Sports Illustrated on MSN: HBCU All-Star Game: HBCU Basketball's Elite Talent, Teams, How to Watch, & Awards Everything you need to know about the 5th Annual HBCU All-Star Game — from the full rosters and award winners to tipoff time, broadcast details, and the week of events surrounding college basketball's ... HBCU All-Star Game: HBCU Basketball's Elite Talent, Teams, How to Watch, & Awards 3 “Earlier today” is a totally correct way to refer to a point in time between the beginning of the day and the current time. Because it refers to a moment in the past, it can be used with the past tense, as you did in your example.
The 2002 reference grammar by Huddleston and Pullum et al., The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, would consider words like yesterday, today, tonight, and tomorrow as pronouns (specifically, deictic temporal pronouns). Related info is in CGEL pages 429, 564-5. I think it is a good question. When there is yesterday morning and tomorrow morning, why have an exception for this morning (which means today's morning)?
today all star game, Yes, idiom, but I actually do like idiomatic extensions like these - as long as everybody knows what is meant and no grammar or semantic rules are violated... It's raining today. Raining is a verb, describing the action of rain. It's rainy today. Rainy is an adjective, describing what the weather is like today.
today all star game, Sunny and cloudy are also adjectives that describe the weather, so for parallelism, it makes sense to say "It's rainy today" if you would otherwise write "It's sunny today." Two other options (in addition to "as from today," "from today," and "effective today") are "beginning today" and "as of today." These may be more U.S.-idiomatic forms than British-idiomatic forms (the two "from" options have a British English sound to me, although "effective today" does not); but all five options are grammatically faultless, I believe.
