Wildfire Problem Growing Beyond Our Ability to Tame It | Add-on Spawns a New Era of Machine Guns | Vaccination Against Fake News, and more

An even bigger challenge will be in treating the most dangerous urban fuels — our homes. We need to promote fire-resistant materials in our building codes, improve warning systems and work harder to reduce human-started fires. Evacuation routes are an increasingly hard-to-solve problem in the West, where housing growth into remote, flammable places leaves communities at risk. We need to think about ways to shift incentive structures around private development away from fire-prone areas and toward those with multiple exits.
As these challenges mount, it is not too soon to begin debate about a national fire insurance program and to bolster the science that provides risk maps. Just as the federal government insures our farmland from erosion and our communities from floods, we need to increase access to insurance for populations that are now in the path of wildfire. Homeowners in California are increasingly unable to insure their most valuable asset. That’s just not right — and the trend will soon spread to other states.

Barrels of Drinking Water for Migrants Walking Through Texas Have Disappeared  (AP / VOA News)
As one of the worst heat waves on record set in across much of the southern United States this summer, authorities and activists in South Texas found themselves embroiled in a mystery in this arid region near the border with Mexico.
Barrels of life-saving water that a human rights group had strategically placed for wayward migrants traveling on foot had vanished.
Usually, they are hard to miss. Labeled with the word “AGUA” painted in white, capital letters and standing about waist-high, the 55-gallon (208-liter), blue drums stand out against the scrub and grass, turned from green to a sundried brown.
The stakes of solving this mystery are high.
Summer temperatures can climb to 43.3 degrees Celsius in Texas’ sparsely populated Jim Hogg County, with its vast, inhospitable ranchlands. Migrants — and sometimes human smugglers — take a route through this county to try to circumvent a Border Patrol checkpoint on a busier highway about 48 kilometers to the east. More than 96 kilometers from the U.S.-Mexico border, it can take several days to walk there for migrants who may have already spent weeks crossing mountains and desert and avoiding cartel violence.

Pentagon Revamping DC’s National Guard Over Its Jan. 6 Response  (AP / VOA News)
The Pentagon is developing plans to restructure the National Guard in Washington, D.C., in a move to address problems highlighted by the chaotic response to the Jan. 6 riot and safety breaches during the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd, The Associated Press has learned.
The changes under discussion would transfer the District of Columbia’s aviation units, which came under sharp criticism during the protests when a helicopter flew dangerously low over a crowd. In exchange, the district would get more military police, which is often the city’s most significant need, as it grapples with crowd control and large public events.
A key sticking point is who would be in control of the D.C. Guard — a politically divisive question that gets to the heart of what has been an ongoing, turbulent issue. Across the country, governors control their National Guard units and can make decisions on deploying them to local disasters and other needs. But D.C. is not a state, so the president is in charge but gives that authority to the defense secretary, who generally delegates it to the Army secretary.

Man Pleads Guilty to Sending Bomb Threat to Arizona Election Official  (Amanda Holpuch, New York Times)
A Massachusetts man who searched online for an Arizona election official’s address and name along with the words “how to kill” pleaded guilty on Friday to making a bomb threat to the official, the U.S. Justice Department said.
Threats against election workers and officials increased after former President Donald J. Trump spread the lie that fraud had cost him the 2020 presidential election.
In Arizona, which Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by a little over 10,000 votes, politicians and other conspiracy theorists aligned with Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that the election was marred fraud.
A review of the election by Mark Brnovich, a Republican who served as Arizona’s attorney general until January, which was released by his Democratic successor in February, discredited the numerous claims of problems.
Scholars who study political violence say threats of political violence, and actual attacks, have become more common because of a heightened use of dehumanizing and apocalyptic language, particularly by right-wing politicians and media.

Two Months in Georgia: How Trump Tried to Overturn the Vote  (Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset, New York Times)
Over the two months that followed, a vast effort unfolded on behalf of the lame-duck president to overturn the election results in swing states across the country. But perhaps nowhere were there as many attempts to intervene as in Georgia, where Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is now poised to bring an indictment for a series of brazen moves made on behalf of Mr. Trump in the state after his loss and for lies that the president and his allies circulated about the election there.
Mr. Trump has already been indicted three times this year, most recently in a federal case brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith that is also related to election interference. But the Georgia case may prove the most expansive legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power, with nearly 20 people informed that they could face charges.
Perhaps above all, the Georgia case assembled by Ms. Willis offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths taken by Mr. Trump and his allies to exert pressure on local officials to overturn the election — an up-close portrait of American democracy tested to its limits.

Fast Living and Foreign Dealings: An F.B.I. Spy Hunter’s Rise and Fall  (Michael Rothfeld, Adam Goldman and William K. Rashbaum, New York Times)
Charles Franklin McGonigal was no ordinary agent. As the chief of counterintelligence for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York, he was tasked with rooting out foreign efforts to steal vital national security and economic secrets in one of the world’s most fertile cities for spying.
Apart from his outward image as a wholesome and responsible G-man, however, there was another, less visible side to Mr. McGonigal, federal prosecutors and his former colleagues say. He held off-the-books meetings with foreign politicians and businessmen and accepted illicit payments while doing favors for associates, according to federal indictments filed against him in two states earlier this year.
Mr. McGonigal’s arrest, in part based on accusations that he had worked for a Russian oligarch, came at a time when U.S.-Russia relations had reached their lowest point since the Cold War, leading to questions about whether one of the country’s most trusted spy hunters had become a spy himself. But a close look at Mr. McGonigal’s life and career reveals an arc that appears to have little or nothing to do with espionage and international intrigue. Instead, it seems to be a quintessentially American story about greed.

This Psychologist Wants to Vaccinate You Against Fake News  (Grace Browne, Wired)
As a child in the Netherlands, the University of Cambridge social psychologist Sander van der Linden became absorbed by the question of how so many people came to support the ideas of someone like Adolf Hitler, and how they might be taught to resist such influence.
While studying psychology at graduate school in the mid-2010s, van der Linden came across the work of American researcher William McGuire, who developed a theory that psychological vaccination might prevent indoctrination.
Traditional vaccines protect us by feeding us a weaker dose of pathogen, enabling our bodies’ immune defenses to take note of its appearance so we’re better equipped to fight the real thing when we encounter it. A psychological vaccine works much the same way: Give the brain a weakened hit of a misinformation-shaped virus, and the next time it encounters it in fully-fledged form, its “mental antibodies” remember it and can launch a defense.
Van der Linden had not anticipated that his work would be landing in the era of Donald Trump’s election, fake news, and post-truth. Attention on his research from the media and governments exploded. Everyone wanted to know, how do you scale this up?

Philadelphia Teen Charged with Planning National Terrorist Attack  (Chris Eberhart, Fox News)
Heavily armed law enforcement officers swarmed the Philadelphia home of a teenager who was plotting to launch a national terrorist attack, authorities said. The suspect, an unnamed 17-year-old, was in contact with a global terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda and had access to a “significant” number of guns and was building bombs, FBI Special Agent in Charge Jacqueline Maguire said during a Monday press conference. The teen, who was arrested Friday, “conducted general research” into potential targets that weren’t confined to one location, and they were not just in Philadelphia, she said. “Most concerning was the evidence to his access to firearms and purchased items and materials commonly [used] for constructing improvised explosive devices,” Maguire said. “Among the items he purchased were tactical equipment, wiring, chemicals and devices often used as the detonators.”