Not so odd

January 06, 2016 - Daily News Briefing

To breathe more easily, India’s capital tries daily curbs on private cars.

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French President Francois Hollande honored 17 victims killed in Islamic extremist attacks at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, a kosher market and police a year ago this week, unveiling plaques around Paris marking violence that ushered in a tumultuous year. Tuesday's ceremonies came as Charlie Hebdo is releasing a special anniversary issue laced with obscene and offensive cartoons, its surviving artists and columnists vaunting their freedom to lampoon everyone from Muslim fundamentalists to children, politicians and Catholic priests.

China's first landing of a plane on one of its new island runways in the South China Sea shows Beijing's facilities in the disputed region are being completed on schedule and military flights will inevitably follow, foreign officials and analysts said. China's increasing military presence in the disputed sea could effectively lead to a Beijing-controlled air defense zone, they said, ratcheting up tensions with other claimants and with the United States in one of the world's most volatile areas.

The former South Carolina police officer who fatally shot at a black driver eight times as he fled a traffic stop last April has been released on $500,000 bail to await his October 2016 trial. Michael Slager will be under house arrest, and is under orders not to contact the family of Walter Scott, who was 50 when he died on April 4. Video captured on a bystander's cellphone helped the case gain national attention, part of a wave of debate around police officers' use of lethal force, particularly in black communities.

An Islamic State video showing a young boy in military fatigues and an older masked militant who both spoke with British accents is "desperate" propaganda from an organization that is losing ground, Prime Minister David Cameron said on Monday. The video, which could not be independently verified, also shows the killing of five men accused of spying for Britain. The masked man threatens Cameron and vows that Islamic State will one day occupy Britain before shooting one of the alleged spies.

General Motors Co on Monday named Chief Executive Mary Barra as the chairman of its board, effective immediately, following a year in which Barra delivered strong financial results, quelled a shareholder uprising and put the worst of a recall scandal behind the automaker. Barra takes over as chairman from former Cummins Inc Chief Executive Theodore Solso, who will continue serving as the board's lead independent director, the company said.

Americans are buying more new cars than ever before. US auto sales hit a record high of 17.47 million in 2015, topping the old record of 17.35 million set in 2000. Analysts expect sales could go even higher this year as unemployment continues to decline and more young buyers enter the market. Automakers reported December and full-year sales Tuesday.

Despite development of increasingly intelligent computers, scientists from Cornell University and the Human Computation Institute in Fairfax, Va., say that they wouldn’t leave the task of solving the world’s most complex problems – from environmental to economic to social – to computers alone. Instead, the researchers call for a sophisticated form of “human computation,” a computer science technique that taps the strengths of humans and computers to accomplish tasks that neither can do alone. A human-computer collaborative system could incorporate human experiences, reason, and creativity into computer intelligence to solve the world’s most nuanced problems, say researchers in a column published in the January 1 issue of the journal Science.

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