Tropical Storm Hilary drenches Southern California, Spain wins World Cup: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Hilary makes landfall

Hilary makes landfall. Plus, USA TODAY National Correspondent Will Carless looks at the rise in charges over public threats, how a rare, flesh-eating bacteria kills, USA TODAY Dow Jones News Fund Intern Abhinav S. Krishnan looks at the fight between cities and states over Confederate monuments, and Spain wins the World Cup.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning, I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Monday, the 21st of August 2023. Today, Hilary has made landfall. Plus, a look at threats against public officials and the fight between cities and states over Confederate monuments.

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Tropical Storm Hilary drenched Southern California yesterday, bringing heavy rains to the region. Some mountain and desert areas saw more than half an average year's worth of rain in one day. That includes the desert resort city of Palm Springs, which was hit with nearly three inches of rain by last night.

Hilary was the first tropical storm to cross into California from Mexico since Nora, in 1997, according to the weather service office in San Diego. If Hilary had made direct landfall from the ocean in California, it would've been the first tropical storm to do so since 1939.

One person drowned yesterday in the Mexican town of Santa Rosalia when a car was swept away in an overflowing stream, and rescue workers saved four other people in the township of Mulegé. North of the border the Los Angeles School District, the second largest in the country, said all its schools will be closed today. And the San Diego District, which planned to begin its fall term today, said it'll do the same.

Meanwhile, an earthquake also rocked Southern California registering as a magnitude 5.1 yesterday afternoon, about 80 miles from Los Angeles. Geoscientists believed the quake was coincidental and not related to heavy rainfall in the area.

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Last year, federal officials charged more people over public threats than at any point over the past decade, according to research from the National Counter-Terrorism Innovation Technology and Education Center at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. I spoke with USA TODAY National Correspondent Will Carless about the rise and what might account for it. Will, thanks for making the time.

Will Carless:

Thanks as always for having me on.

Taylor Wilson:

So the number of people being prosecuted for threatening public officials has skyrocketed in recent years. What do the numbers say here Will?

Will Carless:

There's a team at the University of Nebraska led by a researcher called Seamus Hughes, who I've been talking to for years, and they went and looked at prosecutions by the federal government against people who have made threats against public officials, and that's everyone from the president on down to the local council person. They found that over the last 10 years, from 2013 to 2022, the numbers of those cases almost doubled. So there were 38 back in 2013 and there were 74 last year, which is by far the highest number that they've recorded.

Now I saw that data and I asked Seamus to go and look at this year, and so they tallied the cases from the beginning of the year and they've already found 44 cases this year. As Seamus put it, we're on track to at least be equal to last year, if not to exceed it, which would make it the highest number of these cases ever.

Taylor Wilson:

Wow. So is this jump because of more threats or more attention to them from law enforcement?

Will Carless:

That's a really great question, and I'm glad you asked it. Data is always kind of funky, right? And so when you look at these cases, this reflects a bit of both. This reflects both that there are more threats out there. Pretty much every agency out there is warning of increased threats. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security put out a bulletin actually almost a year ago to the day in the wake of the search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago property, saying that they were seeing a far increased level of threats against them.

So I think it's fair to say that there are certainly more threats being made. But also, when you have a federal government that is interested in and is paying attention to those threats, and is willing to prosecute them, then of course you're going to see these numbers go up. So you can argue, yes, there are more threats, but also the federal government is deciding that this is a priority and that it needs to go after these cases and to prosecute them and to put people in prison, and to sort of I guess send a message to a certain extent that it's not okay to go on your Facebook page and threaten to kill the president.

Taylor Wilson:

So Will, where are these threats coming from? Is this an issue from the far right or is this really across the political spectrum?

Will Carless:

It's really important to note that the experts that I talked to said, look, this is not exclusively a far right kind of domain. There are threats made from all different sides of the political spectrum throughout the year. For example, earlier this month, a woman was charged in Illinois for making threats that she was going to kill former President Trump and his youngest son Barron. She allegedly phoned in those threats to a school in Palm Beach, presumably to Barron Trump's school. So look, I mean these threats come from the right and they come from the left.

Now I will say, when it comes to these federal threats, there has been a particular upsurge, according to the researchers, in the number of threats coming from the far right. I think that makes some sense. You have an awful lot of people on the far right, particularly supporters of President Trump, who are extremely angry and are extremely upset, and they're also being fed a steady stream of, it's fair to say, disinformation about the 2020 election, as well as they're being told this is a witch hunt and that this is a political prosecution, et cetera, et cetera. So there's an awful lot of angry people on the far right and I think that's translating into an increased number of threats coming from the far right. But they're certainly not alone. It's on all sides of the spectrum.

Taylor Wilson:

And as you mentioned, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued this joint warning shortly after the raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago home. We know that that raid led to an indictment. We've now seen a series of indictments against the former president. Will, how might a charged political environment around this fuel threats against public officials and law enforcement?

Will Carless:

Well, everybody I've talked to is concerned about that. I mean, even from the most sober experts that I talk to who are always quick to tamp down any speculation, they're really worried about where we're going in the next couple of years when it comes to not only threats, but also acts of violence, of course, against public officials, against federal government, against people like judges and district attorneys, people bringing these cases.

Another thing that we saw last week was that the grand jurors, the everyday citizens who heard the Trump case and decided to indict him in Georgia, their names were leaked online, they were doxxed. Their addresses and in some cases their images were placed in dark corners of the internet. And that just shows a clear animosity towards people who are engaged in this process. We've also seen increased threats against election officials, against school board members, just kind of across the gamut. So it's not looking good over the next couple of years. People are extremely concerned about it.

Taylor Wilson:

Will Carless covers extremism and emerging issues for USA TODAY. Thank you, Will.

Will Carless:

Thanks Taylor.

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Taylor Wilson:

At least eight people have died from a rare flesh eating bacteria. Five of the recent deaths came in the Tampa area, while another three were in Connecticut and New York. The Vibrio vulnificus bacteria was apparently responsible. It can be found in raw or undercooked seafood and in salt water and brackish water. Officials warn against swimming in warm brackish water, which is where fresh water meets salt water, if you have an open wound or cut. The bacteria cannot penetrate intact skin, but must enter through an existing break in the skin. If it does so, it can cause necrotizing fasciitis, where the flesh around the infection site dies. And the CDC says about one in five who get the infection die.

Because of climate change and warming oceans, Vibrio vulnificus is migrating north, studies have found. Infections also increased eightfold from 1988 to 2018 in the U.S. as climate change has warmed the coastal waters where the bacteria live, according to research published earlier this year in the journal Nature Portfolio. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.

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Cities in recent years have begun removing Confederate monuments, but a number of states are pushing back with historic preservation laws that prevent them from being taken down. I spoke with USA TODAY Dow Jones News Fund Intern Abhinav S. Krishnan to learn more. Welcome to 5 Things. Thanks for hopping on.

Abhinav S. Krishnan:

Thank you for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

What are some of the states that have passed or even just proposed these bills and how do these so-called statue statutes actually work?

Abhinav S. Krishnan:

We, in our analysis, have found around 117 bills related to protecting and preserving war memorials. And of those, we found them spread across like 20-something states. And there's the usual suspects. We see a lot of these bills being introduced in states with Republican legislatures, and most of the bills that have passed are in states that belong to the former Confederacy, so Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina.

But we're also seeing these bills being introduced in states with just Republican legislatures. So Idaho, for example, which didn't become a state until well after the Civil War, has attempted to introduce a bill about this issue. Oklahoma as well. And West Virginia, which was particularly surprising. West Virginia was a state that seceded from Virginia during the Civil War over opposition to slavery. And in that state we have seen dozens of bills being introduced, attempting to protect memorials in a way that would also preserve Confederate memorials.

Taylor Wilson:

I want to get to the heart of the argument that supporters of these monuments put forward in defense of them. What is the main case that they make?

Abhinav S. Krishnan:

I think it's important to recognize that support for monuments only arose after really opposition to monuments became an issue. And you hear a lot of these supporters talking about how these monuments represent the history of their states and their ancestors. A lot of Civil War related organizations, so the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Daughters of the Confederacy who were also involved in the construction of these memorials, are often the organizations that are bringing lawsuits against monument removal, are speaking out about preserving these monuments and the importance of these monuments.

Their main argument is frequently that removing monuments is erasing history or heritage in some way. And historians have talked about how that isn't a, first of all, an accurate representation of what monuments stand for and how removing monuments doesn't necessarily mean that we're forgetting history.

Taylor Wilson:

You write that some experts say such laws are part of a larger attempt to erode the power of blue cities in red states. Can you explain what they mean?

Abhinav S. Krishnan:

These bills attempt to use a legal tool called preemption that allows state legislatures to write laws that supersede local laws. And many of the experts I've spoken to say that that's a direct response to changing demographics. In a lot of Republican states, urban areas have increasingly become more Democratic, and as a result, local governments have been pushing for more liberal policies or at least more control over policies in their region. And so in response, a lot of these states have introduced and even past bills that severely limit the power of cities within their state. Texas, in addition to having introduced a monument protection bill, has also introduced bills that would severely limit municipalities' abilities to govern on things like daycares.

Taylor Wilson:

How are cities finding ways around monument removal bans?

Abhinav S. Krishnan:

So some cities have challenged these bans in court, and that's been particularly difficult because many of these bans aren't written to be particularly clear, and so it's difficult to understand what rights cities actually have and who's supposed to enforce these bans. And so we've seen a lot of legal cases in that area.

A lot of scholarship has also focused on novel ways that cities can find ways around these bans, like suing on grounds of a civil rights violation, for example. Some cities are also just straight up ignoring the bans and going ahead anyway with monument removal and relying on popular support to kind of bear the consequences. For example, in Alabama, the city of Birmingham erected a plywood screen around a monument, and then were faced with fines from Alabama state government for violating the Monument Protection Act that the state had just recently passed. In response, citizens crowdsourced more than twice the amount of money that the city had been fined in order to help pay off that fine and assist with other costs.

And so we're seeing cities respond in kind through legal challenges, but also just going ahead and bearing the consequences of these bans in the hopes that state legislatures will kind of lose the desire to enforce these bans.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, Abhinav Krishnan, great insight for us into a contentious issue. Thanks for making the time.

Abhinav S. Krishnan:

Thank you.

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Taylor Wilson:

Spain are World Cup champions. La Roja beat England one to nothing yesterday off a winning goal from Olga Carmona. It was the first World Cup title for the Spanish Women's National Team and came just a year after 15 players resigned from the team over training environment conditions under Coach Jorge Vilda. That same coach lifted the trophy yesterday after taking only three of those 15 players to the tournament.

And there were more shadows around the Spanish Federation yesterday when Federation President Luis Rubiales grabbed Jennifer Hermoso, the team's all-time leading scorer, and kissed her on the lips without her permission. Hermoso told broadcasters afterwards, "Yeah, I did not enjoy that." USA TODAY Sports Columnist Nancy Armor has more with a piece up on usatoday.com.

As for the tournament itself on the field, Spain's Aitana Bonmatí won Golden Ball as the best player. And earlier this weekend, Sweden beat Australia in the third place match.

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. If you like the show, please subscribe and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And if you have any comments, you can reach us at [email protected]. I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.