Новости за 15.12.2016

NBA sideline reporter Craig Sager died Thursday at the age of 65 after a years-long battle with leukemia, ESPN reports. A longtime employee for TNT and TBS, Sager was described by Turner president David Levy as a "true inspiration to us all."

Dylann Storm Roof, the self-described white supremacist accused of murdering nine people at the historically black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, has been found guilty on all 33 counts brought against him. Roof, 22, faced multiple charges stemming from the June 2015 attack, including hate crimes, religious obstruction crimes, and firearms crimes, The Daily Beast reports. The jury reportedly took just two hours to reach their conclusions.

What do you do when the president-elect attacks you on Twitter? Fight back? Apologize? Change your name and enter the witness protection program? Or totally own it?

Labor Secretary Tom Perez officially announced his campaign for Democratic National Committee chairman Thursday. "The last month hasn't been easy for Democrats," he wrote in the announcement on his website. "But now isn't the time to despair — it's time to organize and fight."

Facebook announced Thursday its plans to address the spread of fake news, an apparent response to critics who have blamed the site for making it easy to peddle misinformation or even swing the election. The social media network has long been cautious about interfering with what gets shared, not wanting to be, as The New York Times puts it, "an arbiter of truth." But while "we really value giving people a voice … we also believe we need to take responsibility for the spread of fake news on our platform," said Adam Mosseri... Читать дальше...

The Republican National Committee has got a head-scratcher of a response to those accusing Donald Trump and his family of facing potential conflicts of interest. Sean Spicer, the spokesman for the Republican National Committee, told CNN's Kate Bolduan on Wednesday that you simply have to "tell everyone, here's what's going on, here's the process, here are the people that are playing a role" to avoid such conflicts.

Whither President-elect Donald Trump's foreign policy? Well, if he's listening to Senate Republicans for guidance, the incoming president is receiving mixed messages indeed.

The highly-anticipated smartphone game Super Mario Run launches Thursday for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and analysts are already expecting it to be "tremendously successful."

Five federal agencies held 1,183 dogs in captivity in 2015, and 294 of them were used by the government in experiments that caused the animals "significant pain and distress," says a new report from the White Coat Waste Project, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to stopping tax-funded vivisection.

When Donald Trump showed up to huddle with America's top tech executives on Wednesday, his three adult children flanked him. The presence of Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric Trump at the meeting sparked outcry as well as finger-pointing from critics about the threat of nepotism: "I looked at this seating map published by Quartz and notice that there are 25 people in attendance. This is a group of our most-senior technology leaders and our new government-elect," Mark Suster wrote for Both Sides of the Table. Читать дальше...

The president-elect of the United States took aim at Vanity Fair magazine Thursday morning after the publication gave his restaurant a blisteringly negative review. "Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine," Trump asked in his first tweet of the day. "Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!"

Yahoo announced Wednesday that more than a billion user accounts could have been compromised in a 2013 hack. Among that number are more than 150,000 U.S. government or military employees, Bloomberg reports: "These employees had given their official government accounts to Yahoo in case they were ever locked out of their email," they write.

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Federal Reserve policy makers raised interest rates a quarter of a percentage point as expected on Thursday at the close of a two-day meeting. The hike, putting the federal funds rate between 0.5 percent and 0.75 percent, was just the second since the 2008 financial crisis. The last increase came in December 2015. The Fed's Open Market Committee signaled that it would step up the pace of rate increases in 2017, forecasting three more hikes next year instead of the two envisioned as of September. Читать дальше...

Republicans will need at least eight Democratic votes in the Senate in order to pass a replacement to the Affordable Care Act, and some Democrats tell Politico that they're willing to be flexible when the time comes. Republicans will fill 52 seats when President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House, and while Democrats won't initially vote to repeal ObamaCare, 10 members will be up for reelection in 2018 in states that Donald Trump won and could be under intense pressure to be friendly toward the Republican alternative. Читать дальше...

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U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News they had "a high level of confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed how messages and other documents hacked from Democrats were used to influence the presidential election. Two senior intelligence officials said information on Putin's role came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies. The effort reportedly started as retaliation against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton for criticizing Russian parliamentary elections in 2011... Читать дальше...

"The Electoral College is a process, not a place," says the National Archives. And on Monday, the 538 electors in this "college" who will formally pick the next president of the United States will meet in their own states to cast their ballots. The winning candidate needs a half of the electoral votes plus one, or 270 votes. Since Donald Trump won a majority in states with 306 electoral votes, and most states legally oblige their electors to vote for the candidate who won the state, Trump will almost certainly get the nod. Читать дальше...

Earlier this week, a federal judge in Manhattan suggested that he may approve a motion to unseal the search warrant that led FBI Director James Comey to announce that Hillary Clinton's email investigation had been reactivated just 11 days before the presidential election — only to announce nine days later that the FBI had found nothing new. "Countless American citizens, including Secretary Clinton, believe that Comey's announcement and the reopening of the investigation might have single-handedly swayed the election," says the lawsuit... Читать дальше...

During the presidential campaign, it was often noted that Donald Trump was the most unpopular major-party nominee in memory. That somehow didn't stop him from winning the election, but in the days since, the public has decided not to give him the "honeymoon" most presidents enjoy. He'll be taking office as the most unpopular incoming president in memory, too. Trump himself doesn't believe this — he's telling anyone who'll listen that he won an enormous and historic Electoral College landslide (false)... Читать дальше...

The assertion of sundry anonymous officials in the CIA that Russian hackers deliberately influenced the 2016 presidential election has driven many liberal Democrats nearly into hysterics. Not without reason, either — the idea that foreign agents broke into the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta with the objective of assisting Donald Trump is incredibly alarming. What else might they be doing?

This week, Donald Trump picked ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his nominee for secretary of state. The choice has proven controversial among many watchers, Republican, Democrat, and nonpartisan. When your nomination is opposed by both Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, you know something's up; Politico's Blake Hounshell reports an unnamed State Department staffer's reaction: "I've been resisting the urge to drink since 7 a.m. when I read the news."

The most important thing Donald Trump can do for the United States is bigger than making America great again. It's something far more ambitious and historic, something that benefits not just Americans, but the entire human race.

All newly elected presidents claim a mandate to lead the country in whatever direction they want, and in typical Donald Trump fashion, he and his team have claimed a huge one.

Aleppo has fallen. And much of the West is awash in a considerable amount of guilt over the Syrian city's fate.

For more on this story and to test your knowledge of amazing and interesting facts, trivia, and quizzes, head over to Mental Floss.

After a year of will-they-or-won't-they false starts, the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates yesterday. It was a modest increase of just 0.25 percentage points, and the first hike since last December. Nonetheless, the decision also ratcheted up the chances of a showdown between Fed officials and President-elect Trump.