Juba

Sudanese rebels threatened to shoot down any aircraft flying to southern Sudan without their authorization, but U.N. organizers continued to prepare to airlift food to famine victims in the region. In a radio report monitored in Khartoum, a spokesman for the Sudanese People's Liberation Army reiterated an earlier warning that anyone flying over the war-torn, hunger-plagued south "would be doing so at their own risk."

Video "The Hunting of the Snark & Jabberwocky." First Run Features. $15. (800) 488-6652; http://www.firstrunfeatures.com/. From critically acclaimed animator Michael Sporn ("Whitewash," "Champagne and the Talking Eggs") comes a soulful little masterpiece, an animated adaptation of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "The Hunting of the Snark."

His memorial appears untouched since the funeral a year ago. Temporary aluminum roofing covers baskets of dusty plastic flowers. Tattered flags and fading tinsel hang limply from metal beams. Yet each day, visitors stream by to pay their respects to Sudanese rebel leader John Garang, who led a 21-year civil war against the government before signing a landmark peace deal, only to die six months later in a helicopter crash.

Starvation, a constant peril in the war zone of southern Sudan, once again threatens hundreds of thousands of people because of intense fighting and government mismanagement. Francis Junod, who runs the International Committee of the Red Cross relief operation, said 350,000 of the region's perennially malnourished residents may die unless supplies get through by the end of February.

A promised cease-fire in the 5-year-old war ravaging southern Sudan may come too late for thousands of civilians trapped in the garrison town of Torit with food almost gone and little hope of relief. "The people we are concerned with now are the children--they are starving," said Roman Catholic Bishop Paride Taran in an interview by radio from Juba, the southern Sudanese capital on the banks of the White Nile.

Opening a five-performance run, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater offered its usual combination of old works and new, spectacular technique and blistering intensity Wednesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. However, this first program of three (alternating through Sunday afternoon) also displayed an odd split in creative ambition.

To outsiders, the move appears suicidal, a recipe for ruining the economy and possibly returning to war. But on the streets of Juba, the capital of South Sudan, the decision to turn off the flow from oil wells that produce 98% of the government's revenue has triggered bursts of defiance and national pride. "The oil was shut down because it's our oil. We need our rights," said truck driver Nimeiry Thomas, 30, his face dripping with sweat in Juba's Konyo Konyo market. One of the world's poorest countries, South Sudan made the move last month in an escalating dispute with northern neighbor Sudan, from which it seceded in July.

One expects certain conventions from a play set in Mississippi during the 1950s, and "Under the Moon," Layce Gardner's new drama at American Renegade Theatre in North Hollywood, does not disappoint. There is a tobacco-chewing redneck, an ornery deputy and even a Ku Klux Klan cross-burning. Such devices give this interracial love story an instantly recognizable setting, if not a fresh and credible viewpoint.

Hundreds of thousands of people stranded by devastating floods in southern Somalia will go hungry--and some may die--unless nations chip in several million dollars immediately for emergency relief, aid workers said Tuesday. They estimated that 2,000 people have drowned since the flooding began in the East African nation last month. Tens of thousands more are marooned on small patches of high land that are inaccessible by road or airplane.