IHT Quick Read: Feb. 23

NEWS Since the days of the Medici family in Florence, the banking house of Monte dei Paschi has rained wealth on the people of Siena, Italy. For 541 years, it has endured war, plague and panic, and it stands today as the world’s oldest operating bank. But inside the stately offices of Monte dei Paschi di Siena, a thoroughly modern fiasco has done what the centuries could not. Monte dei Paschi, founded in 1472, has been brought to its knees by 21st-century finance. Jack Ewing and Gaia Pianigiani report from Siena.

Despite growing confidence that Europe is managing its debt crisis and is poised to embark on a recovery, fresh developments on Friday indicated that the region continues to struggle to stimulate growth while cutting spending to pare deficits. James Kater reports from Brussels.

Alcatel-Lucent, the struggling French telecommunications equipment maker, on Friday hired a former Vodafone and France Télécom executive, Michel Combes, to lead the company through what might be a major downsizing. Mr. Combes, 51, will take over for Ben Verwaayen, who had failed in four years to bring the equipment maker, created by the 2006 merger of Alcatel of France and Lucent Technologies of New Jersey, to sustained profit. Kevin J. O’Brien reports from Berlin.

Another big food producer was ensnared in the scandal over horse meat in beef products Friday when the company that owns the Iglo and Birds Eye brands withdrew a dozen types of prepared meals from stores in four European countries. The Iglo Foods Group, the parent company, said it took the action after a chili con carne dish, produced by a Belgian company called F! rigilunch and on sale in Belgium, was found to contain about 2 percent horse meat. Stephen Castle reports from London.

A deadly attack by militants on an Algerian natural gas plant last month has dealt a major setback to a group of North African countries whose prospects as oil and gas producers were already cloudy. Both oil and natural gas production have been in decline in Algeria, the region’s biggest gas producer, since the mid-2000s. In Libya, the rebellion that ousted Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and its chaotic aftermath have disrupted oil and gas exploration. In Egypt, rising domestic consumption, encouraged by government policies, has cut into exports. Stanley Reed reports from London.

ARTS The director David Lynch has released a musical album, exhibited his artwork, designed a nihtclub and worked tirelessly for T.M. What he has not been doing is making movies. Claire Hoffman reports from Los Angeles.

What’s the Matter with Kenya

Rendezvous's editor, Marcus Mabry, and Marc Lacey, a deputy foreign editor, discuss the escalating ethnic violence in Kenya as elections approach.

What’s the Matter with Kenya

Rendezvous's editor, Marcus Mabry, and Marc Lacey, a deputy foreign editor, discuss the escalating ethnic violence in Kenya as elections approach.

Russian Nationalists Say ‘Nyet’ to Foreign Words

LONDON â€" 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, wich 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.”

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 cuntry 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

The Lichtenstein You Know, and the One You May Not

LONDONâ€"At a preview of “Lichtenstein: A Retrospective,” at the Tate Modern earlier this week, a man pushed a toddler in a stroller as he considered the artwork. Both studied the paintings with apparently equal interest, which you could understand, since the bold patterns, the thick, graphic outlines and bright colors of Roy Lichtenstein’s work often resemble the simple, eye-catching illustrations of a child’s book or comic.

Almost everyone knows what a Lichtenstein looks like, even if they don’t know that it’s a Lichtenstein. The famed pop-art pieces, with their speech bubbles (“Oh Jeff, I love you too… But…” is the exhibition avatar), and their look of cheap advertising or pixelated television screens, are like Andy Warhol’s soup cans; so reproduced and recognizable that you might never know there is an original.

But this exhibition (on view through May 27), which was shown with some sligt differences at the National Gallery of Art in Washington before coming to the Tate, does a brilliant job of grouping the paintings to show unexpected facets of Lichtenstein’s career. The first major retrospective of his work since his death in 1997, it moves from very early work, made before he embarked upon the comic-book style that would mark him as a major exponent of Pop Art, to the final works, “Chinese Landscapes,” that he painted before he died at 73.

As the New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote in his review of the show in Washington, “his work looks like no one else’s, and some of it still feels fresh and audacious. He encapsulates, at least in his early work, the spirit of an era. He is embedded in the culture now, and unlikely to be dislodged.”

To a non-Lichtenstein specialist (that would be me), the Chinese piec! es were the last in a long line of surprises. The first was a room of black-and-white pieces, after the bold primary colors of the early comic-inspired pieces â€" among them the work that put the artist on the path to success, the 1961 “Look Mickey,” inspired by his young son’s picture books.

The monochrome room contains, among other things, an enormous replica of a composition book with a black-and-white swirly- patterned cover. There is no frame; the painting reproduces, becomes, the object itself in Alice-in-Wonderland giant size. There is a painting of a radio, with a real strap attached; an effervescent tablet dissolving in water in an eruption of bubbles; a ball of string. Each object is ordinary, yet so precisely, rendered in their exploded form that they become strange and rather beautiful.

Also a surprise was the large room devoted to homages to other artists: pieces that rework, with due Lichtensteinian detail, paintings by Picasso, Monet and Mondrian, among others. There is als a 1974 homage to Matisse, in the form of four huge paintings that cover the walls of a smaller room. Called “Artist’s Studio,” they offer a vision of Lichtenstein’s own workplace, filled with some of the paintings we have just seen, but without any human figures.

Putting these paintings together in a small room gives the viewer the feeling of stepping into that studioâ€"and into art history; immediately after comes the jolting view of a series of painted mirrors that offer no reflection, and no such comforting immersion in the work.

Most touching, and farthest away from the exploding bombs and emoting women of the famous cartoon pieces, are the final “Chinese Landscapes,” which pay tribute to the nature painters of the Song Dynasty (960-1279). They are delicate, finely wrought studies of sea and sky; the dots are there, but as an almost pointillist shimmer of mist and cloud, with tiny cartoon-clear figures perc! hed right! at the edge of the paintings, minute specks on vast landscapes.

The anxieties of contemporary life, the headlong rush toward consumerism, the shadowy specter of war and violence, and the banal superficialities that Lichtenstein’s most famous work gets at is, here, left behind. The pared down, the unemotional, is a fascinating enlargement of the Lichtenstein we know.

Would You Halve Your Meat Consumption to Save the Environment

The phrase “I could eat a horse” has acquired a new meaning in Europe in recent weeks, where horse DNA has been found in “beef” products on supermarket shelves.

As my colleague Harvey Morris reported last week, the horsemeat scandal has already changed the buying habits of some consumers and is likely to change the way Europeans think about inexpensive meat for good.

Now the lead author on a scientific study on the environmental effects of food production suggests that eating a lot â€" the original meaning of the phrase â€" of meat severely harms the environment in ways we don’t usually think about.

Mark Sutton and colleagues found that the natural nitrogen and phosphorus cycles are seriously affected by fertilizers used in farming and that the imbalance is causing a wide array of environmental problems, from aquatic dead zones to ozone depletion. The findings were pubished this week in the United Nations-sponsored study, Our Nutrient World.

According to the scientists, 80 percent of nitrogen-fertilizer pollution can be attributed to meat production.

This news comes on top of well-publicized studies that found meat production uses 20 to 50 times more water than the production of vegetables.

According to Mr. Sutton, who is with the Natural Environment Research Council in Britain, consumers in rich Western nations eat too much meat and can reduce their environmental footprint by cutting back. Mr. Sutton is advocating consumers become demitarians â€" cutting their current meat consumption, whatever it is, in half.

“Eat meat, but less often â€" make it special,” Mr. Sutton told the press.

Join our sustainability conversation. Would you ever consider giving up or limiting your meat intake for the sake of the environment