HAPPY NATIONAL ROBOTICS WEEK.

MARK RIPPETOE IS BACK WITH THIS MODEST PROPOSAL: End Men’s and Women’s Divisions in Sports.

Normally I find myself in agreement with Mark, but this time I’m going to have to wait until he agrees to some kind of exemption or carve-out for beach volleyball.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST A WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: Ohio CPS took 7-year-old from parents without cause.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: The world’s first international race for molecule-cars, the Nanocar Race, is on. (Via NanoDot).

I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM. AND I GOT ONE! U.S. drops “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan, marking weapon’s first use. “The bomb, officially called a GBU-43, is known as the ‘mother of all bombs.’ It is the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal and has never before been used in combat.” It’s interesting, and perhaps disturbing, that field commanders have to get special permission to use these non-nuclear weapons. I’m especially concerned at the possibility that the permission may involve lawyers.

WASHINGTON IS WHERE BAD IDEAS GO TO BECOME ENSHRINED IN LAW FOREVER: Trump’s Budget Director Confirms the Export-Import Bank Will ‘Continue to Exist’

President Trump fully supports the flip-flop, saying the Ex-Im Bank is “a very good thing.”

AH, YOU THINK DARKNESS IS YOUR ALLY? YOU MERELY ADOPTED THE DARK. I WAS BORN IN IT, MOLDED BY IT: USA Today columnist Michael Wolff to Kellyanne Conway: ‘When They Say Democracy Dies in Darkness, You’re the Darkness.’

Related: Conway: ‘Alternative fact’ critics are ‘f—ing miserable’ people.

Analysis: All too true in most cases.

TREAT THEM LIKE OLD-FASHIONED COMMON CARRIERS, AND DON’T LET THEM CONTRACT OUT OF THEIR OBLIGATIONS: Can an Airline Really Just Yank You Off the Plane?

RELIGIOUS CLEANSING: Bishop says state of emergency not enough to protect Egypt’s Copts.

Bishop Macarius, head of the Coptic diocese in Minya, south of Cairo, was skeptical that a state of emergency imposed after the Islamist attacks on Palm Sunday was adequate security and said the church wanted further guarantees.

Copts make up about 10 percent of the 92-million population of mostly Muslim Egypt and are the region’s largest Christian denomination, with a nearly 2,000-year-old history in the country.

The Coptic church in Egypt will mark Easter in a subdued fashion, Macarius said, with the usual prayers and religious observances but none of the celebrations and visits from dignitaries that would normally enliven the day.

“We can consider ourselves in a wave of persecution, but the church has gone through a lot in 20 centuries,” the bearded Macarius told Reuters in an interview.

“There are waves of persecution. It reaches to the highest point like a pyramid and then it goes down again,” the bishop said on Wednesday. “We are at a very high point.”

Still, the el-Sisi government is doing more to protect Copts than the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Morsi regime it overthrew.

FASTER & FURIOUSER PLEASE: Suspected Triggerman in Border Agent Brian Terry’s Murder Arrested.

ON A MISSION: Restoration to Return NASA Mission Control Room to Apollo Glory.

The Mission Operations Control Room, located on the third floor of the Christopher C. Kraft, Jr. Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas, is about to get a $5 million restoration to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and serve as an inspiration for the generations of visitors who come to see it on public tours.

“I believe this is going to be the tribute that the men, and a few women, are provided for the years of dedication,” said Eugene Kranz, the famed flight director who led the room when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969 and when the Apollo 13 astronauts radioed, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” a year later. “It’s a real pleasure to address the era that we worked in, with technologies that we worked with in the 1950s and 60s.”

Designated by the National Park Service as a landmark in 1985, the Apollo-era Mission Operations Control Room-2 (MOCR-2, also known as Flight Control Room-2, or FCR-2) has been left in more or less the condition it was when it controlled its last flight, space shuttle Discovery’s STS-53 mission in December 1992. The restoration will strip away the later-era modifications to present the room in the state for which it is best known.

“The room was actively in use for 30 years. It was used for the shuttle program, so it has been adapted,” said William Harris, president and CEO of Space Center Houston. “The room is very barebones at this point. It is kind of shell of what it had been during that era.”

This seems backwards. Renewed mission before renewing Mission Control.

WELL, THAT’S A LOAD OF CRAP. THE SUPREME COURT WAS BROKEN IN 1937. Linda Greenhouse tells Republicans — about the Supreme Court — you broke it, you own it. But it’s Linda Greenhouse, so waddyagonnado.

UH-HUH: Assad Says Chemical attacks ‘100 percent fabrication’

ROGER SIMON: Trump’s Tilt to China Spells Trouble for Putin.

A DESTRUCTIVE FAIRYTALE: MIT Press Publishes ‘Communism for Kids’ Book.

Bumped, and with the link fixed — sorry!

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1435: House GOP Tax Writers Ask Attorney General To Reopen Criminal Investigation Of Lois Lerner.

PROMISES, PROMISES: The Future Of Energy Isn’t Fossil Fuels Or Renewables, It’s Nuclear Fusion.

One day this will be true. I hope.

GOOD LORD: 1st Female Muslim Judge Found Dead in Hudson River.

The life of a trailblazing New York judge has come to a tragic—and currently unexplained—end. The body of Sheila Abdus-Salaam, a 65-year-old judge on the state’s highest court, was found floating in the Hudson River on Wednesday afternoon, around a mile from her Harlem home, the New York Daily News reports. Police say there was no sign of traumatic injuries or foul play. Her husband, who reported her missing Tuesday morning, was brought in to identify the body.

No sign of foul play, but found in the Hudson — very odd.

Tyler O’Neil has more.

Bad link — fixed now!

THE ONLY PEOPLE ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING FOR CARBON EMISSIONS ARE FRACKERS, WHO ARE WEIRDLY CAST AS THE VILLAINS: The Magic Disappearing $100 Billion Climate Fund.

Shocking news—the magic $100 billion climate fund appears not to be taking shape! Even optimistic estimates sat the fund is $40 billion short, and developing countries say that understates the problem. . . .

First world donors have been busily relabeling other foreign aid as contributions to the climate kitty. For developing countries, this is a cheat—they expect $100 billion in new money.

Or, to put it more accurately, they are not nearly stupid and naive enough to believe the lies Western diplomats tell when trying to bamboozle naive green voters at home that they are “Doing Something” about climate change. So they don’t really expect all that money, but hope to use these commitments to pry something out of the West. Also, since the West will certainly default on these bogus commitments, developing countries have all the justification they need to blow off their own commitments when the time comes.

This, one notes, is the house of cards that the last Administration claimed was a big piece of its legacy.

It’s lies and financial flim-flammery all the way down.

MORE ON THE ROLLING STONE LAWSUIT SETTLEMENT, from the always-on-point Ashe Schow. A lot of people have come on to this story, but she owned it from the beginning.

SHOT: Trump and Xi – Tensions Turn to Friendship.

It’s safe to say very few people saw that coming. China was, as much as any country, the target of Trump broadsides during the 2016 presidential campaign—for not playing fair in the world economy, for taking advantage of the U.S., for stealing American business, for intimidating its neighbors.

Meantime, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin was the great-power leader who was supposed to emerge as the Trump favorite, the one who would develop a close relationship and be forgiven for past transgressions.

Yet somehow in the five months or so since Mr. Trump’s election victory, almost the reverse has happened. Now it appears the Trump-Xi relationship may be emerging as the world’s most important.

As Mr. Trump recounted in the interview, he spent hours with Mr. Xi at his Mar-a-Lago resort last week, including long stretches minus their retinues. An opening discussion between the two “was scheduled for 10 to 15 minutes, and it lasted for three hours,” Mr. Trump said. “And then the second day we had another 10-minute meeting and that lasted for two hours. We had just a very good chemistry.”

CHASER: Kim Jong Un’s rockets are getting an important boost — from China.

When North Korea launched its Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite into space last February, officials heralded the event as a birthday gift for dead leader Kim Jong Il. But the day also brought an unexpected prize for the country’s adversaries: priceless intelligence in the form of rocket parts that fell into the Yellow Sea.

Entire sections of booster rocket were snagged by South Korea’s navy and then scrutinized by international weapons experts for clues about the state of North Korea’s missile program. Along with motor parts and wiring, investigators discerned a pattern. Many key components were foreign-made, acquired from businesses based in China.

The trove “demonstrates the continuing critical importance of high-end, foreign-sourced components” in building the missiles North Korea uses to threaten its neighbors, a U.N. expert team concluded in a report released last month. When U.N. officials contacted the implicated Chinese firms to ask about the parts, the report said, they received only silence.

It is, as they say, complicated.

A BIGGER THREAT TO THE COURT IS A CHIEF JUSTICE WITH SO LITTLE BACKBONE HE’LL SWITCH POSITIONS IN RESPONSE TO OP-ED BULLYING: Chief Justice Roberts: ‘Partisan hostility’ a ‘real danger’ to Supreme Court.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases Freshly Updated Each Hour.

Plus, Save Big on Amazon Bestsellers by Category.

And don’t miss Big Savings in the Kindle Daily Deals.

Also, fresh savings on Today’s Digital Deals.

BRUCE BAWER: Is Marine Le Pen France’s Very Own ‘Pinkwasher’?

I’d never heard of pinkwashing — which turns out to be nothing new in that it is anti-Israel, yet reaches entirely new levels of self-deception and twisted logic.