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By Jemima Kelly LONDON, July 17 (Reuters) - Sterling slipped back below $1.31 on Monday after soaring to its highest levels in 10 months at the end of last week on a broad dollar sell-off. Traders were cautious as four days of Brexit negotiations began in Brussels. The pound jumped almost 2 cents on Friday to hit $1.3113 <GBP=D3, its strongest since last September, after U.S. inflation and retail sales data came in weaker than expected, putting into doubt the prospect of a further rate hike from the Federal Reserve this year. But sterling started the week by edging down from those highs, trading down 0.1 percent on the day at $1.3089 and flat against the euro at 87.50 pence, still close to a three-week peak hit on Friday. Brexit Secretary David Davis, in the Belgian capital for talks with the European Union's chief negotiator Michel Barnier a month after a first meeting, said on Monday that having "made a good start" during their last encounter, "this ...

The 'Night of the Living Dead' director all but created the contemporary film/television zombie, offering bored or anxious American consumers a fresh and indelible fantasy. George Romero, who  died  Sunday at 77, had an impact on contemporary pop culture that is difficult to overstate. Other living filmmakers, like George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, transformed genres; Romero all but created one. Yes, there were "zombies" in movies before his  Night of the Living Dead  came along in 1968. But the wretched victims of 1932's  White Zombie  and later schlock movies bore little resemblance to Romero's ghouls. Before 1968, zombies tended to be people enslaved by voodoo or revived as slaves by evil scientists; Romero's mysterious plague of widespread corpse reanimation — and the peculiar way these undead beings threatened the still-living — was something new, and lasting. That was especially true once Romero and cowriter John Russo's vision comingled ...

We'll be recapping Season 7 of HBO's  Game of Thrones  here on Monkey See. We'll try to turn them around overnight, so look for them first thing on Mondays. And of course: Spoilers abound After a deck-clearing, barn-burner (Sept-burner, technically) of a season finale like "The Winds of Winter" — a towering achievement by any metric, not least of which, you know: body count — you'd be forgiven for expecting a season premiere that would concern itself with placing  Game of Thrones ' scattered, wildfire-singed gamepieces back on the board, methodically and meticulously. And yet: Things are ostensibly speeding up, right? This seventh season is an abbreviated one — 7 episodes, not the usual 10 — and we've got only a total of thirteen episodes to go. Granted, some of those later episodes will reportedly clock in with runtimes that'll seem positively Apatowian, but the point is: Now is not the time for shilly-shallying. No, now is the time for pl...

Nine people were dead, including six children, and one man was missing after a flash flood roared through a popular Arizona swimming hole on Saturday afternoon. The deadly incident at the Cold Springs swimming hole in Tonto National Forest followed heavy rains that had spurred thunderstorm and flash flood warnings from the  National Weather Service  in areas scarred by a recent wildfire. Officials suspended their search Sunday evening but were expected to resume on Monday. source:http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-arizona-flash-flood-20170716-story.html

BEDMINSTER, N.J. — President Trump unleashed a new fusillade of tweets on Sunday morning, defending his son Donald Trump Jr., slashing the news media and tarring his long-vanquished opponent, Hillary Clinton. After a leisurely Saturday afternoon spent at a women’s golf tournament at his club here, where he waved to the crowd from a glassed-in viewing stand, Mr. Trump awoke with a familiar list of grievances. “HillaryClinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News media?” he  tweeted shortly before 7 a.m.  Forty minutes later,  he posted , “With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country.” In between those posts, Mr. Trump thanked people who had turned out to cheer him at the United States Women’s Open, which is being played at Trump National Golf Club despite calls from women’s groups for ...

The longer Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare flounder, the clearer it becomes that President Donald Trump’s team and many in Congress dramatically underestimated the challenge of rolling back former President Barack Obama’s signature achievement. The Trump transition team and other Republican leaders presumed that Congress would scrap Obamacare by President’s Day weekend in late February, according to three former Republican congressional aides and two current ones familiar with the administration’s efforts. Republican leaders last fall planned a quick strike on the law in a series of meetings and phone calls, hoping to simply revive a 2015 repeal bill that Obama vetoed. Few in the administration or Republican leadership expected the effort to stretch into the summer months, with another delay  announced  this weekend,   eating into valuable time for lawmakers to tackle tax reform, nominations or spending bills. As Trump himself infamously remarked, “...