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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.

”Considering the premier’s remarks at press conferences, it would be zero,” Hachiro told reporters in answer to the question whether the number of nuclear plants would reduce to none in the future.

As Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor project shared the full list of the rogue certificates, it became clear that fraudulent certificates for domains of a number of intelligence agencies from around the world were also issued during the CA’s compromise – including the CIA, MI6 and Mossad.

Additional targeted domains include Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Skype, Twitter, Tor, WordPress and many others.

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And while there is a difference of opinion between security experts who speculate about the entity behind the attack, there seems to be an almost universal consensus about the fact that DigiNotar will be closed for business forever after this.

Kaspersky Lab’s Roel Schouwenberg notes that “with some 500 authorities out there globally it’s hard to believe DigiNotar is the only compromised CA out there.”