Midday Roundup: Uber driver implicated in Kalamazoo shootings

Mass shooting. Police in Kalamazoo, Mich., are still trying to make sense of a shooting spree Saturday night that left at least six people dead. The suspect, 46-year-old Jason Brian Dalton, was a driver for Uber. One passenger called police before the shootings to report Dalton’s dangerous driving and erratic behavior. Dalton first shot a woman multiple times at an apartment complex, then went on to shoot and kill a father and son outside a car dealership, and finally opened fire on a group of people outside a restaurant. “There is no connection that we’re aware of between the three different sets of victims to each other or any of the victims to Mr. Dalton,” Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeff Getting said. The police caught up to Dalton nearly six hours after the first shooting incident and found weapons inside his vehicle. They say he did not resist arrest.

Cracking the code. The FBI and Apple exchanged fighting words today over the case of the San Bernardino shooter’s locked iPhone. FBI agents think the cellphone of Syed Farook, who with his wife killed 14 people in December, holds valuable information, but they don’t know Farook’s passcode. The iPhone’s features let users enter only a few incorrect passcodes before waiting to try again. If too many incorrect passcodes are rapidly entered in succession, the phone can erase all its data. “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly,” FBI Director James Comey wrote in a statement released this morning. In an email to employees, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company doesn’t want to set a precedent of violating users’ privacy or create a program that could be stolen and used to hack iPhones around the world. San Bernardino County, which employed Farook and owned the phone, could have prevented this dispute if it had just installed its mobile management software on the phone. The county had a contract for the software, which allows employers to remotely access their employees’ phones, but never put it to use in Farook’s department. Victims of the San Bernardino shooting are expected to file a legal brief today in support of the FBI.

Secret negotiations. The Obama administration held secret talks with North Korea just before the rogue communist nation conducted its latest hydrogen bomb test last month, The Wall Street Journal reported. The United Sates agreed to drop denuclearization as a precondition to peace talks to formally end the Korean War. Instead, the U.S. offered to make North Korea ending its nuclear weapons program simply a part of those talks. The Kim Jong-un regime rebuffed the offer and defiantly carried out a nuclear test just days later, according to the Journal.

Lucky break. Denny Hamlin won the NASCAR Sprint Cup Daytona 500 on Sunday in an unexpected photo finish. At the end of the race, Hamlin saw another car charging toward his teammate, Matt Kenseth. Hamlin moved to block the charge, and his opponent’s car hit his in a way that propelled Hamlin ahead for the victory. He won by one-tenth of a second. “I don’t know where that came from, I don’t know what happened, I can’t even figure out what I did,” Hamlin said.

WORLD Radio’s Jim Henry and The Associated Press contributed to this report.