Fed Up

December 16, 2015 - Daily News Briefing

The Federal Reserve’s interest rate rises could prove decisive in the presidential election.

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Investigators scouring the online accounts of two proven terrorists have uncovered Facebook messages in support of jihad dating as far back as 2012. Investigators have found private messages promoting terrorist groups sent to friends and family in Pakistan from Tashfeen Malik, who along with her husband shot 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., before ultimately dying in a gun battle with police. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now coming to terms with how to investigate social media to stop terrorists before they act.

Police opened fire Tuesday on unarmed Shiite Muslim protesters in the northern city of Kaduna, leaving three dead, the spokesman for Shiites in Nigeria said, as activists accused soldiers of having killed hundreds of Shiites in "a massacre" in a nearby town in recent days. Spokesman Ibrahim Musa of the Shiite Islamic Movement in Nigeria says 10 people were also wounded when police shot "peaceful protesters." They were condemning the mass killings over the weekend and early Monday in the ancient Muslim university town of Zaria, and demanding the military release their leader, Ibraheem Zakzaky.

Rapidly-growing populations in county jails have accelerated the country's dramatic increase in mass incarceration, according to a new analysis, exposing a little-discussed angle of America's prison system, which locks up more people than any other country in the world. The Vera Institute of Justice's review of jail statistics from 1970 to today finds that prisoner rates in medium-sized counties (250,000 to 1 million residents) grew fourfold over that period, while small counties' rates grew sevenfold. In large counties, populations only grew threefold. Whereas smaller counties held 28 percent of the nation's inmates in 1978, by 2014 they housed 44 percent. Jails themselves are expanding, in part to accommodate longer sentences: while average jail time in 1978 was nine days, that's grown to 23 days today.

The Environmental Protection Agency's social media campaign encouraging voters to weigh in on a controversial proposal amounted to "covert propaganda" and "grassroots lobbying" that federal agencies cannot legally conduct, according to a total 26-page report released on Monday by Congress's Government Accountability Office. The EPA said in a statement its use of social media aligned with the practice of most organizations. The report condemned the EPA for using social media to advertise a highly controversial rule about water in the United States, which federal courts have put on hold to consider lawsuits by 31 states against it.

Iran's firing of a medium-range ballistic missile in October violated U.N. sanctions banning the Islamic Republic from launches capable of delivering nuclear weapons, U.N. experts said in a new report. The report submitted to the U.N. Security Council and seen by the Associated Press on Tuesday said the launch used ballistic missile technology banned under a June 2010 resolution. The Oct. 10 launch was the first test of a ballistic surface-to-surface missile after Iran and six world powers reached a landmark nuclear deal on July 14. The Security Council endorsed the deal in a resolution on July 20 that also called on Iran not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons. Iran says none of its missiles are designed to carry nuclear weapons.

The head of New York City's beleaguered Homeless Services agency is stepping down amid a stubborn rise in homelessness that has become a significant political problem for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Gilbert Taylor, who was appointed commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services when de Blasio took office in January 2014, announced Tuesday he is resigning his post at year's end. His sudden departure comes as part of an overhaul of the department that has struggled to combat the rise in homelessness in the nation's largest city. Nearly 58,000 people are living in New York's homeless shelters, according to statistics released by the city this week. More than 23,000 of them are children. An additional 3,000 or so people are estimated to be living on the city's streets.

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