Tag: switzerland
World’s Biggest, Fastest Particle Collider Restarts

World’s Biggest, Fastest Particle Collider Restarts

By Thomas Burmeister, dpa (TNS)

BASEL, Switzerland — The Large Hadron Collider restarted Sunday after a two-years of work to make the biggest machine ever built even faster in the hope that it will unspin the secrets of the creation of the universe.

Particles were pushed through the collider’s 17-mile tunnel for the first time since February 2013, said the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

“There is great joy here,” CERN director general Rolf-Dieter Heuer said at the control centre in Meyrin, near Geneva. “It came off brilliantly.”

The collider, which is under the Swiss-French border, accelerates subatomic particles to nearly the speed of light and smashes them together with the aim of clarifying the theory of the Big Bang, believed to be the moment the universe sprang to life 14 billion years ago.

The renovations at the collider have revved up the already record-breaking machine so the energy of its particle collisions will be nearly doubled, opening up the possibility of discovering new particles and testing unproven theories.
Heuer said CERN expects its collider to be up to full speed in about two months, after the new equipment is calibrated and particle streams intensified.

Part of what the CERN scientists hope to discover is how elementary particles acquire mass.

The collider was restarted nearly three years after experiments there showed that the Higgs boson particle is likely to exist. The particle is believed to be responsible for all mass in the universe. The Higgs boson, nicknamed the “God particle,” was the missing piece in the standard model of physics, which describes how nature’s smallest building blocks interact but could not previously explain why they have mass.

It could also unlock other mysteries left unexplained by the standard model, including dark matter, a form of invisible matter that is believed to make up most of the universe.

CERN researchers said they hope the collider will provide the first concrete evidence for the existence of dark matter, as well as information about its composition.

“The restart with notable higher energy opens up the chance to push forward into unexplored regions and to discover new physics phenomena like dark matter,” said Joachim Mnich, director of particle physics at Germany’s national research center that operates particle accelerators. “All particle physicists involved look towards Geneva with excitement.”

Mnich and the 150 other researchers at his center are among the tens of thousands of scientists taking part worldwide in the CERN experiments.

“We are all excited how quickly now after more than two years of construction that the first particle stream occurred successfully in the accelerator ring,” Heuer said.

But he advised patience about when new discoveries might be announced.

“I am very careful here” about predictions, he said.

(c)2015 Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (Hamburg, Germany), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Mark Hillary, Flickr

U.S. Attorney General Talks Tax Evasion With Swiss Counterpart

U.S. Attorney General Talks Tax Evasion With Swiss Counterpart

Washington (AFP) – U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder met with his counterpart from Switzerland as investigators crack down on Swiss banks that help U.S. customers avoid paying taxes.

U.S. officials were tight-lipped about the content of the meeting between Holder and Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, but told AFP that the U.S. probe into the Credit Suisse bank was discussed.

Credit Suisse has been in talks with the Justice Department to settle a probe over its role in enabling Americans evade taxes. U.S. prosecutors have reportedly pressed for a guilty plea from a bank subsidiary.

One possible outcome is that Credit Suisse will be fined. Press reports say the fine could exceed the $780 million that another Swiss bank, UBS, paid in 2009.

In early April Credit Suisse said it had set aside 425 million Swiss francs ($476 million) in provisions for a possible deal with U.S. tax authorities.

The Justice Department has described a decades-long conspiracy that resulted in secret accounts for U.S. customers.

“The conspiracy dates back to 1953 and involved two generations of U.S. tax evaders including U.S. customers who inherited secret accounts” at Credit Suisse, it said in a July 2011 news release.

Credit Suisse is one of 14 Swiss banks under U.S. investigation for allegedly accepting billions of undeclared dollars from U.S. citizens.

On Wednesday, the owner of a Swiss trust company pleaded guilty in New York to conspiring with Credit Suisse bankers to enable U.S. customers avoid taxes by hiding assets in secret Swiss bank accounts.

Josef Dorig admitted he engaged in a “wide-ranging” conspiracy between 1997 and 2011 to help U.S. citizens evade income taxes by concealing assets in Credit Suisse accounts held in the names of sham entities, the Justice Department said.

A U.S. Senate report out in February showed that at its peak, Credit Suisse sheltered between $10 billion and $12 billion in largely non-reported assets in the accounts of more than 22,000 U.S. customers.

The exact amount funds unreported to U.S. tax authorities is probably around $7 billion, Credit Suisse director Brady Dougan in late February.

AFP Photo/Andrew Winning

Co-Pilot Of Ethiopian Airliner Hijacks His Own Plane

Co-Pilot Of Ethiopian Airliner Hijacks His Own Plane

GENEVA — A co-pilot of Ethiopian Airlines hijacked his own plane with some 200 people on board and diverted it to Geneva on Monday, as the Swiss air force remained on the ground due to budget constrictions.

When flight number ET 702 landed at Geneva airport instead of its planned destination at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, the 31-year-old suspect was arrested, leaving all passengers unharmed.

The man said his motivation for the hijacking was to seek asylum in Switzerland.

The Boeing 767 left its predetermined path shortly after departing from Addis Ababa at around midnight.

Italy scrambled fighter jets, the Italian air force said in a statement, adding that French air force jets escorted the airliner across the Alps to Geneva, which lies near the French-Swiss border. The French air force has the right to fly over Swiss territory but cannot shoot down planes there.

Switzerland did not deploy its own air force because the incident occurred out of office hours — 8 a.m. to noon and from 1:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. — which it is restricted to because of budget constraints, air force spokesman Laurent Savary told the Swiss news agency sda.

The Swiss defense ministry said it plans to extend its service to round-the-clock standby from 2020.

The co-pilot apparently took advantage of a brief absence of the main pilot, said Eric Grandjean, spokesman of the Geneva police.

“When the captain went to the toilet, he locked himself in the cockpit,” he said.

Shortly after landing, the co-pilot climbed out of the aircraft through a cockpit window and surrendered to police.

He said that he was not safe in Ethiopia and wanted to be granted asylum in Switzerland, according to Grandjean.

“This man’s chances [for asylum] are not very high,” said Pierre Maudet, the security councillor of the government of the canton of Geneva.

The prosecutor’s office in Geneva said that the co-pilot faces up to 20 years in prison for kidnapping and violating aviation security.

In Addis Ababa, Information Minister Redwan Hussein apologized to the flight’s passengers, which included around 139 Italians, 11 U.S. citizens, four French people and two Germans.

AFP Photo/Mario Goldman

European Banks Biggest Losers at Basel Regulation Talks

Many of the world’s largest and most powerful banks failed in efforts to push back against stricter capital maintenance requirements at a meeting of regulators in Basel, Switzerland this weekend:

Regulators meeting in Basel this weekend agreed to make as many as 30 of the world’s largest, or systemically important, banks hold as much as 2.5 percentage points more capital than the 7 percent core Tier 1 capital required. They also blocked European banks’ requests to use hybrid capital, such as contingent convertible bonds, to meet the target. The biggest banks will use mostly retained earnings and ordinary shares.

Lenders had lobbied against the extra capital requirements, saying they risked stunting the global economic recovery and some had sought to avoid being categorized as systemically important. The decision marks a loss for European banks that are grappling with the region’s debt crisis and had sought to use hybrid capital to meet regulators’ extra requirements.

Banks here and abroad have argued against any form of increased regulation or capital requirements since the financial crisis, because it would compel them, they claim, to stop lending and slow the recovery. Apparently this was a “win” for U.S. banks because they hadn’t been seeking the hybrid capital exception as Europeans had; nonetheless, one can be sure they will howl as much as anyone else when forced to take public interest into account, whether by disclosing investments, subjecting some trading to regulatory authority, or adhering to these tougher capital requirements, which are meant to prevent collapse.

More remarkable than these changes, though, is that banks in the United States have basically seen their size and political clout unfazed by their epic failure in 2008. It speaks to their lobbying prowess–and the unending influence of money in politics–that the Jamie Dimons of the world feel comfortable decrying common-sense regulations like these. Apparently, their fear of populist anger, which reached immense heights in late 2008 and early 2009, has waned, and things are returning to normal for the power players of international finance.