GENEVA, SWITZERLAND - Leading Republicans have recently voiced concerns over the safety of the particle physics experiments taking place at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator, which operates in a 30-kilometer tunnel located underneath the Swiss-French border. Opponents of the LHC claim that particle collisions may produce unnatural physical phenomena, such as black holes capable of swallowing the earth, or black presidents capable of leading the United States.

GOP officials cite calculations predicting a small, but nonzero, probability that the LHC could create black presidents that would remain politically stable over a long enough timescale to affect the earth. Some simulations also indicate particle signatures resembling Barack Obama's face. The same pattern was also supposedly seen burnt onto a tortilla of LHC project leader Lyn Evans.

In a recent interview, Republican presidential nominee John McCain stated, "Although my science advisor tells me it would be an extremely low probability event, the occurrence of even a single a black president would be catastrophic...not only would it be capable of destroying the earth, but by destabilizing the presidential power vacuum during an inflationary economic crisis, it might even expand to envelop the entire universe at faster than the speed of light."

Explained CERN director Robert Aymar, "What John McCain doesn't understand is that cosmic rays from space — with energies far exceeding anything that we can create in a terrestrial accelerator — have been bombarding the Earth's atmosphere for billions of years. If the probability of producing black presidents from such high energy collisions wasn't so astronomically small, surely we would have seen one by now. And no, Bill Clinton doesn't count. So clearly the absence of past black presidents should assure any voters that the LHC should in no way impact the election. Besides, with the technical glitches, the LHC isn't even running now and it won't go online until well after the election. Although in fairness I should say that, with quantum mechanics, anything is possible...even a little hope."  HSP