Century.”

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