By Ashley Southall @ NYTimes.com, April 20

In East New York, Brooklyn, a police observation tower still hovers over the intersection where a 16-year-old boy was gunned down on his way home from playing basketball last November.

It was one of a string of killings toward the end of the year in the 75th Precinct, an area long scarred by violence that gained notoriety in the 1990s as New York City’s “killing fields” and regularly logged more than 100 murders a year. Even as crime has plummeted across the city — and in the 75th — the precinct has remained among the deadliest. Last year, the police tallied 11 murders, the second most in the city.

But so far this year, something remarkable has happened in the 75th Precinct — or, more precisely, not happened: No one has been killed.

The 129-day stretch without a murder, dating back to Dec. 12, is the longest in the precinct since the Police Department began keeping modern records in 1993. And it surprises old-timers like David Cochran and Reginald Atkins, who grew up in East New York as drugs flooded the neighborhood. [.....]

By Holly Yan and Phil Gast @ CNN.com, Updated 4:03 PM ET, Sun April 22, 2018

They are interviewing him (James Shaw, Jr.) on CNN TV right now, he is a really soft-spoken, polite, humble guy; impressive "young black male," that the Nashville police have already labeled a "hero"no holds barred.  By the way, the shooter was clearly white.

Guest op-ed By Peter Fritsch and Glenn R. Simpson @ NYTimes.com, April 21

Mr. Fritsch and Mr. Simpson are the founders of the research firm Fusion GPS.

Home page lede: Forget Stormy Daniels. The business records subpoenaed by Robert Mueller might be Donald Trump’s greatest legal headache.

Put aside Russian collusion for a moment. Press pause on possible presidential obstruction of justice. Forget Stormy Daniels. The most significant recent development involving the president may be that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has subpoenaed Trump Organization business records as part of his inquiry into Russian interference in the presidential election.

Those documents — and records recently seized by the F.B.I. from the president’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen — might answer a question raised by the president’s critics: Have certain real estate investors used Trump-branded properties to launder the proceeds of criminal activity around the world?

We pored over Donald Trump’s business records for well over a year, at least those records you can get without a badge or a subpoena. We also hired a former British intelligence official, Christopher Steele [....]

Verdejo still believes Sanders’s core message about economic inequality is important, but it doesn’t capture the racial complexities of the America that he and other people of color live in — especially in the wake of police shooting after police shooting and recent news about two young black men arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks simply for asking to use the bathroom of without ordering anything first.

If he runs again in 2020, it won't be the same as 2016 - count on it.

This narrative, fueled by center-left outlets like MSNBC, Center for American Progress and Mother Jones, has reached its inevitable, sleazy nadir: the smearing of a black activist by an NPR affiliate for the crime of going on a Russian government–funded radio station a handful of times.

By Joe Concha @ TheHill.com, April 19

Fox News and CNN On Wednesday again traded blows on the air with Fox News's Sean Hannity comparing CNN's Anderson Cooper to Jerry Springer and Cooper hitting Fox for not reprimanding its top-rated host.

The back-and-forth jabs seem to be happening on a regular basis between the two cable news networks, with MSNBC, which is currently second to Fox News overall in the cable news race, rarely being dragged into the fight [....]

By Jonathan Greenberg @ WashingtonPost.com, April 20

An investigative journalist describes a 1984 conversation in which Donald Trump — posing as a Trump Organization official named John Barron — claimed that he owned most of his father's real estate empire.

• Listen to the phone conversation

The Fix: The Forbes 400 and how Trump’s shameless self-promotion helped make him president

By Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman & Ellen Nakashima @ WashingtonPost.com, April 20

The Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit Friday against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.

The complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, alleges that top Trump campaign officials conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and help Trump by hacking the computer networks of the Democratic Party and disseminating stolen material found there.

“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement. “This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,” he said [....]

By Cade Metz @ NYTimes.com/Technology, April 19

[....] a little-noticed tax filing by a research lab called OpenAI has made some of those eye-popping figures public. OpenAI paid its top researcher, Ilya Sutskever, more than $1.9 million in 2016. It paid another leading researcher, Ian Goodfellow, more than $800,000 — even though he was not hired until March of that year. Both were recruited from Google. A third big name in the field, the roboticist Pieter Abbeel, made $425,000, though he did not join until June 2016, after taking a leave from his job as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Those figures all include signing bonuses.

The figures listed on the tax forms, which OpenAI is required to release publicly because it is a nonprofit, provide new insight into what organizations around the world are paying for A.I. talent. But there is a caveat: The compensation at OpenAI may be underselling what these researchers can make, since as a nonprofit it can’t offer stock options.

Salaries for top A.I. researchers have skyrocketed because there are not many people who understand the technology and thousands of companies want to work with it [....]

By Ronan Farrow (newbie Pulitzer winner) @ NewYorker.com, April 19

The last days of his brief and chaotic tenure as Secretary of State.

Rex Tillerson’s team was fighting again. “So, who’s going to go in with him?” Margaret Peterlin, his chief of staff, was saying. She looked me up and down with an expression that suggested she’d discovered a pest in the house. We were standing at the wide double doors into the Secretary of State’s office on Mahogany Row, the opulent, wood-panelled corridor on the seventh floor of the State Department’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, which houses the most powerful offices in American foreign policy. Steven Goldstein, the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, folded his arms and stared daggers at Peterlin. “Well, I guess I won’t be,” he told her. “Heather can go.” Goldstein tilted his head toward Tillerson’s spokesperson, the former Fox News anchor Heather Nauert. Peterlin narrowed her eyes at Goldstein. “Are you sure?” she said, with theatrical displeasure. Goldstein didn’t reply. Tillerson strode up to the door, cutting the tension. Nauert and Peterlin joined the interview, along with Tillerson’s director of policy planning, Brian Hook. Goldstein remained outside. (Peterlin said that she was following a rule enacted by Secretary Tillerson that only one communications officer be allowed in his interviews.)

Such discord often simmered just under the surface in the year before Tillerson’s unceremonious firing in March, according to multiple members of his embattled inner circle [....]