* The Intercept got the big scoop today.
Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.
The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light…
The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than was previously understood. It states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document.
* The document has also been authenticated by CBS News.
.@cbsnews confirms the NSA report is real –> NSA report details Russian hacking effort days before election https://t.co/iEeCNUMUow
— Rebecca Shabad (@RebeccaShabad) June 5, 2017
* Good news from the Supreme Court today.
The Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that struck down 28 state House and Senate districts in North Carolina because they violated the rights of black voters. But the justices rejected the court’s order to redraw the districts and hold a special election.The action by the justices Monday sends the matter back to the lower court, which could order new districts in time for the regular cycle of elections in 2018.Democrats hope new district maps will help them break the Republican stranglehold on the state legislature…
A panel of three federal judges in North Carolina that struck down the districts as illegal racial gerrymanders had ordered the drawing of new districts in time for special elections this year. But the Supreme Court blocked the order for the new districts. The matter is back in the hands of the lower court.
* Lisa Solod writes about “the silencing of the Hillary Clinton supporter.”
Over the past many months, I have spoken with many middle and lower-middle class women, who shared stories with me about why they voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, including a 34-year veteran school teacher who is so news-obsessed, she has her friends text her news alerts while she’s on vacation, and a 24-year-old college student who “kind of liked” Bernie until she realized that the U.S. was one of the few civilized countries that had never had a woman leader. We’ve seen the millions of women who took to the streets the day after the inauguration. We’ve learned that it’s older women who make most of the calls to Congress, and we have heard that nearly 13,000 women want to run for office since Hillary lost the election. All this while the media has mostly ignored the 90 percent of Black women—many of them lower, working, and middle class—who voted for Hillary. And yet, six months later, the media continues to fixate on the white working-class voters who didn’t cast theirs for her in the autopsy of the 2016 election.
* I agree with James.
Genius. Whoever did this 👏 pic.twitter.com/pye5PDfs64
— James Corden (@JKCorden) June 5, 2017
* I actually first read about this next story on Facebook because the young man involved is my cousin’s step-son. His mother was with him and wrote what had happened on their way home from the evening’s performance. Later, the NYT published an account. I’m only partially sharing it here as a point of personal privilege. It’s also an amazingly uplifting story of courage and I love the fact that it shatters so many of the stereotypes that circulate about millennials—especially those New Yorkers.
After a 58-year-old man fell onto subway tracks Saturday night in Manhattan, a ballet dancer, who had just watched his wife perform with American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House, leapt down after him. With a lift that they do not teach in dance school, he moved him to safety.
“At first I waited for somebody else to jump down there,” said Gray Davis, 31, a dancer with American Ballet Theater, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “People were screaming to get help. But nobody jumped down. So I jumped down.”
Once on the tracks, at the 72nd Street Broadway-Seventh Avenue station, Mr. Davis said, he picked up the man, who was unconscious, and lifted him to the platform, where others pulled him up. Then, hearing a train in the distance and unsure which track it was on, he faced the next problem: getting back up on the platform himself.
“I never realized how high it was,” he said. “Luckily, I’m a ballet dancer, so I swung my leg up.”
* Finally, here is Ariana Grande at her “One Love Manchester” concert showing an awful lot of compassion and courage for someone so young.