Names and faces

LITTLE ROCK — NPR will no longer distribute the member station produced program World of Opera to about 60 stationsacross the country because show host Lisa Simeone helped organize an ongoing Washington protest, a network official said Friday evening. Instead, North Carolina-based classical music station WDAV, which produces the show, said it will distribute the nationally syndicated program on its own beginning Nov. 11. The station said it plans to keep Simeone as host and has said her involvement in a political protest does not affect her job as a music program host. NPR spokesman Dana Davis Rehm said the network disagrees with the station on the role of program hosts but respects its position. Simeone, who lives in Baltimore, was fired Wednesday as the host of a radio documentary program, Soundprint, because she helped organize an anti-war demonstration that also protested Wall Street.

Ti n t i n went home to Belgium on Saturday for the world premiere of Steven Spielberg’s The Adventuresof Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn. The movie is rolling out first across Europe and elsewhere before hitting the United States by the Christmas movie season. “To highjack Tintin and bring it to America first, and then release it overseas second, would be something that would not have even occurred to us,” Spielberg said. “From the outset, the plan was to give Tintin back to the countries where Tintin was the most beloved.” For Spielberg, a happy ending will mean the movie is such a box-office success that a sequel becomes unavoidable. Together with Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, he will be ready. “We have chosen the nextstory. We have a screenplay that is being written right now,” Spielberg said, refusing to say which of Herge’s two-dozen Tintin books he would take on.