Courtrooms

Like any concerned mother, Athena Hohenberg wanted to be sure her 4-year-old was getting a good breakfast. So she served up Nutella, a hazelnut and cocoa spread marketed as part of a balanced breakfast. "Start your day with Nutella spread," urge the TV ads. But Hohenberg was shocked to learn, she said in a lawsuit filed in February, that the sandwich spread is chock full of fat and sugar — "the next best thing to a candy bar," she alleged. Nutella manufacturer Ferrero USA Inc. has agreed to settle the suit brought by the San Diego mother on behalf of hundreds of thousands of consumers who may have been similarly deceived, even though the ads specified that fruit, milk and whole wheat bread were also part of that balanced meal.

Appearing in a military courtroom Friday for the first time, accused WikiLeaks source Army Pfc. Bradley Manning said he understood the charges against him in a criminal case that involves one of the largest leaks of classified material in U.S. history. The pretrial proceeding got bogged down in legal maneuvering when Manning's civilian lawyer, David Coombs, argued that the presiding military officer could not be impartial because he is also a federal prosecutor. Coombs said Army Reserve Lt. Col. Paul Almanza should step aside because he is the deputy chief prosecutor of the child exploitation and obscenity section of the criminal division of the Department of Justice.

A string of angry shouts, including "I hate you! I hate you!" tore through a packed Santa Ana courtroom Friday as the man accused of killing eight people and wounding a ninth at a Seal Beach beauty salon made his first court appearance. The defendant, Scott Dekraai, showed no emotion amid taunts from the spectators, who included dozens of the victims' family members and friends. Prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty against Dekraai, who is charged with eight felony counts of special circumstance first-degree murder, and one felony count of attempted murder in connection with the worst mass killings in Orange County history.

A former Laker player who is accused of shooting an Atlanta woman to death appeared to be retaliating for being robbed of $55,000 worth of jewelry, police said. Javaris Crittenton , who was suspended from the NBA along with his ex-teammate Gilbert Arenas for having guns in a locker room, was arrested late Monday at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana. He has been charged with murder in the Aug. 19 shooting death of Jullian Jones outside her house in Atlanta, the FBI said.

Reporting from Moscow -- The abuse-of-power trial of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko slid into chaos Wednesday when the Western-leaning politician was tossed from a Kiev courtroom after calling the judge a "monster" and her prosecution a "farce. " The former princess of the so-called Orange Revolution, which in late 2004 and early 2005 loosened Ukraine's ties to Russia, is also under investigation, government officials said, on possible charges of high treason and the alleged attempted embezzlement of $405 million while she and her colleagues were in power.

The most important recent advance on the marriage equality front didn't occur in the halls of Congress or a state legislature, or the chambers of the federal appellate court pondering the legal challenge to Proposition 8. It occurred, of all places, in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Los Angeles. It was there that 20 U.S. bankruptcy judges put their signatures to a ringing declaration that the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA — that 1996 federal law declaring that only marriage between a man and a woman was legally valid in federal eyes — was unconstitutional as a violation of the 5th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French politician who is charged with attempting to rape a hotel maid, formally told a judge Monday in a Manhattan court that he was innocent. The former head of the International Monetary Fund entered the courtroom accompanied by two guards and his wife, Anne Sinclair, an heiress and onetime French journalist. The last time Strauss-Kahn was in court, he was granted a $6-million bail-and-bond package after agreeing to remain under house arrest. He is living not far from the courthouse in a townhouse that he is reportedly renting for $50,000 a month while he faces charges.

Michael Connelly's richly entertaining new novel, "The Fifth Witness," features defense attorney Mickey Haller, who operates out of the big armor-plated Lincoln he acquired from some lowlife in lieu of a fee and who seems, for the moment, to have replaced detective Harry Bosch as this immensely successful writer's go-to narrative guy. Haller (recently portrayed by Matthew McConaughey in the movie "The Lincoln Lawyer") has given Connelly's career an adrenaline boost (not that it really needed one)

As prospective jurors milled about in a court hallway recently to see if they were going to serve on a gang case, a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy assigned to the courtroom apparently had no qualms sharing his views of the defendant. "You can look at him and just see he's guilty," one juror heard him say. The deputy suggested the case was a waste of time, another juror said. "I don't know why we're here anyway," the second juror quoted the deputy as saying. "He's guilty.

It's the Battle of the Bratz, the sequel. Bitter toy rivals Mattel Inc. and MGA Entertainment Inc. were back in court Tuesday to renew their years-long battle over who owns the billion-dollar Bratz, the sexy-with-an-attitude dolls that debuted a decade ago and deeply cut into Mattel's Barbie empire. During the first trial in 2008, a jury in Riverside found that Bratz inventor and former Barbie designer Carter Bryant was in Mattel's employ when he developed the concept for the immensely popular dolls.