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...make Transformers 2 a great movie? A lot of film critics - and even some real people - saw the film's popularity as some triumph of the clones. It's not that the killer-toy action adventure was a bad movie, though it was, but that it amassed its fortune almost by rote, as if its title alone, promising to duplicate the automaton thrills of its predecessor, justified laying down money for it. Transformers 2 didn't enter the national consciousness; it anaesthetized it. Nobody buzzed about the movie, but everybody saw it. The industry, it seemed, had finally figured...
...before in Afghanistan. In October, five British soldiers were killed when an Afghan policeman fired on a U.K. training team inside a checkpoint in Helmand Province. But Grenier says that given the breadth and depth of the CIA's operations in Afghanistan, the death toll among employees has been "almost miraculously light." He adds: "Fate may have caught up with us today." The Khost death toll is second only to the record for the number of CIA staffers killed in a single day. On April 18 1983, eight members of the Agency were killed when the US Embassy in Beirut...
...conceived of an ornate "time ball" that would descend just before midnight to mark the exact end of the year. The first ball to drop - an illuminated 400-pound iron-and-wood orb - was lowered from a flagpole. Tradition took root and the ball has heralded a new beginning almost every year since - in 1942 and 1943, during World War II, the ball was temporarily put out of commission by a war-time "dimout." Instead crowds gathered in the square and observed a moment of silence before hooting and hollering...
Mexican insurrections often do coincide with important dates. Most recently, Zapatista guerrillas in the poor southern state of Chiapas started a revolt on Jan. 1, 1994, the day the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. A big fear now is that Mexico's drug cartels, responsible for almost 15,000 killings in the past decade, are lending their resources and firepower to emerging guerrilla groups. If so, their plan may be to sow bicentennial terror and turn Mexicans against President Felipe Calderón's drug-war offensive. This past fall authorities say they seized an arsenal of large...
...politics. "Lula is very popular, and his political life is not over," says João Augusto de Castro Neves, a political analyst in the capital, Brasília. "He could still be President in 2014 or have another political position. I think the intention with the film is almost to provoke the opposition. Lula is so popular that no one is going to question...