WP 4.4. responsive images browser choosing the “wrong” one

Concerning documentation there is this blog post on the Make Blog:

Responsive Images in WordPress 4.4

To increase the 1600px limit mentioned in the comments try this:

add_filter('max_srcset_image_width', function($max_srcset_image_width, $size_array){
    return 2000;
}, 10, 2);

Finally as already mentioned you should fix your calls to add_image_size

add_image_size(‘news-large’, 1024, false);

needs to be

add_image_size('news-large', 1024, 0, false);