Seasonal politics, seasonal sentiment

December 10, 2015 - Daily News Briefing

Sharp division isn't unusual in the year before an election. General satisfaction isn't unusual in the year after one.

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel apologized for the 2014 shooting of a black teenager Wednesday during a special City Council meeting that he called to discuss a police abuse scandal at the center of the biggest crisis of his administration, and promised "complete and total" reform to restore trust in the police. But his emotional speech didn't stop hundreds of people from taking part in a midday protest downtown, chanting "16 shots and a cover-up" in reference to the release of a video showing white Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who appeared in the video to be walking away. Van Dyke is charged with first-degree murder.

The married couple that carried out a massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., last Wednesday had been radicalized for some time, but there is no indication they were part of a larger terrorist cell, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch told reporters in London on Wednesday. Tashfeen Malik, and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, were not on authorities’ radar prior to amassing thousands of rounds of ammunition, high-powered guns and pipe bombs, then perpetrating a massacre that killed 14 and injured 20 at a holiday gathering before they were killed in a shootout with police. Now investigators are trying to identify the origin of their radicalization and what events brought them to the Dec. 2 attack.

As lawmakers in the US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to limit a visa waiver program that lets citizens of 38 countries come to the United States without a visa for up to 90 days, a new poll finds just over half of Americans worry about consequences of immigration from the Middle East. On Tuesday, the House voted 407-19 to require anyone who has been in Iraq and Syria in the last five years to obtain a visa before entering the US, along with citizens of those countries and any other nation that is deemed to be a terrorist hotspot.

Two months after FBI Director James Comey called the bureau’s system for tracking fatal police shootings “unacceptable” and “embarrassing and ridiculous,” the FBI announced plans Tuesday to revamp the system, expanding its focus to track any incident that causes serious injury and death to civilians in near-real time. The new system will be in place by 2017, a bureau official told The Washington Post, saying it would also include incidents where police use stun guns, pepper spray, and even their fists and feet that cause serious injuries.

Detroit is slowly showing signs of improvement a year after exiting from bankruptcy, finding it has money to spend to make unexpected fixes to issues that have long troubled the city. With the purchase of 80 new buses, the city’s public transportation system will meet its posted schedules for the first time in 20 years, while emergency workers can respond to 911 priority calls in nine minutes, down from a reported 50 minutes for all calls. Under Mayor Mike Duggan, elected in May 2014, the city has torn down 7,100 of its estimated 40,000 vacant homes and auctioned off an additional 500 homes by using its bankruptcy savings and federal and private funds. The improvements to the long-struggling city are thanks to a $35 million budget surplus it is projected to have after paying down its debt and other expenses during this fiscal year, which began July 1.

Douglas Tompkins, an environmentalist and businessman whose passion for conservation led him to buy millions of acres of land in Chile and Argentina in an effort to preserve them, died in a kayaking accident in Chile on Tuesday. Mr. Tompkins first became known as a co-founder of the outdoors-focused The North Face and Esprit clothing companies, but after retiring in 1989, he fully embraced his passion for conservation, winning praise for efforts to raise awareness about the damage man-made activities such as dams or logging can have on ecosystems. “Doug was a passionate advocate for the environment," The North Face said in a statement. "His legacy of conservation will help ensure that there are outdoor spaces to be explored for generations to come."

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