The Original Wheel of Thrills Performance at The EX

A descendant of the renowned Swiss Family: the Fabulous Fearless Bauers, Daredevil Joseph D Bauer made his CNE debut this year with his spellbinding Wheel of Thrills. We watched as he walked and ran inside and outside of a large wheel that rotates on a beam at 360 degrees! Not only that, he also juggled torches, skips ropes and walked blindfolded while running on the wheel! Crazy moments were included as well, since it looked like he would fall down to the ground too on couple of occasions...

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CIA hired mercenary assassins (or assassin trainers) in plan to bump off Qaeda leaders - Boing Boing

For once I am far from being surprised by it:
In 2004, the CIA hired Blackwater USA contractors as part of a covert program to find and kill top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to statements from current and former US officials.

Snip from New York Times story:

blackwater_logo_demo.jpg The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.'s director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting in June to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said.

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.

C.I.A. Sought Blackwater's Help to Kill Jihadists (NYT via Mitch Kapor)

A related news article, just out today: The Rise and Fall of the Mercenary Formerly Known as Blackwater (Newsweek)

Oh, and by the way, Blackwater has changed its name to "Xe," which I'm none too happy about for personal reasons (cough).

 

Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America by David Wise

Picked up a new book today - Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America by David Wise and I cannot wait to dive into it. 

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This is a very revealing book on Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied on the US for the Russians for over 20 years before he was finally caught. If you saw the movie "Breach" with Ryan Phillipe and Chris Cooper, this is a much more in-depth view of the incident, though, interestingly, Eric O'Neill (Phillipe's character) is never mentioned. "Spy" provides a solid look at Hanssen's upbringing and early marriage, and shows how there were several times he might have been caught, but wasn't - usually due to someone finding evidence that might be incriminating, but not presenting it because they either believed Hanssen wasn't the type of person to spy (he was very staunchly Catholic, appeared to live by what might be called "old-fashioned" mores, and often espoused strongly conservative values,) or because after discovering what Hanssen was up to, he promised them he wouldn't do it again. It also details how he accomplished his spying, and the impact his activities had - from the deaths of a number of Soviet officials who had been turning over information on the USSR's, to giving the Soviet Union our "continuity of government" plan, which details not only who will be in charge of what in case of emergency (and who takes over for whom if someone is killed - all the way up to the President) but also the locations where important government officials were to be held (e.g. Dick Cheney's infamous "undisclosed location.") David Wise is a well-respected author on topics of espionage and, in addition to an engrossing story, he provides a number of footnotes, offering notes to help clarify situations, terminology, apparent questions about dates, and the some of what happens in the book had on the wider national and world stages. He also provides copious references to back up the information he provides. Wise is also the author of [book: Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million], about the Ames, who - until Hanssen was caught, was considered the worst traitor in American history. "Nightmover" was written well before Hanssen's treachery was uncovered, and reading both of them provides an even deeper understanding of what the world was like - and how governments reacted - during the cold war. When I read them, I read "Spy" first and then "Nightmover" and I found that doing so put a kind of interesting twist on things. I would read about questions that had arisen during the Ames investigation which hadn't been satisfactorily answered, but were somewhat set aside either as dead ends or dismissed as likely being the result of some of the vagueness that is a natural part of the espionage business. Many of these questions would be answered years later when Robert Hanssen was captured and it was made clear that both Ames *and* Hanssen had been, separately, working for the Soviet. The fact that the USSR had control of both of them at the same time was a significant advantage to them - the would often get the same information from both men, which was a pretty strong indicator that the information was, in fact, accurate - coming as it did from two different agencies who rarely cooperated, and could hardly be expected to be working on a coordinated effort to use disinformation to the Soviets in order to flush the spies out of hiding. If you are at all a fan of real-life spy stories, then this is one to get. 

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Posterous Finally Has An iPhone App, Could Have Been Way Better

Review of the Posterous iPhone App, I will have download it today and check it out myself... It looks like a good start, but hopefully they will address more features in the future releases:


It’s not that the app, dubbed PicPosterous, doesn’t do what is advertised on the product website, it’s just that I wish it did a little more. Billed as ‘Your iPhone Instant Camera’, you can basically use the iPhone 3GS’ camera to shoot both pictures and videos, which you can subsequently add to virtual albums and upload directly to your Posterous blog.

When you log on to the app using your registered Posterous account (which you don’t necessarily need to have to use it), you can manage multiple sites, create private albums and auto-post whatever you upload to your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and FriendFeed stream.

The app is capable of geo-tagging photos and videos, so you can switch on a location map online next to each album. The nice thing about it is that you can add a first picture to an album and then simply keep uploading photos to that album for as long as you like, so the pictures are not each posted as a separate blog post when you send them in.

A couple of gripes though. First, when you send pictures or videos to your Posterous blog, it’s impossible to add any kind of text or link from within the app (something I was able to do when I simply e-mailed in photos I took with my iPhone camera using the mail application). Second, when you add multiple pictures to one album you can’t delete individual pics afterwards, leaving you only the option to clear all your albums and start over. Third, you need to use your iPhone camera in landscape mode when you want your pictures to come out right on your blog, something that’s not indicated anywhere and you need to find out yourself. And finally, while you can turn off the auto-post feature, it would be nice if you could get the option to send it to e.g. only your Twitter or Flickr account rather than all or nothing.

Great to finally see Posterous come out with an iPhone, but I sincerely hope they keep improving it based on my and other users’ feedback to make it as satisfying an experience as the actual web service.

Twitterrific Premium 2.1 Released

Despite many awesome Twitter Apps for an iPhone available, I have remained with Twitterrific Premium for a year now. Yesterday's latest release of this App added many new features to its functionality. One which stands out for me personally is the ability to translate tweets, let's face it English is not the only language out there. One of the people I follow is often tweeting in German. Now I am able to easily translate each tweets into English by pressing Translate button. The translation may not be perfect but they are good enough to get the idea what the tweet is about. See an example below:

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Sneak Peek At Facebook for iPhone 3.0

Techcrunch posted list of the new features and improvements for the App as well some screen shots as well:


Facebook for iPhone version 3.0 will hopefully soon be made available through the iTunes App Store, but lead engineer Joe Hewitt has apparently already graced the team over at Appadvice with an early look.

Check out their review for more details, but here’s the gist:

- A new home screen (see first screenshot above) which will offer the ability to customize i.e. add boxes to the default start screen

- A better ‘News feed’: much more complete overview of status updates from your friends, but still lacking the ability to hide/unhide them from inside the app

- Videos (as expected): uploading video supposedly works like a charm, but you still can’t watch Facebook videos unless they’re actually hosted on YouTube (and likely other video hosting platforms as well) and simply played from inside the app

- Events (as expected): includes the ability to RSVP, but you can’t visit the complete event wall, which is unfortunate

- Pages: you can search for, view and interact with pages using Facebook for iPhone 3.0

- Photos: you can create new photo albums, upload photos to any album, zoom into photos and change your profile picture

- Communication: you can quickly or call people straight from the Friends page

- Improved ‘liking’ feature

- Notes, including the ability to edit them

- Notifications: much better, link directly to comments which you can respond to

- Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit the app or are interrupted by a phone call

Here’s to hoping for a quick green light from Apple.