WTF Just Happened Today

Monday, May 24, 2021

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1/ Biden doubled FEMA’s budget for extreme weather preparation ahead of hurricane and wildfire season, saying “We’re going to spare no expense, no effort, to keep Americans safe and respond to crises when they arise.” The $1 billion for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program will help communities prepare for hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters. The U.S., however, logged 22 separate weather and climate-related disasters in 2020 that each exceeded $1 billion in damages. The administration will also start a new NASA initiative to develop “next generation climate data systems” to track the impact of climate change. “We all know that the storms are coming, and we’re going to be prepared,” Biden added. “We have to be ready.” (CNN / Washington Post / ABC News / New York Times)

2/ The Biden administration extended special protections for Haitians temporarily living in the U.S. after they were displaced by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake in 2010. The temporary protected status designation will be in place for 18 months and could protect as many as 150,000 Haitians already living in the U.S. In 2017, the Trump administration ended temporary protected status for nearly 60,000 Haitians, forcing them to leave the U.S. And, in a meeting on immigration in 2017, Trump said Haitians “all have AIDS” and questioned why the U.S. would admit people from “shithole countries” like Haiti after lawmakers floated the idea of restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti as part of a bipartisan immigration deal. (New York Times)

3/ More than 500 Biden campaign and Democratic Party staffers called on Biden to do more to protect Palestinian human rights and “hold Israel accountable for its actions.” The letter praises Biden for helping negotiate a ceasefire, which went into effect Friday, but called for him to acknowledge the “power imbalance” and the disproportionate number of deaths caused by Israeli forces compared with those caused by Palestinian militants. More than 230 Palestinians were killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza before the ceasefire, destroying 1,500 housing and commercial units and displacing more than 75,000 people. 12 people in Israel were killed by Hamas rockets. (Washington Post / Axios)

4/ Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned Belarus for faking a bomb threat in order to force down a Ryanair flight and arrest a dissident journalist. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko sent a MiG-29 fighter jet to intercept a commercial plane flying through the country’s airspace and ordered the plane to land in the capital. No bomb was found on board and Belarus’s top investigative agency said it had opened a criminal case into a false bomb threat. “This shocking act,” Blinken said, “perpetrated by the Lukashenka regime endangered the lives of more than 120 passengers, including U.S...

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