The last days of the Rialto Cinemas Lakeside in Santa Rosa are ticking away, but owner Ky Boyd is looking ahead to creating a new venue to take its place.

It’s now looking likely that there will be no active Rialto venue in Santa Rosa for a year or more, but owner Ky Boyd says he’s confident that the film distributors who are critical to his business, will be ready to work with him again as soon as he is able to resume bookings.

One unexpected aspect in the current Rialto situation has been the outpouring of public support the theaters and their owner have received, including, Boyd notes, a heavily trafficked Facebook page.

For an extensive account of the back story and the history of movie theater ownership in Santa Rosa, read this.

There are short stories, and then there’s “micro-fiction,” such as the ultra-brief vignettes featured in Weekend All Things Considered’s “Three-Minute Fiction” contests.

Approximately 15,000 writers have submitted their creations in the first three rounds of the 3-Minute Fiction contests, and Guy Raz says that, even among the finalists, only a fraction of them have ever had anything published

With this level of participation, the process of reading and judging all the entries has become a bigger job, but Raz says listeners to his program will be kept apprised of the process as it unfolds.

Details on how to submit a story for the fourth round of the contest (which will be judged by author Ann Patchett , right) , as well as samples of some of the best submissions from the previous rounds can be found at  3-Minute Fiction.

Long-time NPR listeners will recognize Guy Raz as a well-traveled reporter for the network (his professional bio appears below) . It was just about a year ago that he made the transition to hosting the weekend afternoon newsmagazines, which he says required him to make a considerable adjustment.

Guy Raz joined NPR as an intern in 1997 and became Berlin bureau chief in 2000. In 2003, he was moved to London as NPR's bureau chief. In 2004, Raz left NPR for two years to work as CNN's Jerusalem correspondent.

During his six years abroad, Raz reported from more than 40 countries with a focus on Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

His reporting has been part of two Alfred duPont Awards and one Peabody awarded to NPR. He's been a finalist for the Livingston Award four times. For his reporting from Germany, Raz was awarded both the RIAS Berlin prize and the Arthur F. Burns Award.

He has profiled and interviewed dozens of world leaders, including Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres, General David Petraeus and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen.

As CNN's Jerusalem correspondent, Raz chronicled everything from the rise of Hamas as a political power to the incapacitation of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Israel's withdrawl from the Gaza Strip in 2005. In May 2004, he spent six weeks with U.S. forces in Najaf during a period of heavy fighting with Shiite insurgents.

In 2006, Raz produced a a five-part series called "The Language of our Times" which ran on All Things Considered. The stories attempted to turn words and terms like "Jihad" and "War on Terror" into "audio characters."

Raz's written work has appeared in Salon, Washington City Paper, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

An international trade agreement on counterfeiting, currently being negotiated in secret, may actually impose strict new enforcements of expanded copyright protections.

While it’s not unusual for international trade treaties to be negotiated behind closed doors, most of the rationales for doing so don’t apply in the case of ACTA. There are 37 nations involved in the talks, and they freely share materials among themselves; it has been the public—in all of those countries—that has been excluded from the process. The high degree of secrecy surrounding the ACTA negotiations are additionally suspicious, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation's International Policy director, Gwen Hinze (left) , when contrasted with the way other similar pacts were developed in recent years.

Extending the stringent protections of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to written work that is published online has already been tried in several of the countries that are party to the ACTA negotiations, says Gwen Hinze. But everywhere that has been tried, it has prompted enormous public outcry.

Requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to enforce a “three strikes” policy against anyone accused of three violations of the new, tougher copyright protections, is being advocated by the film and music industries—who are being consulted in the ACTA negotiations—and opposed by the ISPs, who are on the outside. The Electronic Frontier Foundation agrees with the ISPs, because, as Hinze observes, there are too many ways such an enforcement policy can go wrong.

There's additional background information on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement here. EFF is also mounting a letter-writing campaign to urge that  Congress demand the ACTA process be opened to public scrutiny.

Karl Marx was an economic and social theorist, and a self-described communist. But one thing he said he was not, was a Marxist.

Jerry Levy is a college professor, a longtime leftist activist and an actor who has been performing Howard Zinn’s Marx in Soho frequently for the past six years. (He's seen in character at the left.) He notes that the play’s central premise places the 19^th Century writer and theorist into the present day, giving Marx a platform to comment on contemporary issues.

Although Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin are often linked in connection with the Russian revolution a century ago, Levy says that Lenin is largely ignored throughout Marx in Soho.

Below are photographs of Howard Zinn (left) and the offstage Jerry Levy.

The Messenger is a film about war that doesn’t take sides, according to director Oren Moverman, but seeks instead to personalize the losses experienced by the families of the servicemen and women who don’t return.

Oren Moverman (right), writer-director of The Messenger, says there is no political agenda behind it, other than a desire to raise awareness about the human costs and consequences of modern warfare.

The Messenger has drawn generally good reviews, but Moverman is even more pleased that coverage of it has also included his central themes about the people it portrays.

In his private life, actor Woody Harrelson (below right)  is well know for his progressive politics. But in the film, Moverman says Harrelson was entirely in sync with the director’s apolitical stance.

View the trailer for The Messenger below, or go here for a sampling of reviews of the film.

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