Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 29 September. Top stories Representatives of the social media giant Twitter have been summonsed to Washington to give evidence to congressional investigators about Russia's use of their platform to attempt to influence the 2016 US presidential election. The closed-door hearing with House and Senate staff followed a similar briefing involving Facebook this month,which revealed that the tech giant sold more than 3,000 election ads linked to a Russian agency. The Capitol Hill investigation is trying to understand the degree to which Russia and groups allied with the Kremlin used social media to spread fake news stories and misinformation – and what the companies could have done to prevent and stem such attacks. Twitter has been under intense pressure to release everything it knows regarding alleged tampering in the election after Facebook revealed that hundreds of accounts and pages probably operated from Russia spent nearly $100,000 on ads. Twitter has been largely silent on its role, though in June its vice-president of public policy, Colin Crowell, said it was not Twitter's responsibility to be "the arbiter of truth". "Twitter's open and real-time nature is a powerful antidote to the spreading of all types of false information," Crowell wrote. "This is important because we cannot distinguish whether every single tweet from every person is truthful or not." Indigenous groups have renewed calls for the creation of an Indigenous incarceration reduction target after a leaked letter showed the government was just weeks away from going public with a refresh of its failing Closing the Gap strategy. So far Australia has largely failed to stay on track to meet the Closing the Gap targets, which measure efforts to reduce the entrenched inequality between Australia's Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. This year just one of the seven targets was met. Targets to improve life expectancy and child mortality were not on track, nor was an aim to halve the gap in reading and numeracy for Indigenous students by 2018. Ignorance of dual citizenship is no excuse, say Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters, the two Greens senators who resigned and kicked off the high court case that has now engulfed another five parliamentarians. But those who haven't resigned disagree, and maintain that ignorance of their dual citizenship is central to their case. The high court has released the submissions of Barnaby Joyce, Fiona Nash, Matt Canavan and Nick Xenophon, along with those of Waters and Ludlam. The three government members and Xenophon are arguing that no reasonable person in their position would have suspected they held dual citizenship and therefore they could not have been expected to check it. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the star of Seinfeld and Veep, has revealed she has breast cancer. The Emmy-winning actor shared a note on Twitter on Thursday to inform her followers, while also reminding them of the importance of universal healthcare. "The good news is that I have the most glorious group of supportive and caring family and friends, and fantastic insurance through my union," she wrote. "The bad news is that not all women are so lucky, so let's fight all cancers and make universal health care a reality." According to a statement from HBO, Louis-Dreyfus received the news the day after she won her record-breaking sixth Emmy for playing the lead in HBO's hit comedy Veep. The head of the British spy agency MI6 has said George Smiley is a better fictional role model for recruits than James Bond. Sir Alex Younger, known in agency circles as C, says 007's "brash antics" give a misleading portrayal of life in the service, and John le Carre's fictional spymaster Smiley was a better fit for the serice with his "quiet courage and integrity". Younger has long expressed ambivalence about Bond, seeing him as both a boon and a curse, lifting the service's profile worldwide but also giving a seriously misleading portrayal of what intelligence officers do. Sport Ben Stokes is in danger of missing the Ashes as he and Alex Hales have been dropped by England until further notice after they were arrested following an altercation during a night out in Bristol on Monday. The England and Wales Cricket Board has reversed its decision from earlier in the week after a video purporting to be of the incident was published by the Sun newspaper, and now both players will now be unavailable for international selection pending further investigation. Considering Melbourne's dominant NRL season thus far – and considering they've won their past five against Sunday's grand final opponents, North Queensland – it would be no surprise to see the Storm win in a canter, writes Paul Connolly. Then again, sport is full of surprises – why else would we watch?
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Photograph: Richard Drew/AP 
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