Word: cracking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's how alien Michael (Quinton Aaron) appears to most of the students and faculty at Wingate Christian School. The abandoned son of a crack-addict mom (his father vanished and was murdered years later), he's the kind of kid for whom a written test looks like a scrawl in hieroglyphics, as foreign to him as a quick pass to the wideout might be to a more studious child. It asks him to strain muscles he has never been encouraged to use. His teachers dismiss him as stupid, illiterate, unteachable; his classmates shy away from him; and the ladies...
...Michael's enablers are white folks. Here are the film's main black characters: his crack-addicted mother (Adriane Lenox, who's very good, considering what she's got to work with); a drug lord and his posse who try to derail Michael from his destiny; and a buppie lawyer from the NCAA who investigates a charge that the Tuohys have unfairly steered Michael, who's finally a much-recruited high school star, into the Ole Miss football program. These characters are either lost, evil or suspicious. It's as if blackness were a plague and adoption by whites...
...cybertrifecta, the 2009 list is predictably grim. In a year that saw the "Summer of Death," Michael Jackson was the second fastest-rising term, and Natasha Richardson (No. 8) and Farrah Fawcett (No. 9) made the top 10. The only celebrity who's still among us that managed to crack the list? Lady Gaga, who catapulted to fame this year and landed at No. 10. (See the 25 sites we can't live without...
...counties see only a handful of them each year; but Miami-Dade County in the past decade has seen as many as 46, a good number of them taking the lives of children like Ashley. It's partly due to a mind-set that views pedestrians as nuisances. To crack down on that way of thinking, Risete, Ashley's mother, has pushed for a number of measures in Florida - including the Ashley Nicole Valdes Alert System in Miami-Dade, which notifies the public (by cell phone for those who sign up for it) of the description of an alleged...
...humanitarian supplies through Turkmen airspace - but no military hardware. Earlier this year, Gen. David Petreaus, chief of the U.S. Central Command, met with Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, who became Turkmenistan's new President when Niyazov died in 2006, but was unable to persuade him to open his country even a crack to the U.S. military...