Austrian-Canadian billionaire and automotive business founder Frank Stronach was found guilty Friday of sexual assault and indecent assault of two women decades ago.

Stronach, who is 93, had been accused of alleged incidents involving seven complainants and pleaded not guilty to 12 charges.

Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy, who is overseeing the case, said the two women who brought those allegations were credible and careful witnesses and she believed their accounts of what happened all those years ago.

Outside court, Stronach's lawyer said they would take time to thoroughly review the decision but were satisfied he had been found not guilty on most of the charges.

"Mr. Stronach has been found guilty on the least serious offenses for two complainants who were not exposed in any way, he was not exposed … no one had their clothes off," Leora Shemesh said.

Despite the two findings of guilt, Shemesh said Stronach "really is a national treasure and should be treated as such, in my respectful opinion."

Stronach became one of Canada's wealthiest people by creating auto parts giant Magna in his garage in 1957. He also founded The Stronach Group, a company that specializes in horse racing.

Stronach resigned as Magna's chairman in 2011 and founded his own political party in his native Austria the following year.

His trial started in February, and by the time arguments wrapped up in April, prosecutors had withdrawn one charge and agreed Stronach should be found not guilty on four more. He was found guilty of two of the remaining charges Friday. The allegations spanned from the late 1970s to the 1990s.

A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for September.

Stronach faces a separate trial on similar charges in Newmarket, Ontario, which is set to take place in May.

Two U.S. families went to Italy's highest court Tuesday to challenge the scope of a year-old law passed by Giorgia Meloni's government limiting citizenship claims to Italian descendants removed by more than two generations.

Their lawyer, Marco Mellone, argued before the Cassation Court that the law should apply only to people born after it took effect, potentially opening a pathway to citizenship for millions of people living in the United States and parts of Latin America. Another lawyer represented Italian descendants from Venezuela.

A decision by an expanded panel, which makes the ruling binding in lower courts, is expected in the coming weeks.

A decree by the conservative government in March 2025 put the brakes on previous rules allowing anyone who could prove ancestry after Italy's formation in 1861 to seek citizenship. Italy's constitutional court last month ruled the new law is valid, but Mellone said the supreme court has the power to clarify the scope of the law.

"The families involved in this case are simply descendants ... from an Italian ancestor who emigrated in the late 19th century to the United States, like millions of other people, of other Italians," Mellone said before the hearing. "Today they are invoking their right to Italian citizenship."

Mellone's case would clarify the citizenship rights of the descendants of some 14 million Italians who emigrated between 1877 and 1914, according to Foreign Ministry statistics, and beyond.

While Mellone's case involves two families, another dozen people whose citizenship claims were stopped by the law were present outside the courthouse in solidarity.

Karen Bonadio said she hopes one day to move to Italy on the strength of her ancestry. She brought photos of her as a young girl alongside her Italian-born great-grandparents, who emigrated from Basilicata in southern Italy to upstate New York, along with their birth certificates.

"The new law says, 'all these great-grandchildren didn't know their great-grandparents.' This is from 1963, I think I was 3 1/2," she said, showing the photograph.

At least one of Mellone's cases had been rejected in lower courts before the new law, hinging partially on rulings that Italian emigrants who took on another citizenship before having children cannot pass on Italian citizenship.

Jennifer Daley's case has been working its way through the Italian bureaucracy for nearly a decade. Her grandfather, Giuseppe Dalfollo, immigrated to the U.S. in 1912 from the northern province of Trento when it was under Austro-Hungarian control. He later married an Italian woman and brought her over, and at some point became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Daley said she always had a strong Italian identity that transcended her last name anglicized by U.S. immigration officials. She petitioned for citizenship because "it is truly a recognition of who I am, where I am from. It's so much more than citizenship. It's everything," Daley, a historian, said by phone from Salina, Kansas.

Outside the courthouse, Alexis Traino said great-grandparents on both her maternal and paternal sides had come from Italy, where she now lives, mainly in Florence.

"My entire life, I grew up knowing — and my parents always emphasized — that I was Italian. I had a very, very strong connection with Italy," said Traino, 34, who was waiting for documents from Italy and the U.S. when the law passed, blocking her case.

A judge has rejected a request for a new trial for a Venezuelan man convicted of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, a case that became a flashpoint in the national debate over immigration.

Lawyers for Jose Ibarra argued his constitutional rights were violated when the judge declined two defense motions before trial. One was a request to delay the trial to give an expert witness time to review and analyze DNA data. The other would have excluded some cellphone evidence.

Clarke County Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard, who presided over the trial, wrote in an order Monday that the evidence of Ibarra's guilt presented by the state was "overwhelming and powerful." After Ibarra waived his right to a jury trial, Haggard found him guilty of murder and other charges during the November 2024 trial and sentenced him to life in prison. A spokesperson for Ibarra's attorneys said they plan to file an appeal.

Ibarra, 28, had entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 and was allowed to stay while he pursued his immigration case.

Prosecutors said Ibarra encountered Riley while she was running on the University of Georgia campus in Athens on Feb. 22, 2024, and killed her during a struggle. Riley was a student at Augusta University College of Nursing, which also has a campus in Athens, about 70 miles (115 kilometers) east of Atlanta.

Ibarra's trial attorneys had asked the judge to delay the trial after a DNA expert said she would need six weeks to review evidence analyzed using TrueAllele Casework, software used to interpret DNA and assist the defense. The judge wrote in his order Monday that Ibarra's lawyers "effectively challenged the TrueAllele DNA evidence at trial" and concluded that Ibarra was not harmed by the denial of a delay.

The DNA expert testified during a January hearing on the motion for a new trial, and the judge wrote that he did not find her opinion to be persuasive or credible and that it would not have changed the trial outcome.

Ibarra's attorneys also had challenged the seizure of two cellphones from his apartment, saying they were not listed on the search warrant, and sought to exclude evidence pulled from them. Haggard wrote that there were "exigent circumstances authorizing the seizure of the cellphones" and that the phones were not searched until after warrants were issued authorizing the search of the contents of the phones.

As U.S. and Israeli forces pounded Iran, and Tehran and its affiliates retaliated by firing missiles at targets across the Mideast on Monday, the international legal order was caught in the crossfire.

At the heart of the post-World War II global order — United Nations headquarters in New York — Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council on Saturday that U.S. and Israeli airstrikes violated international law, including the U.N. Charter. He also condemned Iran's retaliatory attacks for violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations in the Mideast.

Officials in the Trump administration insist that the military campaign is a lawful measure to ensure Tehran does not build nuclear weapons. "It's a matter of global security. And to that end, the United States is taking lawful actions," Trump's U.N. ambassador, Mike Waltz, said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a letter to the U.N. on Sunday that the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "constitutes a grave and unprecedented breach of the most fundamental norms governing relations among States."

On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bullishly defended the U.S. military campaign. "No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win and we don't waste time or lives," he said at the Pentagon.

The war with Iran comes less than two months after U.S. forces swooped into Caracas to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and fly him to New York to face justice.

David Crane, an American expert on international law and founding prosecutor of a United Nations court that prosecuted crimes in Sierra Leone, wrote in an analysis that U.S. attacks in Iran and Venezuela "highlight a dangerous trend: the normalization of unilateral force as a tool of foreign policy. Even when the outcome is positive, the violation of international law and constitutional limits sets a precedent that threatens global stability and undermines America's own legal foundations."

In Washington, many Democrats have called the strikes illegal. They argue that under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war. They say the Trump administration failed to lay out its rationale or plan for the military strikes, and the aftermath.

Congress hurriedly scheduled a war powers debate for Monday over Trump's authority to bomb Iran.