5: Pope Francis compares fake news consumption to eating faeces
Pope Francis has lambasted media organisations that focus on scandals and smears and promote fake news as a means of discrediting people in public life. Spreading disinformation was “probably the greatest damage that the media can do”, the pontiff told the Belgian Catholic weekly Tertio. It is a sin to defame people, he added.
Using striking terminology, Francis said journalists and the media must avoid falling into “coprophilia” – an abnormal interest in excrement. Those reading or watching such stories risked behaving like coprophagics, people who eat faeces, he added.
The Guardian
On Monday, over 2,000 people packed into Riverside Church in Manhattan to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Democracy Now! It was an historic occasion in part because it marked the first time Noam Chomsky and Harry Belafonte appeared on stage together in conversation. The two have been longtime champions of social justice. Chomsky is a world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author who gained fame in the 1960s for his critique of the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism. He is institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught for more than 50 years. Harry Belafonte is a longtime civil rights activist who was an immensely popular singer and actor. He was one of Martin Luther King’s closest confidants and helped organize the March on Washington in 1963.
Democracy Now
3: DROWNING IN INFORMATION: NSA REVELATIONS FROM 262 SPY DOCUMENTS
BY THE FIRST half of 2004, the National Security Agency was drowning in information. It had amassed 85 billion phone and online records and cut the ribbon on a new hacking center in Hawaii — but it was woefully short on linguists who could make sense of captured communications and lacked enough network analysts to effectively monitor all the systems it had hacked.
The signals intelligence collected by the agency was being used for critically important decisions even as NSA struggled to understand it. Some bombs in Iraq were being targeted based entirely on signals intelligence, a senior NSA official told staff at the time — with decisions being made in a matter of “minutes” with “less and less review.”
The Intercept
2: Time magazine names Donald Trump Person of the Year
Time magazine has named President-elect Donald Trump its Person of the Year for his shocking upset election victory that rewrote the rules of politics.
“When have we ever seen a single individual who has so defied expectations, broken the rules, violated norms, beaten not one but two political parties on the way to winning an election that he entered with 100-to-1 odds against him?” the magazine’s managing editor, Nancy Gibbs, said on Wednesday on NBC’s Today Show.
Aljazeera
1: The Earth’s Poles Have Lost Enough Ice to Cover Texas Four Times
As if 2016 wasn’t rough enough, climate scientists recently discovered parts of Antarctica have now melted. The polar continent’s ice shelf had been spared from rising global temperatures until this year.
Ice shelves in Antarctica had generally remained steady, and even grew, despite the steady collapse of ice up north in the Arctic. But this year, researchers recorded ice receding at both the northern and southern poles, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado.
In fact, the center recorded that the Arctic and Antarctic combined had shrunk 3.8 million square kilometers below the 1981-2010 average ice cover as of Dec. 4, which is enough ice to cover all of Texas four-and-a-half times.
Antarctica alone shrunk about 2 million square kilometers, according to data from the center, from its 1981-2010 average as of November—but the center’s research shows it could gain 0.4 percent of its mass back per decade from certain parts of the continent refreezing as usual. The Arctic shrunk about 2.3 million square kilometers during that time, and it’s on track to diminish 5 percent per decade.
Vice News
