Politics: from talk to tactics

January 05, 2016 - Daily News Briefing

All the rhetoric that has characterized the US presidential race to date now takes a back seat to getting voters to vote.

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President Obama defended his administration's plans to tighten the nation's gun-control restrictions without going through Congress, insisting Monday that the steps he'll announce fall within his legal authority and uphold the constitutional right to own a gun. Flanked by his attorney general and the head of the FBI, Obama offered few details about the list of recommendations he's received and will come out with over the next few days. Behind the scenes, though, Obama's administration has been preparing an effort to expand background checks on gun sales by forcing more sellers to register as federally licensed gun dealers.

While workers around the country shuffled into their offices Monday morning after a month of holiday celebrations, the 600 employees of the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino returned from a more grim hiatus. Most employees of the nonprofit organization that provides services to 31,000 developmentally disabled people in southern California haven’t been back to the office since the December 2 massacre of 14 people on the center's campus.

Michigan's Supreme Court has proposed new regulations to determine if defendants can afford to pay court fines, which would strengthen widely disregarded laws against jailing people who cannot pay them without hardship. Critics say that the hodgepodge system for determining a person's ability to pay has created a modern-day version of debtors' prisons, which were outlawed in the early 1800s, and essentially resulted in a "pay or stay" system. People who cannot afford fines for arrests, tickets, or court fees often wind up in jail, where they accrue more costs, while they are prevented from earning money.

General Motors Co. and ride-hailing company Lyft Inc. are forming an unprecedented partnership that could help them beat their rivals to the self-driving future. Lyft said Monday that GM invested $500 million in the company as part of a round of a $1 billion round of fund-raising. GM gets a seat on Lyft's board and access to the three-year-old company's software, which matches riders with drivers and automates payments. It also becomes a preferred vehicle provider. San Francisco-based Lyft gets the expertise of a 108-year-old automaker with decades of experience in making connected and autonomous vehicles. Detroit-based GM also has an enviable global reach; it sells almost 10 million cars each year in more than 100 countries. Lyft operates in 190 US cities, although it recently formed partnerships with ride-sharing services in China and India.

The Justice Department sued Volkswagen on Monday over emissions-cheating software found in nearly 600,000 vehicles sold in the United States. The civil complaint against the German automaker, filed on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency in US District Court in Detroit, alleges the company illegally installed software designed to make its diesel engines pass federal emissions standards while undergoing laboratory testing. The vehicles then switched off those measures to boost performance in real-world driving conditions, resulting in greenhouse gas emissions up to 40 times greater than federal environmental standards.

After all the talk, El Niño storms have finally lined up over the Pacific and started soaking drought-parched California with rain expected to last for most of the next two weeks, forecasters said Monday. As much as 15 inches of rain could fall in the next 16 days in Northern California, with about 2 feet of snow expected in the highest points of the Sierra Nevada, said Johnny Powell, a forecaster with the National Weather Service. To the south, persistent wet conditions could put some Los Angeles County communities at risk of flash-flooding along with mud and debris flows, especially in wildfire burn areas.

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