>Good ratings, better games as NBA lockout looms

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The NBA hasn’t been this entertaining in a while.
All of a sudden, hustle is in, the East is no longer the junior varsity, and players from top to bottom are putting on such a good show that most nights you’d swear everyone on the floor is angling for a new contract. That’s no coincidence.
Turns out a handful of governors aren’t the only people these days looking to score points against unions. With four months to go on the owners’ threat to lock them out and kiss off next season, that’s exactly what the players are doing: taking their case to the public.
Few people bothered to notice while the NFL was dominating the sports landscape, but the previous weekend’s NBA all-star bash was practically Exhibit A. After the celebrity game and dunk contest generated more buzz than usual, and after Commissioner David Stern and union chief Billy Hunter finished sniping at one another behind the scenes, the players went out and made sure the focus was back where it should be — on the court.
The trades that sent Carmelo Anthony to New York and Deron Williams to New Jersey, among others, kept the momentum going. Then a week featuring several entertaining matchups was topped off Sunday night with New York at Miami.
A midseason game that mattered in the standings, brimming with stars and shown in prime time, is exactly what the players and owners both want. So naturally, they’re going to spend the next few months — and likely beyond — arguing over who should get the lion’s share of both the credit and cash.
Owners point to Anthony’s move from Denver to New York, and Williams from Utah to New Jersey as proof the league needs a hard salary cap and-or the flexibility to tag franchise players to stem the exodus of stars from small-market teams to big ones. Stern said the league is projecting losses of $350 million this season, which is why some business practices have to change. The players, though, say they’re simply doing what they’re supposed to do — anything to win a championship, including forming alliances with old rivals on new teams.
LeBron James got torched, first for his bumbling departure from Cleveland last summer, and more recently for suggesting the league should consider contraction as a way back to its salad days, when most teams boasted more than one star.
But he was onto something if the Knicks-Heat game was any indication. Between James and teammates Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, and Anthony and teammate Amare Stoudemire, the two clubs have committed nearly $500 million in salary, locked up five All-Stars and practically guaranteed themselves a rivalry for some time to come.
The Heat have become the league’s top road draw and its favourite villains. And on this night, between the contingent that came down with director-superfan Spike Lee and those New Yorkers who’ve taken their retirement to South Beach, they were the villains in their own building on occasion.
The Knicks had plenty of support when they strung together runs of 16-0 to close the first half and 13-2 at the end the game en route to a 91-86 win. Interestingly, the result reinforced the notion that a thrown-together team of superstars isn’t the guaranteed way to win, it’s only a first step.
“I told y’all when I made this move, I wanted to take on big challenges,” Anthony said afterward.
He’d asked Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni to let him guard James down the stretch, but it was a game-sealing block by Stoudemire after he lost his man in the lane that decided the outcome.
“Tonight was a big challenge for me and a big challenge for us defensively,” Anthony added, “and we stood up to that.”
Bosh, meanwhile, conceded that despite nearly six months trying to mesh their talents, the Heat still haven’t figured out how to close out games.
“We’ll get up, dust ourselves off and move on to the next one,” he said.
The East race may yet come down to Miami and Boston, which collected its own “Big Three” of Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen in 2007. But with Anthony’s move to join Stoudemire in New York, and Carlos Boozer joining Derrick Rose in Chicago, the playoffs in the East should be as interesting as the West has been — and continues to be — over the last half-dozen seasons.
The migration of stars from East to West hasn’t touched the Lakers so far, nor affected the smart small-market teams in the West,.either. Aging San Antonio is still reaping the benefits of locking up its stars for the long haul, a lesson that hasn’t been lost on Oklahoma City, which did the same with Kevin Durant, the best youngster in the league. The coming labour war will decide what happens to everybody else.
Rich NBA owners — and their NFL counterparts, for that matter — have almost nothing in common with cash-strapped state chief executives, save their determination to wring concessions from the employees in the next contract. Rich NBA stars have only so much in common with working folks, but they, too, aren’t in the mood to give back any more than they have to. Increasingly, it’s shaping up to be a fight that neither side can win.

>Miley Cyrus Is ‘Hurt and Angry’ over Dad’s Comments: Source

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Billy Ray Cyrus has been speaking out candidly about the toll that fame has taken on his family, especially daughter Miley Cyrus.
But the real source of Miley’s pain has been her father’s words, according to someone who knows the Cyrus clan.
“Miley is upset,” the source tells PEOPLE in its new issue. “She’s very hurt and angry.”
So why did Billy Ray, 49, share his fears and regrets? One longtime pal believes he may have felt he had no other choice: “Maybe he can’t get the message of how much they mean to him across, and this is the way to do it.”
Billy Ray tells PEOPLE that he realizes his comments were “explosive and unintentionally so,” but also that he’s focused on mending his family.
So far, Miley, 18, has refused to comment on the current drama, but in its wake she has been spotted brunching with mom Tish, 43, and paying visits to a recording studio as well as with her So Undercover costar and love interest Josh Bowman.
A source who sees her often says Miley has “seemed stressed, though she tries to hide it behind a constant smile.”

>John Galliano: Damaging New Racist Revelations

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John Galliano’s troubles may have multiplied over the weekend as a second complaint of alleged anti-Semitism was formally lodged against Dior’s chief designer – and a bombshell video surfaced showing the designer declaring: “I love Hitler.”
On Friday, Galliano was suspended by Dior following his overnight arrest on charges of assault and making anti-Semitic and racial remarks to a couple during a reputed sparring match in the Paris café La Perle.
The undated video obtained and posted online by Britain’s Sun is said to have been filmed in the same café but not on the same evening as Galliano’s arrest.
In the cell-phone video, the designer, appearing to be seated at a bar, is seen insulting people. Slurring his words, he tells them, “People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be f—ing gassed.”
During the Thursday night incident that led to arrest of Galliano, 50, and prompted a police probe, the designer allegedly assaulted a woman, pulled her hair and told her she had “a dirty Jew face.” He also reportedly hurled racial slurs at her companion, who is of partial Asian ethnicity.
Over the weekend, a second police complaint was lodged against Galliano, when a 48-year old woman came forward, asserting he had subjected her to a similar tirade at the same locale on Oct. 9. Several eyewitnesses from this earlier episode have confirmed to PEOPLE the authenticity of her charge.
On Monday afternoon, police in Paris’s third arrondisement (municipal district), where the incidents allegedly occurred, convened a hearing to draw together all the parties and their attorneys.
Though none of those allegedly on the receiving end of Galliano’s outbursts are, in fact, Jewish, under French law the making of anti-Semitic remarks qualifies as “incitement to racial prejudice,” a criminal offense that potentially carries a sentence of up to six months in prison.

>Colin Firth’s Oscar acceptance speech (VIDEO): Did he stutter?

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There was no stuttering for Colin Firth during his Oscar’s acceptance speech for Best Actor.
Firth, 50, won for his phenomenal portrayal of King George VI who battled to overcome a horrible stutter. George is eventually victorious and delivers an inspiring speech to Britain at the dawn of WWII.
On Sunday night, Firth was no less eloquent – adding dashes of humor and humility.
“I have a feeling my career has just peaked,” he deadpanned when he hit the stage. Then continued.
“I’m afraid I have to warn you that I’m experiencing stirrings somewhere in the upper abdominals which are threatening to form themselves into dance moves. Which, joyous as they may be for me, they’ll be extremely problematic if they make it to my legs before I get off stage.”
He also thanked his wife “Livia for putting up with my fleeting delusions of royalty and who I hold responsible for this and for really everything good that has happened since i met her.”
This was his second Oscar nomination and first win.

>Charlie Sheen — I’m Gonna Sue ‘Em All!!!

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Charlie Sheen says he plans on suing CBS, Warner Bros., and Chuck Lorre for breach of contract — and he wants to back the money truck up straight to their door.
When asked he planned on filing a lawsuit over the “Two and a Half Men” fiasco, Sheen told ABC this morning, “Wouldn’t you? I don’t have a job. I got a whole family to support … They’re gonna put [the money] on a scale and say, ‘A little more, a little more. Add some gold! Add some gold! Bingo!’ … I’m here to collect.”
Even among all this animosity, Sheen wants to do a season 9 and even a season … if they paid him $3 million an episode plus a $20 million signing bonus.

>North Korea, South Korea standoff heats up as war games begin

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South Korea and the US start new war games Monday, just days after the South dropped propaganda leaflets about Middle East revolutions over North Korea.
US and South Korean troops opened 11 days of war games Monday in the face of North Korean threats to turn Seoul into “a sea of fire” and to start “all-out war.”
Officials dismissed the rhetoric from North Korea as a sign of rising North Korean anger in a familiar cycle of threats. The US command here says the exercises, involving nearly 13,000 US troops and 200,000 Korean civilians mainly conducted on computers, had been in the planning stage for months and were entirely “defensive.”
The real question is the degree to which China will act to discourage a North Korean response akin to what happened last year following similar drills. Though North Korea has repeatedly denied any role, an international investigation blamed it for sinking the South Korea’s Navy corvette the Cheonan nearly a year ago, killing 46 South Korean sailors.
China’s concern
China maintains its prime concern on the Korean peninsula is “stability,” but has pointedly refused to support the results of the South Korean investigation with international participation, the Cheonan incident. Last week, it opposed a move in the United Nations to condemn North Korea for construction of a new nuclear reactor capable of enriching uranium for nuclear weapons.
“After the Cheonan incident, we have witnessed a new chapter in the war for the Korean peninsula,” says Koo Kab-woo, professor at the University of North Korean Studies here. “The new situation depends on China. North Korea has to talk to China before doing anything.”
China, says Professor Koo, wields power over North Korea by modulating the flow of food as the North suffers through the coldest winter in many years. “That way China can manipulate the North Korean planning,” he says. With China providing the North with 80 percent of its food and fuel, he notes, Chinese officials “have leverage.”
Defiance
North Korea, however, may still be tempted to defy South Korea, responding not to war games but to the launching over the past week of balloons carrying several hundred thousand propaganda leaflets from the South. The leaflets include detailed reports of protests in the Middle East – a precedent that North Korean leaders clearly do not want their own people to know about.
While there is no way of telling how many have been read, enough of them have fallen into the hands of North Koreans for the government to threaten to fire at launch sites the next time balloons are launched.
Another sign of North Korean concern about the affect of events in the Middle East is a report that authorities have cut off cellphone service between cities except for conversations among high-level officials. More than 300,000 North Koreans now have cellphones provided by the Egyptian firm Orascom Telecom.
“They are afraid news of the democracy movement will spread,” says Ha Tae-keung, president of Open Radio for North Korea, which picks up information from North Korea on cellphone contacts through Chinese networks and broadcasts two hours daily by shortwave into the North.
South Korean officials staunchly deny any direct role in the balloon launches, which they say are the handiwork of nongovernmental organizations, several of them spurred by defectors from North Korea.
“We do not have the legal means to restrict them,” says an official from the South’s Unification Ministry, responsible for dealing with North Korea. The government, he says, has “advised them to cut down their activities, but they continue to send them.”
As for the latest spate of invective from North Korea, Mr. Ha believes the North is still hoping to bring about renewal of six-party talks about its nuclear program. While the North would not give up its nuclear program, he says, North Korean diplomats would then get the chance to bargain for much needed food. Supplies reach their lowest levels in the late spring and early summer before the current year’s crops are harvested.
“These days, North Korea wants to get more food from the rest of the world,” he says. “They want to have rice from the United States” – one of the biggest sources of food aid before South Korea’s conservative President Lee Myung-bak cut off most aid to North Korea three years ago and the US agreed to follow suit.

>The deal with Celtics: They’ve moved on

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The Celtics [team stats] appeared to turn a corner during and after Saturday night’s win against the Clippers in Los Angeles. They no longer seemed to be a team taking a standing eight count from the blow of the Kendrick Perkins [stats] trade.
Getting a taste of what Jeff Green and Nenad Krstic can bring to the table certainly helped, but, risking a crass analogy considering the relative gravity, the progression is not unlike the stages of grief — shock, anger, acceptance.
The Celtics have shifted back into drive.
“I think so,” said Paul Pierce [stats], who went for 24 points against the Clips and knows he will benefit greatly from Green’s relief. I think we’ve kind of settled down now. I mean, I thought it was kind of like an earthquake right there for a second when the trade happened. We were suffering from the shock waves in Denver. But we picked everything up, put the pieces back together, and hopefully we can get going now.”
Krstic had six offensive rebounds and nine points Saturday, drilling a 20-footer in the third quarter that gave the Celts their first lead since 6-4.
Green overcame some early anxiety to score seven points, displaying a versatility that will make him a good fit with either Rajon Rondo [stats] or Delonte West at the point.
Both, however, were a step behind on defensive rotations, but that was to be expected since they had just a little more than an hour with their mates Saturday morning to soak in the system.
“It’s going to take time to get these guys going, but I think guys, hopefully after (Saturday), can get past it,” Pierce said. “Definitely it’s hard because it’s not only a teammate, it’s a friend. I’ve been there with Perkins since Day 1. I’ve seen where he started and where he got to.”
But now the Celtics have new talent to incorporate, and it’s important that they facilitate the process.
“We have no choice,” Pierce said. “We’ve still got to keep our eyes on the prize — it’s to win a championship, and we can’t lose focus from that.
“We’ve got to work with what’s in the room and just play basketball. It is what it is. No more crying over spilled milk. We had a day for that, and now it’s time to play.”
Ray Allen was typically philosophical in assessing the situation.
“You have to sympathize with a guy who gets traded,” he said. “But the one thing people never look at is that, as much as there’s somebody going, there’s somebody coming. It’s a two-way street. And I’ve always said it’s not like you’re going to jail. You know, like, ‘Oh, woe is me. It’s the worst thing possible.’ You still play basketball. So you’ve got to take what you know going into a new situation and try to become a better player.
“Now you have to welcome the new guys that are here and get them on the same page so we can try to work this thing without missing a beat.”
Kevin Garnett isn’t giving up his hurt without a fight, but he busied himself Saturday by engaging Krstic in long talks to set their defensive communication.
“He’s open, and that’s the important thing,” Garnett said.
“The emotional part (of the trade) is what it is. You have to separate the two. My whole thing in this is just embrace change. That’s what I’m doing.”
Celtics notes
Green’s first shot as a Celtic was a hideously bricked free throw. He then gathered himself and poured in the second.
In case you missed it from the final edition of the Sunday Herald, there was a priceless moment on the Celtics [team stats] bench when Krstic got two offensive rebounds on the team’s first possession.
Coach Doc Rivers turned to assistant Lawrence Frank, who coached Krstic with the Nets, and asked, “Does he do that all the time?”
Replied Frank: “If he did, I’d still be in New Jersey.”

>Glow never wore off Brooklyn Dodgers’ Duke Snider, the Hall of Famer who has passed at age of 84

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One of the downsides of growing up is that we learn way too much about sports and the people who play them.
But for me, at least, that never dimmed the first star, which was Number Four, playing center field and batting third for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
I don’t know how Duke Snider became my favorite player. Who knows how love starts? I was 7, and from the minute I saw him on our 13-inch Magnavox, he was who I wanted to be.
In my backyard I set up Ebbets Field. The white birch was first base. I played every position for both teams, and magically it always ended up that Duke would win it with two out in the ninth by sending a towering blast over the roof of the garage.
My Duke often needed multiple swings to drive the rubber ball that far, which only sweetened the final lap around the bases. Sometimes, for punctuation, I would slide home.
Summer afternoons I would wait for the paperboy to deliver the Hartford Times, where there was this thing called box scores. I’d spread out the paper on the porch and devour the incredible amount of information coded into those four or five square inches. Mostly I calculated Duke’s progress, like whether he would hit 40 home runs again, and it never concerned me that beyond the box scores and what Topps put on the back of his baseball card, I knew almost nothing about him.
I’ve thought about it over the years – why Duke? – and I’ve figured maybe that’s just how your first sports heroes work. It’s just the universe at its most wonderfully random.
I followed Duke Snider so closely I wanted to become a lefty. That never happened. But he did make me a Dodgers fan and a baseball fan.
Fifty-three springs ago, when I spent an hour twisting the dial on our Zenith radio in search of the Dodgers broadcast I wouldn’t be hearing again, Duke was the reason I kept the faith.
Duke Snider was still a Dodger, so I was still a Dodgers fan.
Robert Moses is a different story. But I only picked up on that part of the story years later.
It was also years later when my wife bought me a Duke Snider autographed bat for Christmas and I wondered if he had declared the income to the IRS.
That’s part of the too much we learn about sports when we grow up.
And it has never lessened the pleasure of that first glow.
I will miss a man I never met, who never knew how fine a run he gave me just by playing baseball.

>Frank Buckles, Last World War I Doughboy, Is Dead at 110

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Frank Buckles, who drove an Army ambulance in France in 1918 and came to symbolize a generation of embattled young Americans as the last of the World War I doughboys, died Sunday at his home in Charles Town, W. Va. He was 110.
His death was announced by a family spokesman, David DeJonge, The Associated Press said.
He was only a corporal and he never got closer than 30 or so miles from the Western Front trenches, but Mr. Buckles became something of a national treasure as the last living link to the two million men who served in the American Expeditionary Forces in France in “the war to end all wars.”
Frail, stooped and hard of hearing, but sharp of mind, Mr. Buckles was named grand marshal of the National Memorial Day Parade in Washington in 2007. He was a guest at Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day 2007 for a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns. He was honored by Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the Pentagon and met with President George W. Bush at the White House in March 2008.
United States Senators played host to him at the Capitol in June 2008 for the impending 90th anniversary of the World War I armistice. And he appeared before a Senate subcommittee in December 2009 to support legislation named in his honor to bestow federal status on a World War I memorial on the National Mall built in the 1930s.
Sought out for interviews in his final years, Mr. Buckles told of having witnessed a ceremony involving British veterans of the Crimean War, fought in the 1850s, when he was stationed in England before heading to France. He remembered chatting with General John J. Pershing, the commander of American troops in World War I, at an event in Oklahoma City soon after the war’s end.
And he proudly held a sepia-toned photograph of himself in his doughboy uniform when he was interviewed by USA Today in 2007. “I was a snappy soldier,” he said. “All gung-ho.”
Frank Woodruff Buckles was born Feb. 1, 1901, on a farm near Bethany, Mo. He was living in Oakwood, Okla., when America entered World War I and he tried to enlist in the Marine Corps at age 16, having been inspired by recruiting posters.
The Marines turned him down as underage and under the required weight. The Navy didn’t want him either, saying he had flat feet. But the Army took him in August 1917 when he lied about his age, and he volunteered to be an ambulance driver, hearing that was the quickest path to service in France.
He sailed for England in December 1917 on the Carpathia, the ship that helped save survivors of the Titanic’s sinking in 1912. He later served in various locations in France, including Bordeaux, and drove military autos and ambulances. He was touched by the war’s impact on the French people.
“The little French children were hungry,” Mr. Buckles recalled in a 2001 interview for the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress. “We’d feed the children. To me, that was a pretty sad sight.”
Mr. Buckles escorted German prisoners of war back to their homeland after the armistice, then returned to America and later worked in the Toronto office of the White Star shipping line.
He traveled widely over the years, working for steamship companies, and he was on business in Manila when the Japanese occupied it following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He was imprisoned by the Japanese, losing more than 50 pounds, before being liberated by an American airborne unit in February 1945.
After retiring from steamship work in the mid-1950s, Mr. Buckles ran a cattle farm in Charles Town, and he was still riding a tractor there at age 104.
In April 2007, Mr. Buckles was identified by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs as one of the four known survivors among the more than 4.7 million Americans who had served in the armed forces of the Allied nations between April 6, 1917, when the United States entered World War I, and the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918.
Two of the four — J. Russell Coffey and Harry Landis — had served stateside in the American Army. Mr. Coffey died in December 2007 at 109 and Mr. Landis died in February 2008 at 108. John Babcock, who was Canadian born, served in Canada’s army in Britain in World War I and held dual American and Canadian citizenship, died in Spokane, Wash., in February 2010 at 109.
The last known veterans of the French and German armies in World War I, Lazare Ponticelli and Erich Kästner, died a few months apart in 2008; Harry Patch, the last British soldier, died in 2009. A former nurse and a former sailor, both English, are thought to be the only two people still living who served in any capacity in the war.
Mr. Buckles is survived by his daughter, Susannah Flanagan. His wife, Audrey, died in 1999.
More than eight decades after World War I ended, Mr. Buckles retained images of his French comrades. And he thought back to the fate that awaited them.
“What I have a vivid memory of is the French soldiers — being in a small village and going in to a local wine shop in the evening,” he told a Library of Congress interviewer. “They had very, very little money. But they were having wine and singing the ‘Marseillaise’ with enthusiasm. And I inquired, ‘What is the occasion?’ They were going back to the front. Can you imagine that?”

>James Franco’s GRANDMA Parties Like a Rockstar!

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She stole the show at the Academy Awards last night … and after the show, James Franco’s grandmother partied her face off ’til 2 IN THE MORNING!!
Franco’s younger brother walked their granny out of an Oscar after-party at Supperclub and into a waiting limo.
No word on how long Anne Hathaway’s mom was able to hang.