Arsenal’s 22-match unbeaten record unexpectedly came to an end at the Riverside this afternoon as Stewart Downing’s early penalty and Tuncay Sanli’s second-half strike sealed a deserved 2-1 victory to lift Middlesbrough out of the bottom three and leave the Premier League leaders just a point clear at the top.

The Gunners dropped two points when drawing 1-1 against Newcastle on Wednesday and, although Tomas Rosicky scored in added time, three more went awry in the north-east as Gareth Southgate’s side gave a spirited performance against visitors sorely lacking their leading lights.

Arsиne Wenger’s side had scored after just four minutes against Newcastle but that’s exactly how long it took them to go behind when they needlessly conceded a penalty in Boro’s first attack. After the Gunners lost possession in midfield, Jйrйmie Aliadiиre raced onto Gary O’Neil’s precise through ball. The Frenchman showed Kolo Tourй a clean pair of heels but, after forcing him wide, the Arsenal defender floored his former team-mate with a belated lunge. Howard Webb had no option but to point to the spot and, though Manuel Almunia correctly guessed the direction of Downing’s strike, he was beaten by the pace of his low shot.

Buoyed by their positive start the home side almost scored again soon afterwards, Tourй and William Gallas misreading each other’s intentions and enabling Tuncay a sight of goal. As he pulled the trigger, however, Gallas denied the Turkey international with a crucial block. Uncharacteristically, the visitors’ performance was littered with sloppy passing and hopeful long balls - the result of Middlesbrough’s tigerish pressing in midfield and, but for Tourй’s timely header at the far post, Tuncay might have doubled the lead from O’Neil’s floated cross.

With Arsenal missing Cesc Fбbregas, Aleksandr Hleb and Mathieu Flamini, the onus was on Rosicky to provide midfield creativity but O’Neil and Fabio Rochemback proved adept at thwarting the threat of the Czech Republic international by both foul means and fair. The clutch of free-kicks Arsenal were awarded were wasted, with the exception of Emmanuel Ebouй’s long ball, which Emmanuel Adebayor headed narrowly wide 10 minutes before half-time.

Boro were well worth their lead, though, and Tuncay was disappointed to lose his composure, and his coordination, when he cut inside before miscuing his left-foot shot on 40 minutes. The striker missed an even better chance shortly after the restart when Rochemback slid him in with a defence-splitting pass only for Tuncay to drag his shot wide.

The hosts continued to dominate a weary-looking Arsenal side and, on 58 minutes, pieced together a delightful, sweeping move that should have produced a wonderful goal. Aliadiиre cut in from the left, O’Neil dummied and George Boateng’s rasping, angled drive missed the far post by inches.

The second goal was not long in coming though as, on 72 minutes, O’Neil’s fierce shot was saved by Almunia but Tuncay, from the tightest of angles, fired into the roof of the net. As Arsenal surged forward in injury time, Rosicky arrived unmarked to fire a late consolation, but it proved to be too little, too late as Arsenal’s colours were lowered for the first time this season.

(12-09) 08:45 PST Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP) —

NASA on Sunday delayed the launch of space shuttle Atlantis until January after a gauge in the fuel tank failed for the second time in four days.

With only a few days remaining in the launch window for the shuttle’s mission to the international space station, senior managers decided to stand down until next month in hopes of better understanding the perplexing and persistent fuel gauge problem.

“We’re determined to get to the bottom of this,” said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team.

Whether Atlantis can fly as early as Jan. 2 “is all going to depend on what we find out,” he said.

The trouble with the fuel gauge resurfaced just before sunrise Sunday, about an hour after the launch team began filling Atlantis’ big external tank for an afternoon liftoff.

Shuttle managers had said they would halt the countdown and call everything off if any of the four hydrogen fuel gauges acted up. Three failed during Thursday’s launch attempt; no one knows why.

Launch director Doug Lyons said Sunday’s failure was similar to what happened before, except only one gauge malfunctioned this time.

“We would rather have launched today, obviously,” Cain said. “This was going to be in the very least a good tanking test for us, and that’s what it’s turned out to be.”

NASA quickly established an engineering team to come up with ideas on how to pinpoint and fix the problem, which has bedeviled NASA off and on for the past two years. The engineers will report back to Cain and other managers on Tuesday.

Most inspections and repairs could be carried out at the launch pad. If the shuttle has to be returned to its hangar for more invasive work, there will be no hope of launching in early January, Cain said.

NASA had until Thursday to launch Atlantis with the European Space Agency’s space station laboratory, Columbus. After that, unfavorable sun angles and computer concerns would make it impossible for the shuttle to fly to the international space station until next month.

Despite objections from some engineers, NASA tightened up its launch rules for Sunday’s attempt in hopes of getting Atlantis off the ground by the week’s end.

Not only did all four of Atlantis’ fuel gauges have to work on Sunday Д until now, only three good gauges were required Д a new instrumentation system for monitoring these gauges also had to check out. NASA also shrank its launch window from five minutes to a single minute for added safety.

The troublesome gauges, called engine cutoff sensors, are part of a backup system to prevent the shuttle’s main engines from shutting down too late and running without fuel, a potentially catastrophic situation. They have been a source of sporadic trouble ever since flights resumed in 2005 following the Columbia tragedy.

Two groups of NASA engineers recommended that the flight be postponed and the fuel gauge system tested, to figure out what might be going on. But they did not oppose a Sunday launch attempt when it came time for the final vote.

Shuttle commander Stephen Frick was deeply involved with the decisions that were made, officials said.

Frick and his six crewmates planned to return to their home base in Houston later Sunday. “We hope everyone gets some well-deserved rest and we will be back to try again when the vehicle is ready to fly,” the astronauts said in a prepared statement.

It was another disappointing delay for the European Space Agency, which has been waiting for years for its $2 billion Columbus lab to fly. NASA space station design problems in the 1980s and early 1990s slowed everything down, then Russian troubles and, most recently, the 2003 Columbia tragedy stalled the project.

“Another few weeks isn’t going to make any difference,” said Alan Thirkettle, the European space station program manager. “We want to fly, but we want to fly safe.”

NASA officials said they expect little ripple effect on space station construction.

___

Associated Press writer Brian Skoloff contributed to this report.

___

On the Net:

NASA: «spaceflight.nasa.gov»

BusinessWeek asked business undergraduates to tell us about their favorite professors. Here’s another installment in the series.

On the first day of orientation at the http://www.businessweek.com/, Frank Wright will tell his audience of undergraduate students: “I admire your courage.”

Later, as the same rapt audience of students sits in front of him on the first day of Introduction to Management, Wright springs it on them: “I screwed you,” he tells them as they leaf through the eight-page syllabus that looks more like a government contract. But he won’t tell them how—that, he says, is part of the learning process.

They’ll have to figure out for themselves that multiple projects are due simultaneously, and schedule conflicts abound. He lets them know the word “hope” (which “has no place in management talk”) is forbidden in class, that a PowerPoint typo earns an automatic F, that they should address one another formally using last names, that for every one thing he teaches them, they must learn three more. Whats more, they should be in class at 8 a.m. sharp.

Students responding to BusinessWeek’s 2007 undergraduate survey said it’s by far their hardest class in college. Still, they said, Wright is their favorite RPI prof. How so? The Magic Key

The 58-year-old former Raytheon («www.businessweek.com») executive and Navy officer remembers an astonishing number of the 1,753 students’ faces (2,243 if you’re counting graduate students) who have passed through his Introduction to Management course over the past decade. With an average of 23 academic majors filling his lecture room each semester (figures he keeps track of over the years), he makes sure to get the attention of each student—using four of six different teaching methods every class session to accommodate what he describes as four distinct learning styles.

More important, he draws from his military days to gain their respect. “When you are on a ship at sea and you’re carrying all sorts of weapons and ammunition, you have to trust everyone together,” says Wright. “That trust comes from respect. And therein lies the magic key.”

He memorizes the names and faces of his new students off a photo roster before the first day of class. Leah Carboni, who graduated from Lally in the spring, says Wright’s unequivocal respect for students—he always referred to her as Ms. Carboni—was contagious in the classroom. “It almost left all of the other college stuff at the door,” she says. Stepping into the classroom each morning, she would think: “I’m not Leah anymore; I’m Ms. Carboni.”

While he’s got their attention, he will douse them with stories. “I guess it’s because I kissed the Blarney Stone,” Wright jokes of the day years ago when he leaned over a parapet in Blarney Castle in Ireland (one of 54 countries he’s visited) and placed his lips on the rock known for anointing with storytelling prowess those who kiss it. He will sprinkle conversations with examples from every walk of life. In five minutes’ time, he will quote Tommy Lee Jones from Men in Black, draw a lesson from Confucius, compare himself to NBA coach Pat Riley, and cite the influence of thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Darwin. Earning the Grade

It is hard to imagine that this former military officer who rises at 3 a.m. seven days a week quit college the first time around because schoolwork took a back seat to basketball. He later earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees while in the Navy.

Still, his path to academia was unconventional. “Im a dropout,” he admits, referring not to his college years but to the choice to quit four years into a PhD program at the very management school where today he teaches and is head of the undergraduate business program. But this time, says Wright, the unfinished degree was because he was “lured into teaching.”

Daily this fall, he will remind his management students—as he has for the past decade—of his mantra: “Prior preparation prevents poor presentation.” Before class presentations, he tells students the projector they were counting on suddenly broke, confiscates handouts to see how they lead a discussion without notes, and makes last-minute location changes to throw them off. “You knew you were earning your grade,” says Carboni. And “he knew he was a great professor because kids would rave about him.”

Wright wont dispute that: “I chalk the chalk, if you will.”