IHT Rendezvous: As Oscars Fever Builds, Some Chinese Ask: ‘What About Our Films?’

BEIJING — As Oscar fever grows around the world with the 85th Academy Awards set to begin in Los Angeles just hours from now, excitement is building in China, even though it has no films in competition. There is also a sense of frustration here about why China’s movies aren’t nominated for the world’s biggest awards?

China sees itself as advancing in many ways, growing richer and more powerful, so its inability to come up with serious Oscars contenders rankles.

The most popular answer to the question, held by ordinary Chinese and film experts alike, is: “Too few good films. That’s the real reason in recent years Chinese films have moved further and further away from the Oscars dream,” wrote The International Herald Leader newspaper, in a story carried on the country’s popular Tencent entertainment site.

An article by The Economic Daily, carried on People’s Daily Web site, gave another interpretation: “The Oscars have never been a communal forum, the films taken seriously have only the responsibility to portray the North American world view and the lives they’re willing to see.”

As I’ve explored elsewhere, strict censorship hobbles the Chinese film industry. Directors are increasingly voicing their frustration in public, yet there’s little they can do against the directives of the state. One result of this hamstringing of talent is it’s virtually impossible to make probing films about contemporary society, which has many social tensions the government doesn’t want openly explored. Instead, filmmakers retreat to the safety of historical themes, with tales of warring dynasties commonplace.

Also, strict import rules governing overseas movies mean few may be shown here. As a person with the handle LA-YIN wrote on Sina Weibo, the microblog: “With the exception of Ang Lee’s ‘Life of Pi,’ none of the nominated films has screened in China.”

Much attention is being focused on a prediction of winners in an annual list drawn up by the actress Zhang Ziyi. Ms. Zhang starred in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” a hit in 2000 by the Taiwanese director Ang Lee. She is also the first Chinese star from the People’s Republic of China to be listed on the jury for the Oscars, in 2005, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported.

Many netizens are pointing out that Ms. Zhang’s list runs at an estimated 90 percent accuracy rate. So what’s she tapping?

Best Director? Mr. Lee and Steven Spielberg (“Lincoln”) are in tight competition, she writes. “Emotionally, I’m drawn to Ang Lee. Intellectually I’m drawn to Spielberg. These are the two films I’ve liked most this year.”

Best Film? “Lincoln. Whether you like the movie or not, it gives off glamor and radiance. I salute Spielberg’s youthfulness,” she wrote.

China is 16 hours ahead of Los Angeles, so watching will be tricky for people headed into a normal working day on Monday. As –Mostro- wrote on a microblog site, “It’s the Oscars today!!!!!!! But it’ll only be on tomorrow, Beijing time ….I can’t watch it,” followed by four yellow, grimacing emoticons.

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You're Invited to PEOPLE.com's Oscars Party!

02/24/2013 at 08:40 AM EST

From left: Bradley Cooper, Oscar, Jessica Chastain

AFP/Getty; Wireimage; Splash News Online

Oscars host Seth MacFarlane isn't the only one gearing up for Hollywood's biggest night – we are too!

Be a part of the glamour and excitement Sunday at 6 p.m. ET when we roll out the red carpet for our PEOPLE.com VIPs.

Here's what you can expect:
• Tune in to our red carpet preshow for exclusive A-list interviews
• Be the first to see the gorgeous gowns – and make your own best-dressed list
• Download your own Oscars ballot – and make your own Academy Awards picks
• Tweet with our editors at #PeopleOscars
• Take our up-to-the-minute Oscars polls

And come back the next day for so much more ...
• See the night's best dresses from all angles with our 360º slideshow
• Come inside the most exclusive Oscars after-parties
• Relive the most memorable quotes of the show
• Get the scoop on the night's biggest shockers and funniest moments everyone is talking about

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FDA approves new targeted breast cancer drug

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-a-kind breast cancer medication that targets tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.

The drug Kadcyla from Roche combines the established drug Herceptin with a powerful chemotherapy drug and a third chemical linking the medicines together. The chemical keeps the cocktail intact until it binds to a cancer cell, delivering a potent dose of anti-tumor poison.

Cancer researchers say the drug is an important step forward because it delivers more medication while reducing the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy.

"This antibody goes seeking out the tumor cells, gets internalized and then explodes them from within. So it's very kind and gentle on the patients — there's no hair loss, no nausea, no vomiting," said Dr. Melody Cobleigh of Rush University Medical Center. "It's a revolutionary way of treating cancer."

Cobleigh helped conduct the key studies of the drug at the Chicago facility.

The FDA approved the new treatment for about 20 percent of breast cancer patients with a form of the disease that is typically more aggressive and less responsive to hormone therapy. These patients have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2. Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer in U.S. women, and is expected to kill more than 39,000 Americans this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The approval will help Roche's Genentech unit build on the blockbuster success of Herceptin, which has long dominated the breast cancer marketplace. The drug had sales of roughly $6 billion last year.

Genentech said Friday that Kadcyla will cost $9,800 per month, compared to $4,500 per month for regular Herceptin. The company estimates a full course of Kadcyla, about nine months of medicine, will cost $94,000.

FDA scientists said they approved the drug based on company studies showing Kadcyla delayed the progression of breast cancer by several months. Researchers reported last year that patients treated with the drug lived 9.6 months before death or the spread of their disease, compared with a little more than six months for patients treated with two other standard drugs, Tykerb and Xeloda.

Overall, patients taking Kadcyla lived about 2.6 years, compared with 2 years for patients taking the other drugs.

FDA specifically approved the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer who have already been treated with Herceptin and taxane, a widely used chemotherapy drug. Doctors are not required to follow FDA prescribing guidelines, and cancer researchers say the drug could have great potential in patients with earlier forms of breast cancer

Kadcyla will carry a boxed warning, the most severe type, alerting doctors and patients that the drug can cause liver toxicity, heart problems and potentially death. The drug can also cause severe birth defects and should not be used by pregnant women.

Kadcyla was developed by South San Francisco-based Genentech using drug-binding technology licensed from Waltham, Mass.-based ImmunoGen. The company developed the chemical that keeps the drug cocktail together and is scheduled to receive a $10.5 million payment from Genentech on the FDA decision. The company will also receive additional royalties on the drug's sales.

Shares of ImmunoGen Inc. rose 2 cents to $14.32 in afternoon trading. The stock has ttraded in a 52-wek range of $10.85 to $18.10.

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Investors face another Washington deadline

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Investors face another Washington-imposed deadline on government spending cuts next week, but it's not generating the same level of fear as two months ago when the "fiscal cliff" loomed large.

Investors in sectors most likely to be affected by the cuts, like defense, seem untroubled that the budget talks could send stocks tumbling.

Talks on the U.S. budget crisis began again this week leading up to the March 1 deadline for the so-called sequestration when $85 billion in automatic federal spending cuts are scheduled to take effect.

"It's at this point a political hot button in Washington but a very low level investor concern," said Fred Dickson, chief market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon. The fight pits President Barack Obama and fellow Democrats against congressional Republicans.

Stocks rallied in early January after a compromise temporarily avoided the fiscal cliff, and the Standard & Poor's 500 index <.spx> has risen 6.3 percent since the start of the year.

But the benchmark index lost steam this week, posting its first week of losses since the start of the year. Minutes on Wednesday from the last Federal Reserve meeting, which suggested the central bank may slow or stop its stimulus policy sooner than expected, provided the catalyst.

National elections in Italy on Sunday and Monday could also add to investor concern. Most investors expect a government headed by Pier Luigi Bersani to win and continue with reforms to tackle Italy's debt problems. However, a resurgence by former leader Silvio Berlusconi has raised doubts.

"Europe has been in the last six months less of a topic for the stock market, but the problems haven't gone away. This may bring back investor attention to that," said Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh.

OPTIONS BULLS TARGET GAINS

The spending cuts, if they go ahead, could hit the defense industry particularly hard.

Yet in the options market, bulls were targeting gains in Lockheed Martin Corp , the Pentagon's biggest supplier.

Calls on the stock far outpaced puts, suggesting that many investors anticipate the stock to move higher. Overall options volume on the stock was 2.8 times the daily average with 17,000 calls and 3,360 puts traded, according to options analytics firm Trade Alert.

"The upside call buying in Lockheed solidifies the idea that option investors are not pricing in a lot of downside risk in most defense stocks from the likely impact of sequestration," said Jared Woodard, a founder of research and advisory firm condoroptions.com in Forest, Virginia.

The stock ended up 0.6 percent at $88.12 on Friday.

If lawmakers fail to reach an agreement on reducing the U.S. budget deficit in the next few days, a sequester would include significant cuts in defense spending. Companies such as General Dynamics Corp and Smith & Wesson Holding Corp could be affected.

General Dynamics Corp shares rose 1.2 percent to $67.32 and Smith & Wesson added 4.6 percent to $9.18 on Friday.

EYES ON GDP DATA, APPLE

The latest data on fourth-quarter U.S. gross domestic product is expected on Thursday, and some analysts predict an upward revision following trade data that showed America's deficit shrank in December to its narrowest in nearly three years.

U.S. GDP unexpectedly contracted in the fourth quarter, according to an earlier government estimate, but analysts said there was no reason for panic, given that consumer spending and business investment picked up.

Investors will be looking for any hints of changes in the Fed's policy of monetary easing when Fed Chairman Ben Bernake speaks before congressional committees on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Shares of Apple will be watched closely next week when the company's annual stockholders' meeting is held.

On Friday, a U.S. judge handed outspoken hedge fund manager David Einhorn a victory in his battle with the iPhone maker, blocking the company from moving forward with a shareholder vote on a controversial proposal to limit the company's ability to issue preferred stock.

(Additional reporting by Doris Frankel; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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U.N. Rejects Claim for Direct Compensation to Victims of Cholera Epidemic in Haiti

There will be no direct financial compensation from the United Nations for the more than 8,000 Haitians who died and the 646,000 sickened by cholera since the disease struck the earthquake-ravaged country in October 2010, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the Haitian president this week.

More than 15 months after the United Nations received a legal claim seeking to hold peacekeeping troops responsible for setting off the epidemic, its lawyers declared the claim “not receivable,” citing diplomatic immunity.

At the same time, Partners in Health, the leading nongovernmental health care provider in Haiti, has stepped forward to urge the United Nations to invest more seriously in Mr. Ban’s own largely unfunded anticholera initiative to make amends.

In an Op-Ed article posted Friday night on the Web site of The New York Times, Dr. Louise C. Ivers, the group’s senior health and policy adviser, says the United Nations has “a moral, if not legal, obligation to help solve a crisis it inadvertently helped start.” Evidence, she said, finds the United Nations “largely, though not wholly” culpable for the outbreak of cholera.

To date, Mr. Ban has not acknowledged the reigning scientific theory about the origin of Haiti’s cholera epidemic — that peacekeepers from Nepal imported the cholera and, through a faulty sanitation system at their base, infected a tributary of the country’s largest river.

Dr. Ivers, however, while noting the “causality” of epidemic disease is complex, says that no other reasonable hypothesis for Haiti’s cholera has been put forth.

What makes her comments especially striking is that her organization’s co-founder and chief strategist, Dr. Paul Farmer, served as the United Nations’ deputy special envoy for Haiti for the past three years and was appointed by Mr. Ban in December to lead the very anticholera initiative that she found lacking.

Dr. Farmer declined to comment, but a spokeswoman for Partners in Health said Dr. Ivers’s statements represented the group’s concerns about the 10-year, $2.2 billion anticholera initiative that he was supposed to advise.

The ambitious initiative is intended to upgrade Haiti’s abysmal water and sanitation infrastructure while increasing cholera prevention and treatment efforts, including the expansion of a small cholera vaccination campaign that Partners in Health and a Haitian health care group, Gheskio, undertook last year.

Donors have pledged $215 million. The United Nations said it would contribute $23.5 million — 1 percent of the initiative’s cost, Dr. Ivers said.

In contrast, she said, this year’s budget for the United Nations peacekeeping mission, $648 million, “could more than fund the entire cholera elimination initiative for two years.”

Expressing his “deep sorrow and solidarity with the many Haitian families who lost loved ones in this terrible epidemic,” Nigel Fisher, the new head of the peacekeeping mission, nonetheless said that the United Nations had “mobilized resolutely to combat the disease.” It spent some $118 million on cholera before the initiative was announced, officials have said.

Mr. Ban, through his spokesman, also expressed “his profound sympathy” while announcing on Thursday that the legal claim had been rejected.

Mario Joseph, lead lawyer for the cholera victims, said, “While these sympathies are welcome, they will not stop cholera’s killing or ensure that survivors can go on living after losing breadwinners to cholera.”

The demand, filed in an internal United Nations claims unit, had sought $100,000 for each bereaved family and $50,000 for each cholera survivor.

Mr. Joseph described the United Nations’ terse rejection of a claim filed over a year ago as “disgraceful,” and he and his American colleagues at the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti said they would file a lawsuit in Haiti or abroad.

Though the death rate from cholera has declined significantly since the epidemic initially devastated Haiti, the disease is still coursing through the country. National statistics show a spike of reported cases in December 2012 over that same month in 2011 — 11,220 compared with 8,205.

“The U.N. will not pay,” said a headline Friday on the Web site of Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste newspaper.

“It’s not surprising,” a reader responded.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 23, 2013

An earlier version of this article misrendered a quotation from an Op-Ed article by Dr. Louise C. Ivers. The quotation should have read “largely, though not wholly,” not “largely, if not wholly.”

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Reeva Steenkamp's Father: If Oscar Pistorius Speaks the Truth, 'I Can Perhaps Someday Forgive Him'

By Stephen M. Silverman

02/23/2013 at 09:30 AM EST

Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp

Elite/EMPICS Entertainment/ABACA

Having been freed on bail Friday as he awaits trial for the premeditated murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, Oscar Pistorius "will have to live with his conscience," her father said Saturday.

Speaking to the Beeld newspaper (and translated by the BBC), Barry Steenkamp – referring to Pistorius's claim that he fatally fired his gun four times at Reeva because he thought an intruder had broken into his house – said: "If it didn't happen the way he says it did, he must suffer and he will suffer."

Steenkamp also said, "It does not matter how much money he has and how good his legal team is, he will have to live with his conscience. But if he speaks the truth, I can perhaps someday forgive him."

The next hearing for the Paralympian, 26, is scheduled for June 4.

Besides setting bail at $114,000 – the amount is considered high for a murder trial in South Africa, reports The New York Times – Magistrate Nair Desmond also ordered Pistorius to relinquish firearms and passports, and to stay away from his home, because it is an official crime scene.

In addition, he is not permitted to contact witnesses, leave Pretoria without official permission or use drugs or alcohol. He is to report to a police station twice every week.

Arnold Pistorius, an uncle speaking on behalf of the family, told reporters Friday, "We are relieved by the fact that Oscar got bail today, but at the same time, we are in mourning for Reeva Steenkamp and her family."

Oscar Pistorius is reportedly staying at Arnold's home in an upscale part of Pretoria. News photos showed the athlete being picked up from the courtroom and driven away by his sister, Aimee.

Reeva Steenkamp's mother June told Beeld that the Pistorius family had sent a bouquet of flowers.

"But what does it mean?" she said. "Nothing."

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FDA approves new targeted breast cancer drug

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-a-kind breast cancer medication that targets tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.

The drug Kadcyla from Roche combines the established drug Herceptin with a powerful chemotherapy drug and a third chemical linking the medicines together. The chemical keeps the cocktail intact until it binds to a cancer cell, delivering a potent dose of anti-tumor poison.

Cancer researchers say the drug is an important step forward because it delivers more medication while reducing the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy.

"This antibody goes seeking out the tumor cells, gets internalized and then explodes them from within. So it's very kind and gentle on the patients — there's no hair loss, no nausea, no vomiting," said Dr. Melody Cobleigh of Rush University Medical Center. "It's a revolutionary way of treating cancer."

Cobleigh helped conduct the key studies of the drug at the Chicago facility.

The FDA approved the new treatment for about 20 percent of breast cancer patients with a form of the disease that is typically more aggressive and less responsive to hormone therapy. These patients have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2. Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer in U.S. women, and is expected to kill more than 39,000 Americans this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The approval will help Roche's Genentech unit build on the blockbuster success of Herceptin, which has long dominated the breast cancer marketplace. The drug had sales of roughly $6 billion last year.

Genentech said Friday that Kadcyla will cost $9,800 per month, compared to $4,500 per month for regular Herceptin. The company estimates a full course of Kadcyla, about nine months of medicine, will cost $94,000.

FDA scientists said they approved the drug based on company studies showing Kadcyla delayed the progression of breast cancer by several months. Researchers reported last year that patients treated with the drug lived 9.6 months before death or the spread of their disease, compared with a little more than six months for patients treated with two other standard drugs, Tykerb and Xeloda.

Overall, patients taking Kadcyla lived about 2.6 years, compared with 2 years for patients taking the other drugs.

FDA specifically approved the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer who have already been treated with Herceptin and taxane, a widely used chemotherapy drug. Doctors are not required to follow FDA prescribing guidelines, and cancer researchers say the drug could have great potential in patients with earlier forms of breast cancer

Kadcyla will carry a boxed warning, the most severe type, alerting doctors and patients that the drug can cause liver toxicity, heart problems and potentially death. The drug can also cause severe birth defects and should not be used by pregnant women.

Kadcyla was developed by South San Francisco-based Genentech using drug-binding technology licensed from Waltham, Mass.-based ImmunoGen. The company developed the chemical that keeps the drug cocktail together and is scheduled to receive a $10.5 million payment from Genentech on the FDA decision. The company will also receive additional royalties on the drug's sales.

Shares of ImmunoGen Inc. rose 2 cents to $14.32 in afternoon trading. The stock has ttraded in a 52-wek range of $10.85 to $18.10.

Read More..

Investors face another Washington deadline

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Investors face another Washington-imposed deadline on government spending cuts next week, but it's not generating the same level of fear as two months ago when the "fiscal cliff" loomed large.

Investors in sectors most likely to be affected by the cuts, like defense, seem untroubled that the budget talks could send stocks tumbling.

Talks on the U.S. budget crisis began again this week leading up to the March 1 deadline for the so-called sequestration when $85 billion in automatic federal spending cuts are scheduled to take effect.

"It's at this point a political hot button in Washington but a very low level investor concern," said Fred Dickson, chief market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon. The fight pits President Barack Obama and fellow Democrats against congressional Republicans.

Stocks rallied in early January after a compromise temporarily avoided the fiscal cliff, and the Standard & Poor's 500 index <.spx> has risen 6.3 percent since the start of the year.

But the benchmark index lost steam this week, posting its first week of losses since the start of the year. Minutes on Wednesday from the last Federal Reserve meeting, which suggested the central bank may slow or stop its stimulus policy sooner than expected, provided the catalyst.

National elections in Italy on Sunday and Monday could also add to investor concern. Most investors expect a government headed by Pier Luigi Bersani to win and continue with reforms to tackle Italy's debt problems. However, a resurgence by former leader Silvio Berlusconi has raised doubts.

"Europe has been in the last six months less of a topic for the stock market, but the problems haven't gone away. This may bring back investor attention to that," said Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh.

OPTIONS BULLS TARGET GAINS

The spending cuts, if they go ahead, could hit the defense industry particularly hard.

Yet in the options market, bulls were targeting gains in Lockheed Martin Corp , the Pentagon's biggest supplier.

Calls on the stock far outpaced puts, suggesting that many investors anticipate the stock to move higher. Overall options volume on the stock was 2.8 times the daily average with 17,000 calls and 3,360 puts traded, according to options analytics firm Trade Alert.

"The upside call buying in Lockheed solidifies the idea that option investors are not pricing in a lot of downside risk in most defense stocks from the likely impact of sequestration," said Jared Woodard, a founder of research and advisory firm condoroptions.com in Forest, Virginia.

The stock ended up 0.6 percent at $88.12 on Friday.

If lawmakers fail to reach an agreement on reducing the U.S. budget deficit in the next few days, a sequester would include significant cuts in defense spending. Companies such as General Dynamics Corp and Smith & Wesson Holding Corp could be affected.

General Dynamics Corp shares rose 1.2 percent to $67.32 and Smith & Wesson added 4.6 percent to $9.18 on Friday.

EYES ON GDP DATA, APPLE

The latest data on fourth-quarter U.S. gross domestic product is expected on Thursday, and some analysts predict an upward revision following trade data that showed America's deficit shrank in December to its narrowest in nearly three years.

U.S. GDP unexpectedly contracted in the fourth quarter, according to an earlier government estimate, but analysts said there was no reason for panic, given that consumer spending and business investment picked up.

Investors will be looking for any hints of changes in the Fed's policy of monetary easing when Fed Chairman Ben Bernake speaks before congressional committees on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Shares of Apple will be watched closely next week when the company's annual stockholders' meeting is held.

On Friday, a U.S. judge handed outspoken hedge fund manager David Einhorn a victory in his battle with the iPhone maker, blocking the company from moving forward with a shareholder vote on a controversial proposal to limit the company's ability to issue preferred stock.

(Additional reporting by Doris Frankel; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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IHT Rendezvous: Russian Nationalists Say ‘Nyet’ to Foreign Words

LONDON — Nationalist Russian legislators have introduced a bill to hold back a tide of foreign words, specifically English ones, which they claim is swamping the Russian language.

A bill submitted by the minority Liberal Democratic Party would impose fines of up to $1,700 on officials, advertisers and journalists who use foreign words rather than their Russian equivalents.

Their main gripe appears to be with English words that have crept into Russian since the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to the broadcaster Russia Today.

“They specifically mention the Russian words that ended up as ‘dealer’, ’boutique’, ‘manager’, ‘single’, ‘OK’ and ‘wow’,” RT said on its Web site.

The legislators were said to have taken their inspiration from France and Poland, which have laws to protect their national languages from foreign incursions, and from Quebec, where local officials zealously guard the Canadian province’s French-language tradition.

Given the onward march of English as the dominant world language, the efforts of the language purists may ultimately be doomed.

The tendency of languages to adopt foreign words is scarcely a modern phenomenon. Russian itself has a multitude of borrowings from languages as diverse as Mongolian and Latin.

Borrowings often reflect concepts or linguistic nuances that do not exist in the native language. English borrowed “mammoth” and “sable” from the Russians as well as the more recent “agitprop” and “gulag.”

Alina Sabitova, writing for the Russkiy Mir Foundation, which promotes Russian language and culture, acknowledged that proscriptive laws in countries such as Poland and France were rarely observed in practice.

That cast doubt on the claim of Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, the Liberal Democratic Party leader, that “all major countries have purged foreign loan words from their national languages.”

The bill appeared to be the latest in a patriotic wave of perceived anti-foreign measures to go before the Duma, the lower house of parliament. My colleague Ellen Barry wrote from Moscow last month that many of the proposals sounded eccentric and were unlikely to advance and become law.

Russia Today got itself in hot water on Thursday with the headline “Grammar Nazi Style” on its report of the proposed ban.

One anonymous commenter suggested those responsible should be sent to the gulags, while another declared:

“Russia needs to protect own language for a million parasite words that have infiltrated the country from the West. Russian language is a very rich language and stupid replacement of Russian words with English is bad for the country and culture.”

The language debate in Russia, as elsewhere, has obvious political overtones, with purists frequently railing against American cultural hegemony and English-language imperialism. (A colleague recalls that one Communist-era Polish language activist took particular exception to the phrase “whiskey on the rocks.”)

Language watchdogs can also fall into the trap of overzealousness.

Quebec’s French language office backed down this week after it provoked a furor by warning the owner of an Italian restaurant that there were too many Italian words on his menu.

Where do you stand on the language issue? Do foreign borrowings enrich languages or diminish them? Is the dominance of English a plus or a minus in an increasingly interconnected world? And will new laws do anything to counter the trend?

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Oscar Pistorius to Be Released on Bail

Breaking News

By Stephen M. Silverman

02/22/2013 at 09:25 AM EST

Oscar Pistorius, Feb. 22, 2013

AP

Prosecutors in South Africa were defeated Friday in their effort to deny bail for "Blade Runner" Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee track star accused of the premeditated Feb. 14 murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

Pistorius will be released on U.S. $114,000 bail, CNN reports.

Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair announced his decision in a packed Pretoria courtroom Friday afternoon. Over the past four days during the bail hearing, both authorities and Pistorius's legal team agreed that he killed Steenkamp, 29, but the athlete says he killed her accidentally after he mistook her for an intruder.

In final arguments Friday morning, prosecutor Gerrie Nel, having called the accused a flight risk, told the judge that Pistorius, 26, didn't deserve bail. CNN reports. "He must realize that long-term imprisonment is almost guaranteed," said Nel. "He might think he'll be acquitted."

The prosecutor also said: "We all know that a lot of important people were granted bail and they stayed in the country. But lots of very important people have escaped."

"What kind of life would he lead if he were to flee?" asked the magistrate.

"A life of freedom," Nel replied.

The judge later said in lengthy remarks leading up to his decision Friday that he did not find that it had been established that Pistorius posed a flight risk. Nair also said that he was aware that releasing the accused could lead to "shock and outrage" in the community.

Entering the courtroom Friday, Pistorius bowed his head, and later appeared to be holding back tears when Nel recounted Steenkamp's plight on the fateful night, reports The New York Times.

"I am not saying the planning of the murder of Reeva Steenkamp happened weeks ahead, days ahead," said Nel, according to the newspaper. "I am saying the planning to kill Reeva Steenkamp happened that night."

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