Hong Kong
Louis Vuitton court victory against Chinese tea chain stirs up copyrights debate
HONG KONG (AP) — A debate over ownership of traditional Chinese symbols has cropped up after a court ordered a local tea chain to pay French luxury brand Louis Vuitton $1.5 million over trademark infringement claims.
Chinese state-media and online commentators are questioning if the four-petal flower design in the fashion house’s 130-year-old signature monogram is derived from patterns dating back to ancient China. Some are accusing the company of “monopolizing” traditional Chinese patterns.
A court in the eastern city of Suzhou recently ruled that the logo of the Molly Tea, whose signature drinks are based on jasmine and other floral-based teas, infringed on Louis Vuitton’s trademark monogram. It ordered the tea company to pay 10.3 million yuan ($1.5 million) to the French company, according to local media reports that carried copies or details of what they said was the ruling.
Intellectual property fights between Western and Chinese brands are not uncommon. International brands like American sneaker maker New Balance have taken Chinese firms to local courts and sometimes prevailed in intellectual property and trademark cases.
The judgement has been trending online in China.
The state owned newspaper Beijing Daily said Tuesday in a post on the popular online platform Weibo that the ruling exposed a gap in protections of ancient Chinese heritage and symbols.
“Why did a Chinese enterprise end up paying more than 10 million yuan in damages to a French company for using a design that resonated with the spirit of China’s centuries-old patterns?” it said.
“Chinese netizens accuse LV of attempting to monopolize ancient motifs after lawsuit against tea brand,” said a headline in the Global Times, a state-owned English language newspaper. It asserted there was “widespread frustration” over a foreign brand controlling a design believed to be part of China’s cultural heritage.
A photo and caption accompanying the article showed patterns on a Tang Dynasty rosewood “pipa,” a kind of Chinese traditional lute, side-by-side with the Louis Vuitton monogram pattern.
Louis Vuitton is celebrating the 130th anniversary of its monogram designed in 1896, which it has called a “universal symbol of creativity.” The monogram was “inspired by neo-gothic ornamentation and the influence of Japonism,” its parent LVMH’s website says.
LVMH and Molly Tea did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Molly Tea, founded in 2021, was still displaying its four-petal flower logo on its official website as of Tuesday. The company told local media it was planning to appeal.
California
Lawsuit says U.S. illegally shared confidential information on Iranian asylum seekers with Iran
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges that the Trump administration’s immigration agencies have been sharing confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with the Iranian government, violating national immigration regulations and endangering countless Iranians, court filings argue.
The lawsuit depicts a coordinated campaign between the U.S. and Iranian governments to identify Iranians in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and pressure them to return to Iran — a marked departure from decades of diplomatic hostility between the two governments and an ongoing war.
Roughly 600 Iranians were put in immigration detention last year, according to public records obtained by the National Iranian American Council. In June, an Iranian woman was among the two dozen migrants the U.S. deported to the Central African Republic — in a marked departure from a decades-long practice by the U.S. of welcoming Iranian dissidents, exiles and others since the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced a large number of Iranians to flee.
The U.S. government is allowed to work with government officials of foreign countries to coordinate deportation logistics. However, federal regulations passed in the late 1990s prohibit the government from sharing information that could reveal that the individual getting deported applied for asylum.
“Congress made these confidentiality protections mandatory precisely because lives depend on them, and no agency and no administration, of either party, may set them aside,” said Ali Rahnama, the interim executive director of Iranian American Legal Defense Fund.
Starting in March 2025, the U.S. State Department arranged monthly meetings with Iranian officials, using the Pakistani embassy as an intermediary, in which U.S. officials shared detailed, sensitive information about detained Iranian immigrants who the U.S. government hoped to deport, lawyers for the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and the Public Citizen Litigation Group wrote in a complaint.
The information included details about asylum applications filed by people who say they were persecuted for converting to Christianity, for their sexuality or for participating in the Women, Life, Freedom protests against the Iranian government in 2022, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
ICE forced Iranian asylum applicants who had been detained in numerous facilities, mostly southern states, to meet with an Iranian government official who had extensive and specific knowledge about their applications, according to the complaint. The information was shared even after the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran started the Iran war in February 2026.
The lawsuit is seeking to halt sharing information about asylum seekers with the Iranian government and appoint an independent monitor to prevent future disclosures.
“Despite the U.S.’s ongoing war with Iran, the administration seems more committed to mass deportation than protecting human lives,” Michael Kirkpatrick, attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group said in a statement.
The complaint names the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and the Department of State as some of the defendants. The Department of Homeland Security and the State Department didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment on Tuesday morning.
The allegations come amid President Donald Trump’s ambitious and aggressive immigration crackdown that involved over 600,000 deportations and causing roughly 1.9 million immigrants to voluntarily leave in 2025 alone, according to an announcement made by DHS.
Iranian officials acknowledged in September 2025 that as many as 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump’s administration. That month, the first of three deportation flights brought dozens of Iranians back to Iran. The second deportation flight was in December 2025, and the final recorded deportation flight departed at the end of January 2026, roughly a month before the war on Iran started, and just weeks after the Iranian government killed thousands of citizens as part of a brutal crackdown on protests. The New York Times reported at the time that some of those deported in the flights in September, December and January were asylum seekers.
London
Judge dismisses Prince Harry’s privacy invasion lawsuit against tabloid publisher
LONDON (AP) — Prince Harry ‘s final lawsuit aimed at taming the British tabloids ended in defeat Tuesday as a judge said he failed to prove his privacy invasion claims against the publisher of the Daily Mail.
Justice Matthew Nicklin rejected the broad inferences the Duke of Sussex relied on to try to show that Associated Newspapers Ltd. engaged in unlawful activities. He said there was a shortage of evidence to support the claims and found there was a possibility that the news stories came from legitimate sources.
“In substance, the claimants’ case invites the Court to conclude that, because the information was private and because Associated cannot positively explain how it was sourced, the article must have been unlawfully sourced,” Nicklin wrote. “That is not a permissible approach.”
The ruling scuttles a bid by Harry and six others, including singer Elton John and actor-model Elizabeth Hurley, which sought substantial damages but could leave them with a large lawyers’ bill. Legal costs were estimated at about 40 million pounds ($53.5 million) for years of case preparation and an 11-week trial.
The publisher called it an “overwhelming victory” and a “magnificent vindication” of the Mail’s journalism.
“The reputations of our decent and hard-working journalists were terribly impugned, and today they have been exonerated,” Associated said in a statement.
The newspapers had denied the allegations as “preposterous,” insisting the roughly 50 articles at issue were based on lawful sources including friends, royal aides and publicists who offered information to reporters.
The 436-page decision leaves a mixed legacy for Harry’s trio of lawsuits accusing tabloid publishers of using unlawful tactics, such as phone hacking, or hiring private detectives to dig up dirt to snoop on his life.
Harry won a judgment in 2023 that condemned the publishers of the Daily Mirror for “widespread and habitual” phone hacking. Last year, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship U.K. tabloid, The Sun, made an unprecedented apology for intruding on his life for years, and agreed to pay substantial damages to settle his privacy invasion lawsuit.
Mark Stephens, a media lawyer not involved in the case, said Harry’s first significant loss was due to a lack of evidence such as admissions of culpability that he had in previous lawsuits.
“This was always a mosaic case where little inferences from different things were being put together by the lawyers for Prince Harry,” Stephens said. “Associated newspapers’ lawyers cleverly rearranged the tiles to show an innocent picture as opposed to the culpable picture that the claimants’ lawyers were trying to demonstrate.”
The verdict, released remotely with no court hearing, coincided with Harry’s visit home to the U.K., which has been dominated by headlines over his latest efforts to repair a rift with his father, King Charles III.
Harry has said his litigation — in which he broke with royal family tradition to seek relief in the courts — was a primary source of his falling out with his father and brother, Prince William.
His grudge with the press runs deep. He blames it for the death of his mother, Princess Diana, who was killed in a car crash in 1997 while being pursued by paparazzi in Paris, and for attacks on his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, that led the couple to abandon royal life and move to the United States in 2020.
“They continue to come after me, they have made my wife’s life an absolute misery,” he testified as he choked back tears in the witness box during the trial in January.
Attorney David Sherborne said the Daily Mail and its sister publication, Mail on Sunday, used its journalists, freelance reporters and private eyes for “clear, systematic and sustained use of unlawful information gathering” to snoop on his clients.
Defense lawyer Antony White said the case relied on conjecture and inferences when the more likely source of information was “ordinary, legitimate journalism.” He said Harry was “inclined to see unlawful evidence gathering, in particular voicemail interception, everywhere.”
Other claimants in the case were actor Sadie Frost, anti-racism activist Doreen Lawrence, former politician Simon Hughes and John’s husband, David Furnish.
The Mail trial played out differently than the Mirror case, with many more journalists defending their work in court. Some Mail reporters pointed to official mouthpieces, such as a palace spokesperson, and others named their sources to dispute Harry’s assertion that his “social circles were not leaky.”
“They were not all tight-lipped,” Katie Nicholl, a former Mail on Sunday editor, said about Harry’s associates. “I had very good sources in the inner circle.”
Louis Vuitton court victory against Chinese tea chain stirs up copyrights debate
HONG KONG (AP) — A debate over ownership of traditional Chinese symbols has cropped up after a court ordered a local tea chain to pay French luxury brand Louis Vuitton $1.5 million over trademark infringement claims.
Chinese state-media and online commentators are questioning if the four-petal flower design in the fashion house’s 130-year-old signature monogram is derived from patterns dating back to ancient China. Some are accusing the company of “monopolizing” traditional Chinese patterns.
A court in the eastern city of Suzhou recently ruled that the logo of the Molly Tea, whose signature drinks are based on jasmine and other floral-based teas, infringed on Louis Vuitton’s trademark monogram. It ordered the tea company to pay 10.3 million yuan ($1.5 million) to the French company, according to local media reports that carried copies or details of what they said was the ruling.
Intellectual property fights between Western and Chinese brands are not uncommon. International brands like American sneaker maker New Balance have taken Chinese firms to local courts and sometimes prevailed in intellectual property and trademark cases.
The judgement has been trending online in China.
The state owned newspaper Beijing Daily said Tuesday in a post on the popular online platform Weibo that the ruling exposed a gap in protections of ancient Chinese heritage and symbols.
“Why did a Chinese enterprise end up paying more than 10 million yuan in damages to a French company for using a design that resonated with the spirit of China’s centuries-old patterns?” it said.
“Chinese netizens accuse LV of attempting to monopolize ancient motifs after lawsuit against tea brand,” said a headline in the Global Times, a state-owned English language newspaper. It asserted there was “widespread frustration” over a foreign brand controlling a design believed to be part of China’s cultural heritage.
A photo and caption accompanying the article showed patterns on a Tang Dynasty rosewood “pipa,” a kind of Chinese traditional lute, side-by-side with the Louis Vuitton monogram pattern.
Louis Vuitton is celebrating the 130th anniversary of its monogram designed in 1896, which it has called a “universal symbol of creativity.” The monogram was “inspired by neo-gothic ornamentation and the influence of Japonism,” its parent LVMH’s website says.
LVMH and Molly Tea did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Molly Tea, founded in 2021, was still displaying its four-petal flower logo on its official website as of Tuesday. The company told local media it was planning to appeal.
California
Lawsuit says U.S. illegally shared confidential information on Iranian asylum seekers with Iran
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges that the Trump administration’s immigration agencies have been sharing confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with the Iranian government, violating national immigration regulations and endangering countless Iranians, court filings argue.
The lawsuit depicts a coordinated campaign between the U.S. and Iranian governments to identify Iranians in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and pressure them to return to Iran — a marked departure from decades of diplomatic hostility between the two governments and an ongoing war.
Roughly 600 Iranians were put in immigration detention last year, according to public records obtained by the National Iranian American Council. In June, an Iranian woman was among the two dozen migrants the U.S. deported to the Central African Republic — in a marked departure from a decades-long practice by the U.S. of welcoming Iranian dissidents, exiles and others since the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced a large number of Iranians to flee.
The U.S. government is allowed to work with government officials of foreign countries to coordinate deportation logistics. However, federal regulations passed in the late 1990s prohibit the government from sharing information that could reveal that the individual getting deported applied for asylum.
“Congress made these confidentiality protections mandatory precisely because lives depend on them, and no agency and no administration, of either party, may set them aside,” said Ali Rahnama, the interim executive director of Iranian American Legal Defense Fund.
Starting in March 2025, the U.S. State Department arranged monthly meetings with Iranian officials, using the Pakistani embassy as an intermediary, in which U.S. officials shared detailed, sensitive information about detained Iranian immigrants who the U.S. government hoped to deport, lawyers for the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and the Public Citizen Litigation Group wrote in a complaint.
The information included details about asylum applications filed by people who say they were persecuted for converting to Christianity, for their sexuality or for participating in the Women, Life, Freedom protests against the Iranian government in 2022, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
ICE forced Iranian asylum applicants who had been detained in numerous facilities, mostly southern states, to meet with an Iranian government official who had extensive and specific knowledge about their applications, according to the complaint. The information was shared even after the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran started the Iran war in February 2026.
The lawsuit is seeking to halt sharing information about asylum seekers with the Iranian government and appoint an independent monitor to prevent future disclosures.
“Despite the U.S.’s ongoing war with Iran, the administration seems more committed to mass deportation than protecting human lives,” Michael Kirkpatrick, attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group said in a statement.
The complaint names the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and the Department of State as some of the defendants. The Department of Homeland Security and the State Department didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment on Tuesday morning.
The allegations come amid President Donald Trump’s ambitious and aggressive immigration crackdown that involved over 600,000 deportations and causing roughly 1.9 million immigrants to voluntarily leave in 2025 alone, according to an announcement made by DHS.
Iranian officials acknowledged in September 2025 that as many as 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump’s administration. That month, the first of three deportation flights brought dozens of Iranians back to Iran. The second deportation flight was in December 2025, and the final recorded deportation flight departed at the end of January 2026, roughly a month before the war on Iran started, and just weeks after the Iranian government killed thousands of citizens as part of a brutal crackdown on protests. The New York Times reported at the time that some of those deported in the flights in September, December and January were asylum seekers.
London
Judge dismisses Prince Harry’s privacy invasion lawsuit against tabloid publisher
LONDON (AP) — Prince Harry ‘s final lawsuit aimed at taming the British tabloids ended in defeat Tuesday as a judge said he failed to prove his privacy invasion claims against the publisher of the Daily Mail.
Justice Matthew Nicklin rejected the broad inferences the Duke of Sussex relied on to try to show that Associated Newspapers Ltd. engaged in unlawful activities. He said there was a shortage of evidence to support the claims and found there was a possibility that the news stories came from legitimate sources.
“In substance, the claimants’ case invites the Court to conclude that, because the information was private and because Associated cannot positively explain how it was sourced, the article must have been unlawfully sourced,” Nicklin wrote. “That is not a permissible approach.”
The ruling scuttles a bid by Harry and six others, including singer Elton John and actor-model Elizabeth Hurley, which sought substantial damages but could leave them with a large lawyers’ bill. Legal costs were estimated at about 40 million pounds ($53.5 million) for years of case preparation and an 11-week trial.
The publisher called it an “overwhelming victory” and a “magnificent vindication” of the Mail’s journalism.
“The reputations of our decent and hard-working journalists were terribly impugned, and today they have been exonerated,” Associated said in a statement.
The newspapers had denied the allegations as “preposterous,” insisting the roughly 50 articles at issue were based on lawful sources including friends, royal aides and publicists who offered information to reporters.
The 436-page decision leaves a mixed legacy for Harry’s trio of lawsuits accusing tabloid publishers of using unlawful tactics, such as phone hacking, or hiring private detectives to dig up dirt to snoop on his life.
Harry won a judgment in 2023 that condemned the publishers of the Daily Mirror for “widespread and habitual” phone hacking. Last year, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship U.K. tabloid, The Sun, made an unprecedented apology for intruding on his life for years, and agreed to pay substantial damages to settle his privacy invasion lawsuit.
Mark Stephens, a media lawyer not involved in the case, said Harry’s first significant loss was due to a lack of evidence such as admissions of culpability that he had in previous lawsuits.
“This was always a mosaic case where little inferences from different things were being put together by the lawyers for Prince Harry,” Stephens said. “Associated newspapers’ lawyers cleverly rearranged the tiles to show an innocent picture as opposed to the culpable picture that the claimants’ lawyers were trying to demonstrate.”
The verdict, released remotely with no court hearing, coincided with Harry’s visit home to the U.K., which has been dominated by headlines over his latest efforts to repair a rift with his father, King Charles III.
Harry has said his litigation — in which he broke with royal family tradition to seek relief in the courts — was a primary source of his falling out with his father and brother, Prince William.
His grudge with the press runs deep. He blames it for the death of his mother, Princess Diana, who was killed in a car crash in 1997 while being pursued by paparazzi in Paris, and for attacks on his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, that led the couple to abandon royal life and move to the United States in 2020.
“They continue to come after me, they have made my wife’s life an absolute misery,” he testified as he choked back tears in the witness box during the trial in January.
Attorney David Sherborne said the Daily Mail and its sister publication, Mail on Sunday, used its journalists, freelance reporters and private eyes for “clear, systematic and sustained use of unlawful information gathering” to snoop on his clients.
Defense lawyer Antony White said the case relied on conjecture and inferences when the more likely source of information was “ordinary, legitimate journalism.” He said Harry was “inclined to see unlawful evidence gathering, in particular voicemail interception, everywhere.”
Other claimants in the case were actor Sadie Frost, anti-racism activist Doreen Lawrence, former politician Simon Hughes and John’s husband, David Furnish.
The Mail trial played out differently than the Mirror case, with many more journalists defending their work in court. Some Mail reporters pointed to official mouthpieces, such as a palace spokesperson, and others named their sources to dispute Harry’s assertion that his “social circles were not leaky.”
“They were not all tight-lipped,” Katie Nicholl, a former Mail on Sunday editor, said about Harry’s associates. “I had very good sources in the inner circle.”
