Federer wins 6th Dubai Championships final

DUBAI-

Roger Federer roared back from a set and a break down to subdue Tomas Berdych 3-6 6-4 6-3 in the Dubai Championships final on Saturday as the Swiss maestro sealed a 78th singles title.

Federer had recovered from a similar position to stun world number two Novak Djokovic in Friday’s semi-final and the 32-year-old again struggled early on before he dug deep to claim a sixth Dubai crown.

“It was a tough match,” fourth seed Federer said in a courtside interview. “Tomas had the advantage and could have, should have, brought it home, but maybe I got a little lucky.”

Federer nursed a back injury for much of last season and has slumped to eighth in the rankings, his lowest position since 2002, but ahead of Dubai he claimed his best tennis was still to come.

With wins against top 10 opponents in successive days, the Swiss proved there may be some basis to his confidence.

“I have a lot of tennis in my body over the years.

“I’m just happy I’m healthy again and that I can focus on tactics and not on ‘Am I feeling alright when I wake up tomorrow?,” said Federer, whose latest title puts him one clear of John McEnroe and third on the all-time list behind Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl.

EARLY MISTAKES

After beating Djokovic, Federer spoke of his need to be aggressive on Dubai’s quick courts, but against Berdych the 17-times grand slam champion seemed too eager to adopt that strategy, over-hitting a series of shots from the baseline in the opening stages.

The third-seeded Berdych, 28, suffered from a similar problem, which made for an error-strewn first set.

Federer broke for a 2-1 lead, but he then surrendered his serve immediately.

Serving at 3-2 down, the Swiss again blundered, a scuffed backhand dribbling into the net to give Berdych a 4-2 lead.

World number six Berdych’s first ace of the match earned a set point, which he took when Federer – who later said his serving was poor in the first set – netted a backhand return.

“That’s something I maybe have to clean up a little bit,” said Federer. “I was struggling with half volleys, I was struggling with my forehand.”

Berdych broke for a 3-2 second set lead to leave Federer facing a third straight defeat against the Czech.

SUBLIME DROP

The Swiss immediately broke back and then held to love following a superbly disguised half-volley drop shot at the net that had the 5,000 capacity crowd roaring his name.

“You just stand on the baseline, try to hit a few good shots and hope he doesn’t keep hitting the big serves,” said Federer, when asked what he was thinking after being broken in the second set.

“I was able to break back right away, which was key. I stayed calm and once I got even I started to play better.”

Having built some momentum, Federer twice held to love and then levelled the match after another Berdych forehand error.

Receiving serve at 1-0 up in the decider, Federer raced to a 40-0 lead but squandered three break points as Berdych, who was on an 11-match winning streak, refused to wilt.

Federer was not to be denied, however, and a long Berdych forehand gave him a 3-1 lead.

There was still time for more jitters, Federer failing to covert two match points against serve at 5-2 up but the Swiss sealed the title soon after as Berdych clubbed another forehand long.

“He is the greatest player of all time – he will never give up and just give you anything for free,” Berdych told reporters.

“Of course I knew that. I was ready for it, but my execution was not good enough to hold it until the end

Man Utd team with Google

LONDON-

Manchester United have joined forces with technology giant Google to allow a handful of soccer fans around the world to follow next month’s clash with Liverpool as if they were pitchside at Old Trafford.

To heighten the sense of being at the game, images of the fans will appear live on the digital advertising hoardings at the stadium during the Premier League game on March 16.

Their pictures will be streamed using the Google+Hangout system — a video chat function.

Google described the move as an “experiment into what the future of supporting your team could be”, although the initiative will be limited to only around 10-20 fans this time.

United fans are being asked to share a picture on Google+ with the tag “#MUFrontRow” to show their support and the participants will be chosen from this group.

English champions United claim to have more than 650 million global followers.

Man Utd team with Google

LONDON-

Manchester United have joined forces with technology giant Google to allow a handful of soccer fans around the world to follow next month’s clash with Liverpool as if they were pitchside at Old Trafford.

To heighten the sense of being at the game, images of the fans will appear live on the digital advertising hoardings at the stadium during the Premier League game on March 16.

Their pictures will be streamed using the Google+Hangout system — a video chat function.

Google described the move as an “experiment into what the future of supporting your team could be”, although the initiative will be limited to only around 10-20 fans this time.

United fans are being asked to share a picture on Google+ with the tag “#MUFrontRow” to show their support and the participants will be chosen from this group.

English champions United claim to have more than 650 million global followers.

Robocops take over a capital city in Africa – to control traffic

KINSHASHA-

How do you solve the problem of choking road traffic in one of the world’s bustling megacities? You bring in the robot cops.

In Kinshasa, the sprawling capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, two humanoid robots have been installed in high-traffic areas to regulate the flow of vehicles and help drivers and pedestrians traverse the roads safely.

The goal is to ease the traffic woes of commuters and cut the number of road accidents in the center of Kinshasa, a city of some 10 million people.

“It is an innovation about road safety,” tells Vale Manga Wilma, president of the DRC’s National Commission for Road Safety.

“The traffic is a big problem in the rush hours,” he explained. “With the robots’ policemen intelligence, the road safety in Kinshasa becomes very easy.”

Standing eight feet tall, the robot traffic wardens are on duty 24 hours a day, their towering — even scarecrow-like — mass visible from afar. They are powered by solar panels and are equipped with rotating chests and surveillance cameras that record the flow of vehicles.

The humanoids, which are installed on Kinshasa’s busy Triomphal and Lumumba intersections, are built of aluminum and stainless steel to endure the city’s year-round hot climate.

Featuring green and red lights, Kinshasa’s robot cops are designed to merge some of the functions of human officers and traffic lights. The anthropomorphic robots can raise or bend their arms to stop passing vehicles or let others pass, and are also programmed to speak, indicating to pedestrians when they can cross the road

715 new planets discovered by NASA

NASA’s Kepler mission has announced the discovery of 715 new planets. These newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system.

Nearly 95 percent of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth. This discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.

“The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet hunting results,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “That these new planets and solar systems look somewhat like our own, portends a great future when we have the James Webb Space Telescope in space to characterize the new worlds.”

Since the discovery of the first planets outside our solar system roughly two decades ago, verification has been a laborious planet-by-planet process. Now, scientists have a statistical technique that can be applied to many planets at once when they are found in systems that harbor more than one planet around the same star.

To verify this bounty of planets, a research team co-led by Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., analyzed stars with more than one potential planet, all of which were detected in the first two years of Kepler’s observations — May 2009 to March 2011.

The research team used a technique called verification by multiplicity, which relies in part on the logic of probability. Kepler observes 150,000 stars, and has found a few thousand of those to have planet candidates. If the candidates were randomly distributed among Kepler’s stars, only a handful would have more than one planet candidate. However, Kepler observed hundreds of stars that have multiple planet candidates. Through a careful study of this sample, these 715 new planets were verified.

Origin of lahore.

Origins THE LAHORE ..
The origins of the original Lahore are unspecific. According to carbon dating evidence of archaeological findings in the Lahore Fort, the time period may start as early as 2,000 BCE. Lahore had many names throughout its history. Mohallah Maulian represents one of the two most probable sites of the original Lahore. Sootar Mandi (the yarn market) inside Lohari Gate, had been called Mohallah Chaileywala Hammam located in Machli Hatta Gulzar, just off Chowk Chalka.

As late as 1864, the Lohari Mandi area had been known among the old folk of the Walled City as kacha kot, the mud fort, a name derived from the gradient of the land, the water flow, and the formation of mohallahs, kuchas, and kattrahs. The curve of Koocha Pir Bola merges with Waachowali Bazaar, the Lohari Bazaar merges with Chowk Lohari Mandi, and Chowk Mati merges with Papar Mandi, giving a sense of a mud fort. Along Lohari Bazaar, a short distance from Chowk Chakla, the street opens slightly, revealing a half-buried archway of pucca bricks and mud.

The famous mud fort may have been built by Malik Ayaz, the first Muslim governor of Lahore. Lohari Gate served as the main entrance to Ayaz's mud fort. Chowk Sootar Mandi constituted one important center of Kacha Kot. The lay of the streets also suggest the boundaries. At the time of Mughal Emperor Akbar, the original wall of the Walled City of Lahore stood, on the western side, to the right of Bazaar Hakeeman in Bhati Gate. On the eastern side to the left of Shahalam Gate, curved eastwards and formed a "kidney-shaped" city that depended on the flow of the curving River Ravi. Thus the Lahore of the kacha kot era has continued to expand in three major leaps of expansion, each with an almost 400-year gap. The eras of Raja Jaipal of Akbar and of Maharaja Ranjit Singh mark the high points of that expansion.

The expanding of the mud fort had its origins in three factors:

the way the Ravi has flown and how and when it has been changing its course,
the existence of the Lahore Fort and how power has flowed from the rulers, and
the manner the population and economy of the old original Walled City has changed over time, grown, or even shrunk, depending of invasions, droughts and famines in the countryside.

The story of kacha kot has been determined by those factors. The oldest buildings in the entire Walled City exist in this area, among them the old exquisite mosque known even now as Masjid Kohana Hammam Chaileywala. A huge hammam may have stood during the kacha kot period. The tomb of Pir Bola (Gali) still exists. Little remains of the original mud fort.

Rain-soaked Hollywood primed for Oscars drama

HOLLYWOOD-

Hollywood’s finest finally hit the red carpet Sunday for the most fiercely contested Oscars show in decades — after organizers scrambled to make sure the weather doesn’t rain on the glamorous parade.

After months of drought, a huge storm has hit just in time for the Academy Awards, drenching the famous red carpet where A-listers will strut their stuff as Tinseltown’s annual awards season comes to a climax.

Three movies — harrowing historical drama “12 Years a Slave,” 3D space thriller “Gravity” and 1970s crime caper “American Hustle” — are leading a packed field for the top prizes.

On the acting front, Cate Blanchett is the hot favorite for her turn in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” while Matthew McConaughey is widely tipped to strike Oscars gold for his portrayal of homophobic HIV-positive AIDS activist Ron Woodroof in “Dallas Buyers Club.”

Jared Leto’s role as Woodroof’s unlikely transgender business partner has put him ahead of the field for best supporting actor, and Lupita Nyong’o could take home a statuette for her big-screen debut in “12 Years a Slave.”

- ‘ Very suspenseful’ -

On the eve of Hollywood’s biggest night, “12 Years a Slave” scored a last-minute boost by winning best feature and best director for Briton Steve McQueen Saturday at the Independent Spirit Awards.

McConaughey, Leto, Blanchett and Nyong’o took home the acting awards, further cementing their status as the ones to beat for the prized Oscar statuettes.

But experts agree that, while some categories may be seemingly settled, all bets are off for the big prize of the night, the best picture Oscar, which will be handed out at the end of the 86th Academy Awards ceremony hosted by US talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.

“It’s been a very intense season because there’s been so many good films,” industry journal Variety’s awards editor Tim Gray told a foreign news agency in the run-up to the Oscars.

“The very last envelope that’s opened is going to be very suspenseful.”

The 6,000 or so voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences cast their ballots over 12 days starting on Valentine’s Day and ending on Tuesday.

But the best picture race is so close that the winner could come down to only a few votes, under the Academy’s preferential voting system. Under the rules, voters rank all nine nominated films.

They are: “American Hustle,” “Captain Phillips,” “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Gravity,” “Her,” “Nebraska,” “Philomena,” “12 Years A Slave” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Those with the least first-place votes are dropped, and their votes given to the next highest-ranked nominees. This continues until one movie has 50 percent plus one vote.

It has been a long awards season — extended by the Sochi Winter Olympics, which bumped the Oscars from February into March.

And it has also been among the most grueling, partly due to the bumper crop of films vying for glory.

Topping nominations are “American Hustle” and Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity,” with 10 nods apiece, followed by
“12 Years a Slave,” a true story of a free black man sold into slavery, with nine.

Cuaron is the frontrunner for the best director prize, and his star Sandra Bullock earned high praise for her work in the spectacular space drama, prompting some to suggest she could cause an upset in the best actress race.

But Australia’s Blanchett remains the firm favorite in that category, despite a strong field also containing Meryl Streep (“August: Osage County”), Judi Dench (“Philomena”) and Amy Adams (“American Hustle”).

- Starry, starry night

The star-studded Oscars broadcast will feature performances by Irish rockers U2, playing their nominated song from “Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom,” and a first Oscars turn by veteran Bette Midler.

Sunday night’s show will be preceded by the usual fashion extravaganza on the red carpet, as Tinseltown’s finest parade along Hollywood Boulevard and into the Dolby Theatre.

Organizers hope rain doesn’t affect the parade — they were still scrambling Saturday to get everything in place amid a steady downpour, 24 hours before the curtain goes up.

A see-through tent covers the whole runway, and the carpet itself had a layer of plastic on it, but there was little disguising that rain had got through, with workers constantly mopping up.