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FOXBOROUGH - With elimination on the line, the Revolution nearly always seem to defeat the Chicago Fire. The Revolution have won four successive times and are 5-1 against the Fire since 2002 with playoff advancement or a playoff berth at stake.
But the Fire (3-1-1, 10 points) seem quite capable of confronting the Revolution (3-2-1, 10 points) on even terms this season, judging by a 4-0 victory over New England April 3. The Fire capitalized on the seventh-minute ejection of Revolution midfielder Jeff Larentowicz in that match in Bridgeview, Ill.
“It was a crazy game at their place, a great environment,” midfielder Shalrie Joseph recalled yesterday. “That has sparked us to return the favor. We expect them to be confident. They outscored us and outplayed us the first time. They really handed it to us. But that was a wake-up call, an early-season one, and now we know what we are capable of.”
The Revolution, who host the Fire tonight at Gillette Stadium, surrendered four goals in the first 39 minutes of the match against Chicago. In 411 minutes since, opponents have scored thrice against the Revolution.
“It should be easier 11 v. 11,” Revolution coach Steve Nicol said. “It will be nice to play them on level terms. Everyone plays each other so many times in the Eastern Conference that every game is a rivalry.”
The Revolution concluded the first match against Chicago with only nine healthy players, right back Chris Albright hobbling on a bruised right ankle for the final 20-plus minutes, and unable to perform since. Albright will return to the starting lineup tonight in a three-defender setup alongside Jay Heaps and Michael Parkhurst.
“[Albright] wasn’t injured last week but he wasn’t ready,” Nicol said. “That’s why we took an extra week with him.”
The depth of the Revolution roster is allowing players to fully recuperate from injuries. Steve Ralston (dislocated shoulder) will be available tonight but will be a backup for Mauricio Castro. Taylor Twellman (knee surgery) has been training at nearly full speed but will be held out at least until the Revolution visit Chivas USA a week from tomorrow.

boston.com

• For complete analysis of who’s in and out of the 2008 NBA draft, click here.
ORLANDO, Fla. — The first full day of the Orlando pre-draft camp gave us a few surprises in the games and more NBA rumors.
I spent the last 10 hours watching games and talking to NBA scouts and executives. Here is what they’re saying about Wednesday’s performances:
The best matchup of the night pitted UNC’s Ty Lawson versus Tennessee-Martin’s Lester Hudson. Lawson came in with the blue-chip pedigree but with a draft stock that’s taken a beating this year. Hudson came in with a small school background and a checkered past, but he had wowed scouts and executives in the early drills.
Hudson’s stock looked to be on the rise while Lawson’s seemed to be free-falling.
Both players came off the bench at the 10-minute mark and guarded each other. The verdict was an overwhelming knockout for Lawson, who dominated Hudson on both ends of the ball.Lawson’s tenacious defense forced Hudson into five early turnovers and a couple of bad shots. Meanwhile, Lawson kept pushing the ball and making things happen on the offensive end.
Hudson ended the game with four points on 2-for-6 shooting, with five assists and five turnovers.Lawson’s numbers weren’t spectacular — he had 10 points, four assists and shot 4-for-10 from the field — but several GMs walked away impressed with Lawson.
“He came out with great energy and played like he had something to prove,” one GM said. “He kicked Hudson’s [butt]. I think he helped himself.”
Even with Hudson’s poor performance, NBA executives still feel Hudson is going to be in the league. The Spurs met with him earlier in the day and several other teams are scheduled to interview him.
“Up until that first game, he showed great poise, athleticism and the ability to score from wherever,” one GM said. “I really think he has a shot at being a quality NBA player. He reminds me a little of Lindsey Hunter when he came into the league.”

sports.espn.go.com

Does the outcome of last month’s election in Italy have any relevance to the U.S.? A youngish center-left candidate who claimed to represent a new politics of hope, “Si puo fare,” (”It can be done”) lost decisively to a 71-year-old figure of the center-right who is nothing if not a familiar fixture of Italian politics. The loser’s resemblance to Barack Obama is not coincidental. Walter Veltroni was the first European politician to promote Obama after the two met in 2005. Veltroni wrote the introduction for the Italian release of “The Audacity of Hope.” While he has moved to the center in recent years, Veltroni began his political life in the Communist Party, a biographical detail unforgiven by some voters.
But Silvio Berlusconi pulled out a great victory. And that is where resemblances to American politics must end. Consider what Berlusconi faces. The New York Times reported it this way: “Beginning his third term as prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi on Wednesday pledged unusually forceful measures to solve Italy’s deep problems. These steps include new restrictions on illegal immigrants and the use of the military to tackle the longstanding garbage crisis in Naples.” The military? To clear garbage?
Your humble correspondent was just in Italy recently and amid many delights (including the gorgeous Amalfi Coast) had the misfortune to spend the better part of a day in Naples. Nothing prepares you for the squalor. The trash is piled up in great hillocks around the city, many as much as one-story high. The stench is oppressive. A great deal of garbage has of course escaped its plastic bags and decorates the streets and sidewalks. Everywhere your eye falls, even in the district surrounding the Palazzo Reale (Royal Palace), blight reigns. Having just seen Rome and Sorrento, Naples was a jar.
My friend Michael Ledeen, an expert on Italian fascism, Eurocommunism, the history of Italy, terrorism and many other subjects, is completing a book on Naples. He compares it to New Orleans, another corrupt city. Both cities are doomed, he explains. New Orleans, it need hardly be recalled post-Katrina, lies below sea level in the path of hurricanes. Naples sits right below Mount Vesuvius, which has erupted dozens of times since its catastrophic explosion in A.D. 79, most recently in 1944.

news-leader.com

A US TV show has reported actress Angelina Jolie has given birth to twins but other media outlets have denied the report.
Entertainment Tonight reported online today that Jolie gave birth to twins in the south of France where she is living with her partner Brad Pitt and their four children: six-year-old Maddox, four-year-old Pax and three-year-old Zahara and two-year-old Shiloh.
Other US TV shows and entertainment magazine People have all reprted that Jolie is still pregnant and has not yet given birth.
Jolie and Pitt have reportedly agreed to a three-year lease on a castle in the small town of Correns in the south of France.
According to its web site of Jolie and Pitt’s new home, the Miraval estate, the castle dates from pre-Roman times. It includes fountains, aqueducts, moats, a lake and vineyards that produce an organic wine distributed worldwide.
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news.com.au

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sj-r.com

A quietly intriguing column. This week: QI goes tribal
As the ocean “waves”, the universe “peoples”.
Alan Watts (1915-1973)
The word tribe comes from the Latin tribus - meaning “three peoples” - and refers to the three ethnic/political divisions of the early Roman state. Most “tribal” people prefer to call themselves “indigenous” or “first” peoples. There are about 7,000 indigenous societies containing as many as 700 million people.
As with diversity among plants and animals, so with humans: warmer climates mean more abundant food and therefore more diverse populations. There are five times more languages spoken on Papua New Guinea than in all Europe.
No such thing as race
In genetic terms, the most diverse people on the planet are Australian aborigines and the Mbuti pygmies of Zaire, despite them both being hunter-gatherers with similar skin colour and body shapes. They have been genetically separated for 60,000 years: almost 2/3 of the entire history of modern humans. Genetically, Europeans are about half-way between the two.
Genes responsible for our physical appearance are those that have reacted to climate. Hot climates tend to select for dark skin colour, a smaller build and wider nostrils. In general, the genes that control our physical appearance, the major component of “racial difference”, make up less than 0.01 per cent of the whole.
“Race” is a social concept, not a biological one.
There are an estimated 6,912 languages but more than half of these will disappear before the end of the century and of those that survive, 90 per cent will be “endangered”. In January, the last speaker of Eyak, a southern Alaskan language, died, aged 89. Marie Smith Jones did not teach her children Eyak because of the social stigma attached to it, although she did work with a linguist to produce a written grammar and dictionary before she died.

telegraph.co.uk

The legendary screen rampages of the ninja warrior make an impressive sweep at the box office but the reality is quite a different story for those who teach the true purpose of karate, according to a karate school owner.
Tenchi Dojo, 11831 S. Fortuna Road, teaches not only the Okinawa style of karate but also jujitsu and tai chi.
Nathan Bratcher, the owner and principal instructor, said he teaches the skill as an art rather than a sport. Bratcher said most of his students approach the discipline with a realistic view.
“Some still think it’s like the Power Rangers. Some of the younger kids like to learn for the acrobatics but it’s really about developing yourself as a better person.”
The true purpose of karate is to develop the mind, body and spirit, according to Bratcher. By disciplining those functions in a harmonious manner, a person is more able to take on daily challenges.
“Some of my kids face bullies every day and have a lot of peer pressure. They may not be the most popular, but karate helps them build confidence - whatever task is put in front of them, test, science project or sports.”
Progressing from white to black belt usually requires six years of training, but a minimum of six months to a year is needed to gain a solid foundation, Bratcher said.
“I’d say 40 percent of students are there to learn self-defense and the rest are there to develop discipline, respect and focus. Karate is one of the few disciplines that use both sides of the brain. The left brain, analytical, and the right brain, intuitive. Karate brings those two into balance.”
Some of those students start instruction with chronic pain or behavioral problems. But in the process of learning karate, many find that shoulder, knee or lower back pain disappears.

yumasun.com

If the weather carries on as it has been, the organisers of the French Open might like to consider adapting cricket’s Duckworth/Lewis method. This is a system whereby matches interrupted by rain can be decided over a shortened distance. The great thing about it is that no one really understands it and so is in no position to argue with it.
Tennis has done it before, of course, when it introduced the tie-breaker to stop matches going on interminably. This, in contrast to Duckworth/Lewis, is quite a straightforward system.
Before the rain arrived today - making it four days out of five that the weather has intervened - the first real upsets of the competition took place with the defeats of Amelie Mauresmo, two times a grand-slam winner, and the men’s sixth and seventh seeds, David Nalbandian and James Blake. And what was really surprising was that all three lost to no-hopers.
Even Mauresmo, who has a reputation for being someone who could choke on pureed banana, could not possibly lose to the Spanish qualifier Carla Suarez Navarro. But this is what she did, going out 6-3, 6-4.
In fairness to Mauresmo, who in 2006 won the Australian and Wimbledon titles, this is her first tournament since last month’s Fed Cup tie in Japan. Since then she has been held back by an abdominal injury and today she clearly had trouble with her serve as she lost her second-round match in 72 minutes.
Suarez Navarro, 19, who was playing in her first grand-slam event, was the first to hold serve in the fifth game and broke her opponent again to lead 5-2 before sealing the opening set in 34 minutes. Mauresmo, who has never made it past the quarter-finals in Paris, dropped serve again in the fourth game of the second set and despite managing three games in a row, was broken again in the ninth.

blogs.guardian.co.uk

Elegant substance: Nigel Seaman as he leads Desford to Masters victory
Given that over the past 150 years, the majority of brass band contest test pieces have adhered to the formatted equation of form and function, it comes as a surprise that every now again that precept sometimes changes to that of style and substance – or in the case of the 2008 All England Masters International contest – possibly, style over substance.
This rare contesting phenomenon is possibly explained by the type of test pieces elite bands have become accustomed to playing at the highest level: prescribed, regimented and highly technical in form, whilst their function derives directly from their construction – many are mere exercises in jumping through pyrotechnical musical hoops.
Style and substance
When faced however with a work that is quite transparently indirect pastiche, parody and allusion (as well as illusion), and which clearly directs the conductors to search for the interpretation of such, then form and function become almost redundant, and style and substance become the key.
It perhaps helps explain why Desford Colliery and not Fodens Richardson won the day at the Corn Exchange on Sunday too.
’Malcolm Arnold Variations’ gave the conductors of the 21 bands a test piece that was well within their technical capabilities, but also one that was stylistically beyond many of their own imaginations.
Privy to the possibility
Given that the composer himself had openly invited them to look for ideas of interpretative style by acquainting themselves with Arnold’s film scores, symphonies, concertos and ballets, it should have come as little surprise that the highly experienced trio of adjudicators, David Read, Philip Sparke and Eric Crees, would do the same.
You can’t say the bands, the conductors - and 4br for that matter – were not privy to the possibility of this becoming a contest where interpretation held the upper hand over traditional workaday functionality. It was there in black and white in the preface to the Ellerby score.

4barsrest.com

State and local officials are still assessing the damage caused by tornadoes that struck the state last night.
The worst damage was reported in Kearney, but several businesses in Aurora were also damaged. No major injuries or deaths have been reported.
Gov. Dave Heineman said the storms caused widespread damage in Kearney but the extent of the damage wasn’t clear this morning.
In Aurora, Heineman said at least eight businesses and several homes were damaged by the storm.
Heineman plans to visit Kearney this morning, and Lt. Gov. Rick Sheehy was headed to Aurora to assess damage and talk to local officials.
Thursday night, 10/11’s Alicia Myers went to one of the communities hit hard by the storm — Aurora. Several homes and businesses were damaged in the area as well as farm equipment.
The storm that started in the southwest corner of the state moved toward central and eastern Nebraska Thursday night, leaving its mark on communities like Aurora.
“The cornstalks were blowing across the hood and the water was so bad on the windows, you couldn’t see out. It sounded like it was hailing, but it was just the corn stalks,” said Maurice Wiggans, Harbine.
Maurice Wiggans was enroute to Hastings in his semi as the storm hit.
“Everything started rocking pretty hard, so I crawled into the bunk and pulled the mattress down over my head because I figured it was going to go over,” he said.
His truck was one of the lucky ones. Several semis, larger vehicles and power lines blew over on the interstate in the high winds, causing several miles of the interstate to be closed overnight.
One mobile home was stranded .25 miles east of the Hampton exit.
As the storm continued moving east, it left it’s mark on businesses such as the shell gas station just north of the aurora exit. Another mile north of the demolished gas pumps a farmstead was devastated, as grain bins and buildings were ripped from their foundation, the roof of the home blown off and debris scattered everywhere.

kolnkgin.com