New Charm Results from Focus

New results from the photoproduction experiment FOCUS are reported: Dalitz plot analysis, semileptonic form factor ratios and excited meson spectroscopy.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, Frascati preprint style lnfprep.sty (included). Presented by S.Bianco at the 18th Rencontres de Physique de la Vallee d'Aoste 29 February-6 March, La Thuile, Vallee d'Aoste, Italy. Frascati preprint LNF-04/14(P), Fermilab preprint FERMILAB-CONF-04-372-

Chance to Change: Jennings V. Rodriguez as a Chance To Bring Due Process to a Broken Detention System

Jennings v. Rodriguez will determine whether specific classes of detained noncitizens will be entitled to bond hearings before Immigration Judges moving forward. The challenge comes from the Ninth Circuit, which, with the Second Circuit, mandates bond hearings for some detainees automatically after six months. Those Circuits found that after that point, the detention was arbitrary without a showing by the Government of why the noncitizen needed continued detention. The Government seeks to retain the current system, where the noncitizen’s detention release is entirely at the Government’s discretion. This commentary sets out the case and argues that the better route is to affirm the six-month, mandatory approach. That approach is in line with the Supreme Court’s approach to bond generally, and is compatible with the precedent on immigration detention. The six-month approach balances the Government’s needs for detention in the immigration context with the constitutional and human right to be free from arbitrary restraint

Spectroscopy of D Mesons

The scenario of heavy quark meson spectroscopy underwent recently a major revolution, after the observation of BABAR and CLEO, confirmed by BELLE, of \DsJ L=1 excited states, and by further evidences by SELEX. These experimental results have cast doubts on the incarnations of the ideas of Heavy Quark Effective Theory in heavy quark spectroscopy. I shall review the status of experimental data, discuss implications and sketch an outlook.Comment: Invited review talk delivered at HADRON05, Rio de Janeiro (Brasil), August 2005.9 pages, 6 figures. Fixed two wrong reference

An application of pp-adic integration to the dynamics of a birational transformation preserving a fibration

Let $f\colon X \dashrightarrow X$ be a birational transformation of a projective manifold $X$ whose Kodaira dimension $\kappa(X)$ is non-negative. We show that, if there exist a meromorphic fibration $\pi \colon X\dashrightarrow B$ and a pseudo-automorphism $f_B\colon B\dashrightarrow B$ which preserves a big line bundle $L\in Pic(B)$ and such that $f_B\circ \pi=\pi\circ f$, then $f_B$ has finite order. As a corollary we show that, for projective irreducible symplectic manifolds of type $K3^{[n]}$ or generalized Kummer, the first dynamical degree characterizes the birational transformations admitting a Zariski-dense orbit

On the primitivity of birational transformations of irreducible symplectic manifolds

Let $f\colon X\dashrightarrow X$ be a bimeromorphic transformation of a complex irreducible symplectic manifold $X$. Some important dynamical properties of $f$ are encoded by the induced linear automorphism $f^*$ of $H^2(X,\mathbb Z)$. Our main result is that a bimeromorphic transformation such that $f^*$ has at least one eigenvalue with modulus $>1$ doesn't admit any invariant fibration (in particular its generic orbit is Zariski-dense)