Good morning, I'm Taylor Wilson, and this is five things you need to know Monday, the 21st of August, 2023.

Today, Hillary has made landfall, plus a look at threats against public officials,

and the fight between cities and states over Confederate monuments.

Tropical storm Hillary 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.

Hillary 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 Hillary had made direct landfall from the ocean in California, it would have been the first tropical storm to do so since 1939.

One person drowned yesterday in the Mexican town of Santa Rosa Lía when a car was swept away in an overflowing stream, and rescue workers saved four other people in the township of Mulej.

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.

Last year, federal officials charged more people over public threats than at any point over the past decade.

According to research from the National Counterterrorism Innovation Technology and Education Center at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

I spoke with USA Today National Correspondent Will Carlos about the rise and what might account for it?

Will, thanks for making the time.

Thanks as always for having me on.

So the number of people being prosecuted for threatening public officials has skyrocketed in recent years.

What do the numbers say here Will?

There's a team at the University of Nebraska led by a researcher called Shamus 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, you know, the president on down to sort of the local council person.

They found that over the last 10 years from 2013 to 2022, the numbers of those cases almost doubled.

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