Dear Colleagues, dear Members of the EP Department and CERN Users,

When you read this EP Newsletter the LHC will be operating in full production mode after a very smooth start-up. Interrupted only by short machine development periods, proton-proton data taking will continue until the end of the year. Note that this year no Pb run is foreseen. All other CERN accelerators are operating as well and small and large experiments are taking data. Whoever is not actively participating in the operation and data taking is busy analysing in view of the upcoming summer conferences. CERN is in full physics mode!

Moving into the summer period, we are also looking back to a very busy first half of 2017. The external committees for the various projects and experiments have met at least once and overall they have given excellent marks to the CERN projects reviewed.

In this Newsletter you will find again many articles covering the variety of physics experiments at CERN: a retrospective of the LHC results shown in Moriond, NA64 (a fixed target experiment searching for dark photons), new milestones reached in ISOLDE, detector and electronics developments, and much more. Enjoy reading the reflections by J. Ellis on the 5^th birthday of the Higgs and the 007 reasons for physics beyond the Standard Model and an interview with Kip Thorne by P. Charitos 

While relaxing in the evening in your armchair and waiting for the BBQ to be ready you may want to watch the long travel of the ICARUS detector from CERN, where it received an upgrade for a second life, to its final destination at Fermilab, US. Just click on http://icarustrip.fnal.gov.

Manfred Krammer

EP Department Head