Album review: Comedown Machine – The Strokes

COMEDOWN MACHINE The Strokes (Sony) Considering Julian Casablancas and friends pretty much invited the world into their too-cool-for-school indie house party a decade and a half ago, for the past three albums they’ve been giving a damned good impression of a band who didn’t really want to enjoy the resulting glorious chaos. And even here in their fifth outing, there’s a feeling of a band happy to be on the guest-list (as they would have it in the incredibly catchy Partners in Crime) rather than hosting the VIP suite

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BRITAIN: Was Mother a Virgin?

Under a huge oil painting of King George VI's coronation, nine peers of the realm gathered last week in a paneled committee room of the House of Lords. Ranged around a horseshoe table, the lords listened intently as, one by one, bewigged barristers rose to argue the fine points of one of the oddest cases in British legal history—the sort of legal conundrum that could exist only in a country that still has titles and a nobility.

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Russia Cracks Down on Political Art

On June 11, Alexander Shchednov, known in Russia’s art circles as Shurik, was hanging up a collage outside the town hall in the southwestern city of Voronezh. The image showed the face of a coy looking Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s superimposed over the head of a woman in an evening dress, with the slogan: “Oh I don’t know ..

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Legislation would triple U.S. non-military aid to Pakistan

As Pakistani forces continue to battle an advancing Taliban, the leading senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee introduced legislation Monday tripling aid to the country. The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, introduced by Sens. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, and Dick Lugar, R-Indiana, authorizes $7.5 billion in non-military aid to Pakistan over the next five years to foster economic growth and development, and another $7.5 billion for the following five years.

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Painting, sold under Nazis, returned to owner’s estate

An oil painting was returned Tuesday to the estate of a Jewish art dealer who was forced to consign the painting and other artwork under Nazi Germany before fleeing the country. The painting, “Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe,” was done in 1632 by an unknown painter from the Northern Netherlandish school, according to a statement from the U.S

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