Recreating the Big Bang: “Physicists are hoping that the experiments will give an insight into the elusive Higgs boson, the particle that is thought to give everything mass.” BBC

A tour through the wreckage of the former Soviet Union:

“Ten years after the collapse of communism, the only functioning former Soviet republic is Estonia. A wry and learned tour through the wreckage of what used to be the Soviet Union.” The New Republic

R.U. Sirius wonders: “On 10/11, I posted an article called Ignore the War: A Personal Declaration of Deep Neutrality on Disinfo.com. Most of it was written before the current US bombing raids on Afghanistan. Part of it was written just after it started.

People ask me if I’m still neutral. I might have done better to call it a personal declaration of uncertainty. I could have avoided those nasty emails accusing me of being Swiss. But yes, I am still in a state of uncertainty. In fact, when I wrote the piece, I felt nearly apologetic for not being able to choose whether to be a dove or a hawk. But after awhile, I realized it’s the people who are so fuckin’ sure they know what’s going on and what to do about who are straight up nuts!” The Thresher

Serbia’s anxious mobsters seek out shrinks: “Tony Soprano is not a Serb but he would be at home with in the waiting rooms of Belgrade’s growing army of therapists and psychoanalysts.

There are the depressed and psychologically scarred for whom years of war in the Balkans have proved too much. But Belgrade’s hitmen and mobsters, a legacy of the era of Serbia’s organised crime, are also trying to escape their demons in the psychiatrist’s chair – just like Tony in The Sopranos.Independent UK

Fatal Delusions: “Israel’s own security interests dictate that it should bring its people home to a defensible perimeter (something close to the 1967 borders, but padded here and there for security reasons). Likewise, it’s in the Palestinians’ interest to pipe down about the right of return, for such claims only prevent them from getting a homeland of their own.” — Nicholas Kristof NY Times op-ed

Bush and Sharon Have Similar Views but Distinct Agendas: News analysis in The New York Times

from Serge Schmemann. Bush’s audacity in demanding Israeli withdrawal, his contemptible school-marm tone, and the ludicrousness of banking his personal prestige — of which, as a diplomat, he has none — on it, probably did lead to Sharon’s token withdrawal from two towns in the occupied territory, but only with his impassioned insistence that the Israeli incursions are necessary for Israel’s survival.

…(T)o most experts, this was a tactical dance of two hardheaded men aware of their mutual dependence and not the striving of two close friends to patch up their differences….

Most Israelis view the bonds that developed between Mr. Bush and Mr. Sharon since Sept. 11 as being based on mutual interest rather than friendship, although the two men have known each other for a long time. As governor of Texas, Mr. Bush visited Israel, and Mr. Sharon took him on a tour of the West Bank to bolster his arguments about Israel’s vulnerability.

Both leaders came to office less than two months apart, Mr. Bush in late January 2001 and Mr. Sharon in early March of that year, both intent on reversing the policies of their predecessors in the Middle East.

Mr. Bush believed that Mr. Clinton had created a mess in the Middle East by investing too much of his prestige and time, and so became determined to stay clear of the region. Mr. Sharon viewed the whole Oslo process, in which Washington was a central player, as a mistake, and he came to office on a pledge to crush the Palestinian uprising and to punish Mr. Arafat.

When Mr. Sharon and President Bush intersected, it was not always cordial. At a joint news conference in Washington last June, the two men openly disagreed in their description of the situation in the Middle East. After Sept. 11, when Mr. Sharon felt that the United States was cozying up to the Arabs to garner support against Al Qaeda, the prime minister famously used a word associated with the prelude to World War II, saying, “Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense.”

The Hindustan Times reports on Sharon’s determination to create permanent security buffers in the West Bank and the Palestinian perception that this effectively means the end of Palestinian self-rule and the death knell to the peace process. Israeli military commanders wanted eight more weeks to smoke out Palestinian terrorists, and tension has developed between them and the Sharon government for acceding at all to Bush’s demand for a pullout.

Reuters notes that Powell’s shuttle diplomacy got off to a ‘frosty start’ as King Mohammed of Morocco kept him waiting for two hours before receiving him, then asked him acerbically why he had not started his trip in Jerusalem instead. Exactly my question. The article observes that, despite the public rhetoric to the contrary, this step might be interpreted as a US green light to Sharon to continue the West Bank operation until Powell gets around to meeting with the Israelis later this week. It should also be seen as showing our true, craven, priorities. Powell gets sent out whenever the illusory War-on-Terrorism® alliance needs shoring up. This little Israeli-Palestinian brouhaha may just interfere annoyingly with US plans to orchestrate a move on Iraq.

Related: Phil Agre points to this interesting (if at times a little incoherent, probably because we’re reading the English instead of the Farsi…) Islamic perspective in The Iranian on the relationship between suicide bombing, martyrdom and jihad.

A Sophisticated Strain of Anthrax: “Last fall FBI profilers announced that the person who sent deadly anthrax-laced letters to news organizations and Capitol Hill was probably a grudge-bearing, sociopathic male laboratory nerd with knowledge of the geography of Trenton, N.J. But a new scientific analysis sent to top government officials suggests the anthrax attacker may be a scientific whiz so smart that he succeeded in making a “weaponized” form of the bacterium more sophisticated than any previously known.” MSNBC

New York Times dominates Pulitzers: “In a year when terrorism dominated the news as no subject since Vietnam, The New York Times captured a record seven Pulitzer Prizes and The Wall Street Journal won one for publishing a comprehensive edition even as the World Trade Center collapsed a block away.” Globe and Mail

Let’s Roll!

In recent months anyone who surfs the news programs has been subjected to Lisa Beamer’s teary face on every outlet worth mentioning. …

…All right, one might say, but what exactly is so terrible about that? It may be unseemly, but at worst the only sin of Lisa Beamer and her media patrons is banality. That’s entirely too facile and too generous. There is an irreducibly private dimension to real grief, a point at which one’s own words and the kind intentions of others all run to ground and we can only bear what follows in silence. And that silence is not a bad thing; it’s a measure of respect, for oneself and for what is lost, as well as an acknowledgment of the hard things we all must bear on our own eventually. The media’s incessant flogging of Beamer’s story, and her eager collaboration in it, amount to a grotesque comment on the very idea of grief and loss. They take catastrophic personal tragedy and cheapen it by making it feel like a publicity stunt — a set of gestures repeatedly enacted for the cameras. AlterNet