While bashing Wall Street is easy, popular, and profitable, the Academy appears uninterested in using the power of film to pursue social justices that might offend the political sensibilities of its members.

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"Schools are taking up our offer to become academies because they recognise the huge benefits of being an academy - more autonomy, more power to teachers, and an opportunity to thrive, free from interference from government, " said Mr Gove.

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What strikes one about both the National Academy of Sciences report on the power grid, and the World Bank report on the state of the world climate is that both are really talking about similar things: a deterioration and vulnerability of our infrastructure, whether it be man-made or a natural.

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Issues of dueling star power are also swirling around the ongoing divorce of Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon and her husband of seven years Ryan Phillippe, The pair, who met and married in 1999 before either was an A-list star, apparently never signed a prenup.

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Olga Kryshtanovskaya, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has studied the country's centres of power since the late 1980s.

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In one corner of the American academy, you have what might be called the Vietnam generation: those who want nothing to do with power, and that includes studying it.

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