45 percent of world's wealth destroyed: Blackstone CEO

Private equity company Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman said on Tuesday that up to 45 percent of the world's wealth has been destroyed by the global credit crisis.

"Between 40 and 45 percent of the world's wealth has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half," Schwarzman told an audience at the Japan Society. "This is absolutely unprecedented in our lifetime."

But the U.S. government is committed to the preservation of financial institutions, he said, and will do whatever it takes to restart the economy.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner plans to unfreeze credit markets through a new program that will combine public and private capital in a fund that would buy bank toxic assets of up to $1 trillion.

"In all likelihood, that will have the private sector buy troubled assets to clean the banks out in terms of providing leverage ... so that we can get more money back into the banking system," Schwarzman said.

He expects the private sector to end up making "some good money doing that," but added there were complex issues on how to price toxic assets.

He put part of the blame for the financial crisis to credit rating agencies.

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The story of the Israeli secret service, the Mossad

...Yossi Melman: Under the British mandate the element which is known nowadays as Mossad was doing political espionage, diplomatic espionage, to have a feeling of what the British rulers are up to, trying to maintain contact with Arab leaders in the surrounding countries and also were in charge of smuggling the weapons to the Jewish underground formations, the militias, and also they were in charge of illegal, what the British called illegal immigration of Jews mainly from Europe after the Second World War and the Holocaust, to Palestine, to the pre statehood Israel.

Annabelle Quince: According to Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, what made the Mossad so effective was the training many of them gained from the British, both in Palestine and later in Scotland.

Gordon Thomas: What made them good and powerful was they had a British officer who trained them. He was a Zionist and he offered his services to them, and the British wanted him to do that, because they were having a handful of trouble with the Arabs. But he had taught the Israelis exactly the tactics of how to fight and defend themselves, and from that, many volunteered to join the British Army during World War II, and they became members of a special operations executive. They were trained in espionage tactics and the Jews who signed on were young, clever, formidable and they were trained in Scotland, then they were dropped into Europe, and they became among the first spies that entered the war in Europe. When they went back to Israel after the war, they were recruited into the Haganah again, and they became part of the formation that would lead to Mossad, and these people had learnt espionage techniques, they'd learnt guerrilla warfare techniques, and they had also learnt some techniques from the Americans in the jungles of Asia, and they combined all these to form themselves into what eventually became known as Mossad. Now Mossad itself, the word just means 'the office' if you like, and they were very small in number. At one stage there were four separate intelligence services who were conflicting with each other, and one by one, the Prime Minister reduced them all and Ben Gurion insisted as Prime Minister that it would be Mossad. He knew the Mossad people from the war, he knew what they'd done, and these were people he wanted to head his intelligence service. And they began in a small office, then they moved to a building in the centre of Tel Aviv, and now they have a certain number of safe houses around Tel Aviv. They've expanded, they expanded like any small company going big if you like. And they're extraordinary, I mean they're out in the Negev Desert, the people who are out there are the most deadly of all, they are the Kidon. Kidon in Hebrew means of course bayonet, and these are the assassins.

Yossi Melman: Its role and mission has changed during the years. The Mossad I would say have had traditionally more or less four or five missions. One, and it's the most important one, is to provide intelligence, information, about the capabilities and the intentions of Israel's enemies and mainly to provide an early warning if these enemies, these states which are considered to be enemy, though declare themselves as enemies, are planning an attack on Israel, this is the ultimate goal of the Mossad, and for that, they are running agents under deep cover. They are told 'Please do nothing, don't risk yourself, only provide us with information which would indicate let's say the Syrian Army or in the past the Egyptian Army are planning an attack against Israel.' This is the main mission. I can give you a very good example which is still engraved in our minds, and this is the days which led to the Yom Kippur War, the 9th October, 1973 war. The Mossad had a very good agent in Egypt. His name was Alsof Mawan, he was the son in-law of the then Egyptian President, Gamal Abdul Nasser, actually he volunteered to provide information; eventually he was paid but he came to Israeli Embassy in London, wanted to work with Israel, he wanted to take revenge on his father in-law and maybe there was some other motive. First he was rejected. After a few weeks he came back again and then he was accepted, and went underwent some tests and eventually was recruited and run as an agent, and he provided Israel, a day before the war of '73, with very precise information that the war is imminent and it's coming that it would happen within a few hours. The information was so important and so shocking, that the head of the Mossad at the time personally flew to London to meet him secretly, to make sure that this agent is accurate and was telling the truth. And he called the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir at the time, and told her, 'Tomorrow there will be a war'. ...

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Nikola Tesla predicted SMS in 1909

Texting may be a boon in today's world, but the concept was visualized more than a century ago.

And, it was a pioneering American physicist who had predicted the portable messaging service, like the SMS, via a handheld device in the Popular Mechanics magazine in 1909, its technology editor Seth Porges has claimed in a report.

Nikola Tesla, the physicist and a mechanical engineer, whose name lives on at the electric car maker Tesla Motors saw wireless energy as the only way to make electricity thrive, according to Porges.

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Eurozone under warfare: Engdahl on Greece crisis

'Possible' CSIS relied on Afghan intel extracted by torture: official

Canada's spy service says it's "possible" that information received from Afghanistan's notorious secret police may have been extracted by the torture of Canadian-transferred detainees.

But the Canadian Security Intelligence Service says it is forbidden from relying on any intelligence it suspects comes from torture or abuse.

Michel Coulombe of CSIS told the special committee on the Afghanistan mission Wednesday the agency shared information with the Afghan National Directorate of Security, or NDS.

There are allegations the NDS and other Afghan authorities abused prisoners in their custody.

Asked whether NDS intelligence could have been beaten out of prisoners in Afghan custody, Coulombe acknowledged: "That is possible."

"We were not aware of the techniques used to obtain the information."

CSIS can go back to its sources and ask how they obtained their information if the spy agency suspects torture is involved, Coulombe said.

"At the end of the day, if a doubt remains the departmental directive is such that we must not rely on that information," he said.

"There is a caveat that is placed on the information that will follow that piece of evidence around, stating that the information must not be used because it may have been obtained by means of torture or mistreatment. So the information is identified to ensure that it is not used."

CSIS also doesn't appear to have qualms about relying on sources that may at times extract their information through torture.

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