Word: ii
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...book by the priest in charge of the Vatican's official case for Pope John Paul II's sainthood is packed with fascinating - and, apparently, meticulously verified - revelations. The one that grabbed most of the headlines was the claim that John Paul whipped himself with a belt, an act of corporal penitence designed to draw the flagellator closer to Christ's suffering, and one that is usually associated with a very distant century, or a Dan Brown novel...
...Daybreakers (directed by another set of twins, Peter and Michael Spierig) and The Road, that by now the future can seem passé. But the Detroit-born Hughes brothers have the bona fides to put dreadful war zones on the screen. When they were just 20, they made Menace II Society, a scalding view of gang-plagued Los Angeles. Their next film, Dead Presidents, depicted the scars of Vietnam on a returning vet. After the documentary American Pimp, they sent Johnny Depp in pursuit of Jack the Ripper in the 2001 From Hell, based on an Alan Moore graphic novel...
Espionage boomed during the 20th century, as World War II and the Cold War made invisible ink and encrypted messages more than just fodder for thrillers. Austro-Hungarian agent Dusko Popov, the reported inspiration for Ian Fleming's James Bond, gallivanted around Europe feeding false intelligence to the Nazis and sleeping with countless women. (His fondness for ménages à trois earned him the code name Tricycle.) British spymaster Kim Philby spent 30 years rising nearly to the top of MI6, only to be unmasked as a double agent in 1963--having sent decades of secrets to the Soviets...
...Soviet state collapsed in 1991, the Orthodox Russians who came to France to flee communism say they're starting to view Moscow with mistrust again. The reason: the recent move by Russia to take control of a dazzling Orthodox cathedral built in Nice during the reign of Czar Nicholas II, which some opponents say is part a wider, nationalistic power play by Moscow to regain symbols of Russia's historical, cultural and religious grandeur abroad...
...tussle centers on the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas - a breathtaking church topped with spires and domes that was built in 1912 on land that Nicholas' grandfather Alexander II had purchased half a century earlier. Initially intended as a place of worship for the Russian aristocrats and industrialists who flocked to the Côte d'Azur before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the cathedral became a spiritual and cultural focal point for the mass of exiles who fled to Nice during the Soviet era. Since the fall of communism nearly 19 years ago, the so-called white Russian community...