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Approved after the September 11 attacks in 2001 at the request of the Bush administration, techniques such as roving wiretaps and accessing all kinds of personal records drew criticism from civil liberties groups and some lawmakers who said they were unconstitutional and violated privacy rights.

on Sunday, local authorities said on Tuesday.

McDonald, 56, was found with a single gunshot wound in his car near a strip mall in Dartmouth, Massachusetts on Sunday afternoon. Police are still investigating.

“The preliminary investigation concludes that this was an apparent suicide,” said Gregg Miliote, a spokesman for Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter.

McDonald was credited with growing Rockefeller & Co, the New York-based family office established by oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller in 1882 to manage the dynasty’s assets, into a broader investment management company with roughly $28 billion in assets.

Known as a perfectionist who drove himself and his employees hard, McDonald lived in New York City where people who worked with him said he was equally at home in corporate boardrooms and the city’s most exclusive social circles.

Friends described McDonald, who earned degrees from Harvard and the University of Virginia, as a brilliant thinker who grasped difficult concepts quickly and had a vision to expand the company.

Several people who knew him professionally said on Tuesday that they were shocked by the news, noting they had no knowledge about any specific problems at Rockefeller & Co that might have prompted the death.

A spokesman at the Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment on whether McDonald or the firm was facing any inquiries. In Massachusetts, where the state securities regulator has waged an aggressive campaign against investment advisers who were cheating clients, there is no investigation into McDonald or the company, a spokesman for Secretary of State William Galvin said.

The people, however, spoke of the mounting pressures McDonald faced while running an investment management business during exceedingly difficult financial market conditions.

Earlier this year, McDonald was one of the directors who left the board of lender CIT Group.

The directors cited the increased demands related to CIT becoming a bank holding company in December 2008 and time constraints related to each of their other professional commitments and responsibilities as their reasons for leaving, according to a CIT proxy.

McDonald was married with a son and daughter and had homes on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and in Boston.

Following a lead from a mafia turncoat, investigators used a remote-controlled submersible to film the 110-meter (360-feet) long vessel on Saturday, around 28 km (18 miles) from the coast of the southwestern Italian region of Calabria.

The ship, which officials say may even contain radioactive elements, lay in 500 meters (yards) of water in the Tyrrhenian sea. TV images showed at least one barrel had fallen from its damaged hull and lay empty on the seabed.

“There could be problems of toxins and heavy metals … this is an issue for the whole international community,” said Silvestro Greco, head of Calabria’s environment agency.

The ship’s location was revealed by Francesco Fonti, an ex-member of Calabria’s feared ‘Ndrangheta crime group, who confessed to using explosives to sink this vessel and two others.

Greco said investigators believed there were 32 ships carrying toxic waste sunk by the mafia since the introduction of tighter environmental legislation in the 1980s made illegal waste disposal a lucrative business for crime groups.

Most of the time, the shoebox-sized robot – which is being developed for the US military – uses its four wheels to get around.

But the Precision Urban Hopper can use a piston-actuated “leg” to launch it over obstacles such as walls or fences.

The robot could boost the capabilities of troops and special forces engaged in urban warfare, say researchers.

The programme is being funded by Darpa, the US military’s research arm.

Earlier this year, Sandia National Laboratories awarded the contract to build the next generation of the hopper to Massachusetts-based robotics firm Boston Dynamics.

Researchers at Sandia have tried out the robot on a variety of different surfaces.

The semi-autonomous, GPS-guided gadget could be used for surveillance in urban environments.

Its developers say this could potentially reduce troop casualties.

The Boston office of the U.S. attorney announced Monday that Bridgewater, N.J.-based Biovail Pharmaceuticals Inc. was sentenced to pay $22,243,590 after pleading guilty to conspiracy and kickback charges.

Prosecutors alleged Biovail paid thousands of physicians, nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants and others up to $1,000 apiece to induce them to prescribe or recommend Biovail’s drug Cardizem to patients, including prescriptions that were paid for by Medicaid.

“These payments exceeded the reasonable fair market value of the medical prescribers’ time necessary to enrol these patients,” the office said in a release.

“Such attempts not only drive up health-care costs, they deprive patients of the untainted medical decision-making and trust they deserve,” acting United States Attorney Michael K. Loucks said.

Biovail had previously announced it had agreed to plead guilty and pay to settle the case in May 2008.

“Dirty: How the Tarsands Are Fuelling Global Climate Change” is set to be released Monday.

Greenpeace commissioned award-winning author Andrew Nikiforuk, a business and environmental reporter, to write the report.

“Nobody in Canada wants to talk about the scale issues,” he said in an interview Saturday.

“The emissions are bigger than Estonia and Lithuania right now and in 2020 will be larger than countries like Belgium, Austria, Ireland and Denmark.”

The report documents the “real” cost of the oilsands, which Nikiforuk said are the world’s largest energy project.

“The major energy projects in the Middle East,… they don’t come anywhere near. None of them approach the scale and capital intensity of the oilsands.”

The report says almost $200 billion has been or will be invested in the projects in northern Alberta, including not only the oilsands but pipelines, refinery expansions and other associated infrastructure.