Our picksThis Is Worse Than Saigon | The American West Is Drying Up | America’s Covid-Reporting Breakdown, and more

The American West Is Drying Up  (Economist)
The effects of climate change are being exacerbated by a century of bad policy.

Inside America’s Covid-Reporting Breakdown  (Erin Banco, Politico)
Crashing computers, three-week delays tracking infections, lab results delivered by snail mail: State officials detail a vast failure to identify hotspots quickly enough to prevent outbreaks.

Clinical Evidence that the Pandemic from 1889 to 1891 Commonly Called the Russian flu Might Have Been an Earlier Coronavirus Pandemic  (Harald Brüssow and Lutz Brüssow, Microbial Biotechnology)
Contemporary medical reports from Britain and Germany on patients suffering from a pandemic infection between 1889 and 1891, which was historically referred to as the Russian flu, share a number of characteristics with COVID-19. Most notable are aspects of multisystem affections comprising respiratory, gastrointestinal and neurological symptoms including loss of taste and smell perception; a protracted recovery resembling long covid and pathology observations of thrombosis in multiple organs, inflammation and rheumatic affections. As in COVID-19 and unlike in influenza, mortality was seen in elderly subjects while children were only weakly affected. Contemporary reports noted trans-species infection between pet animals or horses and humans, which would concur with a cross-infection by a broad host range bovine coronavirus dated by molecular clock arguments to an about 1890 cross-species infection event.

The FBI’s Warning to Silicon Valley: China and Russia Are Trying to Turn Your Employees into Spies  (Biz Carson, Protocol)
A top special agent in San Francisco has a stark message: “Raise your shields.”

A Judge Is Requiring the Biden Administration to Restart Trump’s Remain in Mexico Policy for Asylum-Seekers  (Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed News / Yahoo News)
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday denied the Biden administration’s attempt to halt a Texas federal court judge’s ruling demanding the government restart a controversial Trump-era program that forced asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico for the duration of their US immigration cases.
The policy, titled the Migration Protection Protocols, led to tens of thousands of asylum-seekers being forced to stay in Mexico as they waited for their day in a US court. Often left with nowhere to go but squalid camps in Mexican border towns, human rights advocates reported cases of the immigrants being kidnapped, raped, and tortured while the US government forced them to wait there.

Census Servers Hacked in 2020  (Adam Mazmanian, FCW)
Hackers targeted remote servers at the Census Bureau in January 2020, taking advantage of a publicly available and known exploit to gain access to government systems and create user accounts, according to a watchdog report released this week.

‘This Is Not Saigon. This Is Worse Than Saigon.’  (Russell Berman, The Atlantic)
Why was the administration so slow to evacuate U.S. allies in Afghanistan trying to flee the Taliban?