Vox Sentences: The saddest part of Amtrak's derailment is it was probably preventable

1. Derailed

John Nagle, a NJ Transit conductor, waits for passengers to board at Penn Station; the crash forced train service to be suspended between New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC, causing commuters to use NJ Transit. (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

• An Amtrak train going from DC to New York partly derailed in Philadelphia last night, killing at least seven people and injuring at least 200 more.

  [Vox / Margarita Noriega]

• At the time of the crash, the train was going 100 mph, twice the legal speed limit at that location.

  [NYT / Jon Hurdle, Jad Mouawad, and Richard Pérez-Peña]

• For context, traveling by rail is generally much safer than driving; traveling the same distance, you're about 17 times likelier to die if you're in a car than if you're in a train.

  [Vox / Joseph Stromberg]

• A technology called Positive Train Control would prevent Amtrak trains from breaking the speed limit, and Amtrak is supposed to adopt it across the Northeast Corridor by the end of the year. But it wasn't in place in time to stop this accident.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Mere hours after the accident, House Republicans voted to cut Amtrak's budget by a fifth, which could slow Positive Train Control's adoption still further.

  [Politico / Heather Caygle]

• If you want to know why Amtrak lags so far behind European rail systems, I can't recommend Simon van Zuylen-Wood's longform explanation highly enough.

  [National Journal / Simon van Zuylen-Wood]

• Train expert Tom Zoellner on how to fix Amtrak: "the 1970 law must be amended to guarantee a healthy level of federal support, clearly prioritize passenger trains over freights, take posturing by Congress out of the equation, double-down on advertising and capturing new customers and lay down dedicated tracks outside the Northeast Corridor."

  [Washington Post / Tom Zoellner]

2. The whole thing's suddenly worth / A faster track, a faster track

An anti-TPP protest on March 20, 2015 in Miami, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

• Senate leaders have struck a deal to pass "fast track" legislation enabling President Obama to negotiate his big Asian trade deal without worrying about Congressional interference.

  [NYT / Jonathan Weisman]

• Fast track authority enables the administration to get an up-or-down vote from Congress once a deal is reached; lacking that, it would be possible for legislators to pass amendments that muck up the agreement.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• In exchange for their support, Democrats get votes on renewal of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (which reduces trade barriers for goods imported from sub-Saharan Africa) and on a trade enforcement bill that would crack down on countries that boost exports by devaluing their currencies.

  [Politico / Burgess Everett]

• It's not really clear how bad countries using their currency to boost trade (what's known as "currency manipulation") is; it probably helps US consumers, for one thing.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• The move is a defeat for a whole bevy of liberal interest groups opposed to TPP, from labor (for obvious reasons) to the ACLU (because of the deal's intellectual property provisions) to the Sierra Club (because of its potential environmental impact).

  [Vox / Danielle Kurtzleben]

• The best case is that the deal might reduce poverty in Vietnam, which is part of the agreement and still much poorer than the other parties.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• But even if it does help Vietnam, that could come at the expense of even poorer countries outside of the deal such as Cambodia or Bangladesh.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

3. Boom, Snowden'd

Admiral Michael Rogers, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, might soon lose access to your phone records. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

• The House has passed a bill (the USA Freedom Act) that will end the National Security Agency (NSA) program that collects phone records in bulk.

  [NYT / Jennifer Steinhauer]

• The vote was overwhelming (338 to 88) and bipartisan (196 to 47 among Republicans, 142 to 41 among Democrats).

  [Clerk of the House]

• Section 215 of the Patriot Act —which the NSA has used to justify the phone records program — is set to expire on June 1, meaning Congress has to either renew it or (as the USA Freedom Act would do) amend it.

  [Washington Post / Mike DeBonis and Ellen Nakashima]

• In lieu of bulk collection, the USA Freedom Act would "create a new system that requires the NSA to obtain court approval to request phone records from phone companies on a case-by-case basis."

  [WSJ / Damien Paletta and Kristina Peterson]

• Some civil liberties groups, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have pulled support for the bill, saying it has too many concessions to the intelligence community. For example, it allows "emergency exceptions" to spy on foreign nationals in the US without a court order and increases the maximum sentence for supporting terrorism.

  [Ars Technica / David Greene and Mark Jaycox]

• Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that even under the Patriot Act as currently written, the surveillance program is illegal, meaning the court system could end it even if Congress ultimately doesn't.

  [Reuters / Jonathan Stempel]

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is strongly opposed to the law, but it appears to have a filibuster-proof majority backing it in the chamber.

  [NYT / Jennifer Steinhauer]

• The Obama administration has endorsed the bill, so if McConnell allows a vote, expect it to become law.

  [National Journal / Kaveh Waddell]

4. Misc.

• There are streets in China that are literally paved with unsold Robbie Williams CDs.

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• Tinder, but for forging a durable two-state solution in Israel and Palestine.

  [Ynetnews / Omer Barak]

• Countries like Bulgaria and Cyprus are under fire for selling citizenship to rich foreigners. But really, more countries ought to auction citizenship to the highest bidder.

  [Slate / Eric Posner]

• The genius of tidying guru Marie Kondo is that she's secretly a behavioral economist.

  [The Atlantic / Bouree Lam]

5. Verbatim

• "Ten minutes later, at 7:06 p.m., Clayton Lockett was declared dead. He had been dying amidst all the chaos, just very slowly and in apparent agony."

  [The Atlantic / Jeffrey Stern]

• "A Cambridge University college is trying to find the owner of a large bag of red kidney beans."

  [BBC]

• "Prince Charles asked the Blair government to consider the culling of badgers, historic documents reveal."

  [BBC / Helen Briggs]

• "Mad men mad at Mad Max for having mad women."

  [AV Club / Sean O'Neal]

• "But Panttiere won’t follow your stupid rules. Instead, she bangs a window, yelling, 'I’m not leaving without my heart!' as if drunkenly harassing McDonald’s employees for some 2 a.m. ketchup."

  [Slate / Laura Bradley]

• "We made a pact: If he married someday or if I remarried and one of our wives was diagnosed with cancer, the other would show up at the hospital and slip a knife between his ribs."

  [Esquire / Matthew Teague]

Correction: This post originally stated the train that derailed was going from New York to DC. It was going from DC to New York.

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