French Court

A split federal appeals court dismissed a lawsuit Thursday in which Yahoo Inc. claimed its free speech rights were violated when a French court fined the company $15 million for displaying Nazi memorabilia. But the ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco resolved the case on highly technical grounds, largely bypassing the 1st Amendment issues the company had raised.

Twitter suspended an account run by Somali extremists linked to Al Qaeda on Friday, two days after the militants threatened to execute Kenyan hostages and posted a video of one pleading for the Kenyan government to help free them. Shabab militants released the video titled “Kenyan POWS: The Final Message” on Twitter on Wednesday. In the short video, one of the hostages asks Kenyans to pressure their government to ensure the captives are freed, according to the SITE monitoring service, whose analysts track extremist statements.

A man conceived in a rape by French soldiers during the Algerian independence war was declared a war victim Thursday and awarded damages. An appeals court awarded Mohammed Garne, 41, a partial military pension for three years, but it denied his request for full lifetime benefits. The decision was the first time a French court ruled that a person conceived as the result of a rape was a war victim, and it brought a formal closure to Garne's tortuous search for his identity.

John Galliano, fired as creative director at Christian Dior in 2011 after his racist bar rants came to light, on Monday won a round in court in his unlawful-dismissal lawsuit against Dior and his namesake John Galliano label. A French court ruled that it is qualified to hear the case. [WWD] (Subscription required.) For Galliano, there's a lot of money riding on this, according to court documents, which show he was paid a fixed annual salary of $1 million euros (about $1.3 million)

Fabio, the Italian model whose craggy but sensitive face has appeared on more than 1,000 romance novel covers, is also the spokesface for I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! Naturally, that butter substitute company features him big time on its Internet site, where you can read a Fabiography, enter a contest to win a phone call from the King of Romance, get romance advice and romantic vacation tips, and--need we say it--download diet recipes featuring I Can't Believe. The address: www.tasteyoulove.

Two members of Pussy Riot remain imprisoned for their defiant “punk prayer” at a Moscow cathedral. Now the video of their protest against Vladimir Putin could be cut off from Russia as well, after a Moscow court deemed footage of their punk performance “extremist.” The ruling handed down Thursday by a Moscow court could soon require Russian Internet providers to block access to the video, Russian news outlets reported. The ban will go into effect after a brief period if the court ruling isn't appealed.

With war afoot, so is "Henry V." William Shakespeare's 1599 saga of Henry Plantagenet's 1415 French conquest remains acutely pertinent, as two notable productions demonstrate. "Henry V [Masters of War]" at the Knightsbridge Theatre in Pasadena and the Charlens Company "Henry V" at the Stella Adler in Hollywood offer differing yet apt approaches. Agitprop outrage dominates director Tiger Reel's Pasadena deconstruction, less complete than Kenneth Branagh's 1986 film but even more antiwar.

European leaders gathered for an emergency counter-terrorism summit in Brussels today are poised to tackle an urgent challenge: the prospect of a prolonged battle at home. Last week's suicide attacks in the United States triggered a crackdown across Europe on suspected Islamic terrorists, including a network allegedly linked to Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and suspected of having plotted to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris.

A recent decision by a French court — paving the way for the return of former dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega to Panama after more than 20 years in prisons in the United States and France — has made a long-standing question suddenly urgent: What happened to the thousands of boxes of documents U.S. forces seized during Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989? The surprising answer, the U.S. government recently confirmed, is that the U.S. Army still has them. The United States should immediately return these documents to Panama, where they are needed not only by historians and human rights researchers but also by attorneys on both sides of legal proceedings that will follow Noriega's return.

In the face of angry accusations of cowardice, Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief in Lyon, refused Wednesday to attend any more sessions of his trial for "crimes against humanity." Barbie's withdrawal, permissible under French law, drained the trial of much of its drama, ensuring that Barbie will not have to face his alleged victims and their families during the weeks ahead.