"I am an unsentimental Jew. I am aware of our suffering, but I don't wallow in it," said Ronald Harwood, the British screenwriter, playwright and novelist.

The self-appraisal seems odd for a man whose credits include two of the most penetrating screenplays probing the extremes of human suffering.

In "The Pianist," for which Harwood won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, the title character observes the extermination of his fellow Jews while hiding in the rubble of Warsaw.

Harwood has a good shot at another Oscar on Feb. 24 for "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," based on the autobiography of Parisian fashion magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who is completely paralyzed by a stroke and can communicate only by blinking his left eyelid. The film's director, Julian Schnabel, and cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, are also in Oscar contention.

Beijing's gold-medal hotels

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De La Hoya makes his retirement plan

Starting this week at the Honda Classic, the tour will return to a traditional 36-hole cut for the top 70 and ties. If more than 78 players make the cut, there will be another cut to the top 70 and ties after the third round.

• Finnish ski jumper Harri Olli was banned for the rest of the season for breaching team rules and unsportsmanlike conduct at the ski flying world championships. The Finnish Skiing Association banned Olli after he reportedly disappeared late Friday and turned up Saturday three hours before the second day of jumping at the worlds in Germany.

The Totally Coolest Candidate Ever

Berkeley, I made a couple of comments about the use of Chelsea as a prop for controversy-free photo ops when her parents dropped her off for her first semester of college at Stanford. Scraping for something to say about the upcoming football game between Cal and Stanford, I criticized my school's rival for pouring resources into the circus surrounding Chelsea's arrival, suggesting that they were more concerned with maintaining a pristine, photogenic student body than educating as large and diverse a population as possible. I then encouraged Berkeley students to share our less refined ways by trashing the campus, including Ms. Clinton. Sure, my line "show your spirit on Chelsea's bloodied carcass" was over the top and poorly chosen. And then the AP wire snipped my column's line, "Chelsea Clinton represents the Stanford ethos of establishment worship which must be subverted and destroyed," into "Chelsea Clinton … must be destroyed." (The column is no longer available online.)

The comments made their way to Mrs.