[Quote]:

The Higgs boson-like particle whose discovery was announced on 4 July looks significantly more certain to exist.

The particle has been the subject of a decades-long hunt as the last missing piece of physics’ Standard Model, explaining why matter has mass.

Now one Higgs-hunting team at the Large Hadron Collider report a “5.9 sigma” levels of certainty it exists.

That equates to a one-in-300 million chance that the Higgs does not exist and the results are statistical flukes.

[Quote]:

A Port St. Joe man was shot in the head late Monday night in what Gulf County Sheriff Joe Nugent is labeling a hate crime.

Walton Henry Butler, a 59-year-old white male, was arrested after he admitted shooting Everett Gant with a .22 rifle. Butler was charged with attempted murder with a hate crime enhancement.

[..]

Nugent said Butler acted as if inconvenienced when put under arrest, saying he could not understand the problem as “he had only shot a (racial slur).”

[Quote]:

Amanpour asked Alazreg whether Sudan will hand over the country’s president, Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court. Alazreg responded by saying that Sudan is “willing to hand over whomever, provided that America hands over Bush and the United Kingdom hands over Blair.”

[Quote]:

Norwegian police discovered the device under the vehicle at 11:30am today when it was stopped on its way into the embassy by security staff. The police swiftly evacuated a 500-meter (1640 foot) radius around the embassy and sent a large number of police forces into the area.

[Quote]:

Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time — 10 times fewer than in Germany — and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development — in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.

Germany, on the other hand, didn’t bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany’s biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany’s continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.

[Quote]:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has what he says is an informed explanation for why Mitt Romney refuses to release additional tax returns. According a Bain investor, Reid charged, Romney didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years.