Property Rights

For decades, three Italian Renaissance paintings have hung on the walls of Hearst Castle without betraying their grim history. But on Friday, state parks officials will formally acknowledge the artworks' past, turning them over to the heirs of a Jewish couple who were forced by the Nazis to liquidate their Berlin art gallery in 1935.

The federal government on Friday set a deadline for Pennsylvania landowners who have refused to give up their property so that a memorial to United Airlines Flight 93 can be built. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told landowners that they have one week to reach sale agreements with the National Park Service before the agency exercises eminent domain to acquire the 500 remaining acres for the memorial, at the site where the hijacked plane crashed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Plucking the already tense string that binds new media and old, the Associated Press announced an initiative Monday to protect online versions of its news content from what it called "misappropriation" by a variety of online news outlets. At its annual meeting in San Diego, AP Chairman Dean Singleton said the news syndicate would pursue "legal and legislative remedies" against entities that it believes are unfairly borrowing its content.

A Texas mayor who admitted stealing her neighbor's Shih Tzu was indicted Friday on felony charges -- a serious turn in a canine custody drama that has become the butt of jokes in the Lone Star State. Grace Saenz-Lopez, the mayor of Alice, was indicted on charges of concealing and falsifying evidence by a Jim Wells County grand jury. Each count is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The mayor filed a report with police Jan.

An Orange County land battle going back half a century has resurfaced, and as is always the case when it's real estate with a Newport Beach ZIP Code, things get thorny. At stake is a privately owned, undeveloped 402-acre parcel known as Banning Ranch. Costa Mesa, which flanks the property on the north, has had its sights on annexing the land, arguing that the city would be most affected if it gets developed.

A Virginia court has ruled in favor of 11 conservative congregations that broke away from the U.S. Episcopal Church and want to keep property worth millions of dollars, parties in the dispute said Friday. The ruling is the latest development in an upheaval over orthodoxy roiling the global Anglican community. Its U.S. branch, the Episcopal Church, has been beset by disputes, including one involving the installation of an openly gay bishop.

Carol Evans remembers watching the sun sink into the ocean from her San Clemente sun room. "You could see the palm trees, beautiful oranges and golds. . . . It was gorgeous," she said. Until the neighbors added a second story. Now, most of her ocean vista is obscured by a house. Sometimes, she said, she can glimpse the water through their open doors.

A grand jury here Monday cleared a Pasadena, Texas, man in the shooting deaths of two suspected burglars as they left his neighbor's house -- a case that stirred a national debate over whether he was a vigilante or a hero. Joe Horn, 62, shot the men on Nov. 14 after he called authorities and declared his intention to open fire on the suspects with his 12-gauge shotgun.

It's too bad that Greg Kinnear couldn't have played Robert Kearns more often in real life. That thought went through my mind last week while watching Kinnear's performance in "Flash of Genius," a new drama based on the story of the cantankerous Detroit engineer who successfully sued Ford and Chrysler for a combined $30 million for infringing on his patent designs for the intermittent windshield wiper. Kinnear apparently never met Kearns, who died of cancer at age 77 in 2005.

Nearly 150 years after Russian Czar Alexander II bought a large plot of land in Jerusalem from the Ottoman Empire, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert arrived in Moscow last week bearing a gift: the deed. The move by the outgoing Israeli leader, after decades of dispute on the issue, has caused an uproar here over the timing and, more significantly, the idea of yielding parts of Jerusalem -- a serious red line in this country.