Island Air has hired 22 employees as it prepares for its new daily service to Kona International Airport, which starts next week.

The new members will fill positions including customer service agents, ramp agents and station manager, the company said.

Island Air plans to start service to Kona on Tuesday with five daily round-trip flights between Honolulu and Kona, and connecting flights to Kahului and Lihue. The airline’s check-in counter at the Kona airport will be in Terminal 1, and flights will depart from and arrive at Gate 5.

The airline has more than 200 flights a week between Oahu, Maui, Kauai and the Big Island.

Hack threat spurs Twitter to lock logins

Twitter Inc. said some of its accounts were locked to prevent potential disclosures from hacks of other websites that may have leaked login credentials on the internet.

Users whose accounts might be vulnerable were notified and told they must reset their passwords to gain access to the social messaging service, Twitter said Thursday in a blog post from Michael Coates, trust and information security officer.

“In each of the recent password disclosures, we cross-checked the data with our records,” Coates said in the post. “As a result, a number of Twitter accounts were identified for extra protection.”

In the post, Coates said the company is “confident the information was not obtained from a hack of Twitter’s servers.”

U.S. eases grip on internet addressing

NEW YORK >> The U.S. government is taking a key step in relinquishing control of the internet’s addressing system, fulfilling a promise made in the 1990s.

The Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration said Thursday that it endorses a March proposal to turn over full control to a private international organization. All that remains is completing some contracts and operational testing. That’s expected to be done in the coming months.

The organization deals with matters including the assignment of internet suffixes such as “.com” and “.org” and the operation of the internet’s “root servers,” the master directories for telling web browsers where to find websites. Without them, users would have to remember a set of four numbers rather than “ap.org” to reach the Associated Press’ website, for instance.

This system has already been managed by a private organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. But the U.S. government, which funded much of the internet’s early development, has retained veto power.

Swedish court bars lowercase M&M’s

STOCKHOLM >> A Swedish court has ordered candy maker Mars to stop selling M&M’s in the Scandinavian country, at least not with the customary lower-case letters it uses on the packaging and on the colorful chocolates.

The Svea Court of Appeal said Wednesday it ruled against McLean, Va.-based Mars in a trademark dispute with Kraft Foods, which sells chocolate-covered peanuts under the Marabou brand with a single “m” on the packaging.

It said Kraft has exclusive rights to the trademark in Sweden.

However, it added that using the upper-case M&M’s, as Mars does in its corporate communications, doesn’t constitute a trademark infringement in Sweden.

Mars said, “We have always believed no confusion exists” between the two products and that it would “assess the next steps for our beloved brand in Sweden.”

On the move

Maui Medical Group has announced the appointment of new health care practitioners to its Maui offices:

>> Dr. Derek Illastron is an internal medicine doctor and works in Maui Medical Group’s Pukalani and Wailuku clinics. Prior to joining Maui Medical Group, Illastron served as a primary care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Everett and Revere, Mass., as well as at Harvard Vanguard in Boston and Pentucket Medical in Haverhill, Mass.

>> Dr. Heather Bejenaru is a family practice doctor and works in Maui Medical Group’s Kihei clinic. Bejenaru previously worked at several medical clinics on Maui, including Kaiser Kihei Clinic, Upcountry Medical Clinic, Veterans Affairs, Doctors on Call and Wailea Medical Center and Urgent Care.

>> Dr. Shannon Evans is in family practice and works in the Wailuku clinic. Prior to joining Maui Medical Group, she served as a family medicine physician at the Sublette County Rural Healthcare District in Marbleton, Wyo.

>> Rey Lalwani is in family practice and works in their Wailuku clinic. She previously worked at Montgomery Family Medicine and at Metropolitan NeuroEar Group, both in Maryland.

>> Maxi Lohrengel-West works in internal medicine and works in the Kahului and Kihei clinics. She obtained her master’s degree in physician assistant studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

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Star-Advertiser staff, Bloomberg News and Associated Press