Electricite de France SA could potentially recover some euro1.2 billion after it won a European Union court challenge Tuesday that said EU regulators were wrong to order the company to repay tax relief to the French government.

The ruling from the EU's general court can still be appealed to the EU's highest legal authority, the court of justice — or EU regulators can also come to a new decision on the subsidy that would address the court's criticisms.

The court said Monday that the European Commission had failed to check if the French government had acted like a private investor when it decided that the company had effectively received an illegal subsidy by reclassifying money saved from a 1997 tax break as a capital injection.

The court said regulators had violated EU state aid law by failing "to apply the private investor test" to the terms of the capital injection — even if the money had come from a fiscal debt.

In 2003, commission ordered the company to repay the euro888.89 million tax concession to the government, saying it was a state subsidy that gave the business — then state-owned — an unfair advantage over rivals.

At the time, it was the highest subsidy that the EU had ever ordered to be repaid. With interest, the full amount was euro1.2 billion — which EDF has now paid to the French state.

A Los Angeles man has pleaded not guilty to running a Ponzi scheme that cheated about 50 investors in a NASCAR merchandise wholesale business out of at least $10 million.

Federal prosecutors say 63-year-old Eliott Dresher was arraigned and ordered held pending trial in U.S. District Court Monday.

The U.S. attorney's office says Dresher claimed investors' money would be used to buy NASCAR apparel and sell it to stores. He claimed he had $70 million in various accounts and his business would return 20 percent every six months.

Dresher ran his scheme for about 10 years before it c

Two Riverside County men have been found guilty of murdering an 18-year-old girl, putting her body in a 55-gallon drum and leaving it in a field in Southern California.

Two separate Riverside Superior Court juries on Monday convicted Jeffree Buettner of Menifee and Glen Jones of Wildomar of the 2002 murder.

Prosecutors say Buettner and Jones beat and strangled Stephanie Benton because they thought she was talking to law enforcement about other crimes the men had committed.

Her decomposed body was found in a drum in a Lake Elsinore field with a leather belt around her neck and duct tape wrapped around her head.

The juries also found special circumstances that make the men eligible for the death penalty.

Erin Andrews plans to be in a Los Angeles courtroom when a man accused of secretly filming her nude enters an expected guilty plea to stalking.

A hearing is set for Tuesday afternoon for Illinois insurance executive Michael David Barrett to enter the plea. Andrews' attorney, Marshall Grossman, says the ESPN sideline reporter will attend and may call for a tougher sentence against Barrett.

Prosecutors have agreed to seek a 27-month prison sentence against Barrett, but he faces up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

Barrett is suspected of renting hotel rooms next to Andrews three times and shooting two videos of her. He is accused of posting the videos online.

Andrews called the experience a nightmare in a September interview with Oprah Winfrey.

North Carolina's appeals court has temporarily blocked the release of two convicted murderers sentenced under a 1970s law that limited life terms.

The court clerk issued an order Monday afternoon approving a request to halt the case, but he gave no explanation. The decision gives state attorneys another chance to argue the inmates should not be set free.

Superior Court Judge Ripley Rand had ordered convicted murderers Alford Jones and Faye Brown freed earlier Monday. Their attorneys convinced Rand that sentence-reduction credits have shortened their life terms, which were defined as only 80 years when they were sentenced.

Rand had set a 5 p.m. deadline for the Department of Correction to release Jones and Brown.

A teen who pleaded guilty to gang raping a South Florida woman and beating her young son has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Seventeen-year-old Avion Lawson pleaded guilty in August and testified against three other suspects in the 2007 attack. The others have all received life in prison.

Lawson, who was sentenced Monday, had faced a maximum 11 life sentences plus 50 years.

Lawson and the three other defendants were all teenagers when police say they barged into a 35-year-old woman's apartment, raped her repeatedly, beat her 12-year-old son and then forced her to perform oral sex on the boy.

The victims were doused in chemicals to clean the crime scene, and police say their attackers discussed setting them on fire before fleeing.

Florida's judges and lawyers should no longer "friend" each other on Facebook, the popular social networking site, according to a ruling from the state's Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee.

At least one South Florida judge warned her pals with a Facebook status update that they could be "unfriended," and the ruling has prompted others to do the same. The committee ruled Nov. 17 that online "friendships" could create the impression that lawyers are in a special position to influence their judge friends.

The committee did conclude that a judge can post comments on another judge's site and that during judicial elections, a judge's campaign can have "fans" that include lawyers. And the ruling doesn't single out Facebook.