Superb Woods charges to 65 at Firestone

Tiger Woods is poised to win his seventh title at Firestone after charging to a third round 65 in the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational on Saturday. Woods started the third day five shots behind leader Padraig Harrington, frustrated by his putting in his second round 70 for a halfway total of two-under 138. But the world number one found his touch with a breathtaking back nine in wet conditions in Akron, Ohio

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Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice: A Magical Mystery Tour

After the vast tundra of his last book, Against the Day, which was a thousand-plus pages, with more than a hundred or so scurrying characters and a shape-shifting plot that went everywhere and nowhere, Thomas Pynchon has decided to give his fan base a break. His seventh novel is practically beach reading. Inherent Vice is a comic-noir detective tale set in Los Angeles around 1970, not long after the Manson murders added their special note to the already twitchy local vibe

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Funny People: Uneasy Mix of Humor and Heart

A 40-year-old needs to retire his record as America’s oldest male virgin. A schlub gets drunk and impregnates a woman he just met. The two films that Judd Apatow has written and directed, not including the 493 other comedies he’s produced in the past two years, are relationship pictures.

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Obama, prof, cop to sit down over brews

President Obama will sit down for a beer at the White House Thursday night with a top African-American professor and the policeman who arrested him earlier this month. The arrest, in response to reports of a possible break-in at the home of Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates Jr., sparked a national debate about race, class and police attitudes towards minorities. Obama himself quickly got involved, saying at a news conference that police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, acted “stupidly.” His comment itself drew criticism and later he softened his stance, saying, “I could’ve calibrated those words differently.” But Obama’s spokesman said the sight of Gates and Sgt.

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French Unemployment Drops, Worse Expected

No one is ever going to accuse the French of knee-jerk exuberance. Case in point: the reaction to Monday’s announcement by government officials that France’s main unemployment index actually shrank in June — the first reversal in rising joblessness since April 2008.

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Was Robert Capa’s Famous Civil War Photo a Fake?

“If your pictures aren’t good enough,” Robert Capa once remarked, “then you’re not close enough.” For more than 35 years, Capa’s 1936 photograph “Death of a Militiaman” — arguably the most enduring image of the Spanish Civil War — commanded worldwide acclaim and helped establish Capa as the archetypal modern war photographer. But beginning in the 1970s, researchers and historians began to challenge the picture’s veracity and raise questions about Capa’s reputation: Did the famous photograph capture the militiaman at the moment of his death, or was it staged Now comes a claim that new and “indisputable” evidence determines once and for all that the photograph is a fake. “We tried to reconstruct the events exactly as they would have to have occurred for Capa’s photo to have been taken during a military conflict,” says Ernest Alos, the reporter for Cataluna’s daily El Periodico who has led the latest inquiry.

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Movie Review: In ‘The Ugly Truth,’ Katherine Heigl Gets Mocked Up

Was Hollywood wrong in putting its money on Katherine Heigl to be the next Julia Roberts? Heigl, a large, pretty actress of farm-girl robustness and pale orange skin and hair tones, had emerged from the cast of Grey’s Anatomy to serve as Seth Rogen’s femme foil in the surprise hit Knocked Up, then scored on her own as the perpetual bridesmaid in 27 Dresses. More than Reese Witherspoon and Kate Hudson, her prime rivals among early-30s contenders for the Roberts ring, Heigl radiated a pensive solidity that, if properly exploited, could have spurred the return of a warmer, less dizzy brand of romantic comedy

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