10 things you need to know today: May 17, 2015

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1. American Pharoah wins Preakness, one step from Triple Crown
2. Amtrak ordered to improve safety at crash site
3. Bill, Hillary Clinton made $30 million in 16 months
4. Raid on ISIS kills 32, including top commander
5. Burundi president appears for first time since coup
6. Tornadoes strike nine states in sprawling storm
7. GOP presidential hopefuls descend on Iowa
8. Weeklong truce set to expire in Yemen
9. David Lynch returns to Twin Peaks reboot
10. Holyfield beats Romney in charity boxing match

published 17 May 2015

1. American Pharoah wins Preakness, one step from Triple Crown

American Pharoah on Saturday won a sloppy, rain-drenched Preakness Stakes to come within one win of capturing horse racing's vaunted Triple Crown. Only 12 horses have ever won the trifecta, with Affirmed being the last to accomplish the feat, in 1978. Having already won the Kentucky Derby, American Pharoah needs only a win in next month's Belmont Stakes to complete the circuit. "Great horses do great things," American Pharoah's trainer, Bob Baffert, said after the race.

The Federal Railroad Administration on Saturday ordered Amtrak to expand a safety system on the section of track where a speeding train derailed last week, killing eight people. Already in place on nearby tracks, the system alerts the engineer when a train is speeding, and automatically applies the brakes if the engineer fails to act. On Tuesday, a train traveling from Washington, D.C., to New York flew off the rails in Philadelphia after traveling 106 miles per hour in a 50 mph zone.

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Bill and Hillary Clinton have earned around $30 million from speeches and book sales since January 2014, according to financial disclosure forms made public Friday. The documents reveal that $5 million came from Simon and Schuster for Hillary Clinton's autobiography Hard Choices. The remaining money came from a combined total of around 100 paid speeches by both Bill and Hillary Clinton, which works out to an average payday of around $250,000 per speech.

Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza on Sunday appeared in public for the first time since repelling a coup attempt last week. Making no direct mention of the attempted coup, Nkurunziza instead warned about the threat posed by the Somali-based Islamic group al-Shabaab. Though forces loyal to Nkurunziza thwarted the would-be coup, they have yet to capture the alleged ringleader in the plot attempt, Maj. Gen. Godefroid Niyombare.

More than two dozen tornadoes reportedly touched down Saturday across nine states as a band of severe weather moved through the central U.S. There have been at least 28 reported tornadoes since Saturday, with sightings coming in Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming, according to The Weather Channel. The severe weather affected some 20 million people, according to NBC, though there were no reported casualties in the immediate aftermath.

Nearly a dozen declared or prospective Republican presidential candidates on Saturday gathered in Iowa for the key primary state's annual Lincoln Day Dinner. Ranging in viability from establishment favorites (Jeb Bush) to quixotic long shots (Ben Carson), the 11 candidates in attendance took turns wooing would-be voters and criticizing the president. "Name a country where the relationship is better than the day that Barack Obama came into office," Bush said in his 10-minute pitch. "Iran. Cuba. I rest my case."

A United Nations envoy to Yemen on Sunday called for the extension of a five-day truce between a Saudi-led coalition and Yemen’s Shiite Houthi rebels. "We need the ceasefire to continue for long, not just for a few days," the diplomat, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, said hours before the truce was to expire. The conflict has displaced an estimated 450,000 people and forced Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi to flee the country.

The conflict that led to David Lynch pulling out of Showtime's planned revival of Twin Peaks has apparently been resolved as the show's creator took to Twitter Friday to announce, in characteristically cryptic style, that he had rejoined the reboot. Lynch "will direct the whole thing which will total more than the originally announced nine hours," Showtime President David Nevins said in confirming the news. Lynch originally dropped out of the Twin Peaks revival under murky circumstances in early April, saying that "not enough money was offered to do the script the way I felt it needed to be done."

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is sitting out the 2016 fight, but on Friday he stepped into the ring for a very different kind of battle when the ex-presidential candidate took on ex-heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield in a lighthearted charity boxing match. Held in Salt Lake City, Utah, the "fight" raised money for the organization CharityVision, which one of Romney's son's runs. After some playful sparring and an egregious Holyfield dive, Romney threw in the towel in the second round. "He said, 'You know what? You float like a bee and sting like a butterfly,'" Romney said Holyfield told him after the fight.

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Jon Terbush is an associate editor at TheWeek.com covering politics, sports, and other things he finds interesting. He has previously written for Talking Points Memo, Raw Story, and Business Insider.