Ralph Peters Blasts the Left’s Selective Outrage Over Islamist Treatment of Women

Brunei Ownership Casts a Shadow on a Beverly Hills Hotel (The New York Times)

LOS ANGELES — For longer than most here care to remember, Arthur Cohn, a producer of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” which won an Oscar in 1972, has staged an intimate pre-Academy Awards dinner for friends, movie stars and others at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

The actress Robin Wright and the chief executive of 20th Century Fox Film, Jim Gianopulos, were on hand this year. As ever, the peppery Polo Lounge tomato soup was part of the ritual. And Mr. Cohn now says that dinner will be his very last at the hotel, so long as the sultan of Brunei, whose sovereign wealth fund owns the property, enforces a new penal code that will permit the stoning of gays and adulterers in his home country.

“I absolutely couldn’t do the dinner,” said Mr. Cohn, who spoke by telephone on Friday from Switzerland, where he lives.

“If I’m respected in this industry, it’s as someone who sticks to my views,” he said.