The news at a glance ... Europe

Belfast, U.K.

Gerry Adams murder allegation: Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams ordered murders and bombings as an Irish Republican Army commander, according to a book published this week. Adams, a key Republican leader in Northern Ireland, has always said he was not an IRA member. But in Voices From the Grave, a book of interviews conducted with now-deceased IRA members, Adams is alleged to have directed some of the IRA’s most notorious killings. “I never carried out a major operation without the okay or the order from Gerry,” said Brendan Hughes, an IRA member who died in 2008. “And for him to sit in his plush office and deny it, I mean it’s like Hitler denying that there was ever a Holocaust.” Sinn Fein denied the allegations.

Geneva

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World doesn’t end: After months of delay, the Large Hadron Collider finally revved into action this week, smashing subatomic particles together at close to the speed of light in a simulation of the Big Bang. The LHC, the world’s largest particle accelerator, is a 17-mile-long underground ring that cost $10 billion to build. Physicists from around the world will use it to test theories about the structure of the universe, including the existence of dark matter and other dimensions. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, head of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates the collider, says it will usher in “a new period of discovery in the history of mankind.” A few alarmists with science degrees had theorized that the collider could produce a black hole that would swallow Earth and kill all 6.8 billion inhabitants. So far, that has not happened.

Basel, Switzerland

Violent casino heist: A masked gang shot up a casino on the Swiss-French border this week, terrifying staff and gamblers and making off with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ten gunmen smashed a door to Basel’s Grand Casino with a sledgehammer, bursting in at 4 a.m. After failing to shoot open the locks on the casino’s main safe, the masked men grabbed all the cash in the tills and escaped. “It was like something out of an action film, and very frightening,” said a casino spokesman. Witnesses said the gang drove off toward France in two cars.