Anna Nicole Smith awarded $88 million

Anna Nicole Smithawarded $88 million
SANTA ANA, Calif. -- Anna Nicole Smith was awarded more than $88 million in a ruling that determined the former Playboy Playmate had a reasonable expectation she would receive part of her late husband's estate without interference from her stepson.
U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter wrote in his ruling that Howard Marshall II's son, E. Pierce Marshall, and others spied on the couple and controlled his father's access to money to deny Smith what she was promised.
"The evidence of willfulness, maliciousness and fraud is overwhelming," said the ruling, which was released on Thursday.
Carter said in his ruling that Smith was entitled to $44.3 million in punitive damages and the same amount in compensatory damages against E. Pierce Marshall, who controls the trust established by his late father.
"This is a complete victory for my client, and I think it's a victory for a husband's love for his wife," said Smith's attorney, Philip Boesch.
Irish voters rejecttougher abortion law
DUBLIN, Ireland -- After years of moral and legal debate, voters in this predominantly Catholic nation narrowly defeated a constitutional amendment toughening Ireland's anti-abortion laws, undermining their premier just months before national elections.
Prime Minister Bertie Ahern pushed for the amendment excluding suicide threats as legal grounds for abortion. Ireland's constitution requires public approval for any changes to its stern anti-abortion law -- the toughest in Europe.
But the results from Wednesday's referendum, announced Thursday, demonstrated a profound lack of consensus on what remains the most divisive social issue in this nation.
Those voting against the proposed amendment prevailed by just 10,556 votes out of 1.25 million cast -- a difference of less than 1 percent. Political analysts said the referendum probably was defeated by a split within Ireland's many anti-abortion groups, who campaigned on both sides of the issue.
A beige universe
WASHINGTON -- The color of the universe is not an intriguing pale turquoise, as astronomers recently announced. It's actually beige -- and a rather ordinary beige at that.
Two Johns Hopkins University astronomers announced in January they had averaged all the colors from the light of 200,000 galaxies and concluded that if the human eye could see this combined hue, it would be a sprightly pale green. That, they said, was the color of the universe.
But Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry said Thursday that their conclusion was wrong. They had been tripped up by flawed software that was uncovered by color engineers who checked their data.
"It is embarrassing," Glazebrook said. "But this is science. We're not like politicians. If we make mistakes, we admit them. That's how science works."
The effect of the error was that the computer picked a nonstandard white from its electronic palette and mixed it with the other colors to come up with the turquoise. When the error was corrected and replaced with a standard white index, beige was the result, Glazebrook said.
Associated Press