State Farm Insurance will accelerate settlement payouts to Mississippi Gulf Coast residents whose homes were affected by Hurricane Katrina, according to Mississippi Insurance Commissioner George Dale Monday. Dale told Reuters that after the court delayed certifying a proposed settlement, he negotiated with State Farm "to bring closure for coastal homeowners." State Farm had originally reported that it would no longer write new policies to insure Mississippi home owners when the settlement was delayed, but Dale said his the resolution would discourage State Farm, Mississippi's largest insurer, from leaving the state. The agreement makes millions of additional dollars available to insured homeowners in three coastal counties.

In February, State Farm filed to have a judge removed from a Katrina class action lawsuit for bias. In January, a Mississippi jury held State Farm liable for $2.5 million dollars in punitive damages for rejecting a Katrina claim that State Farm said was due to wind before the storm rather than the hurricane itself. In the same month, State Farm agreed to settle with hundreds of Mississippi homeowners, but the judge rejected the proposed settlement.

Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks has filed for an injunction to delay his military trial currently scheduled to start March 20. Maj. Michael Mori, Hicks' Pentagon-appointed lawyer, said Saturday that Hicks' defense team asked the US District Court in Washington last week to order the suspension of Hicks' military commission, even though he admitted the bid will likely be unsuccessful.

The injunction bid was made in parallel with an appeal by other Guantanamo inmates to the US Supreme Court, asking for the right to challenge their detention in US courts.

US military prosecutors have charged Hicks with providing material support to terrorists. He is expected to plead not guilty.

Former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan will be hanged Tuesday, according to Iraqi legal sources quoted by wire services Monday afternoon. The Iraqi government has scheduled the execution despite defense lawyers' contention that the government must wait at least 30 days after sentencing to execute a defendant. Ramadan, found guilty with Saddam Hussein of crimes against humanity by the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT) in November for his role in the reprisal killings of 148 Shiites at Dujail, lost an appeal of his sentence last week. He was originally given a life sentence, but after intervention by the appeals panel the trial court in February ordered the death penalty.

Following the failed appeal Ramadan's Rome-based lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano sent a letter to Gen. David Petraeus, commanding general of the Multi-National Force Iraq, urging him to intervene and prevent Ramadan's transfer from US to Iraqi custody. Di Stefano has also petitioned Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who has expressed opposition to the death penalty, to intervene and commute Ramadan's sentence. In an e-mail to JURIST late Monday, Di Stefano, formerly one of lawyers representing Saddam Hussein, said he had already moved to prosecute Saddam trial chief judge Rauf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman in the UK after he was alleged to have sought asylum there, and would "prosecute any and all that have been involved in the execution of my clients."

Last week, UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers Leandro Despouy urged the Iraqi government not to execute Ramadan because of "grave shortcomings" in his legal process. In February, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Phillip Alston also called on the government to suspend the execution because of judicial misconduct.

Nacchio and other executives also face a class action lawsuit and civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Another former Qwest employee, ex-Vice President Marc Weisberg, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in December 2005 and agreed to help prosecutors build a case against Nacchio.

U.S. doctors may be over-prescribing antibiotics for sinus infections, which are often caused by viruses and not bacteria, according to a study released Monday.

A review of two national surveys of visits to doctors and recommended treatments found antibiotics prescribed for about 82 percent of acute sinus infections and nearly 70 percent of chronic sinus infections, researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha said.

That "far outweighs the predicted incidence of bacterial causes. The literature repeatedly shows that viruses are by far the most frequent cause of acute rhinosinusitis," the study, published in this week's Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, said.

The infections are considered acute when symptoms persist up to a month. They become chronic when they last for three months or more.

Overuse of antibiotics, which are useless against viruses, is causing the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria that must be treated with the most expensive new antibiotics.

But many patients with sinus infections demand an antibiotic, Dr. Hadley Sharp and colleagues said. As many as one-fifth of antibiotic prescriptions for adults are written for a drug to treat sinusitis.

The high level of antibiotic use may partly come from doctors treating secondary infections, Sharp's team said.

"The vast use of these agents makes the statement that they seem to be effective ... or they would have been abandoned," the researchers wrote.

It is also possible that many sinus infections will simply clear up on their own, the researchers added.

"While keeping the goals of treatment in mind, there are concerns about the overuse of antibiotics and the resultant problems, including drug resistance and increasingly virulent bacteria," they wrote.

The four-engine Airbus A380 touched down at John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 12:10 p.m. EDT, to the cheers of onlookers gathered to watch the arrival. As the plane taxied, a pilot waved an American flag. Minutes later, a separate A380 arrived in Los Angeles, with just a crew and no passengers.

The first U.S. flights are a chance for the European plane builder Airbus and German airline Lufthansa AG to show off the jewel of Airbus' offerings to potential American buyers and to the airports they hope to turn into flight bases for the jet. The 239-foot-long A380 can seat as many as 550 passengers, hold 81,890 gallons of fuel, cruise at 560 mph and fly some 8,000 nautical miles.

Lufthansa Flight 8940 is meant to be a statement by Airbus that it can accommodate vast numbers of travelers comfortably and efficiently.

"We're talking about an airplane that is representing aviation in the 21st century in terms of efficiency," said Jens Bischoff, Lufthansa's vice president for the Americas.

It was one of the highest-profile maiden voyages since 1969, when the Concorde, the world's first and still only commercial supersonic transport, arrived at JFK from London. The European-made Concorde was retired from British and French service in 2005.

Airbus hopes the A380 designed to carry more people farther than any plane in history, though at subsonic speeds will dominate air travel for the next two decades.

Anthony Coscia, chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said Monday's flight marked the beginning of an era in meeting the New York City area's transportation needs. He says the A380 will generate millions of dollars in economic activity each year.

Waiting in the wings, however, is Boeing Co., whose 747 jumbo jet has been the world's principal long-haul aircraft for the past 30 years and now has competitors to the A380 in early production.

Rumors abound that Google plans to launch a mobile phone, reportedly code-named "Switch," with the look and feel of a BlackBerry but with better Internet capabilities.

But in all the commentary from news agencies, blogs, gadget sites, analysts, investors, and reportedly Google's own operation's chief for Spain and Portugal, there haven't been many compelling reasons given as to why Google would enter the mobile phone market. It's a highly cutthroat business.

Just ask Taiwan's BenQ. The company tried to revitalize Siemens' mobile phone operations, but one year and $1 billion later it gave up. It's not hard to see why Nokia and Motorola gained market share against most of their rivals last year. But even their stock prices have suffered, because fierce price competition for handsets hurt their profitability.

Still, the idea of a Google phone is compelling, and great fun to read about. There are even pictures of the rumored device, including one at gadget site Gizmodo.com. The picture shows a flat-screen mobile phone, purportedly designed to work like a BlackBerry.

Another, altogether different design can be found at Engadget.com, but authors on the site cast doubts about whether the photo--or the phone--is real.

The Engadget picture comes from a forum member on Mobileburn.com, who goes by the online name of Madnezz and claims he filled out an online survey about a Google phone developed by Samsung Electronics.

If you click that link, note that beside Madnezz's name is a picture of his online persona, or avatar: a boy covering his mouth and laughing as if he's done something naughty. Could that be all this really is, some rumor and speculation, thrown together with a few tall tales to stoke the flames?

If nothing else it's excellent publicity for Google, especially if the company is coming out with some new mobile phone applications soon. Rumors of a Google phone have been around at least since last December, when it supposedly planned to team up with Taiwan's High Tech Computer to make the device.

But the commentaries have been mostly about rumors, and they lack a good motive for such a move. Google makes software, not hardware, and rumors that it was developing a PC a few years back turned out to be wrong--it was simply making software for PCs.

Some say Google wants to make something like Apple's iPhone, but called the gPhone instead. The easy answer to that theory is that almost everyone wants to make something like Apple's iPhone, so Google would be entering a crowded copycat business. That doesn't sound like Google. Sure, Apple jumped in the phone business, but it already made hardware, and it had to defend its music player business as those functions moved onto phones.

Even worse, if Google makes its own handset it will become a competitor to companies like Samsung, which are preloading Google software on their own phones. These companies have other choices for mobile search, including Yahoo and Microsoft, and Google would risk losing some valuable preloading partners.

Another theory says that Google wants to make a low-cost device to increase Internet usage around the world. But it is already part of one such group, the One Laptop Per Child Project. Besides, mobile phone makers are already slashing the cost of Internet-ready phones with developing markets in mind.

Google has said only that mobile applications are important to the company, and declined further comment on the speculation. The head of its operations in Spain and Portugal, Isabel Aguilera, told the Spanish news site Noticias.com last week that Google has been exploring the idea of a phone and that some of its engineers have spent time working on one. It's not exactly a smoking gun; Google is famous for encouraging its engineers to spend a portion of their time on experimental projects, many of which never see the light of day.

The company also posted a job advertisement recently, saying it was "experimenting with a few wireless communications systems." But in the end the evidence for a Google phone is thin at best. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that all the phone talk is misguided, and that Google is really developing new software for mobile phones, albeit more sophisticated than what it has developed before.