Новости за 13.05.2016

This week's question: Budweiser is renaming its beer "America" until Nov. 8, to capitalize on a surge of patriotism for the Summer Olympics, national holidays like July 4, and the presidential election. If you were running a rival beer company and wanted to choose an equally manipulative new name for your alcoholic beverage, what would it be?

A special-needs student at a Tennessee high school was turned away from his prom because his 24-year-old sister was too old to be his "date," according to NBC4i. School officials told Jayce Whisenhunt, 19, who has autism, that his sister, Jessica, exceeded the prom age limit of 20, which is deemed a school safety issue.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced Friday that it will be putting controls on the distribution of its drugs in order to ensure none are used for lethal injections, The New York Times reports. The company's decision effectively ends the last open-market F.D.A.-approved source for drugs used in executions. "Executing states must now go underground if they want to get hold of medicines for use in lethal injections," said Maya Foa of the London-based human rights advocacy group Reprieve.

Conservative politicians were quick to slam President Obama's directive Friday that public schools allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity, rather than biological sex, with Texas even going so far as to hint at a lawsuit. "We will not be blackmailed," Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said, advising local school boards and superintendents not to heed the administration's orders. "I believe it is the biggest issue facing families and schools in America since prayer was taken out of public schools. Читать дальше...

"Living Goddess" Kumari Unikia Bajracharya is adorned by her mother before taking part in the Chariot Festival in Lalitpur, Nepal, where they pray for rain during the rice harvest season. | (REUTERS/Navesh Chitrakar)

In a Friday news conference on state television, Russian government officials adamantly denied claims leveled by the former director of the country's anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, that Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics were involved in a government-sponsored doping ploy. President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, says Rodchenkov's allegation that the government ordered up a performance-enhancing cocktail that blended alcohol with three different anabolic steroids... Читать дальше...

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Uncle Sam feels your pain, frequent flyers.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security — in an acknowledgement that long waits in airport security lines are a drag for travelers — hopes to make the whole exercise a little less painful this summer by increasing the use of overtime work and expediting the process of hiring more screening officers, Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson announced Friday. The TSA plans to speed up the hiring of 768 new transportation security officers to have in place as soon as mid-June... Читать дальше...

Residents of French Lick Springs, Indiana, had a serious case of triskaidekaphobia — or fear of Friday the 13th — in 1942:

ISIS has declared a state of emergency in its capital of Raqqa, Syria, with media reports indicating the city is mobilizing to shield potential targets from airstrikes or ground attacks. The terrorist group appears to believe their capital will soon be under siege, according to those monitoring social media channels.

There are flying fish and flying squirrels, but you won't find too many flying turtles outside of Super Mario Bros. You might imagine Nicole Marie Bjanes' surprise, then, when a turtle came crashing through her windshield while she was driving down Interstate 4 in Deltona, Florida.

For all intents and purposes, Donald Trump is the Republican nominee — he only has about 100 delegates to go before he hits the required 1,237, and no one is left standing in his way. But everyone ought to hold onto their horses for just one more minute because, as The New York Times writes, the Republican convention is "essentially a living body, with rules and procedures that can be modified or discarded to suit the desires of the delegates."

The media circus over Donald Trump's meeting with House Speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday was entirely too much for Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly to handle. "You would have thought it was the second coming," Kelly said on her show,The Kelly File, mocking MSNBC's "Breaking News" chyron that said "Breaking News: Trump Gives Thumbs Up Heading Into Meeting."

If we believe another person has similar DNA to our own, we're more likely to treat them kindly. If we're told they're genetic strangers, we're more likely behave aggressively.

Even before the Chicago Cubs dropped both games of their doubleheader Wednesday against the San Diego Padres, team president Theo Epstein was attempting to temper expectations. "Baseball karma is real," he told reporters earlier this week. "You see some of the stuff written about us in the winter, some of the World Series odds and things like that, [it's a lot] for a team that is a defending third-place team and hasn't done anything yet."

For the first time since at least 2001, people around the world are drinking less than they used to. The latest tally of global alcohol sales by the market research firm Euromonitor International found that sales fell in 2015 for the first time since the firm first started tracking sales 14 years ago; Euromonitor's alcoholic drinks analyst Spiros Malandrakis estimates that the last drop in worldwide alcohol consumption actually took place in the late 1990s, during the Asian financial crisis. "The... Читать дальше...

Sen. Bernie Sanders has vowed to stay in the Democratic race "until the last vote is cast." And even if he can't clinch the nomination, he'll likely have enough support heading into the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to push for significant changes in his party.

One of the Clinton Global Initiative's latest donations reportedly went to helping out Bill and Hillary Clinton's friends, The Wall Street Journal reports. While the charitable organization usually aims to give money to charities and nongovernmental organizations to serve its mission of helping to solve the world's problems, in September 2010, the tax-exempt charity committed $2 million to Energy Pioneer Solutions, Inc., a for-profit organization. The company, which is committed to delivering... Читать дальше...

In 2009, conservative radio host G. Gordon Liddy panicked about the appointment of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, fearing that because Sotomayor is biologically a woman, her hormones would get in the way of her job. "Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad," he said. "Lord knows what we would get then."

The world's oldest person, Susannah Mushatt Jones, died Thursday night in New York at the age of 116. Jones had reportedly been ill for 10 days preceding her death at the public housing facility for seniors in Brooklyn where she'd been living for more than three decades.

Donald Trump did some major backtracking this week, claiming that his earlier call for Muslims to be banned from traveling to the United States was "just a suggestion." On Friday, Trump doubled down on his new motto, telling Fox & Friends, "Everything I say right now, I'm not the president. Everything is a suggestion, no matter what you say, it's a suggestion."

Donald Trump's publicist from the '90s, John Miller, sure sounds a lot like his boss. In a recording from a 1991 interview with People magazine obtained by The Washington Post, a man who claims to be Trump's media spokesman can be heard answering questions about Trump's love life in a voice that The Washington Post contends sounds suspiciously familiar:

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Apple's stock price dropped below $90 a share on Thursday for the first time since 2014 as fear increased over weak iPhone demand ahead of the release of the latest version of the long-dominant smartphone later this year. The stock's drop helped Google briefly push past Apple as the world's most valuable company. Later Thursday, Apple announced that it was investing $1 billion in Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-sharing service that is battling UberChina for riders and investors.

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House Speaker Paul Ryan and Donald Trump emerged from a high-profile meeting on Thursday pledging to work together to unite the Republican Party. Trump and Ryan clashed in recent days after Trump became the GOP's presumptive presidential nominee and Ryan said he was not ready to endorse him. "I was very encouraged by what I heard from Donald Trump today," said Ryan, who was the party's 2012 vice presidential nominee. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who participated in the meeting... Читать дальше...

Swallowing the Donald Trump pill has been rough for many in the Republican establishment, leading to a discussion about shutting out independents and Democrats from helping to pick future nominees during the primaries, Politico reports.