Man who took hostages from Clinton office in 2007 missing from unit - Fox News

Published April 07, 2013

Associated Press

MANCHESTER, N.H. –  A man who took hostages at a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign office in 2007 escaped from a minimum-security correctional facility on Sunday, authorities said.

Leeland Eisenberg was discovered missing during a head count Sunday afternoon at the Calumet Transitional Housing Unit in Manchester, state Department of Corrections spokesman Jeff Lyons said.

Eisenberg was sentenced in May 2010 to 3 1/2 to 7 years for probation violations. The 52-year-old would have been eligible for parole in August.

Once he is found, he will be charged with escape, a felony punishable by 3 1/2 to 7 years in prison, Lyons said. Eisenberg isn't considered armed.

Eisenberg spent about two years behind bars for the November 2007 siege at Clinton's Rochester campaign office in which he claimed to have a bomb. No one was hurt in a five-hour standoff and the bomb turned out to be road flares.

At his arraignment in that case, public defender Randy Hawkes portrayed Eisenberg as a man at the end of his rope emotionally after being repeatedly turned down when he sought psychiatric help.

Eisenberg "heard voices and saw a movie in his head telling him he had to sacrifice himself" to shine light on the flaws in the health care system, Hawkes said.

Eisenberg was released on probation in November 2009. His first violation occurred soon after his release, when he failed to charge his monitoring bracelet. He was incarcerated in January 2010 after failing to take mandatory alcohol breath tests.

In February 2010, he cut off his electronic monitoring bracelet and fled, a day after being given a last chance at freedom by a judge who released him despite multiple probation violations. He was found in his Dover apartment the next day.

Eisenberg's long criminal record also includes two rape convictions.

He was sentenced to 10 years for rape in Worcester, Mass., in 1985 but escaped the next year and committed another rape, prosecutors said. He was sentenced to 11 to 20 years for that. He was released from prison in March 2005.

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Met Office advice was 'not helpful'

28 March 2013 Last updated at 21:07 ETBy Roger Harrabin Environment analyst

Between March and April 2012, the UK experienced an extraordinary shift in pressure and downpours

The Met Office has admitted issuing advice to government that was "not helpful" during last year's remarkable switch in weather patterns.

Between March and April 2012, the UK experienced an extraordinary shift from high pressure and drought to low pressure and downpours.

But the Met Office said the forecast for average rainfall "slightly" favoured drier than average conditions.

The three-month forecast is said to be experimental.

It is sent to contingency planners but has been withheld from the public since the Met Office was pilloried for its "barbecue summer" forecast.

Last spring's forecast has been obtained by BBC News under Freedom of Information.

The Met Office three-monthly outlook at the end of March stated: "The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier than average conditions for April-May-June, and slightly favours April being the driest of the three months."

A soul-searching Met Office analysis later confessed: "Given that April was the wettest since detailed records began in 1910 and the April-May-June quarter was also the wettest, this advice was not helpful."

In a note to the government chief scientist, the Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo explains the difficulty of constructing long-distance forecasts, given the UK's position at the far edge of dominant world weather systems.

She says last year's calculations were not actually wrong because they were probabilistic.

The Met Office forecast that the probability that April-May-June would fall into the driest of five categories was 20-25%, whilst the probability it would fall into the wettest was 10-15% (The average probability would be 20%).

The Met Office explained it this way: "The probabilistic forecast can be considered as somewhat like a form guide for a horse race.

"It provides an insight into which outcomes are most likely, although in some cases there is a broad spread of outcomes, analogous to a race in which there is no strong favourite. Just as any of the horses in the race could win the race, any of the outcomes could occur, but some are more likely than others."

It said: "The creation of the three monthly outlook relies upon the fact that weather is influenced by the slow variation of ocean conditions (and other processes) which can be predicted months in advance.

"Whilst there is a very strong dependence of tropical weather on processes such as El Nino ,the UK's weather is dominated by the highly variable atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic, making it much harder to what will happen weeks and months ahead."

In the case of last spring, Dr Slingo says the forecast may have been pushed awry by a little-understood climate phenomenon, the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) - a pattern of thunderstorms that starts in the Indian Ocean. The Met Office calls it "one of the great unsolved challenges of tropical meteorology".

The irregular phenomenon is an envelope of thunderstorms starting in the Indian Ocean and moving into the Pacific. The MJO concentrates tropical rainfall within the envelope, with blue skies around it.

Nick Klingaman from Reading University says that, as it moves east, the MJO influences monsoon rainfall in Australia, India, Southeast Asia, South America and Africa.

These "bursts" and "breaks" in the monsoon cause floods and droughts that impact agriculture, river systems and infrastructure. The "long arm of the MJO" even extends into the middle latitudes.

"The thunderstorm activity generates waves in the atmosphere that move toward the poles," he told me. "The position of the MJO today has been shown to influence the position of the Pacific and Atlantic jet streams 10-15 days later."

He says the MJO can be an important predictor of the state of the North Atlantic Oscillation - which controls much of our weather in the UK - about 2-4 weeks in advance.

And that's how a thunderstorm off the coast of India might trigger a pattern of events which led to the weather switch last spring.

Some weather models can predict the MJO three weeks ahead, he said, but others struggle to predict it a week ahead.

Forecasts have greater skill when the MJO is already active. Reading University is working with the Met Office on improving MJO forecasting, he said.

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