The suit against South Carolina-based Force Protection on behalf of shareholder Allan Candelore seeks class-action status. The Post and Courier of Charleston reports the lawsuit claims top company officials did not warn investors about delays in delivering bomb-resistant vehicles to the U.S. military.

Force Protection shares plummeted earlier this month after the company announced it was reshuffling management and told shareholders it had major accounting problems.

Christy Toler of Jeff Davis County was struck by a car March 7, 2005, and sought treatment at the Brown Arrowhead Chiropractic Clinic in Brunswick.

Before she arrived at the clinic, she was met by a paralegal for attorney John E. King and signed a contract for representation.

Those were the basic elements included in a 2006 suit filed by Toler and three Savannahians against Arrowhead Clinic, King and several others.

Now Chatham County State Court Judge Hermann Coolidge has certified the case as a class action.

That means attorneys for Toler and the others named in the original suit can pursue a class of others who fit similar experiences.

The class, which will include plaintiffs statewide, could number as many as 3,500 individuals, said Stanley Karsman, one of several defense lawyers in the case.

That would include anyone in similar circumstances to Toler between Jan. 1, 2004, and Monday, the date of the order.

Coolidge directed the parties in the case to confer and submit a proposed notice to class members within 30 days.

Class certifications in Georgia may be appealed directly to the state Court of Appeals, said attorney Patrick O'Connor, one of several defense lawyers in the case.

O'Connor said he will appeal Coolidge's ruling, an action that could take "from a few months to as much as a year" for the appeals court to rule.

The original suit, filed by Karsman and attorneys Brent Savage and Steven Scheer, contended the defendants used their chiropractic centers to encourage incoming accident victims to use King to handle legal aspects of their accident claims.

They made no disclosure of any relationship between the defendants, the suit alleged.

The suit did not specify a damage sum.

The typical arrangement was for the patient, King and the clinic to each receive one-third of any money recovered from insurance companies, the suit contended.

In addition to Arrowhead clinics in Savannah and Brunswick and King and/or John E. King and Associates, defendants include Arrowhead Management Inc.; H. Brown Management Co.; Harry W. Brown, a chiropractor and sole owner of Arrowhead Management Inc.; and Harry W. Brown Jr.

It alleged professional negligence, fraud, negligence and breach of trust duties to the plaintiffs.

According to the suit, the defendants placed a profit motive "over and above the interest of the patient."

They also are accused of engaging in "unauthorized disclosure of private information and ... the over-utilization of chiropractic services."

Today, domain hunter Chris McElory chucked a federal class action lawsuit at Network Solutions, insisting that the Comcast of domain registrars uses "fraudulent and deceptive business practices to effectively trap consumers into paying its grossly inflated domain name registrations fees".

In the words of Brian Kabateck, one of McElory's lawyers, Network Solutions is guilty of "a very sophisticated form of price fixing". We take issue with the "very sophisticated" bit.

If you visit the Network Solutions website and show interest in a domain without actually putting your money down, the company will quickly register the address under its own name. For the next four days, you can still purchase the address from Network Solutions, but you can't purchase it from any other registrar.

Back in January, for instance, one loyal Reg reader searched the site for "network-solutions-registers-all-names-searched.com," and minutes later, he discovered that "network-solutions-registers-all-names-searched" belonged to none other than Network Solutions. Meanwhile, other readers have pulled this trick with domain names that describe the company's behavior in very different terms.

Though it won't speak to us, Networks Solutions tells others that by self-registering domains, it's protecting customers from cybersquatters on the lookout for highly marketable urls. "In response to customer concerns about Domain Name Front Running (domains being registered by someone else just after they have conducted a domain name search)," the company has said, "we have implemented a security measure to protect our customers."

So, Network Solutions is front running domains in an effort to prevent other outfits from front running. And judging from a recent ICANN study, those other outfits don't exist.

And even if they do exist, Network Solutions' little trick doesn't prevent them from front-running. It merely forces them to spend their dirty dollars with Network Solutions. Network Solutions claims that it would never sell domains to front runners, but we question its ability to identify front runners. After all, it has failed to identify itself.

The company claims that these mysterious front runners are also "domain tasters," those clever characters that temporarily register thousands of domains just to test their "marketability." And it wants the world to know that if ICANN would just prevent people from returning addresses within five days for a full refund, it will quit self-registering domains.

But this is merely stating the obvious. If ICANN removes the five-day full refund, Network Solutions couldn't self register domains without paying good money for them. And it won't pay good money for them.

As Chris McElory's suit says, Network Solutions' self-registering trick is merely an effort to make some extra dough. If customers search on a name but don't immediately buy, his complaint says, they "cannot register their domain name through any of Network Solutions' less expensive competitors because their chosen domain is unavailable through any other service - which (unbeknownst to the customer) is now held exclusively by Network Solutions - who is now offering to sell the domain to anyone willing to pay its grossly inflated registration fee."

The suit even goes so far as to say that Network Solutions isn't the only guilty party. ICANN is also named. "ICANN rules tacitly say that Network Solutions practice is acceptable," Kabateck told us. "We aren't seeking damages against ICANN. We just want a declaration from the court that its allowing this to go on."

What does Kabateck think of Network Solutions' claim that it's merely trying to destroy domain tasters? "Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't get," he says. And we can assure you he's not stupid.

It was only a matter of time. Most have known for a while now that Bluray players were designed in different phases. The problem is that the same goes for the discs themselves. This leads to a situation where some players play some movies while some players are unable to. Such is the case with the first generation player from Samsung. And now the BD01200 player is the center of a class action lawsuit against the manufacturer Samsung.

A man named Bob McGovern has filed a suit because his BluRay player is unable to play some of the newer Blu-Ray movies.  His Bluray was manufactured in 2006 and is unable to play the movies due to the lack of updated firmware for his particular machine.

Samsung has publicly stated that they have no intentions of providing the necessary firmware update for the machine. Why the company would do this and face a lawsuit is a curious decision indeed. The lawsuit is open to anyone facing the same dilemma as Mr. McGovern.

Sallie Mae, which a week ago obtained new financing and ended its court battle over a failed $25 billion buyout of the student lender, is now the subject of a class-action suit.

Law firm Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP said it filed a suit against Reston, Va.-based Sallie Mae in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of purchasers of Sallie Mae common stock between Jan. 18, 2007, and Jan. 3, 2008.

The firm said the complaint charges Sallie Mae and certain officers and directors with violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The complaint alleges that the defendants issued materially false and misleading statements regarding Sallie Mae's business and financial results.

We believe the complaint is meritless," said Tom Joyce, a spokesman for Sallie Mae, formally known as SLM Corp.Sallie Mae said on Jan. 28 that the lawsuit it filed in October against four proposed acquirers of the company would be dismissed, as would all counterclaims, and the merger agreement was terminated.

In conjunction with that action, Sallie Mae would receive commitments for $31 billion of 364-day financing from a group of banks led by Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC), New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co.and others.

Last year the investors backed away from the merger, pointing to the credit crunch that has made it more difficult to land money to finance large deals and a new federal law that slashes subsidies to student lenders.

Sallie Mae recently cut 3 percent of its work force and warned that more layoffs are likely to occur as it tries to cut costs.