Filmmakers at Sundance look to indie video game industry PARK CITY, Utah--Imagine a Sundance Video Game Festival, an event that might showcase new work from some of the world's best independent game makers.

Such an idea is not a stretch to video game makers who view themselves much like the independent filmmaking pioneers of decades ago--innovators whose work led the creation of the annual Sundance Film Festival taking place here.

The young, but fast-growing independent video game industry--which has been offering new genres, including documentary, casual and serious games--was the focus of a panel discussion Saturday for filmmakers interested in exploring the evolving video game medium.

The enthusiastic panelists, comprised of both indie game community members and those watching them, concluded that the movement is not only radically changing the gaming industry; it's changing the way in which people perceive the world.

"We've come to understand that we're at the beginning of a major revolution of learning," said panelist Connie Yowell, who reviews education grants for the MacArthur Foundation. "Games are based on productive conflict. Fundamentally, that's what learning is...We're beginning to understand just how powerful this medium is for learning." CNET

Murdered Turkish-Armenian writer shunned silence Hrant Dink spoke with quiet intensity about Turkey's most controversial issue. He wrote about it openly and bravely.
His murder is another challenge to the forces of modernisation in a country locked in a bitter internal debate about how it should deal with its past. BBC News

Sundance 2007 Invited from the same short film program as its namesake event, this exclusive collection of premiere work in short filmmaking premieres first in Park City, Utah -- and then rolls-out streaming to you. Free from anywhere in the world. Sundance Film Festival

Cancer deaths finally on decline in U.S. About 3,000 fewer people died from cancer in the United States from 2003 to 2004, the American Cancer Society reported on Wednesday.

It said the big decrease shows that not only has the death rate from cancer been reversed -- but it has been reversed so much that fewer people are dying, even though the population of elderly people, who are most susceptible to cancer, is growing.

The American Cancer Society projected there will be 559,650 deaths from cancer in 2007. "The Society also predicts there will be 1,444,920 new cases of cancer in 2007; 766,860 among men and 678,060 among women," it said in a statement.

The society uses a different method to project and calculate deaths now, so the 2007 numbers cannot be compared directly with the 2004 numbers.

"Cancer death rates have been declining for a long time. The declines have now outpaced the growth and aging of the population," Elizabeth Ward, director of surveillance research for the American Cancer Society, said in a telephone interview.

She said a small decline seen in the previous report had grown considerably, showing the trend was real.

Decreases in smoking may be a major factor, Ward said.

"I think tobacco control has had a real impact. There is also the influence of early detection and screening and thirdly the influence of improvements in treatment," Ward said.

The biggest fall in deaths was seen in colorectal cancer, the second-leading cause of U.S. cancer deaths, which will affect 112,000 people in 2007 and kill 52,000. Reuters Canada

Doomsday Clock Advances We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.

As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization. We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

This deteriorating state of global affairs leads the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists--in consultation with a Board of Sponsors that includes 18 Nobel laureates--to move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” from seven to five minutes to midnight. The Bulletin

Where's the outrage? A real antiwar movement would end our Iraq disaster. But the middle class doesn't care enough to protest, so the kids who go to community college will keep dying.

So now we wait for the end. The man who led America into the most disastrous war in its history has run out of tricks, out of troops and out of time. It is no longer a question of whether George W. Bush's presidency will officially die, but when -- and how many more Americans will have to die before it does.

We find ourselves, almost four years into the Iraq war, in a very strange situation. What do you do when it has become obvious that the leader of your country is -- there is no kinder way to put this -- a delusional fool? And that his weird fantasy war is hopelessly and irretrievably lost? Apparently, you just wait.

... there is no significant antiwar movement. And there isn't going to be one unless Bush completely loses it and decides to attack Iran. (Insane as this idea is, Bush might see it as the only way to simultaneously destroy what he regards as a Nazi-like threat and save his shattered presidency.) This isn't Vietnam, where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest. This is the new, post-draft America, where a subclass of poorly paid professional warriors does the bidding of a power elite. With some notable exceptions, Cindy Sheehan being the most famous, the warriors and their families, those who pay the price, do not protest. And the rest of the country, not facing death or the death of immediate family members, doesn't care enough to.

The sad truth is that America is not one nation. We may not be Iraq, breaking up in hatred and a primeval battle for power, but the fissures are deep. There is one America that fights, and another America that doesn't. The elites talk and the kids who go to community college get blown up. .. Salon

Writings show King as liberal Christian, rejecting literalism ... King was not a conformist Christian. He not only eschewed literalism, he was a strident critic of how the Christian church perpetuated injustices such as slavery and segregation.

"Too often has the church talked about a future good 'over yonder,' totally forgetting the present evil over here," King wrote in 1952 to Coretta Scott, his future wife. SF Gate

The many faces of American Muslims American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion," by Paul Barrett, is the ideal book to enlighten a whole host of people who don't realize they need it. That includes everyone who claims that moderate Muslims haven't spoken up against fundamentalist militants or that all Muslim women go around veiled or that the religion is inherently warlike. It also includes everyone whose only response to Islamist terrorism is to talk about the sins of Israel, those who claim that Islam doesn't have a growing problem with violent fanatics or the role of women, and those who insist that it is purely a religion of peace. Salon

Archaeologists find ancient stone tools What appear to be crude stone tools may provide evidence that people lived in Minnesota 13,000 to 15,000 years ago, which if confirmed would make them among the oldest human artifacts ever found in North America, archaeologists said Friday.
Archaeologists in the northern Minnesota town of Walker dug up the items, which appear to be beveled scrapers, choppers, a crude knife and several flakes that could have been used for cutting, said Colleen Wells, field director for the Leech Lake Heritage Sites Program. Spokesman Review

Top 10 Discoveries of 2006
How do you know it's been an extraordinary year in archaeology? When the discovery of the earliest Maya writing and a 2,500-year-old sarcophagus decorated with scenes from the Iliad don't crack ARCHAEOLOGY's Top 10 list:

1. Valley of the Kings Tomb
KV63 was the first tomb to be excavated in the Valley of the Kings since Tutankhamun's in 1922. The chamber held seven 18th Dynasty coffins.

2. 3-Million-Year-Old Child
After years of chiseling tiny bones out of sandstone blocks from Ethiopia's Rift Valley, paleontologists announced the discovery of a nearly complete Australopithecus afarensis child (see "The New Face of Evolution").

3. Olmec Script
A stone block uncovered in the 1990s in Veracruz, Mexico, was shown to bear the first definitive proof that the ancient Olmec had a writing system, the oldest in the New World (see "What We Learn").

4. Irish Bog Psalms
In a peat bog near Dublin, bulldozer operator Eddie Fogarty found a book of Pslams, the first early medieval manuscript discovered in Ireland in 200 years.

5. Peru's Temple of the Fox Dating to 2200 B.C., an Andean templ
e was found with unprecedented astronomical alignments, including a facelike disk that frowns at the sunset on the first day of the harvest.

6. China's "Guest Worker"
DNA analysis of bones found near the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuangdi (r. 247-221 B.C.) shows the remains belonged to a Persian man, likely a captive forced to work on the emperor's tomb (see "Worker from the West").

7. Tomb of the Roaring Lions
Grave robbers led Italian authorities to the oldest tomb paintings in the western Mediterranean. The seventh-century B.C. Etruscan scenes feature fanciful lions (see "Flights of Fancy").

8. Lost Kingdom of Tambora
The discovery of a modest house buried by an 1815 volcanic eruption in Indonesia presented the first evidence of the Kingdom of Tambora.

9. Scythian Mummy
A burial mound in the Mongolian Altai Mountains yielded the 2,500-year-old frozen remains of a blond Scythian warrior in full regalia.

10. Brazilian Stonehenge
A circle of some 130 granite blocks in the Brazilian state of Amapa was hailed as a possible 2,000-year-old winter solstice marker. Archaeology

Greece hunts new generation of militants Greek police spent nearly 30 years hunting far-left terror groups, whose aging members were captured before the 2004 Olympics. Now authorities say they are dealing with copycat militants -- styled on those 1970s radicals -- who were blamed for Friday's attack on the U.S. Embassy in Athens.
The pre-dawn rocket attack, which was aimed at the embassy seal and caused no injuries, bore similarities to strikes by deadly groups such as November 17 and Revolutionary Popular Struggle, or ELA, many of whose members are serving life sentences in prison near Athens. CNN

Warlords agree to disarm Nairobi: Key Somali warlords have agreed to disarm their fighters and join the transitional government, an official said on Friday.
The announcement followed a meeting on Friday between Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf and clan leaders that proceeded even as - just outside the presidential residence - clan gunmen fired a rocket-propelled grenade and exchanged gunfire with government troops. Gulf News

German Comedy About Hitler Criticized ..."Mein Fuehrer," which opens in Germany Thursday, could generate empathy for the former Nazi dictator by its portrayal of him as a comic figure who had a bad childhood.
"It gets people to suffer with him, to say `this poor guy," said Kramer,.. SF Gate

A speech that ignored the real disaster ... George W. Bush told Americans last night that failure in Iraq would be a disaster. The disaster is Bush's war, and he has already failed. Wednesday night was his chance to stop offering more fog and be honest with the nation, and he did not take it.
Americans and the world needed to hear a clear plan to extricate U.S. troops from the disaster that Bush created. What they got was more gauzy talk of victory in the war on terrorism and of creating a "young democracy" in Iraq. In other words, a way for this president to run out the clock and leave his mess for the next one. the International Herald Tribune

Al-Majid admits ordering executions Ali Hassan al-Majid, the former head of the Iraqi military's northern command, has said that he ordered troops to execute villagers who refused to leave their homes during an operation against the Kurds in 1988.... "Yes, I gave my instructions to consider these villages as prohibited areas and I gave orders to the troops to catch anyone they find there and execute them after investigating them," al-Majid said. English Aljazeera

HOW TO CLOSE GUANTÁNAMO
Enough is enough!
Join activists worldwide TODAY in showing solidarity with the detainees and their families, demanding once more, and louder than ever, that the US government close Guantánamo! Ammesty International

Peace activists target Guantanamo ... Protests will be held in several cities around the world, including Rome, London, Tokyo and New York.
Critics say the detention centre should close because it has damaged US credibility. They believe momentum is growing towards closing it.... BBC News

MySpace Refused Common Cause Ad

By Dawn Holian Iype
Posted on Wed Jan 10, 2007 at 10:32:19 AM EST

With just one week left to send messages to the FCC about media ownership, we thought we'd try to reach out to the next generation of media activists by posting an ad on MySpace.

But they said 'no'.

MySpace told us that they "won't allow that to be shown."

And that's exactly the problem: Big Media (MySpace was bought by NewsCorp in 2005) has too much control over what the public hears, sees and watches.

We still have time to get the word out -- if we act fast. Tell us where you think we should be advertising. Vote in the poll or leave a comment.

Or, help us do an end-run around the censors at MySpace. Post our ad on your MySpace page, or on any blog or website you're involved with.


Comon Cause