Sunday’s London Times details the (probable Mossad) assassination of Hamas terrorist mastermind Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. The background on the operation, and other recent hits (featuring exploding headrests, yacht-borne snipers, and poisoned earwax) is entertaining. Read the whole thing.
What amazes me, though, is how the operation came to light. By most standards, the operation was textbook. The hit team had left the country for hours before al-Mabhouh was missed, let alone discovered dead. Initially, it was believed he died of natural causes. Only several weeks of work and a fiendishly difficult autopsy suggested that he was killed. All the elements Mossad would need to have plausible deniability, if not strict operational security.
The most impressive person I’ve met—and this includes former CEOs of Fortune 20 companies, a US Attorney General, a Nobel Prize winner, multiple National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner—was World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov.
Wall Street investment banks helped Greece hide billions of euros in liabilities with exotic currency swaps and other complex financial contracts, according to the New York Times.
It had worked before. In 2001, just after Greece was admitted to Europe’s monetary union, Goldman helped the government quietly borrow billions, people familiar with the transaction said. That deal, hidden from public view because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.
This gives me hope for real innovation by iPhone and iPad app developers.
Square seems like a clever solution to a big problem: simplifying and democratizing credit card processing. The use of the audio port is brilliant. The software provides an elegant solution to security issues. Very cool all the way around.
Tripit puts all travel information in one place. There’s no end to iPhone apps that organize information. But I wonder: at what point does the sheer number of apps, and moderate usefulness, make the market so small that it doesn’t return the cost of development?
The US Treasury sells bonds periodically to finance US Federal Government spending. If people—banks, foreign governments, investment funds, etc.—aren’t willing to purchase Treasury bonds, the US government has no other means of funding its (now record level) of deficit spending.
While the World has been glued to the unfolding crisis in Greece—which is in danger of defaulting on its bond payments and, as a result, being unable to convince people to purchase its bonds—there has been increasing concern over “sovereign risk” (the risk that sovereign governments will be unwilling or unable to pay their debt obligations) in other developed countries (Japan, Ireland, other Euro Zone countries, and even the United States).
Natural gas exploration may have caused a mud volcano is Indonesia—that managed to level three square miles. Wired describes the new scientific evidence.
The interwebs are buzzing with speculation about Google Buzz, the social networking service built on Gmail—and other Google Apps—that integrates features of a number of social networks in one, real-time life stream.
The response has been all over the map. There have been (now somewhat addressed) privacy concerns. Fred Wilson, interesting as usual, argues that Buzz tries to do too many things. Better to do one thing well than most things middling. Meanwhile, Jason Calcanis views it as a big success that might already have derailed Facebook’s IPO. And CounterNotions investigates what Google’s ultimate strategy may be.
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Sunday’s London Times details the (probable Mossad) assassination of Hamas terrorist mastermind Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. The background on the operation, and other recent hits (featuring exploding headrests, yacht-borne snipers, and poisoned earwax) is entertaining. Read the whole thing.
