Sony facing suits by 2 ex-workers over data breach
NEW YORK — A second class action lawsuit has been filed against Sony Pictures Entertainment by two former employees whose private data was stolen from the company’s servers and posted online.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court accuses Sony of waiting too long to notify employees that data such as Social Security numbers, salaries and medical records had been stolen. The suit is filed by two former Sony film production workers, Susan Dukow and Yvonne Yaconelli.
Their filing comes one day after two other former Sony employees filed a class action lawsuit in federal court. Both cases seek to represent current and former Sony employees who private data was posted online.
Rally fizzles, leaving US indexes lower
NEW YORK — Sudden twists in the price of oil and currency trading turned the stock market into a roller-coaster ride on Tuesday.
Major indexes opened lower as falling oil prices and a plunge in the Russian ruble weighed on markets. Less than an hour later, crude oil recovered and oil and gas producers surged, driving the Dow Jones industrial average up as much as 246 points in the morning.
By the end of the day, however, all of the gains were wiped out.
The Standard &Poor’s 500 index ended with a loss of 16.89 points, or 0.9 percent, to 1,972.74.
The Dow Jones industrial average lost 111.97 points, or 0.7 percent, to 17,068.87, while the Nasdaq composite dropped 57.32 points, or 1.2 percent, to 4,547.83.
Horror over deadly Sydney siege turns to anger
SYDNEY — Horror over a deadly siege morphed into anger Tuesday as leaders of a grieving nation demanded to know how a man with a violent criminal history slipped through the cracks and ended up in the downtown Sydney cafe where he took 17 people hostage.
The 16-hour siege ended in a barrage of gunfire and screams early Tuesday morning when police stormed into the Lindt Chocolat Cafe in a desperate bid to free the hostages. Two of the hostages were killed, as was the gunman, Man Haron Monis, a 50-year-old Iranian-born, self-styled cleric described by Australia’s prime minister as a deeply disturbed person carrying out a “sick fantasy.”
Monis was convicted and sentenced last year to 300 hours of community service for sending what a judge called “grossly offensive” letters to families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2009. He later was charged with being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife. Earlier this year, he was charged with the 2002 sexual assault of a woman. He had been out on bail on all the charges.
Jeb Bush exploring White House bid
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Jeb Bush answered the biggest question looming over the Republican Party’s next campaign for the White House on Tuesday, all but declaring his candidacy for president more than a year before the first primaries.
Bush, the son and brother of Republican presidents, is the first potential candidate to step this far into the 2016 contest, and his early announcement could deeply affect the race for the GOP nomination.
He is the early favorite of the GOP’s establishment wing, and his move puts immediate pressure on other establishment-minded GOP contenders to start actively competing with him for donors, campaign staff and national attention.
The 61-year-old, former two-term governor of Florida declared on Facebook he would “actively explore the possibility of running for president of the United States.”
While his statement doesn’t commit Bush to running, veterans of presidential politics described it as “a de facto announcement” that ends months of speculation about his intentions.
By wire sources