It looks lioke you have out of date security certificates.
See an excerpt from your log
Spoiler:
Could not fetch link
https://arstechnica.com/?p=2048683
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "mechanize\_urllib2_fork.py", line 1236, in do_open
File "http\client.py", line 1286, in request
File "http\client.py", line 1332, in _send_request
File "http\client.py", line 1281, in endheaders
File "http\client.py", line 1041, in _send_output
File "http\client.py", line 979, in send
File "http\client.py", line 1458, in connect
File "ssl.py", line 517, in wrap_socket
File "ssl.py", line 1108, in _create
File "ssl.py", line 1379, in do_handshake
ssl.SSLCertVerificationError: [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1006)
Try visiting the site in your browser and see if that helps.