Iron Man beats Gatsby at the box office

Sharif's Agenda NAWAZ SHARIF is back. To critics, he is an unreformed rightwinger, a conservative politician who allows his party to pander to the extremist Islamist fringe, an arrogant bully who recklessly threatens confrontation with other institutions, particularly the powerful army. But Sharif is no longer the callow 30-year-old who got his start in politics as a protege of the dictator General Zia. Nor is he the wild confrontationist whose first two terms as prime minister came to premature ends because of his inability to pick his battles. Instead, a stint in jail under Musharraf, then exile and five years as the leader of the opposition to the Asif Ali Zardari-led PPP government appear to have mellowed ...

The Next Scapegoat TWENTY years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, at various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as the spokeswoman at the State Department. Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down ...

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