It is called Atlas, after the Greek god who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders: 150 feet long, 82 feet high and weighing 7000 tonnes, this mammoth machine has been designed to measure particles so small you can fit hundreds of billions of them into a beam narrower than a human hair. For the next few months, PhD students and Nobel prize winners will hurry around it like Lilliputians tending a giant. Every pipe, magnet and sensor will be tested and tested again. Then the machine will be switched on, and the world will hold its breath: the search for the so-called ‘God particle’ will start. Some of nature’s deepest secrets will be investigated: What is dark matter? Why is the universe expanding? What are its building blocks? Located at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva, the world’s largest particle accelerator has taken 25 years to plan and £1.5 billion to build. When up and running, it will fire two beams of proton particles in opposite directions around a 17-mile ring some 300 feet under the earth’s surface. Travelling in a vacuum, the beams will approach the speed of light, making 11,245 […]
In another harsh rebuke to the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism strategy, a divided federal appeals panel ruled Monday that the government cannot detain U.S. residents indefinitely without charging them by declaring them enemy combatants. The three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the nation’s most conservative, also ruled that the government should charge Ali al-Marri or release him from military custody. ‘Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them ‘enemy combatants,” the court said. Such detention ‘would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution - and the country,’ Judge Diana G. Motz wrote in the majority opinion. The court also found that the federal Military Commissions Act doesn’t strip Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident and the only alleged enemy combatant held on American soil, of his constitutional right to challenge his accusers in court. Al-Marri’s lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz, of the Brennan Center for Justice, said the decision protects both U.S. citizens and legal aliens and shows that the Bush administration ‘can’t […]
Prosecutors are calling for tougher regulations on Switzerland’s assisted suicide clinics after uncovering evidence that some of the foreign clients they help to die are simply depressed rather than suffering incurable pain. The clinics, which attract hundreds of foreigners, including Britons, every year, have been accused of failing to carry out proper investigations into whether patients meet the requirements of Switzerland’s right-to-die laws. In some cases, foreign clients are being given drugs to commit suicide within hours of their arrival, which critics say leaves doctors and psychologists unable to conduct a detailed assessment or to provide appropriate counselling. advertisement Andreas Brunner, the senior prosecutor of the Zurich canton, told The Sunday Telegraph: ‘We are not trying to ban the so-called death tourism, but the outsourcing of suicide must be put under stricter control. ‘Prosecutors look into every suicide, assisted or not, and there are many cases where it is not clear whether the assisted person has chosen death in full possession of their decision-making capacity. But investigations are difficult due to lack of evidence after the suicide. ‘We, therefore, demand that the federal government amend the legislation to enable closer and lengthier monitoring of suicide […]
ST. PETERSBURG — Russian president Vladimir Putin called on Sunday for a radical overhaul of the world’s financial and trade institutions to reflect the growing economic power of emerging market countries – including Russia. Mr Putin said the world needed to create a new international financial architecture to replace an existing model that had become ‘archaic, undemocratic and unwieldy’. His apparent challenge to western dominance of the world economic order came at a forum in St Petersburg designed to showcase the country’s economic recovery. Among 6,000 delegates at the biggest business forum ever held in post-Soviet Russia were scores of international chief executives including heads of Deutsche Bank, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Nestlé, Chevron, Siemens and Coca-Cola. Business deals worth more than $4bn were signed at the conference – including an order by Aeroflot for Boeing jets – as executives said they were continuing to invest in Russia despite deteriorating relations with the west. Mr Putin’s hosting of the forum capped a week in which he dominated the international stage. He warned last Monday that Russia might target nuclear missiles at Europe if the US built a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, then […]
It’s getting harder and harder to know what’s safe to eat. Despite the repeated attempts at reassurance of safety by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the nation’s food supply is at risk, whether from melamine contamination, salmonella or E.coli. An additional 5.3 MILLION pounds of fresh and frozen ground beef products produced by United Food Group LLC of California has now been recalled in addition to the more then 40,000 pounds of ground beef just recalled by Tyson Fresh Meats Inc. which had been shipped to Wal-Mart stores in 12 states after samples tested at a Sherman, Texas plant showed signs of E. coli contamination. http://www.northcountrygazette.org/news/2007/06/09/beef_recall-2/ In what was labeled as a precautionary measure to protect consumers based on new information just provided to the company, United Food Group, LLC, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture has voluntarily expanding its recall to include fresh and frozen ground beef products produced at its plant from April 6 through April 20, an estimated 5.3 million pounds that may have been contaminated with the E. coli O157:H7 bacteria. United Food had recalled 75,000 pounds of ground beef […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
