NEWS OF THE DAY
From Across the Nation
1 Iowa slaying: The Iowa college student who was allegedly abducted by a stranger while running last month in a small Iowa town was killed by “multiple sharp force injuries,” investigators announced Thursday. Preliminary autopsy results from the state medical examiner’s office also determined that 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts was the victim of a homicide, the Division of Criminal Investigation announced in a press release. The young man from Mexico charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts’ death, Cristhian Bahena Rivera, presented himself as a legal U.S. resident and reliable worker at a family dairy farm in Iowa, his employer said. Rivera worked at that farm for four years a few miles from where Tibbetts was last seen. He and Tibbetts have no known connections. Rivera is being held on a $5 million cash-only bond, and faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted.
2 False alarm: The suspected hacking attempt of the Democratic National Committee’s voter database was a false alarm, and the unusual activity that raised concern was merely a test, a committee official said Thursday in Chicago. The suspicious phishing activity detected this week had prompted the committee to contact the FBI out of fears that it was another Russian attempt to penetrate the committee, as Moscow did during the 2016 campaign. The test had similar attributes to an actual hacking, said Bob Lord, the committee’s chief security officer. It was not a test that the committee had authorized, but rather a simulated phishing test built by a third party. A Democratic Party official who was not authorized to speak about the attack said it was conducted by hackers hired by the Michigan Democratic Party, which did not inform the national committee.
3 Poll closings: Leaders from the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus are urging officials in a predominantly black rural county not to move forward with a plan to close 75 percent of their polling places. Democratic Rep. Sandra Scott of Rex, Ga., said the closures would disenfranchise black voters and echo a past era of institutionalized racial discrimination. The elections board of Randolph County is considering eliminating seven of nine polling places. County officials say the polling places don’t comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. But opponents raised questions about the timing, coming just months before a hotly contested race in which Democrat Stacey Abrams is seeking to become Georgia’s first black governor. The board is expected to vote on the issue Friday.
4 NSA leaker: A former National Security Agency contractor who pleaded guilty to mailing a classified U.S. report on Russian hackers to a news organization was sentenced in Augusta, Ga., to more than five years in prison Thursday as part of a deal with prosecutors, who called it the longest sentence ever imposed for a federal crime involving leaks to the media. Reality Winner, 26, pleaded guilty to a single count of transmitting national security information.