Moved by last weekend’s earthquake-tsunami catastrophe, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra said it would donate $136,000 to the World Health Organization to help provide drinking water to survivors.

"We wish to express our solidarity with all those who have lost everything," the orchestra’s president, Clemens Hellsberg, said Thursday.

The United Nations WHO said up to 5 million people around the tsunami-struck Indian Ocean region did not have access to the basics they need to stay alive - clean water, shelter, food, sanitation and health care.

The orchestra typically donates about $68,000 to a humanitarian cause each New Year’s Day, when it plays a concert that is broadcast around the world.

Lorin Maazel, music director of the New York Philharmonic and a former chief conductor of the Vienna State Opera, will conduct today’s concert, to be broadcast in the United States by the Public Broadcasting Service. (MPT, Channels 22 and 67 at 6 p.m.)

Well-gifted

Even a week after Christmas, don’t expect to find these folks standing in line waiting to return these gifts.

We’re pretty sure Sarah Michelle Gellar is going to hold onto the diamond-and-ruby necklace she received from hubby Freddie Prinze Jr.

Ditto the pink alligator Asprey handbag some unidentified donor spent $11,000 on for model Naomi Campbell.

Less glitzy are the matching PJs Faith Hill and Tim McGraw gave each other.

Now what’s a poor girl to do?

A federal appeals court Thursday threw out a judge’s ruling that awarded $88.5 million to former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith from the estate of her late husband, an oil tycoon who died at age 90 just over a year after they wed.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Texas probate court’s decision that the oilman’s son was his sole heir should stand. The appeals court said the federal judge in California who ruled in Smith’s favor in 2002 should never have even heard the case.

The decision comes after years of wrangling in three courts over the fortune of J. Howard Marshall II.

Smith met him in 1991 when she was working as a stripper. The couple married three years later when she was 26 and he was 89.

"After nine years of litigation, I’m very pleased by the judgment issued by the 9th Circuit upholding my father’s wishes regarding disposition of his assets," E. Pierce Marshall said in a statement.

A call to Smith’s attorney was not immediately returned.

Sarajevo to memorialize Susan Sontag

Sarajevo authorities will name a street after Susan Sontag, who helped the city’s residents during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

Sontag, 71, died Tuesday in New York from complications of leukemia.

Sontag made numerous visits during the war and lobbied for the end of the siege of the Bosnian capital. In 1993, Sontag and a group of actors and directors staged a production of Waiting for Godot at the Youth Theater.

"Anyone who spent four years in the besieged Sarajevo cannot help today remembering the excellent, truth-loving and justice-loving Susan," said Nermin Tulic, an actor and the director of the Youth Theater.

Not a needles-in-a-haystack dilemma

It didn’t take police in Winnipeg, Manitoba, long to solve the great Christmas tree heist - a trail of pine needles from the scene of the crime led directly to a suspect’s living room.

"It’s got to be the dumbest crime of the century," apartment caretaker Cindy Peterson said Wednesday. "You could see where they dragged it into the house."

The theft happened early Dec. 23 when someone cut down an 18-foot blue spruce from in front of Peterson’s apartment building.

When Peterson and neighbor Ralph Mehmedov investigated, they followed a trail of pine cones, needles and broken limbs to a residence across the street.

Police questioned the 22-year-old occupant, who told them he had bought the tree from a door-to-door tree salesman for $5. The man was charged with possession of stolen goods and released on a promise to appear in court at a later date.