First Norwegian To Win The World Road Race Crown

Thor Hushovd won a bunch sprint from a whittled down leading peloton to claim the blue riband men's road race title at the world championships in Australia on Sunday.

Hushovd is the first Norwegian to win the coveted crown as he relegated Denmark's Matti Breschel and home hope Allan Davis to the minor podium positions after 262.7 kilometers of racing around Melbourne.

Breschel now has a silver to add to his bronze of 2008 while Davis could not quite emulate the feat of compatriot Cadel Evans who was defending his title in front of home crowds.

Hushovd, a former green jersey winner at the Tour de France and one-day classics expert, timed his charge for the line perfectly.

"It's hard to understand I've won the worlds. It's a dream, it's unreal," he told. "This has to be the best moment of my career."

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Paris Motor Show Present’s Coolest Cars

Jaguar marked its 75th anniversary with this range-extended electric sports car considered to hit speeds of up to 205 miles per hour.

The car has four electric motors - one at each wheel - that make up to 195 horsepower each. Total control output is 778 horsepower.

Unlike the Chevrolet Volt, this car doesn't use a normal piston engine to produce on-board electricity for long-range driving. Instead, it uses a jet-like turbine engine. Total range, with 68 miles on pure plug-in power, is supposed to be about 560 miles, Jaguar claims.

Those figures are likely to remain merely theoretical since Jaguar has no plans to actually produce this car.

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World Cyber Games Begins In Los Angels

The Olympics of the video game world launched Thursday with players from 58 countries marching through the Los Angeles Convention Center holding their nations' flags. Over the next four days, more than 400 gamers will contend at the 10th annual World Cyber Games Grand Final for more than $250,000 in prize money, as well as new gear.

"We're quite confident," said Johan "face" Klasson, who will be representing Sweden while playing the first-person shooter "Counter-Strike" with his team. "I think the strongest opponents this year will be the Ukrainian team, also identified as Navi. They've been playing really well in tournaments all over the world. Those are the ones we have to look out for."

Players who formerly qualified at regional competitions held across the globe are here to face off in such games as "Guitar Hero 5," ''Forza Motorsport 3," ''FIFA 10," ''Tekken 6" and "Warcraft III." The tournament-style matchups are taking place along rows of monitors erected in a giant circular pattern inside a dimly lit convention hall.

After the World Cyber Games launched in Seoul in 2001, the Grand Final has been held over the past 10 years in such cities as Singapore; San Francisco; Seattle; Monza, Italy; and Cologne, Germany. Last year, organizers said more than 82,000 audience attended the event at the Century City New Convention and Exposition Center in Chengdu, China.

"We wanted to come back to America to celebrate our 10th anniversary because it's the most significant market in terms of entertainment," said Hyoung Seok Kim, president of the World Cyber Games. "It's the center of amusement. Many publishers and developers are located here, and there's a good communications. We don't have to worry about translation."

Kim said he expects 40,000 audiences at this year's Grand Final. While the World Cyber Games have grown over the last decade, aggressive gaming still lacks the same cultural punch in the United States as it does in Asia, where players like Lee "The God of Destruction" Jae-Dong are chased by squealing female fans and earn enormous salaries.

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Gascoyne Signs Contract For Lotus F1

The chief technical executive Mike Gascoyne has signed a new five-year contract. Lotus only returned to the grid this year but, along with fellow-newcomers Virgin Racing and Hispania, has failed to score a single point so far.

However, they have constantly out-performed their new fledling rivals and the experienced Gascoyne will now remain with the English-based outfit until 2015.

Gascoyne -- who has also worked for McLaren, Tyrrell, Jordan, Benetton, Toyota and Spyker -- told the team's official website: "It was always my purpose to finish my career here, so it's great to have officially agreed a five-year deal.

"I'm tremendously grateful to everyone involved in Lotus Racing for having the assurance to take this into a long-term contract.

Team principal Tony Fernandes added: "Mike's five-year contract is a main announcement for the Lotus Racing team.

"It shows just how serious we are, not only about how far ahead we are setting our aspirations, but also as a reward to Mike for the amazing hard work he and the team have already put in to get us to our current position."

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Google Offers Gmail Users More Control Over Inboxes

Google Inc. is addressing one of the main complaints about its free e-mail service by giving people more control over how their inboxes are organized.

The new selection announced will allow Gmail users to choose whether they prefer their incoming messages stacked in sequential order, instead of having them threaded together as part of the same electronic conversation.

Gmail has been mechanically grouping messages by topic or senders since Google rolled out the service six years ago.

But this so-called "conversation view" confused or aggravated many Gmail users who had grown accustomed to seeing all their latest messages at the top of the inbox followed by the older correspondence. After all, that's how the majority other e-mail programs work.

The complaints grew loud enough to influence Google to revise the Gmail settings so users can turn off discussion view and unravel their messages.

"We really hoped everyone would learn to love chat view, but we came to understand that it's just not right for some people," Google software engineer Doug Chen wrote in a blog post.

The aversion to conversation view doesn't seem to be extensive. Gmail ended July with nearly 186 million worldwide users, a 22 percent augment from the same time a year ago, according to the research firm comScore Inc. Both Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail (nearly 346 million users) and Yahoo's e-mail (303 million users) are larger, but aren't growing almost as quickly as Gmail.