News Cut: July 28, 2010 Archive

7/28/10 - Five by 8: Immigrants, alligators, and God's particle

Posted at 8:00 AM on July 28, 2010 by Elliot deBruyn

1) On Thursday, Arizona's controversial immigration bill will go into effect, making it legal for police officers to ask people questions regarding their citizenship status based on appearances and circumstances. Many opposed to the law plan to demonstrate; some protests could throw a huge wrench in the state's detention machine and daily life:

Arizona's new immigration law takes effect Thursday, creating a potentially volatile mix of law enforcement, illegal immigrants and thousands of activists, many planning to show up without identification as a show of solidarity.

Along with the adoption of the new laws within Arizona, people all over the country are looking at themselves and how they feel about the law. Despite all of the protest, the majority of people polled by CNN agree with the new legislature.

Fifty-five percent of people questioned in the poll say they favor the measure, with four in 10 saying they oppose the law. Thirty-four percent of white respondents oppose the measure, but among Hispanics, that number jumps to 71 percent.

Rage Against the Machine, however, does not agree:

We will see tomorrow how full the detention centers get, how many people carpooling to work get asked if they are illegal immigrants, and whether state officials can get into their offices. We've got our eye on this one...

(via the New York Times, CNN, and the Pioneer Press)

2) After 100 days of oil spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico following the deadly explosion of the off-shore oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, CNN has put together a great summary segment:

At this fork in the road, after BP has announced Tony Hayward will be replaced by American Robert Dudley and that it has set aside $30 billion for the financial recovery effort, the oil giant needs to start thinking about the future.

(via CNN and the New York Times)

3) A cool idea from Gawker blog Lifehacker if you want a fire pit in your backyard and just so happen to own an old washing machine... just as a quick break from the heavy stuff above.

4) Scientists in Illinois have announced that the list of suspects is narrowing quickly in the search for the God particle, or the Higgs boson.

Although they have technically been looking for the infamous building-block of life for years (and have gone through millions of dollars of repairs on the large hadron collider), this news is extremely exciting because, well, they're closer to finding out what everything is made of.

But the large hadron collider needs to deal with it's long, LONG list of problems before it can compete with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

The first experiments with the collider were delayed by over a year when an explosion vaporized an electrical connection and spewed tons of helium underneath the Swiss-French countryside in the fall of 2008.

Because of the defective joints and some mysteriously underperforming magnets, it will still be three years at least before CERN's collider runs at or near full strength.

Here we go, science!

5) And finally, a video of lots of alligators. Lots.

If Serpico had known about YouTube

Posted at 11:30 AM on July 28, 2010 by Eric Ringham

"I am not afraid of quitting. I will tell you my name. I am Dymovsky, Aleksei Aleksandrovich."

A New York Times story recounts the adventures of Aleksei Dymovsky, a Russian police major who blew the whistle on corruption in a big way. The story compares him to Frank Serpico, the corruption-fighting New York police officer who became a household name courtesy of Hollywood, where he was portrayed by Al Pacino. Dymovsky, on the other hand, has become a household name (in Russia) courtesy of YouTube, where he portrayed himself:

Just imagine how compelling his story would be if it were told with the help of a famous actor, as Serpico's was. Come to think of it, a movie treatment already exists. Many of the themes in Dymovsky's story will be familiar to fans of Arkady Renko, the police-major protagonist in the novels of Martin Cruz Smith. One of those novels, "Gorky Park," was made into a movie starring William Hurt. It also features this other guy, who went on to become a famous action figure.