Another Night at the Museum: More Monkey Business

“People love what’s next,” says Ricky Gervais’ fussy museum manager, explaining why many of the beloved old-fashioned exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History are being shipped off to storage at the Smithsonian Institute, to be replaced by holograms. Even Ben Stiller’s Larry Daley, the former night guard at the museum, seems to have moved on. He’s now the infomercial king, hawking such wares as the Glow in the Dark Torch in excruciatingly stilted exchanges with George Foreman

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Maybe You Shouldn’t Buy That, Dummy

Not many people get away with calling the Central Intelligence Agency a bald-faced liar, at least not when they’re speaking to a room packed with dozens of national media outlets. And yet that is exactly what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did on Thursday. “Madam Speaker, just to be clear,” stuttered a reporter at a Capitol Hill press conference, “you’re accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002?” “Yes,” Pelosi declared definitively, “misleading the Congress of the United States

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How to Defeat an Insurgency: Sri Lanka’s Bad Example

The conflict in Sri Lanka has long provided lessons for militant groups around the world. The Tamil Tigers taught terrorists everywhere the finer points of suicide bombing, the recruitment of child soldiers, arms trafficking, propaganda and the use of a global diaspora to collect resources

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Autumn of the Capo: The Diary of a Drug Lord

Prison bars have long inspired infamous inmates from revolutionaries to mass murderers to record their tales and thoughts on rusty typewriters or hidden scraps of paper. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the first published writings of a major Mexican drug trafficker have emerged from one of the nation’s top security penitentiaries.

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When Bibi Met Barack: A Tougher Line on Middle East Peace

It was an odd choice for a gift. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the White House carrying a book for President Barack Obama, an edition of the American humorist Mark Twain’s travels to the Holy Land. Twain didn’t like the place much; he wrote rudely about the Arabs and thought the Jews should not have their own nation

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Top Republicans want apology or proof from Pelosi

Top Republicans are demanding an apology from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or proof to back her claim that the CIA misled Congress about the use of harsh interrogation tactics. Pelosi last week said that she was briefed by the CIA on such techniques only once — in September 2002 — and that she was told at the time that techniques like waterboarding were not being used. Pelosi, D-California, said she learned from an aide that waterboarding had been used after other lawmakers were briefed in 2003.

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