Three days before Americans voted last November, Reality Winner joked with her sister online that Moscow’s efforts to influence the US presidential election could have an upside for her as a keen weightlifter.

“When we become the United States of the Russian Federation,” she said on Facebook, “Olympic lifting will be the national sport.” Seven months later, Winner, 25, called home to Texas on Saturday to let her family know that the Russian hacking saga had ended up landing her in a far more serious situation. “She said that she had been arrested by the FBI and that she couldn’t really talk about it,” her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, told the Guardian in a telephone interview. “I am still in shock.”Prosecutors allege that last month, Winner, who was working for the defense contractor Pluribus International Corporation, printed an NSA document detailing how Russia had hacked a voting equipment vendor in Florida and was trying to breach local election systems right up until the days before November’s vote. The Intercept reported on Monday that Russian military intelligence carried out a cyber-attack on at least one US voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than a hundred local election officials days before the poll.(guardian)…[+]

The UN’s top human rights official has marked the 50th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories by calling for its quick end, insisting that such an outcome would benefit both sides. Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the Jordanian prince who heads the UN Human Rights Council, echoed the strong language of the UN secretary general, António Guterres, who earlier this week condemned the occupation’s “heavy humanitarian and development burden on the Palestinian people”, which he said had “fuelled recurring cycles of violence and retribution”.

The remarks follow a series of critical reports by humanitarian and rights organisations that reveal the impact of the 50-year occupation, and come as Israeli politicians celebrate the bicentenary of the 1967 six-day war, in which Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the Old City.

The focus of the Israeli celebrations has been what it calls the “reunification” of Jerusalem, a characterisation rejected by most of the international community, which does not recognise Israeli sovereignty over the captured territories.(guardian)…[+]

Kuwait is trying to mediate in the Gulf crisis in which Arab countries have cut diplomatic ties to Qatar and moved to isolate the kingdom from the outside world, Qatar’s foreign minister said on Tuesday. The row is the biggest diplomatic crisis in the Persian Gulf since the 1991 US-led war against Iraq and has seen shoppers in Doha panic buying food and other supplies after Saudi Arabia imposed a de facto blockade.

Qatar – an energy-rich travel hub – shares its only land border with Saudi Arabia and relies heavily on importing food, much of it from Gulf countries.Queues up to 25 people deep formed in the Carrefour supermarket in Doha’s City Center mall, one of the busiest shopping areas in the Qatari capital, hours after five Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, cut diplomatic ties with the kingdom, accusing it of supporting extremism.(guardian)…[+]