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Republican Ralph Norman had a good birthday Tuesday night, winning the special election to fill South Carolinas 5th District seat, albeit by a closer-than-expected margin.

Norman defeated Democrat Archie Parnell 51 percent to 48percent, with 100percent of precincts reporting, according to The Associated Press.

Norman, a former state representative, replacesformer Rep. Mick Mulvaney, who vacated the seat in February to become director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The incoming congressmanhas said he wants to join the House Freedom Caucus, of which his predecessor was a co-founder. (The caucus is invitation only.)

South Carolinas special election never caught on the way special elections did in Kansas, Montana or especially Georgia, where voters also went to the polls Tuesday. Democrats failed to rally behind Parnell, a former Goldman Sachs adviser, in a much tougher district for the party than Georgias 6th District.

President Donald Trump carried South Carolinas 5th District by nearly 19 points last fall.

Norman has fully embraced Trump, saying in a Saturday morning interview that the president is still popular in the district.Norman praised Trumps selection of Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court and said hed support a Trump plan for infrastructure spending.

Hes one of these who doesnt give out blank checks, Norman said.

Asked about some of Trumps more controversial measures, such ashis executive orderto restrict travel from certain Muslim-majority countries, Norman said, Hes right on that, absolutely.

Norman went on to defend the president, whom he said has been treated unfairly by the media, especially when it comes to the investigation into Russias interference in the 2016 elections.

Theyve convicted President Trump already, Norman said of the press.

If you hear the criticisms, a lot of them are, We dont like the tweets. Well, my argument is, I dont have to read tweets. Its a choice. And the media has not given him a fair shot, and so this is his way of communications, Norman said.

Trumps election last year galvanized Norman to run for Congress.

When Nov. 8 came and we didnt have Hillary Clinton as president, I got motivated, he said. (Practically speaking, the 5th District also would probably not have been open had Clinton won.)

Would he have run to be a check on Clinton? I would have had to look at it. It would have been a serious detriment, he said. Im excited with Trump.

Norman cited North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, as a congressional role model. But he said he also respects House Speaker Paul D. Ryan.

I like him. Hes in it for the right reasons, Norman said of the Wisconsin Republican.

Tuesdays election was the third vote in this district this year. After party primaries in May, the top-two GOP finishers advanced to a runoff two weeks later. Norman defeated state House Speaker Pro Tempore Tommy Pope by just 221 votes.

Norman will fill the seat portrayed in the hit Netflix seriesHouse of Cards. He just finished watching the first season.

Its interesting, the congressman-electsaid.

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Republican Ralph Norman Wins Close Race in South Carolina - Roll Call

As a member of the Berkeley College Republican club, I table everyday which means I sit at a table on campus and try to recruit new members, have discussions with passersby, and expose Berkeley to the Republican platform. One day this past semester, though, I was sitting at the club table reading for my classes when I was approached by a red-haired woman who appeared as if she was dying to get something off her chest. I greeted her with the common salutation, Hi there, can I help you maam? From there, the conversation immediately declined.

In addition to verbally insulting my heritage I am a Hispanic-Asian she insisted that it was people like me who were making this country disgusting and an uninhabitable land. After she had finished venting to me, I smiled and simply replied as I do to all who would say the same, Thank you. You have a nice day.

Thats a pretty typical interaction between Republicans and the rest of liberal Berkeley.

It was my goal to meet open-minded individuals who had opposing views to that of mine, and would be welcoming of intellectual conversations on various hot-button topics. After having been at UC Berkeley for three years now, I am greatly disappointed.

I knew I was a Republican from the time of the Bush presidency (W., that is). That was when I was still in middle school in a predominantly blue city--Miami, Florida--where I attended liberal-leaning schools all the way through high school. At a young age I realized how fond I was of debates and discussions about politics. Thats part of what helped me in my decision-making process when selecting a university to attend. It was my goal to meet open-minded individuals who had opposing views to that of mine, and would be welcoming of intellectual conversations on various hot-button topics. After having been at UC Berkeley for three years now, I am greatly disappointed.

Now, for those of you who dont know, BCR has a bad name on campus, and its not just for being full of Republicans. It originates from those who wish to seek publicity through ego-driven stunts that actually detract from what we should be trying to accomplish on campus. For instance, instead of calling ourselves the Free Speech Movement only for the cameras, we should actually become the Free Speech Movement by calling for legislators to protect our First Amendment right. BCR has also pushed for a lawsuit to be filed against the university in the hopes of granting us the freedom to invite high-profile speakers to the campus. However, the lawsuit has done nothing to remedy that situation and has been dragged out to soak up media attention. Our lawyers should be frantically pushing the envelope and getting us our freedom as soon as possible so that we may once again invite speakers to our campus without the infringement of the administration.

Our club, as with all clubs, is not perfect. I remain a member because I want to change BCR from the inside for the better. And until certain attention-seeking colleagues of mine and the angry liberals around me realize how far they have fallen, I remain a moderate stuck in the middle, fighting for reasonable discussion on two fronts.

It is obvious that Republicans at Berkeley are a minority and may never have a majority. That is not my intention though. Right now, the first step is simply getting the word Republican to be tolerated. The way things are now, I feel reluctant in expressing my political opinions in class or in professional settings as it could be detrimental to my education. There are certain departments on campus that I know are not welcoming to conservative students. After all, I was physically attacked by a Graduate Student Instructor employed by UC Berkeley. If he is willing to try and do me physical harm, what is stopping him from tampering with my grades? So, for now, I choose to be silent in the classroom. But I hope its not like that forever.

I merely want to listen to people who are interested in calmly deliberating their political opinions--even those that are different from my own--and backing their thoughts with facts and sources. But that cant happen as long as people on campus treat Republican like its a dirty word.

And yet, I have hope. Every so often, when I spend all day tabling on Sproul Plaza, there are some individuals who will come up to me and engage in a lively conversation -- a real conversation. Well go back and forth on the ethics of abortion, or global warming, or gun regulations, for hours at a time. In some cases, we start agreeing and coming up with new ideas on how to tackle these issues. And in these moments, it feels like the UC Berkeley I originally came for.

Jonathan Chow is a second-generation immigrant who grew up in Miami, Florida. His mother was born in Havana, Cuba and his father in Canton, China both fled to the US as teenagers. He is a student at UC Berkeley majoring in early modern intellectual history.

Continued here:
A Republican at Berkeley: What it's really like - Fox News

BBC News

Secretive Republican healthcare bill sickens Democrats BBC News US Democrats are up in arms about secretive Senate Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, with no sign of a bill a week before a crunch vote. President Donald Trump's party has been busily crafting a behind-closed-doors healthcare bill without holding ... Republican Senators to Get Their Health Care Bill This WeekNBCNews.com The secretive Senate health care process is wrong. Just ask Republicans.CNN International Murphy, Democrats Go On Hunt For Republican Health Care BillHartford Courant HuffPost -New Republic -CNN all 882 news articles »

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Secretive Republican healthcare bill sickens Democrats - BBC News

The Trump administration has not said whether the government will continue paying subsidies to keep costs down for people with Obamacare. If it doesnt, middle-income people could see their rates jump.

Lonnie Carpenter, above, a self-employed roofer, said it would have been tough to survive without his insurance after a back injury.

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3. Days after Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of all charges in the fatal shooting of Philando Castile, a black motorist in Minnesota, a video of the shooting was released by state investigators.

Millions of people had seen the aftermath of the shooting because Mr. Castiles girlfriend had livestreamed it on Facebook.

The new video, shot from the dashcam of the police car, shows how a mundane conversation about a broken taillight devolved within seconds into gunfire. But it also leaves some questions unanswered.

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4. The death of Otto Warmbier, the American student who was returned from North Korea in a coma, above, drove a new wedge between Washington and Pyongyang.

Three other Americans are still imprisoned in North Korea. President Trump condemned the North for its brutality, but he and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stopped short of announcing fresh sanctions.

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5. The bodies of seven American sailors were flown home as the U.S. and Japanese authorities ramped up their investigations in the fatal collision of a cargo vessel and the U.S.S. Fitzgerald off the coast of Japan.

The biographies of the sailors who died in Saturdays collision, above, illustrate how much the American military relies on recruits from immigrant communities.

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6. Federal agents are using surveillance equipment adapted from military use in Iraq and Afghanistan to patrol the Mexican border. Experts say technology can create a virtual wall thats as effective as a physical one, at far lower cost.

And within Mexico, human rights lawyers, journalists and activists have been targeted by spyware that an Israeli company sold to the government for use against criminals and extremists.

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7. Our videographer embedded with Iraqi troops on the front lines of the war against the Islamic State in Mosul.

Iraqs second-largest city had been controlled by the militants for two years. The soldiers we followed were greeted as liberators by residents. One family even named a newborn after the units 33-year-old commander, Major Sajjad al-Hour, above.

Ben Solomon, who shot the video, describes the experience in this essay.

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8. In Portugal, more than 60 people were killed in a raging wildfire this week. Our correspondent drove into the countryside to interview survivors and firefighters, passing burned-out cars and melted road signs on his way.

Deadly blazes have become increasingly severe and routine in Portugal, spurred by poor land management and hotter, drier summers because of climate change.

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9. Theres an opera renaissance underway in Paris.

The Opra Comique, one of the citys oldest performance sites, is hoping to attract new audiences by reimagining what modern opera could be.

Its latest production, the Baroque opera Alcyone, hasnt been performed in Paris in 246 years and the new version includes avant-garde staging, and even acrobats.

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10. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, summer begins at 12:24 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday.

Thats the summer solstice, when the hemisphere will dip toward the sun, basking in its warmth for longer than any other day.

It offers the perfect opportunity to ponder the explosive ball of plasma that makes our very existence possible. Above, last years solstice in Santa Monica, Calif.

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11. Finally, Beyonc and Jay-Z havent confirmed the news, but that didnt stop the late-night hosts from congratulating them on the birth of their twins.

For the first time in history, people actually want to see pictures of kids on Facebook, Trevor Noah joked on The Daily Show. Above, the singer at the Grammy Awards in February.

Have a great night.

_____

Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help.

Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.

And dont miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a.m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a.m. Sundays.

Want to look back? Heres last nights briefing.

What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes.com.

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Georgia, Republican Party, Otto Warmbier: Your Tuesday Evening Briefing - New York Times

To any nefarious hackers looking for information that could be used to sway elections or steal Americans identities, the file compiled by a GOP data firm called Deep Root Analytics offered all manner of possibilities.

There in one place was detailed personal information about almost every voter in the U.S. It was a collection of some 9.5 billion data points that helped the firm assess not only how those Americans would probably vote, but their projected political preferences. In some cases, the data collectors had scoured peoples histories on Reddit, the social media platform, to match vote history with social media use, and well-informed predictions were made about where each voter would stand on issues as personal as abortion and stem cell research.

Its the kind of sensitive information that, if a bank or a big-box retailer or almost any other corporation had failed to protect it, would have triggered major trouble with regulators. But there it sat on the Internet, without so much as a password to guard it, for 12 days.

Luckily for the Republican Party and Deep Root, an Arlington, Va.-based firm that handles data management and analysis for the party, it was a cybersecurity consultant who came across the treasure-trove of political data this month, not a foreign agent. There is no indication that the database had been tapped by any other unauthorized parties while it was unprotected.

But the exposure of the data, which some are describing as the largest leak of voter information in history, is a jolting reminder of how deeply the political parties are probing into the lives of voters and how vulnerable the information they are compiling is to theft.

The Deep Root incident is the latest in a series of such problems with political data, the most infamous being the case of the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee. As cybersecurity experts sound an increasingly loud alarm about the potential consequences, the lapses keep happening often with nobody held accountable for them.

This is a catalog of human lives, with intrinsic details, said Mike Baukes, chief executive of UpGuard, the Mountain View, Calif., firm that came across the file during a routine scan of cloud systems.

Every voter in America is potentially in there. The scale of it is just staggering, and the fact that it was left wide open is wholly irresponsible.This is happening all the time. We are continually finding these things. It is just staggering.

Privacy experts were skeptical that political operatives will change their ways following the latest incident.

The state of security for massive data sets is so incredibly poor despite a daily drumbeat of data breached, said Timothy Sparapani, a former director of public policy for Facebook who is now a data privacy consultant at the firm SPQR Strategies, based in Washington. It is shocking. It is embarrassing. People ought to lose their jobs.

Sparapani said if the culprit had been a private firm, it would be subjected to punitive actions by attorneys general, consumer lawsuits and big fines from regulators. But political operations face no such repercussions.

As a voter, you are left with almost no recourse because our laws have not caught up to the massive computing power which is readily available to gather enormous data sets and make them searchable at the click of a button, he said. The breadth and depth of data collection by these companies is not well understood. If it were, I think the average voter would be frightened.

UpGuard was able to access the file merely by guessing a Web address. It alerted Deep Root as well as federal authorities.

Deep Root apologized in a statement, but also suggested the incident had been overblown.

The data file is our proprietary analysis to help inform local-television ad buying, the statement said. It noted that much of the voter information the analysis is built on is readily provided by state government offices. The firm said it has put security procedures in place to prevent future leaks.

Other digital strategists warned, however, that the failure to protect such detailed information not only raised major privacy and security concerns, but also may have tipped off political adversaries to the inner workings of the Republican Partys closely guarded digital strategy.

The GOP contracted with Deep Root during the presidential campaign. The firms co-founder, Alex Lundry, led the data efforts of GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012 and then worked for the unsuccessful presidential campaign of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush last year.

GOP officials said the data belonging to the party that was exposed was limited to very basic information about voters, such as their party registration. They said none of the GOPs sensitive strategic data was exposed. The party has suspended work with the firm pending an investigation by Deep Root into security procedures.

The failure by Deep Root to protect its massive database was particularly troubling to some advocates at a time when Congress is investigating how Russia exploited data vulnerabilities to meddle in last years presidential election.

This is data used for opinion manipulation, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the nonprofit research group Electronic Privacy Information Center, based in Washington. It needs to be regulated. And there needs to be consequence for breaches. We have a major problem in this country with data security, and its getting worse. The foundation wants Congress to hold hearings on political data security.

But holding political parties and contractors accountable for their data practices has proven tricky. David Berger, an attorney with the Bay Area-based firm Girard Gibbs who has represented consumers affected by data breaches at Anthem and Home Depot, said part of the problem is voters are not demanding changes loudly enough.

When a retail company fails to protect the privacy of its customers, Berger said, the company suffers and lawmakers hear about it from the victims.

When people see Deep Root, they are not going to necessarily associate that with the [Republican Party] or anything else, he said. If your average American knew the amounts of data and profiling that is already put together by these companies about every single one of us, people would be very concerned. But theres no face here, and they try to keep quiet.

Halper reported from Washington and Dave from Los Angeles.

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A Republican voter data firm probably exposed your personal information for days and you don't have much recourse - Los Angeles Times