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North Korea, Angela Merkel, Golden State Killer: Your Evening Briefing

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Here’s what you need to know at the end of the day.
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up .)
Good evening. Here’s the latest.
1. President Trump had much praise for the groundbreaking summit meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea, and declared that in his own planned talks with the North he would not be fooled the way he said his predecessors had been.
“The United States has been played beautifully, like a fiddle, because you had a different kind of a leader,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re not going to be played, O. K.?”
Mr. Trump spoke after the Korean leaders agreed to work to remove all nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula and, within the year, pursue talks with the U. S. to declare an official end to the Korean War.
Their meeting was long on theatrics, but was also marked by candid moments and sweeping pledges. Kim Jong-un, the North’s leader, declared, “I came here to put an end to the history of confrontation.” Here’s a look at the meeting in the leaders’ own words .
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2. President Trump and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany disagreed openly about the future of the Iran nuclear deal and trade relations between the U. S. and Europe.
Mr. Trump and Ms. Merkel, who have had a chilly relationship, went out of their way to compliment each other — but it went only so far. Mr. Trump called the bilateral trade relationship “unfair,” and Ms. Merkel emerged from the White House without any notable progress on the nuclear deal with Iran or a permanent exemption for Germany from steel and aluminum tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed in March.
Both issues are time-sensitive: A temporary exemption from the tariffs for European countries expires on Tuesday, and Mr. Trump faces a May 12 deadline for recertifying the nuclear deal with Iran.
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3. The House Intelligence Committee released its report on Russian election meddling, saying it had found no evidence that the Trump campaign was involved.
Partisan bickering ensued: Republicans, who control the committee, criticized the Obama administration for a “slow and inconsistent” response to Russia’s active measures and took aim at the F. B. I. Democrats, in a dissenting document, accused the Republicans of prematurely closing the investigation to protect Mr. Trump. Read the full report here.
And newly released emails suggest that Natalia Veselnitskaya, above, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump campaign officials in Trump Tower in June 2016, had closer ties to the Kremlin than she had let on.
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4. Hundreds of Palestinian protesters stormed the Gaza security fence and tried to cross into Israel. Israeli troops responded with lethal force.
As of Friday night, the Gaza health ministry said that three Palestinians had been killed, all of them shot in the head, and nearly 1,000 had been wounded, 178 of them by live ammunition.
The protest was the fifth in a series of weekly demonstrations, billed as the Great Return March, meant to highlight the decade-old Israeli blockade and to rekindle international sympathy for Palestinian refugees’ claim of a right to return to what is now Israel.
At least 40 demonstrators were killed in the first four weekly protests.
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5. “Truth prevails.”
That was Andrea Constand, whose sexual assault complaint against Bill Cosby led to his conviction, as she broke her long public silence with a Twitter message thanking the local community.
Our critic at large Wesley Morris remembers a time when Mr. Cosby’s signature TV character — and America’s favorite father figure from the 1980s — once seemed inseparable from the man who portrayed him.
“If a sexual predator wanted to come up with a smoke screen for his ghastly conquests,” he writes, “he couldn’t do better than Cliff Huxtable.”
So, is Mr. Cosby going to prison? Here’s a look at what might come next .
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6. More on the Golden State Killer: Using DNA from crime scenes, investigators plugged a genetic profile into an online genealogy database. They found distant relatives of the suspect, Joseph James DeAngelo, and traced their DNA to him.
Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest came more than 30 years after the killer’s crime wave, confounding the belief that serial rapists and killers are incapable of stopping. Experts say that’s more myth than reality.
And here’s some of the original news coverage of the Golden State Killer .
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7. The U. S. economy, which has been whacked around like a pinball in the first quarter, still grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent, the government reported, offering a preliminary glance at the effects of the tax overhaul.
The pace is below the 2.9 percent annualized rate recorded in the fourth quarter of 2017, and short of President Trump’s goal of at least 3 percent. Most forecasters, however, expect quarterly growth to float around the 3 percent mark for the rest of the year.
One economist called the 2.3 percent figure “moderately encouraging.”
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8. In Oman, in the Arabian Peninsula, certain rocks have a special ability: They can turn carbon dioxide into stone.
Scientists say that if this natural process, called carbon mineralization, could be harnessed, accelerated and applied inexpensively on a huge scale — admittedly very big “ifs” — it could help fight climate change.
In theory, the rocks could remove some of the billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that humans have pumped into the air since the beginning of the industrial age.
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9. Report cards are in for yesterday’s first round of the N.F.L. Draft.
According to the experts, there are players who will turn their teams into winners, and others who are already terrible busts. (Sometimes it’s the same player.) Read our own analysis of every pick in the first round here.
Baker Mayfield, above, was the top pick, but the highest grade of the draft went to Derwin James, the safety selected by the Chargers at No. 17. With three A+’s, two A’s and just one B, his G. P. A. was a 3.98.
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10. Finally, New Jersey is set to proclaim Danny DeVito Day.
Starting this year, Nov. 17, the day the actor was born, will be reserved for Mr. DeVito. Gov. Philip Murphy is expected to issue a statewide proclamation in his honor.
“I was very flattered,” Mr. DeVito said. “Of course, they first told me I could have a beach.

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