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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.

In some cases, people may simply have been seeking revenge against the ruthless Taliban, in a society that tends to accept tit-for-tat reprisals, local politicians said.

But the scale of the retaliation, the similarities in the way that many of the victims have been tortured and the systematic nature of the deaths and disappearances in areas that the military firmly controls have led local residents, human rights workers and some Pakistani officials to conclude that the military has had a role in the campaign.

The Pakistani Army, which is supported by the United States and in the absence of effective political leadership is running much of Swat with an iron hand, has strenuously denied any involvement in the killings. The army has acknowledged that bodies have turned up, but its spokesmen assert that the killings are the result of civilians settling scores.

“There are no extrajudicial killings in our system,” said Col. Akhtar Abbas, the army spokesman in Swat. “If something happens, we have a foolproof accountability system.”

But neighbors of the victims and Swat residents say there is something more going on than revenge killings by civilians.

In a speech opening a weekend gathering of military and foreign policy experts, Mr. Brzezinski, who was national security adviser when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, endorsed a British and German call, backed by France, for a new international conference on the country. He also set the tone for a weekend of somber assessments of the situation.

He noted that it took about 300 U.S. Special Forces — fighting with Northern Alliance troops — to overthrow Taliban rule after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Now, however, with about 100,000 U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan, those forces are increasingly perceived as foreign invaders, much as the Soviet troops were from the start, Mr. Brzezinski said.

For President Barack Obama, Afghanistan is the foreign policy issue that has “perhaps the greatest need for strategic review,” said Mr. Brzezinski, who met with Mr. Obama during the presidential campaign last year, and endorsed his candidacy but was not a formal adviser.

“We are running the risk of replicating — obviously unintentionally — the fate of the Soviets,” Mr. Brzezinski said in his speech Friday night.

The presence of so many foreign troops underpins an Afghan perception that the Americans and their allies are hostile invaders and “suggests transformation of the conflict is taking place,” he added.

A new international conference would help devise a more refined strategy, Mr. Brzezinski said in a brief interview Sunday. Using the military to support a development strategy would help prolong the European presence, he suggested — “our European friends are less likely to leave us in the lurch.”

If the United States is left alone in Afghanistan, Mr. Brzezinski said Friday night, “that would probably spell the end of the Alliance.”

A discussion on Afghanistan on Saturday featured, among others, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British foreign secretary’s special representative for Afghanistan and a former British ambassador to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

“All is not doom and gloom in Afghanistan,” Sir Sherard told the conference, the Global Strategic Review of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, a nongovernment organization. But “walking away would destroy everything that has been achieved.”

The virus, named Lujo, is an arenavirus that over the course of nine days caused rash, fever, muscle pain, diarrhea, severe bleeding, vomiting, organ failure and death, said Nivesh Sewlall, who treated the first patient at Johannesburg’s Morningside MediClinic Hospital. He reported the findings at an infectious disease conference in San Francisco today.

Lujo appears more dangerous than other arenaviruses and related hemorrhagic fever syndromes, with the exception of Ebola and Marburg, which have similar fatality rates of about 80 percent. Although outbreaks of illness from these viruses have been sporadic and not widespread, the World Health Organization has said population growth into remote areas and urbanization have led to new diseases emerging more quickly in recent years.

“It wasn’t the outer jungle, this was suburban Lusaka,” said Sewlall, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Morningside, in an interview in San Francisco. “There are parts of Central Park that are more rural,” he said, referring to the landmark in New York.

Scientists don’t know where the pathogen came from, though humans usually catch other arenaviruses such as Lassa fever by inhaling dust contaminated with rodent droppings, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Human-to-human infections may occur through contact with bodily fluids or open skin cuts, the CDC said.

First Case

The first case of Lujo virus was a critically ill tourist guide and polo player in Lusaka, Zambia, who was airlifted to Johannesburg, South Africa, for treatment in September last year, according to the CDC. The Lujo virus is named after Lusaka and Johannesburg, where it was first detected.

The first patient died, as did three health-care workers who treated her. A fifth person, a nurse who worked with Sewlall in the hospital and treated one of the secondary cases, also caught the virus but survived after a barrage of treatments including the antiviral drug ribavirin. The patient took almost a year before she was able to return to work.

After the first few cases, the hospital staff was taking extra precautions: wearing protective clothing and checking their temperatures twice a day. That didn’t stop the second nurse from catching the disease. At one point, Sewlall himself developed a fever, around midnight after caring for the dying patients.

‘Hardest Three Hours’

“It was one of the hardest three hours of my life,” waiting for the laboratory results to determine whether he, too, had caught the virus, Sewlall said. The results came back negative.

The research was presented at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco today.

There are about 20 known arenaviruses carried by rats, and only five show symptoms in humans, Sewlall said. Most arenaviruses don’t sicken their rodent hosts.

The project, called the Charged Aerosol Release Experiment (CARE), plans to trigger cloud formation around the rocket’s exhaust particles. The clouds are intended to simulate naturally-occurring phenomena called noctilucent clouds, which are the highest clouds in the atmosphere.

“This is really essentially at the boundary of space,” said Wayne Scales, a scientist at Virginia Tech who will use computer models to study the physics of the artificial dust cloud as it’s released. “Nothing like this has been done before and that’s why everybody’s really excited about it.”

The experiment is the first attempt to create artificial noctilucent clouds. A previous spacecraft, called Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM), launched in 2007 to observe the natural clouds from space.

CARE is slated to launch Tuesday between 7:30 and 7:57 p.m. EDT (2330 and 2357 GMT) from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Noctilucent means “night shining” in Latin. Although difficult to spot with the naked eye, the clouds are best visible when Earth’s surface is in darkness and sunlight from below the horizon illuminates the high-altitude clouds.

These clouds, also known as polar mesospheric clouds, are made of ice crystals. The natural ones tend to hover around 50 to 55 miles (80 to 90 km) above the Earth. CARE will release its dust particles a bit higher than that, then let them settle back down to a lower altitude.

“What the CARE experiment hopes to do is to create an artificial dust layer,” Scales told SPACE.com. “Hopefully it’s a creation in a controlled sense, which will allow scientists to study different aspects of it, the turbulence generated on the inside, the distribution of dust particles and such.”

CARE is a project of the Naval Research Laboratory and the Department of Defense Space Test Program. The spacecraft will launch aboard a NASA four-stage Black Brant XII suborbital sounding rocket.

Scientists will study its progress from ground based instruments as well as the STP/NRL STPSat-1 spacecraft in Earth orbit. Researchers will track the CARE dust cloud for days or even months to study its behavior and development over time.

Because the optical observations are crucial, the launch can only take place if the weather is clear both at the launch site and at multiple observation stations along the Atlantic coast and in Bermuda.

Authorities searched at least two apartments including one shared by five Afghan men, taking some of them in for questioning, said one man who was questioned.

Members of U.S. Congress briefed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation said there was no imminent danger.

“There was nothing imminent, and they are very good now at tracking potentially dangerous actions and this was preventive,” said Charles Schumer, a U.S. Senator from New York who was among those briefed by FBI officials.

A man who identified himself as Amanullah Akbar, a 30-year-old taxi driver, said the FBI raided the apartment he shares with four other Afghan men at 2:30 a.m. (1630 GMT)

He was brought in for questioning and released and said he had no idea why his home was targeted, adding that he believed one of his roommates was arrested.

A neighbor said she saw FBI agents armed with what she called machine guns storm the apartment building, and that one of them emerged carrying a box.

“It was scary. I wasn’t going to stop the FBI and ask them what was going on,” said Melissa Khan, 28.