President Barack Obama needs to immediately stop looking for space on his mantle to place his Nobel Peace Prize and get back to work on closing the ever-widening science-fiction war science gap that's opening between the United States and her terrorist enemies. Because while NASA is only getting up to speed on how to use bombs to annoy the moon, al Qaeda is ramping up its efforts to open up a black hole and send all of existence to a parallel universe where... maybe Rod Blagojevich is president, who knows?
That's the news from the Daily Mail today, which reports that a scientist -- not identified by name -- who works in "the lab that houses the Swiss Large Hadron Collider" -- the device that's been built to simulate the "Big Bang" and otherwise terrify humanity, has been arrested by French police on suspicion of having links to al Qaeda:
The 32-year-old man was the elder of two brothers arrested in the French town of Vienne yesterday.
The arrested man had been working on an experiment in particle physics as a contractor since 2003, Cern said... Le Figaro newspaper reported earlier that the man had been in contact with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and had suggested several French targets for militant attacks.
A judicial source confirmed that one of the brothers had been in contact with people close to the organisation but said there was no indication of a clearly established plot at this stage.
In a statement, the European Nuclear Physics Organization (CERN), which oversees the Hadron Collider project, said that "none of [their] research has potential for military application," and that the suspect "had no contact with anything that could have been used for terrorism." You know...other than a giant particle collider that could potentially blast a gaping hole in existence and kill us all.
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