GENEVA - A small blip on a computer screen sent champagne corks popping among physicists in Switzerland. Near Chicago, researchers at a "pajama party" who watched via satellite let out an early morning cheer.

The blip was literally of cosmic proportions, representing a new tool to probe the birth of the universe.

The world's largest atom smasher passed its first test Wednesday as scientists said their powerful tool is almost ready to reveal how the tiniest particles were first created after the "big bang," which many theorize was the massive explosion that formed the stars, planets and everything.

Rivals and friends turned out in the wee hours at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., in pajamas to watch the event by a special satellite connection. Joining in from around the world were other physicists - many of whom may one day work on the new Large Hadron Collider.

Tension mounted in the five control rooms at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, as scientists huddled around computer screens. After a few trial runs, they fired a beam of protons clockwise around the 17-mile tunnel of the collider deep under the rolling fields along the Swiss-French border. Then they succeeded in sending another beam in the opposite, counterclockwise direction.

The physicists celebrated with champagne when the white dots flashed on the blue screens of the control room, showing a successful crossing of the finish line on the $10 billion machine under planning since 1984.

"The first technical challenge has been met," said a jubilant Robert Aymar, director-general of CERN. "What you have just seen is the result of 20 years of effort. It all went like clockwork. Now it's for the physicists to show us what they can do.

"They are ready to go for discoveries," Aymar said. "Man has always shown he wants to know where he comes from and where he will go, where the universe comes from and where it will go. So here we're looking at essential questions for mankind."

The beams will gradually be filled with more protons and fired at near the speed of light in opposite directions around the tunnel, making 11,000 circuits a second. They will travel down the middle of two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder than outer space. At four points in the tunnel, the scientist will use giant magnets to cross the beams and cause protons to collide. The collider's two largest detectors - essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons - are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

It is likely to be several weeks before the first significant collisions.

The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of a hypothetical particle - the Higgs boson - which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Scientists once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but experiments have shown that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.

The LHC provides much greater power than earlier colliders.

Its start came over the objections of some who feared the collision of protons could eventually imperil the Earth by creating micro black holes - subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, which also received support for the project by leading scientists such as Britain's Stephen Hawking.

Gillies said the only risk would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel. No one would be endangered because the tunnel is evacuated when beams are being fired.

No such problem occurred Wednesday, although the accelerator is still probably a year away from full power.

The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country that contributed $531 million. Japan, Canada, Russia and India - also observers - are other major contributors.

Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC.

The complexity of manufacturing it required groundbreaking advances in the use of supercooled, superconducting equipment. The 2001 start and 2005 completion dates were pushed back by two years each, and the cost of the construction was 25 percent higher than originally budgeted in 1996, said Luciano Maiani, who was CERN director-general at the time.

Maiani and the other three former directors-general attended Wednesday's experiment.

PHOENIX - A sex offender who posed as a 12-year-old boy to enroll in schools in Arizona has pleaded guilty to seven criminal charges, two stemming from the charade he pulled for two years.

Authorities didn't find any victims of sexual abuse at the schools 30-year-old Neil Havens Rodreick II attended. But when Rodreick's ruse was discovered in January 2007, they found an extensive collection of child pornography at his home.

Rodreick had originally faced 28 counts, but pleaded guilty to only a quarter of them Friday in Yavapai County Superior Court in northern Arizona, according to a plea agreement document obtained Wednesday. Rodreick pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual exploitation of a minor stemming from the pornography, as well as one count each of failure to register as a sex offender, fraud and simple assault.

The felony fraud and misdemeanor assault charge are the only ones that stem from Rodreick's involvement at schools. Authorities say he enrolled in school under fraudulent pretenses, and that he grabbed a girl's buttocks at a charter school in Prescott Valley with the intent to injure, insult or provoke.

Authorities said that when the girl believed Rodreick to be a boy, she shrugged off his behavior as immature. But when police told her his true age, the girl became upset and started to cry.

Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk did not return calls or an e-mail seeking comment on the plea deal on Wednesday. Rodreick's defense attorney, Alex Harris, also did not return a call seeking comment.

Sentencing has not been scheduled.

Rodreick attended charter schools in Surprise, Payson and Prescott Valley starting in 2005, authorities said. They say he shaved and wore pancake makeup to help him appear younger, convincing teachers, students and administrators that he was a young boy named Casey.

He was caught in January 2007 after spending a day in the seventh grade at a Chino Valley school after school officials became suspicious about his paperwork.

Rodreick was arrested with Brian J. Nellis, 36, who was posing as Rodreick's cousin, and two older men posing as the men's uncle and grandfather.

Nellis, Lonnie Eugene Stiffler, 63, and Robert James Snow, 45, were indicted on various charges, including child pornography and forgery. Nellis and Snow, both convicted sex offenders, were also charged with failing to register with authorities.

When authorities searched the four men's home in Chino Valley, a community northwest of Phoenix, they found more than 600 graphic photos and videos of child pornography and a sex tape that depicts Rodreick and a boy between the ages of 10 and 13 having sex in a motel room.

Before coming to Arizona, Rodreick was convicted in Oklahoma of lewdly propositioning a 6-year-old boy in 1996. He served about six years in prison.

The trial for Nellis, Stiffler and Snow is scheduled to begin Nov. 19.

WASHINGTON - North Korea has quietly built a long-range missile base that is larger and more capable than an older and well-known launch pad for intercontinental ballistic missiles, according to independent analysts relying on new satellite images of the site and other data. Analysts provided images of the previously secret site to The Associated Press.

Construction on the site on North Korea's west coast began at least eight years ago, according to Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr., senior analyst with Jane's Information Group, and Tim Brown with Talent-keyhole.com, a private satellite imagery analysis company. Bermudez first located the site in early spring and they have tracked its construction using commercial and unclassified satellite imagery.

"The primary purpose of the facility is to test," Bermudez told The Associated Press in an interview last week. A base capable of a long-range test could obviously be used in wartime to launch a missile that carried a warhead.

"This is a clear indication North Korea is continuing its ballistic missile development program," Bermudez said.

Bermudez is also unveiling the images on the defense web site Janes.com and in the Sept. 17 edition of Jane's Defence Weekly.

He said the launch pad has been operational since 2005 but has not yet been used. He believes North Korea wants to use it to develop longer-range and more accurate ICBMs. It could also launch satellites into space.

Although North Korea has been long thought to want additional missile capability and test facilities, this is the first public disclosure of the new launch facility, according to Bermudez, Brown and John Pike, an imagery analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, who first reviewed the information last week.

Pike said the new facility represents a major step forward for North Korea's long-range missile program as it would allow multiple test flights in a short time, which is difficult at the smaller, original long-range missile launch site known as Musudan-ni.

"This would be a facility to conduct a real flight-test program and develop something that you have some operational confidence in," Pike told the Associated Press. "It would suggest they have the intention to develop the capability to perfect a missile to deliver atomic bombs to the United States."

"At the old facility, (a robust test program) just wasn't going to happen," he said.

Pike and Brown identified Musudan-ni nine years ago when they were both with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.

A U.S. counterproliferation official said U.S. intelligence has been aware of the North Korean site for several years. He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.

North Korea has not used the new site, but could at any time, U.S. intelligence officials and the outside analysts said.

"There is no reason they couldn't launch in the near future," Brown told The Associated Press.

Construction has continued even as the U.S. government renewed its attempt to persuade North Korea to shut down its nuclear weapons program. Those negotiations do not address North Korea's long-range missile program, but would give North Korea much-desired economic and political incentives in exchange for giving up nuclear weapons.

The deal's future may be in doubt with news this week that Kim Jong Il, who has held absolute rule in the impoverished, isolated Stalinist regime, may have been incapacitated by a stroke or other health crisis. North Korean authorities deny he is ailing.

The new launch facility exceeds in both size and sophistication the Musudan-ni base on North Korea's east coast, images from DigitalGlobe and GeoEye suggest.

North Korea launched a failed long-range Taepodong-2 space launch vehicle in 2006 from Musudan-ni. That test alarmed the world and gave new energy to the stop-and-start diplomacy over North Korea's nuclear program. It also conducted a surprise launch of a Taepodong-1 over Japan in 1998 from that east coast site.

Pyongyang has not yet attempted to launch the ballistic missile version of Taepodong-2, which is estimated to have a maximum range of about 2,500 miles, potentially threatening the western edge of Alaska. The range could be extended with engine improvements and light payloads.

The new launch facility is built on the site of a small village called Pongdong-ni which was displaced during construction. It includes a movable launch pad and 10-story tall tower capable of supporting North Korea's largest ballistic missiles and rockets. It also includes a rocket motor test pad, which Brown and Bermudez said is similar in size and design to a rocket test facility outside of Tehran, Iran. There are also support buildings.

"The discovery of this new facility demonstrates that North Korea is still conducting an ambitious ballistic missile program and may still have plans to launch satellites into space," Brown said.

Bermudez and Brown refer to the site as the Tongch'ang-dong launch facility, naming it after the closest village. U.S. intelligence does not use the same name for the site. Officials would not immediately divulge the term they use.

The base is not quite complete, according to Pike, who reviewed the most recent imagery Tuesday and said it is still missing a vertical assembly building where the missile would undergo its final assembly before being rolled to the launch site. Brown and Bermudez have not yet found optical or radar tracking facilities; they believe North Korea will rely on mobile or shipboard radar systems in tests. They have also not identified fixed air defense systems that would protect the facility from air attack.

But the site does have an engine test stand, a critical facility for measuring vibration from the engines and adjusting guidance systems to account for it, Bermudez said.

"The engine test stand means they now have the ability to increase the reliability of whatever system" they develop, he said.

Brown and Bermudez say the new launch facility is more protected from surveillance aircraft than Musudan-ni because it is mostly surrounded by hills. Its proximity to Chinese airspace could also discourage close observation by plane, as the U.S. military may want to avoid a repeat of the 2001 collision of a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter.

North Korea is believed to possess up to a dozen nuclear warheads. The new launch pad would help in the development of missiles to carry them, he said. In 2006, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, removing any doubt it had the means to make a nuclear warhead. Its previous missile test showed it also had the means to deliver one.

North Korea has agreed in principle to forswear nuclear weapons and the plutonium used to fuel them. It placed its known plutonium-producing reactor out of commission earlier this year, but has recently backtracked by taking some equipment back out of storage in possible preparation to restart the reactor.

In June, North Korea destroyed the reactor's distinctive conical cooling tower as a symbolic show of good faith with the United States and other nations bargaining with it. But the deal has since stalled over North Korea's obligations to allow intensive international fact-checking of its past nuclear activities.

North Korea claims the U.S. has not held up its end of a nuclear disarmament deal because it has not removed the North from a list of state sponsors of terrorism

Here I sit with my grand daughter on my knee thinking What will be left of this country, planet, by the time she gets to be my age. That will be about 2055, dammit. I am listening to the Mexican drug trade  on CNN and nobody will legalize Marijuana in the United States for god only knows why. But the government of the USA won't budge on it. So the drugs keep coming. When the Money, which is the problem, could be staying in the country. All of gods plants that are drugs should be legalized. Marijuana, Opium, Coca leaves. They were put on this Planet for a reason. If it were legalized the people that do have a problem with drugs could at least get some kind of real help. Drug addiction is a disease, A genetic disease that will attack the human body no matter what and with no matter what. It does not have to be a so called illegal drug to attack you.

Interfax quoted the ministry as saying in a statement that the two Tu-160 strategic bombers landed in Venezuela on Wednesday.

The ministry said the planes will conduct training flights over neutral waters over the next few days before heading back to Russia.

The maneuvers appear to be retaliatory after the U.S. sent warships to deliver aid to Georgia following its war with Russia last month.