BEIJING (AP)—It’s official now. This is NOT Japan and the 2006 World Championships, not to mention Athens and the 2004 Olympics.
This is Beijing and the 2008 Olympics, and the U.S. is back in men’s basketball.
These Americans, who looked so lost two years ago in Japan, appear to have found their Olympic way in China.
Batting away balls or swatting shots on seemingly every possession late in the second quarter, the Americans broke open a close game and went on to a 92-69 victory Thursday night to clinch a spot in the medal round.
“We played like we wanted to win. We played together,” U.S. guard Dwyane Wade said. “We were very aware of their offensive sets, we were very aware of their personnel and we played like that. So we were kind of a step in front of what they wanted to do because we kind of knew everything already.”
The Americans were also able to find the range on jump shots when the Greeks went to a zone defense to slow them down. Kobe Bryant, who entered the game shooting just 37 percent in the first two games, was 7-for-14 from the field and finished with 18 points.
Chris Bosh also had 18 points, Wade added 17 and LeBron James had 13 for the United States (3-0), which moves on to a matchup of Group B unbeatens Saturday night against world champion Spain. The winner will earn the group’s top seed for the quarterfinals.
Greece stunned the Americans two years ago in the semifinals of the 2006 world championships, shredding the U.S. defense for 63 percent shooting with clinical execution of its pick-and-roll offense in a 101-95 victory.
“We wanted to really keep the pressure on them. We wanted to kind of redeem ourselves,” Bosh said. “This was kind of like a payback game for us and we knew that people were wondering how we were going to respond, so we tried to play a solid game and stay on them the whole game.”
The Americans counted 42 possessions on tape in which the Greeks ran the pick-and-roll, so they spent much of their game plan on scheming to stop it.
This time, the Greeks hit just 41.3 percent (26-for-63) from the field and just 4-for-18, 22 percent, from 3-point range as the Americans used a suffocating defense to extend a seven-point lead to a 19-point cushion in the final 51/2 minutes of the first half.
“Any time you get beat it’s embarrassing and that’s enough,” Bosh said. “And we can really use that as a tool to help us with our defense now, and that’s the name of the game. Because if you play good defense, no matter how you’re shooting the ball you’re going to be in the game.”
The Americans’ defense failed them at the 2004 Athens Olympics. The U.S. finished 5-3 and gave up an average of 91.6 points per game in the three losses. The disappointing showing was the impetus that led to the three-year training this squad underwent to prepare for these Summer Games. This is not just a roster of NBA All-Stars, these players feel a part of a team.
Thursday night Theo Papaloukas led Greece with 15 points, but like China and Angola before them, the Greeks stayed close for about 11/2 quarters before the Americans’ depth and athleticism blew open the game.
After the previously slumping Bryant finally knocked down a 3-pointer, James blocked a shot that led to Bosh’s three-point play for a 44-30 lead with 2:31 remaining in the second quarter. James came up with a steal less than 30 seconds later and threw down a reverse dunk.
Bosh swiped at a ball that led to another Greece turnover, and James found him on the next possession for another three-point play and a 49-30 bulge. The Greeks then turned it over again, with James keeping his balance while nearly falling down to take an outlet pass and convert a layup, and Bosh blocked the final Greek shot of the half to make it 51-32 at the break.
The United States had 12-point lead in the game in Japan two years ago before handing it over with its sloppy defensive effort. The Americans came out much sharper this time, with Jason Kidd picking up three fouls in the first 1:25 while aggressively defending, and Bryant guarding Vasileios Spanoulis, the top Greek scorer.
Spanoulis scored 14 points but shot just 4-of-13.
And after stubbornly sticking to what wasn’t working in the game two years ago, the Americans showed the Greeks different looks this time. They picked up full court on one early possession, then fell back into a zone defense on another.
“We came out here and did what we had to do. From the beginning to the end, we did that,” Carmelo Anthony said. “From the beginning of the game, we felt different, the pace of the game, the way we approached this game mentally, we really wanted to get out from the jump ball.
Unlike their easy victory against Angola two nights earlier, the Americans kept up the defensive intensity after halftime. Dwight Howard smacked away a shot right into Kidd’s head, leading to a shot clock violation, and James and Bosh had rejections on the same third-quarter possession a few minutes later.
The Americans still struggled from the free throw line and 3-point arc. They were 7-of-20 on 3s and just 13 of 23 at the line.
Greece (1-2), which lost to Spain in its opener, faces winless Angola before closing pool play against China.
“If you play with teams like the United States, it makes the team a lot better in our technique and conditioning,” Greek coach Panagiotis Giannakis said.
Track Listing: |
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| 01 - Roamin' 03:37 |
| 02 - Lazy Days 03:38 |
| 03 - Corona And Lime 03:56 |
| 04 - Buzzin' 03:32 |
| 05 - Don't Be Shy 03:08 |
| 06 - Hollywood 04:17 |
| 07 - Polaroid 04:47 |
| 08 - James Brown Is Dead 03:15 |
| 09 - Lost My Mind 03:22 |
| 10 - Mary Jane 03:48 |
| 11 - Lazy Susan 03:57 |
| 12 - Flashlight feat. Dave Navarro 04:31 |
| 13 - Bonus Track 03:20 |
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| 49:08 min
http://link-protector.com/562313/
Hudgens, one of the stars of Disney's successful "High School Musical" series, entered into an agreement with producer Johnny Vieira when she was still a minor, the lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday, states. Vieira claims Hudgens and her father, Greg, sued to get out of the agreement, but have also failed to abide by settlement terms.
An e-mail message seeking comment from Hudgens' publicist wasn't immediately returned Tuesday morning.
Vieira is described in the lawsuit as a songwriter and music producer who was "engaged in the business of discovering and developing artists in the music industry" when he entered into an agreement with Hudgens in 2005.
That agreement, Vieira states, called for him to equally share in advances, royalties and merchandising from Hudgens' career.
That was before she landed a starring role in "High School Musical," which is scheduled to release its third installment later this year. She has also released a pair of solo albums.
Vieira claims an audit turned up at least two instances where he is owed money, and that Hudgens, 19, has refused to pay him.
He is also suing Greg Hudgens for defamation, claiming he sent an e-mail to others that accused Vieira of being a "predator."
Hudgens was sued last year by a lawyer who claimed she owed him $150,000. Court records show the lawsuit was settled in January, about a month after a judge ruled that case could go to trial.
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Say what you will about Rachael Ray, but the jaunty chef-next-door knows how to build a brand.
She began winning audiences with catch phrases like "EVOO" (for extra-virgin olive oil) on her first Food Network show, 30 Minute Meals, in 2001. Today, she has four Food Network programs, including Tasty Travels and $40 a Day. Her nationally syndicated, Oprah-backed talk show, Rachael Ray, is averaging 2.6 million viewers this season, and her Every Day With Rachael Ray magazine has 1.5 million readers. She endorses Dunkin' Donuts too--all to the tune of $18 million a year.
More established chefs also know how to play her game. Wolfgang Puck pulls in $16 million a year. The Austrian-born patriarch of celebrity chefdom got his start with the ritzy Los Angeles restaurant Spago in 1982. That hot spot, once frequented by Orson Welles and Sidney Poitier, now counts Brad Pitt and Jamie Foxx among its regulars. Today Puck owns 15 other fine-dining brands, including Chinois, Cut and the Source, and he also sells sandwiches to weary airport travelers at Wolfgang Puck Express. He's got Wolfgang Puck Bistros in suburbia and sells soups in the grocery aisle and cutlery on the Home Shopping Network.
Others of their sort include Paula Deen ($4.5 million), Alain Ducasse ($5 million) and Mario Batali ($3 million). Ducasse's empire includes 22 restaurants from Tokyo to Paris. The French chef's first New York spot shuttered in 2006 after critics said the food was too fussy; he opened two humbler joints there this year. Deen, the queen of Southern cuisine, serves up butter-drenched casseroles and motherly charm on two Food Network shows. Her loyal audience laps it up, and her cookbooks, memoir and magazine are all bestsellers. And Batali, a culinary school dropout, is now a master of Italian cuisine who owns 13 restaurants in New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Reservations at his New York spots Babbo and Del Posto are especially hard to get. In Depth: Top-Earning Celebrity Chefs
01. Intro (Black Gloves) 02:14
02. Get Ready 03:55
03. Take An Oath 03:10
04. Think Of A Problem 03:38
05. Come On Baby Girl 02:41
06. Realest Nigga Doin' It 03:25
07. True Colors 03:05
08. I Luv Stuntin' (feat. Sen) 03:22
09. What Up? (feat. J.R. Writer) 04:25
10. Push 'Em Back 03:48
11. Rumors 03:08
12. Million Dollar Plan 03
BEIJING – On his way out of the game, Yao Ming thrust his fist through the air, and soon made that long, wobbly walk to the Chinese bench. The end of a brilliant and historic night for basketball, the end of responsibility for Yao. His work is done. Let him rest.
“The game was a treasure,” Yao said, “and it will be a treasure for the rest of my life.”
Here was a surreal sight on Sunday night in these Olympic Games. Here was the embodiment of Yao Ming’s legacy: His heart, his determination, his immensity. He made possible a billion people worldwide watching a basketball game on television. He made possible these blistering ovations and rock-star treatment the U.S. players receive here. He made possible the hundreds of millions of dollars that David Stern can generate here.
And above all, Yao gave China its Olympic flag-bearer and iconic athlete to frame the most important engagement it’s ever had with the world.
“Yao built the bridge for all of us,” Kobe Bryant said.
To watch Yao limp and flail and double over to breathe was to understand the reasons with which his sense of obligation brought him back so soon from another broken foot, another surgery. For Yao, this is his life’s lot. For his own preservation, his own crack at a career undiminished, he needs to tell a most unrelenting Chinese sports machine that its days of running him into the ground are gone.
No more summers with the national team in non-Olympic years, no more of the treatment that’s breaking down his body. The sport’s never seen an athlete of his size who is so skilled, so agile. His lower body has crumbled under the burden, with two broken feet, a broken leg and an infected toe. It breaks your heart to watch what has happened to him. As much as anyone, his body needs rest and recovery. The pounding has taken a terrible toll on him.
They will continue to pressure him,” one high-ranking international basketball official said of Chinese officials. “The one thing they do with all of their athletes is drive them into the ground with training. The strongest survive. If you don’t, they’ll find another to come and do it.
“I mean, they don’t do little things like block out good airline seats for them when they travel. They can all be in middle seats in coach for all they care, and that’s how Yao travels with them. Whatever happens with his injuries, they’re going to insist that he keeps playing for them.”
The Chinese government had monitored his birth because of the perfect physical and athletic genes of his parents, forever treating him as something of a science project. Yet there’s nothing robotic, nothing programmed, about him. He has such humanity, such a sense of grace and honor. Over time, you can slowly see him assimilating into more of a Western mindset. He has things on his mind. Yes, he has plenty of opinions. It just isn’t his culture’s way to share them.
Poor Yao. The Rockets traded for the tempestuous Ron Artest and Yao’s reaction was perfectly appropriate. What he wanted to know, he said, was if Artest was done pummeling fans in the stands. Essentially, it was his way of asking: Will this clown ever get it right? Fair question, but the surprising bite to his words created a reaction that immediately sent Yao scurrying to make public and private apologies.
Yao showed a little edge, and he needs to do it again. After these Games, he needs to use the leverage of his popularity, his earning power in China and tell the regime that he’s done with the grinding national team calendar. Tell them that they’ll see him in 2012 in London, and that if they leave him alone, maybe he’ll make it there as an elite player.
When Yao crumbled with a stress fracture, necessitating the fourth surgery on his lower body in the past two years, his old Houston Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy pleaded that Yao – or someone close with a willingness to be the bad guy – has to learn the word “No.”
Still, Yao gives China its biggest star in these Olympics. Here, everything is about saving face, and the under-manned Chinese did that with a respectable showing. Yao missed seven of 10 shots and spent so much of his night crumpled over, holding his shorts, gasping for breath. He gave them one moment, though. Before the U.S. turned its Pool B game into a dunking line, Yao started it all. Of all things, he backed behind the three-point line and delivered the game’s first basket. Such a roar in this jammed building, such a poetic moment. After all, Yao has always defied range and reach.
“I felt honored to be there watching that,” U.S. point guard Chris Paul said. “It felt like a storybook when he hit that shot.’
So yes, everybody has made a killing on Yao Ming and he is tired and beaten and owed something here. Owed big. No one ever came to the NBA with his hype and pressure, with so many people openly pulling for him to be a flop. He was a mysterious figure out of the Far East and he felt like a threat. Now, everyone understands: The NBA needs Yao, the way China does. Only, he counted on them looking out for his best interests. They’ve bled him dry. His time, his turn now.
For once in his life, Yao needs it to be about him. He’s never going to lose face, but he could have his career cut far too short. Whatever’s happened, Yao must tell China’s government: Enough is enough – we’re even.
Scientists have taken another step toward the goal of rendering objects invisible using high-tech cloaks that redirect light.
Researchers for the first time demonstrated that a new material can bend visible light the wrong way in three dimensional tests. It builds on research that cloaks objects in the microwave wavelength.
The research, announced today, will be detailed later this week in the journals Nature and Science.
The metamaterial, as it is called, produces what's known as negative refraction of visible light. That means light is made to travel in the opposite direction from how it normally should bend when passing through a material. A common example is how a pencil will appear to bend upward when half-submerged in a glass of water. In the new work, researchers make the light appear to bend the other way.
Metamaterials are artificially engineered structures that have "extraordinary optical properties that do not exist in nature," the researchers write in Science. "They can alter the propagation of electromagnetic waves, resulting in negative refraction, subwavelength imaging and cloaking."
Visible light is just one type of electromagnetic radiation, a spectrum that includes everything from radio waves to X-rays and more.
Until now, the effectiveness of the cloaking has been demonstrated only in thin, two-dimensional materials.
Now at a National Science Foundation lab at the University of California, Berkeley, Jason Valentine, Jie Yao, Xiang Zhang and others have create a multilayered, "fishnet structure" that "unambiguously exhibits negative refractive index," they write.
"This straightforward and elegant demonstration enhances our ability to mould and harness light at will," according to a statement from the journal Nature.
Other research has looked into using plasmons - tiny electronic excitations on the surfaces of some metals - to cancel out the visible light or other radiation coming from an object and effectively cloak it.
Sci-fi fans know that cloaking technology made Romulan spaceships disappear in Star Trek. Among the real applications pondered for the future of real-world cloaking technology: stealth military devices and new medical techniques.
Top music downloads
1. Take a Bow, Rihanna
2. I Kissed a Girl, Katy Perry
3. A Millie, Lil Wayne
4. Get Like Me, David Banner
5. Put On, Young Jeezy
6. Got Money, Lil Wayne
7. Lollipop, Lil Wayne
TiVo favorites
1. So You Think You Can Dance, Thurs.
2. So You Think You Can Dance, Wed.
3. America's Got Talent
4. Big Brother 10, Thurs.
5. Big Brother 10, Sun.
Yahoo! yardstick
1. Victoria Gotti
2. Melissa Lawson
3. Brangelina baby pix
4. Bernie Mac
5. Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal
Most downloaded videos
1. Telephone piano
2. Coldplay's "Viva La Vida"
3. "Disaster Movie" trailer
4. Miley Cyrus "7 Things" spoof
5. McCain's "Bimbos" ad
6. Gina Michaelis in concert
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No. Time Track
01. 03:08 Intro (Original Version With Uncleared Samples)
02. 03:50 Things Done Changed (Original Version)
03. 04:58 Gimme The Loot (Never Before Heard Uncensored Version)
04. 03:20 Machine Gun Funk (DJ Premier's Version)
05. 03:37 Warning (Original Version)
06. 03:45 Ready To Die (Original Version With Different Beat)
07. 04:53 One More Chance (Original Version With Uncleared Sample)
08. 01:29 fu*k Me (Interlude)
09. 03:52 The What (feat. Method Man) (Original Version With Unheard Lyrics)
10. 04:35 Juicy (Pete Rock's Version)
11. 05:13 Everyday Struggle (Original Demo Mix)
12. 03:38 Me & My bi*ch (Original Version With Different Beat)
13. 05:37 Respect (Original Extended Edition)
14. 03:23 Friend Of Mine (Original Demo Version)
15. 03:34 Whatchu Want (Unreleased Original Version)
16. 02:51 Suicidal Thoughts (Pete Rock's Version)
17. 04:57 Come On (feat. Sadat X) (Unreleased Original Version)
18. 01:10 Who Shot Ya? (Original Demo Mix)
19. 03:24 For The Macs & Dons (Unreleased Track)
20. 01:13 Pepsi Freestyle (Unreleased Track)
21. 03:53 Biggie Got The Hype sh*t (Unreleased 1991 Demo Track)
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