KPMG Says L&H; Execs Lied
Accounting firm KPMG alleged on Thursday that the co-founders of Lernout & Hauspie (L&H;) gave it false information about the company's operations, obstructing an audit of its books last year. KPMG said in a report to a Belgian commercial court that Pol Hauspie, Jo Lernout, and two former senior managers also withheld information from it and urged L&H; employees not to cooperate. "The former top management had given explicit instructions to conceal the truth from KPMG," it said, naming former chief executive Gaston Bastiaens and former managing director Nico Willaert as the other two managers. Hauspie's lawyer, Frank Van Leemput, declined comment, while lawyers for Lernout, Bastiaens, and Willaert could not be reached. The 60-page report answered questions by Judge Michel Handschoewerker in the Ieper commercial court after he granted L&H; bankruptcy protection in January. Ieper is home to L&H.;

Educators To Control .Edu Suffix
The U.S. government plans to hand over control of the ".edu" Internet suffix to an educational group, allowing more community colleges to sign up for simplified website addresses. The U.S. Department of Commerce filed a notice of intent Wednesday to transfer control of the database to Educause, an association of 1,800 college information-technology departments. The .edu database is currently run by VeriSign Inc. (stock: VRSN), which controls the lucrative .com domain. Educause intends to relax restrictions on the domain to allow the nation's 1,600 two-year community colleges to register for .edu addresses, a spokesman said. Unlike unrestricted domains such as .com, .org, and .net, use of the .edu domain name is reserved for the approximately 2,000 four-year colleges and universities in the United States.