The hellish blaze that engulfed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris this week was a disheartening spectacle that none of us would ever hope to see again, anywhere in the world. For many, the timing of the inferno was almost too coincidental to be accidental, given that this is the beginning of Holy Week for the Christian faith, culminating with Easter Sunday in just a few days.  Online conspiracy theorists have long been trying to tie these threads together in order to fit their own narrative, mind you, complete with the occasional race-baiting insinuation that this was Islamic terrorism. To be clear, there is no evidence of a criminal act having taken place at Notre Dame. In contrast, however, police in New York City have arrested a man who looked to clearly be ready to reenact the Notre Dame blaze at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral just yesterday. A New Jersey man was arrested after entering St. Patrick’s Cathedral carrying two cans of gasoline, lighter fluid and butane lighters, the New York Police Department said, just days after flames ravaged the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The unidentified 37-year-old man had pulled up Wednesday night in a minivan outside the landmark cathedral on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, walked around the area, then returned to his vehicle at 7:55 p.m. and retrieved the gasoline and lighter fluid, said NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller. That’s scary enough…but it gets stranger. “His basic story was he was cutting through the cathedral to get to Madison Avenue. That his car had run out of gas,” Miller said. “We took a look at the vehicle. It was not out of gas and at that point he was taken into custody.” The incident comes as another potential copycat criminal was found dead after “obsessing”…

Perhaps it was always too good to be true. Donald Trump, a President who was widely lambasted by the liberal left on account of his political inexperience, became an unprecedented hero in an unlikely situation with North Korea early into his presidency. For reasons perhaps still unknown, Trump’s opening of a dialogue with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un suddenly seemed to bring the DPRK back into the global community.  Part of this resurgence included, as it must, a promise of denuclearization by the hermit kingdom. Somewhere along the way, things have fallen off the rails, likely at the behest of Kim himself. Now, ever more astonishingly, the dainty despot is pushing the envelope even further with claims of a new weapons test. North Korea said Thursday that it had test-fired a new type of “tactical guided weapon,” its first such test in nearly half a year, and demanded that Washington remove Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from nuclear negotiations. The test, which didn’t appear to be of a banned mid- or long-range ballistic missile that could scuttle negotiations, allows North Korea to show its people it is pushing ahead with weapons development while also reassuring domestic military officials worried that diplomacy with Washington signals weakness. And that’s not all:  The DPRK is also now taking pot shots at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Separately, the North Korean Foreign Ministry accused Pompeo of playing down the significance of comments by leader Kim Jong Un, who said last week that Washington has until the end of the year to offer mutually acceptable terms for an agreement to salvage the high-stakes nuclear diplomacy. Both the demand for Pompeo’s removal from the talks and the weapon test point to North Korea’s displeasure with the deadlocked negotiations. Was this all a ruse by North…