American, 2 Japanese share Nobel Prize
STOCKHOLM, Sweden: Two Japanese citizens and an American won the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics yesterday for discoveries that help explain the behavior of the smallest particles of matter. American Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago, won half of the 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicted the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature. The Nobel citation said Nambu's theories now permeate the Standard Model of physics, which is the basic theory of how the universe operates.
Author of anti-Obama book detained in Kenya
NAIROBI, Kenya: The American author of a controversial book attacking Barack Obama was detained yesterday in Kenya. Jerome Corsi, author of The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, was picked up yesterday morning by Kenyan authorities shortly before he planned to host a news conference to promote his book, which Obama's campaign has dismissed as a smear campaign riddled with falsehoods. He later boarded a plane out of the country, Kenyan police and his publicist said, amid questions about whether he left voluntarily or under duress. Obama, whose father was Kenyan and mother was American, is wildly popular in this East African nation, which embraces the senator from Illinois as a native son. Kenyan authorities accused Corsi of failing to obtain the proper visa needed to work in the country. Corsi could not be reached for comment.
Russian measures fail to lift stock markets
MOSCOW: Efforts by the Russian government to prop up the country's troubled banking sector with fresh cash injections did little to lift stock markets a day after they suffered their worst-ever day of trading. President Dmitry Medvedev unveiled new measures yesterday to ease liquidity concerns in the banking system, announcing 950-billion rubles ($36.3 billion) of loans with a five-year term to banks. Most of the money will go to the country's two largest state-backed lenders, Sberbank and VTB, in an effort to get liquidity moving through the whole system. A further 223 billion rubles will be lent to banks in particular difficulty. This comes on top of some $170 billion pledged already by the state in recent weeks in the form of loans and relief. A stock market collapse in September - triggered by plunging oil prices and turmoil on Wall Street - sparked a crisis of confidence among lenders, and resulted in a severe liquidity squeeze.
