US Job Losses Surge In November,Attention Job Seekers

US employers axed 533,000 jobs in November, the biggest monthly cut since 1974, the US Labor Department said.

In a dramatic indication of the worsening situation in the economy, the US jobless rate rose to a 15-year high of 6.7% from 6.5% in October.

Since these latest figures were compiled, further jobs losses have been announced, including big cuts at AT&T.

The grim economic data pushed Wall Street shares down by 2.5% while oil fell to a near four-year low of $40.

Recent data has fuelled fears that the world’s biggest economy is set for a deep, long downturn.

“This was much worse than was expected and represents wholesale capitulation. The threat of a widespread depression is now real and present,” said Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Business.

Reacting to the unemployment data, US President-elect Barack Obama said: “There are no quick or easy fixes to this crisis, which has been many years in the making, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.”

Recession year

The National Bureau of Economic Research said this week that the US entered a recession in December 2007.

Separately, a measure of US service sector activity, the Institute for Supply Management’s index, dropped to a record low in November.

The US service sector makes up about 80% of US economic activity.

November was the 11th month in a row that the economy lost jobs.

“In the past six months the US has lost 1.55 million jobs, almost as many as were lost in the whole 2001 recession,” said Ian Shepherdson at High Frequency Economics.

“You can’t get much uglier than this. The economy has just collapsed, and has gone into a free fall,” said Richard Yamarone at Argus Research in New York.

Bleak outlook

The economy contracted at an annual rate of 0.5% from July to September due to the biggest fall in US consumer spending in 28 years.

Many economists believe the gross domestic product will fall even more sharply in the current quarter.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve Board painted a bleak picture of the US economy in its influential Beige Book, a report used to help determine US interest rates.

It said economic activity has weakened across the US in the past two months, with retail sales, and vehicle sales in particular, “down significantly”.

US companies such as AT&T, DuPont, JPMorgan Chase and mining company Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold have announced job cuts this month.

Analysts fear the trend will worsen further.

Egg Lemon Soup,Lemony Twist On Garlic Soup

The authentic version of this Greek dish is chicken soup with an egg-and-lemon enrichment stirred in at the end. But I don’t hesitate to make egg lemon soup using garlic broth, thereby transforming a Greek classic into a refreshing, lemony twist on garlic soup.

2 quarts garlic broth

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1/2 cup long grain rice

2 eggs

1/4 to 1/3 cup lemon juice (to taste)

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

optional: a good size broccoli crown, broken into small florets and steamed for 5 minutes

1. Bring the garlic broth to a simmer and season as desired with salt and pepper. Add the rice and simmer until tender, about 15 minutes, or until the rice is tender.

2. Beat the eggs in a small bowl and beat in the lemon juice.

3. Distribute the optional broccoli among 4 soup bowls. Ladle about 1/2 cup of the hot broth into the lemon/egg mixture and whisk together. Making sure that the soup is not boiling, stir the egg mixture back into the soup and turn off the heat. Stir for a minute or two, taste and adjust seasonings. Add the parsley, and serve.

Yield: Serves 4

Advance preparation: The garlic broth will keep for a day in the refrigerator and can be frozen.

Approximate Nutritional Information per Serving: Without broccoli: 197 calories; total fat: 5.1g; saturated fat: 1.5g; cholesterol: 93mg; sodium: 1560mg; total carbohydrates: 21.9g; sugars: 2.0g; protein: 14.2g; vitamin A 5% recommended daily allowance (RDA) based on 2,000 calorie diet; vitamin C: 16% RDA; calcium 4% RDA; iron 14% RDA

The Black Balloon(2008)-Movie Review,Story Line

Would you be able to cope? That is the unspoken challenge laid down by “The Black Balloon,” a harrowing, unsentimental portrait of a middle-class Australian family whose oldest son has severe autism compounded by attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Would you find in yourself the seemingly infinite reserves of love and patience possessed by the Mollisons, the movie’s itinerant, highly stressed army family who have just moved to the suburbs of Sydney? Maybe not.

“The Black Balloon,” directed by Elissa Down, was inspired by her experiences growing up in a household with two autistic brothers, the younger of whom served as the model for Charlie (Luke Ford), a mute who communicates in sign language and heaving, wheezing grunts. When calm, Charlie is adorably playful and cuddlesome, but when agitated, which is often, he makes noises that assume a feral intensity.

At his most intimidating, during uncontrollable tantrums, he becomes a desperate wild animal, flailing and spitting and biting. Mr. Ford, who was seen earlier this year as the hero’s rambunctious son in “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” makes Charlie a character whose complexity transcends his disability; you can almost decipher the words he is unable to speak.

Ms. Down’s sympathetic alter ego is Charlie’s slightly younger brother, Thomas (Rhys Wakefield), a shy 15-year-old whose love for Charlie is increasingly compromised by his embarrassment. As the new kid at his school, Thomas is something of a fish out of water himself; barely able to swim, he struggles to stay afloat during lifesaving classes. He is so ashamed of Charlie, who attends a school for the disabled, that when Jackie (Gemma Ward), a sweet, attractive girl his own age, comes calling, he futilely tries to keep him out of sight.

“The Black Balloon” offers a wrenching portrait of the Mollison household. The boys’ exhausted mother, Maggie (Toni Collette), only days away from giving birth to a third child, refuses the bed rest ordered by her doctors. When she goes to the hospital to give birth, her husband, Simon (Erik Thomson), a gruff, good-hearted army officer, mistakenly imagines that the house can run smoothly while she is away. No sooner has she left than Charlie begins wreaking havoc.

The scenes of Charlie running amok are agonizing. One afternoon he flees in his underwear and, with Thomas in frantic pursuit, dashes through the neighborhood and into a strange house to use the bathroom. In a supermarket checkout line he flops onto the floor and begins bellowing when Simon asks him to return some items to the shelves; eventually he has to be dragged out of the store screaming. At one point an angry neighbor summons child services to the Mollisons’ home.

In the most repellent scene, Charlie is discovered in his room smearing his feces on the carpet and over his body. Thomas is expected to clean up the mess. His growing sense of being trapped by his brother’s disability is evoked in moments when he anxiously listens to Charlie’s noises and to the squall of the newborn through the door of his room.

The blooming puppy love between Thomas and Jackie lends “The Black Balloon” a welcome strain of tenderness. Mr. Wakefield and Ms. Ward project the innocence of shy, sensitive young people for whom a tentative shared kiss is a very big deal.

But Ms. Collette’s Maggie is the film’s prime mover. This wonderful Australian actress, who hasn’t a shred of vanity, virtually disappears into the complicated characters she plays, and Maggie is one of the strongest. With every forceful gesture and glaring look, Ms. Collette portrays Maggie as an indefatigable woman of heart and sinew who, through sheer determination, holds off chaos.

THE BLACK BALLOON

Directed by Elissa Down; written by Ms. Down and Jimmy Jack (a k a Jimmy the Exploder); director of photography, Denson Baker; edited by Veronica Jenet; music by Michael Yezerski; production designer, Nicholas McCallum; produced by Tristram Miall; released by NeoClassics Films Ltd. In Manhattan at the AMC Empire 25, 234 West 42nd Street. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Rhys Wakefield (Thomas), Luke Ford (Charlie), Gemma Ward (Jackie), Erik Thomson (Simon) and Toni Collette(Maggie).

Song Of Whales:Human Noise Drowns Out

(ROME) — The songs that whales and dolphins use to communicate, orient themselves and find mates are being drowned out by human-made noises in the world’s oceans, U.N. officials and environmental groups said Wednesday.

That sound pollution — everything from increasing commercial shipping and seismic surveys to a new generation of military sonar — is not only confounding the mammals, it also is further threatening the survival of these endangered animals.

Studies show that these cetaceans, which once communicated over thousands of miles (kilometers) to forage and mate, are losing touch with each other, the experts said on the sidelines of a U.N. wildlife conference in Rome.

“Call it a cocktail-party effect,” said Mark Simmonds, director of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, a Britain-based NGO. “You have to speak louder and louder until no one can hear each other anymore.”

An indirect source of noise pollution may also be coming from climate change, which is altering the chemistry of the oceans and making sound travel farther through sea water, the experts said.

Representatives of more than 100 governments are gathered in Rome for a meeting of the U.N.-backed Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals.

The agenda of the conference, which ends Friday, includes ways to increase protection for endangered species, including measures to mitigate underwater noise.

Environmental groups also are increasingly finding cases of beached whales and dolphins that can be linked to sound pollution, Simmonds said.

Marine mammals are turning up on the world’s beaches with tissue damage similar to that found in divers suffering from decompression sickness. The condition, known as the bends, causes gas bubbles to form in the bloodstream upon surfacing too quickly.

Scientists say the use of military sonar or seismic testing may have scared the animals into diving and surfacing beyond their physical limits, Simmonds said.

Several species of cetaceans are already listed as endangered or critically endangered from other causes, including hunting, chemical pollution, collisions with boats and entanglements with fishing equipment. Though it is not yet known precisely how many animals are affected, sound pollution is increasingly being recognized as a serious factor, the experts said.

As an example, Simmonds offered two incidents this year which, though still under study, could be linked to noise pollution: the beaching of more than 100 melon-headed whales in Madagascar and that of two dozen common dolphins on the southern British coast.

The sound of a seismic test, used to locate hydrocarbons beneath the seabed, can spread 1,800 miles (3,000 kilometers) under water, said Veronica Frank, an official with the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

A study by her group found that the blue whale, which used to communicate across entire oceans, has lost 90 percent of its range over the last 40 years.

Despite being the largest mammal ever to inhabit Earth, the endangered blue whale still holds mysteries for scientists.

“We don’t even know where their breeding grounds are,” Simmonds said. “But what’s most important is that they need to know where they are.”

Other research suggests that rising levels of carbon dioxide are increasing the acidity of the Earth’s oceans, making sound travel farther through sea water.

The study by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in the United States shows the changes may mean some sound frequencies are traveling 10 percent farther than a few centuries ago. That could increase to 70 percent by 2050 if greenhouse gases are not cut.

“This is a new, strange and unwanted development,” Simmonds said. “It shows how the degradation of the environment is all linked.”

However, governments seem ready to take action, said Nick Nutall, a spokesman for the U.N. Environment Program, which administers the convention being discussed in Rome. The conference is discussing a resolution that would oblige countries to reduce sound pollution, he said.

Measures suggested include rerouting shipping and installing quieter engines as well as cutting speed and banning tests and sonar use in areas known to be inhabited by the endangered animals.

Lighting: Bright Idea,Philips

The next time you flick on a light switch, consider this: about one-fifth of the world’s electricity is used for lighting, and most of it is squandered. Traditional 
 incandescent light bulbs invented more than a century ago remain the norm, but they are horribly inefficient. Only about 5%-10% of the energy they consume is used to produce light, while the rest is burned off as useless heat.

For Allard Bijlsma, that spells opportunity. Standing in a conference room in a suburb of Antwerp, he picks up an oblong silver object slightly smaller than a rugby ball, brandishes it triumphantly, and makes the sales pitch. “We will shape this market; we will change the rules of the game,” he says.

Bijlsma runs the consumer luminaries business for Dutch company Royal Philips Electronics. He’s feeling particularly upbeat these days because he’s about to launch a new line of high-tech products that use only a fraction of the energy of traditional lighting. The oblong object he’s holding is a table lamp. It’s just one of 50-plus lighting fixtures (luminaries, in the industry jargon) in a new range based on the latest in digital light-emitting diode (LED) technology, which can produce a warm, white light that comes close to rivaling halogen lamps but uses only a fraction of the electricity. And, unlike traditional bulbs, there’s no need to stock up on spares: Philips estimates the new lights will have a 20-year life.

Energy-efficient lamps have been around for more than two decades, but until recently they’ve had a mixed track record. The earliest fluorescent models were expensive and clunky, and that put many consumers off. “A lot of people still think that energy-saving light bulbs are too large and too dim,” says James Russill, a lighting specialist at Energy Saving Trust, a British nonprofit consumer advisory group. That’s finally starting to change, for three reasons. The first is that the technology has improved immeasurably thanks to LED, which consists essentially of semiconductors coated with phosphorus. Second, prices have come down to the point where a high-tech lamp doesn’t need to be much more expensive than a traditional incandescent one. Perhaps most significantly, governments are now getting involved in energy-saving efforts. Last year, Australia became the first country to announce it is banning incandescent bulbs (from 2010). Britain is also moving to phase them out: from January, no incandescent bulbs of 100 W or more will be sold. In October, a meeting of European Union energy ministers supported calls for an E.U.-wide ban on these bulbs, but the exact timing has yet to be decided.

Business is starting to catch on, too, not least because of the potential long-term cost savings. While the initial investment in new digital lighting is steep, the long life of the lights means that it can be a smart one-time buy. In Britain this year, supermarket giants Tesco and Sainsbury have both announced plans to substitute fluorescent with LED lighting in their freezer sections. Hotel chains are also making the switch.

Lighting companies the world over are scurrying to capitalize on these shifts, including heavyweights Osram and GE. “The industry has been extremely proactive,” says Russill of the Energy Saving Trust. Philips is making some of the biggest bets. Over the past two years, it has spent more than $4 billion on acquisitions aimed at positioning itself as a leader in digital, low-energy lighting. The plant outside Antwerp belonged to the consumer-lighting market leader Partners in Lighting, which Philips bought in 2006. The company followed that purchase a year later with the $2.7 billion acquisition of Genlyte, a big U.S. player that makes lights for offices, highways, factories and outdoor advertising. Those deals come on top of its own massive in-house research efforts in R&D labs from Silicon Valley to Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

There’s a lot at stake. The worldwide lighting market is worth about $78 billion a year, and consumer luminaries alone — excluding the market for bulbs — is almost one-third of that. Philips is moving fast to expand from its traditional European base. Bijlsma reckons the firm’s sales of LED and other low-energy lighting will double every year in emerging markets, and grow “at a fast pace” in mature markets. Philips is targeting Latin America, and also Asia, where it is planning branded showrooms in stores.

Will consumers go for it this time around? Yes, says Russill: “LED is here and it’s moving very quickly.” Back in Antwerp, Bijlsma and Philips are betting he’s right.

Laugh And The World Laughs With You

Ever wonder whether happy people have something you don’t, something that keeps them cheerful, chipper and able to see the good in everything? It turns out they do — they have happy friends.

That’s the conclusion of researchers from Harvard and the University of California at San Diego, who report in the British Medical Journal online that happiness spreads among people like a salubrious disease. Dr. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler studied nearly 5,000 people and their more than 50,000 social ties to family, friends and co-workers, and found that an individual’s happiness is chiefly a collective affair, depending in large part on his or her friends’ happiness — and the happiness of their friends’ friends, and even the friends of their friends’ friends. The merriment of one person, the researchers found, can ripple out and cause happiness in people up to three degrees away: So, if you’re happy, you increase the chance of joy in your close friend by 25%; a friend of that friend enjoys a 10% increased chance. And that friend’s friend has a 5.6% higher chance.

“This is a very serious piece of research; it’s pioneering,” says Dr. Richard Suzman, director of the division of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging. “We are barely beginning to understand its translational and applied aspects.”

The authors analyzed data from the Framingham Heart Study, an historic study of heart disease among nearly 5,000 people begun in 1948. Because it was designed to follow participants and their offspring over several generations, the study’s creators recorded detailed information about each person’s closest relatives and friends, to better keep tabs on the original participants. That database served as an ideal social laboratory for Christakis and Fowler, who questioned each participant and his or her friends and family about their emotional state three times over 20 years.

The idea of mood transfer is not exactly revolutionary — it makes sense, after all, that your happiness will affect your closest friends, and that their emotional state will influence your own. (Interestingly, the same association was not found with unhappiness, despite the old adage about misery and company, and the contagion effect was weaker among family members than friends, possibly because while people take a cue from friends, they take for granted their families and spouses.) What was less expected was that the effect was sustained up to three degrees of separation away, among people who may not necessarily know one other. You may owe your good cheer to your friend’s brother’s girlfriend, even if you don’t know her name.

That’s the power of the social network, which, the authors argue, may impact our emotional state even more than our individual choices and environments. And it is not merely a result of like seeking like. The authors compared their observed network to a control network in which they randomly assigned feelings of happiness to individuals, and were able to rule out the possibility that happy people were simply clustering together by choice. Indeed, in another study in the same issue of the BMJ, researchers from Yale University and the Federal Reserve of Boston showed a similar tendency to cluster among people who, for example, are the same height, or suffer from acne, or headaches. But once the researchers adjusted for confounding factors, the network dissolved; in Christakis and Fowler’s paper, the happiness link remained unbroken.

But the effect was limited by space and time. Researchers found that the risk of catching happiness increased with proximity: so, a next-door neighbor enjoys a 34% increased chance of happiness by living near a happy person, but a friend who lives across town is less affected. And the best-connected social networkers — those who were at the center of their social nodes — were more likely to become happy than people on the fringes. Viral happiness was relatively short-lived, however, lasting about a year.

This is the authors’ third such networking study suggesting that the social group is a powerful super-organism that wields much influence over individuals’ well-being. Previous analyses by Christakis and Fowler, based on the same pool of data, have shown that obesity is similarly contagious, as is the act of quitting smoking.

The researchers’ hope is that a better understanding of how people pick up and pass on behaviors will help health officials create more targeted public health messages. Antismoking campaigns aimed at teens, for example, might be more powerful if they were geared toward the most socially connected students in a high school — rather than individual smokers. “We are always looking for areas to invest in, promising new areas of research that will give us new levels of ability to help people, and without a doubt I see this as a very promising area,” says Suzman.

“DRUG STATE”, 13 Killed In Mexico

The bodies of 13 people have been found on a dirt road in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, home to one of the country’s most violent drug cartels.

The victims’ hands were bound and all had been shot. Most were teenagers.

Passersby found the bodies near a stolen truck in the northwest of the state on Thursday.

It comes a day after a leading newspaper, El Universal, said that at least 5,000 people had been killed in drug-related violence this year.

A local prosecutor, Juan de Dios Beltran, said the police were still trying to identify the victims.

Clean-up

President Felipe Calderon has deployed more than 40,000 troops to combat drug traffickers.

However, drug violence in Mexico is rising as gangs fight each other and the security forces.

In October, drug traffickers killed 11 people in a bar in Ciudad Juarez.

In August, 11 beheaded bodies were dumped in the country’s south. In the same month, 13 people, including a baby, were killed in a tourist town in the north.

The government is also struggling to clean up its security forces.

Last month, Noe Ramirez Mandujano, the ex-head of the anti-organised crime agency, was arrested as part of an investigation into links to drug cartels.

The attorney general said Mr Ramirez accepted $450,000 (£305,897) from cartels and was offered a monthly fee for information.

Other senior officials have been detained as part of an operation to crack down on corruption.

Yuvraj Back In India Test Squad

India have announced a 15-man squad for the two-Test series against England beginning in Chennai on 11 December.

Yuvraj Singh, 26, who scored successive centuries in the aborted one-day series with England, is back in the Test squad for the first time since April.

He could fill the middle order gap created by Sourav Ganguly’s retirement.

Left-arm spinner Pragyan Ojha, who toured Sri Lanka but has yet to make his Test debut, is in the party but left-arm seamer RP Singh is omitted.

Yuvraj, who made his Test debut against New Zealand in October 2003, has had an inconsistent career in the longer format.

In 23 matches he has scored three centuries, all against Pakistan, but has also made five ducks, with an average of 32.

On India’s most recent tour of Australia in 2007/08 he was twice out for nought and made only 17 runs in two Tests.

Ojha, 22, has played five one-day internationals, taking five wickets with a best of 2-28 against Sri Lanka.

He is expected to provide cover for off-spinner Harbhajan Singh and new leg-spin hope Amit Mishra.

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India squad: Mahendra Dhoni (capt & wk), Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman, Yuvraj Singh, Amit Mishra, Zaheer Khan, Ishant Sharma, Harbhajan Singh, Subramaniam Badrinath, Munaf Patel, Murali Vijay, Pragyan Ojha.

India Admits ‘Lapses’ Over Mumbai,US Warning

India’s new home minister has admitted that there were security lapses in last week’s militant attacks on Mumbai.

Palaniappan Chidambaram said the lapses were being “looked into” and their “causes would be addressed soon”.

Officials have now revised the death toll – they say 172 people died, including nine gunmen, in the attack on multiple targets in the city.

India has blamed Pakistan-based militants for the attacks. Islamabad denies any role.

US warning

The Indian government has faced growing criticism at home over its handling of the attacks.

Mr Chidambaram took over as home minister on Monday after his predecessor Shivraj Patil was forced to quit amid media and opposition criticism that he was taking a “soft approach on terror”.

“I would be less than truthful if I said there were no lapses,” Mr Chidambaram told reporters in Mumbai.

“These are being looked into. We will address the causes that led to the lapses.”

Mr Chidambaram refused to give any details of the investigation into the attacks.

“Work is under way. A lot of evidence has been gathered. Many aspects are being checked… and when the full picture is drawn up I expect to be able to make a statement in parliament,” he said.

When asked about the possible involvement of Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, Mr Chidambaram said: “There is ample evidence to show the source of the attacks was clearly linked to organisations which have in the past been identified as behind terrorist attacks in India,”

US media said this week that Washington had warned India in October that Mumbai could be targeted by militants arriving by sea.

The home minister said the death toll now stood at 172 which included 163 civilians and members of the security forces, and nine militants.

Mr Chidambaram said 18 security force officers were killed, among them the head of Mumbai’s anti-terrorism squad, Hemant Karkare.

Many of the 293 people who were injured were still undergoing treatment, he said.

‘Common enemy’

Meanwhile, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev – who is on a visit to India – offered to help India fight terrorism and investigate the attacks in Mumbai.

“Terrorism is a common enemy. We are ready to help India in fighting this menace,” India’s national channel Doordarshan quoted him as saying.

On Thursday, India said it had decided to put “on hold” all official initiatives to boost trade with Pakistan.

“Quite clearly, the environment being what it is now, we have put everything on hold,” the Indian Express newspaper quoted Minister of State for Commerce and Power Jairam Ramesh as saying.

“The way forward depends on [Pakistan's] response. If it is positive, we can go back to doing all that both sides had proposed on improving trade,” he said.

Last week’s attacks shocked the country, with many describing it as India’s 9/11.

Three major airports in India are on heightened alert after a threat of attacks by the Deccan Mujahideen, the previously unknown militant group who claimed responsibility for last week’s Mumbai attacks.

India has blamed Pakistan-based banned group Lashkar-e-Toiba for the attacks. It denies involvement.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited both India and Pakistan this week to try to ease tensions.

In Islamabad, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari vowed to take “strong action” against any elements in his country that were involved in Mumbai attacks.

“Pakistan is determined to ensure that its territory is not used for any act of terrorism,” he said.

Ms Rice demanded “a robust response” from Pakistan but warned India should not take actions that would provoke “unintended consequences”.

Aston Villa 1-2 MSK Zilina,Updated

Aston Villa fell to a shock loss to MSK Zilina but still reached the Uefa Cup’s last 32, thanks to Hamburg’s victory over Slavia Prague.

Zilina took the lead when Vladimir Leitner’s cross went straight in.

They doubled their advantage when Peter Styvar converted Peter Pekarik’s cross after a breakaway.

Nathan Delfouneso, on his full debut for Villa, scored with a superb left-foot volley but Zilina held on despite having Leitner sent off.

Not that the result mattered in terms of Villa’s progress in the competition as Hamburg’s 2-0 win guaranteed Martin O’Neill’s side a top-three finish in the group.

But O’Neill will not be pleased with the way Villa conceded twice to a side who had previously scored only one goal in the whole of the group stages.

Zat Knight, who had earlier seen a header tipped over the bar by Zilina keeper Dusan Pernis, looked a little at fault for Zilina’s first goal.

The defender looked to duck out of heading away Leitner’s floated cross and the ball sailed over him and beyond Brad Guzan’s dive to nestle in the bottom right corner.

But if the Slovaks’ opener owed a little to poor defending and good fortune, their second goal was simply sublime.

A devastating counter-attack saw Adauto carry the ball forward before laying it off to Pekarik to cross for Styvar to finish the move in style.

At that time it was hard to see how an unfamiliar Villa side, which had eight changes from the team that played at the weekend, would claw their way back into the match.

It took a moment of superb skill for 17-year-old striker Delfouneso, who volleyed in superbly after Marlon Harewood had set him up by chesting the ball down at the edge of the box.

Yet the goal did little to improve Villa’s fluency and too many crosses failed to find a player as the hosts struggled to take a grip on the game.

In midfield, Villa looked lightweight, and while that changed when James Milner and Gareth Barry were brought on, chances remained sparse.

Craig Gardner saw his shot on the turn saved and Milner fired over from the rebound.

Then Leitner pulled back Ashley Young, having been booked for the same thing earlier, and was sent off after being cautioned again.

Villa tried to make their numerical advantage tell and Barry went close before Gardner should have done much better with a free header that he directed wide.

In injury time, Gardner came close to making amends but his header cannoned back off the post.

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Aston Villa: Guzan, Reo-Coker, Knight, Cuellar, Luke Young, Gardner, Salifou (Barry 68), Osbourne (Milner 65), Ashley Young, Delfouneso (Agbonlahor 76), Harewood.
Subs Not Used: Friedel, Laursen, Petrov, Clarke.

Booked: Osbourne.

Goals: Delfouneso 28.

MSK Zilina: Pernis, Pekarik, Vomacka, Sourek, Leitner, Strba, Jez (Tesak 90), Pecalka, Piacek, Adauto (Vladavic 70), Styvar (Rilke 86).
Subs Not Used: Seman, Karoglan, Belak, Poliacek.

Sent Off: Leitner (79).

Booked: Leitner, Pecalka.

Goals: Leitner 16, Styvar 19.

Att: 28,797

Ref: Espen Berntsen (Norway).