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A fresh take on a classic experiment makes no progress in unifying quantum mechanics and relativity. If you ever want to get your head around the riddle that is quantum mechanics, look no further than the double-slit experiment. This shows, with perfect simplicity, how just watching a wave or a particle can change its behaviour. The idea is so unpalatable to physicists that they have spent decades trying to find new ways to test it. The latest such attempt, by physicists in Europe and Canada, used a three-slit version — but quantum mechanics won out again. In the standard double-slit...

UNION BEACH -- A Pennsylvania woman was charged with animal cruelty and a weapons offense after authorities said she slit a dog’s throat Sunday night during an argument with her fiancé. Amato said Milford and her fiancé, who had both been drinking alcohol, argued during a party at his family’s Prospect Avenue home. During the dispute, she went into a laundry room and slit the throat twice of the family’s dog, a nearly two -year-old Jack Russell Terrier named Penelope, he said. Amato said the wounds went from ear to ear on the dog.

DAMADOLA, Pakistan, June 27 (Reuters) - Taliban militants in northwest Pakistan publicly slit the throats of two Afghans on Friday after they were accused of spying for U.S. forces suspected of launching a missile strike in May. The two men, one of them a former Taliban fighter, were brought blindfolded before a crowd of several thousand people near the village of Damadola in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border before they were executed. "They were spies. Whoever spies for the Americans will meet the same fate," Qari Zia-ur-Rehman, a Taliban leader in the area, told the crowd before another...

FURIOUS townspeople hacked a man to death after he shot and killed nine persons and slit the throat of his 10-month-old nephew in south-western Mexico, officials said overnight. The man, identified as Oscar Junior Flores Lopez, 22, went on a shooting rampage late on Saturday in San Jeronimo de Juarez, a town of 15,000 near the popular resort of Acapulco in south-western Mexico, after killing his nephew, police said. He killed 10 people and wounded two others, police officer Raul Arias said. "He was later taken to a hospital where he died because of machete blows from residents trying to...

As I explain in Islam Unveiled, this is not infrequently the kind of reception that awaits Muslims who dare to stand up for reform of the religion. Why? Because Islam is perfect, as Allah tells Muhammad: "This day have I perfected your religion for you, completed My favour upon you, and have chosen for you Islam as your religion" (Qur'an 5:3). Jihadists say to moderates: "You would change what is perfect? Do you know more than Allah?" And of course they see such presumption as a manifestation of unbelief and apostasy, making the moderate liable to a death sentence. Also,...

Editor's note: Readers may also be interested in Holland: Portent of Things to Come? and Dutch Center-Right Coalition Stands up to Islamism."Education by murder" describes the slow and painful way people wake up to the problem of radical Islam. It took 3,000 deaths to wake up Americans, or at least to wake up the half of them who are conservative. Likewise, it took hundreds of deaths in the Bali explosion to semi-wake up Australians; it took the Madrid assault for Spaniards, and the Beslan atrocity for Russians. Twelve workers beheaded in Iraq awoke the Nepalese.But it took just one death...

LONDON/TOKYO (Reuters) - British police revealed on Saturday that a scientist at the center of a row over the government's justification for war in Iraq had died of a slit wrist, leaving little doubt he had taken his own life. A haggard Prime Minister Tony Blair urged the media on a visit to Tokyo to "set aside the speculation and the claims and the counter-claims" over the death of Dr David Kelly, a Defense Ministry weapons expert. Kelly was named as a possible "mole" for a news story saying aides to Blair -- who has staked his career on his...

"You believe in a dice-playing God and I in perfect laws in the world of things existing as real objects." Albert Einstein Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Proem If in the development of a scientific theory an error is made, further errors will necessarily follow. Each new identification generally assumes the correctness of the theory developed up to that point. If the partial theory is incorrect, any extension will operate to perpetuate its errors, and in the process will generate additional and more extensive errors. Unless the initial error is corrected, the consequence is an endless series of errors piled...