Actress Mo’Nique (L), winner of Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture award for her work in “Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire”, poses with actress Gabourey Sidibe winner of Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture award for her work on the same film backstage at the 41st Annual NAACP Image Awards at the Shrine auditorium in Los Angeles, February 26, 2010. [Agencies]Actress Mo’Nique (L), winner of Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture award for her work in “Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire”, kisses actress Gabourey Sidibe winner of Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture award for her work on the same film as they pose backstage at the 41st Annual NAACP Image Awards at the Shrine auditorium in Los Angeles, February 26, 2010.

PARIS – Jacques Audiard’s powerful prison drama “Un Prophete” (A Prophet) swept the board at the “Cesar” awards Saturday, picking up the best film, best actor and best director prizes at France’s annual version of the Oscars.

“A Prophet,” one of the outstanding films at last year’s Cannes film festival, was named as best foreign film at the BAFTA awards last week and is in the running in the same category at the Academy Awards on March 7.

A dark tale of a young, illiterate petty criminal who gradually climbs up a brutal prison hierarchy, “A Prophet” took nine awards on the night, leaving little for the rest of the field.

Audiard, whose previous films include “De battre mon coeur s’est arrete” (The Beat My Heart Skipped), picked up the best director award, while the film’s star Tahar Rahim, took both the award for best actor and best newcomer.

Niels Arestrup also won the prize for best supporting actor for his portrayal of the old-style Corsican gang boss who offers patronage to the humble and submissive young greenhorn who ends up turning the tables on him.

Audiard paid tribute to the numerous former prisoners who appeared as extras in the film and helped to create its grimly realistic atmosphere.

“We had a really exceptional cast of extras. They forced us to do something exceptional,” he said.

The best actress award went to Isabelle Adjani, one of France’s biggest stars, who collected her fifth Cesar playing against her glamorous image to portray a dowdy teacher facing breakdown in “La journee de la jupe” (Skirt Day).

The Cesar awards provide French cinema with one of its yearly highlights, a star-studded night of glory and gushing tributes, which is often mocked as a local industry love-in which rewards arthouse films nobody watches.

“A Prophet,” a major box office success in France is an exception and the film has also attracted widespread critical success outside its home market.

With over 200 million entries, cinema attendance in France last year was at its highest level since 1982, with local productions accounting for 37 percent of the total.

Sigourney Weaver and Harrison Ford, who was awarded a special lifetime achievement award, added a touch of international glamour to the event.

But it was otherwise a resolutely French affair, with the traditional package of tears, long speeches, jokes and sketches of varying success.

The ceremony also included a tribute to Eric Rohmer, the pioneer of the French “New Wave” which transformed cinema in the 1950s and 60s, who continued making films until not long before his death last month at the age of 89.

The ‘High School Musical’ star – who recently splashed out $1 million on a “modest” Hollywood apartment – found his lavish home was ankle-high in water after a night of torrential rain flooded his infinity pool.

A source told National Enquirer magazine: “Zac called his pool guy, who arrived with a pump and started directing water away from the property.”

The 22-year-old actor had to call up a group of his closest friends, who came over and helped him repair the damage and clear up the mess.

The source added: “He and some pals spent an entire day mopping out his house and sandbagging doors to block further flooding. Now Zac’s working with landscapers to design a better drainage set-up – and he just keeps thanking his lucky stars he was in town to stop further damage.”

As well as flooding his Los Angeles mansion, Zac’s garden was also damaged by adverse weather.

The magazine reported: “While Zac slept, his swimming pool had overflowed, his backyard became a lake and water seeping under exterior doors flooded the house.”

Stage

Chinese orchestra

To usher in the traditional Lantern Festival, the Chinese National Orchestra will give a multimedia concert named Special Moonlight. The program includes traditional instrument ensemble and chorus, plus dizi, pipa, erhu, sheng and matouqin performances accompanied by an orchestra.

7:30 pm, Feb 22, 23. 100-480 yuan. National Center for the Performing Arts, west of Tian’anmen Square. 6655-0000

国家大剧院, 天安门广场西

Remembering Chopin

Chopin’s 200th birth anniversary will be celebrated with a concert. Led by renowned Polish conductor Jacek Kaspszyk, the concert will present Chopin’s Nocturne in A-flat Major Op 32 and Piano Concerto in E Minor Op 11, and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

7:30 pm, Feb 27. 50-680 yuan. Forbidden City Concert Hall in Zhongshan Park, Northwest of Tian’anmen Square. 6559-8285

中山音乐堂，中山公园内

Exhibitions

Ancient ceramics

Ten porcelain treasures are on exhibition at Beijing World Art Museum that trace the historical and cultural imprint from the Han to the Tang Dynasty.

9 am-17:30 pm, until Feb 25. Beijing World Art Museum, China Millennium Monument, A9 Fuxing Lu, Haidian district. 5980-2222

中华世纪坛世界美术馆，北京市海淀区复兴路甲9号

Oil paintings

An exhibition showing canvases by Beijing artists painted during the past century is being held at Beijing World Art Museum. Most work features historical figures, including Mao Zedong and Qu Yuan, and famous tourist destinations such as the Great Wall, Lama Temple and the Forbidden City Meridian Gate.

The exhibition of oil paintings will offer a full picture of the development of the craft locally.

9 am-17:30 pm, until Feb 25. Beijing World Art Museum, China Millennium Monument, A9 Fuxing Lu, Haidian district. 5980-2222

中华世纪坛世界美术馆，北京市海淀区复兴路甲9号

Installations and sculptures

Veteran British artist Antony Gormley’s solo show is titled Another Singularity. Among the exhibits is a large-scale installation in the form of a complex web. Made of silk-covered bungee cords, the work conveys the idea of the human body as a dimensional space rather than an object. The exhibition also includes sculptures of human forms.

11 am-5 pm, until Feb 28 except Monday. Galleria Continua, 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang district. 5978-9505

常青画廊, 朝阳区酒仙桥路2号

Events

Hand-pulled noodles

Learn how to roll dough out into noodles and master the ancient art of hand-pulled cooking.

The class is open to students of all levels.

7:15 pm-9:15 pm, Feb 22. 200 yuan. The Hutong, 1 Zhongxiang Hutong, Jiudaowan, Dongcheng district. 159-0104-6127

With Beijing resuming its tradition of holding a temple fair for the Spring Festival at Ditan Park, in 1985, Fu Wengang has become a star.

He steals the show with a 15-kg flagpole, balancing it on his head, shoulders, elbows, hands, crotch, knees and feet, despite the challenge of strong winds crashing into the decorated cloth banners draping it.

And as if that was not enough to thrill, the Beijing native throws in other stunts, twirling, kicking, cartwheeling the flagpole and catching it with a forward roll or on his face.

“I can perform more than 100 stunts with the flagpole,” says the proud 48-year-old folk artist.

The flagpole stunt is called zhongfan and was first performed by the Mongolians, before being borrowed by the Manchus during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The heyday for flagpole stunts was the early 1900s in Beijing’s Tianqiao area, where folk artists, storytellers, acrobatics and jugglers would gather on the street to entertain the working class.

Born into a Beijing family of zhongfan performers, Fu was initiated into the act at 13.

But zhongfan, along with other street performances, declined during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76).

Fu moved away from zhongfan and set up a building-materials factory in the 1980s.

However, the return of temple fairs in 1985 re-ignited his enthusiasm for zhongfan.

Over the past decade, Fu has combed the city, hunting for old acrobatic performers, and established the Tianqiao Baosan Art Troupe.

“I am glad that traditional folk performances are once again becoming popular,” Fu says.

He is even trying to get official recognition for zhongfan and its inclusion as part of the nation’s intangible cultural heritage.

NEW YORK – Smoking has long been known to boost tuberculosis risk, and a new study from Hong Kong suggests that being exposed to someone else’s tobacco smoke also increases the likelihood of contracting the disease.

Dr. Chi C. Leung of the Wanchai Chest Clinic in Wanchai and colleagues compared TB risk in older women living with at least one smoker to that of women living in smoke-free homes. The study included 15,486 non-smoking women 65 to 74 years old, all of whom lived with their husbands. All of the women had enrolled at one of the territory’s 18 Elderly Health Centers between 2000 and 2003, and about one in four lived with a smoker.

During follow-up, which lasted through the end of 2008 (or until a person died or was diagnosed with TB), 117 women developed active TB and 69 of these cases were confirmed in a laboratory.

Leung’s team found that women who had been exposed to secondhand smoke were 1.5 times more likely to develop active TB than women who didn’t live with a smoker, while their risk of culture-confirmed TB was 1.7-fold higher.

Secondhand smoke exposure accounted for about 14 percent of active TB cases and about 18 percent of culture-confirmed TB cases.

The researchers also found that the women who lived with a smoker were significantly more likely to have some type of obstructive lung disease, such as emphysema, as well as diabetes, at the study’s outset.

The findings appear in the latest issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

In a written commentary published with the study, Dr. Neal L. Benowitz of the University of California San Francisco notes that secondhand smoke has many known harmful effects, including increasing the risk of lung cancer and heart disease in adults and promoting asthma and lower respiratory illness in children. And smoking can promote respiratory infections, such as TB, by impairing the ability of the lungs to fight off infection, he adds.

In China, 60 percent of men smoke, but only 4 percent of women do, Benowitz notes, so secondhand smoke disproportionately affects women.

“Secondhand smoke exposure is another health problem of particular concern for women in less developed countries,” he adds. “Therefore, smoking bans should be part of the international women’s health advocacy agenda.”

Latest signals from the Democratic People’ Republic of Korea (DPRK) and diplomatic efforts are pointing to a reopening of stalled Six-Party Talks over the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, analysts have said.

On Monday, DPRK top leader Kim Jong-il assured a high-level Chinese envoy that Pyongyang is committed to a nuclear-free peninsula, the Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday.

Kim reiterated on Monday the DPRK’s “persistent stance to realize the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” in talks with Wang Jiarui, head of the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

“The sincerity of relevant parties to resume the Six-Party Talks is very important,” Kim was quoted as saying.

Wang also delivered to Kim a letter from President Hu Jintao, in which he said Beijing is also ready to enhance cooperation and work with the DPRK to maintain peace and stability on the peninsula. Hu also invited Kim to visit China, Xinhua reported.

Similarly, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in Beijing there is now a chance to revive the Six-Party Talks. Ma told other countries involved in the issue to “continue with approaches and dialogues to create conditions and an atmosphere” for the talks.

The DPRK abandoned the Six-Party Talks last year when the United Nations imposed new sanctions on it over its nuclear and missile tests.

Observers believe that China, the chair of the Six-Party Talks, wants to make Wang’s visit an impetus to speed up coordination toward the resumption of the dialogue that also involves the Republic of Korea (ROK), Japan, Russia and the United States, Japan’s Kyodo News reported.

The high-profile engagement this week with the North “may bode well” for reviving the talks that the DPRK has boycotted for a year and could lead to a reduction of tensions on the troubled peninsula, Reuters reported.

Though the DPRK offered “similar disarmament promises in the past”, a Seoul-based analyst still called Kim’s remarks this time a positive development, the Associated Press reported.

“I think Kim Jong-il will soon send his envoy to China to more clearly disclose his disarmament plan and set a date for his country’s return to the Six-Party Talks,” said Yang Moo-jin of Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies.

To that effect, the DPRK’s top nuclear envoy, Kim Kye-gwan, arrived in Beijing with Wang later yesterday, ROK’s Yonhap news agency reported. Yonhap, citing unidentified diplomatic sources in Beijing, said the DPRK envoy’s trip is aimed at discussing the talks.

“This is a sign that the resumption of the Six-Party Talks is imminent,” Yang said.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon’s top political adviser Lynn Pascoe also arrived in Pyongyang yesterday to try to bring the DPRK back to the negotiation table. Pascoe also met Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in Beijing.

Despite the flurry of diplomatic activity, a number of analysts said it is still too early to know if the talks will reopen soon.

Pang Zhongying, an international relations expert at the Beijing-based Renmin University of China, said it is actually up to the US to make some changes before the talks can revive.

“Though the (Barack) Obama administration said it will engage the DPRK, it has made no actual breakthrough after sending Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang in December,” Pang said.

“The DPRK issue is not a priority for Obama’s diplomacy,” Pang said, noting that for the White House, Pyongyang comes after other issues including the war in Afghanistan, the Iranian problem and the Middle East situation.

The standstill will last for now, Pang said, adding that the talks may still open by this year.

The DPRK has made clear it wants sanctions lifted and a peace treaty to formally end the 1950-1953 Korean War before returning to the disarmament talks. Washington has responded that Pyongyang must come back to the talks first before any talk of political and economic concessions.

Wang Fan, a Korean studies expert at China Foreign Affairs University, also said the US should make concessions first to bring the DPRK back to the table.

“The bigger power won’t lose anything by conceding first, as the DPRK is a small power and the disadvantaged side,” he said.

“It won’t be too late to sanction the DPRK, if it violates its pledges.”

Wang said the current problem is one of a lack of trust.

“It seems most countries involved in the issue are still waiting for a change, or better, collapse, of the DPRK leadership, and not seriously seeking talks,” Wang said.

“Mutual trust is the most important.”

Price negotiation and pipe construction for Russian natural gas supplies to China need more time before mega projects can be started, Russia’s trade representative in China Sergey Tsyplakov said yesterday.

However, natural gas is not among the priorities for cooperation between the two countries in the year 2010, Tsyplakov said at a press conference yesterday.

Mechanical and electrical products, timber, ferrous metal and nonferrous metal, and investment cooperation are the four major areas for cooperation between the two countries this year, Tsyplakov said.

“The natural gas supply is still under discussion,” Tsyplakov said. “The two sides are still negotiating prices before any major projects can be launched.”

“The negotiation has lasted for years and there is unlikely to be a breakthrough in the near future,” said Xu Tao, a scholar at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. “The crux is the price.”

The price China offers to Russia cannot compete with that offered by the EU, which is a big buyer of Russia’s natural gas and on top of Russia’s supply list, Xu said.

“Natural gas supply remains an option for the two countries to seek cooperation, but other problems such as the construction of gas pipes still takes more time,” Xu said.

According to Xinhua News Agency, Russia and China are likely to reach an agreement on Russian natural gas supplies to China in mid-2011 and Russia would start to deliver gas to China via the West Siberia pipeline in 2015.

Bilateral trade between China and Russia declined by 32 percent last year, which is mainly because of the reduced investment and consumer demand in Russia, which suffered from the global financial crisis, Tsyplakov said.

Russia’s economy will keep recovering and increasing in the next two years and it is predicted the bilateral trade volume will recover to the level before the financial crisis as early as the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012, Tsyplakov said.

Facebook page for young Polish Holocaust victim provokes debate

WARSAW, Poland: Henio Zytomirski’s Facebook profile picture stands out from most. The grinning 6-year-old is captured in black and white and poses in an old-fashioned buttoned-up shirt and shorts.

The photograph, shot in 1939, is probably the last taken of him before he was murdered in the Holocaust.

A group in the boy’s hometown of Lublin is using the social networking site to breathe virtual life into Henio’s stolen childhood and give people around the world the chance to get to know him, as well as mourn the millions of others killed by Nazi Germany.

With nearly 3,000 friends, Henio’s page is one of the most striking examples of a new phenomenon in which people are setting up Facebook memorials for the victims of the past century’s greatest tragedies. Another project in Belgium attempts to create Facebook pages for each of the 27,594 Allied soldiers who were killed in Belgium during WWII, and Anne Frank and the Auschwitz memorial site are also on Facebook.

Users of Facebook and MySpace have long been creating memorial pages for friends and family – and China’s Baidu bulletin board allows something similar – but these new projects aim to rekindle lives of the more distant dead who might otherwise be forgotten.

“Henio was an eyewitness and a victim to the Nazis’ actions. Because he was murdered, he could never provide his testimony,” his page says in a post written by Neta Zytomirski Avidar, a cousin of Henio’s who lives in Israel and has helped build the site. “We try to guess what might have been his testimony.”

On Henio’s page, postings made by Henio’s cousin and other administrators shift between third-person descriptions of his life and posts in the voice of dead boy.

One of Henio’s pictures shows a Hebrew-language book – the kind Henio would have studied from if the war hadn’t broken out on what was to have been his first day of school, preventing him from ever attending.

The caption in Polish reads: “It will be September soon. I will go to school. I wonder what’s it like at school. I’m a bit afraid. Daddy says there is no need to be afraid. After all – he is a teacher. Today I saw my textbook.”

Some historians and educators fear the use of the social media in war remembrance could trivialize tragedies like the Holocaust, or that postings like those in Henio’s name could blur the boundaries between fact and fiction.

Adam Kopciowski, a historian at Lublin’s Marie Curie-Sklodowska University who specializes in Jewish studies, believes posts written in the dead boy’s voice raise ethical questions and amount to “abuse toward a child that has been dead for the past 70 years.”

“This is an act of pretending to be a person that has died, but we cannot be sure whether he spoke that way, whether he thought that way, whether he acted that way,” Kopciowski said.

Certainly amid the postings for Henio, some mundane, even silly, messages can be found on his Wall, such as invitations to play the popular Facebook game Mafia Wars. Some send him little virtual gifts: a bouquet of flowers, honey from Israel, dreidels at Hanukkah.

Joy Sather-Wagstaff, a cultural anthropologist at North Dakota State University, said the virtual gifts should not necessarily be seen as frivolous.

“I look at this as a virtual version of what they would leave if they actually went to a place where there was a monument to him. I bet they would leave little notes and toys – the physical material version of what you see them leaving on Facebook.”

Sather-Wagstaff co-faciliated an informal December conference in Washington, D.C., co-hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum entitled “Conscience Un-conference: Using Social Media for Good” – in which Henio’s page was a focus of discussion.

She said she sees the Henio phenomenon as one way people today grapple with what death means in an era of great tragedies of scale, from the Sept 11 attacks to the recent earthquake in Haiti.

Pawel Brozek, a history student who helps administer the site, said that when the project was launched last summer, it initially drew criticism from several Poles who said it insulted Henio’s dignity. But those voices were quickly hushed by an outpouring of positive reaction from around the world.

Anthropologist Mark Auslander, a Brandeis University professor who specializes in the use of ritual and art in commemorating the dead, said he believes social media like Facebook are “vital new technologies” that hold great promise in education, and that Henio’s site is one of the most captivating he has seen.

He discussed Henio in a recent blog, writing that “thousands of people log on in order to enter in to some sort of symbolic exchange with the Dead.”

“It tells us something profound about our deep desire around the world to be linked to one another through these fragile traces of memory,” Auslander told The Associated Press.

Technically speaking, Henio’s page goes against Facebook rules: Profile pages are meant primarily for individuals who are still living, to communicate with one another, share photos, play games. For users who have died, it’s possible to set up a “memorialized” account so friends and family can pay tribute.

Pages for businesses, celebrities and other public figures, meanwhile, generally have “fans” instead of “friends” – and that should also be the case for victims of historic tragedies like Henio, said Facebook spokesman Brandee Barker.

A big reason for this is that Facebook limits the number of “friends” individual users can have to 5,000. Fan pages for businesses and public figures have no such limit, so any number of Facebook users could join as fans in tribute to the individual’s life, Barker said.

She added that in “certain cases,” Facebook will work with users to “migrate” a profile page to a fan page.

Henio and his family were forced in 1941 by the Nazis to live in Lublin’s ghetto – one of the hellish places where many Polish Jews died from a lack of food, diseases or random executions.

At some point in 1942 Henio and his father Szmuel were sent to the nearby Majdanek death camp, and it is believed he died there by early 1943. His father was killed there soon after.

Henio’s Facebook page evolved from earlier commemorative projects launched by the group “Grodzka Gate-NN Teater” that uses theater and other forms of performance to resurrect the memory of the 40,000 Jews who lived in the eastern Polish city before the war – a third of the city’s population.

Henio was chosen because a trove of family pictures and letters was made available to the Lublin group by his cousin.

Piotr Kadlcik, the leader of Poland’s Jewish community, said that in today’s rapidly changing world he welcomes the effort.

“For us the past should be used and encouraged,” Kadlcik said. “These are not times for honoring people with huge marble monuments and official ceremonies.”

A similar drive is also behind a new Belgian attempt to create Facebook pages for each of the 27,594 Allied soldiers who were killed in Belgium during WWII and are buried in Belgian cemeteries, men from countries including the US, Britain and Australia.

High school students are each being asked to research the lives and battles of a chosen soldier and – with the help of archives kept by the Institute for Veterans – produce a Facebook page for each one with photos, audio and video. It is hoped relatives of the dead soldiers will submit whatever documents and other evidence they have.

The first Facebook page created as part of that project honors Lance Cpl. Thomas Leslie Cartwright of High Wycombe, England. Cartwright was killed in fighting in 1944 and is buried in the Kasterlee War Cemetery in northern Belgium along with 99 comrades of the British Army’s Royal Scots.

The plan is to have each soldier documented on Facebook by 2014, when the country will mark the 70th anniversary of Belgium’s liberation.

“You are only dead if no one talks about you anymore,” said Pol Van Den Driessche, a Belgian senator who launched the project, known as “Live and Remember.”

BEIJING: Cedric Simmons made a winning free-throw in Dongguan Marco Polo’s 102-101 win over Shanxi Zhongyu on Sunday, spoiling Stephon Marbury’s debut in the Chinese Basketball Association league (CBA).Simmons drew a foul from the two-time NBA All-Star guard and made one of the two free-throws with 5.3 seconds to go, before Maurice Taylor’s three-pointer attempt fell short on the buzzer.

Marbury had 15 points, 7-out-of-11 in the field and 0-out-of-6 on three-pointers, eight assists, four steals and four rebounds in 28 minutes.

It was Dongguan’s Tre Kelley the star of the game as the former Miami Heat’s guard had the game-high 34 points and a go-ahead basket when the Marco Polo were down 100-99 in the final minute.

Hou Bing’s free-throw, assisted by Marbury, tied the game on 101 to all with 10.8 seconds left.

Guangdong Hongyuan avoid a surprise and a repeat of history as they turned a 14-point deficit into a 99-84 away win over the Fujian SBS.

The defending champions lost 104-91 and scored only one point in the four quarter on December 8, 2008 at Jinjiang, Fujian Province.

They trailed 57-43 after the break but used a 32-13 third-quarter run to turn the table around when six players scored in double-digit numbers.

In other matches, Tianjin Ronggang beat Jilin Northeast Tigers 102-96, Liaoning Panpan beat Shaanxi Kylin 105-82, Shanghai Sharks beat Zhejiang Chouzhou 100-90, Qingdao Double Stars beat Shandong Gold 96-90, Zhejiang Guangsha beat Bayi Fubang 98-83, Jiangsu Dragons beat Beijing Ducks 102-96.