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The chairman of Hooters - the US restaurant chain famous for its scantily clad waitresses - has died.

Robert Brooks, 69, made his fortune from the firm - which uses the slogan "Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined" for its style of cuisine and service.

A post-mortem examination was due to be carried out on Monday.

Hooters opened its first restaurant in 1983 and Mr Brooks, with a group of other investors, bought franchise rights a year later.

The South Carolina-born businessman later bought control of the company.

He shared his wealth, buying an American football stadium for Coastal Carolina University.

Hooters has 425 restaurants in 20 countries, including one in the UK, in Nottingham.

The company employs 25,000 people including 15,000 "Hooters Girls" and has been heavily criticised for exploiting attractive women.

But on its website the firm says such claims are "as ridiculous as saying the NFL exploits men who are big and fast".

It adds: "Hooters Girls have the same right to use their natural female sex appeal to earn a living as do super models Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell.

"To Hooters, the women’s rights movement is important because it guarantees women have the right to choose their own careers, be it a Supreme Court Justice or Hooters Girl."

In 1997 a group of Chicago men took the restaurant to court - challenging its right to only hire women for its front-of-house positions.

via BBC.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The space shuttle Discovery dodged clouds to make a textbook touchdown here Monday, capping a 13-day mission that set the stage for resuming construction of the international space station.

Two bone-rattling sonic booms heralded the shuttle’s arrival over Florida, and only a couple of minutes later, Discovery plunged to its landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 9:14 a.m. ET.

"Welcome back, Discovery, and congratulations on a great mission," spacecraft communicator Steve Frick told the crew.

"It was a great mission, a really great mission," Discovery commander Steve Lindsey replied. "Enjoyed the entry and the landing."

The flight ranked as one of NASA’s safest ever, with almost none of the worrisome foam insulation loss that marked last year’s flight of Discovery. In fact, NASA said Discovery’s 5.3 million-mile (8.5 million-kilometer) flight was nearly flawless.

After repeatedly checking the shuttle’s heat shield and assessing a small leak in one of the onboard power units, NASA declared Discovery perfectly safe for landing on Sunday. The verdict on Monday’s weather went almost to the last possible minute, however.

Forecasters were watching a band of rain clouds north of the shuttle’s landing strip here at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, but ultimately concluded that the rain would stay far enough away. The path for Discovery’s final approach was fine-tuned to change from one runway to another at the landing strip, to avoid any troublesome clouds.

Once the decision was made to descend, there was no turning back.

"When an astronaut has to take the controls of a space shuttle that’s worth $5 billion, and land it with one shot — no engines, no chance to go around — you’ve got to do it right the very, very first time you do it for real," astronaut Brent Jett, who is due to command the next shuttle mission in August, told NBC News.

On its way home, Discovery slowed down from a velocity 25 times the speed of sound — in the process, heating the shuttle’s protective skin to temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,700 degrees Celsius). The flight path took the shuttle over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, west of Cuba and then across Florida itself.

The only problem on the way down was a harmless glitch involving one of the shuttle’s air data probes.

Discovery’s touchdown represented the first shuttle landing in Florida since December 2002. The space shuttle Columbia broke up over Texas on its way to a Florida landing in February 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard and forcing a suspension of flights. Last August, Discovery’s first post-Columbia flight ended in California because of unacceptable weather in Florida.

via MSNBC.

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea issued a national crisis warning on Sunday as torrential rain caused flooding in parts of the country, killing 10 people and leaving 17 missing and presumed dead.

The orange alert issued for the capital, Seoul, and its surrounding regions and for the eastern province of Kangwon was prompted by a “high likelihood of large-scale disasters'’ from heavy rain, the National Emergency Management Agency said.

The alert is a step below the category-red warning that shuts down schools and workplaces and bans access to major highways.

The orange alert puts residents of affected areas on standby for possible swift evacuation and advises children and the elderly to remain indoors.

North Korea’s official news agency, meanwhile, reported major agricultural and other economic damage in many areas. It gave no word of any casualties.

Up to 50 cm (20 inches) of rainfall in eastern South Korea since Friday had caused flooding, driving more than 2,000 people into emergency shelters, the emergency agency said in a report.

Further heavy rain was expected in central and eastern regions including Seoul, with more than 25 cm (10 inches) of precipitation expected in some areas before midnight on Sunday, the national meteorological agency said.

The rain, in part triggered by last week’s Typhoon Ewiniar, could affect southern regions later on Sunday, the weather agency said.

Sections of mountainous highways had been washed away or made impassable, the agency said.

"The situation in the eastern region is pretty bad,'’ an agency official said by telephone.

The casualty toll was likely to rise with some people in isolated eastern areas not yet accounted for, the agency said.

North of the border, North Korea reported torrential rainfall across its southern provinces.

"Agricultural and other sectors of the national economy and people’s living were badly damaged by heavy rains in some areas,'’ the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.

"Rainfalls are now going on and investigation into damage is under way,'’ the report said.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (CNN) — Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected a suggestion from U.S. President George W. Bush that his country should emulate democracy in Iraq.

During a joint news conference Saturday in St. Petersburg, Bush said he raised concerns about democracy in Russia during a frank discussion with the Russian leader.

"I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world, like Iraq where there’s a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same," Bush said.

To that, Putin replied, "We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly."

The Bush administration has publicly voiced its disapproval over Putin’s appointment of local governors, crackdown of the press and pursuit of what the United States calls political persecution against the Yukos oil company.

The two leaders met ahead of the G8 summit of the world’s leading industrialized nations, and discussed a variety of topics, including Russia’s WTO bid.

Bush said the two leaders are close to reaching a deal but added "there’s more work to be done."

via CNN.

President Bush and first lady Laura Bush visit the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Friday.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - Negotiations on Russia’s admission to the World Trade Organization broke off with no agreement being reached, U.S. and Russian officials said Saturday.

The talks ended because of differences over assurances the United States was seeking over the protection of U.S. copyrights and patents and promises that Russia would accept greater amounts of U.S. farm goods.

President Bush, speaking at a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, said the deal could not be reached, despite intensive talks, because the administration believed Russia needed to offer more in trade concessions to satisfy the Congress.

“We’re tough negotiators and the reason why is because we want the agreement that we reach to (be) accepted by our U.S. Congress,” Bush said.

He said both sides would continue to negotiate to get a deal. The United States is the only country that has yet to sign off on Russia’s membership in the WTO.

Bush blamed “false reporting” in the press for raising hopes that a deal could be reached. “Well, it was almost reached,” the president said. “There is more work to be done.”

Russian trade negotiator Maxim Medvedkov was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying the deal would not be signed “either today or in coming weeks.”

The failure to reach an agreement dashed the hopes of Putin to burnish the first Group of Eight summit on Russian soil with an economic triumph his government has been seeking for years.

Russia, the largest economy to remain outside of the 149-nation WTO, sees membership as a way to demonstrate how far the country has come since its severe economic collapse in 1998.

Hopes for an agreement had been raised when U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab traveled to Moscow earlier this week for intensive negotiations with Russian Economic and Trade Minister German Gref.

The ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Medvedkov as saying that another stumbling block was an impasse over Russian tariffs on the sale of American airplanes. Russia has imposed high import tariffs for foreign planes as a way to protect its beleaguered aircraft industry.

 The Associated Press.