New York Times

President-elect Donald Trump is entering office with financial entanglements that are exotic and far-flung: a condominium project in Manila, a luxury furniture maker in Istanbul, golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, and a hotel in Azerbaijan. But starting in January, Trump’s most visible business interest will be beamed directly into millions of American living rooms: “The Celebrity Apprentice” is back, and the president-elect is coming with it.

Just weeks before Inauguration Day, President-elect Trump will resume his role as an executive producer of the NBC reality show, an unlikely side project for a commander in chief, and one that is poised to bring him hundreds of thousands of dollars in income. Modern presidents, including the current one, have received royalties from sales of memoirs and book projects. But Trump’s ties to the show — now starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and renamed “The New Celebrity Apprentice” — potentially thrust the president-elect into a host of potential conflicts, from coziness with the brands that advertise on the show to his relationship with the network that airs it.

President Barack Obama has ordered American intelligence agencies to produce a full report on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. He also directed them to develop a list of “lessons learned” from the broad campaign the United States has accused Russia of carrying out to steal e-mails, publish their contents and probe the vote-counting system. “We may have crossed a new threshold here,” said Lisa Monaco, one of President Obama’s closest aides and the former head of the national security division of the Justice Department. “He expects to receive this report before he leaves office.”

The report, according to senior administration officials, will trace the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and on prominent individuals like John D. Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But it is unclear that the contents of the report will be made public. Intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which still has an active investigation of the hacking underway, have been reluctant to make public any of their findings; they fear it will reveal sources and methods of how the incursions were traced back to Russia. After past investigations involving sensitive intelligence information, declassified versions of reports were sometimes published, with a classified version sent to congressional committees and some agencies.

Thirty years as a union boss in Indiana have given Chuck Jones a thick skin. But even threats to shoot him or burn his house down did not quite prepare him for becoming the target of a verbal takedown by the next president of the United States.

In what one Republican strategist described as “cyberbullying,” President-elect Donald J. Trump derided Jones on Twitter, accusing him of doing “a terrible job representing workers” and blaming him for the decisions by companies that ship American jobs overseas. The messages continued Mr. Trump’s pattern of digital assaults, most of them aimed at his political rivals, reporters, Hollywood celebrities or female accusers. But rarely has Trump used Twitter to express his ire at people like Jones, the president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, who described himself as “just a regular working guy.” With the full power of the presidency just weeks away, Trump’s decision to single out Jones for ridicule has drawn condemnation from historians and White House veterans.

By the time you finish reading this column, you would be foolish not to download the messaging app Signal onto your smartphone and computer. The free encrypted messaging service has won the acclaim of security researchers and privacy advocates, including Edward J. Snowden. All have said that Signal goes above and beyond other chat tools in keeping electronic communications private. And now more than ever, we may need it. That’s because hacks are on the rise — look at how the activist group WikiLeaks posted a trove of e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, for all to see.

Many are also watching for how government surveillance may grow under Donald J. Trump, who has chosen Mike Pompeo, who advocates greater surveillance, to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. Signal is one of many encrypted messaging services, but it stands out for its uncompromising security and ease of use. The chat service retains virtually no information from users, including messages and address books, on its servers. What’s more, messages remain encrypted when passing through Signal’s servers, meaning that the app’s creators can’t read them.

It did not take long after election night for the donations to start pouring in to America’s nonprofit journalism organizations. Almost a month later, the money keeps coming, in $10 and $20 and sometimes hundreds of dollars or more from small donors all over the country. At ProPublica, the investigative news organization that pledges to hold the powerful accountable, the postelection haul, $750,000, has easily eclipsed the total raised from small-dollar donors in all of 2015, about $500,000. The list goes on.

From local public radio affiliates to established watchdog groups to start-ups that focus on a single issue, nonprofit, nonpartisan media is having a moment. Just what is motivating these donors — whether it is a partisan response to the election of Donald J. Trump or a broader concern over the viability of a troubled industry — is a matter of speculation, executives say. But one thing seems increasingly clear: Independent accountability journalism is gaining new support among many Americans mulling the election’s outcome and the country’s political divide.

Edgar M. Welch, a 28-year-old father of two from Salisbury (NC) recently read online that Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in northwest Washington, was harboring young children as sex slaves as part of a child-abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton. The articles making those allegations were widespread across the web, appearing on sites including Facebook and Twitter. Apparently concerned, Welch drove about six hours from his home to Comet Ping Pong to see the situation for himself, according to court documents. Not long after arriving at the pizzeria, the police said, he fired from an assault-like AR-15 rifle. The police arrested him. They found a rifle and a handgun in the restaurant. No one was hurt.

Unbeknown to Welch, what he had been reading online were fake news articles about Comet Ping Pong, which have swollen in number over time. The false articles against the pizzeria began appearing on social networks and websites in late October, not long before the presidential election, with the restaurant identified as being the headquarters for a child-trafficking ring. The articles were soon exposed as false by publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and the fact-checking website Snopes. But the debunking did not squash the conspiracy theories about Comet Ping Pong — instead, it led to the opposite.

For all the good that has come from the internet, the online world has also served as a powerful device for recruiting terrorists and spreading their propaganda. A coalition of top technology companies is now trying to change that.

Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft announced that they have teamed up to fight the spread of terrorist content over the web by sharing technology and information to reduce the flow of terrorist propaganda across their services. The group plans to create a kind of shared digital database, “fingerprinting” all of the terrorist content that is flagged. By collectively tracking that information, the companies said they could make sure a video posted on Twitter, for instance, did not appear later on Facebook. Through the coalition, technology companies will use “hashes,” or what they describe as “unique digital fingerprints,” to identify terrorist imagery and videos uploaded to their services.

Robert Bennett, who guided the transformation of a Boston television station into an uncommon font of original programming and went on to run the nation’s largest broadcast station group, died on Nov 29 in Newport Beach CA. He was 89.

In 1971, Bennett was overseeing WNEW-TV, a successful local station in New York City, but, as he later recalled, he was getting bored. “I was very anxious to do more live television.” And a new opportunity arose. A group in Boston was trying to gain control of the license for Channel 5, which was then WHDH, and promised to create 50 hours of original programming each week. Mr. Bennett joined the group, Boston Broadcasters Inc., after securing a guarantee of creative control and an ownership stake in the station should it be granted the license. In 1972, Boston Broadcasters acquired the station, WHDH became WCVB and Mr. Bennett began work to make good on the group’s promise of original programming. While other local stations were making big profits carrying reruns, Mr. Bennett turned to homegrown content. Although it was an ABC affiliate, the station far surpassed its promise on original programming, broadcasting as much as 62 hours each week — about 30 percent of its content — at a time when most local stations devoted less than 10 percent of their airtime to shows produced in-house.

Ben Carson, who took Donald Trump on a tour of blighted neighborhoods in Detroit during the presidential campaign, including his boyhood home, has been chosen by President-elect Trump to oversee one of the government’s main efforts to lift American cities as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, was an early endorser of Trump after ending his own presidential bid. With no experience in government or running a large bureaucracy, Carson, 65, publicly waffled over whether to join the administration. He will oversee an agency with a $47 billion budget, bringing to the job a philosophical opposition to government programs that encourage what he calls “dependency” and engage in “social engineering.” He has no expertise in housing policy, but he did spend part of his childhood in public housing, said a close friend, Armstrong Williams.

In extraordinary exchanges, aides to Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Jeb Bush openly accused Jeffrey Zucker, CNN’s president, of enabling Donald Trump and undermining their candidates in the Republican primary, heckling from their seats as Zucker spoke on a panel in a hotel ballroom. It was a visceral airing of grievances before an audience of the country’s leading political operatives and journalists, gathered for what is typically a staid postelection conference at Harvard. And it captured CNN’s lightning-rod position in the debate over the role of the media in Trump’s rise and, now, his looming presidency.