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Sweden on alert, explosives found near nuke plant
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Sweden ramped up security at its three nuclear power plants Thursday after a small amount of explosives without a triggering device was found on a forklift on the grounds of the country's largest atomic power station, authorities said. Police were investigating possible sabotage, but insisted that even if there had been a blast it would not have posed any great danger.

Bomb-sniffing dogs detected the explosives in a routine check Wednesday afternoon by security staff in the power plant's industrial area near its high-security enclosure. Police declined to describe the amount or type of explosive.

Bomb technicians said the material lacked a detonating device, meaning there was no danger of an imminent explosion. "But even if it would have been equipped with a detonator, a potential blast would have had pretty limited effects — the truck would have received some damage and perhaps some passers-by would have been injured, but it wouldn't have harmed the plant in any way," police spokesman Tommy Nyman said.

With police providing little information, a terror expert speculated it might have been an attempt to test the security system of the Ringhals power plant with a later attack in mind. Four nuclear reactors are at Ringhals, 70 kilometers (45 miles) south of Sweden's second-largest city, Goteborg, which has a population of 550,000 people. The plant is controlled by energy companies Vattenfall and E.ON.

Police said the driver of the forklift truck had been unaware of the explosives and was not suspected of being involved. Nyman said authorities had no suspects and were searching the premises to see if there was more suspicious material.

"An outsider has obviously placed them on the truck," Nyman said. "We're talking to the truck driver and are trying to map out her movements within the (Ringhals) premises throughout the day." The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority said the explosive material was found "en route from the Ringhals industrial park into a protected area ... and did not enter the facility."

The government declined to comment, saying it was a police matter. Martina Kruger, head of the Climate and Energy Division at Greenpeace in the Nordic region, said that even though the explosive material lacked a detonator, the incident was extremely serious, showing how vulnerable nuclear plants are for potential attacks.

"It doesn't matter if it was outside the protected area or not, it shouldn't have made itself within the premises at all," she said, accusing authorities and plant operators of playing the incident down.

Magnus Norell, a terrorism expert at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, said the incident unlikely was a planned attack. "They never got into the security area. It seems very strange that they tried, knowing that security would be high and also that they used explosives that could be detected by a dog," Norell said. "To me that indicates that it's not very professional."

But he said that someone might have been testing the systems. "It could suggest that someone was testing it to do something serious later on. But it's all pure speculation right now as we have so little information," he said. "It shows the (security) system did work. They picked up on it and nothing happened. That's one good signal."

Security at Swedish nuclear plants has also been criticized. In 2010, Greenpeace activists broke into the Forsmark power plant site by climbing a fence and staging a demonstration there. Twenty-nine Greenpeace activists from Germany, Poland, Britain, France and the Nordic countries were convicted and fined.

Kruger, of Greenpeace, said that it did not look like the incident was the work of environmental terrorists. "I find that very hard to believe. Especially in this sort of way," she said. "If environmentalists would have wanted to test the system, they might have used a toy gun or something, but they never would have crossed the line and go on to use something as real as this."

The Swedish nuclear industry has come under fire for the lack of some safety precautions while operating the reactors. Last year, a fire broke out in a Ringhals reactor after the staff had left a vacuum cleaner in the containment building.

Sweden has 10 nuclear reactors at the country's three power plants: Ringhals, Forsmark and Oskarshamn — providing about half of the country's electricity. The country has a four-stage security risk scale for the plants, with four representing the highest security alert.

Ringhals was rated at one — situation "normal" — but after the incident, the nuclear authority said it raised the security alert by a notch to 2, on a four-grade scale, meaning that security has been increased at all the plants.

In 1980, the Nordic country decided to phase out the use of nuclear energy after Swedes voted for that in a referendum. But two years ago, the center-right government overturned that decision, citing the lack of viable long-term environmentally friendly alternatives, a move that paved the way for old reactors to be replaced by new ones.

Ringhals is Sweden's largest power plant, producing 28 Terawatt-Hours a year, or supplying around 20 percent of the country's electricity.

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At 0930 this morning, in scenes reminiscent of Stasi East Germany, 2 police cars and 4 policemen from Merseyside Police arrested British Constitution Group Chairman Roger Hayes at his Wirral home and drove away.

ARTICLE | JULY 2, 2012 - 9:39PM



The first his family heard of him was at 18:30 this evening via a telephone call from a Warder in Liverpool prison, to say that Roger had been tried and sentenced to prison.

At no time were the family or any other members of the public informed of his arrest, and it is understood that he was tried in a secret court without a Jury.

Evelyn de Rothschild and Lynn Forester de Rothschild (notice her hand on top of
Evelyn de Rothschild's hand - dominance)

Lynn Forester de Rothschild

“… On 12 December 1972, Marie-Hélène gave her Surrealist Ball at Ferriéres. This time the guests were asked to come in black tie and long dresses with Surrealist heads. The invitation was printed with reversed writing on a blue and cloudy sky, inspired by a painting by Magritte. To decipher the card, it had to be held to a mirror.

For the evening the chateau was floodlit with moving orange lights to give the impression that it was on fire. The staircase inside was lined by footmen dressed as cats that appeared to have fallen asleep in a variety of staged poses.
Guests had to pass throught a kind of labyrinth of Hell, made of black ribbons to look like cobwebs. The occasional cat appeared to rescue the guests and lead them to the tapestry salon. Here they were greeted by Guy with a hat to resemble a still-life on a platter, and by Marie-Hélène wearing the head of a giant weeping tears made of diamonds.

Marie Hélène proved that she had the flare and imagination to create something unique and worthwhile. None of this was created by charm alone. It needed a degree of ruthless determination. She attended to every minute detail of style in her life and also in her entertaining. She was a great hostess with all the qualities. She loved parties and people. She was forever in quest of new talent and new figures to entertain from the world of the arts, literature, dance and haute couture. She mixed them with the more established set of Paris society. everyone was intrigued. Marie-Hélène’s parties took on such importance that one social figure threatened to commit suicide unless she was invited…

It is not possible to repeat such things now for many reasons. But it is fascinanting to look back and to remember these occasions, which dominated our thoughts and plans to such an extent for so many months. I am happy that I took part in so many, and happy that I gave some myself.”
-Baron Alexis de Redé

A tale of two Rothschilds
The relationship between Kate Goldsmith and rapper Jay Electronica has uncanny parallels with her great aunt Nica’s passion for Thelonious Monk

Why did she do it? She had everything... Beautiful young children... A charming husband who adored her and is passionate about his work, his family.

And handsome. Just as she is an English beauty. They live in the most splendid houses, receive the most interesting invitations, and travel to wonderful places. He has aristocratic blood and is rich and she is, after all, a Rothschild heiress. Why risk losing all this to be with an avant garde, American musician, unknown to most, who grew up in poverty, was kicked out of school, and is part of a world that could not be more different?

You might think this was a description of Kate Rothschild Goldsmith and her spurned husband, Ben Goldsmith, and the rapper orginally from New Orleans, Jay Electronica, with whom she is said to be “obsessed” since meeting him last year.

Yet it is her great aunt, Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild — the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter — who left her husband the Baron and five young children in the early 1950s to be with Thelonious Monk, then a little known jazz artist who would become a giant of 20th-century music.

In both cases, their family and friends were mystified and shocked by their behaviour.

Pannonica Rothschild was bewitched by the charismatic, African-American jazz musician Thelonious Monk. She had been introduced to jazz by her brother, Victor Rothschild — Kate’s grandfather.

In the late 1940s, “Nica” became obsessed by Monk after listening to Round Midnight. Married to a rich French diplomat and war hero, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, by 1954 the couple had separated as she became consumed by the New York jazz scene where she was known as “The Baroness”. She was even arrested while driving Monk to a concert after telling police that the marijuana in the car belonged to her.

Monk eventually moved into her New Jersey house which served as a sanctuary for ageing jazz musicians. By this time Nica Rothschild was long divorced and had lost custody of her five children.

Today, Nica’s great niece, the radiant Rothschild heiress, 29-year-old Kate, has thrown the family into turmoil with her alleged affair with a African-American musician — rapper Jay Electronica, “Jay Elect”, legal name Timothy Elpadaro Thedford.

Married to Ben Goldsmith, the 31-year-old environmentalist, businessman and son of the late tycoon, Sir James Goldsmith, they are now heading for divorce. Last week an enraged Goldsmith received a verbal caution for common assault by the police after a row when he discovered compromising text messages and voice-mails between his wife and the 35-year-old rapper.

THE parallels between Kate and Nica are uncanny. Both married in their early twenties to rich, handsome, ambitious, young men with whom they seemed to be much in love. They became enraptured with unconventional musicians who turned their lives upside down. Most tragically, as young girls, each lost her father to suicide.

The divorce between Ben and Kate undoubtedly will be acrimonious, but it will also reveal new insights into two of Britain’s most powerful and charismatic dynasties — the Goldsmiths and the Rothschilds. Both sides have hired well-connected PR consultants.

And the drama will be the first to be played out on Twitter, with comments and photographs already being posted by both camps. The spotlight on the case will be even more intense because Kate’s younger sister, Alice Rothschild, lives with Ben’s older brother, the Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, who is still caught up in complicated divorce negotiations with his wife, Sheherazade Ventura-Bentley.

The breakdown of Ben and Kate Goldsmith’s marriage has been greeted with sadness by their friends, but everyone agrees they married too young. Kate herself admits that her unexpected pregnancy spurred her to wed Ben, although there is no question they were very much in love.

Kate is the eldest daughter of the late Amschel Rothschild and his wife Anita Guinness, now Mrs James Wigan. Her upbringing — in Kensington and Suffolk — was idyllic but her comfortable life was thrown into turmoil when her father was found dead in Paris in 1996, weeks before her 14th birthday.

Kate, who loved to act as a child, yet was introverted and troubled, was traumatised. At Bryanston in Dorset she became known as a bit of a wild child who would race up to London to party hard, at every chance.

She did not attend university, though was offered a place at the London College of Fashion. She met Ben Goldsmith, then 21, at a dinner party shortly after leaving school in 2000 and a year later moved into his Pimlico flat aged 19.

In 2003 the couple became engaged when Kate discovered she was pregnant. They were married at St Mary’s Church in Bury St Edmunds in September 2003. She was 21 and he was 23.

She was given away by her younger brother James and Zac Goldsmith was Ben’s best man. Her mother, now remarried, hosted the wedding reception at her home for 600 guests, who included Ben’s sister, Jemima Khan — with whom Kate was close until recently. A few months later Kate and Ben’s daughter Iris was born and subsequently two sons.

For most of their marriage they lived in a six-bedroom house in Kensington. The house was bought by the Goldsmith Family Trust, based in Switzerland, for

£5 million in 2002 and Ben and Kate Goldsmith were, in effect, tenants. Legally, it is owned by an offshore company called Garibaldi Villa Ltd, registered in the British Virgin Islands, but in reality the family trust is the beneficial owner. The house is now up for sale for £20 million.

Ben Goldsmith is the younger son of Sir James and Lady Annabel. He is regarded as possessing some of his father’s business acumen along with his brother Zac’s passion for the environment. He attended Eton but did not go to university. Instead in 2002, just 21, he co-founded the WHEB Venture Capital Group with the intention of building Europe’s leading specialist green investment business.

Ben is charming and full of enthusiasm and energy, although it is misdirected occasionally,” said a friend. “He has some business skills but is not in his father’s league. But he is a genuine and passionate ecologist, as is Kate, and is absolutely committed to improving the environment.”

Other friends have described him as “slightly diffident, almost shy, and, like his father, given to histrionic behaviour when angry or upset and can display the same outspoken confidence”.

In the early years of their marriage, Ben and Kate Goldsmith seem to be settling into a conventional, affluent family life dominated by their children, families and friends. But their relationship began to change in the summer of 2010 when Kate decided to become a music producer. She set up her own record label called Roundtable Records alongside James Knight, a former managing editor of Vice magazine.

At first Ben was supportive and saw no reason why she could not combine the role of a mother with her business interests.

If she went out late at night to check out new bands and returned home late, he was happy to take the children to school early the next morning. Within a year of becoming a music producer, however, Kate became immersed by hip-hop and its lifestyle and her all-night partying with musicians increased. Some described her behaviour as “erratic”. Their marriage became increasingly troubled, punctuated by rows, and serious misunderstandings.

Kate was noticeably thin and often wore her chestnut mane in a beehive hair-style, not unlike Amy Winehouse. “The problem was not that she was hanging out with musicians,” said a family friend. “It was that she was out almost every night. She would come home at 5am and Ben would then get up at 6am, take the kids to school and be at his desk at 8am. He is a family man and quite conventional and he became irritated by the lifestyle elements of hip-hop which she was getting involved in.”

Finally in January of this year, they agreed to a trial separation. For some time Ben had been suspicious that his wife was having an affair, but she denied his allegations. They now spent even less time together in an effort to cool off.

After a brief reconcilation this spring Ben again feared Kate was intimately involved with Jay Electronica, who has a three-year-old daughter with Grammy award-winner, Erykah Badu. Kate was spending much of her time with him at late-night parties and at his flat on Cadogan Square.

Last week Ben discovered explicit sexual text messages and voicemails between Kate and Jay. An incensed Ben has instructed solicitors to issue proceedings for divorce for adultery.

So what went wrong? Why is Kate so intense? Is it some sort of “groupie-esque, rebellious infatuation?” Barry Singer asked the same questions, but about Kate’s great aunt Nica in the New York Times back in 2008. Jay Electronica does show some promise although he has yet to produce an album. Jay-Z has said, “As a lyricist, he is almost scary, he’s scary good.”
Jay may then prove to be a bit like Monk was 60 years ago. For Nica and now Kate, Barry Singer asks, “In light of her father’s suicide it seems possible that the underlying bond is childhood loss ... is she drawn to anguished brilliance that consummed her father, whom she could not save?”

Only Kate and Nica know.

They came on the sleekest of yachts bought with the proceeds from the grittiest of industries. Mining and commodity magnates descended this weekend on an unlikely new billionaires' playground in Montenegro, one of Europe's poorest countries, to celebrate the 40th birthday of the rising star of their firmament, Nat Rothschild.

The £1m party started on Thursday and will run over three nights, with guests moving from five-star hotel to poolside disco to the deck of a superyacht. It is part of an attempt to establish an Adriatic St Tropez at Porto Montenegro, a new marina in a former Yugoslav naval base backed by money from Rothschild and other billionaire investors.

The guests at this half-built luxury complex on the Bay of Kotor, where wooded mountains crash into the deep blue sea, are not short of glamour. Russian model Sasha Volkova and Jimmy Choo shoe boss Tamara Mellon were invited, along with the British socialite Plum Sykes. Rothschild's parents, Lord and Lady Rothschild, headed a large family group, and members of Italy's Agnelli clan were expected.

Politicians include Peter Mandelson, the former business secretary, who counts Rothschild as "a close friend". He arrived looking relaxed on Thursday night at a discreet beachside hotel (frequented in the 1960s by Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor) in the nearby beauty spot Sveti Stefan, where the guests were serenaded by a folk quartet. On Friday night the dress code for "Nat's disco soiree" around a 65-metre infinity pool was "disco chic". "I am a bit worried about that," said one Briton. "Do you think I should get a medallion?"

But the richest figures sipping Taittinger champagne were not in banking, computing or the media, but in mining coal, copper, gold, nickel and other commodities whose values are soaring. Rothschild himself has just overseen a £3bn investment aimed at selling Indonesian coal to Chinese furnaces. He declared to the Financial Times: "I don't want [the shareholders] to make 50% or 100%; I want them to make two or three times their money."

Many guests guard their privacy so closely that crew working at the event were given spotter cards with captioned photos of a dozen of the most powerful, to avoid embarrassment. They included Oleg Deripaska, owner of the biggest yacht in the bay, the £80m Queen K. He is reputedly the richest businessman in Russia as a result of his aluminium firm, Rusal, and Rothschild sits on its international advisory board.

Also on the card was Peter Munk, the Canadian octogenarian billionaire and goldmine owner who moored his smaller but no less opulent yacht, Golden Eagle, a couple of berths along. He is the main investor in the £500m Porto Montenegro project. Ivan Glasenberg, who became one of the world's richest men when his Glencore commodity company floated on the stock exchange, was expected on Friday night, as was Tony Hayward, the former BP chief executive vilified over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He is now Rothschild's partner in a £1.3bn oil and gas fund.
Another mining billionaire, Robert Friedland of Canada's giant Ivanhoe Mines, was also on the guest list. His company's plan to exploit gold and copper deposits in Mongolia's Gobi desert sparked civil unrest when local groups complained there had been a lack of environmental assessment.

The platinum-rich Royal Bafokeng Nation, a tribal kingdom inside South Africa, was even represented by its king.

Looking on at the assembled magnates was the Harvard professor of history, Niall Ferguson, an authority on the super-rich who has written histories of the Rothschild clan and a recent study of capitalism, The Ascent of Money. He arrived with his partner, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch-Somali feminist critic of Islam. Before him was the evidence of how little the capital crash seemed to have affected the very richest.

A fleet of articulated lorries travelled from the UK with provisions, equipment and furniture, and a crew of 100 toiled in 35C (95F) heat to place palm trees beside the pool with cranes, build "chillout" cabanas and lower glitter balls into the water. Hundreds of wines from the Rothschilds' top Bordeaux estates, many worth more than £100 a bottle, were poured at festivities due to continue until 4am on Saturday with a roster of DJs flown in to play through the night at the Ibiza-style beach party.

At 2pm on Saturday there will be what staff call "hangover brunch", followed by another party on the jetty beside Deripaska's yacht as the sun sets over the Adriatic.

One of the few people still going could be the birthday boy, who does not drink.

• This article was amended on 11 July 2011. The original referred to Ayaan Hirsi Ali as Niall Ferguson's wife. This has been corrected.