Clinton: Syria on brink of catastrophe as rebels advance. The region in danger

DEBKAfile Special Report

“There is still a chance to save the Syrian state from a catastrophic assault that would be very dangerous not only to Syria, but to the region,” said US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Tokyo, Sunday, July 8. She did not elaborate, but stressed earlier, “… the opposition is getting more effective in defense of themselves and going on the offensive against the Syrian military.”

debkafile’s military sources note that her over-the-top language comes at a pivotal moment in the Syrian conflict: The rebels are winning more and more territory and not only encircling Damascus but fighting inside the capital. To save itself, the Assad regime which still controls the army outside Damascus may in desperation open up its arsenals and deploy weapons of mass destruction in a bid to drive off the rebels while also spreading the flames to other parts of the region, including Israel.

Persian Gulf sources reported Sunday that inside the capital, the Syrian army no longer moves troops in military convoys for fear of rebel attack. They now travel in unmarked civilian vehicles. Some officers prefer to stay on base for fear of assassination or kidnap on their way home.

Clinton did not explain how the rebels were suddenly able in the last few days to develop their ubiquitous capabilities, rising numbers and military organization - or where they procured weapons for their wholesale offensive against the Syrian army.

According to debkafile’s intelligence and military sources, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have substantially stepped up the flow of munitions to the rebels. They are reaching combatants inside Syria as well as the trainees at Turkish military facilities.

Their numbers have, furthermore, risen to 50,000 armed men who are efficiently organized in 17 brigades. Fighting inside the country are 260 military units, each consisting of one or two battalions, which mostly range from 1,000-1,500 men - depending on the arena. Some are brigades of 3,000 men.

By the first week of July, the rebel army had put in place an efficient logistical system:

1. The Free Syrian Army had been able to establish a geographical presence in all of Syria’s provinces, barring the minority regions (Kurds and Druzes) which are outside the conflict, and the pro-regime Alawite region.

2.  A regional operational command was working in all those provinces (260). It was equipped with hi-tech communications connecting the provinces and linked to the FSA’s high command in Turkey.

3.  A well-organized arms smuggling ring was transferring weapons from one command to another as required for local attacks on Syrian military and security forces. This pipeline is fed by Turkish, Saudi and Qatari suppliers via Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Turkey..

4.  A foreign “military adviser” is posted at each provincial command center. They are usually special forces experts mainly from the British, French, Turkish, Saudi and Qatari armies.

Up until last month, the rebels were fighting primarily to sever a strategic strip of land from Idlib in the north to Deraa in the south in order to tie down the regime in Damascus and its Allawite loyalist forces in the west and center and cut it off from the rest of the country. 

This goal has now been abandoned. Today, the anti-Assad forces are concentrating on a single objective: The regime’s overthrow.

Google, Amazon lead rush for new Web domain suffixes in bids to ICANN

By Hayley Tsukayama and Peter Whoriskey

Amazon and Google are staking claims to large swaths of the Internet under a new system for labeling Web domains, bolstering their ability to control traffic as the Web expands beyond the realms of “.com,” “.gov” and “.org.”

The bids by those companies to acquire new domain names such as “.book,” “.shop” and “.movie” renewed fears among competitors that a powerful few will dominate the Internet marketplace of the future.

A slate of roughly 2,000 new Web suffixes, including “.app” and “.sex,” was revealed Wednesday by the nonprofit organization tasked with regulating domain names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The group announced last year that it would take applications for new domain names to foster growth and competition online. The new domains are scheduled to go into effect next year.

“We’re standing at the cusp of a new era of online innovation,” said Rod Beckstrom, president of the group, known as ICANN.

If Internet users embrace the new domains, the companies that control them could bear considerable influence on Web traffic.

Amazon has applied to control the “.book” and “.movie” names, for example, meaning that anyone else selling those items would have to get the company’s permission to be listed within that domain.

The National Retail Federation had urged that oversight of such generic domain names be given to impartial entities rather than individual companies.

“The results for now are as potentially unfair to businesses and consumers as we feared they might be,” said Mallory Duncan, general counsel for the trade group.

For example, if a grocery store controls the “.grocery” suffix, it could theoretically exclude competitors from listing their sites there.

Duncan said consumers may not realize that the new domains are under private control and that the open competition that prevails within the “.com” realm may not exist within, say, “.grocery.”

“Consumers going to that domain may not realize that all of their shopping is being done with one company instead of a competitive market,” Duncan said.

Google was among the most prolific applicants, seeking to register 101 names at an application cost of $18.7 million. Never lacking in its quest for virtual completeness, the company is seeking to control “.mom,” “.dad” and “.kid.”

Amazon applied for 76 new names, including “.amazon” and “.zappos.”

The expansion of Web domains has the potential to make over how surfers conceive of the Internet. Until now, entities have largely broken down by type of institution: “.gov” for government agencies, “.com” for businesses and “.org” for other groups.

The new suffixes add a potentially confusing array of categories. Among the many that have been formally proposed are “.sucks,” “.rip” and “.vip.” While some might sound like jokes, the fact that the application fee for each is $185,000 tends to keep things serious.

Applicants were heavily concentrated in North America (911), Europe (675) and the Asia-Pacific region (303). There were only 17 applications from Africa, which raised questions about whether the cost of an application was too high to be equitable.

Many of the potential new domain names are being sought by multiple companies. The most popular was “.app” with 13 applications, but even “.sucks” is the prize in a three-way contest.

The applicants must first pass an initial review by ICANN. If groups competing for a domain name cannot reach an agreement among themselves, the names will be auctioned off.

ICANN said it expects the first new address to go live in 2013.

What’s not clear, however, is whether consumers will embrace any of the new names.

“It’s going to present users with a lot of new choices,” said Brian Cute, chief executive of the Public Interest Registry, which runs the “.org” domain. “If you have 50 choices of toothpaste, the average consumer is going to the brands they know. That could be the case here.”

Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge, said: “It’s a matter of changing the ingrained habits of millions of people on the Web. Maybe they can do that, and maybe they can’t.”

Even so, many companies are bracing for potential changes to their business.

Advertisers have criticized ICANN’s proposal, saying their concerns were not adequately addressed during the initial review process. Advertisers and others have raised concerns that companies will have to have several defensive addresses — negative-sounding names that the company purchases to keep a rival from exploiting them — to keep counterfeiters at bay.

Beckstrom said Wednesday that ICANN has added several protective provisions, including the option for rapid takedown when brand holders feel their intellectual property may be threatened. ICANN also reserves the right to take a domain name back if there is significant abuse.

Others, however, are bracing for the giants of the Internet to seize even more power over its commerce.

“It would be wrong on so many levels for Amazon to acquire either the ‘.book’ or ‘.author’ top-level domains,” said Paul Aiken of the Author’s Guild. “Their ambitions to extend their monopoly in bookselling have long been abundantly clear, and with their cash, their technical knowledge, this could be yet another way in which they’ve extended their control over the book market. This really makes no sense.”

Using Your Fingers Instead of Passwords

By Kendra Srivastava

Tablet owners may soon unlock their devices using biometric sensors, as security technology progresses beyond traditional passwords.

Napa Sae-Bae, a graduate student at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, is creating an iPad app to verify users' hand shape and finger length. Sae-Bae's biometric analyzing algorithm has already yielded a 90 percent accuracy rate, suggesting her innovation may have widespread application when it debuts in a year.

This project improves on Sae-Bae's existing tablet app, which unlocks iPads in response to hand gestures like palm rotation.

"Unlike gestures, fingerprints are physiological physical traits that you can't change," she explained about her current research. "There's the feeling that these are supposed to be secure and private."

Biometric identification research like Sae-Bae's may revolutionize the mobile industry if it succeeds, as consumers demand new and better ways to protect their data against hackers.

A hospital in Canada already uses fingerprint scanners to verify doctors' identities, allowing them to reach medical records with one swipe rather than entering long passwords.

Fujitsu, a Japanese company, is developing another kind of biometric sensor called PalmSecure that recognizes users' vein patterns instead of fingerprints or hand length.

The company maintains that hand veins never change, while fingerprints and other external hand features may fade or scar over time.

Echoing Fujitsu's logic, researchers at the National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan are building heartbeat scanners to identify mobile phone and tablet owners. Every person's heartbeat is unique, making this biological marker an ideal password.

These seemingly foolproof innovations are designed to prevent the increasing incidence of hackers stealing or cracking personal and company passwords. Recent hacks against worldwide governments and corporations suggest no traditional password is safe, not even those at the Pentagon or FBI.

Despite the danger, many mobile phone owners and IT departments still use convenient security codes like "password1" or "1234," leaving them easily susceptible to malicious intrusions.

But while a palm or retina-scanning app may end the need for such passwords, this technology could also backfire.

For example, the facial detection system on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus is easily fooled by a picture, negating its usefulness as a security tool.

Biometric identification may discourage today's hackers more effectively than traditional passwords, but like any security tool it will likely challenge a new breed of hackers to twist it for their purposes.

iPads could scan palms for passwords

By Matt Liebowitz

Like palm-activated ATMs and retina-scanning smartphones, tablet computers like the iPad may soon authenticate their rightful users by reading the unique movement of their hands, not their passwords.

Napa Sae-Bae, a doctoral student at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, is working to build an app that, using multitouch sensors, will biometrically authenticate tablet users' hand gestures. Her goal, she told NextGov, is for the tablet device to recognize its owner's specific biological traits — their hand shape and finger length, for example — and use those unique characteristics, which do not change, to replace passwords, which run the risk of being cracked.

Although she says it will be at least a year before her app is ready, Sae-Bae has already developed an iPad app that asks users to make gestures on a touch screen, such as rotating an open palm and opening a closed fist, in order to verify their identity. The hand sensor technologies she's using are currently available and already used, in different capacities, on iPads and Android tablets.

She also built a biometric-analyzing algorithm that will be the technological basis of the app; in experiments with 34 people, she achieved a 90 percent accuracy rate in authenticating the hand movements made by each participant, NextGov said.

Sae-Bae's work falls in line with other advancements in biometric authentication that have made headlines in recent months, both for the consumer market and for the government. As part of its human measurements and signatures intelligence (human MASINT) program, the U.S. Air Force has expressed interest in developing security cameras that can detect a suspect's age and ethnicity, and even whether that person is a terrorist smuggling a bomb.

Last month, a Japanese bank announced that beginning in September, it would equip 10 ATMs with biometric sensors that read customers' palms for identity verification.

'Men In Black' Inspired By Scary Stories Of People Who've Seen UFOs

When "Men in Black 3" opens everywhere over Memorial Day weekend, most moviegoers will just be hoping this sequel matches the original for popcorn-munching fun.


But there are many people who say they've been victimized by and live in fear of real MIBs. And those stories, told for decades, are just as terrifying as they are detailed.

Ever since the early 1950s, long before the first "Men in Black" movie hit the silver screen in 1997, men dressed in identical black suits, hats and sunglasses, claiming to be government agents, have reportedly shown up in black cars at the homes or offices of people who reported UFO sightings.

According to those who were paid these unwelcome visits, the MIBs threatened or harassed the eyewitnesses into staying quiet about their UFO encounters.

Watch some reported Men in Black encounters:

1947: Harold Dahl reported seeing a group of UFOs while he was on a boat in Washington's Puget Sound. Soon after, he said, he was approached by a black-suited individual who threatened him and his family if he ever talked again about the UFO sighting.

1967: Robert Richardson was driving his car at night in Toledo, Ohio, when he hit something, which, he claimed, then vanished. He found a piece of metal that he believed originated from the mysterious thing he hit. A few days later, two men, wearing black hats and sunglasses and driving a black 1953 Cadillac, visited Richardson at his home at 11 p.m. to ask questions. A week later, two other men arrived, dressed in black suits, and asked Richardson to turn over the metal to them. When he informed them he had sent it for analysis, he said, they threatened to harm his wife if he didn't get it back. He never heard from them again.

But why? Who were -- and, in some cases, still are -- these strange individuals who give out seemingly meaningless warnings about UFO sightings and try to intimidate people?

"They are the archetypal sinister person who turns up on the doorstep specifically in relation to a UFO encounter," said Nick Redfern, author of "The Real Men in Black" (New Page Books, 2011).

"People who have been visited by MIB tend to fall into two categories: One is the UFO witnesses. The other category is researchers who've been visited," Redfern told The Huffington Post.

After digging closely into the history of many reported MIB encounters, Redfern (pictured below) thinks he has a good handle on what may be going on.

What we have, I'm pretty sure, is a sort of covert department or office or personnel within the official infrastructure. There are people who dress in black deliberately and go around and threaten people in certain circumstances relative to UFOs," he suggested.

"And they look like what you see in the 'Men in Black' movies. They look like agents of the government, like [actors] Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. And they issue veiled warnings not to talk about their UFO encounter."

But then there are the creepier MIB stories that emerge.

Like the one told by Dr. Herbert Hopkins. The respected family physician from Old Orchard Beach, Maine, was home alone on the night of Sept. 11, 1976. At the time, Hopkins was studying a UFO incident.

The phone rang, and a man's voice identified himself as a representative of a New Jersey UFO organization (which turned out to be phony).

"He wanted to know if he could come here and talk to me about the UFO case. He also asked if I was alone, and I said yes," Hopkins told this reporter in 1978 for a story broadcast on NBC Radio.

When Hopkins walked from the phone to the door and turned on the light, the man was already coming up the steps.

"If he was even as close as across the street or next door telephoning, he could not possibly have gotten here as soon as I did to turn on the light for him," recalled Hopkins.

When the stranger came in, Hopkins was struck by his appearance.

"He wore a neatly tailored black suit, black shoes, black socks, a white shirt with black tie, and he wore a black derby. You don't see derbies very often, and I thought to myself, 'This guy looks just like an undertaker.' When he sat down, he removed his derby.

"This character was as bald as an egg. He didn't even have eyebrows or eyelashes. It looked like he had smooth, plastic skin -- like a doll except that it was a dead-white color," Hopkins said.

"His lips were a brilliant ruby red, and he spoke in an expressionless, monotone, scanning speech. He constructed no phrases and sentences -- just a sequence of words evenly spaced. His voice was completely passive with no inflection or intonation, as if you were hearing it from a machine that could talk."

During the short time they were together, Hopkins and the strange man talked about the UFO case that the doctor had been investigating. Hopkins also noticed other very odd things about this Man in Black.

"He sat perfectly motionless and wore grey suede gloves. He idly brushed his lips with the back of a glove, and when he put his hand down, the back of his glove was bright red and the red on his mouth was smeared, so I knew he was wearing lipstick.

"Then I could see that his mouth was a perfectly straight slit. Apparently, he did not have what we call lips, so the lipstick was put on as a decoy -- his mouth was more like a ventriloquist's dummy."

This classic MIB story gets even stranger.

The odd visitor told Hopkins to take a coin out of his pocket and hold it in the palm of his hand.

"He said, 'Watch the coin,' and it started to develop a silver color instead of copper, and then the silver became bluish and the penny was getting quite fuzzy, out of focus, blurred, and then it simply was gone -- it slowly dematerialized."

Following the coin magic, the stranger ordered the doctor to destroy all information he had gathered about the UFO case.

"As he spoke his last words, I noticed his speech was slowing down. His words became slower and farther spaced. He slowly got to his feet, unsteadily, and he said very slowly, 'My -- energy -- is -- running -- low -- must -- go -- now -- goodbye.' Just like that."

Hopkins said that the MIB -- whoever or whatever he was -- clung tightly to the railing as he went down the steps outside, placing both feet on each step, and then disappeared around the corner into a bright light.

When the chilling encounter was over, a terrified, intimidated Hopkins destroyed all traces of any UFO materials he had.

Dan Aykroyd's personal account of a possible MIB encounter:

So who are the real Men in Black who have scared people for decades? Are they government agents trying to spread disinformation about UFOs? But for what purpose?

"The MIB movies are very entertaining, but they portray one angle of a mystery that is actually two-pronged," said Redfern.

"You've got this government conspiracy angle, but you've also got this Gothic archaic mystery that ties in as much with the occult and paranormal as it does with flying saucers."

Here comes Yahoo's own Web browser -- Axis

Yahoo's search group attempts to take control of its destiny by launching its own browser. Surprise: It's good.

By Rafe Needleman

Yahoo is announcing tonight that it's getting into the browser business with its new Axis browser. There are versions for iPad and iPhone, and plug-ins for the desktop browsers Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari.

 The design goal, according to Ethan Batraski, head of product for the Search Innovation Group at Yahoo, is to eliminate the middle step in the usual Web search process: Enter a query, see the results, go to a page. With Axis, you're supposed to be able to go directly from query to page, skipping the step of surfing a sea of links.

The implication that Axis entirely bypasses the need to pick from search results is false, but Axis does nonetheless have a much better way of getting you from searching to visiting a Web page. The browser works well. This is an aggressive product for the struggling Yahoo to launch out of its search group.

Here's why: Yahoo, which still generates more than a billion dollars a year in revenue from its search division, makes a lot of that money from that second step in the search process. It runs ads on search result pages.

On Axis, there are no search result pages.

Instead, what you get when you search, at least 80 percent of the time, Batraski says, is a horizontal display of Web page thumbnails. (The other 20 percent of the time you get text boxes with results in them.) It's easy to see if one of the pages is what you're looking for, and then you can go there directly. To see the tiles again and go to other results, you just pull down the page from the top. To move forward or backward in the list of results directly from a page you're on, you drag your finger from the right or left. bypassing the results list entirely.

So, to be clear, there actually is a list of search results. It just looks a lot better because it's integrated into the browser. Ads will get inserted into the list of search tiles eventually, assuming the product is a success with users. But for the time being, the more successful Axis is, the more it will drive Yahoo traffic away from search revenues -- which only this last quarter began to recover after years of sliding.

As a tactic for launching the browser, focusing on the user experience above all and forgoing search revenues is probably very wise, since it may be difficult for the browser to make a dent in the market. I asked Batraski about other alterna-browsers that struggled to win major market share, and mostly failed: Flock, Rockmelt, Opera, AT&T's Pogo, and others. Why does Yahoo think it can pull a Chrome with its product?

Distribution, says Batraski. There are 700 million people using Yahoo, and they can all be marketed to. Also, Yahoo distributes browsers (mostly IE with the Yahoo embedded toolbar) to 80 million people a year. The company knows how to get browsers out there, at least on desktop operating systems. But Axis on the desktop is actually not its own browser, but rather a plug-in that works with the browser a user already has. If you use the plug-in's URL and search box in the lower-left of your browser, you'll get Yahoo's results. If you forget it's there and use the browser's standard URL/search box, you get whatever you've already been getting.

One gets the feeling that the desktop versions of Axis exist primarily as accessories to the mobile versions, so users can move between platforms and keep their open tabs and histories intact. When you're logged in, Axis knows what you do on each device and makes it easy to pick up on one where you left off on another.

Mobile is where the action is, so it makes sense that Yahoo threw the bulk of its development love into the tablet and smartphone versions. On the iPad, Axis is simply a great browser. The integrated search feature is intuitive, and being able to move through search results without having to go back to search makes sense. After only a few minutes using it I thought, Why hasn't Google done this yet? It's that good.

Although mobile devices like the iPad come with embedded browsers, Batraski says the product has Apple's blessing. He also said that Apple reps have told him they're not throwing many resources into Apple's own iOS browser, Safari. Axis takes the best that Safari has to offer -- its core rendering engine, Webkit -- and really does make it better. But no matter what Apple says, it's not yet fully behind alternative browsers like Axis: On iOS, you can't change your default browser (unless you jailbreak your device). Click a link in an e-mail message or another app, and your device will open it up in Safari, no matter how in love with Axis you are.

Batraski is convinced this will change eventually, and that if it doesn't, Apple will have a Microsoft-scale antitrust issue on its hands.

What about Android? The Android version of Axis is still in development, and while it's much easier for a user to get an alternative browser installed and embedded in an Android product, it's a pretty safe bet that Google isn't exactly going to roll out the welcome mat for Yahoo's browser. Google already has two of its own browsers for mobile, the Android browser and the still-in-beta Android version of Chrome. And those drive traffic to Google's ads, not Yahoo's. (Firefox, by the way, defaults to using Google for search, so even when people use it instead of Chrome, Google still wins.)

The Axis browser may not conquer the world, but it is a very strong mobile product with an important new design concept for search. It's also a gutsy business move from Yahoo. It's rather refreshing.

Undilah video

Ehud Barak refuses to rule out military strike against Iran

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, refused to rule out military action against Iran yesterday, heightening expectations that his government is preparing to authorise an attack on Tehran's nuclear facilities.

By Adrian Blomfield, Jerusalem

In an interview with the BBC, Mr Barak said that sanctions and international diplomacy had so far failed to deter Iran from seeking to build a nuclear bomb, a prospect that would, he warned, threaten the stability of the "whole world".

"We strongly believe that sanctions are effective or could be effective if they are ... paralysing enough, that diplomacy could work if enough unity could be synchronised between the major players, but that no option should be removed from the table," he told the Andrew Marr Show.

The minister's comments come after a week of increasingly insistent claims in the Israeli press that Mr Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, his prime minister, are lobbying cabinet colleagues to support military strikes against Iran.

The two men, considered Israel's chief political hawks when it comes to Iran, are hoping that a report to be submitted by the UN's nuclear watchdog this week will provide justification for military action, observers and officials have suggested.

Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency are expected to present the most compelling evidence yet that Iran is exploring ways to build a nuclear weapon, although European diplomats say the report will not amount to "a smoking gun".

Even so, the Israeli government will seize on its findings to urge the international community to take more decisive action.

The Netanyahu administration tasked Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, with mounting a diplomatic offensive over the weekend in the belief that his dovish credentials will make its case even more compelling.

In a series of interviews, Mr Peres warned that time was running out to prevent Iran from fulfilling its perceived nuclear ambitions and appeared to urge the international community to consider the military option.

"The possibility of a military attack against Iran is now closer to being applied than the application of a diplomatic option," he told the Israel Hayom newspaper.

The key conclusions of the IAEA report will inevitably refocus international attention on Iran. It is expected to confirm that Iran has enough fissile material to build four nuclear bombs if it were further to enrich the uranium in its stockpiles. But it is an appendix, already partly leaked, that concentrates of the military aspect of Iran's nuclear programme which will garner most interest.

Satellite images will show a large steel container at the Parchin base near Tehran that appears to be designed for nuclear-related explosive testing.

Documentary evidence will also be provided to flesh out earlier IAEA suspicions that Iran is researching the construction of an atomic bomb trigger, has carried out computer simulations on building a nuclear device and is experimenting with the neutron technology needed to ignite a nuclear chain reaction.

The report is likely to conclude that Iran is researching how to construct a nuclear weapon but is not actively building one. Iran's foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said the report was based on "counterfeit" claims.

As alarming as the findings are, European states are still likely to countenance against military action and call instead for a fifth round of sanctions.

"We gave imposed sanctions that continue to expand," Alain Juppe (ED: Acute on e please), the French foreign minister, said yesterday. "We can toughen them to put pressure on Iran. We will continue on this path because a military intervention could create a situation that completely destabilises the region."

Some observers have suggested that the bellicose rhetoric emerging from Israel is recent days is intended to alarm the international community into imposing tougher sanctions that it might otherwise ensue.

But there is also concern in the West that Israel could pursue unilateral military action.

US intelligence agencies have reportedly stepped up their monitoring of Israel to glean clues of a surprise attack after allegedly failing to win sufficiently concrete assurances from Mr Netanyahu that he would confer with Washington before taking military action.

Israeli intelligence has concluded that Iran intends to move the bulk of its nuclear production to a heavily fortified underground facility near the hold city of Qom by the end of the year, increasing the pressure to strike before it does so.

But Israel is thought only to have a window of only a few weeks if it wants to launch military action before the onset of winter, when heavy cloud would hamper aircraft targeting systems, making an attack impracticable. Some military experts predict that if an attack does come it will take place either in the spring, or, more likely, next summer.

As Billy Graham prepares for his 93rd birthday, America’s most famous preacher mulls mortality

By Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. — For the Rev. Billy Graham, America’s most famous evangelist across a career that lasted some six decades, the prospect of old age and death was for a long time something he tried not to think about, despite his convictions about the eternity that awaits human beings.

 “I fought growing old in every way,” Graham, who turns 93 on Monday, writes in the newly-published “Nearing Home,” a book that ranges from Scripture quotations about the end of life to brass tacks advice on financial planning. “I faithfully exercised and was careful to pace myself as I began to feel the grasp of Old Man Time. This was not a transition that I welcomed, and I began to dread what I knew would follow.”

Graham’s book, his 30th, comes not only as he reaches another year, but as America’s huge Baby Boom generation moves into old age, its senior members now eligible for Social Security and retirement. And although in recent years Graham has stepped away from active public ministry, his willingness to be frank about the trials as well as the pleasures of growing old may still have an effect on the millions of Americans whose lives coincided with his time as the country’s most famous preacher.

 “I find that, talking to students and a lot of younger people, many of them don’t know who Billy Graham is,” said William Martin, author of “A Prophet With Honor: The Billy Graham Story” and a professor at Rice University. “But the people who will be most interested in this are older, and they do remember and adore Billy Graham.”

Graham has said he wants to preach one last sermon before he dies, and while the new book is not quite that, it has a similar set of themes. Pondering Bible passages on aging and death, exhorting his readers to make sensible changes in their lives (”Take full advantage of your company’s retirement plan, and borrow from it only in an extreme emergency”) in down-to-earth language, Graham’s ultimate focus is always on Jesus Christ.

 “We were not meant for this world alone,” he writes. “We were meant for Heaven, our final home.”
All together, it’s a set of advice that youth-fixated Boomers might not be immediately eager to hear, but coming from Graham it may have more influence. After all, Graham first rose to national prominence with a huge Los Angeles revival in 1949, just as the first Boomers were old enough to notice. Swiftly, Graham — who at the time was just 31 years old — became virtually synonymous with American Protestant Christianity, leading massive crusades at sports stadiums, traveling the globe, and meeting with presidents from Eisenhower to Obama.

Graham’s appeal has not only been durable, it’s extended far beyond the world of evangelical Christianity, according to Grant Wacker, a professor at the Duke University Divinity School, who’s working on a biography of the evangelist.

 “It’s his influence on the broader public that’s intriguing,” Wacker said. “There are a lot of people who are not evangelicals who really admire him.”

Partly that’s because of longevity, Wacker said, and partly because Graham has a reputation for personal integrity that’s in marked contrast with other prominent evangelical leaders tarnished by moral or financial scandal. Primarily, though, Wacker said people outside the world of evangelical Christianity respect the evolution of Graham over his long career as someone who, for example, went from strident anti-Communism in his early days to advocating nuclear arms control in the 1970s, a position scorned by Cold War hawks.

 “He’s acquired first a national and then an international vision over the years,” Wacker said.

“Whether or not they like his theology, people admire anybody who can grow into a wider vision.”
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Is the CIA "following" you on Twitter, Facebook?

By Edecio Martinez

(CBS/AP) - In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, the CIA is following tweets - up to 5 million a day.

Now don't panic, chances are they're not "following" you.

But the idea is that when rebels, militants, activists or diplomats broadcast information on Twitter or elsewhere, America's spies scoop it up.

At the agency's Open Source Center, the analysts the CIA affectionately calls its "vengeful librarians" pore over all forms of social media in many different languages, from all over the world.

The CIA studies and cross-references the material with clandestinely intercepted information to form a snapshot of anything from the mood in Pakistan after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden to whether a Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.