Barcelona wins European Champions League 2009

ROME (AP)—Barcelona gave an emphatic answer to who is the best soccer team in Europe, dispatching Manchester United with a dazzling and dominating display to win the Champions League title for the second time in four seasons.

Samuel Eto’o scored 10 minutes in and Lionel Messi connected in the 70th, leading the Spanish champions to a one-sided 2-0 victory Wednesday night that prevented the English power from becoming the first team in 19 years to win consecutive European titles.

“This is the most important victory of my life,” Messi said. “When the second goal came, that calmed us down a lot.”

Eto’o took a pass from Andres Iniesta, cut around defender Nemanja Vidic and beat Edwin van der Sar from 8 yards. The goalkeeper got a touch on the right-footed shot but couldn’t keep it from going in at the near post.

“The victory is much more important than the goal,” said Eto’o, a three-time African player of the year from Cameroon.

Messi, a 21-year-old star of Argentina’s national team, easily won the glamour duel with reigning FIFA player of the year Cristiano Ronaldo. Messi, who is 5-foot-7, was wide open when he scored on a header from about 6 yards off a cross from Xavi Hernandez, who had hit a post with a free kick 17 minutes earlier. It was Messi’s tournament-high ninth goal and his first in 11 games against English opponents.

Lionel Messi produced something special to help Barcelona beat Manchester United 2-0 in the Champions League final and establish itself as the unofficial best team on the planet.

Messi usually uses his head to send instructions to his feet on how to humble defenders, and the combination brought him a season-high nine Champions League goals and 38 in total for Barca.

"This is the most important victory of my life," Messi said. 'When the second goal came that calmed us down a lot."

"When I won as a player I was young and it was magnificent," Guardiola said of his 1992 triumph at Wembley against Sampdoria. "But now winning the treble at the first attempt is marvelous."

United was chasing its fourth European Cup title, and fourth trophy this season after winning the Premier League, FIFA Club World Cup and League Cup.

But United was thoroughly outplayed by the Spanish side, which has 153 league and cup goals this season.

source : sports.yahoo.com Read More...

Nokia starts roll-out of Apple App Store rival

HELSINKI (May 25) - Nokia on Monday began rolling out its much-anticipated online software and content store, Ovi Store, as it aims to follow the success of Apple's App Store.

Nokia said it had started moving Ovi Store to production servers, preparing for the global commercial launch, and the store was opened to users of a few of its phone models in Australia and Singapore on Monday.

Nokia has promised to open the store globally this week.To cope with slowing phone demand Nokia is building a new business from mobile Internet services -- like games or maps -- but is scaling back separate investment plans due to the slowdown, and focusing on merging the delivery of services.

Nokia, which made its first ever quarterly pretax loss in January-March, is cutting annual costs at its key handset unit alone by more than 700 million euros ($979.7 million) to counter plunging phone demand.

The Apple App Store has proved extremely popular, with one billion applications downloaded in less than a year, and operators and technology firms including Vodafone Nokia, and Microsoft now want a piece of the pie.

However, analysts say firms will likely struggle to match the success of Apple's store when creating their own stores, hampered by technical issues, a lack of applications and increased competition.

"Ovi Store is in some ways the last castle for Nokia - both N-Gage and 'Comes with Music' are industry laughing stocks," said Global Crown analyst Tero Kuittinen.

Games and music have been spearheads of Nokia's services push, but its mobile gaming offering has had little success, and its much-hyped music offering, which bundles free music downloads with a sold phone, has also found few clients.

Nokia will also sell games and music through the Ovi Store.

Source : Reuters.com Read More...

Nadal and Safina dazzle in Paris sun

PARIS (May 25) - World number ones Rafael Nadal and Dinara Safina dazzled their opponents in the Parisian sun on Monday to blaze into the second round of the French Open.

Brazil's Marcos Daniel fought valiantly for almost 2-1/2 hours before suffering the same fate as four-times champion Nadal's previous 28 opponents at the claycourt grand slam, going down 7-5 6-4 6-3.

Roland Garros also caught a brief glimpse of Safina who white-washed Britain's Anne Keothavong 6-0 6-0.

The Paris crowd had barely had time to file into Center Court and settle into their baking-hot plastic seats before the Russian, who looks poised to improve on her 2008 runner-up finish, had dashed back into the cooler confines of the locker room.

So ferocious were Safina's groundstrokes that a linesman was lucky to dodge one of the missiles. Keothavong might have won 33 points but 24 of these came from Safina's unforced errors.

Despite being on the receiving end of the 61-minute hammering, Keothavong at least saw the funny side.

"I'm not going to walk out here and slit my wrists or anything," said Keothavong, who last week became the first British woman in 26 years to reach the semis of a Tour event on clay in Warsaw. "In the end, you just kind of have to find ways to laugh about it. What else is there to do? I'm sure there will be a few jokes about it but I can take it."

Safina's coach, however, was not amused.

"(He felt) I could serve a little bit better and hit the balls a little harder, especially in that love game, 5-0 (in second set), when I pushed a few shots he was angry," said Safina, who has been beaten on clay just once this season.

"He said: 'What's this at 5-0? You have to hit the ball.'"

It is a message Venus Williams could also take on board after her mind went walkabout in the second set during a 6-1 4-6 6-2 win over fellow American Bethanie Mattek-Sands.

Williams, who owns seven grand slam trophies but has never triumphed at Roland Garros, will next face Czech Lucie Safarova.

Nadal has ruled Roland Garros since 2005 and, as he began his pursuit of a record fifth consecutive title, there was little to suggest that anyone would be able to wrest the title away from him.
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Honoring the fallen on a Google Earth map

Each Memorial Day we honor the men and women in uniform who have paid the ultimate price for the freedom we enjoy. Traditionally, this is the day many people visit cemeteries and memorials, especially the Arlington National Cemetery. But not all of us can do that. Good news is this year there's an alternative.

Sean Askay, a Google engineer, released on Sunday a Google Earth layer, called Map the Fallen, that contains detailed information of more than 5,700 service members who died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This is an interactive tool that allows you to see photos, learn about how each service member died, visit memorial Web sites with comments from friends and families, and explore the places they called home and where they died.

Askay has no military affiliation or background and developed the project on his personal time. He said on his mapthefallen blog that he came up with the idea when he was still a student and ran across icasualties.org, a public database of dead soldiers since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan.

According the Askay's blog, the Map the Fallen layer contains information collected from a number of sources, including the Department of Defense's Statistical Information Analysis Division, icasualties.org, MilitaryTimes.com's Honor the Fallen, The Washington Post's Faces of the Fallen, the Iraq and Afghanistan Pages, and Legacy.com.

The layer requires Google Earth 5.0 or later. Once the software is installed, you just need to download the Map the Fallen layer layer and choose to open it. After a few seconds, the layer will be loaded and you can learn so much more about those honorable men and women that you might otherwise don't know about at all.

Personally, seeing the sheer number of human figures closely shown on the surface the Earth is enough to give me somber and humble feelings.

What Askay did shows the true meaning of Memorial Day, and for a lot of us it offers an easy and convenient way to frequently remember and honor those we are often too distracted to do so.

source : news.cnet.com Read More...