Saturday, November 21, 2009 ZURICH: A team of scientists in Switzerland have restarted the world's largest sub-atomic particle collider for the first time since the nearly $10bn machine suffered a massive malfunction last year.Scientists switched on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss-French border on Friday after 14 months of repairs, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) said.The LHC aims to resolve some of the greatest questions surrounding fundamental matter, such as how particles acquire mass and how they were forged in the big bang that created the universe some 13.7bn years ago.Scientists hope sub-atomic particles flung around the 27km of tunnel will collide at close to the speed of light.A spokesman for the organisation said scientists hope to have beams circulating by early Saturday.The machine circulated its first beams on September 10, 2008, but it was shut down days later because of a fault in the cooling system.
BEIRUT: Thousands of people converged Saturday on central Beirut to mark the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Lebanese former premier Rafiq Hariri.Waving Lebanese flags and carrying pictures of the slain leader, men, women and children gathered under sunny skies in Martyr's Square where members of the parliamentary majority were to address the crowd. The rally comes as final preparations are underway in The Hague for the launch of the international tribunal set up to bring Hariri's killers to justice. It also comes as the country prepares for legislative elections in June that will pit Western-backed political parties against a Hezbollah-led alliance backed by Syria and Iran.Hariri died in a massive car bombing on February 14, 2005 that also killed 22 others. The assassination was widely blamed on then Lebanese power-broker Syria, which has denied any involvement. The attack on the Beirut seafront was one of the worst acts of political violence to rock Lebanon since t...
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