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суббота

During the opening scene of Broadchurch, a new drama on BBC America, the camera lingers on a sign that reads "Love Thy Neighbour." But it must be pretty hard to 'love thy neighbor' when you know there's a murderer in your midst.

Broadchurch is also the fictional name of the idyllic looking English seaside town where the show is set. From afar, it looks like the perfect vacation spot — but up close the picture is quite different.

The show stars Scottish actor David Tennant — best known to American audiences as the tenth Time Lord on Doctor Who. He plays a broody detective called Alec Hardy, sent to Broadchurch to solve the murder of a young boy.

Broadchurch has many of the markers of a classic crime drama — a bickering, mismatched cop duo at the center, red herrings and secrets galore. "These are the motifs of crime drama," Tennant tells NPR's Celeste Headlee. "They're all very recognizable to us, they're all quite well-worn. But I think what Chris Chibnall, who wrote Broadchurch, so exceptionally manages to do, is five minutes into the show, you're not thinking that anymore, you're just in this beautifully-crafted world ... it all feels fresh-minted."

Activists around the world are trumpeting a call to "Dump Russian Vodka" — Stolichnaya, in particular — a protest against the implementation of several anti-gay laws in Russia, the latest in a marked surge in anti-gay sentiment and violence in the country.

But as NPR and other media have reported, the Stoli boycott may be misguided: the vodka that everyone in the world outside Russia drinks isn't made in Russia at all, but in Latvia.

And that got us wondering: What other beloved national products have pulled the old switcheroo and are made somewhere else?

Here are a few we came up with:

пятница

Babies come in pretty cute packaging — we're pretty sure it has something to do with Mother Nature wanting you to coo over a burping, pooping little freeloader. But now Chinese Internet users have found a way to one-up nature – they're wrapping those already adorable babes in watermelons.

Yep, watermelons.

Apparently, the melon children meme started circulating in July, when this little guy dressed in watermelon overalls showed up on the streets of Wenzhou, a city in Zhejiang province, the Chinese news agency Xinhua reports.

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A Mexican court has thrown out the conviction of infamous drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, 28 years after he was convicted and imprisoned for the 1985 kidnapping and murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique Camarena.

Quintero had been serving a 40-year sentence for torturing and killing Camerena, but the court voided the sentence on a technicality – saying he should have been tried in a state court instead of the federal court where he was convicted.

After the announcement of his release, Mexican television showed a greying Camarena, now 61, leaving a medium security prison in the state of Jalisco, "where he reportedly had lived a life of semi-luxury," according to The Los Angeles Times.

The Times provides some background on the case:

"Special Agent Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena was working for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, based in the city of Guadalajara, when Caro Quintero allegedly ordered him killed. Camarena went missing in February 1985, as he left the U.S. consulate. His body, showing evidence of torture, was eventually discovered near a ranch in western Mexico's Michoacan state, along with that of the Mexican pilot he flew with to hunt marijuana fields. ...

The Camarena killing strained relations between Mexico and Washington. U.S. officials were furious at Mexican authorities and suspicious that there had been high-level cooperation with Caro Quintero and, at the minimum, a cover-up of the crime by what was supposedly a friendly government."

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