Police explore the high society past of kidnapper Clark Rockefeller

“He was one of the most difficult, pathological personalities I’ve ever known. Everybody was immediately led to assume that he was one of the Rockefeller family, that there was lots of money, lots of power.”

– Peter Burling, a New Hampshire state senator

The Times | Jul 31, 2008

Clark Rockefeller snatched Reigh Boss, 7, who lived with her mother in London and was known as Snooks, during a supervised access visit in Boston, Massachusetts, on Sunday. He had not seen his daughter since his divorce in December His former wife, Sandra Boss, moved to London with Reigh this year. The wealthy socialite is a senior partner with McKinsey & Co, a leading management consulting firm.

Ms Boss, 41, is reported have become concerned at Mr Rockefeller’s secrecy surrounding his past and convinced a US judge to issue an order limiting his access rights to Reigh when their marriage ended after 12 years.

Mr Rockefeller was initially thought to have fled on board a 72ft catamaran that he told friends he had recently bought with $300,000 of gold bars. However, a spotter plane could find no trace of the yacht yesterday and police now believe that Mr Rockefeller told friends of his plan to sail around the world with Reigh in an attempt to throw them off the trail.

Mr Rockefeller, 48, was last seen in New York with Reigh on Sunday night. Boston police said yesterday that they were investigating dozens of sightings, including reports from a woman who believed that she saw them in Smyrna, Delaware.

Detectives released pictures of two dresses that Mr Rockefeller had recently bought in Boston in case he had attempted to disguise his daughter.

Police sources said that he had managed to become a member of high society despite having at least half a dozen aliases and no steady job or valid social security number. Newspaper headlines described him as “Crock Feller”, “Off-His-Rockefeller” and “Rockefooler”.

The couple married in 1995 and bought an historic 15-room “cottage” worth $775,000 in Cornish, New Hampshire, a $2.3 million townhouse in Beacon Hill, Boston, and a home on the exclusive Nantucket Island.

Police said that Mr Rockefeller had told his wife that he was a member of the oil dynasty.He had also claimed to be a mathematician who attended Yale and taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. None of the institutions has any record of him.

The New York Post reported that before his marriage Mr Rockefeller lived in Manhattan and held parties for leading artists. He was considered a knowledgeable collector with an apartment full of 20th-century masterpieces, including works by Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian.

A police source told the New York Daily News: “He’s not a Rockefeller. It’s not clear where he gets his money. That’s part of the investigation.”

A friend said: “I don’t think anyone in his life knew – including Sandra – what was real and what wasn’t. People would get interested and look into it, but they’d never get far.”

Peter Burling, a New Hampshire state senator and neighbour of the Rockefellers, said: “He was one of the most difficult, pathological personalities I’ve ever known. Everybody was immediately led to assume that he was one of the Rockefeller family, that there was lots of money, lots of power.”

Friends described him as a devoted father and main carer for Reigh while his wife was away on business. But another Cornish resident, Don McLeay, said that Reigh “never had a normal life” and was not allowed to play with other children because her father feared she would “catch something”.

Ms Boss, a former aide to Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, was in Boston last night helping police to build up a picture of her former husband’s past.

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Clark Rockefeller is a member of New York’s elite Kickerbocker Club,  Metropolitan Club and was director of Boston’s high society Algonquin Club

Knickerbocker Club – Wikipedia

Notable members

▪ John Jacob Astor
▪ John Jacob Astor IV
▪ Vincent Astor
▪ August Belmont
▪ Alexander Hamilton Jr. (first president of the club)
▪ H.B. Hollins
▪ Elliott Roosevelt, father of Eleanor Roosevelt

▪ David Rockefeller
▪ J. Sterling Rockefeller
▪ Franklin Delano Roosevelt (member, 1905-1937)
▪ John Hay Whitney
▪ Edgerton L. Winthrop (fourth president of the club)

Algonquin Club – Wikipedia
Members include former Boston University president John Silber, former Bank of Boston chairman Ira Stepanian, and other Boston business leaders.

The Algonquin Club of Boston
Presidents, heads of state, foreign dignitaries and preeminent local and national leaders have enjoyed visiting the Club.

The Metropolitan Club
It was commissioned by JP  Morgan and designed by Stanford White and built on property (purchased from  an American Duchess of Marlborough). Seven hundred members, including Vanderbilts, Hamiltons, Cromwells, Browns, Whitneys and Roosevelts,  pledged the funds.

New York Metropolitan Club, Fifth Ave.

Burnt remains from at least five murdered children found under orphanage

Excavations were started into four blocked-up cellars referred to as “punishment rooms” by alleged victims. Blood spots in a concrete bath and shackles were found in one cellar.

Bones in Jersey abuse probe ‘from at least five children’

Prosecution “unlikely”

AFP | Aug 1, 2008

LONDON (AFP) — Police said Thursday they had found the remains of at least five children at a former home on the Channel island of Jersey, but admitted a murder inquiry was increasingly unlikely.

Deputy Chief Officer Lenny Harper, who is leading the investigation, said the remains could not be dated exactly.

A search at the Haut de la Garenne site, which closed in the 1980s and became a youth hostel, has found 65 milk teeth and more than 100 bone fragments, including one from a child’s leg and another from inside an ear.

Police say an attempt was made to burn the remains to conceal them.

Harper told BBC radio: “We were pinning our hopes on the process of carbon dating. The latest information we’re getting is that for the period we’re looking at, it’s not going to be possible to give us an exact time of death.”

He added: “The indications are that if the results come back the same way as they have now it is obvious there won’t be a homicide inquiry.

“We cannot get away from the fact that we have found the remains of at least five children there.” He said the children were aged between four and 11.

“But at the end of the day there just might not be the evidence to mount a homicide inquiry in an attempt to bring anybody to justice.”

Jersey, which lies off the coast of northwest France, is a British dependency which has its own political and legal system and an independent police force.

A former member of the island’s governing council who was removed from his post last year said the intervention of police from the British mainland was now the “only hope” for victims of the abuse to see justice done.

Stuart Syvret, a former health minister, has alleged that the island’s authorities covered up the abuse.

“Knowing Jersey, even before I was aware of the covert police inquiry into abuse I said to a number of the survivors that we had no chance whatsoever of winning this war unless we could get it exposed outside Jersey,” he said.

“The only hope for justice is if London intervenes and it sends a completely independent judiciary, prosecution and courts, without any prior connection with Jersey.”

However, the investigating officer Harper is not from Jersey, and neither is the police officer who will replace him in the coming weeks when he retires.

Syvret claims mistreatment occurred in Jersey children’s homes until as recently as 18 months ago when the issue was highlighted by a social worker.

Three men have so far been charged with child abuse offences as part of the inquiry.

Police began searching at Haut de la Garenne in February after the discovery of what was at first thought to be a skull fragment. It was part of a wider abuse investigation on the island.

Excavations were started into four blocked-up cellars referred to as “punishment rooms” by alleged victims. Blood spots in a concrete bath and shackles were found in one cellar.

In one cellar, the disturbing message “I’ve been bad for years and years” was found scrawled on a wooden post.

Blackswift: The First Robotic War Machine In Space

The HTV-3X Blackswift (Image by: Wired)

The Blackswift will give the U.S. the ability to send a missile to any spot on Earth within 60 minutes

io9 | Jul 31, 2008

Development of the U.S.’s first hypersonic military space plane, the HTV-3X Blackswift, is zooming forward, with plans for Boeing and Lockheed to work together on the project. When it’s ready to fly (possibly as soon as 2010), the Blackswift will give the U.S. the ability to send a missile to any spot on Earth within 60 minutes. Check out the unique propulsion system that will take Blackswift above Mach 6.

The goal for Blackswift is to be able to take off from a conventional runway, hit Mach 6 and possibly leave the atmosphere, accomplish its mission, then come back down and land on its own. It’s also part of DARPA’s Prompt Global Strike initiative (“If your missile isn’t there in 60 minutes or less, it’s free!”). The Blackswift propulsion system is a hybrid that mixes a fairly conventional turbojet for low-altitude, low speed flight with a ram/scramjet for hypersonic speeds. Above Mach 4, the ramjet takes over, slamming air through the jet at supersonic speeds without the use of a compressor or fan blade.

If everything goes well, Blackswift could provide a basic platform for the development of further military space vehicles. Which is simultaneously really neat and pretty terrifying.

Sicilian mayor brands Garibaldi “a ferocious murderer in the service of Freemasonry”

Sicilian mayor takes a hammer to Garibaldi, the revolutionary hero

Times Online | Aug 1, 2008

By Richard Owen in Rome

Admirers of Giuseppe Garibaldi sprang to his defence yesterday after the mayor of a town in Sicily tore down the sign bearing his name in the main square and branded him “a ferocious murderer in the service of Freemasonry and the British”.

Garibaldi landed at Marsala, Sicily, with his famous red-shirted militia, “The Thousand”, in May 1860, to start the armed struggle to unify Italy known as the Risorgimento .

Every town in Italy has a piazza or main street that is named in honour of its greatest national hero, and often there is also a prominent Garibaldi statue.

This reverence, however, is not shared by Enzo Sindoni, Mayor of Capo d’Orlando, near Messina. He said that it was time that “the myth” of Garibaldi was dismantled, because the regions of Italy – including Sicily – had been forged together by “violence, blood and misery”.

In the mayor’s view, Garibaldi was merely the instrument of a “northerner” – Victor Emmanuel II, the King of Piedmont, Savoy and Sardinia and later the first King of united Italy. To vent his fury, the mayor took a hammer to the sign marking Piazza Garibaldi, and renamed it Piazza IV Luglio (Fourth of July Square), chosen in honour not of American Independence but a little-known naval battle of 1299.

He was backed by Raffaele Lombar-do, the president of the Sicilian region, who suggested that the move should be followed by the redesignation of squares and streets named after Count Camillo Cavour, the first Prime Minister of the united Italy, “who after all was Piedmontese”. But other Sicilians were outraged by the stunt. Francesco Renda, a historian who lives in Palermo, said that he was shocked and blamed the “long history of Sicilian separatism” for the misguided protest. “Fine, let us review history, discuss it, debate it – but not smash public place names,” he said.

Vincenzo Consolo, a writer who is of Sicilian origin but lives in Milan, said that the antiGaribaldi movement was ignorant and obscene.

“These people who want to destroy or besmirch the unity of Italy should be ashamed of themselves,” he said. “They have no idea what it has achieved or what it cost to bring about.” Italians had “paid with their lives to unite the country”, he added.

However, the antiGaribaldi revolt was hailed by the Northern League, which has long campaigned for autonomy for northern Italy and is a key component in the centre-right Government of Silvio Berlusconi. Mario Borghezio, a Northern League Euro MP, said that the decision to rename Piazza Garibaldi in Capo d’Orlando had been an act of courage.

“It sends out an important signal – that Sicily wants to liberate itself from a symbol of centralism who brought the island nothing but harm,” Mr Borghezio said. “I ask myself whether we shouldn’t follow suit and tear down such street signs in northern Italy”.

Historians agree that Garibaldi’s landing at Marsala opened the way for unification. It came after uprisings in Messina and Palermo against the Bourbon rulers of Naples and Sicily.

Joined by local rebels, Garibaldi won a remarkable victory against Bourbon forces on the island, allegedly observing to his lieutenant, Nino Bixio: “Today we unite Italy or die.” Some scholars have suggested that he benefited from British support. Britain was alarmed at a sympathetic response by the Bourbon monarchy to overtures from Russia for the use of ports in Sicily and the Mediterranean, and was keen to gain access to Sicily’s prized sulphur deposits.

The Marsala landings took place in the presence of two Royal Navy warships, the Intrepid and Argus. It is also widely accepted that Garibaldi was a Freemason, as was Giuseppe Mazzini, the theoretician of the Risorgimento.

Revolutionary life

— Born in 1807 in Nice

— While serving in the Piedmont-Sardinian navy in 1834, he participated in a failed insurrection and was sentenced to death in absentia by a Genoese court

— Formed the Italian Legion or “Red Shirts” in 1843 in Uruguay with other exiles

— Served with the Sardinian army against Austria, then went to Rome to defend the city against the French

— In 1860, leading 1,000 Red Shirts, won Sicily and Naples for the new kingdom of Italy

— Invaded the Tyrol in 1866, and in return Prussia gave Italy Venice

British gas company hauls in record profits after massive price hike

Yesterday, Centrica unveiled huge rises in energy bills which could increase the cost of gas and electricity for some of British Gas’s 10 million customers by up to 44 per cent.

Times Online |  Jul 31, 2008

by Robin Pagnamenta

Centrica, owner of British Gas, today revealed profits of nearly £1 billion and a £144.6 million dividend payout for its shareholders just hours after unveiling the largest energy price hike in UK history.

Centrica said group operating profits were £992 million for the first half of 2008, 20 per cent lower than the same period last year. It also announced that its investors will receive a 16 per cent increase in the dividend for the first six months to June 30.

Yesterday, Centrica unveiled huge rises in energy bills which could increase the cost of gas and electricity for some of British Gas’s 10 million customers by up to 44 per cent.

The average gas bill will rise by 35 per cent while electricity will increase by 9 per cent.

The company’s chief executive, Sam Laidlaw, who will receive payouts worth £46,000, defended the double-digit dividend rise as a “purely mechanical” payout based on the company’s strong performance during the previous year.

Jake Ulrich, managing director at Centrica Energy, who earlier this year suggested consumers wear two jumpers instead of one to reduce their heating bill, is in line for a dividend payment of £116,000.

Mr Laidlaw claimed the steep rise in energy bills was necessary because of rising wholesale energy prices and the need to invest in new sources of low carbon energy.

“The UK is no longer self-contained from an energy perspective,” said Mr Laidlaw. “The wholesale price [of gas] has gone up by 90 per cent. If we are going to remain a viable business then this price rise is necessary.”

He rejected claims that UK consumers were now paying among the highest gas bills in the world, claiming that Europeans were being charged more, although he acknowledged that “we are catching up”.

The announcement came as another energy giant, Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s second biggest oil company, reported a rise in second-quarter profits to nearly $8 billion (£4 billion), driven by the soaring price of oil, which touched a record high of $147 earlier this month.

Jeroen van der Veer, Shell’s chief executive, said the results were “competitive” and that the company’s strategy was “on track”.

Centrica’s profits will be particularly galling for UK consumers struggling to deal with soaring prices for a range of consumer goods, including food, petrol, mortgages and insurance.

The company, which has 16 million UK customers, introduced average increases yesterday of 35 per cent for gas and 9 per cent for electricity. However, it also launched a regional pricing structure for gas, which means consumers in some areas, such as London and Southern England, will be hit by a 44 per cent increase in their gas bills, with immediate effect.

Nick Luff, Centrica’s finance director, said the company was only able to source 30 per cent of its gas supplies from its own fields, including one at Morecambe Bay.

It needed to import the remainder from countries such as Norway and the Netherlands and was thus having to pay international prices for them.

The results contained a 69 per cent plunge in profits from British Gas Residential, its UK household supply business, to £166 million from £533 million in 2007.

The bulk of profits came from British Gas Services, its central heating repair and maintenance arm, and from Centrica Energy, its wholesale arm.

Centrica said its tax bill had risen to £577m, up from £411 million.

The company said it was paying up to 75 per cent on its Morecambe Bay and other gas production fields and claimed to be the second highest tax payer in the FTSE 100, at a rate of 58 per cent of group profits.

Utah Congressmen hands over 9/11 conspiracy mail to Capitol Police

Concerned citizens who write to representatives may be reported for their views

Infowars.net | Jul 30, 2008

By Steve Watson

An otherwise uninteresting article in the Salt Lake Tribune, about Utah representatives receiving different kinds of mail, has thrown up some disturbing information regarding letters about 9/11 truth.

Amongst the stories about Congressmen receiving letters from people who use “Star Trek” stationery, and from kids wanting homework outlawed, we find the following little tidbit:

“Others have written in about 9/11 conspiracies, global takeovers or secret CIA mind-control techniques that “got so crazy we actually had to hand them over to Capitol Police,” he (Legislative assistant Omar Raschid) said.”

Apparently not accepting the government’s version of events surrounding 9/11 may land you in trouble with the cops if you’re writing from Utah.

Questioning the collapse of WTC 7 for example, an incident that was totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission Report, could get you reported.

Asking your elected representative how he or she thinks a man dying from kidney failure in a cave half way across the world was able to organize four breeches of U.S. air defenses in one day might embroil you in a police investigation.

Informing your Congressman of important information which has come to light since the attacks of 9/11, implicating the highest echelons of the government and intelligence agencies in the events which have precipitated two wars in the middle east and seen the evisceration of liberty and the erection of a domestic police state over the last seven years, may be deemed a threat, and might see your details turned over to the authorities.

Residents of Utah, if you believe there is a global elite that functions beyond the realm of governments and may pose a threat to national sovereignty and the freedoms of people around the world, you are clearly thought of as “crazy”.

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TSA ramps up program to psychologically screen airline passengers

Raw Story | Jul 29, 2008

By Nick Langewis and David Edwards

In addition to having your bags scanned, taking off your shoes and emptying your pockets on the way to your plane, prepare to have an on-the-spot psychoanalysis as well.

The TSA is in the process of training “behavior detection officers” to seek out involuntary physical and physiological signs of “stress, fear or deception” among air passengers to help determine who to subject to additional screening at airport security checkpoints.

SPOT, short for the Screening Passengers by Observation Technique, has so far been tested in major airports such as Boston, Providence, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. In addition, the Los Angeles Times reported, a “handful” of airports were added last December.

“There are certain thresholds that this individual needs to meet in our behavioral detection program,” TSA spokesperson Andrea McCauley told KXAN. “We don’t just see someone who is nervous and pull them over to talk with them.”

Another TSA spokesperson, Jennifer Peppin, told the Los Angeles Times that SPOT has helped catch drug smugglers and people holding fake passports. “Have we caught actual terrorists? That remains to be seen,” she said. Caroline Fredrickson of the ACLU, however, worries of profiling, adding that the program sets “a very dangerous precedent” in trying to train TSA screeners to be “behavioral scientists.”

“Cultural sensitivity” is part of the week-long training regimen, the TSA insisted.

Bioweapons scientist in anthrax case dies of apparent suicide

Los Angeles Times | Aug 1, 2008

By David Willman

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

Ivins, whose name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals.

Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins also helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator’s office in Washington.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague, who declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI.

The death — without any mention of suicide — was announced to Ivins’ colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, through a staffwide e-mail.

“People here are pretty shook up about it,” said Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman for USAMRIID, who said she was not at liberty to discuss details surrounding the death.

The anthrax mailings killed five people, crippled national mail service, shut down a Senate office building and spread fear of further terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The extraordinary turn of events followed the government’s payment in June of a settlement valued at $5.82 million to a former government scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, who was long targeted as the FBI’s chief suspect despite a lack of any evidence that he had ever possessed anthrax.

The payout to Hatfill, a highly unusual development that all but exonerated him in the mailings, was an essential step to clear the way for prosecuting Ivins, according to lawyers familiar with the matter.

Federal investigators moved away from Hatfill — for years the only publicly identified “person of interest” — and ultimately concluded that Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III changed leadership of the investigation in late 2006.

The FBI’s new top investigators — Vincent B. Lisi and Edward W. Montooth — instructed agents to reexamine leads or potential suspects that may have received insufficient attention. Moreover, significant progress was made in analyzing genetic properties of the anthrax powder recovered from letters addressed to two senators.

The renewed efforts led the FBI back to USAMRIID, where agents first questioned scientists in December 2001, a few weeks after the fatal mailings.

By spring of this year, FBI agents were still contacting Ivins’ present and former colleagues. At USAMRIID and elsewhere, scientists acquainted with Ivins were asked to sign confidentiality agreements in order to prevent leaks of new investigative details.

Ivins, employed as a civilian at Ft. Detrick, earlier had attracted the attention of Army officials because of anthrax contaminations that Ivins failed to report for five months. In sworn oral and written statements to an Army investigator, Ivins said that he had erred by keeping the episodes secret — from December 2001 to late April 2002. He said he had swabbed and bleached more than 20 areas that he suspected were contaminated by a sloppy lab technician.

“In retrospect, although my concern for biosafety was honest and my desire to refrain from crying ‘Wolf!’ . . . was sincere, I should have notified my supervisor ahead of time of my worries about a possible breach in biocontainment,” Ivins told the Army. “I thought that quietly and diligently cleaning the dirty desk area would both eliminate any possible [anthrax] contamination as well as prevent unintended anxiety at the institute.”

The Army chose not to discipline Ivins regarding his failure to report the contamination. Officials said that penalizing Ivins might discourage other employees from voluntarily reporting accidental spills of “hot” agents.

But Ivins’ recollections should have raised serious questions about his veracity and his intentions, according to some of those familiar with the investigation. For instance, although Ivins said that he swabbed areas near and within his personal office, and bleached surfaces to kill any spores, and that some of the swabs tested positive, he was vague about what should have been an essential next step:

Reswabbing to check whether any spores remained.

“I honestly do not recall if follow-up swabs were taken of the area,” Ivins said. “I may have done so, but I do not now remember reswabbing.”

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