It’s Raining, It’s Pouring: Torrents of rain have caused mudslides, flooding, fallen trees, and forced evacuations in Southern California. More is coming.

  Up to seven inches of rain have fallen in the lower elevations of the state in the past 24 hours. Roughly 34 million people are under flood watch. After weeks of rain, the ground is saturated and water is just running off. Washouts and mud slides have cut roads while rivers and creeks have risen to dangerous levels. A 5-year-old boy was swept away.

 The storm is now moving south, threatening Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, and Las Vegas areas today. And with all this, the deluge is not enough to relieve the  region’s severe drought.

Open Secret: About a dozen secret documents from President Biden’s time as Vice President were found in one of his private offices, The White House has confirmed. 

  Biden’s lawyers are reported to have found the documents in November while closing down a Washington, DC office that Biden used after he was vice president as part of his relationship with the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an honorary professor from 2017 to 2019. 

  This incident is a gift to Donald Trump, who’s on the defensive about taking secret documents with him to his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago. Trump asked in a social media post, “When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?”

  But there’s a difference. Biden’s lawyers reported the matter immediately and returned the documents while Trump held on and refused to return what he had.

  The Biden materials included some files marked “sensitive compartmented information,” which is a designation for highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources.

  After being told about the documents, the National Archives is reported to have then informed the Justice Department.

   “The White House is cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice regarding the discovery of what appear to be Obama-Biden Administration records, including a small number of documents with classified markings,” Richard Sauber, special counsel to President Biden, said in a statement.

It’s Political: In some of their first moves as the majority, House Republicans voted to make it more difficult to raise taxes and also to cut off President Biden’s $80 billion overhaul of the Internal Revenue Service.  It won’t pass the Senate, but it’s an opening salvo.

  South Carolina’s Rep. Nancy Mace on Sunday blasted the extremist House Republicans saying, “I am concerned that commonsense legislation will not get through to get a vote on the floor.”

Liar, Liar: A complaint has been filed with the Federal Election Commission accusing New York Republican Rep. George Santos of violations including masking the true source of his campaign funding, misrepresenting campaign spending, and using campaign money for personal expenses.

  Santos is the freshman member of Congress who fabricated his biography while running for office. Republican leaders have said nothing about his deception, let alone attempting to block him from taking his seat. The complaint against him was filed by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. 

Heart Stopping: Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin has been released from intensive care at the Cincinnati hospital where he’s been treated since his heart stopped and he collapsed on the field January 3^rd in a game against the Bengals. The 24-year-old Hamlin was transferred to the Buffalo General Medical Center.

  He was reported to have become so excited during Sunday’s win over the Patriots that he set off every medical alarm.

  Hamlin’s heart appears to have stopped because of a blow to his chest during a tackle. Doctors say recovery from such an incident could take weeks to months. It’s far too early to say whether Hamlin will play football again.

The Obit Page: Novelist Russell Banks, who wrote about issues of poverty, race, and class, died on Sunday at home in Saratoga Springs, NY. He was 82. Two of his novels, the 1985 “Continental Drift,” and the 1998 “Cloudsplitter,” were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. — Adolfo Kaminsky, a French man who at 18 became a master forger during World War II, altering the official documents of Jewish men, women, and children, to help them survive Hitler’s “final solution,” has died at age 97. He had learned to erase indelible ink working for a clothing dyer and dry cleaner in his Normandy home town.

The Spin Rack: The special Georgia grand jury investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election says it has finished its work and will issue a report later this month. This grand jury has no authority to indict anyone and would have to pass along its evidence to prosecutors and a grand jury with that authority. — As many as 1,500 people have been arrested in the wake of the riot that overran the Brazilian government center amid claims of election fraud. Here in the US, Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who claims he was robbed of his office, was admitted to a hospital for abdominal “discomfort” from injuries sustained in a 2018 knife attack, according to his wife. — Investment bank Goldman Sachs says it will lay off 3,200 of its 49,100 employees. — Massachusetts investigators have found a bloody knife in the basement of the home pf Ana Walshe, a missing mother of three. They also found in the  internet tracks of her husband, Brian Walshe, searches for “how to dispose of a 115-pound woman’s body” and how to dismember a body.

Below the Fold: Looking to protect the environment, the British government is set to ban many single-use plastic products, including plastic plates, trays, bowls, cutlery, balloon sticks, and certain kinds of polystyrene cups and food containers.

  Environment Secretary Therese Coffey told The Mail, “A plastic fork can take 200 years to decompose — that is two centuries in landfill or polluting our oceans.” 

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