Brain-eating amoeba; Social media as war?; weathering the next Florence, and more

continues to devolve into a literal nightmare. The U.S. government is currently responsible for some 13,000 migrant children, five times the number in custody as recently as last year, which now amounts to the largest population of immigrant minors in custody ever. As the time spent in detention as increased—from 34 to 59 days—the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the children’s care, has struggled to house the growing number of unaccompanied minors, most of whom share rooms of two or three in private foster homes or shelters, where they receive schooling as their cases slowly work their way through the system.
That, however, is changing and the New York Times paints a devastating picture of hundreds of children getting rounded up each week, in the middle of the night in order to avoid attempts to escape, and transported to a mass shelter in South Texas. So far 1,600 have been shipped to Texas from across the country, according to the Times, leaving behind a system of care and required schooling and care licensed and monitored by state child welfare authorities for a largely unregulated tent city governed by HHS guidelines that don’t require or provide schooling.

Weathering the next Florence (Greta Moran and Paola Rosa-Aquino, Grist)
How should we prepare for a future filled with dangerous storms? Grist talked to experts for ideas on building resilient communities.

The World Bank and tech companies want to use AI to predict famine (Abigail Higgins, Vox)
A new tool using data and AI is hoping to better predict famine and help millions experiencing food insecurity.

Agencies still need help protecting high value assets (Derek B. Johnson, FCW)
A newly released DHS report reveals feedback from agencies on some of the biggest technical and bureaucratic obstacles they face protecting their most sensitive and mission critical IT assets.

The next pandemic will be arriving shortly (Lisa Monaco and Vin Gupta, Foreign Policy)
Deadly diseases like Ebola and the avian flu are only one flight away. The U.S. government must start taking preparedness seriously.

The Trump administration anticipates catastrophic global warming by 2100 (Eric Levitz, New York Magazine)
Last month, the Trump administration released a report that predicted global temperatures will be four degrees higher by the end of this century, assuming current trends persist. World leaders have pledged to keep global temperatures from rising even two degrees (Celsius) above pre-industrial levels, with the understanding that warming beyond that could prove catastrophic. The last time the Earth was as warm as the White House expects it to be in 2100, its oceans were hundreds of feet higher. Which is to say: The Trump administration ostensibly, officially expects that, absent radical action to reduce carbon emissions, within the next 80 years, much of Manhattan and Miami will sink into the sea; many of world’s coral reefs will be irreversibly destroyed by acidifying oceans; vast regions of the Earth will lose their primary sources of water; and a variety of extreme weather events will dramatically increase in frequency.
And the White House believes that this fact is an argument for loosening restrictions on carbon emissions.
The report that disclosed the administration’s forecast for global warming was not a memo detailing president Trump’s intention to reenter the Paris Climate Accord, or to appoint Naomi Klein as his new EPA director. It was an environmental-impact statement justifying his decision to repeal previously scheduled, federal fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles built after 2020 — a deregulatory measure that will add 8 billion additional tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by the end of this century, according to the government’s own estimates.
As the WashingtonPost revealed Friday, the administration uses its four-degree warming estimate to argue that eliminating 8 billion tons worth of emissions won’t be enough to change the climate outlook, by itself, so the federal government shouldn’t bother.

TSA’s role in pipeline cybersecurity could be up for grabs (Mark Rockwell, FCW)
Congress is looking into which agency should oversee cybersecurity for natural gas and oil pipelines.