Green venture turns sour: Bruce Willis sues M’sian royal

Hollywood actor Bruce Willis is suing a Malaysian company and its royal chairman over an investment in an eco-friendly rubber venture which went sour, the firm said Friday.

Petra Group said Willis had filed a complaint in a Los Angeles court to recover 900,000 dollars from a two million dollar investment in the firm's subsidiary, Green Rubber Global.

Petra is chaired by Tunku Imran Tuanku Jaafar, a prince in the royal family of Malaysia's Negeri Sembilan state.

"The company is very surprised with Mr. Willis' legal actions and refutes in the strongest possible terms any allegations of impropriety," Petra Group spokesman Andrew Murray-Watson told AFP.

He said Petra had refunded most of Willis' investment and had every intention of paying the remainder within a deadline, a fortnight away.

"As a gesture of good will, 1.1 million dollars of the two million Mr. Willis invested has been repaid already. Mr. Willis is aware that the balance will be repaid within the next few weeks," he said.

Murray-Watson said in 2007 Willis contacted Petra's chief executive Vinod Sekhar -- who personally owns almost 100 percent of the group -- asking to invest in Green Rubber, which uses an environmentally friendly technology to recycle tyres.

Sekhar agreed to buy back Willis' shares at any time he wanted to sell.

At the time Green Rubber was planning to list on the London stock market, but because of the global credit crunch the plans had to be put on hold -- triggering the disagreement between the two sides, Murray-Watson said.

Willis' friend and fellow Hollywood actor, Mel Gibson, is another investor in Green Rubber and is reported to be a close friend of Sekhar.

Petra said in a statement Gibson was still happy with his investment and agreed with the decision not to list the company. It quoted him as saying that "in hindsight, it has turned out to be absolutely the right decision".

Green Rubber said last year Sekhar, through Petra, owns 84 percent of the firm, with the remainder held by his celebrity friends including Indian former cricketer Kapil Dev, former golfer Lee Westwood, and the Forbes publishing family.

The firm's recycling process, which avoids used tyres being burned or ending up as landfill, reportedly uses waste-free environmentally friendly technology to produce a rubber compound that can be used to make products including tyres. -- Agence France-Presse - 11/21/2008 9:58 AM GMT

Is Armageddon nigh?

Is the end of the world nigh? Doom-mongers fear the consequences of scientists replicating the Big Bang.

On Wednesday (Sep 10, 2008; 7.30 AM GMT), Dr Lyn Evans - the man behind the world’s biggest scientific experiment - will fire up the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-long doughnut-shaped tunnel that will smash sub-atomic particles together at nearly the speed of light.

Built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the collider lies beneath the French-Swiss border, near the institution’s headquarters in Geneva, at depths ranging from 170ft to 600ft.

The aim of the £4.4billion experiment is to recreate the conditions that existed just an instant after the Big Bang – the birth of the universe – and provide vital clues to the building blocks of life.

It will track the spray of particles thrown out by collisions in a search for the elusive Higgs Boson, named after the British physicist Peter Higgs (pix), a theoretical entity that supposedly lends weight, or mass, to the elementary particles. So important is this mysterious substance that it has been called the ‘God Particle’.

Scientists also hope to shed some light on the invisible material that exists between particles – dubbed ‘dark matter’ as no one knows what it really is – which makes up most of the universe.

But a handful of scientists believe that the experiment could create a shower of unstable black holes that could ‘eat’ the planet from within, and they are launching last-ditch efforts to halt it in the courts.

One of them, Professor Otto Rossler, a retired German chemist, said he feared the experiment may create a devastating quasar – a mass of energy fuelled by black holes – inside the Earth.

‘Nothing will happen for at least four years,’ he said. ‘Then someone will spot a light ray coming out of the Indian Ocean during the night and no one will be able to explain it.

‘A few weeks later, we will see a similar beam of particles coming out of the soil on the other side of the planet. Then we will know there is a little quasar inside the planet.’

Prof Rossler said that as the spinning-top-like quasar devoured the world from within, the two jets emanating from it would grow and catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis would occur at the points they emerged from the Earth.

‘The weather will change completely, wiping out life, and very soon the whole planet will be eaten in a magnificent scenario – if you could watch it from the moon. A Biblical Armageddon. Even cloud and fire will form, as it says in the Bible.’

He said that attempts were still being made in the European Court of Human Rights to halt the experiment on the grounds that it violated the right to life. The court has, however, already rejected calls for a temporary delay in the project, and it is unlikely to come to a speedy decision about whether the CERN experiment should be halted for good.

Meanwhile Dr Walter Wagner, an American scientist who has been warning about the dangers of particle accelerators for 20 years, is awaiting a ruling on a lawsuit he filed a fortnight ago in his home state of Hawaii.

He fears the experiments might unwittingly create something he calls a ‘strangelet’ that could result in a fusion reaction that might ultimately turn the Earth into a supernova, or an exploding star.

But Dr Evans, the leader of the project, who has devoted 14 years of his life to building the vast particle accelerator, is dismissive of the doom-mongers.

In fact, he is so relaxed about the project; he even wears shorts to work.

He said that Prof Rossler was a ‘crazy’ retired professor who had invented his own theory of relativity.

‘We have shown him where his elementary errors are, but of course people like that just will not listen,’ said Dr Evans.

Meanwhile, Dr Wagner’s fears were ‘totally and completely’ unfounded. ‘There are thousands of scientists around the world who have been preparing this machine and they know what they are talking about, unlike these guys,’ he added.

Are we all going to die next Wednesday?

Dr Evans says his real nightmare is not that he will destroy the world but that, with the cameras rolling, the machine will break down. ‘This is not the first accelerator I have commissioned, but the first under the glare of the whole world,’ he said.

‘My main worry is that we’ve got a huge amount of equipment and it is new. If something trips off, we are down for hours and we have all these Press people sitting around.

‘We are not used to that. We are used to setting things up quietly and announcing it afterwards.’

mailonsunday’s full report: Meet ‘Evans the Atom’

The Large Hadron Collider: Our understanding of the Universe is about to change...

The Large Hadron Collider: Our understanding of the Universe is about to change... The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionise our understanding, from the miniscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.

Two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.

There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions, but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe. For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the higher energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm. – CERN

Source: CERN - http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html