Wikinews:Briefs/September 17, 2008
Wikinews News in Brief September 17, 2008 05:00 UTC
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Transcript
It is 500 hours UTC. Good morning, this is your Audio Wikinews Update for Wednesday, September 17, 2008. I'm Kevin Fields, and here are this morning's top stories.
The Libertarian National Committee continues to be in a fierce deadlock today over how to address the growing controversies surrounding their party's U.S. presidential nominee, former congressman Bob Barr. Many libertarians have spoken out against Barr since his last minute refusal to attend former Republican presidential hopeful Congressman Ron Paul's third party unity conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on Wednesday. One faction of the 17-member LNC, led by at-large representative Dr. Mary Ruwart — who lost the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination to Barr at the National Convention in May by only a few votes — is supporting a resolution to apologize to Paul. This is being countered by another faction led by Treasurer Aaron Starr, who favors a resolution to chastise Paul for not endorsing Bob Barr and “splitting the Freedom Movement.” The motion supported by Starr was made available online Tuesday night, it can be read online at wikinews.org
The Large Hadron Collider that started preliminary experiments on September 10 in CERN, Geneva, and the planned International Linear Collider will carry out a series of experiments in future to validate the standard model of particle physics. The model predicts that Higgs boson particles gives mass to all fundamental particles and explains the existence of dark matter, or invisible matter in between galaxies. The LHC is a 27 kilometer long circular high energy particle accelerator which took more than 20 years and USD $9 billion to build. In the next few weeks the machine will collide opposing beams of protons charged with approximately 7 TeV of energy resulting in cataclysmic conditions that will mimic the beginning of time, a re-creation of the Big Bang. It is reported that the studies could also help treat diseases such as cancer, improve the Internet, develop systems for destroying nuclear waste and provide insights into climate change and open the door to travel through extra dimensions. An upgraded version of the LHC was announced, nicknamed the "super LHC". The new accelerator will perform ten times the number of collisions as the current the LHC over the same time. The upgrade will feature a new injection system and enhanced detectors to cope with the increase in data packets from collisions. The bigger International Linear Collider, nicknamed "Einstein's telescope", is planned by the International Technology Recommendation Panel. The ILC will have a collision energy of 500 GeV and will collide electrons with particles of antimatter, called positrons, along a 30-40 km completely straight tunnel. The ILC's two giant "guns" pointing at each other would be able to accelerate electrons and positrons to near-light speeds before smashing them together.
The reports of the death of TV presenter Vernon Kay in the U.K. have been greatly exaggerated. News reports have said that the British television presenter has been forced to state that he is not dead after an editor to the free content encyclopedia Wikipedia posted inaccurate claims that he was dead. On September 13, vandalism was apparently made to the website wikipedia.org, claiming that "Vernon Kay sadly passed away after falling off a yacht on Holiday in Greece." Another edit further stated that, "his funeral will be held on Friday the 19th of September in Bolton". One hour after the claim was initially made, a new user removed the claims that he was dead, saying that Kay is "not dead." Just six minutes later, however, the claims were re-added. An edit war then took place with several contributors adding and removing the complaints over the next few days. The article was eventually protected from editing by anonymous and new users by a Wikipedia administrator. With regards to his death, in Kay's release, he stated, "I am alive and kicking. A few friends rang to check that I was all right. I wish I was on a yacht in Greece."
And finally this morning, in more light-hearted news, Wikipedia editor and photographer ShakataGaNai visited the 45th National Championship Air Races & Air Show, in Reno, NV. Many of his photos are available on display at wikinews.org.
Conclusion
This has been an Audio Wikinews Brief and is freely available for copy under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license at http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/. Catch the latest breaking news at Wikinews at wikinews.org.
