Russia's second chance?

EU leaders condemned Russia's military moves in Georgia but decided against sanctions Monday at an emergency summit on the Caucasus crisis.

Leaders did, however, postpone talks on a long-overdue new partnership agreement with Russia until Moscow withdraws its troops from Georgian territory.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was leading the summit, said he and his colleagues "strongly condemned" Russia's military reaction to the Georgian attack on separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and the recognition of the two breakaway provinces as independent states.

"We must say that Russia's behavior over the past few weeks, its disproportionate response and its recognition of the two entities that declared independence has caused considerable concern in Europe and beyond," Sarkozy said.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso added the West "couldn't continue as if nothing happened."

Sarkozy and Barroso are part of a diplomatic task force that will travel to Moscow next Monday to meet with the Russian leadership. The EU team will urge the Kremlin to adhere to a French-brokered six-point peace plan and then decide whether talks over the partnership agreement can resume.

"We will ask Russia to apply the six-point plan scrupulously," Sarkozy said.

According to Angela Merkel, there is hope for a swift improvement of the situation.

The German chancellor revealed Monday that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had told Sarkozy the Kremlin "seems to be ready" to withdraw its troops to pre-conflict positions.

The Germans, together with France, Italy and Spain, had lobbied for a milder statement than Britain, some of the Baltic states and Poland did.

"I think we found an excellent compromise not going back to business as usual, but still making clear that we want to maintain contact with Russia," Merkel said.

All participants underlined the summit participants' -- at least external -- unity, with Merkel noting that each of the 27 member states was "very willing" to find a joint position.

"Europe has spoken with one voice," Sarkozy said proudly, brushing aside a reporter's question whether the EU wasn't more than a paper tiger to Russia.

"We do not want to create tension," he replied. "We do not want to be flexing our muscles talking about sanctions and counter-sanctions. Who would benefit from that? Nobody."

Internally, there were significantly more differences, as revealed by Polish Premier Donald Tusk, who spoke of European politicians who "would prefer empty conclusions because of their intensive bilateral relations with Russia."

Indeed, Germany, Italy and also Austria, for example, have extensive economic ties with Russia; they are dependent on Russian gas deliveries, and an outright conflict isn't in their interest.

Yet it remains to be seen if Russia is susceptible to the soft approach favored in Berlin and Paris.

The summit in Brussels was preceded by several tit-for-tat exchanges between Russia and the West, with EU officials talking about sanctions, which Moscow in turn called "sick ideas." Medvedev even indicated that Russia could itself level sanctions.

Several Russian officials have noted that the EU would only hurt itself with punitive measures and that the EU-Russian partnership agreement, which also aims to regulate the bilateral energy relationship, is more in Brussels' interest than in Moscow's.

"We don't need these talks or this new agreement any more than the EU does," said Vladimir Chizhov, Russia's envoy to the EU. "It's more a self-punishment for the EU because it doesn't improve its credibility as a trading partner."

Russia has talked about supplying energy to Asia at a higher rate, which would hurt deliveries to the West. Yet not everything Moscow says needs to be taken too seriously, observers say. It is muscle-flexing caused by Russia's new self-confidence.

What the West will have to do is shed some light on who really did launch the first attacks in Georgia, and identify how Russian and Georgian operations killed civilians, and how many of them. Russian sources speak of attempted genocide in South Ossetia.

Merkel, who is known to be critical of the Georgian leadership, underlined that there "never is only one side to blame in such a conflict."

No matter the findings, there are more than 20,000 displaced people in Georgia, and for them, help needs to come sooner rather than later, no matter the speed at which diplomatic progress is made by the West and Russia.

The EU has already committed roughly $15 million in aid and said Monday it would help organize a donors' conference to raise the additional money needed to help people in Georgia -- in the mainland and in the two breakaway provinces.

Russia Recoginizes the Breakaway provinces.

Russia has recognised Georgia’s breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, thus dramatically upping stakes in its mounting confrontation with the West.

President Dmitry Medvedev signed decrees extending formal recognition to South Ossetia and Abkhazia on Tuesday after discussing the issue with top Ministers, defence and security chiefs at his Black Sea residence. The move came a day after Parliament passed non-binding resolutions urging the President to recognise the two territories.

“We have taken this step in order to prevent the genocide and annihilation of the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia after 17 years of international efforts to resolve the conflict between Georgia and the two regions failed,” said Mr. Medvedev.

He accused NATO of conniving at Georgia’s refusal to renounce the use of force against its separatist territories, and said the aid and support Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili received from his “foreign patrons” encouraged him to launch a military attack against South Ossetia. NATO has sent an armada of warships to the Black Sea in a show of support for Georgia. Russia said 10 U.S. and NATO combat ships were already in the Black Sea, and another eight were expected to join them shortly.

There Will Be No Armageddon!

There Will Be No Armageddon
The Large Hadron Collider is expected to generate collision energies of proton bunches (rather than traveling in a continuous beam, particles in accelerators are generally "bunched" together) as high as 7 teraelectronvolts.by Yury ZaitsevMoscow (RIA Novosti) Jun 20, 2008A black hole will appear in mid-July on the border between France and Switzerland, swallowing up first Europe and then the entire planet. Such are the apocalyptic forecasts being made ahead of the scheduled launching, in three weeks, of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The ambitious research project, aimed at looking into superconductivity, high energies and God or devil knows what else, is an international effort involving several countries, including Russia. The report that the LHC will also produce a black hole is the most talked about item.
Remarkably, the most powerful sources of radiation in the universe are not those driven by thermonuclear reactions or annihilation processes. Much more powerful are high-density objects called black holes and neutron stars.
The force of gravity around these bodies is tremendous, and accelerates any matter caught by its pull to immense speeds. Matter impacting on the surface of a neutron star does so at half the speed of light. The efficiency at which energy is released from such impacts is more than ten times that of nuclear or thermonuclear reactions.
The general theory of relativity says black holes appear when matter is compressed into a more compact shape than that of a neutron star.
As a result, a black hole has a gravitational field so strong that neither a material body nor any kind of radiation (including light) is able to escape its embrace. The black holes are, therefore, impossible to see. They can only be identified indirectly, by observing the matter they absorb from a neighboring visible star, for example.
The gas flowing from such a star does not fall into the black hole at once. First, it forms the so-called "accretion disk", where the matter rotates for a long time. As it accelerates, it picks up a speed approaching that of light and starts emitting super-high energy X-radiation, which can be measured by instruments placed in space.
Will it be possible to reproduce these phenomena, as yet only theoretically predicted, in the ground-based accelerator in the Alps?
The hadron collider straddling the French-Swiss border is a ring accelerator designed to collide charged particles into each other at massive speeds. When it is turned on more than a billion collisions per second will occur inside it. The huge circumference of the collider ring (26.65 km) will allow the LHC to whisk particles to speeds close to that of light and produce super-high energy collisions.
The LHC is expected to generate collision energies of proton bunches (rather than traveling in a continuous beam, particles in accelerators are generally "bunched" together) as high as 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV).
Electron-proton bunches will collide with energies of up to 1.5 TeV, and bunches of heavy ions, such as lead, with a total energy of over 1,250 TeV. This is nothing short of a new phenomenon in physics, in particular the likely confirmation of a theory that teraelectronic energies and corresponding gravitation give rise to black holes.
Some theorists, however, and the public at large have started voicing fears that when such processes are modeled there will be a danger of collider experiments getting out of hand and giving rise to a chain reaction that could destroy our planet. The most widely expressed fear is that microscopic black holes may appear and capture the surrounding matter.
Some people take this threat extremely seriously. In March of this year a claim was even filed with the Hawaii district court charging CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), which is building the accelerator, with an attempt at Armageddon, and demanding a ban on the accelerator's launching.
Meanwhile, several years ago, it was discovered that black holes "evaporate" with time - a crucial discovery for understanding their physics. Larger ones do so only slowly, over billions of years, while smaller ones, practically instantaneously, within 10-17 of a second. Naturally, they simply do not have the time to absorb any sizeable amount of matter.
Some researchers also believe that black holes arise when space rays bombard, at much higher energies, the Earth's atmosphere, the Moon and the surfaces of other planets. We just cannot see them because the process is too short-lived.
Black holes are expected to appear (or be detected appearing) in the LHC every second or so. As they evaporate they will leave a trail of radiation that will be registered by the accelerator's monitoring devices.
Such holes pose no threat, even in theory. On the other hand, they should help improve our understanding of the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravitation, because evaporation of black holes is a quantum mechanical process.
It is estimated that it will take about 20 million CDs to record the data produced by the collider and 70,000 mainframe computers to process it. But what is important is not the volume of data but the findings physicists can draw from it.
The super-accelerator, by throwing light on the evolution of black holes, will also recreate the conditions that obtained in the universe within one-billionth of a second of the Big Bang. That, scientists hope, will help to answer many questions about how our world began, questions usually still discussed on a theoretical plane.
Yury Zaitsev is an analyst at the Institute of Space Research.

There Will Be No Armageddon!

There Will Be No Armageddon
The Large Hadron Collider is expected to generate collision energies of proton bunches (rather than traveling in a continuous beam, particles in accelerators are generally "bunched" together) as high as 7 teraelectronvolts.by Yury ZaitsevMoscow (RIA Novosti) Jun 20, 2008A black hole will appear in mid-July on the border between France and Switzerland, swallowing up first Europe and then the entire planet. Such are the apocalyptic forecasts being made ahead of the scheduled launching, in three weeks, of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The ambitious research project, aimed at looking into superconductivity, high energies and God or devil knows what else, is an international effort involving several countries, including Russia. The report that the LHC will also produce a black hole is the most talked about item.
Remarkably, the most powerful sources of radiation in the universe are not those driven by thermonuclear reactions or annihilation processes. Much more powerful are high-density objects called black holes and neutron stars.
The force of gravity around these bodies is tremendous, and accelerates any matter caught by its pull to immense speeds. Matter impacting on the surface of a neutron star does so at half the speed of light. The efficiency at which energy is released from such impacts is more than ten times that of nuclear or thermonuclear reactions.
The general theory of relativity says black holes appear when matter is compressed into a more compact shape than that of a neutron star.
As a result, a black hole has a gravitational field so strong that neither a material body nor any kind of radiation (including light) is able to escape its embrace. The black holes are, therefore, impossible to see. They can only be identified indirectly, by observing the matter they absorb from a neighboring visible star, for example.
The gas flowing from such a star does not fall into the black hole at once. First, it forms the so-called "accretion disk", where the matter rotates for a long time. As it accelerates, it picks up a speed approaching that of light and starts emitting super-high energy X-radiation, which can be measured by instruments placed in space.
Will it be possible to reproduce these phenomena, as yet only theoretically predicted, in the ground-based accelerator in the Alps?
The hadron collider straddling the French-Swiss border is a ring accelerator designed to collide charged particles into each other at massive speeds. When it is turned on more than a billion collisions per second will occur inside it. The huge circumference of the collider ring (26.65 km) will allow the LHC to whisk particles to speeds close to that of light and produce super-high energy collisions.
The LHC is expected to generate collision energies of proton bunches (rather than traveling in a continuous beam, particles in accelerators are generally "bunched" together) as high as 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV).
Electron-proton bunches will collide with energies of up to 1.5 TeV, and bunches of heavy ions, such as lead, with a total energy of over 1,250 TeV. This is nothing short of a new phenomenon in physics, in particular the likely confirmation of a theory that teraelectronic energies and corresponding gravitation give rise to black holes.
Some theorists, however, and the public at large have started voicing fears that when such processes are modeled there will be a danger of collider experiments getting out of hand and giving rise to a chain reaction that could destroy our planet. The most widely expressed fear is that microscopic black holes may appear and capture the surrounding matter.
Some people take this threat extremely seriously. In March of this year a claim was even filed with the Hawaii district court charging CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), which is building the accelerator, with an attempt at Armageddon, and demanding a ban on the accelerator's launching.
Meanwhile, several years ago, it was discovered that black holes "evaporate" with time - a crucial discovery for understanding their physics. Larger ones do so only slowly, over billions of years, while smaller ones, practically instantaneously, within 10-17 of a second. Naturally, they simply do not have the time to absorb any sizeable amount of matter.
Some researchers also believe that black holes arise when space rays bombard, at much higher energies, the Earth's atmosphere, the Moon and the surfaces of other planets. We just cannot see them because the process is too short-lived.
Black holes are expected to appear (or be detected appearing) in the LHC every second or so. As they evaporate they will leave a trail of radiation that will be registered by the accelerator's monitoring devices.
Such holes pose no threat, even in theory. On the other hand, they should help improve our understanding of the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravitation, because evaporation of black holes is a quantum mechanical process.
It is estimated that it will take about 20 million CDs to record the data produced by the collider and 70,000 mainframe computers to process it. But what is important is not the volume of data but the findings physicists can draw from it.
The super-accelerator, by throwing light on the evolution of black holes, will also recreate the conditions that obtained in the universe within one-billionth of a second of the Big Bang. That, scientists hope, will help to answer many questions about how our world began, questions usually still discussed on a theoretical plane.
Yury Zaitsev is an analyst at the Institute of Space Research.