Southwest Airlines said it canceled about 40 flights on Sunday — 1% of those scheduled — to perform voluntary fan blade inspections in the wake of last week’s deadly engine incident in Philadelphia.
The details: The airline said in a statement that this voluntary move is not in response to an emergency directive issued by the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday. The company had announced a fan blade inspection program Tuesday to examine engines similar to the one involved in last week's incident.
NewsGuard, a new service that uses trained journalists to rate thousands of news and information sites, will announce that it has launched a secure, encrypted digital and telephone hotline for political candidates and members of the public to report suspected fake news sites.
The big picture: Steven Brill, co-CEO of NewsGuard: “We’ve already seen one case of a candidate citing an endorsement from a bogus site that was created by supporters of that candidate. This is a particularly insidious variety of fake news, because it is aimed directly at unsuspecting voters.”
The big picture: But the chart above, from a poll by Stagwell's Harris X research consultancy (2,546 Americans polled online April 12-13, right after the Facebook hearings), shows Americans are far from satisfied with the status quo.
As Amazon hones in on where they will build their second headquarters, the Washington Post is reporting that of the "238 cities and counties that applied for consideration, plenty have the population (over a million)... But if they don’t also have an exceptional art museum — and preferably more than one — those cities didn’t make the cut."
The details: Sebastian Smee of the Post points out that museums come into play in the decision considering that "[p]eople qualified to expect high salaries tend to have the leisure time and surplus cash to pursue cultural aspirations... That’s why, in the competition to secure the best and brightest, Amazon and other big companies care deeply about cultural offerings in the places they’re located." Washington, D.C. and Boston are likely to top Amazon's list.
Facebook spent $3.3 million on lobbying in the first three months of 2018, according to its disclosure form, setting a new quarterly record for the social network by a hair.
The big picture: Big Tech lobbying has soared in the Trump era as criticism mounts about its practices.