- No telling if it will hold up for more than a couple of days, but I still welcome news that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's government will formally sign a framework agreement for a cease-fire with rebels in Sudan's volatile Darfur region this week. The alleged peace deal was confirmed by both a rebel representative and state media Saturday. Dr. Tahir al-Fati, chairman of the rebel group Justice and Equality Movement's legislative assembly, explained that a preliminary document for the framework agreement was signed Saturday in Chad between representatives of the two sides. The formal agreement is scheduled to be signed Tuesday in Doha, Qatar. As a gesture of good faith, Sudan’s president also called off death sentences against members of the rebel group who were convicted after clashes in the Khartoum suburb of Omdurman. According to Mahamat Hisseine, spokesman for the government of Chad, the document to be signed on Tuesday will "be an agreement as a cease-fire between the government of Sudan and the Justice and Equality Movement [JEM]. All these details would be part of a general cease-fire agreement that is still being finalized." The obvious hope is that the agreement leads to a permanent cease-fire, but that is obviously a tall order under any circumstances. Still, the deal is a hopeful sign on the heels of last year’s confidence-building agreement in Qatar, signed by both Sudan's government and the JEM. This is a grueling six-year conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands, so it cannot end soon enough. Qatar has been the chief mediator between the two sides in the Darfur conflict, which began in 2003 after rebels started an uprising against the Khartoum government. In response, the government did what governments always do when rebels attack: launch a brutal counter-insurgency campaign. The campaign was aided by government-backed Arab militias that went from village to village in Darfur, killing, torturing and raping residents. Those facts come from none other than the United Nations, Western governments and human rights organizations. The U.N. may be a toothless international punchline for the most part, but that doesn’t mean they can't tell the truth in situations such as this. Al-Bashir is not exactly a saint himself, having been charged with genocide by the International Criminal Court last year for the government's campaign of violence in Darfur. The death tallies are literally staggering: In the past seven years, more than 300,000 people have been killed through direct combat, disease or malnutrition and another 2.7 million people fled their homes because of the incessant fighting. So even though the peace process is tenuous at best, I am choosing to land on the side of hope here and root for a long-awaited end to one of the most heinous and heart-breaking situations anywhere in the world……………
- Rarely do I root for multimillionaire athletes because I feel like they have been greatly wronged. That’s doubly true for those making eight figures in a given season and yet, I found myself cheering and rooting for guard Tracy McGrady in his New York Knicks debut Saturday night. It was his first game since being traded from the Houston Rockets, the team he had played for the past five-plus seasons. Things went sour for McGrady in Houston after he had knee surgery midway through the 2008-09 season and struggled to get back on the court. He felt like he was finally healthy more than a third of the way through this current season and pressed the Rockets to put him back on the court. Instead, they continued to downplay his return and push it back over and over again. The more McGrady felt like he was ready to play, the more the team seemed determined to keep him off the court – for no good reason. Perhaps they worried about him disrupting the chemistry of their scrappy, overachieving squad, I don’t know. What I do know is that he played a mere six games with Houston this season and wasn’t allowed to play more than seven minutes in any of those games. The tension between he and the team reached such heights that he was given permission to leave the team and stay home until they decided what to do with him, meaning finding a suitable trade. That trade came just before Thursday’s NBA trade deadline in the form of a three-team deal that sent McGrady to New York. After months of the Rockers pooh-poohing his ability on the court and casting doubts as to whether or not he had anything left from his All-Star past, all eyes in the basketball world were on the world’s most famous arena, Madison Square Garden, for Saturday night’s game against Oklahoma City. Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni announced earlier in the day that McGrady would be in the starting lineup and indeed he was. Not only that, T-Mac looked every bit like a starter and star on the mend, posting an impressive , 26 points on 10-of-17 shooting, five assists and four rebounds in 32 minutes. Yes, he MSG sat most of fourth quarter and overtime because his conditioning still isn’t fully at game level yet, but he’ll get there. It was his first real action of 10-plus minutes in over a year and his first action of any kind since December. And no, his efforts weren’t enough to help the Knicks avoid a121-118 overtime loss. However, it was still good to see T-Mac prove that it was the Rockets who were wrong in their little showdown and that had they given him a chance to play, he still had something to offer…………
- Dammit, I told you all that if we did not do something to address this problem, it would come back to bite us all in the ass. Did I or did I not suggest some sort of mentoring program to prevent young, at-risk bears from turning to lives of crime and unruliness to support their eating habits? Well look at what we have on our hands now and it’s safe to say that you all should have listened to me. The incident I am referring to occurred in Altoona, Fla., where a woman called police after discovering her car window was smashed out, her seats were ripped to shreds and claw marks were scratched all along the vehicle’s exterior. The police came to take the “victim’s” statement and process the crime scene, but their search for suspects quickly went from human to bear when they found a large noseprint on one of the non-broken windows and a healthy dose of bear fur inside the trashed car. Determining why the bear chose to break into this particular car wasn’t difficult; the owner said she left a bag of garbage in the trunk, which undoubtedly drew the bear in and sparked his anti-vehicular rage. But honestly, the culprit here isn’t the car’s owner or that bag of garbage she left in her trunk. No, the finger needs to be pointed at a society which so lazily and callously ignores the mounting problems and descent into lawlessness by young bears and refuses to deal with the problem until it’s too late. These bears don’t have solid role models growing up and they begin with small incidents like scaring people on nature hikes and raiding coolers left out at campsites. But they gradually escalate and eventually, they are raiding cars in random parking lots simply because there is a bag of smelly garbage sitting in the trunk. The sad thing is that incidents like this one could easily be avoided if anyone cared enough to give of themselves and their time to mentor these young bears and steer them in the right direction. Heck, Tony Dungy will mentor anything with a pulse these days, so maybe he could get the ball rolling. No matter what, someone has to step up and take action so we don’t have any more incidents like the one that took place on Dorrwood Lane in Altoona Tuesday morning……………
- On a weekend when many Americans were expected to tune in to the Olympics, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island took advantage of weak competition to b*tch-slap the rest of the box office field and win the earnings race with a $40.2 million take. With no other wide-release films making their debut, Shutter romped to a win and posted a total that marks a career best for both Scorsese and star Leonardo DiCaprio. It was markedly better than the result from their last project together, 2006’s The Departed, which opened to $26.9 million. Critics were fairly harsh on Shutter and you know that the suits at Paramount had to be gripping in the days leading up to its release. Heck, the studio even pushed back a schedules Oct. 2009 release date for the film, a move the studio officially blamed on marketing expenses. Coming in a distant second was Valentine’s Day with its star-studded cast and ridiculous plot ($17.2 million). A 69-percent drop from last weekend isn’t surprising for this particular movie, given the fact that last weekend was Valentine’s Day weekend and all. In third place was James Cameron’s animated stalwart Avatar, which posted yet another record-breaking performance in its 10th weekend, earning $16.1 million more to boost its cumulative total to a record high once again. In fourth place was Percy Jackson and the Olympians ($15.3 million), which dropped a hefty 51 percent in its second weekend of wide release, the same sort of fate suffered Universal’s crap-tacular horror flick The Wolfman (No. 5, $9.8 million) as it lost 68.7 percent of its audience from last weekend. The other noteworthy debut for the weekend was, Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, which is noteworthy not so much because of the film itself but rather its director. Y’know, the dude who fled the United States a couple decades back rather than face trial for having sex with a 13-year-old girl and has remained at large since then, only to find himself arrested and on the verge of being shipped back to the U.S. recently. Well, his new film banked a $179,000 from four theaters, no doubt owing much of that success to attention garnered by Polanski’s ongoing legal troubles. But I suppose that in the current movie landscape, you take attention for your project any way you can get it and were Polanski to score a record-breaking run with Ghost Writer, perhaps other directors would follow his example. Umm, then again, prolly not. Never mind that one………..
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