Novelist Shirley Hazzard has died.
In a new report, the Committee to Protect Journalists says the number of journalists jailed in 2016 is now at 259, an all-time high since the group began keeping track in 1990. Nearly one-third of the imprisoned journalists are in Turkey, where a failed coup last summer led to a crackdown on the press.
Infowars’s Alex Jones has been removing content from his website that links him to Pizzagate. A criminal complaint against Edgar Maddison Welch, the man who fired a rifle inside Comet Ping Pong, shows that he had shared a video posted by Infowars about the conspiracy theory days before the incident.
Dozens of tech workers have pledged to never work on building a Muslim registry. Signed by “engineers, designers, business executives,” and other employees involved in data collection, the letter states that they “refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs.” Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer and a co-organizer of the letter, told BuzzFeed that “Ultimately, it’s individuals who make decisions and do the work . . . if enough individuals refuse to participate, unethical projects can’t proceed.”
At Recode, executive editor Kara Swisher chides the many tech industry leaders who attended the Trump administration’s tech summit yesterday: “The leaders of tech should be ashamed of themselves for lining up like sheeple after all the numskull attacks Trump has made on what is pretty much the United States’ most important, innovative and future-forward business sector.”
The New York Times and the Washington Post are each sending six reporters to cover the Trump White House next year. Both teams have increased from the four reporters they had during the Obama administration, and the Times’s team is the largest the paper has ever had covering presidential politics.
The January 2017 issue of Wired will be dedicated entirely to science fiction. After the events of 2016, editor in chief Scott Dadich writes, “we decided to consider things a little more obliquely. Sometimes to get a clearer sense of reality, you have to take some time to dream.”