Ok, thanks to a commenter (Titus) to this morning’s post, I learned of information available in the German language press that is vastly superior to anything I had seen previously— much better than today’s New York Times article, because it contains detailed and extensive quotations from a participating scientist on OPERA. [There is nothing like (nearly) first-hand information!] Here is the link:
You can try Google translate and it isn’t awful, but it does contain some important mistakes; my German is good enough to read some more of it but not good enough to do a proper translation for you. I encourage someone fluent to help us out with a proper translation. Someone has done so — see the first comment. [Thanks to the translator!] [2/26 UPDATE: New comment on the situation added at end of post.]
Facts that one can glean from this article bring me to the following conclusions: