Our picksVoting machines manufacturers | fighting hate speech | government’s hacker helpers, and more

An abandoned weapon in the fight against hate speech (James Loeffler, The Atlantic)
A 1952 Supreme Court ruling gave civil-rights groups a way to combat anti-Semitism and other prejudices—but in the years since, it’s largely gone unused.

Russian groups tried to undermine European elections, Brussels says (Hannah Boland, Telegraph)
The European elections were targeted by Russia, Brussels has said.
An initial report by the European Commission has found that bots and fake accounts traced to Russia spread false information online in the run up to the poll in an attempt to radicalize debate and amplify divisive content.
The Commission stated that the elections were far from a “disinformation-free zone”.

North Carolina wants to know who owns voting-machine makers (Emery P. Dalesio, Associated Press)
North Carolina won’t clear voting-machine makers to sell their systems to county elections boards until it learns more about who owns them, the state’s elections board chairman said Friday.
The decision comes amid worries of foreign election interference that have grown since special counsel Robert Mueller’s April report into Russian efforts to sway the 2016 presidential election.
Mueller’s report “essentially says everybody should be concerned about this and everybody should be looking harder at a lot of these things to make sure we’re protected as best we can be,” said Robert Cordle, the head of the state elections board. “It’s just a matter of doing our due diligence now to make sure there are no problems.”

Iran threatens to break nuclear deal’s uranium stockpile limit (Jamie Ross, Daily Beast)
Tensions with Iran just keep on escalating. In the latest major development, Iran on Monday morning threatened to break the uranium stockpile limit it agreed to in its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization announced Monday that its low-enriched uranium stockpile would surpass a limit set in the agreement over the next 10 days. Low-enriched uranium can be used in a nuclear reactor—but not in an atomic bomb. It’s the latest tactic from Iran to force European countries to follow through on plans to give the country access to international financial systems, which would allow it to work around U.S. sanctions. “As long as they comply by their commitments, these [limits] will go back,” said organization spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi. It’s the first time Iran’s government had said explicitly that it would break the pact.