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Spielberg may step down as Beijing Olympics adviser

Director Steven Spielberg may step down as artistic adviser to next year's Beijing Olympics unless China adopts a tougher stance towards Sudan over the conflict in Darfur, ABC television said yesterday.

"Steven will make a determination in the next few weeks regarding his work with the Chinese," Spielberg's spokesman Andy Spahn told ABC television.

"Our main interest is ending the genocide. No one is clear on the best way to do this," Spahn said in an article that appeared on the network's Web site yesterday.

He said "all options were on the table," including resigning.

The director's final decision would depend also on a statement on Sudan by the Chinese government expected in the coming days, Spahn said.

"We expect to hear something from the Chinese government sometime soon, very soon," Spahn said.

"Steven is one [of] many advisers to the Beijing Games and he is trying to use the games to engage the Chinese on this issue. We are in the midst of that right now. We're engaged in a little bit of a back-and-forth private dialogue," Spahn said.

Spielberg came under criticism earlier this year from US actress and UNICEF goodwill ambassador Mia Farrow, who accuses China of lending financial support to Sudan as it backs militia attacks in the Darfur region.

"Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?" she and her son wrote in a March commentary in the Wall Street Journal.

Farrow warned that the Oscar-winning director of the Holocaust film Schindler's List risked becoming a modern version of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, known for her 1936 Berlin games film Olympia.
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