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Markus Reinhardt, 61, had been head of police in the Swiss canton of Graubunden since 1984.

“All indications point to a suicide,” local police said in a statement.

Police captain Marcus Suter will take over the security operation in Davos, where the five-day forum starts on Wednesday.

Lloyd Woodson, 43, whose last known address was Reston, Va., today faces multiple offenses, including second-degree unlawful weapons possession and fourth-degree possession of prohibited weapons, Somerset County Prosecutor Wayne Forrest said.

At the time of his arrest, Woodson was wearing a military-style ballistic vest with a reinforced steel plate and carrying a .223-caliber assault rifle that had been altered to fire .50-caliber ammunition, Forrest. He was also carrying four loaded magazines with hollow-point ammunition, Forrest said.

Branchburg police confronted Woodson at 3:55 a.m. at the Quick Chek convenience store on Route 28 after receiving a call reporting a suspicious person. Branchburg Patorlman Steven Cronce noticed a large bulge beneath the green, military-style jacket that Woodson was wearing, which was later determined to be the assault rifle with a defaced serial number, Forrest said.

Woodson appeared “extremely nervous” as Cronce questioned him, and he ultimately ran from the convenience store toward the Regency Trailer Park on Route 22, Forrest. Officers found Woodson hiding in the bushes and he attempted to run, Forrest said.

Officers tackled him and used pepper spray to subdue Woodson, Forrest said.

Detectives later searched Woodson’s room at the Red Mill Inn on Route 22 and found weapons including a .308-caliber semi-automatic assault rifle with a defaced serial number, a grenade launcher, hundreds .50-caliber and .308-caliber rounds, a police scanner, and the maps of a U.S. military installation and an out-of-state civilian community, Forrest said. Woodson, who is a Navy veteran, had been staying at the hotel since last week.

Investigators also found Middle Eastern red and white traditional headdress, Forrest said.

Calls placed to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington D.C. and the FBI’s Newark office late this afternoon were not immediately returned.

Special Agent Bryan Travers said the FBI was asked to investigate after Lloyd Woodson of Reston, Va. was arrested early Monday. The arrest came after a report that the 43-year-old was acting suspiciously in a convenience store before dawn in Branchburg.

Prosecutors said he was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a semiautomatic rifle. Authorities found a cache of weapons in his motel room, including rifles, a grenade launcher and a night vision scope. They said he also had maps of a U.S. military facility and a town outside New Jersey.

Last year I wrote an article for the Daily Beast that asked the White House and Congress to debate the Afghanistan escalation as though the additional resources were real money, paid for by real taxes, whose addition counted against our real deficit. Here was my last paragraph:

To be sure, there is a dimension to the Afghanistan debate that goes far beyond red and black ink. There is no mechanism for the CBO to score the critical bank-shot of securing Pakistan by strengthening our presence along the Afghan border. Also, scaling down could help our financial integrity in the eyes of the Chinese, but it will impugn our moral integrity in the world’s eyes if we permit a reign of extremist terror marked by scourges of stonings. I don’t mean to combat our generals’ advice with my own. I’m only calling for elected officials to consider the cost of war just as they would consider the cost of any other use of taxpayer dollars. Generals on the ground advocating for an expensive counterinsurgency are only reciting their best opinion. That’s their job. The president should balance their recommendations with our capacity to fulfill them. That’s his.

From the white Caribbean beaches of Cancun to violent towns on the U.S. border and the beauty parlors of Mexico City’s wealthy suburbs, drug cash is everywhere in Mexico. It has even propped up the country’s banking system, helping it ride out the financial crisis and aiding the country’s economy.

Smuggled into Mexico mostly from the United States in $100 bills, narco money finds its way onto the books of restaurants, construction firms and bars as drug lords try to legitimize their cash and prevent police from tracing it.

“Mexico is saturated with this money,” said George Friedman, who heads geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor.

In western Mexico, drug money started pouring into Zapopan and nearby Guadalajara in the 1980s as the Sinaloa cartel bought hospitals and real estate, said Martin Barron, a researcher at the institute that trains Mexico’s organized crime prosecutors.

Now residents in the region known in Mexico for its piety say drug smugglers barely make an effort to disguise themselves.

A strip of fancy boutiques in Zapopan was financed with drug money, says Jaime Ramirez, a local newspaper columnist who has been reporting on the drug world for two decades. As well as the Grupo Collins factory in Zapopan, a nearby car wash is also on the U.S. Treasury’s black list.

A local cemetery draws relatives of traffickers who were among the 17,000 people killed in the drug war in Mexico since 2006. “A lot of narcos are buried there. You should see it on Fathers’ Day,” Ramirez said, as a black pick-up truck with tinted windows pulled in.

Zapopan residents just shrug their shoulders when a wealthy neighbor displays traits seen as typical of a drug trafficker — wearing cowboy gear, playing loud “norteno” music from the country’s north or holding lavish parties attended by guests who arrive in pick-up trucks or SUVs.

First off, I was told that while there appeared to be a problem, I needed to be clear that there would be no prosecutions under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, regardless of the final outcome of the investigation. Although withholding or destroying information is a criminal offence under the terms of the Act, apparently no prosecutions can be brought for offences committed more than six months prior. As anyone who has made a UK FoI request knows, it can take six months to exhaust the internal review process before the ICO even becomes involved. The ICO can then take another six months before starting his investigation.

The upshot is that the FoI Act’s section allowing criminal prosecutions is to all intents and purposes a dead letter and the ICO officer actually volunteered this conclusion himself – “the Act is flawed” was the way he put it. The ICO is apparently going to take this up with the Ministry of Justice, which is fine but will be of little help for those who are interested in seeing justice done.

It seems quite clear that civil servants are able to withhold and destroy information without any consequences and it’s interesting to ponder how such a dramatic flaw can have found its way into the terms of the Act. Of course we in the UK are used to poorly drafted laws finding their way onto the statute books, but we might also consider the thought that Sir Humphrey might have knowingly inserted this crucial error, in order to ensure that when push came to shove he could keep things quiet without any concerns that he might find himself in hot water.

trading-thumb.jpgTrading in equities and derivatives is being driven increasingly by mathematical algorithms used in computer programs. They allow trading to take place automatically in response to market data and news, deciding when and how much to trade similar to the autopilot function in aircraft.

Analysts estimate that up to 60 per cent of trading in equity markets is driven in this way.

Concerns have been highlighted by news that NYSE Euronext, the transatlantic exchange operator, has fined Credit Suisse proprietary trading arm for the first time for failing to control its trading algorithms. In the Credit Suisse case, its system bombarded the NYSE’s systems with hundreds of thousands of “erroneous messages” in 2007, slowing down trading in 975 shares.

The case was far from isolated, say traders. CME Group, the Chicago-based futures exchange, is investigating a case this month where a trader in “mini” S&P Index futures contracts “inadvertently traded approximately 200,000 contracts as both buyer and seller”.

Last year, the London Stock Exchange suffered a three-hour outage after its trading system collapsed under the strain of a huge volume of orders. Some traders blamed the spike in volumes from algorithmic trading.