OUR PICKSWhat Went Wrong in the Texas Floods? | We Can Adapt and Prepare for Floods. But Will We? | The “Russia Hoax,” Revisited, and more

Administration Takes Steps to Target 2 Officials Who Investigated Trump  (Glenn Thrush and Julian E. Barnes, New York Times)
It is unclear whether the moves will lead to charges, but they suggest that President Trump’s appointees intend to follow through on his campaign to exact retribution against his perceived enemies.

The ‘Russia Hoax,’ Revisited  (Shane Harris, The Atlantic)
CIA Director John Ratcliffe wants to rewrite history.
Last week, CIA Director John Ratcliffe released a report that, by his account, finally reveals the whole story about one of the most closely scrutinized documents ever produced by American intelligence agencies.
The “CIA Note,” as it’s officially called, is ostensibly an effort to learn lessons from the past, and it might never have been written absent Ratcliffe’s intervention. In May, he ordered CIA analysts to review the “procedures and analytic tradecraft employed” when drafting an assessment that Russia conducted covert operations to influence the 2016 presidential election, intending to damage Hillary Clinton in order to help Donald Trump. These are the conclusions that Trump, for nearly a decade, has called the “Russia Hoax.”
In public remarks, Ratcliffe claimed that his agency’s review proved that Barack Obama–era national-security leaders had created a “politically charged environment” when they produced the assessment, throwing the credibility of their findings in doubt. “All the world can now see the truth,” he wrote in a post on X. The former heads of the FBI and CIA, along with the director of national intelligence, had “manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals—all to get Trump.”
Those are profound allegations of ethical misconduct and public deception, and they’re particularly serious coming from the CIA director, a historically apolitical office. But you will find scant evidence to support these claims in the report that Ratcliffe now brandishes like a smoking gun.

What Went Wrong in the Texas Floods?  (Economist)
DOGE may not have been to blame but local politicians have a case to answer.

Measles Cases Hit Record High, 25 Years After U.S. Eliminated the Disease  (Teddy Rosenbluth and Jonathan Corum, New York Times)
Experts worry that if vaccination rates do not improve, deadly outbreaks will become the new normal.

We Can Adapt and Prepare for Floods. But Will We?  (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times)
These days, more and more disaster stories appear to be playing out far from the coasts, in defiance of naïve intuitions about climate risk and even of our recent experience of climate horror.