Our picksMore than 100,000 Evacuated | More Menacing Asteroids | U.S. Anti-Vaxxers & the Taliban, and more

Afghanistan Airlift Ops Have Rescued 101,300 From Kabul  (Tara Copp, Defense One)
But numbers out each day are dropping as Taliban tighten grip on airport, security threats rise.

How Many “Natural” Disasters Can One City Endure?  (Sarah Gibbens, National Geographic)
Storm-damaged Lake Charles, a Louisiana petrochemical hub, is facing issues that will confront many communities under climate change. How can we adapt, and who is going to pay?

Judge Sanctions Sidney Powell and Other Trump Campaign Lawyers over Failed Lawsuit  (Jacob Knutson, Axios)
A federal judge on Wednesday sanctioned attorneys including Sidney Powell, an ex-campaign lawyer for former President Trump who spread baseless conspiracy theories, over an unsuccessful lawsuit that attempted to overturn Michigan’s 2020 election results.
U.S. District Judge Linda Parker formally requested a disciplinary body to investigate whether Powell and the other pro-Trump lawyers, including Lin Wood, should be disbarred for filing the lawsuit, which she said “abused the well-established rules applicable to the litigation process by proffering claims not backed by law.”

Number of Objects in Low Earth Orbit Jumps 22% in 2 Years: Space Operations Command  (Tara Copp, Defense One)
Need to track, detect objects driving need for new space domain awareness investment.

U.S. Anti-Vaxxers Are Coming Out in Support of the Taliban  (Natalia Antelava, Coda Story)
American anti-vaccine advocates find strange bedfellows in Afghanistan

The Physics and Hype of Hypersonic Weapons  (David Wright and Cameron Tracy, Scientific American)
These novel missiles cannot live up to the grand promises made on their behalf, aerodynamics shows

Twitter Flagged Donald Trump’s Tweets with Election Misinformation: They Continued to Spread Both on and Off the Platform  (Zeve Sanderson et al., Misinformation Review)
We analyze the spread of Donald Trump’s tweets that were flagged by Twitter using two intervention strategies—attaching a warning label and blocking engagement with the tweet entirely. We find that while blocking engagement on certain tweets limited their diffusion, messages we examined with warning labels spread further on Twitter than those without labels. Additionally, the messages that had been blocked on Twitter remained popular on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, being posted more often and garnering more visibility than messages that had either been labeled by Twitter or received no intervention at all. Taken together, our results emphasize the importance of considering content moderation at the ecosystem level.

Capitol Attack Committee Issues Sweeping Requests for Official Records  (Maya Yang, Guardian)
House select committee writes to multiple government agencies, Chairman says panel plans to contact ‘several hundred’ people.

How Florida’s Massive Covid-19 Spike Got So Bad  (Dylan Scott, Vox)
The Florida surge is a microcosm of a summer gone wrong.

Unvaccinated People Over 29 Times More Likely to Be Hospitalized with Covid, CDC Report Finds  (Tim Fitzsimons, NBC News)
The study of over 40,000 Covid-19 cases in Los Angeles County also found that unvaccinated people were nearly five times more likely to be infected.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Bans COVID Vaccine Mandates  (Rebecca Falconer, Axios)
Gov. Greg Abbott has issued an executive order banning COVID-19 vaccine mandates by any Texas government entity and urged state lawmakers to pass it into law during the ongoing special session.
The announcement comes as Texas grapples with a massive surge in coronavirus cases and as the state reported the most COVID hospitalizations since the pandemic began.