Hillary Clinton, France, Olympics: Your Wednesday Briefing

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Good morning.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Democrats make history.

Hillary Clinton on Tuesday officially became the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party. Mrs. Clinton hailed the moment in an address from her home in New York, telling women at the convention, “This is really your night.” 

But some of her advisers say that overemphasizing the achievement could backfire — a video casting her as a worthy heir to the women’s rights movement was pulled from Tuesday’s convention lineup. In polls, Mrs. Clinton is showing enormous weakness with a group that represented nearly half of all voters in 2012: white voters, particularly men, without a college degree.

Bill Clinton delivered a deeply personal speech, talking about his wife’s life and career, while Mrs. Clinton’s aides try to prepare for his possible role as White House spouse. Here are our takeaways from Day 2, and what to watch for today.

• President Obama’s turn.

Mr. Obama’s address tonight will aim to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s standing with voters, but it will also represent the start of his farewell.

Without his unifying presence, or the focus on health care, Democrats are searching for the party’s next great project.

• Behind the leaked D.N.C. emails.

We’ve learned that the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, said in an interview weeks ago that he had a trove of emails which he hoped would harm Mrs. Clinton’s chances of winning. He accused the former secretary of state of having been among those pushing to indict him after WikiLeaks released diplomatic cables.

U.S. intelligence agencies are said to have “high confidence” that the Kremlin was behind the hacking of the D.N.C.’s emails.

• Religious solidarity in France.

President François Hollande is meeting today with the leaders of many faiths, after the Rev. Jacques Hamel, an 85-year-old Catholic priest, was killed as he celebrated Mass in his church in Normandy on Tuesday. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the killing.

The attack threatens to overshadow World Youth Day, one of the major events on the Catholic calendar.

• Mass killings as contagion?

A small number of people with strong personal grievances appear to be mining massacres for methods and potential targets to plan their own rampages.

We take a closer look at the human toll of these attacks in our profiles of the 247 victims who were killed in six countries during eight terrorist attacks across two weeks in March.