The Red Line: Israel is being blamed for an overnight air strike on a Syrian air base, just hours after President Trump promised a “big price” to be paid for the chemical attack on a Damascus suburb that killed at least 42 people.

The Russian military says two Israeli F-15s carried out the air strike.

President Trump is under pressure to mount an attack as well. In a tweet he held Russia partially responsible. “Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad,” Trump wrote.

Republican Sen. John McCain said Trump “emboldened” Syria last week by announcing he plans to pull US advisory troops out of Syria. McCain said, “The question now is whether he will do anything about it.”

Trump did order a missile strike after a Syrian chemical attack last year.

Truth and Consequences: A Washington Post story that says Chief of Staff John Kelly has lost power and the ear of the President had Trump tweeting one of his anti-press denials. “The Washington Post is far more fiction than fact,” he wrote. “Story after story is made up garbage – more like a poorly written novel than good reporting. Always quoting sources (not names), many of which don’t exist. Story on John Kelly isn’t true, just another hit job!”

The Post story says Kelly has been the subject of presidential tongue-lashings and that he’s being pushed to the sidelines. “Kelly neither lurks around the Oval Office nor listens in on many of the president’s calls, even with foreign leaders,” the Post reports. “He has not been fully consulted on several recent key personnel decisions. And he has lost the trust and support of some of the staff, as well as angered first lady Melania Trump, who officials said was upset over his sudden dismissal of Johnny McEntee, the president’s 27-year-old personal aide.”

Fear Strikes: Republicans on the far right are developing a mid-term election strategy based upon invoking the fear that if Democrats win a majority they will impeach President Trump. The NY Times reports that the anti-impeachment message has helped fundraising, “But party strategists also believe that floating the possibility of impeachment can also act as a sort of scared-straight motivational tool for turnout.”

The Social Network: Just a day before founder Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify before Congress, Facebook is beginning to notify the 87 million users whose personal data was harvested by the research firm, Cambridge Analytica. This comes more than two years after Facebook learned of the unauthorized access.

Name and Shame: New Jersey’s new governor, Phil Murphy, has signed an executive order nicknamed “Name and Shame” that would publicize the origin of guns used in crimes in his state. Roughly 80 percent of guns used in crimes in New Jersey come from out of state. Murphy’s order directs local and state police to periodically publish data on guns used in crimes and reveal where they came from.

From the Putting Green: Twenty-six-year-old Patrick Reed beat Rickie Fowler by a single stroke to win the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Ga. It’s the first major win for the somewhat brash Reed, who’s not the most popular player on the circuit.

Headlines and Deadlines: About two dozen journalists at the Denver Post lose their jobs today in cutbacks ordered by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital that owns the paper. Newspaper layoffs are not unusual these days, except that the Post ran a strongly-worded editorial objecting to the layoffs in open rebellion against its owners.

The editorial asks, “Does this cut, which follows so many in recent years that our ranks have shriveled from more than 250 to fewer than 100 today, represent the beginning of the end for the Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire?”

The Denver Post has been a good newspaper. It has won nine Pulitzer Prizes, including one in 2013 for coverage of the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.

The editorial goes on, “The hedge fund managers — often tellingly referred to as ‘vulture capitalists’ — have hidden behind a narrative that adequately staffed newsrooms and newspapers can no longer survive in the digital marketplace. Try to square that with a recent lawsuit filed by one of Digital First Media’s minority shareholders that claims Alden has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars of its newspaper profits into shaky investments completely unrelated to the business of gathering news.”

And the editorial says, “The smart money is that in a few years The Denver Post will be rotting bones. And a major city in an important political region will find itself without a newspaper.”

Let’s see what happens. You can question the world in journalism, but not your own boss.

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