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Victims Sue Thailand, U.S., Accor Over Tsunami

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Monday, March 07, 2005 9:20 a.m. ET

VIENNA (Reuters) – U.S. and Austrian lawyers have filed a lawsuit demanding Thailand, U.S. forecasters and the French Accor group answer accusations they failed in a duty to warn populations hit by December’s Tsunami disaster, a lawyer said Monday.

The lawsuit was filed Friday at a New York district court on behalf of tsunami victims by lawyers including U.S. attorney Edward Fagan, internationally renowned for 1990s lawsuits against Swiss banks over Holocaust-era accounts. It demanded an account of their actions on Dec. 26.
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“We expect a hearing within 30 days,” Austrian lawyer Gerhard Podovsovnik told Reuters.

“We don’t earn any money on the lawsuit. We want to help people,” he said. “We are suing to get information.”

The disaster left about 300,000 people dead or missing in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Maldives, Bangladesh and East Africa. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes.

The text of the lawsuit is available on the Web site www.tsunamivictimsgroup.com.

The U.S. and Austrian lawyers filed the lawsuit on behalf of around 60 named plaintiffs from Austria, Germany, France, Netherlands and elsewhere. Podovsovnik said they were also acting on behalf of at least 40 more not named.

The lawsuit suggests the Thai government and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which operates a Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, failed to issue the requisite warnings.

SLOW WARNINGS

“Respondent NOAA did not notify all involved countries which lay in the tsunami’s path. From public information it appears that … NOAA failed to issue an alert that would notify countries where the tsunami hit that the deadly wave was coming,” the lawsuit said.

“Published reports emerged that upon receipt of the NOAA alert and other data, the seismological and oceanographic experts of Thailand spent more than one hour talking about what the risk may or may not have been, instead of immediately issuing a warning to their population,” it said.

It also accused Thailand of failing to notify Sri Lanka that a tsunami wave was headed its way.

Among the charges leveled against Accor, the owner of the Sofitel hotel chain, was failure to equip its luxury resort and spa in Khao Lak, Thailand with state-of-the-art seismic detection and warning systems, despite its location “in an earthquake and tsunami fault zone.”

Last month, Accor issued a statement denying media reports of possible negligence in connection with the tsunami disaster. “The allegations concerning Accor are completely unfounded,” Accor said on its Web Site.


Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited.

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Woman’s dying secret yields corpse

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Reuters

SOMERVILLE, Massachusetts (Reuters) – A mother’s deathbed confession has led police to a dead body in a storage locker freezer, and officials say the corpse may be that of the woman’s husband whom she murdered more than a decade ago.

The woman apparently told her children as she was dying that their father had not died in a car crash as they thought but that she had in fact killed him and that his body was in a rental storage facility in Somerville, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.

Family members then contacted police, who searched the facility and found a large freezer wrapped in duct tape and giving off a strong odour. Inside, they found the remains of what they think was a man.

Local prosecutors said the man may have died as a result of a domestic homicide that took place more than a decade ago in California. The body was thought to have been shipped from California to Massachusetts, where it has been in storage since at least 1998.

Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley’s office did not identify the woman, who has since died.

Coakley’s office said on Thursday it would contact law enforcement authorities in California as part of its investigation.

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Hooters, Rival Argue Over Stealing Ideas

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Associated Press

ORLANDO, Fla. – Hooters of America and a rival restaurant chain began arguing in federal court over who has rights to the concept of using scantily clad women to sell food and beer.

Atlanta-based Hooters of America accuses Ker’s WingHouse of Kissimmee of poaching the idea coined when it opened its first sports bar in Clearwater in 1983, Hooters lawyer Steve Hill said in opening statements Wednesday in Orlando.

“The evidence will show WingHouse has copied the Hooter girl almost from head to toe,” Hill said. “For want of a better expression, the Hooter girl is our Ronald McDonald.”

But Crawford Ker said he based his chain on Knockers, a failing restaurant with an all-female staff in Largo that he took over after retiring from the NFL, according to pretrial deposition.

He opened his first restaurant in 1994 and now has 15 locations, including five in the Orlando area. The chain had revenues of $26 million last year.

“Hooters wants to use the court system to accomplish what it can’t do in the marketplace. It’s going to ask you to create a monopoly,” Ker lawyer Don Conwell said Wednesday. “They’re a 25-year-old chain. There’s new blood coming into town and they’re not up to the competition.”

Hooters said in a trade dress infringement lawsuit filed last year that Ker’s WingHouse stole everything from the design of its parchment menus to staff calendars and celebrity photographs on the walls.

Hooters said other ideas swiped by its rival include hula hoops for waitresses, Christmas lights and surfboards hanging from the ceiling and traffic-style signs on the walls warning “Double Curves” and “Caution: Blonde Thinking.”

Hooters earns more than $750 million a year from nearly 400 restaurants and that success has inspired a host of copycats, Hooters Senior Vice President Michael McNeil said.

“We believe we are defending the integrity of our intellectual property rights,” McNeil said outside the courtroom Wednesday.

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Christopher Reeve/Superman Dead at 52

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MOUNT KISCO, New York (AP) — Actor Christopher Reeve, the star of the “Superman” movies whose near-fatal riding accident nine years ago turned him into a worldwide advocate for spinal cord research, died of heart failure, his publicist said. He was 52.

We always thought you would walk again one day, but I supposed you are now. We’ll all miss you.

Continue reading Christopher Reeve/Superman Dead at 52 →

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Orgies are the way to ease social tensions, claims US judge

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He is the conservative bastion of the US supreme court, a favourite of President Bush, and a hunting partner of the vice-president. He has argued vociferously against abortion rights, and in favour of anti-sodomy laws.

But it turns out that there is another side to Justice Antonin Scalia: he thinks Americans ought to be having more orgies.

Challenged about his views on sexual morality, Justice Scalia surprised his audience at Harvard University, telling them: “I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.”

It seems unlikely that this is what President Bush meant when he promised to appoint more judges like Scalia to the court, should the opportunity arise. Crucially, Justice Scalia is one of the judges in favour of overturning Roe v Wade, the landmark judgment protecting abortion as a constitutional right.

One audience member also asked the judge “whether you have any gay friends, and, if not, whether you’d like to be my friend,” the Harvard Crimson newspaper reported.

“I probably do have some gay friends, but I have never pressed the point,” Justice Scalia responded. He offered no clue to the logic behind his claim that orgies eliminate social tensions.

Nobody asked him whether he was familiar with Rick Moody’s novel The Ice Storm, turned into a movie by Ang Lee, which appeared to suggest the exact opposite.

Oliver Burkeman in New York
Friday October 1, 2004
The Guardian

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Image flaw exposes Windows PCs

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Microsoft has issued a warning about a critical vulnerability in Windows that could let carefully crafted pictures act as bearers of malicious code.

The flaw was found in the code that the operating system and other Windows programs use to display images prepared in the popular Jpeg format.

The vulnerability has been found in more than a dozen Microsoft programs.

Millions affected

At risk programs include Office XP 2003, Office 2003, Windows Server 2003, Internet Explorer 6 plus some versions of Digital Image Pro and Picture It.

The software giant urged all users who are at risk to download and install a patch for the vulnerability.

Microsoft has also produced a tool that helps users find out if they are running software that contains the vulnerable computer code.

It said that the flaw could only be exploited if users are tricked into opening an image crafted to exploit the vulnerability.

Anyone falling victim to the loophole could have their computer taken over by an attacker.

Microsoft said that it had no evidence that the Jpeg loophole was being actively exploited.

However, because Internet Explorer is one of the programs vulnerable it is theoretically possible that someone could fall victim to a virus written to exploit the flaw just by visiting a website that used such carefully crafted images.

Any image written to exploit the flaw could prove successful because before now people have fallen victims to e-mail viruses when they clicked on attachments that claimed to be a picture.

The flaw in the way that Windows handles the popular Jpeg file format is called a buffer over-run.

Many old viruses have used buffer over-runs to get malicious code on to target machines.

The advisory about the Jpeg flaw is the 28th advisory that Microsoft has issued this year. Often these advisories detail several vulnerabilities. One advisory issued in April mentioned more than 20 separate loopholes in Windows XP.

Microsoft said that anyone who has downloaded and installed the SP2 update for Windows XP is not at risk from this vulnerability.

However, anti-virus firm Sophos said those that have installed SP2 should not be complacent.

“If you are running applications on XP SP 2 which do have the flaw you could be putting your computer at risk,” said Graham Cluley from anti-virus firm Sophos.

Mr Cluley urged users in such a situation to download and apply the patch.

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Boiler kills on impact after sauna launch

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Mon 13 September, 2004 04:45

(Reuters) – A boiler that exploded at a Chinese sauna sailed over a six-storey building and
landed on an old man crossing the road, Xinhua news agency says.
The 63-year-old pedestrian was killed instantly and three people
injured in Sunday’s bizarre accident in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Xinhua quoted local
police as saying on Monday.
“A passerby tried to escape when he saw the large object flying towards him,
but he was hurt in his leg,” Xinhua said. “Two workers in a restaurant
next to the bathhouse were also injured after a wall of the restaurant collapsed.”
The explosion of the boiler, measuring two-metres (six-and-a-half-feet)
across, is under investigation.