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The Large Hadron Collider is ready to start smashing its first particles together early next week, after glitches with the £3.6 billion “big bang machine” were fixed by engineers.

Although scientists had hoped that the successful creation of the particle accelerator’s first beams last Wednesday would clear the way for trial collisions this week, the timetable has had to be delayed because of power failures that affected its cooling system.

The problems were resolved finally yesterday and the team was planning to resume circulating beams of protons around the 17-mile (27km) ring last night. The success should allow the two beams to be fired in opposite directions early next week, and then crashed together inside the vast detectors of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Although the energy of these first collisions will be only 6 per cent of the maximum the LHC will achieve eventually, they will be a critical step forward. Their results will enable scientists to calibrate and test the detectors, before collisions at about 70 per cent of the accelerator’s capacity begin next month. It is then that the LHC will start to provide data that could prove the existence of the Higgs boson — the so-called God particle — and answer other questions about the nature of the Universe.

Once the two beams had been inserted into the LHC ring last Wednesday, the next task was to “capture” them so that protons could be fired in neat pulses or “bunches”. One of the beams had been captured by Friday, but work was then interrupted by the loss of electrical transformers that power the cryogenic cooling system, which chills the LHC’s superconducting magnets to 1.9C above absolute zero.

Laurent Tavian, head of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) cryogenics group, told The Times yesterday that the faults had now been fixed. Engineers could proceed with “capturing” the second beam, allowing for collisions within days. “The plan is now to capture the second beam, and once both beams are ready and captured we can start to do collisions,” Dr Tavian said.

The first collisions will involve beams with an energy of 0.45 teraelectronvolts (TeV), which previous accelerators have been capable of reaching since the 1980s. The aim is to check that the detectors are working properly. The next goal will be to produce beams with energies of 5TeV, which would smash the 1TeV world record, held by the US Tevatron in Illinois. This is scheduled to happen by October 12, in time for the LHC’s formal inauguration ceremony on October 21.

Over the winter the LHC will be shut down for further fine-tuning. Next year it will be boosted to its maximum energy of 7 TeV to produce results that should shed light on some of the most important and enduring questions in physics.

|sources timesonline.co.uk|

Islamabad lashes out at 'grave provocation' that killed at least 15 people just as Prime Minister escapes apparent assassination attempt

ISLAMABAD -- U.S. troops raided a Taliban base in Pakistan yesterday, U.S. officials acknowledged, killing at least 15 people and raising the ire of one of Washington's most import allies in the war on terror.

It's the first known U.S. ground attack in Pakistan, prompting an angry response from Islamabad, which accused the troops of killing civilians.

Relations between Islamabad and Western forces in neighbouring Afghanistan had been improving, before the setback from what Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs described as a "grave provocation."

The deaths, just inside Pakistan, in its Waziristan tribal area, occurred amid growing controversy in Afghanistan over the killing of civilians by Western forces, after an aerial bombardment last month that claimed as many as 90 civilian lives in western Afghanistan.

Separately, Islamic extremists near Islamabad opened fire on Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani's car, in an apparent assassination attempt. The assailants, firing from a roadside embankment, hit the driver's side window twice. Mr. Gilani was not in the car at the time. The armoured Mercedes-Benz was on its way to collect him from the airport outside Islamabad.

Mr. Gilani's son and a government minister were reportedly in the motorcade.

"This was a warning," a top security official in Islamabad said. "They're saying, 'we can get you.' If they could fire bullets, they could also fire a rocket-launcher."

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was a protest against military operations in the northwest valley of Swat.

"We will continue such attacks on government officials and installations," Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan said.

Last week, gunmen opened fire on the car of U.S. diplomat Lynne Tracy, who escaped unhurt. Extremists assassinated Benazir Bhutto, leader of Mr. Gilani's Pakistan Peoples Party, in December of last year, and staged at least three assassination attempts against former president Pervez Musharraf - two of which came close to killing him.

In a speech yesterday, Mr. Gilani, without any hint of irony, said, "I am happy to state that the law and order situation is, God willing, returning to normalcy."

Details were murky about the predawn raid by U.S. forces into South Waziristan, part of the tribal area that NATO believes is used as a haven by insurgents operating in Afghanistan.

A U.S. official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of cross-border operations, said the raid occurred about 1.6 kilometres inside Pakistan. The official, based in Washington, didn't provide details on casualties.

Islamabad has called for international forces to share intelligence on the tribal belt so that it can deal with militants there, but U.S. and NATO commanders have often mistrusted their Pakistani counterparts, believing that elements of the military and intelligence sympathize with the insurgents.

Owais Ghani, the provincial governor in charge of the tribal belt, put the death toll from the incident at a village in the Angoor Adda area as high as 20 civilians, including three women and four children. The Pakistan army put the death toll at 15, including seven civilians.

"This is a direct assault on the sovereignty of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan expect that the armed forces ... would rise to defend the sovereignty of the country and give a befitting reply," Mr. Ghani said.

Habib Khan Wazir, an area resident, said he heard helicopters, then firing. "Later, I saw 15 bodies inside and outside two homes. They had been shot in the head," Mr. Wazir told The Associated Press, adding that all the dead were civilians. "There was darkness at the time when the Americans came and killed our innocent people," he said. "We would have not allowed them to go back alive if they had come to our village in daylight."

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry lodged official protests. It is thought that the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, Anne Patterson, was summoned to the ministry.

There have been frequent U.S. missile strikes in the tribal territory, some of which have killed top al-Qaeda leaders who have been uneasily tolerated by Pakistan. But the acknowledged use of ground forces is unprecedented and appears to be more than Islamabad is willing to tolerate.

"We reserve the right of self-defence and retaliation to protect our citizens and soldiers against aggression," said Major-General Athar Abbas, a spokesman for the Pakistan army.

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan — NATO helicopter gunships attacked three houses near a stronghold of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s South Waziristan region early Wednesday, killing at least 15 people, including women and children, according to local residents, a Taliban commander and the governor of the North-West Frontier Province.

The attacks were aimed at three houses in the village of Jala Khel in the Angoor Adda area of South Waziristan, less than a mile from the border with Afghanistan, the Taliban commander and local residents said.

The helicopter attacks occurred at about 3 a.m. and killed 20 people, according to the provincial governor, Owais Ahmed Ghanisaid.

The governor, the most powerful civilian leader in the province which abuts South Waziristan, condemned the attacks and called for retaliation by Pakistan.

An American military spokesman at Bagram airbase declined to comment on the reports. The spokesman did not deny that the attack had occurred. Often, a statement of no comment by American and NATO spokesmen in Afghanistan, where NATO and American forces are fighting militants from the Taliban and Al Qaeda, indicates that the coalition forces were involved in a cross-border attack.

A Taliban commander, known by the nom de guerre Commander Malang, said the attack took place close to a Pakistani military position on the border and killed 15 people. But the Pakistani military took no action, he said.

The incursion of NATO and American aircraft and helicopters into Pakistan in so-called hot pursuit of Taliban militants is a contentious issue for Pakistan.

Publicly, the Pakistani authorities say their country’s sovereignty must be respected and always condemn such intrusions.

At the same time, Washington has become more vocal about increased attacks by Taliban and Al Qaeda forces crossing into Afghanistan from Pakistan to fight coalition forces.

There had been growing expectation among Pakistanis that NATO units would respond by attacking more forcefully into Pakistani territory.

The Angoor Adda area is on the border with Afghanistan, and its mud-walled compounds are known as a center of Taliban and Al Qaeda strength.

Sher Khan, a phone company employee in Angoor Adda, said in a telephone interview that 19 people were killed in the raid. He said most of the dead were women and children.

A Pakistani intelligence official in South Waziristan said in a telephone interview that a group of Taliban had crossed the border into Afghanistan before an attack late Tuesday. In response, the Afghan National Army called for air support, the intelligence official said, speaking in return for customary anonymity.

The NATO helicopters chased the Taliban militants across the border back into South Waziristan, according to the intelligence official’s account.

But the Taliban militants escaped, the official said.

A spokesman at Inter Services Public Relations, the arm of the Pakistani military that provides information to reporters, said efforts were still being made to investigate the attack.

|Sources NYTIMES|

A federal grand jury yesterday indicted an American-trained behavioral scientist on charges that she tried to shoot and kill U.S. personnel in Afghanistan in July, when they prepared to question her as a terrorism suspect.

Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani national who lived in the United States for 12 years, faces a possible life sentence for allegedly grabbing a U.S. Army officer's M-4 rifle while she was detained, shooting at another Army officer and threatening all seven members of an Army and FBI interview team before she was shot and subdued.

She is scheduled to appear tomorrow in federal court in New York in connection with the seven felony counts, including attempted murder and assault.

Defense attorneys contend that Siddiqui, 36, was "disappeared" and imprisoned for an unspecified period before the shootout and has been set up by authorities.

"These are totally ludicrous claims," said one of the attorneys, Elizabeth Fink. "A woman gets in a cab, never to be seen again, and five years later, she shows up in Afghanistan and gets a gun away from the U.S. military. This stuff is from the Dark Side."

A CIA spokesman said yesterday that the agency had no knowledge of Siddiqui's whereabouts before her July arrest in Afghanistan's Ghazni province, and that she was not in U.S. custody before then.

Siddiqui, a longtime Boston resident who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, vanished with her three children outside her parents' home in Karachi, Pakistan, in March 2003. At the time, U.S. officials were seeking to question her about suspected links to al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

Her disappearance has since become a cause celebre in Pakistan, where activists say the Pakistani government arrested and secretly detained her in 2003 at the behest of the United States.

Yesterday's indictment is based on events that U.S. officials allege occurred a day after Siddiqui and one of her children, an 11-year-old son, surfaced in Afghanistan and were arrested by local police. According to the indictment, Siddiqui was arrested July 17 carrying handwritten notes that referred to a "mass casualty attack" and contained the names of U.S. locations, including the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. They said she also had notes describing the construction of bombs, explosives, and chemical and biological weapons.

Federal authorities are not pursuing in court the accusations they have leveled against Siddiqui in recent years. However, conviction on the attempted murder and firearm charges could put her in prison for life.

In 2004, the Justice Department said Siddiqui was an al-Qaeda "fixer" who helped terrorism suspects with travel documents and plots. She was of particular interest to the United States because she allegedly had married Mohammed's nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi, after a divorce from her first husband.

A biographical summary of terrorism suspects by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence described Siddiqui as part of a ring of "al-Qaeda operatives and facilitators," and said she helped another suspect, Majid Khan, with travel documents.

Khan is in custody in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

|Sources Washington Post|

Officials and witnesses in north-west Pakistan say at least 15 people have been killed in an attack involving US-led forces from Afghanistan.

The attack is said to have involved helicopters in the tribal area of South Waziristan, close to the Afghan border.

The US-led coalition in Afghanistan told the Associated Press that it had no report of any such incident.

Security has deteriorated sharply in recent weeks along the Pakistani border with Afghanistan.

There is mounting US pressure on the Pakistani government to crack down on militants, who use the border region to launch raids into Afghanistan.

The Afghan government and Nato say that the border region is a haven for al-Qaeda and Taleban militants. Pakistan says it is doing all it can to curb militancy.

The BBC's Dilawar Khan Wazir says witnesses told him Nato troops in three helicopters landed in the Musa Nikeh area, located on the border with Afghanistan, at about 0300 (2100 GMT).

Most people in the area were awake at this early hour because of the fasting month of Ramadan.

Some of the troops entered the house of a local tribesman, opened fire and then lobbed a bomb in the house, witnesses said.

They said at least nine bodies had been recovered from the debris. They included two women and two children.

The witnesses said the family was not known for links with militants.

On Monday, Pakistan's military suspended its operations against Taleban militants in the neighbouring Bajaur tribal area.

The government said this suspension of fighting was in honour of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Taleban spokesman Maulvi Omar welcomed the announcement, but he said militants would not lay down their arms.

|Sources bbc.co.uk|