It’s happening again, people. History does tend to repeat itself. If you follow my work, you know there is nothing that outrages me more than the banning of books. And I know it outrages many of you as well.

And yet that has been exactly what’s been going on in this country as of late. Over and over again, we’ve seen works of great literature banned for no reason except for republican insanity.

Book banning is perhaps the ultimate evil. It robs children of the ability to learn, to gain knowledge. It robs people of the ability to make their own decisions about how they view this world. That is the point, I suppose.

Recently, in the state of Florida, 60 schools that are part of Lake County have chosen to ban “And Tango Makes Three.” This is an award-winning book for children though anyone of any age would likely enjoy it. It’s about two gay penguins at a zoo who adopt an egg. They raise the little penguin.

There is no sex in this book. There is no violence. There is only beauty. And yet Governor Desantis and his flock are going book-banning hog-wild crazy. LGBTQ people are being erased in literature. Anything that tips the boat away from the white male is being erased. It breaks my heart.

We’ve brought you numerous stories of various great novels that have been banned. The bluest Eye, To kill a mockingbird, The nowhere girls, Maus. There are so many more. As activists, we can work with libraries to ensure they have these books. We can also donate to companies that are fighting back against this awful censoring of knowledge. It’s the least we can do for the children of America.

The post Throw the book at Ron DeSantis appeared first on Palmer Report.

When he makes his first visit to the border as President on Sunday, Joe Biden will witness a human rights crisis unfolding both in his own backyard and Mexico’s.

In El Paso, Texas, migrant families have streamed into the city in recent months, coming from countries devastated by increasing weather catastrophes, unchecked violence and repressive governments. The recent surge has overwhelmed the border city’s resources, prompting Mayor Oscar Leeser to declare a state of emergency last month.

And just across the Rio Grande, temperatures on the streets of Ciudad Juárez have been dropping into the 40s at night—below freezing in the wind—chilling hundreds of migrant families needing shelter while they wait for an opportunity to cross into America. Tens of thousands of people that presented themselves at the border in recent months have been turned back into Mexico without the opportunity to apply for asylum under the use of the pandemic-era Title 42 public health order. Many are still waiting, hoping for the chance to enter the U.S.

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Biden’s visit comes at a politically charged moment for the country’s immigration policies, as well as his own political future. He has not yet announced whether he will run for re-election, but is widely expected to do so. Republicans have frequently criticized how Biden has not visited the border during his presidency, using the fact as a way of arguing that he has no interest in taking the border situation seriously.

“The border is President Biden’s greatest vulnerability right after inflation,” says Republican political consultant Whit Ayres, adding, “If you watch Fox News, it seems like half the stories they run are about chaos at the border.”

As President, Biden has personally sidestepped the immigration issue in many respects, making little effort to push Congress to tackle it after sending an immigration bill to Capitol Hill on his first day in office, and delegating the work of addressing the origins of the migration surge from Central America to Vice President Kamala Harris. A Harvard-Harris poll from mid-December found that just 40% of voters approve of Biden’s handling of immigration.

On Sunday, however, Biden will be facing the immigration issue head on. He’s stopping in El Paso en route to Mexico City where he will meet with Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau. The three leaders are set to discuss how their countries can work together to address climate change, drug trafficking, as well as the hundreds of thousands of migrants moving through Mexico to get to the U.S. each year.

“The President is very much looking forward to seeing for himself firsthand what the border security situation looks like, particularly in El Paso,” John Kirby, White House National Security Council spokesman, told reporters on Friday. “He’s very much also looking forward to getting a chance to talk to Customs and Border Patrol agents on the ground who are actually involved in this mission to get their firsthand perspectives of it.”

The administration’s immigration policy has been mired in court battles, as Biden administration officials have tried to end Title 42, which was initiated under the Trump administration. The courts have insisted Biden keep the order in place. Biden administration officials say that two years of turning people away without hearing their asylum claims has only led to more repeated attempts to cross the border, putting more demands on Border Patrol agents.

Read more: Hundreds of Migrants Arrive in El Paso As Court Orders Title 42 to Stay in Place

To address the rise in migrants, Biden is hoping to convince lawmakers to fund more asylum officers and immigration judges to deliver verdicts more quickly on who is admissible into the U.S. and clear massive case backlogs. “Instead of a safe and orderly process at the border, we have a patchwork system that simply doesn’t work as it should,” Biden said on Thursday in one of his first extensive speeches about the border. “We don’t have enough asylum officers or personnel to determine whether people qualify for asylum. There’s a standard by what you have to meet.”

“We don’t have enough immigrant judges to adjudicate the claims of immigrants,” Biden added.

According to Biden administration figures, the majority of the increase in migrants trying to enter the U.S. in recent months has stemmed from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. In October, the Biden Administration announced a so-called “parole” program that gave Venezuelans an opportunity to apply to enter the U.S. legally. That was coupled with a threat that Venezuelan migrants who presented themselves at the border without requesting lawful entry beforehand would be turned back to Mexico without being allowed to request asylum. Customs and Border Protection said that the program reduced the number of Venezuelans trying to cross the border from 1,100 each day in October to less than 250 per day on average, according to administration figures.

On Thursday, the Biden Administration officially expanded that program to include offers of parole for migrants coming from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua. Under the new effort, in which the U.S. intends to accept 30,000 people per month from the four nations for two years, migrants can download a U.S. government app on their phone while in their home country, show they have a sponsor in the U.S., and wait to receive permission to buy a plane ticket to travel to the U.S. Also on Thursday, the Biden administration issued a proposed regulation that would disqualify migrants from asylum if they did not request protection first in a country like Mexico they transited through to get to the U.S. border.

The new program quickly prompted criticism from migrant rights activists who say that asking those seeking asylum to return to their home country, use a smartphone and buy a plane ticket shows a lack of understanding of what it means to be destitute and fleeing untenable conditions. Critics on the right hammered Biden for creating a new legal pathway for people to enter the U.S.

Congress has tried and failed for decades to meaningfully overhaul the country’s immigration system. The closest they came to succeeding in recent memory was ten years ago, when Republicans and Democrats in the Senate passed an immigration reform package that contained $30 billion for border security and a pathway to citizenship for people in the country unlawfully, but the proposal died in the Republican-controlled House.

Experts who study migration say that the factors driving people to the U.S. border are bigger than any one administration’s policies and include the increasing frequency of devastating storms caused by the changing climate, authoritarian crackdowns, the COVID-19 pandemic, and unchecked criminal violence. “This has been building up since 2020,” says Josiah Heyman, director of the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. To link migration flows to the policies of any one administration “puts it too much in an American-centered context,” says Heyman. In 2020, people weren’t able to move as freely because of COVID-19 lockdowns on travel. “It has a lot to do with the kind of opening up of people’s ability to move across Latin America in the aftermath of COVID-19,” Heyman says. ”It’s also reflective of the traumatic impacts of COVID in many countries in Latin America.”

The U.S. economy has grown over its history with influxes of migrants into the workforce. Separately, the asylum system came about in the aftermath of America’s reluctance to take in refugees during Adolf Hitler’s systematic killing of Jews in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. “There’s a moral discussion we should have, and there’s a practical discussion, which is we need migrants in our labor force,” Heyman says.

Karina Breceda, who helps migrant women in Juárez and El Paso through a nonprofit called New Wave Feminists, has seen a bottleneck of people at the U.S. border in recent months, filling up shelters. Breceda has noticed more people traveling to the border with small children, a sign, she says, of the desperate conditions they are facing back home.

One night last week when temperatures were below freezing, Breceda’s group found a woman from Nicaragua and her 3-month-old daughter on the street in El Paso, and raced to find a warm place for them to sleep. The woman had already filled out paperwork with the U.S. government and been released in El Paso, but the shelters were full. Breceda says they could help a lot more people if U.S. border officials would tell local groups when migrants were being released. “Nobody deserves to sleep in freezing cold temperatures,” Breceda says. “This isn’t about politics. It’s about people.”

A U.S. appeals court on Friday struck down a Trump administration rule banning bump stocks, which are devices that allow people to rapidly fire multiple rounds from semi-automatic guns.

In a 13-3 decision, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans said that despite “tremendous” public pressure to impose a ban, it was up to the U.S. Congress rather than the president to take action.

Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod also said for the majority that federal gun control laws did not unambiguously prohibit the devices, or give “fair warning that possession of a non-mechanical bump stock is a crime.”

One of the dissenting judges, Circuit Judge Stephen Higginson, wrote that the majority employed reasoning “to legalize an instrument of mass murder.”

Three other federal appeals courts have rejected challenges to the ban, and Friday’s decision raises the prospect that the U.S. Supreme Court could eventually decide the issue.

That court in October declined to hear appeals from two of the earlier decisions.

A bump stock lets a gun’s stock, which rests against the shoulder, slide backward and forward, letting users take advantage of the gun’s recoil to fire rapidly.

Though gun restrictions are often championed by Democrats, Trump’s Republican administration imposed the ban on bump stocks after a gunman used them in killing 58 people at an October 2017 country music concert in Las Vegas.

The Biden administration also supports the ban, which took effect in 2019 and is enforced by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

In December 2021, a three-judge 5th Circuit panel had upheld the ban and ruled against Michael Cargill, a Texas gun owner who opposed it.

Friday’s decision reversed that ruling. Most of the judges in the majority were appointed by Republican presidents, while the dissenting judges were appointed by Democratic presidents.

The U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Cargill’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a similar request.

The case is Cargill v. Garland, 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 20-51016.

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A 6-year-old boy shot and wounded a teacher on Friday at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, police said, prompting consternation from local officials who vowed to find answers and prevent such an event from happening again.

The injury to the teacher, a woman in her 30s, was considered life-threatening, though she had shown some improvement in the hospital, Police Chief Steve Drew told reporters.

There was no further explanation for how a 6-year-old acquired the handgun. Police described it as an “altercation” in the first-grade classroom that resulted in one shot fired.

“This was not an accidental shooting,” Drew said, later adding: “I want to know where that firearm came from.”

The boy was in custody, Drew said.

No students were injured. They were moved to a gymnasium for their safety, and counselors were made available, Drew said.

“They are safe. They are interacting with officers and having some fun, slapping some high fives and teasing each other,” Drew said.

Students were reunited with their parents under a school escort, Drew said.

“Right now it’s still raw, but what I will tell you is there’s going to be a full after-action (report), not only internally from the city council with the school board and others, but we are going to ensure that we have the right steps and policies so that this doesn’t happen again,” Newport News Mayor Phillip Jones told reporters.

In the same news conference, schools superintendent George Parker lamented educators’ inability to keep guns out of school, saying he was “shocked” and “disheartened”.

“We need to keep guns out of the hands of our young people,” Parker said. “I cannot control access to weapons. My teachers cannot control access to weapons.”

Parker said all school campuses are equipped for random metal detector searches but they were not deployed at Richneck Elementary on Friday.

(NewsNation) — The house where four University of Idaho students were killed will remain a crime scene until at least Feb. 1, an Idaho judge ordered last week.

The house in Moscow, Idaho, will be locked and crime tape will remain, according to the court order, which NewsNation reviewed Friday.

The order means “the home and outbuildings, trailers, vehicles and (yard)” must be preserved, but it does not require police to remain at the scene.

Read Bryan Kohberger’s full probable cause affidavit here.

Court filings show 28-year-old suspect Bryan Kohberger’s defense team asked for the scene to be preserved, and the judge agreed.

On Friday, investigators were seen loading covered mattresses and other furniture into the back of several pickup trucks outside the home. It’s unclear whether the furniture belonged to the four victims or the two surviving roommates.

Former FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer told NewsNation’s “Rush Hour” that authorities may be removing items from the house “possibly for further defense evaluation.” “Nothing about this crime scene made a lot of sense,” Coffindaffer added.

The court order also requires that “all samples and evidence collected or generated by the state” be held and preserved for the defense.

Kohberger faces four counts of first-degree murder in the Nov. 13 deaths of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin.

(NewsNation) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order Friday activating the Florida National Guard in response to “the alarming influx of migrants landing in the Florida Keys.”

Officials told NewsNation that hundreds of migrants were bused from the Florida Keys to be processed elsewhere in the state as border patrol facilities in the area fill up.

A group was taken to Dania Beach, not far from Fort Lauderdale, given a court date, and then many were released to family and friends.

But that processing can take more than an hour per person and border agents are stretched thin in addition to providing additional support toward efforts to prevent further migrant landings on Florida shores.

“The burden of the Biden administration’s failure falls on local law enforcement who lack the resources to deal with the crisis,” DeSantis said in a press release. “That is why I am activating the National Guard and directing state resources to help alleviate the strain on local resources.”

Almost 8,000 Cubans and Haitians have been interdicted since August — about 50 per day compared with 17 per day in the 2021-22 fiscal year and just two per day during the 2020-21 fiscal year. 

“We see that on the southwest border right now, now it’s starting to happen in Florida as well,” said Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council.

Judd told NewsNation that border agents in Florida are overwhelmed by what’s been described as a migrant surge in the Florida Keys.

“All you’re doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Judd said. “When you put them on these buses and transport them elsewhere, now you’re taking agents from that location out of the field to do the processing.”

Florida officials have appealed to the U.S. government to do more to deter migrants from making the risky trek.

President Joe Biden signaled a tougher stance on migrants coming from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua, saying it would immediately start turning people from those countries who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, as it has done with Venezuelans.

“They are completely overwhelmed right now,” Judd said. “When you’re dealing with people that are coming from Cuba. All of those agents are now being tasked with doing administrative duties rather than enforcement duties.”

Over the long holiday weekend, the U.S. Coast Guard stopped and sent back more than 600 people in Florida waters. The groups are coming mostly from Cuba and Haiti.

“These folks embark on these vessels that are homemade, rustic vessels, some of them have provisions, but they run out,” said Hansel Pintos, a spokesman for the Coast Guard. “A lot of these vessels I would say the grand majority of these vessels are not seaworthy.”

NewsNation got an exclusive look at the journey a group from Cuba took on one of these makeshift boats to the Florida Keys.

One man on board the boat described strong emotions when he and his friends saw the American flag and knew they’d survived the journey.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

When former Ohio governor John Kasich called for moderate Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives to elect a joint speaker as a way out of the current GOP-led impasse, it brought to mind  a recent (rare) triumph of unity in Israeli politics. 

Mansour Abbaswas the leader of Israel’s United Arab List party who in 2021 made history as the first Arab-Israeli to join a governing coalition. Israel’s 36th ruling government came about under circumstances similar to what’s taking place in Washington, D.C.: a fractious ruling party couldn’t put together the votes to rule. 

No one imagined that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year grip on leadership would ultimately be pried loose by an Israeli Arab. But it happened: an out-of-the-box coalition agreement changed Israeli politics forever.

So here’s my question: Why can’t it happen here?

Former Ohio Governor Kasich’s tweet proposing the idea quickly gathered almost 3 million views and launched Kasich onto a round of TV and podcast appearances.

Wouldn’t it be great for America if a block of Republicans and Democrats work together to pick a Speaker to run a coalition-style government? A coalition allows the House to create policy from the middle out rather than the extremes in.

— John Kasich (@JohnKasich) January 4, 2023

In a followup column in The Hill, Nancy Jacobson, CEO of No Labels, wrote that “electing a Speaker who can elicit support from the minority party could entirely transform the House of Representatives from a body dominated by the extremes to one committed to common sense,”   

She put forward two names,  Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) or Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), who are both members of Congress’s bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. 

“Having worked so well together,” she added, “and having accomplished so much as bulwarks against the demands of the far right and far left, a House led by either would almost surely prove much more productive legislatively than one in which a Speaker essentially controlled by McCarthy’s detractors.”

Kasich and Jacobson are on the right track. But why not go full-Israel here? If enough representatives could agree to share power, the speakership could rotate between two moderates, one Republican, one Democrat. The rules don’t say it can’t be done. That’s how Israel resolved its electoral impasse, giving the prime ministership to the right-wing leader Naftali Bennett of Yamina first, who then, in a rotation agreement, ceded the position to Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid.

Instead of reaching for the one savior, inside or outside Congress, who could take the reins on this runaway wagon, maybe it’s time for two drivers? Why not share? A Democrat takes the gavel for a year, followed by a Republican, both of them committed to getting their members to address the most urgent issues facing the country.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, left, and Naftali Bennett, right, when they took office in June 2021. Photo by Getty Images

In Israel, the coalition government was far from perfect — Abbas himself was refused a seat in the cabinet — but it notched some singular accomplishments, not least of which was its very existence. It was able to pass the country’s first national budget in three years. The coalition didn’t bring peace, unicorns and rainbows to the Middle East. But it did demonstrate that Arabs and Jews in Israel could govern together.

In an America as divided as any time since the Civil War, just the idea that Blues and Reds could work together would be a refreshing change.

The idea becomes less far-fetched if you think of our two party Congress more in terms of political blocs. There are far-right religious members of Congress — just as there are in the Israeli Knesset. Then there’s a left-wing group, an America First party-within-a-party, a Greens-affiliated faction — the blue and red labels in fact paint over a range of ideological diversity and differing priorities.

Israelis figured out a way to herd these cats for the common good, no doubt motivated by ousting a common foe, Netanyahu.

But our 435 representatives face a common foe as well: extremism. If the 20 members blocking Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s speakership have their way, they’d likely elect someone for the job who denies such extremism exists at all. 

McCarthy himself, by kowtowing to this group and lying about Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurgency, demonstrated an inability to stand up for moderation — or to stand for much of anything, frankly.

In Israel, the coalition government was short-lived, brought down by Netanyahu’s machinations and, to be sure, the pressure of Israel’s own divisions. 

No one can know what a joint speakership in Congress could accomplish. But its very creation would demonstrate a new way forward for a broken system and a deeply divided nation.

The post The Israeli way out of the Kevin McCarthy debacle appeared first on The Forward.

Natalie Orpett shared the most recent episode of The Aftermath, Lawfare’s narrative podcast on the government’s response to Jan. 6 and the search for accountability. The latest episode explores Congress’s efforts to create an investigative body after the attack:

Benjamin Wittes sat down with Scott R. Anderson, Orpett, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff to reflect on the Jan. 6 insurrection on its two-year anniversary. They discussed the search for accountability that has taken place since the attack including the efforts of the House Select Committee, criminal investigations and prosecutions, efforts to ensure an insurrection doesn’t happen again, and more:

Katherine Pompilio shared that the Jan. 6 committee’s final report and all of its supporting materials—including hundreds of interview transcripts and video exhibits—can be found, and will remain, on Lawfare’s Jan. 6 Project page, which serves as a primary source repository for all Jan. 6 related documents.

Lawfare editors answered your burning questions on national security law issues from the past year, including the Mar-a-Lago investigation, the Secret Service, the state of the U.S. legal system following the Jan. 6 attacks, the failed German coup, and more:

Wittes joined hosts Alan Rozenshtein, Jurecic, and Anderson to discuss the major national security news stories starting off the year, including current chaos in the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court’s ruling on Title 42, and U.S. arms exports to NATO allies:

David Priess shared the latest episode of Chatter in which he spoke with Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D.-Va.) about her time working at CIA and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and how the skills she learned at both of those jobs have helped her as a representative:

Wittes sat down with Shane Harris to discuss Harris’ recent Washington Post article on the Nord Stream 2 attacks and who could be responsible for them:

Saraphin Dhanani sat down with Anderson to discuss the core legal issues that U.S. policymakers need to consider as they weigh whether and how to move forward with seizing and diverting any frozen Russian-related assets to Ukraine. Their conversation builds on a piece that Anderson and Chimène Keitner wrote for Lawfare titled, “The Legal Challenges Presented by Seizing Frozen Russian Assets”:

Ryan A. Musto argued that, in addressing the dangerous ongoing Russian attacks on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, experts should look to the African Treaty of Pelindaba—which established a nuclear-weapon-free zone—for guidance. 

Bobby Chesney and Steve Vladeck kicked off the new year with a discussion of the Supreme Court’s “Title 42”-related action in Arizona v. Mayorkas, highlights from the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year ’23, Central Command’s year-end summary of its counter-ISIS operations in Syria and Iraq in 2022, and more:

Karen J. Greenberg discussed the contradictions of U.S. policy during the global war on terror, and discussed the treatment of Saifullah and Uzair Paracha to highlight the structure of the military commissions at Guantanamo as it relates to the structure of the federal system.

Christine Bell reviewed Paul Williams’ 2021 book entitled “Lawyering Peace” (Cambridge University Press).

Hannah Neprash and Rozenshtein discussed the growing incidents in ransomware attacks against healthcare systems and offered three recommendations to policymakers interested in supporting a data-driven approach to enhancing cybersecurity in healthcare.

Paul Rosenzweig commended President Biden’s proposed cybersecurity strategy which aims to address the issue of third party liability for cybersecurity failures, and notes that Biden’s strategy is just the beginning of the fight over this issue.

Darrell West was joined by John Villasenor and Mark MacCarthy to discuss Gonzalez v. Google, a case coming before the Supreme Court that could have profound consequences for social media sites and content moderation policies:

Florence G’SELL discussed how French authorities might approach a new Twitter controlled by Elon Musk, considering whether Musk will be inclined to have Twitter follow Europe’s content moderation rules and whether Twitter possesses the means to comply with them.

Timothy R. Heath analyzed the shortcomings of using wargames to deter a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan and how experts might overcome them.

And Jordan Schneider took a break from interviews to read from his weekly ChinaTalk newsletter in which he shared his favorite books and more:

And that was the week that was.

Utility crews in northern California worked to restore power to tens of thousands of homes on Friday following two days of fierce winds and torrential rain, even as the region braced for another onslaught of stormy weather heading into the weekend.

The next bout of heavy showers and gusty winds was expected to arrive in the San Francisco Bay area on Friday night and expand across northern California and into southern Oregon through Saturday, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.

The coming storm – another “atmospheric river” of dense moisture flowing in from the Pacific – is likely to dump several more inches of rain on a region already saturated from repeated downpours since late December, renewing risks of flash flooding and mudslides, the NWS said.

In addition to heavy rains, up to 2 feet of snow was expected to fall over the weekend in higher elevations of the Sierras, where accumulations of a foot to 18 inches or more were measured earlier this week, the weather service said.

On Friday much of the northern two-thirds of California, the most populous state in the United States, was under flood watches, gale-force wind advisories and winter-storm warnings as forecasters urged residents to prepare for the deluge and stay off roads in flood-prone areas.

The ominous forecast comes on the heels of a massive Pacific storm that unleashed hurricane-force wind gusts, pounding surf, soaking rains and heavy snow across California for two days. The northern portion of the state was hardest hit.

As of Friday morning, some 60,000 homes and businesses remained without electricity in several northern California counties because of the weather, according to data from Poweroutages.us.

Howling winds uprooted trees already weakened by prolonged drought and poorly anchored in rain-soaked soil, taking down power lines with them and blocking roadways across the region. Road travel was also disrupted by flash floods and rock slides.

High surf and runoff from heavy rains combined to flood several blocks in the seaside city of Santa Cruz, and heavy waves tore up wooden piers in the adjacent town of Capitola and nearby Seacliff State Beach.

Farther north, pounding waves broke through the rear doors of the historic Point Cabrillo lighthouse in Mendocino County, flooding its ground-floor museum, the Mendocino Voice newspaper reported.

The two-day storm, which ended Thursday night, was powered by an immense atmospheric stream of moisture from the tropical Pacific and a sprawling, hurricane-scale low-pressure system known as a bomb cyclone.

It marked the third and strongest atmospheric river to strike California since early last week. Research predicts that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of such rain storms, punctuating extensive periods of extreme drought.

At least six people have died in the severe weather since New Year’s weekend, including a toddler killed by a fallen redwood tree crushing a mobile home in northern California.

The rapid succession of storms left downtown San Francisco drenched in 10.3 inches of rain from Dec. 26 through Jan. 4, the wettest 10-day stretch recorded there in more than 150 years, since 1871, according to the NWS.

The highest all-time rainfall total ever documented over 10 days in the city’s downtown was 14.37 inches, an 1862 record the NWS said would likely stand through the downpours to come.

The storms have brought welcome replenishments to Sierra Nevada snowpack, a critical source of California’s water supply, but experts say much more snow will need to fall through the winter to markedly improve the state’s grave drought situation.

For better or worse, the weather service predicted that yet another, “likely stronger,” atmospheric river storm was “on the horizon for Monday.”

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