Ryder Cup: Europe stuns USA with a sensational comeback to win the title

Medinah (Illinois): Europe won the Ryder Cup to complete one of the greatest comebacks in golf to defeat United States on Sunday.

The visitors were in hunt for the eight points that would have helped them to retain the trophy and began well winning the six of the first eight clashes.

Martin Kaymer stood over a 6-foot par putt on the 18th hole to clinch the title.

"It will go down in the history books of the Ryder Cup," said European captain Jose Maria Olazabal.

Already parallels have been drawn with the American comeback at Brookline in 1999 and some are suggesting this win to be even better.

Europe looked certain to lose the trophy until Justin Rose and Sergio Garcia lead the turnaround filling the scoreboard with European blue.

"What you did out there today was outstanding," Olazabal was quoted as saying to his team in media reports. "You believed and you delivered. And I`m very proud that you have kept Europe`s hands on this Ryder Cup. All men die, but not all men live. And you made me feel alive again this week."

The Americans were simply stunned.

Three times they came to the 17th hole with a chance to win a match, only for Europe to deliver the key shots that win the Ryder Cup. Ian Poulter won the last two holes, and so did Rose, a birdie-birdie finish to beat Phil Mickelson. Garcia won the last two holes with pars to beat Jim Furyk.

Furyk had beaten Garcia at Brookline in a pivotal match.

If Kaymer had missed the putt and halved his match with Steve Stricker, the Americans would have been one point away from winning — with Tiger Woods in the fairway and 1 up over Francesco Molinari.

Woods wound up missing a 3½-foot par putt and conceded a par to the Italian from the same distance to halve their match. That extra half-point made it a clear-cut win for Europe, 14½-13½. Woods and Stricker, the anchors in the lineup, didn`t win a single match at Medinah.

Love became the first US captain to sit every player at least once before Sunday, wanting them to be fresh for the decisive day. Instead, the Americans faltered at the end — especially Furyk and Stricker, two of his captain`s picks.

The only US points came from Dustin Johnson, who went 3-0 in this Ryder Cup, Zach Johnson and unheralded Jason Dufner.

Agencies 

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Sleeping for long hours can cut risk of diabetes in teens

LONDON: Extending sleep duration may help to reduce diabetes risk in youth, a new study has claimed. 

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh have found that increasing the amount of sleep that teenagers get could improve their insulin resistance and prevent the future onset of diabetes. 

"High levels of insulin resistance can lead to the development of diabetes. We found that if teens that normally get six hours of sleep per night get one extra hour of sleep, they would improve insulin resistance by 9 per cent," said lead author Karen Matthews. 

The study tracked the sleep duration and insulin resistance levels of 245 healthy high school students. 

Participants provided a fasting blood draw, and they kept a sleep log and wore a wrist actigraph for one week during the school year. 

Sleep duration based on actigraphy averaged 6.4 hours over the week, with school days significantly lower than weekends. 

Results showed that higher insulin resistance is associated with shorter sleep duration independent of race, age, gender, waist circumference, and body mass index. 

Interventions to promote metabolic health in adolescence should include efforts to extend nightly sleep duration, authors said in a statement. 

The study will be published in the journal SLEEP.

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Sun shoots off big flare towards Earth

Nasa has captured the image of a particularly wide Earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME) or flare, erupting from the Sun and spewing billions of tonnes of solar particles. Experimental Nasa research models estimate that the CME, travelling around 1,120 km per second, reached the Earth on Saturday. CMEs of these speeds are usually benign.

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Many nations lag in plan to slow extinctions by 2020: UN

Many nations need to do more to slow extinctions of animals and plants under U.N. targets for 2020 that would also save the world economy billions of dollars a year, U.N. experts say.

M

any nations need to do more to slow extinctions of animals and plants under U.N. targets for 2020 that would also save the world economy billions of dollars a year, U.N. experts say.

Only a few countries -- including France and Guatemala -- have so far adopted new national plans to tackle threats such as pollution or climate change in line with a sweeping pact agreed in Japan in 2010.

"There is a lot more to do," David Cooper, head of the scientific, technical and technological unit at the Secretariat of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Montreal, told Reuters by phone.

Almost 200 nations will meet in Hyderabad, India, from October 8-19 to review progress towards goals to protect life on earth that U.N. reports say is suffering the biggest wave of extinctions since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago.

Governments agreed in 2010 to 20 targets including phasing out damaging subsidies and expanding protected areas, for instance to save valuable coral reefs that are nurseries for fish or to slow deforestation from the Congo to the Amazon.

"There is substantial progress. Is it fast enough to achieve the targets by 2020 for most of them? Probably not overall," Cooper said. Biodiversity is threatened by a projected rise in the human population to 9 billion by 2050 from 7 billion now.

"We need a step up in the activities," he said as part of a series of interviews on the outlook for Hyderabad. Biodiversity underpins everything from food to timber production.

Many other countries, such as Australia, Brazil or China, were making progress. China, for instance, has made big strides in reforestation, Cooper said. The United States is not a member of the CBD.

Nations have also been sluggish in ratifying a protocol laying out rules for access to genetic resources, such as rare tropical plants used in medicines, and ways to share benefits among companies, indigenous peoples or governments.

So far, 92 nations have signed the Nagoya Protocol but just six have ratified, well short of the 50 needed for it to gain legal force. The target is for the protocol to be up and running by 2015.

OVER-OPTIMISTIC

"We were a bit too optimistic," said Valerie Normand, senior programme officer for access and benefit sharing at the CBD, who said the Secretariat had hoped for it to come into force this year. The Secretariat now expected entry into force in 2014.

Cooper said many of the targets set for 2020 would save billions of dollars a year, by ensuring that farming, logging or fishing can be managed sustainably. Some fisheries, for instance, have been exploited to the point of collapse.

In Nagoya, experts estimated that annual funding to safeguard biodiversity totalled about $3 billion a year but some developing countries wanted it raised to about $300 billion.

"These are big numbers but they are trivial compared to the benefits we are getting from biodiversity. If we don't act the costs will be very much greater," Cooper said.

Among concerns, 32 percent of livestock breeds are under threat of extinction within the next 20 years, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says. And 75 percent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost since 1900.

"Because we don't really know the full impacts of climate change down the line, we don't really know what's going to happen in terms of growing conditions around the world. It's just safer for us to have a lot of these other varieties in our pocket," said David Ainsworth, spokesman of the CBD Secretariat.

Cooper said the pace of extinctions among the planet's estimated 9 million species -- plants, animals from insects to whales but excluding legions of tiny bacteria -- was perhaps 100 times the background rate estimated in fossil records.

"If you project the rates into the future, the rest of the century, they are likely to be 100 times larger still," he said. The rising human population threatens ever more habitats with expanding cities, farms and roads.

Among goals set in 2010 were to increase protected areas for wildlife to 17 percent of the world's land area by 2020 and to raise marine areas to 10 percent of those under national control. In 2010, respective sizes were 12.7 and 4 percent.

"I am optimistic" that the goal can be reached, said Sarat Babu Gidda, the CBD official who oversees protected areas.

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Nokia, Oracle to announce mapping deal - WSJ

Phone maker Nokia OyjNO1V.HE is expected to announce a deal that will give customers of technology company Oracle Corp(ORCL.O) access to Nokia's mapping services, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The deal may be announced on Monday in San Francisco at the OracleWorld conference. It was confirmed by a Nokia spokesperson, the newspaper said.

Finland's Nokia, which has been looking for ways to boost its location services business, also recently signed mapping deals with Groupon Inc and Amazon.com Inc.

Apple Inc publicly apologized last week for dropping Google Inc's mapping technology in favor of its own, which many customers found to be inaccurate compared to Google's service.

(Writing by Olivia Oran in New York; Editing by Dale Hudson)

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Two Americans killed in confused Afghan shootout

Kabul: Two Americans were killed in Afghanistan during an exchange of fire between NATO-led forces and the Afghan army that may have been the result of a misunderstanding, as the death toll of US military and civilian personnel passed 2,000.

A US official, who asked not to be identified, said on Sunday that an American soldier and a civilian contractor had been killed in the incident in eastern Afghanistan, the circumstances of which remain unclear.

The coalition initially said the incident may have been the result of an “insider attack” and another example of a member of the Afghan national security force turning on coalition troops in a war that began in 2001.

But it later said that nearby insurgent gunfire may have led to a misunderstanding.

“The circumstances were somewhat confused … There was a report of insurgent firing taking place in this incident which we believe may have been a factor,” Lt. General Adrian Bradshaw, deputy commander of the NATO-led coalition, said.

It was the latest setback for the coalition after the United States said joint operations with Afghan forces were returning to normal.

Joint operations were halted two weeks ago after a surge of attacks on the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) by its Afghan allies. At least 52 ISAF service members have been killed this year in so-called “green-on-blue” attacks.

The suspension of joint operations was a blow for NATO which wants to train the 350,000 members of the Afghan security forces so that they can try to ensure stability after coalition forces withdraw.

Pentagon data listing the number of U.S. troops and U.S. contractors killed in Afghanistan since combat began 11 years ago showed the two new deaths pushed the total combined number of U.S. personnel killed past the 2,000 mark.

The attack took place in the Sayed Abad district of the Wardak province, according to local police sources, who said a gun battle had broken out between coalition soldiers and Afghans when an Afghan National Army member opened fire on American troops.

Three members of the Afghan National Army were also killed in the firefight, while three other U.S. citizens and one Afghan were wounded, police spokesman Wali Mohammad said on Sunday.

“We appreciate the sacrifice of our fallen heroes, every death is tragic and important – none more than any other,” ISAF said in a statement after the incident on Saturday.

Tension between coalition forces and their Afghan allies has been rising due to an escalation of so-called “insider” attacks, but Bradshaw denied the incident was a reflection of growing mistrust between Afghan and coalition forces.

“There is a very strong relationship between ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force) and our Afghan colleagues,” Bradshaw told a press conference late on Sunday.

Separately on Saturday, police in eastern Kunar province said they had found the beheaded bodies of three male civilians in a forest.

The Taliban had kidnapped the men three days ago for allegedly spying for the government and NATO forces, Kunar police chief Shirwah Sameen said.

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Tight race nationally as first debate approaches

On the eve of the first presidential debate, President Obama leads or is at parity with Mitt Romney on virtually every major issue and attribute in what remains a competitive general election, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The new survey also highlights an emerging dynamic in the race: the disparity between the state of the race nationally and in battleground states, where campaigning and advertising by the two candidates has been most intense and where the election will be decided.

Nationally, the race is unmoved from early September, with 49 percent of likely voters saying they would vote for Obama if the election were held today and 47 percent saying they would vote for Romney. Among all registered voters, Obama is up by a slim five percentage points, nearly identical to his margin in a poll two weeks ago.

But 52 percent of likely voters across swing states side with Obama and 41 percent with Romney in the new national poll, paralleling Obama’s advantages in recent Washington Post polls in Florida, Ohio and Virginia.

Obama and Romney have focused outsized efforts in swing states: About a third of all voters in these states say they’ve heard from each side. Outreach makes a particularly big difference among less-reliable young voters, who proved critical in electing Obama four years ago.

Romney enters Wednesday’s debate in Denver under acute pressure to turn around a campaign that has lost ground in states — particularly Florida and Ohio — widely seen as critical to his prospects.

“He’s had a tough couple of weeks, let’s be honest,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said of his party’s presidential contender in a Sunday interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “He’s going to come in Wednesday night, he’s going to lay out his vision for America . . . and this whole race is going to turn upside down come Thursday morning.”

By a wide margin, voters expecte the president to win the debate matchup, and the new survey points to key obstacles remaining in Romney’s way. But there are also signs that some parts of the political landscape have shifted somewhat in favor of the Republican.

A slim majority of voters now see Romney’s wealth as a positive, signifying his achieving the “American Dream.” Fewer are focusing on issues of economic inequality and the gap between rich and poor. And there has been a big jump in the number of voters who say he has paid his fair share in taxes.

Just after Romney released his 2010 tax return earlier this year that showed he had paid a federal income tax rate of about 14 percent, 66 percent of voters said he had not paid his fair share. Now, after the release of his 2011 return showing a similar tax rate, 48 percent say he is not paying his fair share, and about as many, 46 percent, say he is.

Romney still faces challenges on this terrain. As was the case before the nominating conventions, almost six in 10 voters say that as president, the former Massachusetts governor would do more to favor the wealthy than the middle class. And by 57 percent to 39 percent, most voters say it is fair that some Americans — including senior citizens on Social Security, people on disability and the working poor — do not pay federal income taxes.

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Flare alert: Sun shoots off 'billions of tonnes' of solar particles towards Earth

Washington: NASA has captured the image of a particularly wide Earth-directed coronal mass ejection or flare, erupting from the Sun and spewing billions of tonnes of solar particles.

Experimental NASA research models estimate that the flare, travelling around 1,120 km per second, reached the Earth on Saturday. Coronal mass ejections of these speeds are usually benign.

CMEs are a phenomenon that can send billions of tonnes of solar particles into space that can reach Earth one to three days later, affecting electronic systems in satellites and on the ground.

The CME is a fairly small solar flare, measured as C-class, a third in strength after X and M-class flares, according to a NASA statement.

Similar CMEs, in the past, have caused auroras near the poles but have not disrupted the electrical systems or significantly interfered with GPS or satellite-based communications systems.

The image captured by NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory is a particularly wide flare, whose leading edge appears to wrap around over half of the entire sun as it moves out into space.

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Pen drives main threat to cyber security: Army

NEW DELHI: Despite a ban, use of pen drives has emerged as the main threat to cyber security in defence forces as it is responsible for over 70 per cent of such breaches in the three Services.

The use of pen drives as an easy-to-carry storage device has increased in the recent past and internal reports have confirmed that over 70 per cent cyber security breaches in the armed forces are due to their unauthorised use, Army officials said.

"These pen drives, which are mostly manufactured in China, have emerged as a big threat to our cyber security systems," they said.

Fresh cyber security guidelines have been issued by the Army headquarters to protect sensitive military networks from hacker attacks, sources said.

Measures have been taken by the other two services also to tighten their cyber security as IAF also recently issued instructions to its personnel warning them against having any official data on their personal computers and pen drives.

All personnel have been asked to declare theirInformation Technology assets and have been asked not to have any official data on them, IAF officials said here.

Anybody found violating these instructions in checks by cyber security personnel will draw strict action which may even amount to disciplinary action including court martial, they said.

When asked about the development, IAF spokesperson Wg Cdr Gerard Galway confirmed the steps taken by the Air headquarters to safeguard its cyber assets and secret information.

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Iran to introduce local alternatives to Gmail and Google

Tehran: Iranian officials announced that they would soon introduce local alternatives to Google and its Gmail e-mail service, even as the country's media and even some officials stepped up complaints over Tehran's decision to enact a ban on Gmail in response to an anti-Islam film, newspapers reported on Sunday.

Last week, Iran blocked Gmail but not the search engine of the parent company Google, in response to a court order linked to the distribution of a low-budget, U.S.-produced film on YouTube, also owned by Google.

In a country with 32 million Internet users out of a population of 75 million, according to official statistics, that ban has caused widespread resentment. Even many pro-government newspapers have complained of the disruptions.

"Some problems have emerged through the blocking of Gmail," Hussein Garrousi, a member of a parliamentary committee on industry, was quoted on Sunday. He said that parliament would summon the minister of telecommunications for questioning if the ban was not lifted.

The deputy minister, Ali Hakim Javadi, told reporters that Iranian authorities were considering lifting the Gmail ban, but also wanted to introduce their own domestic alternatives: the Fakhr ("Pride") search engine and the Fajr ("Dawn") e-mail services, according to reports.

Iran's clerical establishment has long signaled its intent to get citizens off of the international Internet, which they say promotes Western values, and onto a "national" and "clean" domestic network. But it is unclear whether Iran has the technical capacity to follow through on its ambitious plans, or is willing to risk the economic damage.

Bans on Gmail and other services like YouTube and Facebook have left Internet users scrambling to find ways to bypass the blocks.

On Saturday, Asr-e Ertebat weekly reported that Iranians had paid a total of 4.5 million US dollars to purchase proxy services to reach blocked sites over the past month.

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Microsoft Virtual Labs

MSDN Virtual Lab: Windows 8 Lab 3 - Searching and Sharing -  Click the Below link
Mircosoft Virtual Labs

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Top 7 Free Operating Systems For Your Laptop / Netbook.

Tired of Windows, Mac OS X, and other Operating Systems paid up gradation and support? Do you feel like trying something new? Or perhaps you want to test the cutting edge in operating system design or find out what the platform of the future is going to be like.

Or you may simply want to try out a system that your friends are using to see whether you can use it for your computer.

This page lists a variety of free operating systems available that you can download and install on your computer. Many of the systems are also open source so you can also tinker with the system, find out how it works, and learn from it. Below are the excellent systems you can download right now.

1, Ubuntu

Most Linux netbook systems seem to be based off of this one in some way or another, so it’s really worth starting with Ubuntu Ubuntu is an operating system built by a worldwide team of expert developers.

It contains all the applications you need: a web browser, office suite, media apps, instant messaging and much more. Ubuntu is an open-source alternative to Windows and Office.

This operating system wasn’t exactly designed from the ground up. It’s a Gnome-based system including most of the standard Ubuntu apps (Firefox, Open Office, F-Spot, etc.) What makes this setup different is compatibility with computer hardware, and a GUI tailor-made to take advantage of the limited real estate laptop screens feature.

2, Fedora

Fedora is the second most popular Linux-based operating system as of early 2010, behind Ubuntu. Fedora is an RPM-based, general purpose operating system built on top of the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat.

One of Fedora’s main objectives is not only to contain software distributed under a free and open source license, but also to be on the leading edge of such technologies. Fedora developers prefer to make upstream changes instead of applying fixes specifically for Fedora—this ensures that their updates are available to all GNU/Linux distributions.

Fedora has a comparatively short life cycle: version X is maintained until one month after version X+2 is released. With 6 months between releases, the maintenance period is about 13 months for each version.

Fedora because it had fairly good support for PowerPC when he used that processor architecture. He became accustomed to the operating system and continues to use it

3, Kubuntu

Kubuntu is an official derivative of the Ubuntu operating system using the KDE graphical environment instead of GNOME. It is part of the Ubuntu project and uses the same underlying system. It is possible to run both the KDE desktop (kubuntu-desktop) as well as the Gnome desktop (ubuntu-desktop) interchangeably on the same machine.

The Kubuntu desktop is fully customizable. Originally designed to ease transition for users from other operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows) by allowing a similar desktop layout, the KDE 4 Plasma Desktop incorporates widget-centric modularity that allows the user to incorporate function similar to all other operating systems.

It is also create new functionality not found in other operating system desktops. 3-D effects are available in the standard KDE4 installation.

4, Jolicloud

Do you have a low memory low speed netbook? Then Jolicloud is the best operating system for you. It is a Linux-based operating system that is currently in development and Pre-Final testing.

This Operating system is built upon Debian and Ubuntu 9.10, but is tweaked to be more suitable for computers that have weaker specifications in terms of disk storage, memory and screen size, like netbook computers.

Jolicloud relies heavily on Chromium-based packages for running web-based applications. For Windows-only products it uses Wine.

5 Mandriva Linux

Mandriva Linux (formerly Mandrakelinux or Mandrake Linux) is a French Linux distribution distributed by Mandriva (formerly Mandrakesoft).

It uses the RPM Package Manager. The product lifetime of Mandriva Linux releases is 18 months for base updates (Linux, system software, etc.) and 12 months for desktop updates (window managers, desktop environments, web browsers, etc.).

Server products receive full updates for at least 24 months after their release.

6, Crunchbang / Cruncheee

This one’s not exactly a netbook operating system per se, but it can make a pretty good one. Crunchbang is based on Ubuntu but focuses on “speed, style and substance” to quote their website.

Based on the lightweight Openbox window manager, Crunchbang certainly is fast and could run really well on your netbook. I highly suggest trying this out if traditional netbook operating systems don’t work out for you.

It’s worth noting that in 2008, a group of EEE enthusiasts made a custom Crunchbang for EEE users: CrunchEEE. Check out Cruncheee here, but know that it’s over a year out of date.

7, EasyPeasy

Ubuntu Netbook Edition is great, but a lot of things don’t work out of the box. MP3s, for example, can’t be played until you install the codecs.

EasyPeasy aims to be simple by offering propietary applications and codecs out of the box. You’ll be pleased to find MakeUseOf favourites including Skype and Picasa included by default.

One More: Moblin/MeeGo

Moblin Linux is the light-weight Linux distribution Intel developed to run on low power netbooks with small screens and Intel Atom processors. Maemo is the light weight Linux distribution that Nokia developed to run on its handheld internet tablets including the Nokia N900 and N810.

Download Moblin

Download MeeGo

Conclusion

There are a number of great operating systems worth trying out. I’ve only highlighted a few of the pack leaders worth checking out, but there’s a lot more beneath the surface if you’re willing to dig.

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