What We’re Following: A Wave of Bombings in a Single Day
Bombing attacks killed dozens of people in three Baghdad neighborhoods in a single day. The deadliest assault occurred in Sadr City, a predominantly Shia neighborhood, where a car bomb exploded. The number of casualties is not yet clear, and the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for at least one attack.
Amtrak’s Train Tragedy: U.S. transportation officials have determined that the engineer of the Amtrak train that crashed outside Philadelphia last year was distracted by radio traffic when the locomotive rounded a curve at a dangerous 106 miles per hour and derailed, killing eight people.Officials say trains should become equipped with technology called Positive Train Control, which is intended to prevent collisions and derailments. PTC could have prevented 145 accidents since 1969, in which 288 people were killed and nearly 6,600 were injured, they estimate.
The Facebook Vote: The social-media network has come under scrutiny for allegedly tailoring political news content it shows users. Facebook says it would never try to skew the upcoming presidential election or influence voting behavior. But the company actually has the capacity to do so by manipulating the algorithms that curate news feeds of a huge amount of voters. Facebook users get their news from Facebook than any other source, and 40 percent of all U.S. news traffic originates from the website. In the 2010 election, Facebook’s “I Voted” feature drove 340,000 Americans to the polls that would not have voted otherwise.