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FOXNews.com – Texas Begins Evacuating as Hurricane Ike Intensifies to Category 2 Storm in Gulf – Local News | News Articles | National News | US News
McALLEN, Texas — Officials prepared Wednesday to evacuate the first of 1 million Texas residents who could be in the way of Hurricane Ike as the Category 2 storm charged into the Gulf of Mexico and toward the U.S. coast.

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center predicted Ike, which has already left at least 80 people dead in Cuba and the Caribbean, would feed on the Gulf’s warm waters and intensify before slamming into the area near the southern Texas city of Corpus Christi early Saturday morning.

As of 2 p.m. EDT Wednesday, the storm’s top sustained winds measured 100 mph. It was located 255 miles west of Key West, Fla., and was moving toward the northwest at about 13 mph.

If Texas officials order a mandatory exodus, it would be the first large-scale evacuation in South Texas history. State and county officials used to let people decide for themselves whether to leave a hurricane area until just before Hurricane Rita struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. Now county officials can order people out of harm’s way.

Click for the latest on Ike at MyFOXHurricane.com | The Weather Undergound | The National Hurricane Center
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The evacuation would affect the impoverished Rio Grande Valley, home to many immigrants who have traditionally been fearful of evacuating out of concern they could be deported if stopped by authorities. Some county officials say they will visit immigrant neighborhoods and forcefully urge people to clear out.

Gov. Rick Perry has already declared 88 coastal counties disaster areas to start the flow of state aid, activated 7,500 National Guard troops and began preparing for an evacuation, lining up “buses rather than body bags.”

Texas emergency officials were taking no chances with the lives of its medically fragile citizens. Residents with special needs in the Corpus Christi area were set to begin leaving by bus for the central Texas city of San Antonio on Wednesday, and the state said it would open up a northbound shoulder on an interstate highway beginning at 9 a.m. for people who wished to begin leaving.

Texas officials were encouraging residents in the path of Hurricane Ike to do three things — listen to what local officials say, monitor weather reports and gas up, now.

Ike has already killed at least 80 people in the Caribbean and ravaged homes in Cuba. As it left Cuba Tuesday, the storm delivered a punishing blow some towns that already suffered a direct hit from Category 4 Hurricane Gustav on Aug. 30.

Federal authorities gave assurances they would not check people’s immigration status at evacuation loading zones or inland checkpoints. But residents were skeptical, and there were worries that many illegal immigrants would refuse to board buses and go to shelters for fear of getting arrested and deported.

“People are nervous,” said the Rev. Michael Seifert, a Roman Catholic priest and immigrant advocate. “The message that was given to me was that it’s going to be a real problem.”

One reason for the skepticism: Back in May, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the Border Patrol would do nothing to impede an evacuation in the event of a hurricane. But when Hurricane Dolly struck the Rio Grande Valley in late July, no mandatory evacuation was ordered, and as a result the Border Patrol kept its checkpoints open. Agents soon caught a van load of illegal immigrants.

Biggest ‘Big Bang Machine’ switched on – LHC- msnbc.com
After 14 years of preparation, a new scientific wonder of the world opened for business Wednesday with the official startup of Europe’s Large Hadron Collider.

The $10 billion particle accelerator is the biggest, most expensive science machine on earth, designed to probe mysteries ranging from dark matter and missing antimatter to the existence of extra, unseen dimensions in space.
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Scientists, journalists and dignitaries watched from the control room at Europe’s CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border, near Geneva, as beams of protons were sent around the collider’s 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground ring of supercooled pipes for the first time.

“Today is a great day for CERN,” the organization’s director general, Robert Aymar, told the crowd in the control room as the startup process began. The turn-on proceeded slowly, with controllers checking the alignment of the beam at each stage of the route.

Although the actual subatomic collisions aren’t due to begin until next month, CERN designated Wednesday’s “First Beam” as the official occasion for celebration. For the more than 10,000 scientists, engineers and other workers involved in the project, the Large Hadron Collider represents a revolutionary new research opportunity as well as an unprecedented engineering achievement.

“The combination of the size, scale, complexity and technology — well, the comparison I always use is the pyramids,” Peter Limon, a U.S. physicist from Fermilab who played a part in building the device, said during a pre-startup walkthrough. “This is what we do today comparable to the pyramids of 4,000 years ago.”

The LHC is designed to do things the pyramid’s builders never imagined.

Once the machine is in full operation, two streams of invisible protons will be whipped up in opposite directions around an underground racetrack to 99.999999 percent of the speed of light. When the two waves of protons slam into each other, scientists expect particles to melt into bits of energy up to 100,000 times hotter than the sun’s core — a state that should replicate what the entire universe was like just an instant after it came into being.

How can the Large Hadron Collider possibly perform such feats? That’s where the wonder begins.

Going down …
No one was allowed in the underground tunnel for Wednesday’s maiden run, but a visit during the final phases of the LHC’s construction provided an inside look at the wonder at work.

During the seven-year construction phase, components of the collider and its detectors had to be lowered down piecemeal from CERN’s assembly halls, then put together in underground caverns as big as cathedrals.