From the personnel department:

Costa announced that Dana Dominici has been promoted to Director of Public Relations for North America. Dominici joined Costa in February 2006 as a public relations manager. She came to the PR side of the industry from the cable news production side.

From the squished squatter department:

Carnival Corp, the owner of the classic Queen Elizabeth 2, won the rights to the internet domain QE2.com before the World Intellectual Property Organization today.

Carnival found that Prime Choice, a web design and hosting company in Virginia, had registered the domain in August 2000 but never developed it. Carnival, on the other hand, owns the trademark on "QE2" and "Queen Elizabeth 2." The ship was built in 1969.

The WIPO found that Prime Choice "lacks rights or legitimate interests in respect to the domain name."

This is believed to be a case of "cybersquatting" where someone without any connection to the name registers it either in hopes of eventually selling it to someone with a legitimate claim to it, or to divert traffic to their own website. Either way, for the last several years, the practice hasn't been allowed under internet rules, and in these cases the domain is transferred to the rightful owner by the WIPO. Had Prime Choice developed an active website with a name such as Quick Edward's Second Website, Carnival may have had a tougher time before the WIPO.

A Carnival spokesperson today told CND that the company has no immediate plans to utilize the domain, but they were "protecting [their] intellectual property rights."

Ironically, Carnival Corp just recently made a deal to sell the classic liner at the end of next year.

From the personnel department:

Holland America announced today that Fran O'Connor has been promoted to Director of Online Marketing.

O'Connor will direct the company's online strategy and implementation, enhance the website, manage initiatives to increase web traffic and expand the company's international online efforts. She joined Holland America in 2005 managing online communications.

For those of you having trouble with the line's website, her e-mail address wasn't given.

From the health department:

Updating the story from last weekend when seven passengers from Fred Olsen's Black Watch were taken to the hospital in Stockholm:

Two of the passengers have now tested positive for the legionella bacteria, legionnaires disease. Swedish officials said the water samples taken from the ship have tested negative for the bacteria. That would tend to indicate that the passengers contracted the disease somewhere ashore, and the cruise ship was not the source. Nonetheless, the ship is being thoroughly disinfected before the next sailing.

The cruise line has refunded passengers 25% of their cruise fare for the cruise which was terminated two days early. Black Watch is now back in England being "deep cleaned" and preparing for its next cruise on Wednesday.

From the nonstory department:

Seattle TV station KOMO gets our award for running the biggest nonstory lately. Their headline in a story posted Sunday was "Tragedy-stricken cruise ship returns to Seattle." I wondered what had happened to what ship leaving Seattle over the weekend. The story turned out to be about Sun Princess. Last Tuesday, four passengers from the ship had been killed in a plane crash during the ship's Ketchikan port call. KOMO covered the story at that time.

So what was the story they covered on Sunday? They didn't interview anyone traveling with either of the couples who returned without them. There was a brief mention in the article that one passenger said the cruise line had handled it tastefully onboard and by being forthcoming with information onboard. The ship returned as scheduled on Sunday. There wasn't one piece of information in the article (or the linked video clip) that wasn't already known or routine.

The only way this would have been a story on Sunday would have been if Sun Princess hadn't returned to Seattle as scheduled. But it did, so the story was .... what?