Noble Peace Prize

A society of Indian holy men meets regularly in a Guatemala City apartment to study the Mayan calendar, a 2,500-year-old timekeeping system that is at the center of their religion. In recent years, their reading of the calendar has told them that an ancient prophecy is about to come true: "The time of darkness" is coming to an end. The Mayan people, exploited for five centuries, second-class citizens in their own land, will soon enter an age of "clarity and brightness."

A society of Indian holy men meets regularly in a Guatemala City apartment to study the Mayan calendar, a 2,500-year-old timekeeping system that is at the center of their religion. In recent years, their reading of the calendar has told them that an ancient prophecy is about to come true: "The time of darkness" is coming to an end. The Mayan people, exploited for five centuries, second-class citizens in their own land, will soon enter an age of "clarity and brightness."

"The Green Wave" tells its deeply moving story three ways, using animation, on-camera interviews and extensive documentary footage to show us a moment in history that reveals more about itself each time it is examined. That moment is the tumultuous, controversial 2009 presidential election in Iran, when the spirit of reform as symbolized by the color green ended up stained with the blood of demonstrators savagely attacked by forces loyal to the ruling regime. Although a 3-year-old election may sound like old news, "The Green Wave" has considerable contemporary relevance.

Geraldine Chaplin began getting sympathy calls from friends after Mother Teresa died last month. Though the daughter of the legendary Charlie Chaplin never met the beloved humanitarian, she plays the Catholic nun in the Family Channel movie, "Mother Teresa: In the Name of God's Poor," which airs Sunday. "It was very strange," Chaplin says over the phone from her summer home in Switzerland. "People started to phone me up and would say, 'I don't know why I am phoning you, but Mother Teresa's dead.'

It's hard to see how Russian President Vladimir V. Putin could have handled the Kursk submarine crisis any worse. Each move he made seemed to come out of the old Soviet playbook: Lie, cover up, then, when all else fails, blame the West. But after a week of remaining on vacation, tooling around on his water scooter and refusing vital foreign assistance that might have helped avert the death of all 118 sailors aboard the submarine, Putin may have started to turn a corner.

Carrying olive branches and offering prayers, Pope John Paul II and the representatives of the world's religions, including a Crow Indian medicine man from Montana and an African animist witch doctor, pledged Monday to work for peace. As 60 religious leaders joined the Pope in this picturesque medieval hill town where St. Francis preached 700 years ago, governments and rebels throughout the world put down their arms briefly in response to a papal call for a cease-fire and a day of prayer.