The War Zone: Fending off Russian missile attacks, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the G7 leaders to provide  more “modern and effective air defense systems.” Zelensky said additional defense systems are necessary to counter Russian missiles and drones, particularly those supplied by Iran.

  Ukraine’s request is on the agenda as the NATO defense ministers gather. NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said sending more air defense systems is a “top priority.” 

  The Ukrainian president made his pitch during an emergency virtual meeting of the Group of 7 industrialized nations a day after Russia rained Ukraine with 81 missiles and combat drones in retaliation for the attack on the bridge linking Russia and occupied Crimea.

  President Joe Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he thinks Vladmir Putin “is a rational actor who has miscalculated significantly” by invading Ukraine. “I think he thought he was going to be welcomed with open arms, that this was the home of Mother Russia in Kyiv, and that where he was going to be welcomed, and I think he just totally miscalculated,” Biden said.

  The Russians, meanwhile, have detained eight suspects in the explosion that damaged the bridge from Russia to the Crimean peninsula. Ukraine denies responsibility.

Politically Incorrect: An angry crowd attended the meeting of the Los Angeles City Council demanding the resignation of three members who had been caught on an audio recording making racist references to minorities. President Biden yesterday joined the call for the three members to resign their seats.

  In the profanity-laced meeting led by council president Nury Martinez, she described the Black child of a white council member as “changuito,” Spanish for little monkey. She also called Oaxacan immigrants living in Koreatown “short little dark people.”

  Martinez has resigned as council president, but has not resigned her seat on city council.

 Trumped Up: The Justice Department urged the Supreme yesterday to reject former President Donald Trump’s request for it to intervene in the dispute over classified documents seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August. 

  Calling the records “extraordinarily sensitive,” the Justice Department said the Supreme Court should let stand a federal appeals court order blocking the special master’s authority over those records while legal challenges play out. The justice lawyers said it was a matter of national security.

  Speaking at a rally in Arizona Sunday, Trump claimed that his taking of secret documents was nothing unusual and that four previous presidents had done it. In an utter and complete fabrication designed to whip up the crowd, Trump claimed that Barack Obama, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton all moved documents to unsecured locations.  He said;  “George H.W. Bush took millions and millions of documents to a former bowling alley pieced together with what was then an old and broken Chinese restaurant. They put them together. And it had a broken front door and broken windows. Other than that, it was quite secure. There was no security.”

  The Bush documents were still under control of the national archives and they were well guarded. 

Leaving the Party: Former member of Congress from Hawaii and hopeless 2020 presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard announced that she’s leaving the Democratic Party because she can “no longer stomach” the direction that “woke Democratic Party ideologues are taking our country.”

  She said in her announcement that the party is “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers who are driven by cowardly wokeness who divide us by racializing every issue and stoking anti-white racism, who actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms that are enshrined in our Constitution, who are hostile to people of faith and spirituality …” 

 There’s more, but you get the idea.  

The Obit Page: Angela Lansbury, an actress who ranged from to screen to stage and television stardom, died in Los Angeles at age 96.

  Although she had won five Tony awards for her work on stage, Lansbury was probably best known for playing the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the 1980s CBS series “Murder, She Wrote.”

  Born in London in 1925, Lansbury and her mother fled the war to the US where the young actress established her career. She was just 18 when she played Charles Boyer’s mouthy Cockney servant in the 1944 thriller “Gaslight,” resulting  in an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress and a contract with MGM. She was nominated for a second Oscar in 1946, for her supporting performance as a dance-hall girl in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

  The movies were not really her thing. “I wasn’t very good at being a starlet,” she said. “I didn’t want to pose for cheesecake photos and that kind of thing.”

  The stage was more her medium, and she won her first Tony playing the lead in the Broadway production of “Mame.” That made her a star, but it was “Murder, She Wrote” that made her famous. 

  She told The NY Times at the time, “What appealed to me about Jessica Fletcher is that I could do what I do best and have a little chance to play — a sincere, down-to-earth woman.”

  She was nominated 12 times for an Emmy as Jessica Fletcher, but never won.

The Spin Rack: Baltimore prosecutors have dropped charges against Adnan Syed, who was convicted of murdering his former high school girlfriend and spent 23 years in prison before his case was overturned with new information. Syed and his case were the subject of the hit podcast, “Serial.” — Hal Harrell, the superintendent of the Uvalde, Texas school district, announced he’s retiring at the end of the school year. Harrell has been under scrutiny since the Robb elementary school massacre, but a crowd of supporters cheered him at Monday’s school board meeting. — The NY City school system says it’s struggling to absorb 5,500 migrant children who don’t speak English. — The coronation of King Charles III is set for May 6^th.

Hairy Event: Voting has closed for the USA Mullet Championships.

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