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Federal police captured Jean Baptiste Kingery last week at a house in the Pacific tourist town of Mazatlan in Sinaloa state, where they seized a small cache of guns and found a Hummer sports utility vehicle parked outside.

Law enforcement officials accuse Kingery of delivering parts used to make grenades and firearms, some bought at stores and online in the United States, to the Sinaloa cartel, headed by Mexico’s most wanted man Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman.

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If we see nations such as Greece, Portugal and Italy start to default, we could have quite a few major European banks go down in rapid succession. That could be the “tipping point” that sets off mass financial panic around the globe.

Of course the governments of Europe would probably step in to bail out many of those banks, but when the U.S. did something similar back in 2008 that didn’t prevent the world from plunging into a horrible worldwide recession.

Right now, the way that the monetary union is structured in Europe simply does not work. Countries that are deep in debt have no flexibility in dealing with those debts, and citizens of wealthy countries such as Germany are becoming deeply resentful that they must keep shoveling money into the financial black holes of southern Europe.

These bailouts cannot go on indefinitely. Political and financial authorities all over Europe know this and they also know that Europe is rapidly heading toward a day of reckoning.

The Swiss National Bank’s decision yesterday to cap the franc’s rate for the first time since 1978 marked a bid to protect trade hurt by the currency that last month reached a record high against the euro and the dollar. The franc plunged 8.4 percent yesterday against the euro, the most since the creation of Europe’s single currency. It was little changed in Asian trading, standing at 1.204 per euro at 1:42 p.m. in Tokyo.

The initiative may leave Norway and Sweden vulnerable to unwanted gains in their currencies as countries such as Brazil and Japan fight to limit appreciation amid a flight from the euro debt crisis and near-zero interest rates in the U.S. With Group of Seven finance chiefs set to hold talks this week, it also exposes the clash among policy makers counting on exports to offset slumping demand at home.

A Washington, D.C.-based technology company announced plans Tuesday to build the state’s newest ghost town to test everything from renewable energy innovations to intelligent traffic systems, next-generation wireless networks and smart-grid cyber security systems.

Although no one will live there, the replica city will be modeled after a typical American town of 35,000 people, complete with highways, houses and commercial buildings, old and new.

Pegasus Global Holdings CEO Bob Brumley says the $200 million project, known as The Center, will be a first of its kind in the U.S., creating a place for scientists at the state’s universities, federal labs and military installations to test their innovations for upgrading cities to 21st century green technology and infrastructure in a real world setting.

It will also enable them to rub shoulders with investors, meaning it could ultimately draw enough new businesses to give the state a technology corridor like that in California’s Silicon Valley or Virginia’s Reston, Brumley said.

Counting adults 18-64 who were laid off in the recent recession as well as single twenty-somethings still looking for jobs, the new working-age poor represent nearly 3 out of 5 poor people — a switch from the early 1970s when children made up the main impoverished group.

While much of the shift in poverty is due to demographic changes — Americans are having fewer children than before — the now-weakened economy and limited government safety net for workers are heightening the effect.

Currently, the ranks of the working-age poor are at the highest level since the 1960s when the war on poverty was launched. When new census figures for 2010 are released next week, analysts expect a continued increase in the overall poverty rate due to persistently high unemployment last year.

If that holds true, it will mark the fourth year in a row of increases in the U.S. poverty rate, which now stands at 14.3 percent, or 43.6 million people.

“There is a lot of discussion about what the aging of the baby boom should mean for spending on Social Security and Medicare. But there is not much discussion about how the wages of workers, especially those with no more than a high school degree, are not rising,” said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

Now, restaurants, which typically have not participated in the program, are lobbying for a piece of the action.

Louisville-based Yum! Brands, whose restaurants include Taco Bell, KFC, Long John Silver’s and Pizza Hut, is trying to get restaurants more involved, federal lobbying records show.

If accepted by the court, the revelations, including that Cisco trained Chinese officials in how to surveil net users, could prove damning for the company, which has always claimed it has done no more than sell stock standard technology to the regime.

The Human Rights Law Foundation, based in Washington, filed its suit against Cisco in May under a law that allows US companies to be sued for violations of human rights committed abroad.

The suit accuses Cisco, one of the world’s largest technology companies, of aiding the Chinese government in monitoring and jailing members of the banned Falun Gong by helping to develop the “Golden Shield Project”.

The case is running in parallel to a separate case, reported on by Fairfax Media last month, that was brought against Cisco on behalf of Chinese political prisoners who claim they were tortured and suppressed thanks to technology and training provided to the Chinese Communist Party by Cisco.

Developed by BAE Systems, the Adaptiv technology allows vehicles to mimic the temperature of their surroundings.

It can also make a tank look like other objects, such as a cow or car, when seen through heat-sensitive ‘scopes.

Researchers are looking at ways to make it work with other wavelengths of light to confer true invisibility.
Hiding out

The hi-tech camouflage uses hexagonal panels or pixels made of a material that can change temperature very quickly. About 1,000 pixel panels, each of which is 14cm across, are needed to cover a small tank.

The panels are driven by on-board thermal cameras that constantly image the ambient temperature of the tank’s surroundings. This is projected on to the panels to make it harder to spot. The cameras can also work when the tank is moving.