Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Cybercrime is getting decidedly more dramatic.

Ransomware attacks this year have hit a fuel pipeline, a beef conglomerate, a national health system. As more industries and institutions are being literally held to ransom, we ask how better to protect them.

And once upon a time, eels were so abundant in Britain

that they were scooped up from the rivers and used as fertilizer.

Not so anymore.

Now, efforts to up their numbers by giving them a hand shimmying up river

seem to be working.

But first... There's an unfolding assault taking place in America today, an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections.

President Joe Biden gave an impassioned speech yesterday defending voting rights.

In Republican-held statehouses around the country, moves are underway to change how and when

voters can cast their ballots. What's really at issue is how much those change, who casts a ballot,

and Mr. Biden called on Republicans to take a principled stand.

We'll be asking my Republican friends in Congress and states and cities and counties

to stand up for God's sake and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote.

Have you no shame?

The speech came as democratic lawmakers from Texas find themselves in the middle of a kind of tactical field trip.

Joe Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia yesterday in which he described attempts by

Republican-led state legislatures to change voting rules in those states as the most

significant test to our democracy since the Civil War.

...