Our picksAmerica’s Infrastructure Struggles | Turning the Tables on Russia’s Psyops | Health-Care Workers Quitting, and more

America’s Infrastructure Struggles with New Weather Forecast  (Arian Campo-Flores and Katherine Blunt, Wall Street Journal)
Historically anomalous heat and rain have overwhelmed systems designed to withstand old meteorological patterns, and climatologists expect still worse with climate change

Why Health-Care Workers Are Quitting in Droves  (Ed Yong The Atlantic)
About one in five health-care workers has left medicine since the pandemic started. This is their story—and the story of those left behind.

FBI Tracks Threats Against Teachers, School-Board Members  (Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha, Wall Street Journal)
Many Republicans see prospect of criminalizing concerned parents

Taliban Victory Has ‘Heightened Risk’ from Militant Insurgents around the World, Say Terror Analysts  (Kim Sengupta, Independent)
Afghanistan’s fall to Taliban control has created the conditions for terrorist groups to use the country to launch attacks abroad, while Africa’s Sahel region has seen the rise of the fastest growing Islamist insurgency in the world, according to a report by a leading security company. The Islamist victory across the border has led to the formation of new militant alliances in Pakistan’s tribal areas and the rise in assaults on security forces there are likely to continue, says Control Risks which raises the terrorism rating in those parts of Pakistan from “high” to “extreme”. The report states “it will come as no surprise that Afghanistan has moved to ‘extreme’ from ‘high’. The Taliban, a sanctioned terrorist organization, is in control. Or maybe it is not, which is one of the elements of volatility in that country for the coming year. The risk is very high that Afghanistan becomes a safe haven for terrorists with ambitions within its border and beyond.” A number of states in Africa – the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) and parts of the CAR (Central African Republic), and South Sudan have also moved to the “extreme” category in the company’s annual “RiskMap”. However clashes between the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) and a faction of Boko Haram has weakened the militant influence in Nigeria’s Borno state and limited their expansion to the south.

Prosecutors Say Facebook Deleted Crucial Evidence in a Crackdown on Extremist Groups  (Sarah Al-Arshani, Business Insider)
Prosecutors said Facebook deleted crucial evidence when it shut down the accounts of a New Mexico militia group during a crackdown on extremist groups, The Washington Post reported.  In August 2020, Facebook announced the New Mexico Civil Guard was removed from the platform. Business Insider’s Charles Davis previously reported that the right-wing vigilante group’s leaders include “a neo-Confederate with a swastika tattoo and a self-styled ‘national anarchist’ with a history of denying the Holocaust.” The Post reported that in June 2020, a group of men dressed in military-style camouflage confronted a group protesting a statue of a Spanish conquistador in Albuquerque, when one protester was shot and wounded. The outlet reported that prosecutors accused the New Mexico Civil Guard of starting the violence even though the alleged shooter was not a member of the militia group. On Monday, Bernalillo County District Attorney Raul Torrez filed a petition in California, where the social media network is based, asking a judge to force Facebook to hand over information about accounts created by the militia. Prosecutors want information that could help them identify members of the group, Torrez said at a news conference on Monday.

Electricity Partners Launch Sixth Grid Security Exercise  (HSToday)
The goal of GridEx VI is to exercise the resilience of the North American electricity system in the face of a coordinated attack from a state-sponsored adversary.

The US Must Turn the Tables on Russia’s Psyops  (Ivana Stradner, Defense One)
A post-Cold War fixation on hard power has sapped us of the 21st century’s most potent force.

How an Entire Soviet Town Disappeared from the Face of the Earth in a Matter of Minutes  (Yekaterina Sinelschikova, Russia Beyond)
For Severo-Kurilsk, with its 6,000 population, 5 November 1952 turned into an apocalypse.