- Jack Bauer was back leading a CTU tactical team as tonight’s episode of 24 kicked off. Due to Cole Ortiz being AWOL (more on that annoying storyline later), Jack stepped into the role in exchange for all charges against lady friend Renee Walker being dropped. Jack’s first task is going to a warehouse complex in Queens to bring in Fahrad Hassan, brother of Islamic Kingdom President Omar Hassan. Having fled after his cohorts in the plot to overthrow his brother and acquire nuclear materials for their country turned against him, Fahrad finds himself pinned down in a stock yard of some sort, wounded and waiting for the CTU team. CTU director Bryan Hastings urges him to stay where he is an not try to run. Fahrad disobeys the order and one of the men chasing him spots him and puts two bullets through his back. At the same instant the CTU team arrives, Fahrad falls to the ground, dead. The shooter must flee before he can confirm that he is in fact dead and Jack orders the CTU medics to keep Fahrad alive long enough to question him. Meanwhile, President Allison Taylor has been briefed by CTU that those who turned against Fahrad Hassan in his plot are members of the IRK’s own intelligence organization. She meets immediately with President Hassan and tells him that she needs intelligence documents so that CTU can show them to his brother and he can identify those involved in the conspiracy. After initially hesitating, he agrees to turn over the documents and calls Nabeel, his acting head of security, to begin the process. However, Nabeel doesn’t answer his phone because he is in a bit of trouble himself. He has been tasked with transporting Tarin, the former head of security, to the IRK embassy for questioning because the paranoid President Hassan suspects him of being part of the plot against him. Before leaving the U.N. building, Tarin meets with President Hassan’s daughter and his girlfriend Kayla. He tells her that a friend of his on the security staff will provide him with a gun and handcuff key to escape during transport and that she should meet him at a room at the Teodore Hotel in Manhattan he has secured. The plan works and Tarin pulls a gun on Nabeel and his driver during transport, forcing them into the storage compartment behind the rear seat and fleeing. Nabeel overhears Tarin on the phone with Kayla before he flees and when other members of the security team come looking for them and help them out of their spot in the back of the vehicle, Nabeel tells President Hassan as much. Back at the stock yard, Jack waits for the IRK security documents to arrive via computer to question Fahrad with. However, he dies before they arrive and Jack is forced to improvise. He suggests that because those in the plot can't be sure that Fahrad is dead, they leak to the press that he survived the shooting and is being transported to the hospital. His theory is that those involved in the plot will attack to silence Fahrad before he can talk and that the attacker can be caught and interrogated for intel. Hastings agrees and Jack leads the CTU team forward. The ambulance transports Fahrad to St. Julian’s hospital as if he were still alive and he’s taken inside and placed in a third-floor room. While there, Jack gets a call from Renee, who is being released from CTU and has learned of Jack’s role in having the charges against her dismissed. He tells her to have CTU take her to his apartment and that he will meet here there once this is all over. Earlier in the episode, Hastings made the decision not to press charges official and drew the ire of White House chief of staff Rob Weiss, but Hastings doesn’t care. News of Fahrad’s “survival” is broadcast on the late news and Samir, the man who co-opted Fahrad’s plot and turned it into a plan to attack New York, sees it and dispenses a young member of the group named Marcos to the hospital to take out Fahrad. Marcos is the group’s lone American and before going, he tries to warn his mother to leave New York to avoid being there when the nuclear bomb goes off. He accepts to assignment to kill Fahrad and arrives at the hospital strapped with a bomb. By the time he arrives, CTU is running facial recognition software on everyone in the hospital to find the attacker. Chloe is running the software and when Marcos approaches the hospital on foot, she spots him and tips off Jack. Marcos approaches a door manned by CTU agent Owen, who is instructed to comply with whatever Marcos demands of him. Owen nervously goes along with the plan and after surrendering his gun to Marcos, leads him to Fahrad’s room on the third floor. The plot is for Chloe to disable the bomb’s detonating mechanism remotely before Marcos reaches the third floor and after some brief issues, she is able to do so after Owen tricks Marcos into opening his jacket and exposing the bomb to a security camera. By the time Marcos barricades he and Owen inside Fahrad’s room, the bomb is a dud. Marcos adapts and shoots Fahrad several times in the chest with Owen’s gun but sees that the heart monitor hooked up to Fahrad doesn’t show any change He realizes he’s been set up and when Jack and the rest of the tac team bust into the room, Marcos has no intention of being taken alive. He leaps from the window, crashes to the ground below and hobbles off with what appears to be a broken leg. He enters the lower level of the hospital and barricades himself inside some sort of pressure chamber before Jack and catch up to him. Marcos rigs the door so it won't open, then calls Samir and is told that he must detonate the bomb manually in order to prevent himself from being taken alive. Now, onto the Cole Ortiz/Dana Walsh über-annoying storyline. Basically, after killing Dana’s (a.k.a. Jenny Scott from Arkansas) former boyfriend/partner in crime Kevin Wade (actually, he was killed by his own partner, Nick) and his friend Nick after they blackmailed her into helping them commit armed robbery and refused to leave her alone, Cole and Dana are now at the site of the killing out in the woods. They must clean Kevin’s van to leave no traces or evidence behind and weigh both bodies down with rocks before sinking them into the lake. Cole refuses to leave and allow Dana to handle the chore alone because as he points out, he’s now a part of things. The last main development of the episode is President Hassan calling his wife Dalia, who is on her way out of the country and also planning on leaving him, apparently. He reaches her on their private plane just before takeoff and asks her to call Kayla and warn her about the nuclear threat to the city so she can get out before it’s too late. However, she is busy getting after it with Tarin in his hotel room because really, what is better than sex with a fugitive on the run? Tarin is also a couple hours away from meeting with a contact who will help him gain political asylum in the U.S., so he’s scoring in several ways. They may not be on their way out of the city, but President Taylor and all of the other leaders from the peace conference at the U.N. – aside from President Hassan – are. They are headed to a nearby military base outside the city where they will be safe and can monitor the situation. The hour ends with Jack attempting to find a way inside the pressure chamber at the hospital, knowing it’s the best chance at information on the plot to attack New York with a dirty bomb…………
- Am I the only one who wonders why New Mexico men’s basketball coach Steve Alford is apologizing? Sure, Alford engaged in a very public postgame screaming match with BYU senior Jonathan Tavernari during the teams' postgame handshake Saturday after Alford’s Lobos defeated the Cougars in Provo, Utah, 83-81. Video of the incident shows New Mexico assistant coach Wyking Jones yelling at Tavernari and then Alford and Tavernari can be seen in video replays arguing emphatically. "What are you going to do about it?" Jones shouted as Tavernari. "I'm going to tell you real clear ... You're an [expletive]," Alford then yelled at Tavernari. All of this went down right amidst members of both teams who were actually showing good sportsmanship (which is for losers, of course) and shaking hands like they were supposed to. The argument seemed to stem from a physical altercation near the end of the game between Tavernari and New Mexico's Darington Hobson. Tavernari had to be restrained following that incident and he clearly had not cooled off one bit by the time the game ended. "I'm wired as a competitor sometimes to a fault, and Jonathan's a fierce competitor, and it's senior night," Alford said in an interview Monday. "I understand that, I've been there, I've experienced that both as a player and as a coach." Fine, but why are you apologizing? I love college basketball – in fact, it’s my favorite sport- and I don’t have a problem with this at all. Heck, if anything it makes the game more interesting. These are the two top teams in the Mountain West Conference and there’s a good chance these two teams could meet in the championship game of the upcoming conference tournament. Having the coach of one team and star player of the opposing team on the verge of throwing hands at any moment would only up the drama of that game. These are two teams ranked in the top 15 in the country (No. 10 for New Mexico, No. 15 for BYU) and having the possibility of an on-court coach-player brawl during a game would make the Mountain West title game a must-see for all fans. Unfortunately, both involved parties seem to be taking the prescribed course of expressing regret and apologizing. Alford said he was trying to congratulate Tavernari, a senior, on an outstanding career at BYU, and that things spun out of control. "We got to speak afterwards," Alford said. "And so I think it was just the heat of the moment between two pretty good competitors. But nobody has any more respect for him as a player than I do." According to Alford, Tavernari came to the Lobos' locker room after the game and apologized, so they claim to be all good now. Still, the conference is reviewing the incident and could hand down penalties to both men. For me, that’s truly sad and my interest in a potential BYU-New Mexico title game rematch is no longer quite as high…………
- Are you ready for a repeat, California? You may remember that from 1975-1983, a dude named Jerry Brown served as your governor. Well, that dude is now California Attorney General Jerry Brown plans to announce Tuesday that he's entering the race to be governor one more time. Reports have him accumulating $12 million to fund his campaign already and he has the support of Hollywood über-producers David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg. By the way, it is a nice change of pace that the famous, politically unqualified Hollywood types are simply supporting a candidate in the California governor’s race and one of them isn’t actually a candidate. Brown is the only prominent Democratic candidate in the race at this point after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom dropped out of the contest last October. Furthermore, early polls indicate Brown that Brown currently leads known Republican candidates Meg Whitman (by 5 to 10 points) and State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner by 15 to 17 points. Ironically, Brown’s supporters are touting his previous gubernatorial experience as an asset in his candidacy. That’s ironic because when Brown left office last time, he was not exactly held in the highest esteem. In fact, he was viewed as a kook who dated singer Linda Ronstadt, slept on a futon in an apartment to save money on staffing the governor's mansion and earned the nickname Governor Moonbeam after he proposed buying space on a satellite to enhance state communications in the event of an emergency. Still, he doesn’t fret about those criticisms and seems to view himself as something of a visionary. "There's a certain regression to the mean in politics. Things tend to mediocrity,” Brown said, adding that his policies "in a very dramatic and forceful way set the pace for the whole country." So what has he been doing since he left the governor’s office in 1983? Well, Brown made a run for President, spent a little time studying Buddhism, traveled with Mother Theresa and served two terms as Mayor of Oakland. He still has a bit of the ‘70s hippie in him and will now do battle with distinguished candidates such as Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband Prince Frederic von Anhalt. But then again, this is California and what would a gubernatorial race be without a whole lot of kookiness and weirdos…………
- Duck and cover, Russian Olympic officials, duck and cover. Your athletes posted a paltry 15 medals (three gold, five silver and seven bronze) at the just-concluded Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, Canada, coming in 11th with medals. That isn’t sitting well with your dictator, er, President Dmitry Medvedev. With his country poised to host the next Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia in 2014, Medvedev is looking for someone to pay for Russia's poorest showing since it began competing in the Winter Olympics in 1912. "Unprecedented investments are being made in sports in Russia, but money is not everything," Medvedev said. "We need to think about how we change our training methods. The new training system should focus on athletes who should be put at its cornerstone, not sports federations and their executives -- and not even the trainers, with all our great respect to them. Athletes are those who bring victories, and they should become the focus of our attention." Medvedev called for the resignation of the nation's top Olympic officials Monday during an address on state television from his residence outside Moscow. He singled out sports bureaucrats, whom he called "fat cats," and said the country's sports system should be completely reinvented. The 15 medals were an embarrassing result in light of the massive infusions of cash into the country’s Olympic program leading up to the games and the vows of Russian sports officials on the eve of the games that Russians could expect a place in the top three and predicted their athletes would bring home at least 30 medals. From the dictator on down, Russians are outraged that the results did not match the promises and thousands of angry members of the public have taken to Internet message boards to voice their anger. The lack of medals from Russian athletes certainly wasn’t for lack of incentive, as the government promised to pay individual athletes $135,000 for every gold medal won, $81,000 for every silver and just over $54,000 for every bronze medal. In spite of those potential rewards, Russian athletes burst from the starting gate at the Olympics with a grand total of one medal – bronze – in the first week of the Games. Making matters worse, Russian athletes, trainers and sport officials made every lame excuse they could think of, blaming bad luck, lousy weather, equipment failure and even judges' bias. The most embarrassing losses came in figure skating and ice hockey -- the two sports where Russia has long excelled. In figure skating, it was the first time since 1964 that a Soviet or Russian team did not win a single gold medal. Worse still was men’s ice hockey, where the Russian team was curb-stomped by the host Canadians in the quarterfinals, 7-3. Observers blame the declining Russian success in Olympic competition on the fact that the infrastructure built by the former Soviet Union that has been the backbone of Russia’s athletic system is gradually decaying and little has been done to bolster it. "We have been living on Soviet resources for a long time, but that is over now," Medvedev said. That’s fine, but how is Russia going to fix the problem? They had better come up with a solution quickly, because the next Winter Olympic Games in the Black Sea resort of Sochi will be mighty embarrassing if the host country can’t even crack double digits in medals…………
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