Emanuel explores Midway privatization

Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration will explore the possibility of privatizing Midway Airport but will take a shorter-term, more tightly controlled approach than was employed by former Mayor Richard Daley's team on the city's first go-round.

Chicago's last try, a 99-year lease that would have brought in $2.5 billion, died in 2009 when the financial markets froze up.

The city's latest intentions are expected to be formally announced Friday, ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline for deciding whether to retain a slot for Midway in the Federal Aviation Administration's airport privatization pilot program. The city put off this decision several times previously.

The move, preliminary as it is, is sure to be politically charged, given the anger over the way Daley's 75-year parking meter privatization deal has played out, with proceeds used to plug operating deficits and meter rates rising sharply.

With that historical backdrop, Emanuel is suggesting a more conservative approach. It includes a shorter-term lease of less than 40 years; a "travelers' bill of rights" aimed at ensuring any changes will benefit passengers; and a continuing stream of revenue for the city, giving it a shot to capture some growth.

And unlike the parking meter and Chicago Skyway lease deals, a new Midway transaction would not allow proceeds to be used to plug operating deficits or to pay for operations in any way, Emanuel said in an interview Thursday.

"I will not let the city use it as a crutch to not make the tough decisions on the budget," he said.

But while a shorter lease and greater city control may play well locally, those sorts of terms may not appeal to investors, experts said in interviews this month.

"The shorter the lease term, the lower the bid prices are going to be — that's just the math," said Steve Steckler, chairman of the Infrastructure Management Group, a Bethesda, Md.-based company that advises infrastructure owners and operators. "I'd be shocked if investors offered more than $2 billion for a 40-year lease," Steckler said.

Emanuel said: "Nobody knows until you talk to people. … I'm the mayor and I'm not agreeing to … 99 years. I'm saying it's either 40 years or less." His office has not offered an estimate of what such a deal could bring in, saying it would be premature.

"No final decisions have been made, but we can't make a decision until we evaluate fully if this could be a win for Chicagoans," Emanuel said.

A private operator would take over management of such revenue-producing activities as food, beverage and car rental concessions and parking lots. The FAA would continue to provide air traffic control, while the Transportation Security Administration would continue to provide security operations. The city would retain ownership.

Few details were provided about how privatization would affect travelers and Midway employees. Emanuel said specifics will emerge over time.

By year's end, the city will send the FAA a preliminary application, a timetable and a draft "request for qualification," a document the city will put out early next year to identify qualified bidders for the project. A review of the potential bidders will be conducted in the spring.

Last year, Emanuel expressed hesitation in pursuing a private lease for Midway unless a careful vetting process was in place, saying taxpayers were correct to be wary, given the city's history.

The evaluation process will be deliberate and open to public view, he said Thursday.

He pledged to create a committee of business, labor and civic leaders that will provide updates to the public on a regular basis and that will select an independent adviser to vet the transaction. The committee will deliver a report to the City Council, and there will be a 30-day review period before any vote.

"I set up a different process and a different set of principles that stand in stark contrast to what was discussed or done in the past," Emanuel said.

The FAA pilot program frees cities from regulations that require airport revenue to be used for airport purposes. It allows money to be withdrawn for other uses.

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Hundreds of flights canceled as area braces for snow

Periods of heavy snow are expected throughout the evening. Much of the Chicago area can expect to see two to four inches of snow by Friday morning. Areas North and West can expect to see six inches of snow. (Source: WGN TV)

As the Chicago area braced for its first snowstorm of the season, people were being warned to stay off highways and expect widespread power outages as high winds whip up near blizzard conditions in some spots.

The approaching storm was also creating havoc at O'Hare and Midway airports on the eve of the busiest travel day of the holiday season. FlightStats, which gathers data from the Federal Aviation Administration and airport, said nearly 500 flights have already been canceled at the two airports and more than 700 are reporting delays.

Southwest Airlines said it has canceled most of today's flights at Midway.

The long-awaited snow is expected to hit around 3 p.m. as temperatures drop and the winds pick up, the National Weather Service said. The heaviest snow will fall from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. with wind gusts of 50 to 60 mph. Three to 7 inches is expected in the far northwest suburbs, 2 to 4 inches in Chicago and 1 to 3 inches in the south and southwest suburbs.

The weather service says the winds will be the real problem. "We may not get a whole lot of snow but the potential for snowing, drifting and poor visibility is very high," weather service meteorologist Mark Ratzer said.

In its storm warning, the weather service said the greatest chance of near white-out conditions is near the shoreline in Lake and Porter counties in Indiana. The storm warning is in effect from 3 p.m. until 3 a.m. Friday.

In western Illinois and Wisconsin, a blizzard warning is in effect with as much as a foot of snow forecast. Snow could fall 1 to 2 inches an hour around Rockford late in the afternoon, the weather service said.

To the south, a high wind advisory has been issued for Kankakee County. And in Indiana, a lakeshore flood warning is in effect for Lake and Porter counties.

The storm will end a record stretch of 290 days without snow in the Chicago area. This will also be the lastest that the city has seen its first measurable snowfall.

More than 150 flights have already been canceled at O'Hare International Airport, according to the Chicago Department of Aviation. At Midway Airport, airlines have nixed more than 30 flights.

United Airlines said it is waiving change fees for travelers scheduled to fly out of O'Hare on Thursday who want to change their plans.

ComEd said it was bracing for power outages because of the storm. The company said it was preparing additional crews and equipment and asking for help from other utilities to respond quickly to outages.

ComEd Vice President Terence Donnelly said the storm was “expected to be especially damaging” to the company's power system because of the combination of wind, snow and ice.

The Illinois Toll Highway Authority urged motorists to stay off the highways this afternoon.

"This weather event is expected to impact most of the tollway system – from Rockford to Chicago – resulting in rapidly deteriorating driving conditions across the entire region,” tollway executive director Kristi Lafleur.  “We urge everyone to stay off the roads this afternoon and evening, if possible, but if you must drive, slow down and allow plenty of extra time for the commute home.”

The agency said it was mobilizing its full fleet of 182 snowplows on the 286-mile toll road system.

The Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation said it was readying its main fleet of nearly 300 trucks.  More than 200 of them are ready to go, and another 150 trucks can be dispatched if necessary, according to department spokeswoman Anne Sheahan.

The city has 285,000 tons of road salt on hand.
 
The department’s primary concern is icy conditions that could make the evening commute difficult, Sheahan said. She cautioned all drivers to be aware of driving conditions and department trucks out on the road.

The cancellations at O'Hare and Midway are likely to ripple into Friday, when the Chicago Department of Aviation expects 200,000 passengers to pass through O'Hare Friday and about 66,000 passengers through Midway.

The approaching storm dropped nearly a foot of snow in Des Moines. The airport at Creston, Iowa, recorded the highest winds, with a gust of 53 mph.

On the southern edge of the storm system, high winds damaged homes and downed trees in central Arkansas, the weather service said. A powerful storm peeled the roofs off buildings and toppled trucks in Mobile, Ala., but injured no one. Tornado warnings remained in effect in parts of Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama early Thursday.

Transportation officials shut down parts of Interstate 29 in Missouri early Thursday, and Interstate 80 in Nebraska remained closed due to blowing snow.

Contributing: Associated Press

chicagobreaking@tribune.com
Twitter: @chicagobreaking

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Nintendo’s amazing triumph in Japan may doom the company internationally

According to Japanese gaming bible Famitsu, Nintendo (NTDOY) 3DS sold 333,000 units in the week ending December 16, while Sony’s (SNE) PS Vita limped along at 13,000 units, the new Wii U did an okay 130,000 units and the PlayStation 3 managed to sell 46,000 units.  The utter hardware domination of the 3DS is reshaping the Japanese software market. Franchises that were thought to be fading have been revitalized in their portable versions. The 3DS version of the ancient Animal Crossing series, famed for being the game where nothing happens, hit a staggering 1.7 million units last week in Japan. Inazuma Eleven sold 170,000 units in its launch week, up from 140,000 units its DS version managed in 2011.

[More from BGR: RIM, HTC and Nokia could all be headed the way of Palm]

Nintendo’s portable console 3DS had a muted start in its home market in the spring of 2011. Many thought that Sony would have a fair shot at competing with Nintendo once Playstation Vita launched at the end of 2011. But once Nintendo executed an aggressive price cut for 3DS in the summer of 2011 and then launched a large-screen version of the console in mid-2012, the gadget has grown into a Godzilla in Japan, demolishing both Sony Vita and aging tabletop console competition.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 browser smokes iOS 6 and Windows Phone 8 in comparison test [video]]

3DS is doing well also in America, where its lifetime sales are moving close to the 6 million unit mark this holiday season. According to NPD, the 3DS sales in the United States topped 500,000 units in November. That’s a decent number, though far from the torrid volume the portable is racking up in its home market. The U.S. November video game software chart was dominated by massive home console juggernauts: new installments of Call of Duty, Halo and Assassin’s Creed franchises shifted more than 13 million units in retail. At the same time, the Japanese software chart remains in a ’90s time warp, dominated by Nintendo’s musty masterpieces: Super Mario Brothers, Pokemon, Animal Crossing, etc.

Japanese and American tastes have always been different. But what we are witnessing now is a particularly fascinating divergence. American consumers are spending more of their time and money on smartphone and tablet games, while console game spending is increasingly focusing on massive, graphically stunning blockbuster titles on Xbox360 and PS3. The casual gamers are shifting to mobile games, while hardcore gamers remain attracted to sprawling epics on home consoles. The overall video game spending in America keeps declining month after month, as casual titles and mid-list games slide. But the Triple A whales like the Call of Duty series are doing better than ever.

In Japan, Nintendo has been able to battle back iPhone and Android game invasion with a nostalgic series of portable games that basically recycle the biggest hits of ’80s and early ’90s. Mario, Pokemons and other portable heroes are slowly losing their grip on U.S. and European consumers. But in Japan, some form of national nostalgia is keeping Nintendo on track.

The problem here is that the Japanese success of the 3DS may now be convincing Nintendo that it does not have to reconsider its business strategy. The smartphone and tablet game spending continues growing explosively across the world. Unlike console games, mobile game sales in China are legal. The global gaming spending is shifting towards new hardware platforms even as console mammoths like Halo still reign in America. At this critical juncture, Nintendo has managed to cocoon its home market in a web of nostalgia, turning the 3DS console and its Eighties left-over franchises into epic bestsellers yet again.

This means that there is no sense of urgency to push Nintendo into rethinking its long-term plans. The company may continue simply ignoring the smartphone and tablet challenge, designing new portable consoles and the 28th Mario game to support it. Twenty years ago, Japan’s insularity doomed its chances to succeed in the mobile phone business. And now the idiosyncratic nature of Japan may be leading its biggest entertainment industry success astray.

This article was originally published by BGR

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“Gangnam Style” in line for UK dictionary inclusion

LONDON (Reuters) – He has the most-watched video in Youtube history, become a pop sensation with a horse-riding dance craze that has swept the world and now Korean singer Psy may cement his place in popular culture with recognition from a British dictionary.

“Gangnam Style,” Psy’s signature song, has been chosen along with “fiscal cliff” and “Romneyshambles” as some of Collins Dictionary‘s words of the year.

“We were looking for words that told the story of the year,” said Ian Brookes, the dictionary‘s consultant editor.

“Some words are from events that have been and gone and so are not likely to stick around … but others are probably here to stay.”

Other headline entries centered on American politics.

“Fiscal cliff” has drawn a lot of attention as the deadline for Congress and President Obama to agree on government spending and tax plans draws nearer.

While the term “Romneyshambles” entered the British public’s consciousness after Mitt Romney‘s gaffe-ridden visit to London in July in which he questioned Britain’s readiness to host the Olympics.

The inclusion of “47 percent” on the list after a leaked video showed Romney telling donors that 47 percent of Americans would definitely vote for Obama because of their dependency on the government capped off a bad year for the losing presidential candidate.

Collins received over 7,000 submissions on its online database.

Twelve words of the year – one for each month – were then selected on the basis of the frequency with which they were spoken, how many places they appeared and their longevity in public discourse.

Appearing on the Collins words of the year list is no guarantee of insertion in the next dictionary.

But Gangnam Style stands a very good chance, Brookes said.

“It’s obviously a craze, so there’s the possibility it will go away. But it’s been heard by so many people that I think it’s probably earned the right to go into the dictionary.”

Other words of the year include “mummy porn” after the popularity of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books, and “superstorm” after Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc along the east coast of America in October.

(Reporting By Peter Schwartzstein, editing by Paul Casciato)

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U.N. Suspends Polio Campaign in Pakistan After Killings of Workers

B.K. Bangash/Associated Press

A Pakistani woman administered polio vaccine to an infant on Wednesday in the slums of Islamabad. Militants have killed nine polio workers this week.

LAHORE, Pakistan — The front-line heroes of Pakistan’s war on polio are its volunteers: young women who tread fearlessly from door to door, in slums and highland villages, administering precious drops of vaccine to children in places where their immunization campaign is often viewed with suspicion.

Now, those workers have become quarry. After militants stalked and killed eight of them over the course of a three-day, nationwide vaccination drive, the United Nations suspended its anti-polio work in Pakistan on Wednesday, and one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health campaigns has been plunged into crisis.

The World Health Organization and Unicef ordered their staff members off the streets, while government officials reported that some polio volunteers — especially women — were afraid to show up for work.

At the ground level, it is those female health workers who are essential, allowed privileged entrance into private homes to meet and help children in situations denied to men because of conservative rural culture. “They are on the front line; they are the backbone,” said Imtiaz Ali Shah, a polio coordinator in Peshawar.

The killings started in the port city of Karachi on Monday, the first day of a vaccination drive aimed at the worst affected areas, with the shooting of a male health worker. On Tuesday four female polio workers were killed, all gunned down by men on motorcycles in what appeared to be closely coordinated attacks.

The hit jobs then moved to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which, along with the adjoining tribal belt, constitutes Pakistan’s main reservoir of new polio infections. The first victim there was one of two sisters who had volunteered as polio vaccinators. Men on motorcycles shadowed them as they walked from house to house. Once the sisters entered a quiet street, the gunmen opened fire. One of the sisters, Farzana, died instantly; the other was uninjured.

On Wednesday, a man working on the polio campaign was shot dead as he made a chalk mark on the door of a house in a suburb of Peshawar. Later, a female health supervisor in Charsadda, 15 miles to the north, was shot dead in a car she shared with her cousin.

Yet again, Pakistani militants are making a point of attacking women who stand for something larger. In October, it was Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl advocate for education who was gunned down by a Pakistani Taliban attacker in the Swat Valley. She was grievously wounded, and the militants vowed they would try again until they had killed her. The result was a tidal wave of public anger that clearly unsettled the Pakistani Taliban.

In singling out the core workers in one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health initiatives, militants seem to have resolved to harden their stance against immunization drives, and declared anew that they consider women to be legitimate targets. Until this week, vaccinators had never been targeted with such violence in such numbers.

Government officials in Peshawar said that they believe a Taliban faction in Mohmand, a tribal area near Peshawar, was behind at least some of the shootings. Still, the Pakistani Taliban have been uncharacteristically silent about the attacks, with no official claims of responsibility. In staying quiet, the militants may be trying to blunt any public backlash like the huge demonstrations over the attack on Ms. Yousafzai.

Female polio workers here make for easy targets. They wear no uniform but are readily recognizable, with clipboards and refrigerated vaccine boxes, walking door to door. They work in pairs — including at least one woman — and are paid just over $2.50 a day. Most days one team can vaccinate 150 to 200 children.

Faced with suspicious or recalcitrant parents, their only weapon is reassurance: a gentle pat on the hand, a shared cup of tea, an offer to seek religious assurances from a pro-vaccine cleric. “The whole program is dependent on them,” said Mr. Shah, in Peshawar. “If they do good work, and talk well to the parents, then they will vaccinate the children.”

That has happened with increasing frequency in Pakistan over the past year. A concerted immunization drive, involving up to 225,000 vaccination workers, drove the number of newly infected polio victims down to 52. Several high-profile groups shouldered the program forward — at the global level, donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations and Rotary International; and at the national level, President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa, who have made polio eradication a “personal mission.”

On a global scale, setbacks are not unusual in polio vaccination campaigns, which, by dint of their massive scale and need to reach deep inside conservative societies, end up grappling with more than just medical challenges. In other campaigns in Africa and South Asia, vaccinators have grappled with natural disaster, virulent opposition from conservative clerics and sudden outbreaks of mysterious strains of the disease.

Declan Walsh reported from Lahore, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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Illinois jobless rate falls to 8.7%

Illinois' unemployment rate dipped to 8.7 percent in November. (Bloomberg file photo / December 20, 2012)

Associated Press

12:30 p.m. CST, December 20, 2012

Illinois' unemployment rate dipped to 8.7 percent in November as the economy added 16,400 jobs.

Preliminary data released Thursday by the Illinois Department of Employment Security indicate the largest monthly job gain of the year. There still are 574,600 Illinoisans out of work. The rate does not reflect unemployed people who've quit looking for work.

IDES Director Jay Rowell says November's job growth is encouraging and "reinforces the trend of positive economic momentum."

But he says progress will slow if Congress and the president fail to come to a resolution on the so-called fiscal cliff.

November's seasonally adjusted rate is one-tenth of a percentage point lower than in October and 1.1 percentage points lower than November 2011.

Most job gains last month were in professional and business services and manufacturing.

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White House pushes gun policy effort after Newtown shooting

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Joe Biden will lead an effort to craft policies to reduce gun violence in a plan President Barack Obama was to lay out Wednesday amid calls for action after the massacre of 26 people, including 20 children, at a Connecticut elementary school.

Obama was not expected to unveil policy decisions but outline how his administration will proceed, White House aides said. The move could signal that he will make the issue a second-term priority and add momentum to a national debate over tighter gun control laws.

Obama has turned to Biden in the past to take a role in high-profile initiatives, including efforts on a deficit-reduction compromise with congressional Republicans in 2011. The vice president will join Obama for the announcement in the White House briefing room at 11:45 a.m. EST.

Biden's mission - to coordinate a strategy among government agencies in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut shootings - comes days after the mass murder that has generated a national outcry for greater efforts to stem gun violence.

U.S. Representative Ron Barber, who was wounded in a 2011 Arizona shooting that targeted his predecessor Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others, welcomed the effort and echoed other Democratic lawmakers' calls to ban military-grade guns.

"I really believe that we can put together a broad coalition to deal with particularly the assault weapons and the heavy firepower that these large capacity magazines contain," Barber told MSNBC on Wednesday.

Friday's massacre was the fourth shooting rampage to claim multiple lives in the United States this year.

The president demanded changes to the way the United States deals with gun violence at a memorial service in Newtown on Sunday. Obama said he would "use whatever power this office" holds to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Gun control has been a low priority for most U.S. politicians due to the widespread popularity of guns in America and the clout of the National Rifle Association, the powerful gun industry lobby.

The constitutional right to bear arms is seen by many Americans as set in stone, and even after mass shootings, politicians have tiptoed around specific steps to limit access to lethal weapons.

Even so, the horror of the Newtown killings, in which a 20-year-old man killed 6- and 7-year-old children and their teachers in their classrooms before taking his own life, has provoked an apparent change of heart in some politicians.

REVISITING GUN CONTROL

Lawmakers, including pro-gun Democrats and some Republicans, have said they are rethinking their stance on guns after Friday's shooting.

Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a longtime gun rights advocate, has said he is now open to more regulation of military-style rifles like the one used in Newtown. Obama spoke with him on Tuesday, the White House said.

A few Republicans have also expressed a willingness to revisit the gun control issue, though few have offered specifics.

Some gun-rights advocates have pointed to the school shooting as an example for the need to expand access to guns for some, such as teachers.

The White House spelled out some gun control measures on Tuesday that Obama would support.

Spokesman Jay Carney said Obama would back U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein's effort to reinstate an assault weapons ban. The president also would favor any law to close a loophole related to gun-show sales, he said.

Efforts to limit high-capacity gun ammunition clips would be another option, Carney said.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday called on Congress to act immediately to ban high-capacity magazines - attachments that can allow shooters to fire as many as 30 bullets within seconds.

Many on both sides of the issue have also pointed to the need to address mental-health issues, violence in the entertainment industry, and school safety.

Separately on Wednesday, Senator John Rockefeller called for a national study of the impact of violent video games on children, as well as for a review of the ratings system for such games.

(Additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Doina Chiacu and David Brunnstrom)

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Shooting renews argument over video-game violence

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the days since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a shell-shocked nation has looked for reasons. The list of culprits include easy access to guns, a strained mental-health system and the “culture of violence” — the entertainment industry’s embrace of violence in movies, TV shows and, especially, video games.

“The violence in the entertainment culture — particularly, with the extraordinary realism to video games, movies now, et cetera — does cause vulnerable young men to be more violent,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said.

“There might well be some direct connection between people who have some mental instability and when they go over the edge — they transport themselves, they become part of one of those video games,” said Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, where 12 people were killed in a movie theater shooting in July.

White House adviser David Axelrod tweeted, “But shouldn’t we also quit marketing murder as a game?”

And Donald Trump weighed in, tweeting, “Video game violence & glorification must be stopped — it is creating monsters!”

There have been unconfirmed media reports that 20-year-old Newtown shooter Adam Lanza enjoyed a range of video games, from the bloody “Call of Duty” series to the innocuous “Dance Dance Revolution.” But the same could be said for about 80 percent of Americans in Lanza’s age group, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Law enforcement officials haven’t made any connection between Lanza’s possible motives and his interest in games.

The video game industry has been mostly silent since Friday’s attack, in which 20 children and six adults were killed. The Entertainment Software Association, which represents game publishers in Washington, has yet to respond to politicians’ criticisms. Hal Halpin, president of the nonprofit Entertainment Consumers Association, said, “I’d simply and respectfully point to the lack of evidence to support any causal link.”

It’s unlikely that lawmakers will pursue legislation to regulate the sales of video games; such efforts were rejected again and again in a series of court cases over the last decade. Indeed, the industry seemed to have moved beyond the entire issue last year, when the Supreme Court revoked a California law criminalizing the sale of violent games to minors.

The Supreme Court decision focused on First Amendment concerns; in the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that games “are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature.” Scalia also agreed with the ESA’s argument that researchers haven’t established a link between media violence and real-life violence. “Psychological studies purporting to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively,” Scalia wrote.

Still, that doesn’t make games impervious to criticism, or even some soul-searching within the gaming community. At this year’s E3 — the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the industry’s largest U.S. gathering — some attendees were stunned by the intensity of violence on display. A demo for Sony’s “The Last of Us” ended with a villain taking a shotgun blast to the face. A scene from Ubisoft’s “Splinter Cell: Blacklist” showed the hero torturing an enemy. A trailer for Square Enix’s “Hitman: Absolution” showed the protagonist slaughtering a team of lingerie-clad assassins disguised as nuns.

“The ultraviolence has to stop,” designer Warren Spector told the GamesIndustry website after E3. “I do believe that we are fetishizing violence, and now in some cases actually combining it with an adolescent approach to sexuality. I just think it’s in bad taste. Ultimately I think it will cause us trouble.”

“The violence of these games can be off-putting,” Brian Crecente, news editor for the gaming website Polygon, said Monday. “The video-game industry is wrestling with the same issues as movies and TV. There’s this tension between violent games that sell really well and games like ‘Journey,’ a beautiful, artistic creation that was well received by critics but didn’t sell much.”

During November, typically the peak month for pre-holiday game releases, the two best sellers were the military shooters “Call of Duty: Black Ops II,” from Activision, and “Halo 4,” from Microsoft. But even with the dominance of the genre, Crecente said, “There has been a feeling that some of the sameness of war games is grating on people.”

Critic John Peter Grant said, “I’ve also sensed a growing degree of fatigue with ultra-violent games, but not necessarily because of the violence per se.”

The problem, Grant said, “is that violence as a mechanic gets old really fast. Games are amazing possibility spaces! And if the chief way I can interact with them is by destroying and killing? That seems like such a waste of potential.”

There are some hints of a sneaking self-awareness creeping into the gaming community. One gamer — Antwand Pearman, editor of the website GamerFitNation — has called for other players to join in a “Day of Cease-Fire for Online Shooters” this Friday, one week after the massacre.

“We are simply making a statement,” Pearman said, “that we as gamers are not going to sit back and ignore the lives that were lost.”

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A Minute With: Jessica Chastain on “Zero Dark Thirty”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Jessica Chastain carries the weight of starring in one of the year’s most anticipated films, “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the decade-long hunt and eventual killing of Osama bin Laden.

Critics say Chastain pulls it off seamlessly as “Maya,” based on a real-life CIA agent who played a major role in tracking down bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan.

As the film opens in limited U.S. release on Wednesday, Chastain, who is tipped as a likely best actress Oscar nominee for the role, talked to Reuters about playing a character she could not meet and why the film is an important look at America’s role in a dark war.

Q. What did you think when you saw this film finished?

A. “It is a tough one for me to watch, because there is so much responsibility with playing this woman. I find her to be incredible. And I didn’t want to change her story or make her a Hollywood version, with a lot of makeup. I didn’t want to trivialize what she did … I want her to like it, but I don’t know if she will ever see it.”

Q. How did you play someone you had never met?

A. “There was three months of working with (screenplay writer) Mark Boal, doing research, reading lists and talking to people. And then anything I could not solve through research, like what is her favorite candy – ’cause when we are all overseas we have something we do when we are homesick – I had to answer that question myself.”

Q. Boal hasn’t gone into too much detail about her?

A. “We have to protect her because she is an undercover CIA operative, still working.”

Q. What else did you know about her?

A. “When we finished the movie, when the Navy Seal book ‘No Easy Day’ came out. I raced to go read it, because I was like, ‘I need to know if my character is in the book!’ And they talk about Jen, the young CIA girl. Well, everything matched up. She was the only one that said 100 percent ‘he is there.’… They talked about how she had been on it close to a decade and they were only on it for 40 minutes. They said she was crying on the airplane afterwards.”

Q. During filming, were you ever worried about your safety, that the film might be misconstrued?

A. “As an actor you always worry about that. Because you think, maybe someone will see a film and they won’t understand the difference between acting and reality. The good thing is, what (director Kathryn Bigelow) and Mark have done, is that they have not made a propaganda film. They tried to make it as authentic as possible and respectful of the actual historical event as they could. That includes showing the intense interrogation techniques that were used. The end of the film – it’s not a lot of fist pumping and saying, ‘Here is our journey over 10 years and it was so difficult and we finally did it.’ It ends actually on a very different note.”

Q. Can you elaborate on that?

A. “Well, for me the whole thing is about the arc of this woman. She shows up in the beginning and she is wearing her best suit. She thinks she knows what she is in for, and she is completely out of her element. But over the 10 years, this woman, who has been trained to be unemotional and analytically precise … we see her struggling to keep it contained for 10 years and as she descends down the rabbit hole of the world she is in.

“So finally at the end when she is asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ there is no way to answer that question. … She has no idea where she belongs, now that this is done. But not only does it speak in terms of that, but the movie ends with that question – where do you want to go? Where do we go now as a country? Where do we go as a society? It is not a movie that ends with an answer, and I find that powerful.”

Q. How did you cope with filming the torture scenes?

A. “We filmed in a real Jordanian prison, in the middle of nowhere. The environment wasn’t great, especially as a woman.

“They had a lot of trust between the actors, nothing was dangerous or unsafe. There was a lot of discussion to make sure that we weren’t doing something that was going to be salacious. They just wanted it to be accurate.

“I know I am playing a character who has trained to be unemotional. But I have spent my entire life allowing myself to be emotional, and allowing myself to feel everything. … There was actually one day that we were doing a scene, and I said, ‘I am sorry’ and I just had to walk away, and I just started crying … it was a very intense experience.”

Q. You are a top chance for Oscar nomination. Would that be more or less rewarding for this role?

A. “Because she is still an active member of the CIA and undercover, she can’t take credit for what she’s done. … And by making this film, it is my idea as a way of thanking her. It would be very emotional because of that.”

Q. You compare your character to getting lost down a CIA rabbit hole. What about your own dizzying rise as an actress?

A. “That’s a good question. I do think that next year I need to go somewhere for a month and be in a room by myself and be like, ‘Ok, what now Jessica?’ But I am nowhere near where she was at the end of this mission.”

(Reporting By Christine Kearney, editing by Jill Serjeant and Doina Chiacu)

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Irish Government Set to Allow Abortion in Rare Cases

DUBLIN — The Irish government said Tuesday that it was preparing to allow abortion under limited circumstances in an effort to comply with demands by the European Court of Human Rights to clarify the country’s legal position on the issue.

Cathal Mcnaughton/Reuters

A vigil was held in Dublin on Monday in memory of Dr. Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist who died after being denied an abortion.

The proposed legislative and regulatory changes would allow abortion only in cases where there is a real and substantial risk to a woman’s life — as distinct from her health.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that abortion was permissible when risk was present, but the government never passed a law to that effect.

Addressing Parliament after the announcement, Prime Minister Enda Kenny was at pains to emphasize that the proposals would allow abortion only in certain cases. He added that the threat of suicide could be among them.

The abortion debate has convulsed Ireland for decades, but calls for change reached a crescendo after the death of Dr. Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist, in October. Dr. Halappanavar arrived at a Galway hospital in severe pain and was found to be miscarrying. Her fetus had a heartbeat, making termination of the pregnancy illegal under Irish law. She died of septicemia a week after admission.

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